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The St. John's Review
Volume XLIII, number three (1996)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
James Carey
Beale Ruhm Von Oppen
Joe Sachs
john Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Gjergji Bojaxhi
The St. John's Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St.
John's College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Eva T.
H. Brann, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions
are $15.00 for three issues, even though the magazine may sometimes
appear semi-annually rather than three times a year. Unsolicited
essays, stories, poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address
correspondence to the Review, St. John's College, P.O. Box 2800,
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5.00 per
issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore.
©1996 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole
or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
Marcia Baldwin and The St.John's College Print Shop
��Contents
Forewords.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Occasional Speech
Dedicatory Toast: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
The Opening of the Greenfield Library
Elliott Zuckerman
Essays and Lectures
Meno's Paradox and the Zetetic Circle .
] on Lenkowski
Sun and Cave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Eric Salem
7
.29
On Some Texts of Bacon and Descartes . . . . . . . 51
Andre Lalande
Translated by Pamela Kraus
Poetry
Four Poems
Andrew Krivak
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Reviews
Recollection and Composure
Douglas Allanbrook's See Naples
Eva T. H. Brann
. . . . . . . . . . 81
Reason's Parochiality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Carl Page's Philosophical Historicism and the
Betrayal of First Philosophy
Richard Velkley
To See the World Profoundly: . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
The Films of Robert Bresson
Shmuel Ben-Gad
��~
Forewords
St.John's College inaugurated its 300th anniversary year this past
May at the dedication of the Greenfield Library on the Annapolis
campus. To mark our anniversary, this issue of The St.John's Review
includes Elliott Zuckerman's dedicatory toast on that occasion. Mr.
Zuckerman's toast praises the library as a residence for the spirit of
the College-the spirit of books.
The spirit of books, in which and by which we learn, is given us
through their authors, and so it is appropriate to note another anniversary this year, the 400th birthday of Rene Descartes. Descartes is
often referred to'as a "founder" of modern thought. Here we reprint,
in translation, Andre Lalande's 1911 essay comparing excerpts from
the Discourse on Method to passages from earlier writings of Francis
Bacon, Descartes's near contemporary. Striking similarities between
them suggest that Descartes learned and benefitted from the books
of Bacon.
��j.· Dedicatory Toast:
~ The Opening of the Greenfield Library
Elliott Zuckerman
It is an honor to represent the Faculty with a dedicatory toast to the
Greenfield Library. By doing so I serve as successor to our late
colleague Hugh McGrath, who spoke at a similar consecration in
1969. Between the two events there is an obscure verbal connection
of the sort that I can't resist reporting. Many of us here, when we
think of Hugh McGrath, will also think of Falstaff, a role that Hugh
famously played in the early seventies. And when we thinkofFalstaff
we might remember one of the most beautiful details that Shakespeare tells us about him. It is that at the end of his life "he babbled
ofgreen fields."
The obese corrupter of the young may have ended his days with
pious thoughts about lying down in the green pastures of the twentythird psalm. A further detail about Falstaffs death leads us back not
to the Bible but to another of our great bibliographical beginnings.
He seems to have left this world gradually, from the bottom up: first
his feet turned cold, and then his knees, and so on upward-like
Socrates. I wonder whether Shakespeare wanted us to look for further
similarities between the two great teachers. And as I do that wondering, I realize that I am asking a question about a fictional character
who was based on a real person, a real person who was probably
fictionalized, and a playwright about whom we know practically
nothing and yet everything that is worth knowing.
This speech may not have begun so far out in left field as it may
seem. For a few years after the performance of Shakespeare and the
rededication of Woodward Hall, in another part of the campus, the
Admissions Office came up with a new way of enticing prospective
students to St. John's College. They announced that "the following
teachers will be returning to St. John's next year," and by the teachers
they meant, of course, an array of great authors. One of the versions
of the announcement is still being sent to prospectives. It appears at
the top of a large page, usable as a poster, that shows an attractive
collage of pictures of those returning teachers-poets, philosophers,
�4
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
and scientists. There are forty of them-I counted them myself. Most
of the pictures are reproductions of formal portraits or contemporary
drawings or etchings; but the ancient sages appear in the traditional
likenesses of sculpted busts, and, at the other extreme, there are a few
who are recent enough to have faced the camera.
As I looked at those faces, I began to think of what such a school
might be like. Think of having a teacher as amusing as Chaucer or as
articulate as Jane Austen or as clear and complete as Saint Thomas.
Think of being able to report to your friends what Montaigne had to
say this morning in Tutorial. Think of trusting the lab experiments
to Faraday himself, with or without a lab assistant. Imagine a paper
conference with the author of Middlemarch. Picture being badgered
to perplexity not by some neophyte imitating the Socratic Method,
but by the Silenus himself.
On the other hand, what ifimmanuel Kant himself were the only
source of enlightenment about the Transcendental Unity of Apperception? What would it be like to find oneself in a Seminar whose
leaders were Nietzsche and Wagner? What if Baudelaire were to take
an interest in what goes on in the dormitories. And would anyone
ever be able to recover from a Don-Rag Committee that included,
say, Calvin and Sigmund Freud?
Yes, we are fond of making lists of our ideal faculty. I remember
one such list of teachers which, because of an inadvertence, began
with the name 'job." I saw it for the first time, significantly enough,
on aT -shirt. Such a slip could only have occurred in a place where
we claim as our faculty not only the authors of books but the books
themselves. When I used to be asked what I teach, I would often avoid
a hard answer by saying that "the Books are the Teachers." The very
brochure that contains the pictures of all the teachers begins with the
assertion, in large letters, that "Great Books Make Great Teachers"
-and the writers of the Admissions Information are to be commended, for nowhere can I find a numbering of the Books. Although
for purposes of quick characterization we probably have to identify
St. John's as the Great Books School, we should, I think, refuse to
refer to the Hundred Great Books. For once we number the books
we are only one step away from Numbering the Ideas.
�ZUCKERMAN
5
Now "Job" is not only the name of a book but the name of its chief
character. And that suggests another group that has a claim to faculty
status, the very characters, fictional or semi-fictional, whose actions
sustain our interest and teach us what we ourselves might very well
be like. So now we have three sets of teachers: the authors, the books,
and the characters, and often enough-as we saw in the instance of
Falstaff and Socrates and Shakespeare and the Psalms-there is a rich
interrelationship among them. When we talk about Dante, do we
mean the Italian poet, or do we mean the Pilgrim who takes the
journey, or are we referring to the Comedy that got to be called
Divine? The players in Part. II of Don Quixote have read Part I and
are aficionados of the adventurer. The Platonic dialogues bear names
just as young men bear names. And think of those characters who
have separated themselves from the books they first appeared in, to
become perpetually available for purposes of example or comparison
and even gossip. Penelope and Natasha as wives. Cleopatra in a barge
and Huck Finn on a raft. Dimitri, Ivan, and Alyosha. Mister Moneybags and the Man with the Large Soul.
There are certain practical advantages in having as one's teachers
books, and their authors and characters. They do not have to be fed,
and the only new clothing required is an occasional rebinding. We
usually remove their jackets. Only when they get very old or very
decrepit or very precious do we have to place them in the glass cases
of a retirement home. Otherwise, no salaries, no health insurance,
no social security.
They do, however, need a place to stay-and now, two thirds
before the end of this little talk, you see where it has been heading.
For almost a century Woodward Hall housed our teachers well.
Through all the renovations, and repaintings, and extensions, and
deepenings, we had learned to love that abode. We had gotten to
know where everyone lives. Often enough, the catalogue could be
skipped, and we could go straight to a dwelling in the shelves.
Right now I can imagine myself standing at the entry of the King
William Room and knowing exactly what line I should follow in
order to get to Homer, or Sophocles, or Sappho. We all have known
where we could find Vico, or Pico, or Tycho. We will never forget
the cluster of shelves that provided us with Hegel and Schlegel and
�6
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Schiller and Schilling and Schopenhauer and Schleiermacher. We
liked the search for art books where they dwelt, according to size, in
two tiers of apartments. We knew the order of music books from
A!lanbrook to Zuckerkandl. Sometimes we took out a book so
persistently that its habitual home became a shelf in our study at
home. But thanks to Call-in they periodically had to visit their proper
place, however briefly, like expatriots renewing their passports.
We knew where to hide for uninterrupted reading, and where to
read for the purpose of being seen. There were straight chairs and
armchairs and upholstered chairs that we could sink into, sometimes
unto threatening depth. There were desks and tables and carrels.
There were shelves of new books, and books newly acquired, and
there was access to an inner sanctum of books whose virginity was
reserved for a particular reader. There were places to talk and places
where talking was forbidden. Nowhere was there background music.
Above all, there were nooks and corners and alcoves and berths and
cubbyholes.
I have been praising the old in order to express our hope for the
new. For at last the time came to Move House. Our teachers were
transferred in sacks across the expanse of lawn, and it is fitting that
the' day ofthe moving turned out to be a celebration of our sense of
community. For along with those sacks, and along with the friendly
spirit that transported them, I hope all the strengths and delights of
the old library were transferred too.
I do not know the new building yet, but it seems to be happily
provided with surprising vistas and interesting alcoves. There will be
places to work and places to study and places to read. What is most
important will not change. We'll still be learning from the books and
the characters, and the great teachers will keep on returning to St.
John's College in a form that we can take out and take home, well
into the next century-or, as we can say at this privileged time, into
the next millennium.
Now at last you can raise your imaginary glasses. The Tutors and
their colleagues toast the Teachers and their entourage, at the Green
Fields of their new Place of Meeting.
�j
Meno's Paradox and the Zetetic Circle
!i
Jon Lenkowski
Author's Prefatory Note
This essay has undergone a number of metamorphoses over the
years. It first saw the light of day in the mid-seventies as a small part
of a chapter of a dissertation which, alas, never got finished. It was
initially excerpted and presented as a lecture to the philosophy club
at Rutgers University, where I was teaching at the time, and it was
subsequently presented a couple of times in Annapolis as a summer
lecture both before and after I came to teach at the College in 1979.
In 1980, I completely reworked the lecture and rewrote it in German
to present at a philosophy colloquium at the University ofKonstanz,
Germany. The present text is based on the German version and was
presented as a formal lecture in Santa Fe in 1988 and in Annapolis in
1989. I am particularly indebted to my colleagues, Lawrence Berns,
Robert Druecker, and Stewart Umphrey, for reading the German
version and offering discerning comments. Despite revisions great
and small, the fundamental ideas of the essay have remained unchanged for over twenty years. Since in recent years "revision" has
meant little more than changing a word here and there, it seems time
to let go of it.
Introduction
The following is intended to be a contribution to the theory of
science, widely construed, and to be, more particularly, a contribution to the theory of inquiry.
When one speaks of science, one should keep in mind that, despite
the peculiar technologization of contemporary science (by which I
mean the natural sciences and all those disciplines which have sought
to copy them) the very notion of science is itself ancient; in fact it
cuts across the division between antiquity and modernity. From this
perspective, a theory of science would mean a 9EmpEtV bttcr~iJfl.TJS
�8
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
-a looking at or inspection of science-which entails the finding of
a position from which science can best be observed and questioned.
In our time particularly, there seem to be a number of competing
claims to have found just the appropriate point of view. Accordingly,
I would ask whether each and every theory of science is a philosophy
of science. All such attempts at a theory of science, however diverse,
are rightly called "metatheoretical." But perhaps not every
metatheoretical examination of science is a philosophy of science.
Under metatheory generally, I would distinguish at least the four
following orientations: First, the positive clarification of the presuppositions, the methods, and the objectives of the sciences; here I
would also include any positive logic of science. Secondly, an examination of the sciences from the viewpoint of what is called the
"history of ideas." Such an examination focuses on historical presuppositions for scientific development, historical reasons why science
developed-rightly or wrongly-in this or that direction, etc. Here
the clarification is far more historical than critical. Thirdly, when it
is undertaken from various political standpoints or postures,
metatheory becomes a critique of ideology. Here, although critical,
the criticism is focused much less on the question of truth, than on
the supposed political presuppositions which serve as the context
within which the particular content of science has been devised.
Fourthly, what I would call in the most precise sense a philosophy of
science-by which I understand an investigation which opens up
problems of a most fundamental kind. Here, in modern times, I take
Johann Gottlieb Fichte as the paradigm. In a writing which appeared
in 1794 entitled Uber der Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre1 ("On the
Concept of the Theory of Science"), in which he was still occupied
with the question of whether a theory of science was even possible,
he posed to himself four absolutely fundamental problems which
blocked the path to a theory of science that would be secure. Fichte
well understood (as had Aristotle most unmistakably in ancient
times, in Metaphysics, Book B) what the very first step toward the
establishment of science must be, namely, the uncovering, the opming up, and the laying to rest of absolutely fundamental problems
which would otherwise remain hidden and, as such, would establish
science in name only. This very first step I would call a philosophy
�LENKOWSKI
9
of science, which I understand, following Fichte, to be a prolegomenon to a theory of science proper. It is in this spirit that I present the
following essay.
Meno's Paradox and the Zetetic Circle
At SOdS Meno responds to Socrates' invitation to join with him at
last in the search for then' Ecr·n-the "what is"-of virtue or human
excellence (apE'tTj):
Kat 'tt va 'tp6nov I; TJ't'l\crn~. ili ~mKpa'tE~, 'to\l'to o J.1 il
otcr8a 'tO napcmav on £cr'ttv; no'lov yap iliv ouK otcr8a
npo8EJ.1Evo~ i;TJ't'l\crEt~; fi Ei Kat on JlUA.tma EV'tDXOt~
au'ti[>, 11:&~ dcrn O'tt 'tOU'tO £crit v 0 cru OUK filiT]cr8a;
But in what direction will you inquire, Socrates, about that
cifwhich you do not know at all what it is? For what sort of
thing, of all those you do not know, will you put forth and
search after? Or, even ifyou did happen upon it, how would
you know that thiswas the very thing you did not knoW.
Trying to put an end to the inquiry, Meno unknowingly puts his
finger on the very thing without which inquiry would not b~ at all
possible. Howcould one inquire, except by being in some way already
"in touch with"-"in contact with" (the word is 8tyyavro, 8tyE'lv) 2
the object of inquiry?
Every inquiry necessarily proceeds within a horizon of familiarity.
The peculiarity of the "what is" question in particular (as here in the
Meno) is highlighted by the fact that each interlocutor, when asked,
seems to, or presumes to already know the answer to the question,
and is quite baffled to discover he really doesn't. It is only on the
basis of what I will call this "prethematic familiarity" with something
that it ever becomes possible to thematize it and make it the object
of inquiry. At Republic VII, 524c, Socrates says:
Sight too saw large and small...although not separated but
mixed together .. .In order to unmix them, intellect ( v6T]crt~)
is also compelled to see (tliE'i:v) large and small, although
not mixed together but separated and distinguished-just
the opposite of what sight did ... Isn't it therefore from this
�10
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
that it first occurs to us to ask: what are the large and the
small? [italics mine]
The context comprising prethematic familiarity, on the one hand,
and inquiry, on the other hand, is a peculiar context, for it puts us in
relation to the object in two contrary ways at once. More particularly,
the possibility of inquiry presupposes our both knowing and not
knowing something at the same time. To reply to this simply by
saying that in one sense we know and in another sense we don't, does
not solve the difficulty; it rather emphasizes it. For now we want to
know: How is it possible to know in one sense and not know in
another sense the same thing at the same time? This circle of inquiry
presents to reflective understanding a genuine difficulty which cannot
be removed simply by pointing to Meno's obviously eristic argument.
fu the dialogues present it, the "what is" question is the paradigm
of inquiry. An understanding of the "what is" question would therefore seem to demand an understanding of this seeming paradox.
Whatever else it might mean, this prethematic familiarity implies
a relation between thinking or understanding and the object thought
or understood; and insofar as this prethematic familiarity is to serve
as the ground of inquiry, it must be understood as a relation in which
the object is already there for us in a very peculiar way. It would have
to be there under two aspects at once, for we must both "have" the
object already and yet see the necessity of searching after it. But
doesn't this present a problem? Mter all, if one has this prethematic
familiarity with something, why should the question ever have to be
raised about it? Why should an inquiry into it ever become necessary?
Why should there ever be a "question" at all? To understand how
this can happen, we must first understand the peculiar way in which
the object is there for us in that primary horizon of familiarity. To
say that the object would have to be there under two aspects at once
is to say that it would have to present itself as both incomplete and
complete, as both that which is anticipated and the fulfillment
thereof. But wouldn't that mean that the object has to be at once two
objects? And if the fulfilled object were given at all, how could the
inquiry into it ever begin, since the zetetic goal would be there
�LENKOWSKI
11
beforehand? And yet, if it were not given in this double way, no
inquiry could ever begin.
On the other hand, if the burden of difficulty were thought to lie
on the side of thinking, i.e., if inquiry were to be understood as our
"moving closer" to the object, the same problem arises, for why
would there be a desire to close the distance, unless both the starting
point and the goal were presented at once? The object would have
to present itself as at once both "far away" (else the inquiry would
have nothing to overcome) and "close" (for the inquiry could not
begin unless it presupposed its goal). But then the goal must be given
already. And then, again, why should the inquiry ever begin?
The further we think in this direction, the more does the phenomenon of inquiry take on the aspect of a circle. An integral and
essential part of that circle is the horizon of familiarity, which
presents to us a puzzle which we must work through in order to come
to an understanding of what inquiry is, what it involves, and how it
can be at all possible.
In modern times it is above all Heidegger who has squarely faced
the problem posed by the circle of inquiry-the zetetic circle-and
who has acknowledged the essential role that the horizon of familiarity plays in it. Let me, accordingly, turn to an examination of his
account of it.
In the Introduction to Sein und Zeit', there occurs a section
entitled "The Formal Structure of the Question of Being" (S.Z. pp.
5-8). Heidegger begins here by saying that in order to see the
distinctive character of the question of being, it is first necessary to
briefly explain what belongs to any question whatsoever. In other
words, this section about the structure of a question is offered as a
preliminary to his investigation of the question of being, the question
of what being is, or what "being" means. It seems to me-and I hope
to show this in what follows-that all of what Heidegger says here
about questioning in general, is preeminently true of the Socratic
"what is" question in particular, and that what he says in this section
about being in particular is equally true of all those eidetic wholes
(o:&. e'io11) taken up by the "what is" question in the Platonic dialogues.
�12
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
Heidegger then goes on to distinguish four essential moments;
1. The guiding factor, contributed beforehand by what is sought
(die vorgangige Lei tung vom Gesuchten her)
2. What is asked about (das Gefragte)
3. What is interrogated (das Befragte)
4. What is to be discovered or found out (das Erfragte)
I shall now consider these four moments in a somewhat different
order and, in so doing, I shall go somewhat beyond Heidegger's own
presentation of them.
First, every question has what is asked about (das Gefragte )-its
theme or topic, the object which is a problem for it, and which must
therefore be questioned. It is this which in fact evokes (or, perhaps,
"forms") the question in the first place. The very questioning posture arises out of one's comportment to this object.
Secondly, every question has what is to be discovered (das Erfragte )-its anticipated answer, its goal. The very posing of a question
is at once the anticipation of its answer. Were there no cognizance
beforehand of this goal, no question would ever get formulated. The
very formulation of the question derives from the kind of answer
which is anticipated, derives from a precognition of what the answer
would have to be like; and this in turn derives from a precognition of
the problem-character of the object. If the object is an unclarity, the
kind of answer sought will be a clarification, and the question will be
formulated accordingly. If the object is a puzzle, the kind of answer
sought will be an unravelling, and the question will be formulated
accordingly-so inseparable are what is asked about and what is to be
discovered by the asking. This means that in the very formulation of
the question, the direction is already anticipated from which the
answer will come. In other words, there is already anticipated what
would count in ea~h case as cognitive adequacy. The formulation of
a question carries with it certain expectations.
Thirdly, every question has what is interrogated (das Befragte )-that to which the question is posed, that which is asked
concerning what the question asks about. This is that to which the
questioner turns in pursuit of the question. This moment is necessary in order that the question begin to move; and the choice of this
�LENKOWSKl
13
element is not at all arbitrary, but is determined by one's precognition
both of the object and of the anticipated answer. Where one first turns
is never merely by chance, but is dictated by an understanding of the
problem and the goal.
Fourthly and lastly, every question is guided beforehand by what
is sought. It is this fourth moment of the structure of the question
which is most puzzling, and yet it is this which unifies the three other
moments. In fact, it supplies the question as such with its integral
wholeness, for it is only under the condition that there is this
pre-given guidance that the following become at all possible: First,
that the object questioned about and what is to be discovered are
related as they are-and as they must be in order for there to be a
question at all. This fourth moment is not the same as that second
moment (viz. what is to be discovered), though it could be confused
with it, since both moments seem to imply a teleological structure to
the question; rather, it is in a sense the relation between the first and
the second moments, between what is asked about and what is to be
discovered. That is, it is not itself the goal, yet it relates the goal to
the beginning of the quest.
This pre-given guidance makes possible, secondly, that there is
any sense of where to turn to pursue the question. How could one
know to what to pose the question, were this not dictated and guided
by an understanding of the relation between the object and the goal?
And, thirdly, it makes possible that the question itself ever gets
posed in the first place. The very posing of the question is at once
the awareness of the problem-character of the object; but this awareness is possible only in light of an awareness, however dim, of that
object as complete or without the defect. Thus the posing of the
question is at once the recognition of the relation between the object
and the goal, which relation guides the formulation of the question,
as well as the direction the question is to take.
Let us listen to what Heidegger himself has to say about this fourth
moment, keeping in mind that, althpugh his own interest is in the
question of being, what he has to say may be of a more general
significance:
�14
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
Questioning, as a seeking, must be guided beforehand by
what is sought. The meaning of being must therefore be
in some way already available to us. As already suggested,
we already move within an understanding ofbeing. Out of
this understanding grows the explicit question about the
meaning of being, as well as the movement toward its
concept. We do not know what "being" indicates. But
already, when we ask, 'Whatis being?', we are within an
understanding of the "is"-without, however, being able
to fiX conceptually what the "is" means. We do not even
know the horizon within which we ought to grasp and fiX
that meaning. This vague, everyday understanding of
being is nevertheless a fact.
Even if this understanding ofbeing may vacillate and come
and go, and even border on the merely verbal, the very
indefiniteness of this familiarity with being is itself a positive phenomenon, which demands clarification. (S.Z. pp.
5-6)
I would argue that all of what Heidegge'r says in this passage about
being is fully applicable to virtue as it is presented in the Meno, as
well as to those other eidetic wholes taken up by the "what is"
question in the other dialogues. Let me repeat just a part of this
passage:
Questioning... must be guided beforehand by what is
sought. The meaning... must therefore be in some way
already available to us ...we already move within an understanding...
I have already tried to indicate the necessity of what I've called the
"horizon of familiarity" within which alone any question can be
posed. There must already be a prethematic understanding of what
will become the object of the question, else the question could never
come to have an object-which is to say that the question would
never come to form itself. The entire posing of the question, arising
as the explicit expression of the problem-character of the object, takes
its bearings from this prethematic understanding. This prethematic
understanding may long remain inaccessible and thus inexplicit; and
the recognition of its problem-character depends on one's first
�LENKOWSKI
15
finding access to it. The transitiOn from this initial access to the
recognition of its problem-character-or, to use the language of the
Cave in the Republic, the transition from the shadows taken naively,
as independent, to the recognition of their mere shadow-character,
their dependence-though never simply automatic, never guaranteed, can occur only within the context of the Socratic conversation,
But none of this would be possible, failing that ever-present horizon
of familiarity. May I remind you that, for his conversation with the
slave boy, Socrates stipulates only two conditions: (1) that he has not
learned geometry, but (2) that he knows and speaks Greek. This
second condition is of supreme importance, because it means that
the boy has with Socrates a common world of experience (at least on
the pre-philosophical, human level) and it guarantees that the boy is
already familiar with squares and sides, though he may never in his
life have given a moment's thought to them.
Heidegger says:
We do nor know what "being" indicates, but already when
we ask, "what is being?" we are within an understanding of
the "is"-without, however, being able to fix conceptually
what the "is" means.
Can we fail to be reminded here of Meno's own response to his
torpor? He says: "Indeed, I have so often given so very many
speeches about virtue ... however I am now absolutely unable to say
what it is" (80b2-5). Meno, "numb and speechless," continues to
talk about virtue-not, of course, that he continues to give "official"
opinions about it (he is now bereft of these); but he still moves within
that everyday horizon of familiarity with virtue. His official opinions
can be taken from him, but this prethematic understanding of virtue,
which is quite different from those opinions and is yet their ground,
is something of which he can never be dispossessed. An extension
ofthe image of the midwife in theTheaetetus should make this clear.
Theaetetus must be "delivered" of his opinions, which suggests
that he is to be understood as a mere "carrier" or "bearer." In the
preliminary conversation with Theodorus, Socrates shows a much
keener interest in Theaetetus's father (144b8), than in Theaetetus
himself This signals what is to be his main interest in the midwife
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
passsage: Theaetetus, the "bearer," has been "impregnated" by
Theodorus and others. In order to gain access to these "fathers,"
Theaetetus (the "mother" who has nurtured these opinions) must be
made to give them up. He has been impregnated with opinions about
knowledge; they have been implanted in his "psychic womb," if I
may extend the figure. This "psychic womb" is his prethematic
understanding of what knowledge is. This is the only medium in
which those opinions could possibly take root; and this remains,
however many opinions he might be delivered of. This, like the
womb, is essentially his; it cannot be taken from him. Like the womb,
this prethematic understanding is "covered over" by the opinions (or
"offspring") which take root in it, covered over in such a way,
however, that the prethematic understanding becomes hidden from
himself, that the two become indistinguishable, that he naively takes
his own opinion to be the essential "what is." It is this very prethematic understanding, then, that guides the formation of opinion
which becomes superimposed upon it. In the same way that the
shape of the developing foetus is in some way guided by the shape of
the womb, so is the shape of whatever opinion is formed or implanted, guided by the "shape" of that prethematic understanding.
Thus it is that, no matter how extreme, or peculiar, or wrong one's
opinion about the "whatness" of something might be, it has always
recognizably something to do with that whatness-it is never absolutely
wrong; no matter how violently we might disagree with a Thrasymachus or a Callicles, we recognize clearly that his opinion arises out
of the same context of understanding as ours, that we are both talking
about what is essentially the same thing. It is this prethematic
understanding, this horizon of familiarity, which is the same for
everyone-for thought or intellect as such-that accounts for this.
The "therapeutic" function of Socrates' midwifery, then, is to remove
these opinions and thus lay bare that prethematic understanding, to
give one access to it for the first time, and that's the same as to say that
its function is to give one the opportunity to see for the first time the
merely doxic character of one's opinions, i.e., the difference between
the essential "what is" of something and one's opinion of it.
But what exactly is it that one then has access to when one has
access to this prethematic understanding? Or, to formulate the
�LENKOWSKI
17
problem from a slightly different point of view: Where does this
abandoning of one's prior opinion leave one? Ideally, not with
another opinion to replace the first one. Ideally, it leaves one with
nothing-but with a "nothing" that is a "determinate nothing." It leaves
one not with a void, but with the determinate absence of opinion.
Thus I would argue that it is not Socrates' sting, but Meno's own
emptiness that is his torpor. And it is just this absence of opinion
that is at once the raising of the "what is" question. Socrates' insistence that he and Meno now (i.e., once Meno has confessed his
emptiness) inquire jointly into what virtue is-that this joint inquiry
is now finally possible-shows just how closely connected are this
emptiness and the asking of the "what is" question. And this remains
true even ifMeno's own confession of emptiness can finally be taken
seriously only on the most superficial level.
Accordingly, one can translate the image of the Cave in the
following way: Strictly speaking, the transition is not from shadows
to things which would then replace those shadows; rather, it is from
shadows unrecognized as such, to shadows taken as shadows; more
literally, it is from a dependent reality unrecognized as such, to the
recognition of its dependence-character-i.e., to the recognition that
it depends on something else, whatever that something else may be.
In any case, it would be "the real," if only for its priviledged independence. But can it be determined any more concretely than that?
Can we answer the question: What is it?
We can better appreciate the difficulty this latter question presents
by recognizing that the independent is not given in the same way as
what depends on it is given. If it is only the dependent (even once
recognized as such) that one actually has before oneself, then how,
in what manner, is that on which it depends "given" (as it must be,
in order to be at all aware of the dependent character of the dependent)? Or, to ask the question differently: If the overcoming of
opinion is tantamount to the recognition of the essential difference
between knowledge and opinion, what is the character of one's
relation to that knowledge which one is now "aware of'? How is one
now aware of that knowledge, since one surely does not yet "have"
it? To answer this, we must see that a complete translation of the
image of the Cave necessitates an inversion of the relation between
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THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
the eikastic image and the presently beheld "reality"-i.e., a reversal
of our understanding of the direction in which eh:acria, imagemaking, the lowest section of the divided line, operates.
But first, a slight digression. In his commentary on the Meno<,
Jacob Klein coins the very happy expression, "dianoetic.eh:acria" to
designate a specific, higher function of eil<:acria. Ei.Kacria itself
names not merely our ability to see shadows and other such images,
but rather our ability to see images as images, to construe images to
be images, to construe them, therefore, as dependent. !nttvOta,
discursive thinking-the third part of the Divided Line (Republic
VI)-in reflecting on the visible and patently "real'' things of the
world, may at some time begin to give up the trust (1ticrn~) which it
ordinarily invests in them. When this happens, liuiv01ahas already
put eiKacria to work on its behalf, turning all the visibles into
"images" of something more real, i.e., into that kind of being that is
dependent on something else.
I will now go on to use this expression, "dianoetic eixacria "in a
slightly different way, which extends or at least varies Klein's use of it.
Dianoetic eiKacria reaches not backward or downward, but "forward" or "upward," and "brings together" the present opinion, now
suspended, and that on which this opinion depends. Or, we could
say, it brings that on which this opinion depends down to bear upon
this opinion, Republic, Book VI, SlOb sq., makes this clear: The
recognition of a D1t68ecrt~, a supposition, as a U1t68ecrt~ is the recognition of its dependence on a beginning (apxl]) which is really a
beginning, a "beginning free from hypotheses." These apxai are
identified at 511c6 as the VOTi~&, the thinkables or intelligibles.
Now, the Divided Line is presented to us in such a way that we
are naturally led to see its uppermost part, called "intellection"
(v6'l]crt~ Bk. VI, 511d8 sq.) or, later on, "knowledge" (e1ttcr~ill!Tt Bk.
VII, 533e8) as the last stage in one's ascent, indeed, as a way of
thinking and, correlatively, as a realm of objects (the VO'l]~&.),.which
is quite remote and difficult to gain access to. This must, of course,
be an accurate portrayal of philosophic or reflective thinking, insofar
as it traverses what the Republic calls the "upward way" to a genuine
apx11' and then descends again "through etli'l], ending in etli'l]." But
surely this can't be the whole story, for what about everyday thinking?
�LENKOWSKI
19
In terms of the Divided Line, everyday thinking is still thinking, and
would therefore have to be at least dianoetic. But it can't be only that.
All thinking, of whatever sort, embodies and is guided by the
7tpamxt apxm (first principles), expressible technically as laws of
identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle, etc. But more particularly, all thinking embodies and is guided by ever so many abstract
concepts, whether these are general concepts (such as "man," "dog,"
"color," "spatial form," etc.) or purely formal concepts ( such as
"thing," "property," "object," "relation," "whole," "part," etc.).
Thinking can't occur without these concepts, though their role and
function is for the most part inexplicit, nonthematic, much like the
slave boy's understanding of squares and sides. This is, then, what I
meant by saying that the image of the Divided Line must be reversed.
Mental activity as such, always and from the beginning, is not only
dianoetic, but noetic as well, at least to the extent that dianoia must
have noetic underpinnings. This may be suggested by Plato himself
when, later on in Bk VII (534a2), he extends v61]<H<; to designate the
entire upper half of the Divided Line. Aristotle also seems to suggest
this at the end of the Posterior Analytics, Ch. 19: He shows that
knowledge of first principles comes, not through definition or demonstration, but only, and in an originary way, through intellection
(vo\l<;). The reason, of course, is that both demonstration and definition have to start somewhere. Otherwise stated: all discursive,
dianoetic activity of thought presupposes and rests on vo\l<;, on an
original v6T)crt<;, since all thinking discourses from something and
about something.
Thus, in revealing opinion as mere 06/;a, dianoetic Eil<:acrla
performs another, important, correlative function: It brings to us, to
our awareness, the VOT)'tov,i.e., that itself on which the dependent
depends. A passage in the Phaedo (72e) is helpful here: In perceiving
a likeness ofSimmias (e.g., in a picture), one is led automatically to
Simmias himself on whom the likeness depends. Thought brings
Simmias himself (av1:o\l 1:t[Lf1tOD) to mind, brings Simmias himself
to bear on the likeness of Simmias, and it is just this that makes us
see the dependent character of the likeness.
But does dianoetic Eilmcrla thereby bring to us thisVOT)'tOV fully
clarified, transparent, articulated and therefore understood? No.
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THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
What it brings to us is rather a prefiguration, or, better, an adumbration of the vorn:6v. I hesitate to call this adumbration, which is, after
all, something noetic, by the misleading term "image," though it is
based on this function of EiKacr\.a; let me instead call it a "noetic
schema." In choosing this language I am trying to be very cautious
about the way in which I think EiKacria is at work here; but the
language might also suggest something along the lines of Kant's
Schematism, especially ifwe consider his own example of the dog. You
will recall that in the Critique of Pure Reason the schematism is
introduced to solve a very particular problem, viz., how empirical
intuitions (i.e., experiences of concrete objects) can be referrable to
concepts, since intelligible concepts and sensible appearances are
utterly alien to one another. s It is the schema, as a special function
of imagination (Einbildungskrajt) that allows me to say that this fourfooted animal in front of me looks like the concept"dog." The schema
is not an image; it is rather the rule of the imagination which tells me
how to construct the image.
Perhaps this is also true in the example of Simmias. Perhaps the
picture of Simmias leads thought to form an image or schema of
Simmias himself, which mediates the picture and Simmias himself-a schema derived from Simmias himself and containing schematically those features of Simmias himself not adequated by the
picture. So understood, the schema or image would contain schematically the requirements of adequation tailored to the particular
defects of the picture.
This noetic schema is the schema of the requirements of the truth.
It seems to be in this way that that on which the dependent depends
IS gtven.
Let me return now to the other formulation of our question: If
the overcoming of opinion is tantamount to the recognition of the
difference between knowledge and opinion, how-in what manner-is one now aware of that knowledge, since one surely does not
yet "have" it? One now has that knowledge only adumbrationally or
schematically, i.e., in becoming aware of the defect of one's opinion,
one is at once becoming aware of what the requirements of the truth
would be. In becoming aware of the disparity between knowledge
and opinion, one is necessarily becoming aware of the knowledge-
�LENKOWSKI
21
character of knowledge. And that means that one has fallen into the
following paradox: One's knowledge that one doesn't have knowledge entails knowledge of what that knowledge is. This is the paradox
of knowledge of ignorance, or: Socratic ignorance which is identical
with Socratic wisdom. This paradox is the true perplexity and is thus
the beginning of philosophy. 6
It is the noetic schema, and not the fully articulated V01)~6v that
dianoetic EiKacria brings to bear; and it is as noetic schema that the
V01)~6v receives its most rudimentary and primary thematization.
But the noetic schema is itself only an adumbration, a mere "outline"
(~{mos). One has it, but what exactly is it that one has? To ponder
this is the "what is" question; and one will continue to pose it to
oneself as long as this aporetic attitude is sustained. It is only within
this "outline" that the "what is" question can genuinely arise.
Thus, one's prior opinion is replaced, but not by another opinion;
it is replaced by the noetic schema, which is at once a demand. The
bare recognition that there is such a "thing itself' (viz., the V01)~6v)
on which the dependent depends, immediately raises the question,
What is it? More precisely stated: this question raises itself, forms
itself.
The "what is" question is the philosophical question·par excellence, for it is the questing after the "real itself' on which the
dependent depends. Thus it is significant that Aristotle in Metaphysics Z, 1030a18-27, identifies the "what is" question as a question (~6
~i f.crn) with oucria.
Let me now return to my earlier question: What exactly is it that
one has access to when one has access to one's prethematic understanding? It is what I have now referred to as a noetic schema. This
is the demand for inquiry, for it is the posing of the "what is" question.
I have characterized the noetic schema as an adumbration, a mere
"outline." If it is to be identified with this prethematic understanding, then it is that "outline" or "horizon"within which we move
and think. It is from this that our thinking takes its bearings; we can
never move beyond the boundaries of this horizon.
Earlier I claimed that in order for our prethematic familiarity to
serve as the ground of inquiry, the object must present itself to us
initially in a paradoxical way, i.e., it would have to be understood as
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THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
double in character, since it would have to be there for us at once as
both anticipation (else the inquiry would have no beginning) and
fulfillment (else there would be no motivation forthe inquiry). This
necessarily double character of the object seemed to be both the
condition for inquiry as well as that which would make the inquiry
impossible, hence the paradox. But I now notice that a "noetic
schema" is a "pointing," and a pointing which is at once both ends of
the arrow, the "from which" and the "to which"; and that means: not
a single moment 1 but rather a "context" or "span," in which the two
essential moments of the anticipating and the anticipated are at once
present. To put this into Socratic language: the recognition of the
dependent as dependent is tantamount to a real change in the object,
such that the object is now no longer a mere unitary moment, but is
itself now opened up into a context or span in which the two essential
moments of dependent and ground are at once present. The picture
of Simmias, taken as a picture, seems to exemplify such a span. This
context or "span" or horizon would therefore be the noetic schema,
which is the same as the horizon of familiarity.
The object understood in this way as double-not that there are
two objects, but that the object itself has a "structure" or is a "span"
with two essential moments-can now help us to understand how
the inquiry can be guided beforehand by what is sought. For if it is
the object understood in this way that one has access to, when one
has access to that prethematic understanding, then I think I begin to
see how that prethematic understanding not only makes it possible
to begin an inquiry, but also makes it necessary. We can now
understand the way in which that prethematic "contact" (Stl;t<;,
Styeiv) functions as a demand, such that it not only provides the
zetetic object, but also provides the necessity of, or motivation for,
the zetesis. If VO'l]crt<; is understood as that "contact" (St/;t<;) which
mind (voil<;) always has with theVO'l]'tOV, and if that very "contact" is
understood as this demand, then otavotu, of which zetesis is a
precise expression, is the acceding to the demand posed by v61]crt<;,
understood as this "contact." It is, incidentally, tempting in this
context to ask of otavota: To what does the ota refer? Does
Republic VI, 511c1-3 help us with this? The text reads: ".... but by
means of ELO'l], it (viz., the upward way, now moving downward)
�LENKOWSKI
23
goes through EtliTt, to dliTt, also ending in EtliTt" Does the liux of
liu'tvota then refer to the dliTt? If so, it means that mind relates to
the very same thing (viz., the VOTt~6v) in two quite different ways-as
VDTtcrt<; (viz., as that unthematic contact, which is a demand) and as
liuxvota (viz., ~s the acceding to that demand).
Thus would this prethematic understanding account for how the
inquiry could, as it must, be guided beforehand by what is sought.
That this would be necessarily true not only of that paradigm of.
inquiry that Socrates constantly recommends to us, i.e, that which
would begin once all the opinions have been cleared away, but also
of the more negative, and, in the dialogues, certainly more usual,
elenchtic inquiry, should seem clear from the fact that the recognition of the error of a given answer has to take its bearings from
something.
There is, however, a further problem: Even if this prethematic
understanding is the horizon within which the inquiry occurs, and
even if this accounts for how the inquiry could be guided beforehand
by what is sought-if our access to that prethematic understanding
is itself the posing of the "what is" question, then the problem arises:
How can the inquiry ever begin? In whot direction could you move?
To ask this question, "In what direction could you move?", refers
us back to the remaining moment, to what is to be interrogated (das
Befragte). I will say in passing, though I will not dwell on it, that
Heidegger himself, in add-ressing this moment of the question's
structure, breaks out of the zetetic circle and in so doing destroys it.
This he does by not identifying this moment absolutely wi1\h the
other three. I.e. with this moment he turns away from Sein (Being)
to Dasein (human being), from the theme of the question to the one
who poses the question in the first place. This move is, of course,
connected in Being and Time with Heidegger's own particular brand
of transcendental philosophy. I.e, the transcendental move here is
from the question-as-posed, to the structure ofDasein as the condition for the posing of the question. Yet from the point of view of my
own particular interest in the.structure of inquiry, I view this move
as one which leads us away from an understanding of the zetetic
circle. I will try to provide something of an argument for this claim
in what follows.
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THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
To see that the zetetic circle is a necessary circle is to really
understand what the horizon of familiarity implies. I therefore
understand all four moments to be absolutely and uncompromisingly identical. In the case of virtue, e.g., what is asked about is virtue
itself; and what is to be discovered is what virtue is, i.e., virtue itself.
In identifYing absolutely these two moments, das Gefragte and das
Erfragte, I am, of course, denying any difference in itself between
virtue itself and what virtue itself is, i.e., its meaning or sense. As far
as I can see, the eidos "virtue itself' is nothing but a meaning or sense.
What guides the whole inquiry from the outset, what gives the
whole inquiry its bearings, its sense of direction, is virtue itself. And
finally, what is interrogated is necessarily virtue itself. Why? Because
it is only virtue itself that could possibly tell us what it is. It is
important to see that, while it is Meno who is put on the spot, Meno
is not the one interrogated. Hence Socrates' invitation to Meno to
join with him in interrogating virtue together, an invitation which I
believe to be genuine, despite Socrates' divination of the utter intransigence of Meno's soul.
It is this uncompromising identity of all four moments that keeps
the circle absolutely closed, and which therefore raises again the
question, How can one inquire? It essentially raises this question
because, if the question consists of only four structural moments, and
if these four moments are identical, then the question would seem
always to remain motionless, for there does not seem to be any
possibility of going anywhere. There is a passage in theMeno (79b-e)
which makes this problem utterly clear: Socrates chides Meno for
always responding in terms of the parts of virtue, when what is asked
for is virtue as a whole. He asks: "But do you think someone could
know what is a part of virtue, without knowing virtue itself?" (79c8).
Meno does not think so. Socrates then says: 'Well, then, oh best of
men, you must not think that while still inquiring into the 'what is'
of virtue as a whole, that you will be revealing it to anyone by
answering in terms of its parts, or in terms of anything else of that
sort-for it will be necessary to return again to the same question:
What do you say this virtue, which you are talking about, is?-or do
I seem to you to be saying nothing?" (79d5-e3). Meno answers:
"You seem to me to speak rightly."
�LENKOWSKI
25
From the point of view of the whole-part relation, then, the
problem is the following: The "what is" question asks about something as a whole. And in light of what I have said about the structure
of the question, we are, and must be, already in possession of that
whole. How, already having that whole, could we begin to pursue
it? The only other possible way of inquiring into the whole seems
to be by way of an examination of its parts or exemplifications. But a
knowledge of the parts or exemplifications as parts or exemplifications presupposes a knowledge of precisely that whole of which they
are parts or exemplifications, and the turn to them can therefore be
made only in light of a prior understanding of the whole, which
means that an inquiry into the whole, by way of the parts, is inadmissable. And yet this seems to be the only possible way, unless we
address ourselves directly to the whole itself. But how, if we already
have the whole, could we ever begin to pursue it? If this circle is a
completely closed one (and, after all, there is no such thing as an open
circle), then one implication or consequence of this is that, in just
the same way that one cannot escape it or get out of it, so also there
is not, and cannot be, any access to it from the outside: Insofar as one
already has a world and, correlatively, a mental life, one must always
be already within this circle. 7 In other words, the phenomenon of
the circle bespeaks a contact (Oi.~tS) which exists from the very outset.
Can we ever overcome this apparent immobility which the zetetic
circle seems to entail without destroying in the process its necessary
circularity? Socrates' own answer to this question in the Meno is that
all learning is really something called "recollection" (aVUJ.!V110'tS).
He says: " ... as all nature is akin ... there is no difficulty .. .learning out
of a single recollection all the rest, if one is manly and doesn't get
tired of searching" (81d1-5). This seems to mean that, insofar as our
thinking is led to turn inward toward its own proper objects (the
V011'ta), which objects are always at our disposal, always there for us,
it is also led to the possibility of paying attention to, and following up
on, the ways in which these V011'ta point to other such V011'ta, and
ultimately to all other such V011'ta, all of which are already really at
our disposal, really there for us. Through an effortful turning inward,
an effortful focussing of attention, our prethematic contact (ei.~tS)
with the proper objects of our thinking can be made thematic. We
�26
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
are always "open" to these objects, and we are always open to the
"paintings" that they have to one another. In pointing to one another
they show themselves to be interrelated systematically and to constitute a whole, a noetic or eidetic realm, and this too is something we
are always open to. In other words, in our turning inward, our
dianoetic posture, guided by v6rtcn<;, is always one of openness to
the whole. This is what the zetetic circle leads us to see.
It is the Socratic paradox of knowledge of ignorance which reveals
that inquiry is a necessary circle; for this self-aware knowledge of
ignorance exhibits a "contact" with the V01)'tU, a contact which is
always there and can never be broken. And it is, in turn, the zetetic
circle, precisely because it is completely closed, that leads us to
characterize all learning as recollection, and thus reveals to us our
openness to the whole.
Notes
1. Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Ober den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehr~ in
Fichte's Werke, Bd. 1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971) 55sq.
2. Although it never once occurs in Plato, Aristotle does occasionally
(cf.Meta. 1051b24, 25; 1072b21) use this happy word to designate
the relation between intellection and the intelligible. It has the
advantage over such words as A.aflfl&.vnv, which Aristotle also
occasionally uses to designate this relation (e.g.Anal. Post. B,
93b15), that it is neutral with respect to the direction of the activity
involved. Whereas A.af.tfl&.vnv (literally, "to grasp") seems to
suggest that intellect is "active" upon its "passive" objects, a Bi~t<;
indicates merely "contact" or "being in touch with."
3. Martin Heidegger. Sein und Zeit (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1963).
4. Jacob Klein. A Commentary on Plato's Meno (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1965) 112 sq.
�LENKOWSKI
27
5. Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason Trans. by N. Kemp
Smith (London: Macmillan, 1963) 180-187.
6. This is something I attempted to work out in detail in an essay
published earlier in this journal. See my "The Origin ofPhilosophy," St.John's Review, xxxvii, no. 2&3, Spring, 1986, pp. 81-92.
7. Just how one comes to "have" a "world" at all is a problem that
goes well beyond the scope of this present inquiry. It is a concern
central to the phenomenological philosophy ofEdmund Husser!,
and no one interested in the problem can afford to ignore him.
While all of his writings touch on this theme in one way or
another, it is most prominent in the following works: 1) Erfahrung und Urteil (Hamburg: Meiner, 1972); English translation
Experience and Judgment, Trans. J. Churchill and K. Arneriks
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973); 2) Ideen zu
einer reinen Phiinomenologie und phiinomenologischen Philosophie,
Zweites Buch: Phiinomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution
(Haag: Nijhoff, 1952; 3) Analysen zur passiven Synthesis (Haag:
Nijhoff, 1966).
�28
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
�~ Sun and Cave
~
Eric Salem
For Charlie
Introduction
Near the end of book five of the Republic, and at the very center
of the dialogue as a whole, Socrates makes his famous-or infamous-claim: "Unless the philosophers rule as kings or those now
called kings and chiefs genuinely andadequately philosophize ... there
will be no rest from ills for the cities, my dear Glaucon, nor I think
for human kind, nor will the regime we have now described in speech
ever come forth from nature, insofar as possible, and see the light of
the sun" (473d).
Fortunately for us, Glaucon and Adeimantus have the courage to
call Socrates' bluff. They demand that Socrates justify this claim and
he does, over the course of more than two books. In the middle of
his justification, between his account of the nature of the philosopher
and his account of the education proper to him, Socrates sets out
three strange and strangely haunting images. In the image of the
good, he posits a sun-like source that somehow yokes together
knower and known, and calls this source the good or the idea of the
good. In the image of the cave, he describes our nature and condition
in light of that source. In the image of the divided line, Socrates
characterizes the ascent to the good and the human powers required
for that ascent.
I want to think about-.or rather to think through-these images,
by first raising and then attempting to answer the questions about
them that I suppose any serious reader of the Republic would raise.
Eric Salem is a tutor at St. John's College, Armapolis. This essay is a slightly revised
version ofa-lecture delivered at Annapolis and at the Thomas More Institute in Nashua,
N.H. Quotations are from the translation by Allan Bloom, Basic Books, 1968.
�30
SALEM
Now doing this, confronting Socrates' images on their own terms,
will require me to abstract, for the most part, from the context I have
just sketched out. However, I want to urge you to keep this context
in mind. In particular, I urge you to keep asking yourselves what
light Socrates' images might shed on his central claim that the
philosopher is the solution to the problem of human community. I
myself will turn to this question at the end of my essay. There I hope
to show you that Socrates' strange and apparently apolitical images
form the true center of the Republic. That is, I hope to show you that
Socrates' images are the key to understanding why and in what sense
the philosopher should rule.
I. Questions
Socrates introduces his image of the good in book six with the
claim that the good is the chief and universal object of human desire,
that it is "what every soul pursues and for the sake of which it does
everything" (505d). Very near the end of book seven, while describing the final stages of the philosophers' education, Socrates further
claims that the good, once known, can serve as a pattern or paradigm
for the life of a man or a city: "Lifting up the brilliant beams of their
souls, they must be compelled to look toward that which provides
light for everything. Once they see the good itself, they must be
compelled, each in his turn, to use it as a pattern for ordering city,
private men, and themselves for the rest of their lives" (540a-b).
I find neither of these claims about the good particularly problematic. The claim that everyone somehow desires the good is at any rate
a familiar Socratic dictum, and one that seems to be amply borne out
by the drama of the Republic. Glaucon's longing to see the conversation continue, Cephal us's willingness to absent himself from it,
even Thrasymachus's angry wish to put a stop to it-all seem to be
rooted in a desire to secure the good for oneself. The drama of the
Republic also seems to support the claim that the good could serve as
a pattern for human action. For instance, viewed in retrospect,
Glaucon's desire to know whether justice is good can be seen as a
desire to know the good so that he might shape his life in accordance
with it.
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31
What I find puzzling, then, is not these claims themselves, but the
relation of the good as Socrates describes it to them. It would be one
thing if the good were, say, pleasure or knowledge. (These, by the
way, are the alternatives that Socrates explicitly rejects just before he
begins his own description.) I can easily convince myself that pleasure is what everyone desires most, and on some days I can almost
convince myself that the same is true of knowledge. I can also see
how thinking that either pleasure or knowledge were the chief good
would shape and inform a life. But what of the good as Socrates
describes it?· What would it mean to take what yokes together knower
and known as a pattern for the life of a city or a man? And even if
someone could do this, what sense could it make to say that it is the
chief object of desire for anyone "much less everyone"?
In different ways these questions both concern the applicability of
Socrates' image of the good to ordinary human concerns. Both
questions arise because Socrates' image confounds our ordinary
sense of what should count as an answer to the question, "What is
the good?" My next question is of a different sort. It concerns the
very existence of the good as Socrates describes it. As you may
remember, that description draws heavily on an analogy with sight.
Seeing and being seen, Socrates observes, differ from, say, hearing
and being heard in a decisive respect. Hearing, the capacity to hear,
depends only on the presence of something to be heard for its
completion, and vice versa. Put someone who can hear in the presence of a sound; he will hear and the sound will be heard. But put
someone with good eyes in a darkened room full of the most brilliant
colors and nothing will happen. Seeing and being seen depend on a
third thing or rather on two things: light and a source of light. So,
too, Socrates claims, in the case of knowing and being known. The
capacity to know and the capacity to be known depend on an external
source for their completion; this source, this yoke, as Socrates calls
it, is the good or the idea of the good.
Yet why, we might ask, should we suppose that knowing is
sight-like rather than hearing-like? Mter all, as Socrates himself
admits, seeing is the exception and hearing is the rule. That is, in
nearly all cases-and I suppose he is thinking particularly of smelling,
touching and tasting-no third thing seems to be required for the
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completion of a capacity to do something and the corresponding
capacity to suffer. Why, then, does Socrates insist on putting knowing in the class defined uniquely by sight rather than in the common
class-the economy class-characterized by hearing? Is there some
feature of our experience which would allow us to infer that there
must be some mediating principle between knower and known? If
there is, Socrates does not mention it. Do we perhaps encounter this
principle directly in the ordinary course of our learning and knowing? Again, if we do, Socrates does not say so-and in any case, if
we did, it is difficult to see why he would resort to an image to bring
that principle into view.
Socrates' silence about this most basic matter is baffling, and our
bafflement can only increase as we enter further into the details of
his image. For Socrates does more than merely posit a principle that
mediates between knower and known. He likens the ability to see
to an overflow dispensed to us by the sun, and draws the corresponding consequence for our ability to know: the good is not only a
necessary condition for our knowing, but the very source of our
capacity to know. He then goes on to make parallel claims about the
objects of our knowledge. He likens the truth to light, and makes it
somehow a feature of those objects: "[T]herefore say that what
provides truth to the things known and gives the power to the one
who knows is the idea of the good" (508e ). And then, as a final step,
he claims that the good is responsible for the very existence of the
things we know: "[T)herefore say that not only being known is
present in these things as a consequence of the good, but also
existence and being are in them besides as a result of it" (509b ).
It seems to me that each of these additional features of Socrates'
image is worthy of question. I, at any rate, would have liked to hear
some reason given for each of them, some reason that is not dependent on the initial (and questionable) analogy with sight. However,
once again, this is just what Socrates does not provide. Yet suppose
we were to accept, in principle, every detail of Socrates' image of the
good. Suppose, that is, that we were to admit, as genuine, the
possibility that knower and known are yoked together by some
external source, that the knowable things are always aglow, lit up by
that source, and that we as knowers are somehow akin to these things
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by virtue of our common heritage. It seems to me that just here we
encounter a difficulty at least as great as any I've described. We need
only reflect on our own experience as learners and knowers.
On balance it seems to me that we know-really know-very little
and that what little we do know we know only as the result of great
and unremitting labor. The things most worth knowing are not
luminous, not to us at least. Perplexity with respect to them is for
most of us the most we can manage, and in truth most of us prefer
the dull comfort of well-worn opinion to knowing that we don't
know. Is there room in this world of ours for the good as Socrates
imagines it? Is there room in Socrates' sun-drenched world for the
darkness of our own experience as knowers? It would hardly seem
so. And yet, the picture I have just drawn of our condition as learners
and knowers is largely in accord with another picture put forward by
Socrates, his image of the cave. The human-all-too-human preference for opinion over perplexity, the painfulness of that perplexity,
the arduousness of any ascent to true knowledge-these are all
features of Socrates' own image. To say that Socrates' image of the
good is not in accord with our experience is to say that it is not in
accord with his own image of the cave; it is perhaps to say that Socrates
is not in accord with himself. Are we willing to say this? Is there
some way to reconcile the two images with one another?
Here is a possible solution. Someone might argue that Socrates'
image of the good is meant only to characterize us and the world as
it is for us as knowers. But we are not simply knowers. And our
capacity to know is continually distracted, continually drawn away
from its proper objects by other parts of the soul, by what we like to
call our passions. As a consequence, we find ourselves bound in
darkness, our knowing part forced to content itself with shadows
rather than substance, with mere images of things rather than the
things themselves. Thus, according to this argument, there is no
important sense in which the image of the good is at odds with the
image of the cave. The one simply describes our initial-and for
most people, normal-condition; the other, the condition to which
we should aspire.
There is, I think something to be said for this argument. Socrates
himself seems to say that distraction is at the root of our ignorance
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in these lines from his description of the cave: "[B]ut the present
argument indicates that this power [to know] is in the soul of each,
and that the instrument with which each learns-just as an eye is not
able to turn toward the light from the dark without the whole
body-must be turned around from that which is coming into being
together with the whole soul until it is able to endure looking at being
and the brightest part of being. And we affirm that this is the good,
don't we?" (528d) Still, the very way in which Socrates makes his
point, his spatial metaphor, points to the inadequacy of the solution
I have just sketched out. If coming to know is a matter of turning
around, if it somehow involves directing our vision aright, then there
must be parts of the world which are dark, dark beyond any human
making, and these dark regions must be somehow populated by
shadows, again not of our making. In short, although our ignorance,
the human condition, has something to do with the condition of the
soul, it also has to do with the condition, indeed the very structure,
of the world.
This is what I mean when I say that the image of the cave and the
image of the good are at least apparently at odds with one another.
The ordinary sun is sometimes present, sometimes absent. It rises
and sets. Here we have a perfectly satisfactory explanation of ordinary darkness. But the sun as good never sets; the lights are always
on in the world disclosed by Socrates' image of the good. How, then,
are we to explain the presence within it of the shadow-filled darkness
of the cave? Once again we must ask: Is there some way to bring the
images of the sun and cave together, a way that will also point us
toward answers to the other questions we have raised? Let us see.
II. Image and Original
Let us reflect, for a moment, on one obvious feature of Socrates'
image of the cave. The shapes which the inhabitants of the cave
delight in observing are shadows. What difference does this make?
What is a shadow? In the image of the divided line, Socrates puts
shadows first in his list of natural images; he thus suggests that
shadows constitute the lowest order of images. This seems reasonable. The shadow of a face reveals far less about a face than, say, its
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reflection in still water or in a mirror. The shadow of a thing reveals
only the boundary of a thing. The interior of the thing, its texture,
its depth-all these are absent from the shadow. The darkness which
forms the interior of a shadow itself seems to be an image of its lack
of revealing power. And yet a shadow is an image. To know the
boundary or limit of a thing is to knciw something of that thing. The
inhabitants of the cave thus encounter the things that truly are in a
peculiar fashion. They dwell-we dwell-among the shades of things.
Here is something else that might seem to distinguish shadows
from other types of images. A shadow can only exist if at least three
other things are present. There must be a thing to be shadowed.
There must be light. And the light must be directed light: It must
stem from a source or at least a finite number of sources. Otherwise
the light will not be blocked and no shadow will be produced.
How peculiar are these conditions to the kind of images we call
shadows? (I am speaking here of natural images, the sort that Socrates
associates with the first level of the divided line, and by natural images
I mean not images of natural things, but images that do or can arise
without human intervention.) Clearly all images presuppose originals: an image is always an image if something. And clearly all visual
images presuppose light. By this I do not mean that there must be
light for them to be seen, though this is of course true. I mean that
light produces-or at least co-produces-say, the reflection of a tree
in water. Now it is less clear in such cases than in the case of shadows
that all visual images are also dependent on a source. On a cloudy
day, when light is diffuse, there are no shadows, but one can still see
reflections in water. Still, without a source oflight to be diffused, no
reflection can exist.
What, then, of images which are neither visual nor manmade? Do
they also depend for their existence on the equivalent of light and
sources oflight? Let me answer by turning the question around: Are
there such images? We can be deceived-or deceive ourselves-about the things we touch and hear and taste: we can mistake
the voice of an enemy for the voice of a friend; a bitter medicine can
be disguised by the taste of honey. But it is one thing to say this and
another altogether to say that there are natural images in the world
of smells, tastes and so on. My sense is that there are none or none
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SALEM
worth mentioning, and my guess is that Plato and Socrates would
agree with me. (I might mention here that in the Sophist, the only
dialogue I know of in which an explicit distinction is made between
natural and manmade images, the only examples given of the first
class are visual [Sophist 266b-c ]. Likewise in the divided line image.)
On the other hand, the world is full of visual images that are not
of human making. In fact, it is precisely when the conditions for
seeing things are most fully satisfied-when the sun is at its brightest
and things seem to be aglow of themselves-that the world is most
full of such images. Where there is sun, there is shade. And the
converse is also true-where there are natural images, where there
are shadows and reflections, there must be sun or at least some source
of light. Perhaps we can now see another reason why Socrates puts
shadows first on his list of natural images: They may -reveal least
about the things they image, but they are exemplary in the way they
display the dependence of such images on a source of light.
No doubt you have already seen where I mean to go with this
argument. The more we think about images-natural images-and
the conditions for their existence, the less strange at least two of
Socrates' claims sound. We wondered earlier why Socrates chooses
to liken knowing and being known to seeing and being seen and why,
in particular, he insists that knowing and being known depend t;pon
some external source, namely, the good. In a somewhat different
context, we found ourselves wondering how Socrates can both claim
that such a source exists and claim that most men spend their lives
absorbed in the play of shadows not of their own making. But if
within what we ordinarily call the world, ifwithin the world ofvisible,
tangible, audible things, all natural images depend for their being on
some third thing, beyond their originals and beyond those who perceive them, and if, in addition, things in what we ordinarily call the
world are themselves images of purely intelligible objects, then it
makes sense for Socrates to suppose that there must be an external
source of these images as well, a source other than those who perceive
them and other than their intelligible originals. Moreover, if within
what we ordinarily call the world, images arise only in those contexts
where the perception of the original also depends on an external
source (as in the case of sight), and if, furthermore, in these contexts
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the source of the image is always also the source of the perceiving
and being perceived of the original, then it makes sense to say that
knowing and being known, intellection and intelligibility, depend on
a source external to themselves and it makes sense to say that this
source is the same as the source of the images we take to be things.
In short, the relation of seeing and being seen does make sense as a
paradigm for the relation of knowing and being known. It makes
sense to suppose that knowing and being known depend on an
external source-that is to say, it makes sense to suppose that the good
exists-and it also makes sense to suppose that this source is the very
source of what we ordinarily call the world. The cave is the offshoot,
the inevitable byplay, of the illuminating activity of the good. The
shadow-play that surrounds us, the unintelligibility that suffuses the
lives of most of us most of the time, is simply the price-high, but
non-negotiable-that must be paid for supreme intelligibility.
Clearly there are a number of "ifs" in this argument that require
further examination. What's more, there is at least one crucial
condition for the production of shadows that I have glossed over
entirely, a condition that strongly suggests that life in the cave is the
offspring of more than one parent: no shadow can exist in the
absence of a surface upon which it is cast. I haven't mentioned this
condition until now-and won't mention it again-because to consider it adequately would take us too far afield: at the very least we'd
have to think about the correspondence between the wall of the cave
and what's called the Other in the Sophist and variously called
Mother, Nurse, Receptacle and Place in the Tirnaios. Rather than
take upon myself this limitless task, I propose to spend much of my
remaining time looking closely at two of the assumptions I have made.
III. Poetry and Mathematics
The first supposition I want to look at is the claim that the things
around us, which most of us take to be freestanding, are themselves
images of intelligible originals ([loeta), that is, ideas or forms (fide).
Now since Socrates so frequently and so freely employs this supposition in the Republic and elsewhere, and since in certain dialogues,
notably the Parrnenides, the supposition appears to lead to great, if not
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insuperable difficulties, we might expect to find a proof of it somewhere in the dialogues. But to my knowledge no proof of the
supposition is to be found, if by a proof is meant an attempt to reason
one's way to it from grounds that are prior to and clearer than it. I
can think of two reasons why this might be so.
First, it is at least suggested in certain dialogues that, however
problematic the supposition of intelligible originals may be, that
supposition is what first makes reasoning (and hence proving) possible. Or, as Parmenides puts it to the young Socrates, just after
subjecting the ideas to a devastating critique, anyone who denies the
ideas " ...will have nowhere to turn his thought," for that denial will
" ... utterly destroy the power of conversation" and hence philosophy
(135b-c). In other words, the ideas or forms are the always problematic, yet ever indispensable condition for the possibility of serious
inquiry. About them the philosopher could say: Can't think with
them, can't think without them.
A second reason for the avoidance of any attempt at proof emerges
from Socrates' own image of the cave. Life in the cave is so absorbing-our devotion to shadows is so complete-that the effects of the
cave linger long after an initial turning around. Witness the desire of
the man who's been turned around to flee back to his state ofbondage
and witness his tendency to regard what he's seen as less true, less
revealing, than the shadows he loves. Given this state of affairs, it is
difficult to see how a general proof, however certain, would do any
or at least much good. What seems to be needed instead are illuminating experiences, paths by which the potential learner might gradually find his way from the shadows he finds so absorbing-that is,
from his everyday experience of the world-to the intelligible originals upon which they depend.
What experiences are likely to provide this much-needed illumination? Socrates points to one answer through his image of the
divided line. Let me remind you of some of the details of that image.
Socrates has Glaucon cut a line unequally. He then has him cut each
of its parts in the same ratio as the whole was cut. (Thus A+ B:C+ D
:: A:B :: C:D) Socrates goes on to assign certain kinds of beings and
certain powers of the soul to each of the produced segments. The
larger segments produced by the first cut (that is, A+B and C+D)
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correspond respectively to what is intelligible and what is visible. Of
the four segments produced by the second set of cuts, D corresponds
to the natural images we spoke of earlier, C to the things of which
these images are images, B somehow to mathematical objects, and A
to the forms themselves.
THE INTElliGIBlE
Forms
A
THE VISIBLE
Mathematical
Objects
Things
'
c
Images of
Things
0
Now perhaps the first thing we should glean from this image is
the following: To say that C+ D:A+ B :: D:C is to say thatthe visible
world has to the intelligible world the same relation that ordinary
images within the visible world have to their visible counterparts.
This is, of course, just the claim we are examining, the claim that the
things around us are somehow images. The second thing we should
notice is that B has to A, mathematical objects have to the forms or
eide~just this same relation. They are, in other words, the intellectual
equivalent of reflections or, perhaps better, shadows. Socrates partly
unpacks and partly amplifies this thought in his discussion of the
divided line.
Mathematicians and their objects have a curious relation to objects
in the visible world. As Socrates says, "Don't you know that [the
mathematicians] use visible forms and make their arguments about
them, not thinking about them but about those others that they are
like? They make arguments for the sake of the square itself and the
diagonal itself, not for the sake of the diagonal they draw and likewise
with the rest. These things that they mold and draw, of which there
are shadows and images in water, they now use as images, seeking to
know those things themselves, that one can see in no other way than
with thought" (510d-e).
Mathematical objects thus occupy an intermediate position between the eide or forms and things in the world. Like the eide they
are accessible only to thought. And yet the mathematician is constantly forced to see things in the world as images of them in order to
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make the mathematical objects accessible to himself. They may be
mere images or shadows of the things that truly are. Still, shadowy
though they may be_:or perhaps precisely because they are shadowy-they. seem perfectly suited to introduce the learner to the
intelligible realm. Itiscfor this reason that Socrates goes on, in book
seven, to make the first education of the philosopher kings a mathematical education. For it is precisely through the study of mathematics that we first come to see the shadowy, the image-like character of
the things about us.
Or at any rate, mathematics is one way. I think that Socrates'
account of mathematical experience is right on the mark. One cannot
study mathematics seriously without at least wondering from time
to time whether the objects we draw and count-and by extension
all things insofar as they possess shape and number-are not images
of objects accessible only to thought. And yet my sense is that there
are other ways of arriving at this thought, and that Socrates knows it.
I will have occasion to speak about these alternatives later. But first
I need to address at some length a second sticking point in the
argument I sketched out earlier.
Someone might be willing to agree with Socrates' claim that the
things about us are somehow images. He might also be willing to admit
that the things about us can only be images if there exists some source
external to the originals of those images, an image-casting source. But
this someone might deny that the source is the good as Socrates
describes it and might also deny that the originals of the images we see
are the forms or eide-on the grounds that Socrates himself does!
For Socrates makes the shadows on the wall of the cave images of
artificial things carried about by human beings and he has them projected on the wall, not by the good itself, but by a firewithin the cave.
What are we to make of these peculiar features of Socrates' image?
What are the artificial things here? What is the fire? And who are the
human beings? I think it is very hard to say. At one point Socrates
himself interprets his image as follows: "Well, then, my dear Glau~
con, this image as a whole must be connected with what was said
before. Liken the domain revealed by sight to the prison home, and
the light of the fire in it to the sun's power" (517a-b). Ye'nhis
interpretation is very ~trange. How can Socrates suggest that we see·
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only shadows or images of the things illuminated by the ordinary
sun? Whatever the status of the visible things turns out to be, we see
those things directly, don't we?
Another interpretation of this peculiar middle realm comes to
mind when we begin thinking, for instance, of Socrates' criticism of
Homer and other poets in books two and three of the Republic. There
are certain human beings-we might call them image makers or
opinion makers-who so dominate our thinking, our imagining and
our lives that we might almost be said to inhabit worlds of their
making. We can certainly be said to live in their shadows. What we
cherish and revile, what we weep about and laugh at-all are governed by the images they put before us. Might such men, poets of
the first rank and perhaps founders and great statesmen as well, not
be the human beings who occupy this middle realm? Indeed,
couldn't this be why Socrates himself suggests that we see only
shadows or images of the visible things-that we never see even such
things directly? The extraordinary influence of, say, Homer on our
thinking about moral and political affairs seems clear enough: I, for
one, can never think about courage and honor without being haunted
by the figure of Achilles. But in a certain sense that influence seems
to be equally present in our viewing of natural things: Who, having
read Homer, can look at the Mediterranean and not see wine or look
at the sunrise and not see rosy fingers?
If everything we see we see through the eyes of such image makers,
if the world is image for us in this sense, then much of what I've
been saying thus far would seem to be simply false. There might be
a good which somehow yokes together knower and known, but it
would not also be responsible for the images we take to be true things.
The casting of shadows would be a merely human affair. Moreover,
the very existence of the good would seem to be called into question
by this reading. At any rate, my attempt to argue from the image-like
character of the world about us to the existence of the good would
seem to have been misguided. Must we draw these consequences?
Or is there some way to incorporate what I am calling the middle
realm of Socrates' image into those earlier arguments about the good?
I think there is such a way, and I think that Socrates himself points
to it several times in the course of book seven. The first hint comes
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SALEM
at the very beginning of the book. Here Socrates notes, as if in
passing, that the entrance to the cave is both large and "open to the
light across the whole width of the cave" (514a). I take this curious
remark-echoed in myth of the Phaedo, where the many hollows or
caves are said to be more or less open to the surface of the true
earth-to mean something like the following. The light of the good
may not make its way into the cave; it may not be directly responsible
for the shadows we see or for our ability to discern them. And yet
the cave is not altogether closed to the light, not a self-enclosed,
self-contained whole. It is somehow open to the light, and open to
it at every point. Perhaps it would not be going too far to say that the
light of the good is potentially present throughout the cave, in this
sense: Every image, every shadow, is potentially an occasion for the
ascent from cave to sun. Less metaphorically, every opinion or image
put before us by the opinion or image makers, once seen as an
opinion or image, can be an occasion for the ascent to true knowledge.
Why this should be the case Socrates hints at elsewhere in book
seven. First, he suggests that the objects carried before the fire should
not simply be regarded as originals of the shadows that most men see.
They are themselves images. Indeed, at least some of the words that
Socrates uses to describe them-andrias, zoon (man-image, animalimage) and later agalma (image of divine being)-seem to underscore
just this, to emphasize that each object carried before the fire points
beyond itself, to some further original, presumably to some intelligible object (514c-515a; 517d-e). Moreover, Socrates suggests that
what holds for the objects carried before the fire holds for the fire as
well. For instance, in the very passage in which he identifies the light
of the fire with the sun's power, he claims that anyone who sees the
idea of the good must conclude that "this is in fact the cause of all
that is just and beautiful in everything-in the visible it gave birth to
the light and its sovereign, in the intelligible, itself sovereign, it
provided truth and intelligence" (517c). Again, in the passage I have
already cited from the end of book seven, Socrates seems to claim
that all seeing, all discerning-even the discerning of shadows that
takes place in the cave-ultimately depends on the light of the good:
the good is "that which provides light for everything" (540a).
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If the originals of the shadows in the cave are themselves images
of the eide, and if the fire, the shadow-casting and shadow-discerning
source, is itself derived from and an image of the good, then it makes
sense to say that an ascent from cave to sun can begin anywhere.
What's more, it becomes possible to return to a modified version of
our initial conclusion that sun and cave form an elemental pair, with
each implying the existence of the other.
The modification consists, in effect, in the admission that the good
is not directly responsible for the shadows that surround us. The good
is present in the cave by proxy, as it were; it is present-somehow-in
the image-casting activity of image makers. Does this suggestion
make sense? Let me be clear, first, about what I do not mean to say.
I do not mean to say that the shadow casters portrayed by Socrates
knowingly imitate the good. Nor do I mean to say that the quasioriginals with which they cast shadows are known by them to be
images of the truly knowable things. On the contrary, I think we
are meant to see that most image makers are unwitting mediators
between the sun and the cave. A sign of this is the fact that the
human beings in Socrates' picture-! mean the ones who carry
objects before the fire-neither look at nor tend the fire. Instead
they scurry about, shifting their image-producing images from place
to place. The very condition of their activity-which is also the
condition of the activity of the prisoners in the cave-is as unknown
to them as it is to their prisoners
If the image makers portrayed by Socrates are not knowing mediators, in what sense can they be said to mediate? Perhaps this
question can best be addressed by way of another image, that of the
mathematicians of the divided line. As we saw earlier, Socrates
suggests through his image of the divided line that mathematical
objects must be regarded as shadows or images of the eide. Let me
now add to this that Socrates emphasizes in his discussion of the
divided line that the mathematicans, like the image makers, tend not
to be aware of this: They treat images of theeide as originals. Strange
as it may sound, this would seem to mean that when the mathematician inquires, say, into the relations between figures or between
numbers, he is in fact engaged unawares in a purely formal study of
the possible relations among the forms. In other words, something
�44
SALEM
like the possible structures of the eidetic realm are made visible in
shadow form in the more or less accessible speech of the mathematicians. Now, might something similar be said of those we've called
image makers? To found a regime or to craft a great poem is to
fashion a comprehensive vision of what is just and unjust, beautiful
and base, good and bad. But to do this, I am suggesting, is to figure
in speech a possible configuration of the eidetic realm; it is to make
visible the boundaries or limits, the shadowy outlines, of the just, the
beautiful, the good.
Perhaps you find disturbing my suggestion that poetry and mathematics are closely related. I find it a little disturbing myself. Still, my
sense is that Socrates means us to see their kinship with one another.
In fact my sense is that he means us ro see that the third section of
the divided line and what I have been calling the middle realm of the
cave are images of the same place, the proper home of mathematicians
and poets alike. Ifl am right about this, the occupational disease-or
rather, temptation-of those who dwell within this region would
seem to be the temptation to regard their activity and their objects as
freestanding, as originals, rather than as the images they are.
Let me explain why I speak here of an occupational temptation
rather than a disease. In part it is because Socrates himself seems to
envision the possibility of a mathematics that knowingly points
beyond itself, that invites its students to reflect on its formal foundations even as it moves them forward. That is, the harshness of his
critique of mathematicians at the end of book six seems to be offset
by his suggestion in book seven that mathematics is a necessary
preparation for the study of dialectic and the ascent to the good. But
in the end it is the figure of Socrates rather than his description of a
quasi-dialectical mathematics that inclines me to use the language of
temptation rather than disease.
What I mean is this: My sense is that if the Socrates of the
dialogues belongs anywhere on the divided line, it is on the third
level, with the mathematicians and the image makers. We rarely, if
ever, see him engaged in the pure dialectic he associates with the
highest!eve! of the divided line. And we certainly see him producing
a great number of images. Consider the evidence of the Republic
alone. The bulk of the dialogue is an elaborate image of a city, which
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
45
we are meant to see at the same time as an image of the soul. It
ends-after a harsh criticism of image making-with another elaborate image of the soul and its choices. And right at the center of the
dialogue Socrates sets out the very images we have been considering.
It is these images, above all, which display the possibility of a knowing
mediation between sun and cave. For here we see Socrates making
and conveying images-two of them "poetic," one, mathematical-which are intended precisely to point Glaucon and us beyond
the realm of images and human image making. The images of
Socrates announce themselves as images; they are transparent in the
highest degree. Such images could only be the work of a man aware,
supremely aware, that his image-making activity was itself an image
of a more fundamental, more original activity.
I will have more to say about Socrates a bit later. In particular, I
will want to bring the figure of Socrates to bear as we circle back to
the first set of questions I !raised about the good, namely, how the
good as Socrates describe~ it could be the good for us and could
furnish a paradigm for human action. But before we can treat this
first set of questions, we must return to Socrates' own characterization of the good.
IV. Weaving Together
We would do well to remind ourselves at the outset that the feature
of the good we have been focusing on for some time, its image-casting
power, is not at the heart of Socrates' description here. It is certainly
mentioned: the Sun, the image by which we are to glimpse the good,
is called "the child" as well as "most like" the good it images (506e).
But as I said, image-casting is not at the center of Socrates' description.
What is? The good yokes; it gathers; it brings things together-this
seems to be its primary feature. Now thus far we have been supposing
that the gathering of the good is limited, that knower and known are
the only things it brings together. But Socrates says nothing here to
make us think that he means to restrict the gathering power of the
good to this relation alone. And indeed, later on, as he attempts to
describe what it would mean for someone to dwell outside the cave,
he insists that the good is not only "in a certain way the cause of all
�46
SALEM
those things that the man and his companions had been seeing," that
is, somehow the source of shadows in the cave, but also "the source
of seasons and of years [outside it]," that is, the overarching source
of order among the intelligible objects (516b). The good, we must
now understand, is responsible for all collectedness, all being together, within the intelligible realm. It brings together knower and
known; but it also makes the known, the realm of intelligible objects,
a realm, an articulated whole rather than a heap of objects
What does the word "whole" mean here? The word "yoke," used
by Socrates in various forms three times in the course of his image,
might seem to imply the violent imposition of order, subjugation.
But this is clearly not Socrates' meaning (or, at any rate, not his
primary meaning). The good is a ruling source, anarch£, but its rule
is not arbitrary. Rather, as the example of knower and known makes
manifest, the good brings together, not indifferent elements, but
things that belong together. In other words, the collections it produces
are well-ordered collections, and the good is a source of wholeness in
at least this sense.
There is, however, another and perhaps more fundamental sense
in which the good is a source of wholeness. Once again, it is the
relation of knower and known that points the way. It is not the case
that the power to know is, as it were, somewhat better off for being
conjoined with a knowable object. On the contrary, the power to
know is, is wholly itself, only in the presence of what is knowable.
Or, as Socrates himself observes, the power to see is barely distinguishable from blindness in the absence of illuminated objects. In
other words, the very identity of the power to know would seem to
depend on its bei11g joined with a knowable object-and the same
might be said of the knowable object. Perhaps this is why Socrates
insists that the good is in some way responsible for the very existence
of knowable objects: In bringing knower and known together, in
making a pair of them, it makes each one just the one that it is. The
good, in this sense, might also be called the same, the source of all
identity-and indeed this may be just the name that is given to it in
the Sophist, in a discussion where the community and integrity of
the eide is at issue.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW
47
Let me close this section by pointing out a final sense in which the
good is a source of identity. I have just suggested that the good is
such a source insofar as it brings together things that can be fully
themselves only in being together. But Socrates' image suggests that
the good is also the source of the very power of such things to come
together, and that it acts as a source by granting those things a share
of its own being. This is made particularly clear in the case of the
knower; through the analogy with sun and sight, Socrates characterizes the power to know as an overflow and gift of the good. That
a strict parallel to this is intended in the case of the objects of
knowledge becomes clear when we see that light-that is, truth-is
not here a medium through which we see. Instead the good "provides
truth to the things known" (508e). The eide do not simply reflect the
light of truth; they are radiant. They shine forth with a light that is
somehow their own. In the end, the yoking together with which we
began may amount to this: Out of the fullness of its being, the good
renders each being in the intelligible realm fit for the activity and
community which complete it.
Where are we in this picture? In what sense can this good be said
to be our good? And what would it mean to take this good as a
pattern for our lives or the life of our city?
Let me venture a first answer to the first of these questions.
Suppose we were all, at bottom, lovers of wisdom. Suppose the
longing at the bottom of all the great variety of human longing were
a longingto dwell, somehow, among the most knowable objects.
Then it seems to me that there might be two senses in which the
good would be our good. It would be the very condition for the
activity we prized most. For it would be that which fits us for the
activity of knowing and makes our objects fit to be known. That is,
the good would be the most beneficial or most needful thing, the
good for us in this sense. But as the source of the knowability, the
truth, the radiance, of the knowable things, the good would itself be
the most knowable, most radiant, hence most alluring of the knowable things. It would be the chief object of human desire, the good
for us in this sense.
It would be, that is, ifwe were all at bottom lovers of wisdom. But
are we? Would Socrates say that we are? His image of the cave would
�48
SALEM
seem to suggest that we are not. It is true that the inhabitants of the
cave take a certain delight in discerning and distinguishing the
shadows before them. Indeed, this activity of discerning and distinguishing seems to be in some sense at the center of their lives. And
yet, the violence with which they resist being turned around toward .
the truly discernible and distinguishable things suggests that something else, some other desire, is at the core of their being.
Not all human beings, then, are lovers of wisdom, and yet I still
think it can be said that the good is somehow the good for us. First
I must tell you what I think does lie at the core of human desire: I
think it is the desire to be complete, either by being a whole on one's
own or by participating in a larger whole. It seems to me that this
desire for completion is, for instance, the thread that binds together
the two great speeches about love by Socrates and Aristophanes in
the Symposium: The philosopher and the poet disagree about what
constitutes and makes possible human completeness; they do not
disagree about the depth of the desire for it. It also seems to me that
this desire is at the root of the resistance of the inhabitants of the cave
to being turned around: the cave is a dwelling, an oikesis; to give up
the cave is to give up a kind of home; it is to give up a kind of being at
home in the world (514a). Finally, it seems to me that this desire is just
what the image makers in the cave are serving and satisfYing through
their images. The image makers are ."t bottom homemakers. The
visions embedded in their poems and law, the visions of what is good
and evil, noble and base, right and wrong-these visions give order
to the lives of men. They make a common life possible. They make
human being a being together; it is no accident that the word nomos,
usually translated as law, also means song and at bottom means
distribution and order.
Do we not see just here at least one sense in which the good is
somehow our good, and at the same time glimpse an answer to our
other question, namely, how the good could serve as a pattern for
human and political action? The image makers are unwitting images
of the good in a double sense. As makers of images they imitate the
image-casting power of the good, and in this very activity they imitate
its community-making power. But in so doing, in making dwelling
places for men, they make possible-or at least aim to make possi-
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
49
ble-the satisfaction of what I am suggesting is the deepest human desire,
the desire to be whole or complete. The good, and such men as imitators
of the good, are good for us in just this sense.
But of course most human communities fall short. Most men
may find them homey enough to resist the ascent to the good. But
they fail to find in them the full satisfaction of their desire for
completeness. Thrasymachus's violent rejection of the claim that justice
is good, that being just is to one's advantage, is one sign of this lack of
satisfaction. The terrifYing tale ofpolitical strife and disorder that forms the
backdrop for the Republi£ -a tale narrated in part by Thucydides--is
another: Just think of what happens in Corcyra. As Socrates himself says
in the passage with which I began this essay, "there is no rest for ills for the
cities, my dear Glaucon, nor I think for human kind ... "
Of course, Socrates goes on to complete this sentence by suggesting that
the ills of cities and mankind could be put to rest if only the philosophers
were to rule. We are now in a position to see what this would mean. The
philosopher, taking as the model for his activity as king the very thing that
makes possible his activity as a lover ofwisdom, would order the citizens of
his city in accordance with their natures. He would yoke them together
both by casting before them the right images and by rendering each of them
fit for the activity proper to his nature. In so doing he would bring to fruition
the definition ofjustice arrived at in book four: Each citizen would mind
his own business--literilly, do his own thing;-and in doing them achieve
the satisfaction ofbeingonewith himself in being one with the city
Now I say "would" here because by the end of book nine Socrates
and Glaucon see:n to have abandoned the possibility that such a city
could ever be founded "in deed." The pattern for it, Socrates says, is
laid up in heaven. Perhaps a man who looked to it could "found a
city within himself on the basis of what he sees" (592b). But the city
he spent nearly six books of the Republic talking about is just this, a
city in speech. In other words, the true city, the true community, is
the heavenly community presided over by the good; It is the community of the eide-or perhaps the community of the eide in communion with the one who knows them. Such a knower might be able
to shape his owh life and his own soul in the image of that city. But the
�50
SALEM
possibility that a human community might arise that was more than
the merest shadow of the true city-this possibility has been abandoned.
At any rate this is how things look ifwe focus only on the argument
of the Republic. If we look to its drama-and above all if we look to
the figure of Socrates himself-we see something quite different.
For in the Republic we see Socrates founding not one but two cities
in speech. There is the city he talks about with Glaucon and others.
But there is also the city--or at least the community-that arises in
the course of the talk about it. Here, as elsewhere in the dialogues
and like the dialogues themselves, Socrates is at work as the visible image
of the good, uniting within his own person, the person of the
philosopher, the powers of weaving together and image making
delimited in the Sophist and the Statesman. He gathers up and
distinguishes the young men around him, taming Thrasymachus,
spurring Glaucon andAdeimantus on, helping each to find his proper
place and work within their city in speech. He does this in part by
collecting and distinguishing in speech the forms of things, by
practicing the art of dialectic. But Socrates' casting forth ofwondrous
images lies at the center of his gathering, and at the center of these
images stand his images of sun and cave. Here his intellect, itself the
overflow from the sun's treasury, becomes the fire that illuminates
the cave. Here he lets the young men sitting around him see, if only
for a moment, what it would mean to stand up, turn around, and
make their ascent from the cave. If, then, we turn the words of
Socrates' central claim into a question, if we ask whether the "regime
traversed now in speech" can ever "blossom forth and see the light
of the sun," we can say ''Yes"-it can, it has, because the philosopher,
for a time, has become king.
�~
On Some Texts of
~ Bacon and of Descartes
Andre Lalande
It is common knowledge that Francis Bacon coined numerous philosophical aphorisms, such as the adage, "Knowledge is power," or the
saying admired so by Leibniz: "A little science removes us from God;
much science brings us back to Him." It is less known that we find
in his writings, "Man is a god to man" 1 before finding it in Spinoza,
and that Danton owed to him the celebrated saying, "Boldness, again
boldness, boldness always. "2 I presume that an attentive reading of
Descartes, of Pascal, ofMalebranche, ofLeibniz, would show them
to be even more nourished by his works than is generally supposed.
Without a doubt, Cartesianism handles the edifice of the sciences in
a way contrary to Bacon (at least to begin with, because Descartes
recognizes that very quickly it is necessary to proceed toward causes
from effects; and Bacon, on the other hand, makes all the rest of the
sciences depend on physics); but in the critique of previous philosophy, in the epistemological idea of the relation of the mind to things,
in the very plan of this edifice of the sciences which they traverse
differently, the resemblances remain close and numerous. The aim
of this note is to select from the Discourse on Metlwd alone (and
without doubt incompletely) the passages which appear to show
either a certain familiarity or a curious conjunction with the works
of Bacon. It seemed to me that it would be useful to collect these
comparisons, because they are not indicated in any of the annotated
editions of the Discourse that I have had in my hands; 3 nor in the
preface which M. Fowler has put at the beginning of his great edition
of the New Organon-a preface heavily documented, in which a
whole chapter concerns the Baconian influence, and where he has
brought forth much evidence-he cites but two small passages of
Translated by Pamela Kraus.
�52
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
Descartes relative to "Verulamius," taken from letters to Mersenne
of 1631 and 1632.
For greater convenience I arrange these extracts in two columns.
Words from the context necessary for understanding the text are
added in square brackets.
1. Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world ... the diversity of our opinions does not arise
because some of us are more reasonable than others but solely because we direct our thoughts along
different paths and do not attend to
the same things .... The greatest
souls are capable of the greatest
vices as well as the greatest virtues;
and those who proceed but very
slowly can make much greater progress, if they always follow the right
path, than those who hurry and
stray from it. (I, 1)
1. For my method of discovering
knowledge places men's natural talents almost on a level, and does not
leave much to their individual excellence, since it performs every-
thing by the surest rules and
4
demonstrations.
(Novum Organum, I, 122)
But of these three, prudence and
soundness of direction,-that is,
the pointing out and setting forth of
the straight and ready way to the
thing which is to be done,-must
be placed first .. For the cripple in
the right way (as the saying is) outstrips the runner in the wrong. (De
Augmentis, ESH N, p. 284) 5 {ESH II,
2,p.486}
In fact, as is clear, the more
active and faster a man is, the further astray will he go when he is
6
running on the wrong road. Nov.
Org. I, 61).
�LAlANDE
53
2. I knew that ... memorable deeds
told in histories ... help to shape
one's judgment... that poetry has
quite ravishing delicacy ani sweetness; that mathematics contains
some very subtle devices which
serve as much to satisfY the curious
as to further all the arts and lessen
man's labours; that writings on
morals contain many very useful
teachings and exhortations to virtue; that philosophy gives us the
means of speaking plausibly about
any subject and of winning the admiration of the less learned; that
jurisprudence, medicine, and other
sciences bring honours and riches to
those who cultivate them. (I,7)
2. Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile;
natural philosophy, deep; moral,
grave; l~c and rhetoric, able to
contend.
For I have no wish to prevent
those arts and sciences that now
flourish from providing food for
argument, adornment for conversation, employment for professors
and from being a source of profit to
those in business. (Nov. Org. , I,
128.)
3. [O]ne who is too curious
about the practices of past ages usually remains quite ignorant about
those of the present .... those who
regulate their conduct by examples
drawn from these works are liable
to fall into the excesses of the
knights-errant in our tales of chivairy, and conceive plans beyond
their powers. (I, 8)
3. [T]hat learning doth soften
men's minds, ... in making them too
curious and irresolute by variety of
reading, ... or too immoderate and
overweening by reason of the greatness of examples, or too incompatible and differing from the times by
reason ofthe dissimilitude of exampies; or at least that it doth divert
men's travails from action and business .... ( The Proficience and Advancement ofLearning, I in Francis Bacon: A
Selection of His Works ed. by Sidney
Warhaft, Odyssey Press, 1965, pp.
205-6) {ESH III, p. 268}.
�54
4. I compared the moral writings
of the ancient pagans to very proud
and magnificent r.alaces built only
8
on sand and mud. They extol the
virtues, and make them appear
more estimable than anything else
in the world; but they do not adequately explain how to recognize a
virtue, and often what they call by
this fine name is nothing but a case
of callousness, or vanity, or desperation, or parricide (I, 10).
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
4. So have these writers set forth
good and fair copies, and accurate
draughts and portraitures of good,
virtue, duty, [and felicity, as J true
objects [ for the will and desires to
aim at J. But though the marks
themselves be excellent and well
placed, how a man may best take
aim at them; that is, by what
method and course of education
the mind may be trained and put in
order for the attainment of them,
they pass over altogether, or slightly
or unprofitably (De Aug. VII, 1;
ESH V, pp. 3-4) {I, p. 713}.
Notwithstanding (to return to the
philosophers), if before they had
come to the popular and received
notions of virtue and vice, pleasure
and pain, and the rest, they had
stayed a little longer upon the inquiry concerning the roots of good
and evil, and the strings of those
roots; they had given in my opinion
a great light to those questions
which followed; and especially if
they had consulted with the nature
of things, as well as moral axioms,
they had made their doctrines less
prolix, and more profound; (De
Aug. VII; ESH V, p.6) {I, p. 716}.
�LALANDE
55
5. And it was always my most earnest desire to learn to distinguish the
true from the false in order to see
clearly into my own actions and pro ceed with confidence in this life. (I,14)
Cf [I] had acquired some general notions in physics .. .I believed
that I could not keep them secret
without sinning gravely against the
law which obliges us to do all in our
power to secure the general welfare
of mankind. (VI, 2)
5. For my part at least, constrained as I always am by the desire
for truth, I have committed myself
to the uncertainties, difficulties and
loneliness of the ways ... to the end
that I may provide, at last, more
trustworthy and safe guidelines for
present and future generations.
(Nov. Org., Preface to Magna Instauratio, p. 13) {I, p. 130}
6. [T]here is not usually so much
perfection in works composed of
several parts and produced by various different craftsmen [masters]
as in the works of one man. And
... since the sciences contained in
books ... is compounded and
amassed little by little from the
opinions of many different persons,
it never comes so close to the truth
as the simple reasoning which a
man of good sense naturally makes
concerning whatever he comes
across. So, too, I reflected that we
were all. children before being
men ... it is virtually impossible that
our judgements should be as unclouded and firm as they would
have been if we had had the full use
of our reason from the moment of
our birth... (II, 1)
6. The variety of errors and the
unity of truth compete. (Masculine
Origin ofTime). {III, p. 535}
No one has yet been found of
such steady and strict purpose as to
decree and compel himself to
sweep away common notions and
speculations, and to apply his understanding, swept clear and level,
to a fresh study ofparticulars. Thus
it is that human reason, as we have
it, is nothing but a medley, an unsorted collection, a mixture of
chance and credulity, along with
notions we imbibed as children. 9
(Nov. Org. I, 97)
�56
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
7. But regarding the opinions to
which I had hitherto given eredence, I thought that I could not do
better than undertake to get rid of
them, all at one go, in order, to
replace them afterwards with better
ones, or with the same ones once I
had squared them with the standards of reason. I firmly believed
that in this way I would succeed in
conducting my life much better
than if I built only upon old faundations ... (II, 2)
Cf. below: ... to avoid precipitate conclusions and preconceptions. (II,7)
7. There was thus but one course
left, namely to try the whole matter
afresh with better means of support,
and to bring about a great Instauration of the arts and sciences and all
the learning of mankind, raised
upon the proper foundations. (Nov.
Org. "Francis ofVerulam, .. " prefacing The Great Instauration, p.3 {I,
p. 121}
Another error is an impatience
of doubt and haste to assertion
without due and mature suspension
of judgment.... if a man will begin
with certainties, he shall end in
doubts, but if he will be content to
begin with doubts, he shall end in
10
certainties
(The Proficience, I,
Warhaft, p. 233-34) {ESH I, p.
461-2}
8. [I]t would be unreasonable for
... an individua1 to plan to reform a
state by changing it from the faundations up and overturning it in order to set it up· again; ...
These large bodies are too dif -·
ficult to raise up once overthrown,
or even to.hold up once they b'egin
to totter, and their fall cannot but be
a hard one. (II, 2) Cf. VI, 2.
8. In affairs of state, change, even
if for the better, is suspect because
of the disturbance it brings, since
civil affairs rest on authority, consensus, reputation and opinion, not
on demonstration; whereas arts and
sciences ought to be like mines,
loud on every hand with the sounds
of new operations and further pro 11
gress. (Nov Org., I, 90 ) See also,
Essays, XXIV.
�LALANDE
57
9. [A] majority vote is worthless as
a proof oftruths that are at all difficult
9. For in intellectual matters it is
the worst omen of all that an idea
to discover; for a single man is much
commands general consent, except
in sacred matters and in politics,
where there is the right- to vote.
more likely to hit upon them than a
group of people. (II, 4)
For, as I said earlier, nothing pleases
the multitude, unless it strikes the
imagination, or ties up the understanding in knots of common notions12 (Nov. Org., I, 77).
10. But in examining further [the
arts or sciences which seemed
ought to contribute something to
my plan] I observed with regard to
logic that syllogisms and most of its
other techniques are of less use for
learning things than for explaining
to others the things one already
knows or even, as in the art ofLully,
for speaking without judgement
about matters of which one is igno-
rant. And although logic does contain many excellent and true
precepts, these are mixed up with so
many others which are harmful or
superfluous that it is almost as difficult to distinguish them as it is to
carve a Diana or a Minerva from an
unhewn block of marble. (I1,6)
10. And this art which I present ... is
a kind oflogic, though the difference
between it and ordinary logic is great,
indeed immense. For the ordinary
logic professes to devise and prepare
means to help the understanding;
and in this one respect they agree.
(The Great Instauration, "Plan of the
Work" Nov. Org. p. 19) {ESH 1,
p.135}
For in the ordinary logic almost
all the. work is performed around
the syllogism .... For although no
one can doubt that propositions
that agree on a middle term agree
also with each other (this being a
mathematical certainty), neverthe-
less there is this underlying deception, that the syllogism consists of
propositions, propositions of
words, and words are tokens and
symbols of notions. Therefore if
the very notions of the mind ... are
defective ... then everything collapses. (Ibid., p. 19-20) {p.136}
�58
11. In doing this I was not copying the skeptics, who doubt only for
the sake of doubting and pretend to
be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole aim was to reach
certainty-to cast aside the loose
earth and sand so as to come upon
rock or clay. (III, 6)
Cf. above, citation 7: But regarding the opinions to which I had
hitherto given credence ...
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
11. It will be thought... that I support a kind of suspension of judge ment, and reduce the matter to
Acatalepsy. What in fact I have in
mind and propose is Eucatalepsy; for I
do not disparage the sense, but help
it; I do not disdain the understanding,
I govern it. (Nov. Otg., I, 126).
But no one should disapprove of
such a suspension of judgment in a
teaching that asserts, not that nothing
can be known at all, but that knowledge is only possible by following a
certain method and path; and yet
halts for the time being at certain
degrees of certainty for help and support until the mind may arrive at an
explanation of causes on which it can
13
stand. ( Great lnstauration "Plan,"
p. 29) {ESH I, p. 144}
�LAlANDE
12. But the most remarkable of
all these facts [the action of the
heart on the blood] is the generation of the animal spirits: like a very
fine wind, or rather a very pure and
lively flame, they rise continuously
in great abundance from the heart
to the brain, passing from there
through the nerves to the muscles
and imparting movement to all the
parts of the body. (V, 8)
59
12. The other difference between
the spirits is, that the vital spirit has
in it a degree of inflammation, and
is like a breath compounded of
flame and air... (The History of Lift
and Death, part 2; ESH V, p. 323)
{ESH II p. 215}
But this spirit, whereof I am
speaking, is not a virtue, nor an energy, nor an actuality, nor any such
idle matter, but a body thin and
invisible, and yet having place and
dimension, and real 14 (Ibid., p.321)
{p.213}
The spirits are the agents and
workmen that produce all the effects in the body. (Ibid. , p. 268)
The pulse of the heart and arteries
in animals is caused by an endless
and alternate dilatation and contraction of the spirits.
The voluntary motion likewise in
animals, which (in the more perfect) is performed by the nerves,
seems to have its root first in the
compression and then in the relaxation of the spirits. (The History of
Dense and Rare, Ibid., p. 358) {ESH
II, p. 263}
�60
13. This shows not merely that
the beasts have less reason than
men, but that they have no reason
at all. ( V, 11)
[I]t is nature which acts in them
according to the disposition of their
organs. In the same way a clock,
consisting only of wheels and
springs, can count the hours and
measure time more accurately than
we can with all our wisdom. (Ibid).
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
13. For the sensible soul-the
soul of brutes-must clearly be regarded as a corporeal substance, at-
tenuated and made invisible by
heat; a breath (I say) compounded
of the natures of flame and
air. .. clothed with the body, and in
perfect animals residing chiefly in
the head, running along the nerves,
and refreshed and repaired by the
15
spirituous blood of the arteries;
(De Aug., N, ch, 3; ESH, N, p. 398)
{I, p. 606}
For this soul is in brutes the prin-
cipal soul, the body of the brute
being its instrument; whereas in
man it is itself only the instrument
of the rational soul, and may be
more fitly termed not soul, but
spirit. (Ibid.)
�LAlANDE
14. Mter that I described the
rational soul, and showed that, unlike the other things of which I had
spoken, it cannot be derived in any
way from the potentiality of matter,
but must be specially created. And
I showed how it is not sufficient for
it to be lodged in the human body
like a helmsman in his ship, except
perhaps to move its limbs, but that
it must be more closely joined and
united with the body to have, besides this power ofmovement, feelings and apPetites like ours and so
constitute a real man. (V, last para.).
C£ Treatise on the Passions, Part I.
61
14. Let us now proceed to the
doctrine which concerns the Human Soul...The parts thereof are
tvvo; the one treats of the rational
soul, which is divine; the other of
the irrational, which is common
with brutes. I mentioned a little
before ... the two different emanations of souls, which appear in the
first creation thereof the one
springing from the breath of god,
the other from the wombs of the
elements. (Ibid) {p. 606-7}
With regard to the doctrine concerning the League or Common
Bond between the soul and body, it
is distributed into two parts .... [so
the description of this league ... consists .. of two parts] namely, how
these two (that is, the Soul and the
Body) disclose the one the other,
and how they work the one upon
the other.
The latter branch of the doctrine
of the league ... considers either how
and how far the humours and tern -
perament of the body alter and
work upon the mind; or again, how
and how far the passions or apprehensions of the mind alter and
work upon the body. (Ibid IV, 1;
ESH p. 375; 377) {p. 583; 584}
For there are many and great excellencies of the human soul above
the souls ofbrutes, manifest even to
those who philosophise according
to the sense. Now wherever the
mark of so many and great excellencies is found, there also a specific
difference ought to be constituted;
(Ibid., IV, 3; ESH p. 397) {p. 605}
�62
15. Here I dwelt a little upon the
subject of the soul, because it is of
the greatest importance. For after
the error of those who deny
God ... there is none that leads weak
minds further from the straight path
of virtue than that of imagining that
the souls of the beasts are of the
same nature as ours ... But when we
know how much the beasts differ
from us, we understand much bettcr the arguments which prove that
our soul is of a nature entirely inde pendent of the body, and consequently that it is not bound to die
with it. And since we cannot see any
other causes which destroy the soul,
we are naturally led to conclude that
it is immortal. ry, last para.).
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
15. Let there be therefore a more
diligent inquiry concerning this
doctrine; the rather because the imperfect understanding of this has
bred opinions superstitious and
corrupt and most injurious to the
dignity of the human mind, touching metempsychosis, and the puri fications of souls in periods ofyears,
and indeed too near an affinity in all
things between the human soul and
the souls of brutes. (Ibid., ESH, p.
398) {p. 606}
�LAlANDE
16. [I]n place of this speculative
philosophy which is taught in the
schools, one could find a practical
one, through which, kno·Ning the
63
16. Now of this philosophy Aristotle is by universal consent the chief,
power and actions of fire, water, air,
yet he left nature herself untouched
and inviolate, and dissipated his energies in comparing, contrasting, and
stars, the heavens and all the other
analysing popular notions about her.
bodies that surround us as distinctly
(Cogitata et visa translated as: Thoughts
and Conclusions, in The Philosophy <if
Francis Bacon, ed. Benjamin Far-
as we know the different crafts of
our artisans we could use this
knowledge in the same way for all
the purposes for which it is appropriate, and thus make ourselves, as
it were, masters and possessors of
nature. (VI,2)
rington. Chicago, 1964. p. 83)
{ESH, III, p. 601}
Now the only true and proper
goal of the sciences is to bring new
discoveries and powers to human
life. (Nov. Org. 81)
For the end I propose for my science
is the discovery not of arguments but
of arts; (The Great Instauration, "Plan,"
p.19) {ESH!p.135}
For man is only the servant and
interpreter of Nature and he only
does and understands so much as
he shall have observed, in fact or in
thought, of the course of Nature;
more than this he neither knows
nor can do .... So it is that those tvvo
objects of mankind, Knowledge and
Power, come in fact to the same
thing, and the failure of works derives mostly from ignorance of
causes. (Ibid. p. 29) { p. 144}
And for its value and utility it
must be plainly avowed that that
wisdom which we have derived
principally from the Greeks is but
like the boyhood of knowledge, and
has the characteristic property of
boys: it can talk, but it cannot generate, .. .In the mechanical arts we
do not find it so; they, on the contrary, as having in them some
breath oflife, are continually growing and becoming more perfect
(The Great Instauration, "Preface" p.
8) {p. 125}
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
64
17. This is desirable not only for
the invention of innumerable devices which would facilitate our enjoyment of the fruits of the earth
and all the goods we find there, but
also, and most importantly, for the
maintenance of health, which is
undoubtedly the chief good and the
foundation of all the other goods in
this life. For even the mind depends so much on the temperament and disposition of the bodily
organs that if it is possible to find
some means of making men wiser
and more skilful than they have
been up till now, I believe we must
look for it in medicine. (VI,2)
17.
[T] here is one thing still
remaining, which is of more conse -
quence than all the rest;-namely,
a true and active Natural Philosophy for the science of medicine to
be built upon (De Aug., IV, 2; ESH
IV, p. 390) {I, p. 598}
For the physicians prescribe
drugs to heal mental diseases, as in
the treatment of phrensy and melancholy; and pretend also to exhibit
medicines to exhilarate the mind, to
fortifY the heart and thereby confirm the courage, to clarity the wits,
to corroborate the memory, and the
like ... The root and life of all which
.
.
.
prescnpts 16 ... constst Ill t h at o f
which we are speaking, namely the
sympathy of the mind with the state
and disposition of the body (Ibid.
IV, 1; ESH, IV, p. 377) {p. 584}
And therefore the poets did well
to conjoin music and medicine in
Apollo; because the genius of both
these arts is almost the same; for the
office of the physician is but to
know how to stretch and tune this
harp of man's body that the harmony may be without all harshness
and discord (Ibid. IV, 2; ESH, IV, p.
380) {p. 588}
�LALANDE
18. It is true that medicine as currently practised does not contain
much of any significant use; but
without intending to disparage it, I
am sure there is no one, even
among its practitioners, who would
not admit that all we know in medicine is almost nothing in comparison with what remains to be
known, and that we might free ourselves from innumerable diseases,
both of the body and of the mind,
and perhaps even from the infirmity of old age, if we had sufficient
knowledge of their causes and of all
the remedies that nature has provided (Ibid.).
I will say only that I have resolved
to devote the rest ofmy life to nothing
other than trying to acquire some
knowledge of nature from which we
may derive rules in medicine which
are more reliable than those we have
had up till now (VI, 12).
19. Those who gradually discover
the truth in the sciences are like
people who become rich and find
they have less trouble making large
profits than they had in making
much smaller ones when they were
poorer. Or they may be compared
with military comrrianders, whose
forces tend to grow in proportion to
their victories ... (VI, 4).
65
18. Medicine therefore (as we
have seen) is a science which has
been hitherto more professed than
laboured, and yet more laboured
than advanced; the labours spent on
it having been rather in a circle, than
in progression (De Aug., N, 2; ESH
N,p.383) {p. 590}
I will divide it into three parts,
which I will term its three offices;
the first whereof is the PreseiVation
of Health, the second the Cure of
Diseases, and the third the Prolongation of Life (Ibid.)
[This third part] .. .is new, and
deficient; the most noble of all. For
if such a thing may be discovered,
the business of medicine will no
longer be confined to humble
cures, nor will physicians be honoured only for necessity; but for a
gift to men-of earthly gifts per17
haps the greatest ...
(Ibid.; ESH,
N,p.390) {p. 598}
19. [O]nthecontrary,Iwhoconsider the mind not only in its natural capacity but in its connection
with things, cannot but believe that
the art of discovery may grow with
the number of new discoveries.
(Nov. Org., I 130).
�66
20. I do not wonder at the absurdities attributed to al1 the ancient
philosophers whose writings we do
not possess; nor do I conclude from
these attributions that their
thoughts were highly unreasonable. As they were some of the best
minds of their time, I conclude that
their thoughts have been misrepresented (VI, 6)
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
20. And therefore the greatest
minds in every age have doubtless
felt their force; ... and as a result, any
more exalted reflections that may
have gleamed forth were straightway buffeted and extinguished by
the winds of popular opinion. The
result has been that Time, like a
river, has brought down to us the
light and inflated, while it has sunk
the weighty and solid. (The Great
Instauration, Preface, p. 10) {ESH I,
p. 127}
21. We see too that it has almost
never happened that any of their
followers has surpassed them; They
are like the ivy, which never seeks
to climb higher than the trees
which support it, and_often even
grows downward after reaching the
tree-tops (Ibid.).
21. [A] II the tradition and succession of schools represent only the
characters of master and pupil, not
of inventors or those who bring any
distinction to things already invented .. .In fact, they sometimes
flourish most under their first
authors, only to decline thereafter. .. For it is hardly possible at one
and the same time to gaze with admiration upon authors and to excel
them, knowledge being like water,
which does not rise higher than the
level from which it descended. (Ibid.
p. 8-9; 11) {p.126; 128}
These sentence by sentence comparisons give a less clear idea of
he relation between Bacon and Descartes than can a parallel reading
>f their works. Often a paragraph of the latter appears as a vigorous
ummary, with a development which is richer but more diffuse and
~ss coherent than that of his predecessor. Such is the case, for
xample, with chapters ofDe Augmentis, N, 2, on medicine, or VII,
, on ancient morals. Likewise paragraphs 2 and 6 in the sixth part
f the Discourse on Method are comparable taken as a whole to the
�LALANDE
67
general "Preface" to the Great Instauration. I have limited myself, in
the case of these similarities, to citing some characteristic sentences.
Similarly, because I did not find in the Discourse on Method a text
of some few lines to which to oppose them, I had to leave aside the
repeated declarations in which Bacon insists on the unity of science.
It would have been necessary to transcribe extensively, in order to
place in parallel columns, the whole plan of the sciences which
occupies paragraphs 2-4 of the fifth part. But since nothing is more
familiar than this idea, which some have even wanted to make a
discovery proper to Descartes! 8 I will cite here only the Baconian
texts which fit with it.
"And generally let this be a rule; that all divisions of knowledges
be accepted and used rather for lines to mark or distinguish, than
sections to divide and separate them; in order that solution of continuity in sciences may always be avoided. For the contrary hereof has
made particular sciences to become barren, shallow, and erroneous;
not being nourished and maintained and kept right by the common
fountain and aliment."19 (DeAug., IV, l; ESH, IV, p. 373) {I, p. 580}
* *
*
"And therefore the speculation was excellent in Parmenides and
Plato (although in them it was but a bare speculation), 'that all things
by a certain scale ascend to unity.' So then always that knowledge is
worthiest which least burdens the intellect with multiplicity; and this
appears to be Metaphysic, as that which considers chiefly the simple
forms of things (which I have above termed forms of the first clasi0 );
since although few in number, yet in their commensurations and
co-ordinations they make all this variety." (Ibid, III, 4; ESH, IV, p.
362) {pp. 567-8}
* * *
"However, let no one expect much progress in the sciences-especially in their practical aspects-unless natural philosophy is extended to particular sciehces, and particular sciences in turn lead back
�68
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
to natural philosophy. This is the reason why astronomy, optics,
music, many of the mechanical arts, medicine itself and, more
surprisingly, moral and political philosophy and the logical sciences
all lack depth .... Small wonder, then, that the sciences fail to grow, cut
off as they are from their roots. (Nov. Org.I, 80)."
I believe that in works of Descartes other than the Discourse on
Method one would find material for analogous comparison. The
celebrated comparison of the system of the sciences to a tree is found
in De Augmentis.21 The notion of the simple natures, explained in the
Regulae, in particular in Rule XII, recalls very nearly the use of this
expression in the second book of theNovum Organum, and the theory
which is connected with it. And I have already noted, in a previous
work, a text from this very rule which reproduces almosf word for
word a passage from Valerius Terminus. The analogy is all the more
curious as this passage is precisely the statement of the method of
geometrically interpreting sensible phenomena, which holds such a
great place in the Cartesian philosophy at the epoch of its full
development. Is this a simple coincidence? Or can one allow that
Descartes had knowledge, in manuscript form, ofValerius Terminus,
which was only published in 1734 by Robert Stephen in The Letters
and Remains ofLord Chancellor Bacon? Certain scientific works, at this
epoch, circulated in more or less faithful copy, often fragmentary,
before passing on to press. Or still yet, must one see in this method
of geometric translation, an idea transmitted orally from the one to
the other? When one remembers what discussions the concern with
the experiment at Puy de Dome gave rise to, one feels less inclined
to resolve the matter easily.
It will be noted on the other hand that the Valerius Terminus is not
only a first sketch of the New Organum,22 but also marks a time-unhappily indeterminate-when Bacon was attached to the idea of a
universal mechanism in a much more radical way than he was in his
later works; he even sees in it at that time a sort of philosophic secret
which one should communicate only advisedly and under all sorts
of reservations. It is not that he ever returned to "pure" philosophy,
nor that he had put into doubt the value of his interpretation of
�LALANDE
69
natural phenomena; quite the contrary, in the Latin text ofDe
Augmentis, published in 1623, he introduced a sign of this attachment, which does not exist in the Advancement of Learning of 1605
(perhaps in virtue of the same esoteric principle) and which presents
color as having "form," understood in the last analysis as a certain
figured disposition of material elements. It is impossible, as I have
tried to show elsewhere in detail, to be content with the classic
prejudice, in great measure founded on misinterpretations and on a
partial reading of his writings, which makes Bacon a continuer of
scholasticism, a strangerto the great mechanistic idea which was then
at the point of taking over the direction of the sciences. I will recall
only the importance which at all times in his life he attributes to the
progress of mixed mathematics. All that one can legitimately presume
of him is that, as he advanced in age, he saw in the mechanical
interpretation an ideal less near, less immediately realizable, than he
had thought at the beginning. Perhaps also he feared imitating the
defect with which he had reproached the ancients, that of formulating ex cathedra a definitive theory of nature. There is much, in his
work, of that which will be called later a "positivist spirit," less
attached to conclusions than to method. Descartes, a more absolute
character, believed he could reveal the secret of the world in a
categorical fashion; but it is precisely here that discredit came to his
system, and almost to his name, in the very period which was the
most inspired by his epistemology.
P.S. I reproduce here below, to spare readers whom this question
may interest the research, the passage of the Rules and that of the
Valerius Terminus to which I made allusion above:
"So what troublesome consequences could there be if-while
avoiding the useless assumption and pointless invention of some new
entity, and without denying what others have preferred to think on
the subject-we simply make an abstraction, setting aside every
feature of colour apart from its possessing the character of shape, and
conceive of the difference between white, blue, red, etc., as being like
the difference between the following figures or similar ones?
�70
THE ST. JOHN'S REVI.EW
The same can be said about everything perceivable by the senses,
since it is certain that the infinite multiplicity of figures is sufficient
for the expression of all the differences in perceptible things." 23
"All bodies or parts of bodies which are unequal equally, that is in
simple proportion, do represent whiteness ...Absolute equality produceth transparence; inequality in simple order or proportion produceth whiteness; inequality in compound or respective order or
proportion produceth all other colours, and absolute or orderless
inequality produceth blackness; which diversity, if so gross a demonstration be needful, may be signified by four tables: a blank, a chequer, afret, and
a medley; whereof the fret is evident to admit a great variety."24
[M. Lalande's article appeared in Revue de metaphysique et de morale
v. 19 (1911): 296-311. All tra;,_slations of The Discourse on Method are
from The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, v. 1, trans. by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987). Citations are by part and paragraph
number. TranslationsfromNovum Organum are fromNovum Organum With Other Parts of the Great Instauration, trans. and ed. by Peter
Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago: Open Court, 1994). Citation
is by Part and Aphorism number. Other citations, unless otherwise
indicated, refer to The Works ofFrancis Bacon ed. by James Sped ding,
Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Den on Heath (London, 1872),
hereafter abbreviated ESH. References to the English in parenthesis
by volume and page number; citations following, in braces, are to the
�LAlANDE
71
Latin, cited by Lalande. I wish to thank Mr. Chester Burke and Mrs.
Irena Datchev for their help.-Trans.]
Notes:
1 "Tantum sane ut merito hominem homini Deum esse, non
solum ex auxilio et beneficia, sed ex status comparatione dici
possit." Cogitata et Visa, ESH, III, p. 611. Ex status comparatione,
as is clear from the context, is applied to that which man owes to
humanity taken as a whole, that is to say, to the progress of
civilization. [Since "the whole substance of the Cogitata et Visa is
reproduced in the first book of the Novum Organum" (ESH, I, pp.
78-79), here follows the relevant passage in translation from that
work: "... the difference [between the life of men in "the most
civilized province of Europe, and in the most savage and barbarous part of New India"] is so great as truly to justifY the saying
'Man is a god to men,' not only for the help and benefits he can
bring, but also by comparing their conditions."-Trans.]
2 Mter reminding us of Demosthenes' saying that the first quality
of the orator is action, the second, action, and the third, action,
Bacon adds: 'Wonderful like is the case of Boldness in civil
business; what first? Boldness; what second and third? Boldness."
Essays, XII. ["Of Boldness." The French cited by Lalande in the
text is as follows: "De l'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours
l'audace."-Trans.]
3 Charpentier, Brochard, Landormy.
4 Cf. also, II, 12, [Discourse on Method-Trans] the example of the
child who, having calculated a sum, knows as much about it as
anyone. "In short, the method which instructs us to follow the
correct order, and to enumerate exactly all the relevant factors,
contains everything that gives certainty to the rules of arithmetic."
�72
5
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
[The work referred to here is the 1623 De Dignitate et Augmentis
Scientiarum. Lalande refers to the work as De Dignitate; I have used
the more familiar designation, DeAugmentis, i.e., The Advancement
ofLearning. This writing is a Latin translation and expansion of a
work published in 1605, in English, usually referred to as The
Proficience and Advancement of Learning-Trans.]
6 The metaphor is found already in Seneca, De vita beata, 1. Many
similarities between Bacon and Descartes must derive from common readings.
7 I cite the Essays according to the Li'tin text titledSermonesfideles,
which is the final form Bacon gave them. But was this Latin text
published separately before the edition of Opera moralia et civilia,
produced by Rawley in 1638? This is doubtful. [Here·follows the
English text, cited above -Trans.] Baudoin, who made a French
translation of the Essays in 1619 under their first form, published
a second edition in 1626 conforming to the text of 1625, and a
third edition in 1633.
8 Cf. "Francis ofVerulam reasoning thus with himself...," prefacing
the Great Instauration: "[T]hat entire human reasoning that we
apply in the investigation of Nature is poorly put together and
constructed, but is like some magnificent great pile without any
foundation." Novum Organum p.3. {ESH I, p, 121}
9 Bacon opposes to this a few lines further the following: "But if a
man of ripe years, unimpaired faculties, and a mind well purged
should apply himself afresh to experience and particulars, from
him we can expect better things." See the last lines of part 2 of
the Discourse: "I thought I ought not try accomplish it until I had
reached a more mature age than twenty-three, as I then was, and
until I had first spent a long time in preparing myself for it. I had
to uproot from my mind all the wrong opinions I had previously
accepted, amass a variety of experiences to serve as the subject.
matter o[ my reasomngs .... "
�LAlANDE
73
10 It was already the opinion of Gassendi (De logicae finae, chap. vi)
that the destructive part of philosophy is the same in Bacon and
in Descartes.
11 It is necessary to note that in Novum Organum I, 127, Bacon
declares that the method is applicable in principle to the moral
sciences- Logic, Ethics, Politics, no less than to the sciences of
nature. But this is not otherwise in Descartes: "[P]eoples
who ... have made their laws only in so far as they were forced to
by the inconvenience of crimes and quarrels, could not be so well
governed as those who from the beginning of their society have
observed the basic laws laid down by some wise law-giver." II, 1.
12 This is evidently in Bacon an echo of Seneca, De vita beata, 2:
"Human affairs are not so happily ordered that the majority prefer
the better things." The psychological explanation of the matter is
only added to it.
13 Cf. The whole Scala intellectus where Bacon explains in what
respect his doubt resembles that of the sceptics, and in what it
differs. (ESH, II, pp. 687-89).
14 There exists a first kind of spiritus in all chemical bodies (spiritus
mortua/is, or spiritus crudus); it plays a role analogous to that of
matiere sub til in Descartes; furthermore, there exists a second kind
in living bodies (spiritus vivus, or spiritus vitalis). Hist. vitae et mortis,
Canon IV, (ESH, II, p. 214) [English translation in ESH V, p. 322
-Trans.].
15 Bacon indicates further on that this doctrine is that of Telesius
and of his disciple, Doni us. It would be interesting to know if
Descartes knew them directly. Elsewhere Ellis remarks that with
regard to Doni us, the affirmation is not at all exact, and that in
reality, in a discrete manner, he rejected the rational soul altogether. (ESH I, p. 606, n. 1).
�74
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
16 This phrase ends an enumeration of ritual prescriptions, ancient
or Christian, which have the purpose, according to him, of acting
on the dispositions of the soul through the medium of the body.
The end of the paragraph is dedicated to showing that this
dependance does not disprove immortality of the soul.
17 In the remaining part of this chapter, he develops at length "all
the remedies with which nature has provided us." Cf. also The
History of Life and Death
18 'We can no longer deny, in an age when we aim at the constitution
of a general physics, that Descartes, the great geometer who
discovered the principle of the unity of mathematical methods,
was also the great speculative physicist who, the first since the
schools of antiquity, gave us a glimpse of the unity of the physical
world and taught the meaning of a mechanical explanation of
phenomena." Renouvier, "La physique de Descartes,"Critique
philosophique, 3e annee, I, p.2
19 Natural philosophy or physics. Cf. Descartes: "Thus the whole
of philosophy is like a tree. The roots are metaphysics, the trunk
is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the
other sciences, which may be reduced to three principal ones,
namely medicine, mechanics and morals." Principles, Preface,
para. 12. In the passage cited, Bacon intends medicine and the
"knowledge of ourselves."
20 These "forms of the first class" are all the "schematisms" or
"motions," as Bacon has just said in the previous paragraph; and
he adds " ... (like letters of the alphabet) are not many and yet make
up and sustain the essences and forms of all substances." On the
true meaning of form in Bacon, see Quid de mathematica, vel
naturali, vel rationali, senserit Bacon Verulamius. Latin thesis, Paris,
Alcan, 1889.
�LAlANDE
75
21 "But since the divisions of knowledge are not like several lines
that meet in one angle; but are rather like branches of a tree that
meet in one stem (which stem grows for some distance entire and
continuous, before it divide itself into arms and boughs); therefore it is necessary before we enter into the branches of the former
division, to erect and constitute one universal science, to be as the
mother of the rest, and to be regarded in the progress of knowledge as portion of the main and common way, before we come
where the ways part and divide themselves." De Aug. III, 1; ESH,
IV, p. 337 {ESH I, p. 540}. It is true that in this passage the
common trunk is not physics but First philosophy, a kind of
metaphysical logic oflittle interest.
22 The complete title is: "Valerius Terminus of the Interpretation
of Nature, with the annotations of Hermes Stella."
23 Rules for the Direction of the Mind, XII
24 Valerius Terminus, XI, (ESH, III, p. 237) [In Lalande's text there
follows a French translation of this passage.~Trans.]
�76
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
�77
KRNAK
Pluck it, and the initial conditions result
in a pattern on the string, moving back
mid forth in waves.
Nor can I walk.
I move back and forth in waves between
the places I have charted and the seawall.
Height, breadth, depth, length and frequency...
The seawall. At the water's edge I saw
what the symbols meant, shown how in nature
the equation balanced first, long before
the sciences forced their rule. I remembered,
and I have taken for my creed that
... the directions in which nature allows us movement
can be described in mathematics like a name in stone.
I believed I understood then. I understand now.
When we walk we measure our steps
like a child with two cups strung
window to window.
When we swim we kuow
the waves that emanate from the face with their
brief sections of order hold a power prophets
have watched dwindle in exhausted ripples
from Beth-zatha pool.
What nature has allowed
is still etched in the stone of our mathematics.
Conditions I once described in strides
return unadulterated by my steps.
So I am deriving the wave equation still,
for my behaviour betrays suspicion
of descriptions, solutions, and time.
�78
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Approaching Inertia
Solstice, Christmas, Saint Sylvester,
Epiphany-they're all behind us,
and the days keep stretching longer
by unreadable degrees.
This is the lag time, the motionless
long haul, the case of cabin fever,
at one time meditative,
conducive to work and sobering,
but now gone on too long.
The year begins to write itself
into a thirteen line sonnet,
five feet short of a final couplet
and one lasting impression of loss.
It is as quiet here as the streets
on New Year's day, but not from any
touch of mine. This end that feigns
beginning is the worst culprit,
tiring right from the start, like waking
up with unresolved trouble
on the mind, motes in one eye,
boards in the other, indifference
(the rule) stirring halfWay between
bed and the bath, where the honest
mirror flicks back the truth that Newton
failed to see, but the steam engine
and a snowing paperweight
proved centuries later: You can't
get something for nothing. And what
is given up falls short of every
need. What makes the train budge?
Who lifts the stone?
The heat that rises from the log
consumed to ashes now is gone,
and nowhere is there more created
to replace it. I don't dream
oflistless whiskey rocker porches,
but I don't favor the cold. And I
believe a man should be allowed to fear.
�KRNAK
79
Always After Shooting
Always after shooting we return
by way of the barn that blazed the summer
our cousin and his wife-to-be loved,
smoked, and slept, and brought down everything
around them in ashes. They got out,
singed and frightened, but the animalscows, chickens, rabbits and a goat-burned,
and I can't say if our uncle ever thought
his gtandson was an even trade.
The man broke away from the family
like the stones on the wall along the drive.
The fields gtew head high, went to seed,
spilled, and were left wild. Only Matthew
and I ever step foot on this land anymore,
and then only to empty shotgun shells
into skeet and boxes propped against
the rise above the pond.
Some years ago,
in the fall, we unloaded our chambers
into a flock of passing doves and brought
down three (one we had to shoot again).
The exhausted sky kept echoing the blasts,
and the gtound seemed to cringe each time
we took a step toward our kill. We reached
the carcasses that were· strangled deep
within the gtass from the momentum of their
fall, and with a barely audible "christ"
from underneath our breaths we started kicking
dirt and the remains into a hole
we dug with our heels. Then we walked out.
As we passed the charred foundation walls
of the barn, I thought about the night
of the fire, and the fragile balance
of the living on this farm, tipped
so easily with a dirty finger.
It was a while before we went back,
but we did. The fields and gtass gtew thick
�80
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
enough in one month to cover up our
old paths. Animals carried away the rest.
�j
~
Recollection and Composure
Eva T. H. Brann
Douglas Allan brook came to St.John's, Annapolis in 1952, in hi s early
thirties . It was here that his two sons were born, Tim othy and John,
to whom this memoir* is dedicated. Here he has been teaching for
four and a half decades, here he composed his musical oeuvre, and
here too, seemingly out of the blue, he wrote an accornplished
autobiographical book. In it he ref1ects urt Lhc difference between
composing music and recollecting a life:
It is a consolation that in music there are no pcop le, no facts,
no places, nor is there, in any comprehensible way, any
meaning, while in our own stories we arc stuck with
intractable memories which only the holdest fiction can
unite into a whole. When a piece of music is composed, it
is complete, all wrapped in a tight cocoon, awaiting its
release into the sunlight of performance. For the listener
it is a portable memory that can be run through again and
again, a vicarious and safe experience, so utterly uitlerent
from the course of a life, which seems hardly a whole ,
composed as i~ is of pathos and shameful bits, of brief joys
played out agamst the backdrop ohvars and politics (p . 41).
It wa~ at_this college, then, that the composition, the cocoonin g,
not of ~m hfe but of a decade of his life, was accomplished and here
that thts one decade was fitted into the whole and made "a portable
rnemory" for the reader.
This p~ace, the college, is mentioned only twice in passing as an
obscure httle safe-harbor whose life, looked at from a distanct::, is
bizarre and out of the way: "When work and marriages and children
begin, the lights dim, the landscape becomes habitual" (p. 2G7). Such
dimming is a phenomenon familiar to everyone whose life has been
front-loaded by history. All that matters seriously, all day-hy-day
responsibilities and permanent attachments, extensive in time and
local in place-the "long plateau" (p. 268) of human reality- arc
muted compared to the vivid flashings of retrospection into a more
Eva T. H. Brann is Dean at St. John's College.:, Annapolis.
*See Naples: A Memoir by Douglas Allanbrook, A Peter Davison Book, liou~hton
Miffiin Company, New York and Roston, 1995, 269 pp.
�82
THE ST.JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
intense and dangerous time. Yet it is in this relative safety of habitual
reality that imagination and memory accomplish their joint work of
fixing the throng of memories into this one memoir. Here experience
is recollected if not in tranquility then at least in domesticity, the
evidently transferable craft of composition is perfected, the private
readings and the public studies that give memory a frame are pursued.
The book acknowledges this ordinary and orderly ground of its
genesis tacitly but to my sense powerfully.
The decade so emblazoned on the composer's memory is that of
his twenties, his European years. He was a gifted, already welltrained and well-read, receptive and very young American, abroad in
a frightful war and again in a post-war time that was especially golden
for Americans. Whether he found himself in a hell or in an idyll, this
musician, as soldier and veteran, allowed things to happen to him.
Hence the surface texture of the book is thick-woven not only with
incidents, involvements, and vignettes, but also with returns, resolutions, recursions, delightfully trivial and heartrendingly significant:
On the troop transport to Mrica, Private Allanbrook's cherished
watch, his father's gift, is stolen, only to be miraculously retrieved by
a protective buddy at a crap game inland from Oran. A repulsive
fascist major provokes his own bullet-riddled death while in bed with
his mistress, and his wife later turns up, the keeper of an open house
for Allied officers, as the neighbor of the writer's Florentine friends.
There are parallel river and bath idylls, classical in their nude disportings, in Texas and in Tuscany. There are the three cosmopolitan Fates
that preside over the Fulbright Fellow's return, his Neapolitan landladies: the Vesuvius-hating Hungarian witch, the Polish snob, and
the desparate and decent Swiss spinster, Erika of fond memory.
Then there are the deeply wished for resolutions and recursions.
For eighteen years, back in Annapolis, the composer has carried a
restless guilt for the abrupt dumping of Laura, his "Neapolitan Bette
Davis," a high-strung and wilful girl, who was superseded by his
wife-to-be, the placid nymph, Candida. Finally he sets forth to seek
out Laura's solid and straight sister, who puts two decades of doubt
to rest with the casual and candid words: "She had a bad character,
you know. We were so afraid you would marry her!" (p. 42).
�BRANN
83
But above all, there is the ever-returning sight ofVesuvius erupting and the sound of Leonard calling.
Is this book a memoir or a fiction, then? It is a work of genuine
memory, such as is possible for those to whom life is an occasion for
art, for life always supplies amenable incidents to its receptive composers. Does the consummating imagination rectify or falsifY? The
question is pitched too low: The imagination actualizes the merely
real; it makes a fact into an event.
Nonetheless, this book is a prodigious feat of detailed memory.
No doubt this or that aide memoire was to hand: regiment~! records,
maps, perhaps letters, but much of the work has the bright clang of
exactly recalled fact.
Particularly notable is the musician's remembering ear for the
ritualistic obscenity and pungent accuracy of G. I. speech. Here is a
caution to stay out of the shipboard crap game, given to young
Allan brook by the protective Sergeant Kovacs: " ... You'd be skunked
and them punks would find some way to screw you once they seen
your honest little puss (p. 91)." The reader will find said visage on
the frontispiece and take the sergeant's point. It should 'be noted that
the writer's own cadences can be eloquent and his turns mordantly
witty: "Carnal knowledge of our own likely demise ... became part of
our soul's equipment" (p. 127).
The order of telling mimes the associations of memory, whose
contiguities are not of time but of theme. One might say that the
format is Proustian, were it not, for all its artfulness, far less contrived.
For example, one of the most tpemorable incidents is the officer's
gazelle hunt in Mrica before the Italian invasion, to which Private
Allanbrook is detailed as liaison with the Arab guide. The o(ficers
blast away from jeeps with Browning automatic rifles (a weapon no
good in true combat), and the telling of the slaughter immediately
puts the writer in mind of a later gratuitous lethal sport, the gunning
down of an escaping carabiniere sergeant running like a rabbit before
some Partisan boys and Allan brook's own fellow-soldiers.
But the memory does not only project the present onto the future.
It also paints a backdrop of history for the current event. The hated
Colonel Fry has established regimental headquarters at the Cistercian
Abbey ofFossanova, where there is also a field hospital in which very
�84
THE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
young soldiers lie dying, and that brings to mind a different death:
Here Thomas Aquinas ended his life, having lived it.
For me the most moving overlay of remembered and present
sights occurs one hazy morning, when the regiment, having stumbled (among the first to arrive) into Rome by night, sleeps by the
Tiber, and the soldier wakes up to see across the river the sepia print
of Castle Sant' Angelo that hangs in his parents' living room in
Melrose. Everyone of a certain age knows that print and can envision
that veduta, in which the Eternal City is seen through a mist of home
and history class.
For all the artful interleaving of time, the central sequence of
events largely occupies the middle six chapters of the book's ten:
induction, training, passage, the Italian campaign, and its often
bloody aftermath. The mood is stark and darkly comic, and this part
of the account has more the air of factual truth. The reason is that
here the memoir serves as memorial for the many dead fellow
soldiers and for a few good officers.
Douglas Allanbrookwas a real soldier, who earned the four stripes
of a staff sergeant, was not above coveting the six of a master sergeant,
and took a proper pride in his bronze star medal. His loyalty is with
the men and his perspective that of a GI. It is the strong bond of the
faithful and friendly "we" (p. 78), for Allanbrook the Intelligence and
Reconnaissance platoon to which his able map reading assigned him.
His soldier's honor is that ofloyalty to his friends. The one circumstance that exhausts his always liberal sympathy is the German
POW's ready and detailed betrayal of their comrades' positions.
Their incomprehensible lack of honor taints all Germans for this
soldier who has no independent conception of Nazism.
The account of the campaign, otherwise so grim, abounds in
affectionate portraits of all his American fellow-soldiers, each a
highly personal realization of a recognizable ethnic and local type.
It is also suffused with a kind of abashed pleasure that this nearsighted, slight, musical, well-read youngster takes in the affectionate
esteem of his buddies.
But then there are the "them,"-a rogues' gallery of stupid, bigoted, pathetic, posturing officers, not least among them the General
Clark who got them to Rome first-at a terrible cost in casualties.
�BRANN
85
The redeeming figures are some fatherly, competent noncoms, and
the ami-hero, the trusted and sidelined Major Melcher, "a prudent
manager, not a 'leader'; but all of us, in a pickle, would h ave chosen
to follow him and not our fearless colonel" (p. 168); the colonel goes
on to become a general, while the major is kept on, humiliated, after
returning from a three-day breakdown. This is a passage that should
be requi red reading in the services' leadership courses.
Though the horror of the march through Italy does not abate;
because the protective carapace of body and soul wears ever thinner
and never thickens with time , there are redeeming moments of wild
absurdity and comic relief. One is particularly close to my heart
because I recognize it. A package reaches Allanbrook i11 a cold
Christmas season on the Apennines, sent by his mother who is a
teetotaler. It is a moldy fruit cake with a bottle of Scotch secreted
within; no sooner was it sent than she grew anxious lest he get drunk
and wander into enemy lines . My brother was also a foot soldier,
who uncannily resembled Dougla..<> in point of youth, slightness of
build, near-sightedness, musicality, literariness, and in winning the
affectionate regard of his buddies-and even as I write I hoid in my
hand the very same combat infantryman's badge that Douglas is
wearing on the frontispiece. I sent him-was he stationed in Panama
or already fighting in Korea?-a similar camout1aged package (only
it was gin) and then worried similarly about the effects.
Another saving grace was music, both as a respite from war and as
a way to male friendship and female companionship. At the infamous gazelle hunt, the cultivated Arab guide discovers Allanbrook
reading an inscribed Stravinsky score sent by his legendary teacher,
Mlle. Boulanger, and a sudden friendship flares up. Wherever a
piano is to be found, Bechstein or unstrung upright, the Gl goes
straight for it, carried out of the present by the music, but not entirely
unaware of the eclat produced by a creditable rendition of the
Waldstein played by one of the uniformed liberators better knov·lll
for their high spirits than their cultivation.
For all the interludes, death is eve r-present in this central section
on war and therefore, unavoidably, present in the framing sections
on peace. The book is not only a memorial to the many dead but also
an exorcism, half a century later, of some particular ghosts . It appears
�86
THE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
to have succeeded at least in dispersing a recurrent nightmare: like
a Charon forever ferrying but never successfully landing the dead on
the far side of the Styx, the dreamer sails back and forth to Naples on
the Atlantic betwixt wake and sleep, war and peace, quick and dead;
he feels himself to belong in some part of body and soul to the world
of the dead.
The book has a noble dust jacket, maroon, black and gold, framing
a painting of Vesuvius erupting some century and a half before the
writer's first sight of it. That is how the book begins: Private
AJlanbrook and his friend whom he alone calls Leonard-given
names are rare in the army-together on the deck of the troop
transport, watching an obliging Vesuvius erupting and further illuminated by the brilliant crisscross of anti-aircraft fire. Leonard and
Jack, the radio repairman's bosom buddy, are the first "definite
killings" (p. 135) of the platoon, shot by a distinguishable enemy,
dead early, got at from behind. Vesuvius flaring up and Leonard
calling to. AJlanbrook to come in the night-these are the visual and
auditory images that haunt the book. They are signals from the
undercurrent offeeling on which all the incident is borne along. The
feeling is regret, the regret of insufficient response. Rich as the book
is in involvements and affairs, strong as its young protagonist was in
event-eliciting receptivity, it is this sense of incomplete love that
moved the writing of the memoir and tethered its memories: "Remorse was the fixative" (p. 103), but, the writer asks, for what? Was
it all in the imagination? There is so powerful, so near-theological a
sense of the sins of omission-moral sloth, apathy, narcissism, "communion ... rejected" (p. 104)-notjust toward this friend but toward
other friends and lovers, men and women, that the question is rightly
set aside. No baseless regrets for fancied young failures could have
given the book its poignant gravity.
Although the dates are deliberately out of order, there is a clear
temporal progress to the tale. It is to be found in the three successive
completions of the title "See Naples." First: See Naples-and Die;
that is in 1944when Vesuvius is the gate to living hell and likely death.
Second: See Naples-and Live; that is in 1952, when Vesuvius greets
the Fulbright Fellow returning to the golden and event-laden time
that post-war Europe could then offer a young American in Naples.
�BRANN
87
Third: See Naples-and Recollect; those are the ensuing four decades
of revisiting in search of resolution and remembrance lasting until the
final composition of the memoir and the achievement at least of
resignation and lucidity: "I see Naples clearly now I am old" (p.268.)
Yet there is a hint of further consolation. In his forties, the
revenant, on his way back from the settling of Laura's ghost, made a
pilgrimage to Elea, the city of Parmenides. And, by one of those
felicitous coincidences of his life, he overhears on the beach what he
is listening for, a message of Being. A teacher walks to and fro with
his pupil, discoursing, it seems, ever more emphatically on "essere"
(p. 44). This event is recalled at the close of the book:
What a solace it would be if some timeless essence, clear
and lucid, were standing in back of our time-ridden
lives, if all of our shifting loves were grounded in some
apprehensible reality (p. 266).
The sentence is written, to be sure, in the conditional mood, but
the book itself sounds a more affirmative music. For it intimates that
some like solace may be found in artfully composing the passages of
life into a "coherent and passionate whole" (p. 41).
�88
THE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
�i
~
Reason's Parochiality:
On Carl Page's Critique ofHistoricism
Richard Velkley
I
That human reason is in some sense parochial cannot be seriously
doubted. Carl Page's thoughtful and significant book, Philosophical
Historicism and the Betrayal of First Philosophy* takes on the task of
defining that sense through a careful critique of one of the most
prominent philosophical tendencies of the past century: the assertion
of reason's radical parochiality as historical.
Before examining his argument, I note some of reason's parochialisms. The limiting qualifier "human" signifies that we know we are
not divine reasoners, while the sort of reason we possess may or may
not be akin to that of other beings as yet unknown to us. One of the
great puzzles is how a power that has a grasp on universality manifests
itself so locally in the universe. Why do only some beings possess it?
Why these rather than others? And why as species with a plurality of
members? Such questions relate to the problem of understanding the
human being as a whole: How do this being's peculiar rational
powers belong essentially (if they do) to its peculiar sentient, living,
and bodily aspects? Neither ancient nor modern philosophy has
answers to these questions. Aristotle tells us that we are wholes and
yet the principle of this wholeness is very elusive: Are the ends of
humans as living beings and the ends of thought the same ?1 The
question "What is the origin of this peculiar human kind?" cannot
even be asked on the basis of his metaphysics.
The "return to the ancients" is a siren song that may deafen us to
the relevance of modern physical, biological and evolutionary inquiries to these questions. The relevance of such "empirical" investigations points to a certain importance of history for philosophy, as well.
Since "nature loves to hide," the outcome of natural inquiries is
unforeseeable. The uncovering of nature's secrets has been crucially
Richard Velldey is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stonehill College.
*The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.
�90
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
assisted by advances in techniques of widening human powers, the
"technology" affording otherwise impossible access to Jupiter's
moons, viruses·, X-rays, quantum effects and black holes. No doubt
the Baconian and Cartesian revolutions have in a fundamental way
altered irreversibly our account of nature; but the alteration is not the
result of philosophical thought alone. The unanticipated and indeterminate course of human discovery (which may at some point
include the encounter with other intelligent forms oflife) is a form
of human history projected by modern principles. There has to be a
certain rightness in the claim that Plato could not see some truths
relevant to understanding our situation, and that time itself limits
knowing. But perhaps "history" in the historicist sense of the context
of moral and political beliefs dominant at a given time is not the most
pertinent consideration. One suggestion, which may even be not
un-Platonic in spirit: The fluctuating natural order of galactic expansion and contraction may be seen as a sort of instrument for extending
human insight about nature, a Technik der Natur. If the natural order
is not simply permanent and regular, can there be an absolute divide
between nature and art? Veritas filia temporis. 2
The Socratic turn to logoi, the phenomenological examination of
the human lifeworld, the articulation of enduring features of human
experience, will not solve the problem of the biological localization
of reason, although such inquiries are necessary to prevent reductionist and narrow views of the explanandum, human reason. This
points to another dimension of the parochiality of our reason (with
which I end this preliminary meditation). Human reason pursues,
and in a sense thus already possesses, certain kinds of wholeness that
have no evident parallels in natural processes. This pursuit of wholeness (or eros) is available to us only on the phenomenological level;
the Socratic question is how that pursuit relates to "the whole" as
such. Humans are fated to try to understand themselves and all beings
in the light of wholes that exist only in speech or in the idea, thus in
the light of what humans qua natural arenot. 3 The turn to thelogoi
then is not merely provisonal, since it is only through them that the
never-to-be-realized character of human reason comes into view.
When, how, and even whether the self-understanding of reason will
become part of a complete account of nature is a Socratic question
�VELKLEY
91
still alive in contemporary debates about whether and how "objective" natural sciences can account for the "subjective" realm of
consciousness. One must start with an acceptance of a difference
(perhaps never to be bridged) between consciousness and other
natural phenomena, for if the former had no ontological peculiarity
there would be no puzzle needing a solution~
Both of these points (the investigation of nature as an indeterminate, open-ended history, and the problematic relation between
human self-awareness and accounts of nature) bear a great deal on
the theme of Page's book, Philosophical Historicism. The progressive
and "revolutionary" character of modern scientific inquiry has certainly promoted modern accounts of human reason as historical. But
at the same time, the turn to history that is characteristic of thought
called "historicist" is motivated in good part by a desire to protect the
human experience of moral and political life from disruptive intrusions from that science. It has done so in accordance with doubts
about the groundability of this experience in accounts of nature. I
shall return to these considerations later in this review.
II
The parochialism of reason stipulated by philosophical historicism
(henceforth PH) is not a statement of aporia (such as the problems
of the relation of reason to life and the body) but an attempt to resolve
the question of the ends or purposes of human reason. Its solution
however generates newaporiai. The stipulations are familiar: human
reason is limited to the hie et nun, it cannot transcend the contingent
temporal starting-points of inquiry, and thus it is "differentiated by
history without remainder" (Page, 44). PH insists on reason's inevitable temporal parochiality or historicity. Hence PH must regard the
tradition of First Philosophy (henceforth FP) as in pursuit of
chimerae, for FP is based on "the conviction that the human intellect
is in principle and by nature adequate to reality and its primary
principles," i.e. principles of a transtemporal order (3). Besides such
primacy, FP upholds the noetic ideals of universality and Socratic
self-knowledge. Yet PH is the heir of this tradition insofar as itoffers
�92
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
a comprehensive critique of reason's powers. Indeed it is the direct
successor to the modern critique of reason which rejects the possibility of noetic adequacy to reality, but retains allegiance to FP's
search for a universal self-accounting of reason. The critique of
reason retains the ideal of reason's noetic adequacy to itself
Unlike the pre-Hegelian critique of reason, PH temporalizes the
categories of the understanding thus historicizing Kant's quaestio juris
(59-60, 117); all the same it undertakes a comparable 'justification"
of reason (52-55). Page on a number of occasions employs the
expression "the spirit ofFP," as distinct from FP proper, to indicate
points of contact between PH and FP (preeminently in the case of
Heidegger; see 128, 143). Thus PH is not a mere break with FP, but
an internal betrayal, claiming to provide a genuine renovation (not
dismissal) of philosophy. Page puts his leading question as follows:
"As an interpretation of the relationship between historicity and
reason, the single most important question PH must face is that of
its adequacy as an account of human reason's actuality" (6). Here is
a difficulty: if PH should happen to have an adequate account of
reason, would it not be genuine FP (indeed, the only true FP)? And
if its account is inadequate, then why is it a "betrayal," rather than
just an imperfect form of FP?
Page precedes his account and critique of PH proper with a
review of other varieties of the "historicist gesture": Karl Popper's
account of historicism as the "demonization of history," the conditioning of cultural knowledge by history in the classical historicisms
of Friedrich Meinecke and Ernst Troeltsch, and Karl Mannheim's
sociology of knowledge. None of these doctrines is genuine PH
since their particularist or procedural approaches to history do not
undertake to show (or in Popper's case, to criticize) the conditioning
of all powers of reason by history. Page's aim in presenting them is
to underline the self-conscious comprehensiveness of genuine PH,
of which three recent representatives are closely scrutinized: Joseph
Margolis, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Richard Rorty. A general critique of PH as self-refuting emerges from this examination. Yet
behind these figures looms the great figure of Martin Heidegger; to
him Page must turn for a "rehabilitation of historicism's motivating
�VELKLEY
93
insights" (128) of which Page intends to make a "determinate negation" preserving what is valid in PH (6, 128).
Still further behind Heidegger is Hegel, the second figure of the
"rehabilitative" inquiry which closes the book; these two thinkers
offer "the most powerful ontologies of historicity that have been
elaborated to date" (132). Notably Page's review of genuine PH does
not include discussions ofDilthey and Nietzsche, who surely belong
in a complete account. This is because Page in fact does not seek to
give a full genealogy; Page's purpose is strictly philosophical, and his
choice of figures is made for the sake of his. argument. The focus on
Hegel and Heidegger is adequate, in his view, to disclose the motives
of historicist ontology. But a study of Nietzsche can shed invaluable
light on some basic motives; I shall say more on this later. And as a
smaller cavil, I think some of the space accorded to the unphilosophical historicists (Meinecke, Troeltsch, Mannheim) might justly
have been allotted to Dilthey, as the leading figure in the methodological debates about natural science andGeisteswissenschaften. For in
his "typology of world-views," Dilthey clearly discloses the practical
motivation for the turn to historical Grundwissenschaft: the failure of
natural science to offer accounts of human purpose or visions of the
ends oflife.
Page adduces three recent figures (Margolis, Gadamer, Rorty) as
evidence for the "emerging consensus" in Anglophone and Continental philosophy around "the conviction that what is now called
practical rationality is the ruling form of all human understanding
and that its virtues are the highest virtues of the intellect" (47). In the
Anglo-American scene the primacy of practical rationality runs
through anti-foundationalist accounts of knowledge (H. Putnam, C.
Taylor), Nco-Aristotelian classical scholarship (M. Nussbaum),
Kant scholarship (0. O'Neill, S. Neiman), and ethics (B. Williams,
A. Macintyre), although historicist approaches are not the rule in
these areas. Kant, pragmatism, and (and only once mentioned by
Page) the later Wittgenstein's view of language as the repository of
cultural practices determinative of meaning, are pervasive sources,
probably more than major historicist philosophers. Indeed it may be
said that PH is a more radical version of a much broader tendency.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
III
With his three figures as his departure-point, Page develops subtle
variations on the theme of PH's self-refutation. Contrary to the
explicit conclusion of reason's inevitable parochiality, PH's mode of
arguing is a comprehensive rational self-account, without which it
cannot present a binding limitative thesis about knowledge. But if
reason is necessarily constrained by contingency, it should be unable
to make universal claims about such constraint. Or to use words ofEmil
Fackenheim cited by Page, "the reduction to historicity, were it total,
could not come to consciousness" (108). The fact that PH has "no right
to its universal idiom" (110) precipitates the freefall into nihilism so
evident in Rorty's writing, where the only constraints on thought arise
from the "vocabularies" we happen to use. Ifthis is all we have, how can
Rorty say others should alter their vocabularies to suit his? More
moderate "conciliatory pragmatists" like Margolis wish to assure
thought of a common "interim stability" without reduction to chaos,
but lacking any grasp of the universal they cannot carry this off
Yet Page does not finish off PH as quickly as this suggests.
Interestingly, he does not pursue the suggestion of Strauss that PH
must implicitly, to avoid blatant self-refutation, assume a quasiHegelian absolute moment of comprehensive insight. But he attributes to PH a more subtle third possibility, a Kantian type of strategy
which I believe is more to the point. PH need not, it seems, grant a
special exemption giving knowledge-status to its own universal claim
if that claim presumes only that the universal constraint on reason is
intelligible, while not knowable. The universal claim is then a "regulative ideal" grounded not in theoretical insight but in alleged practical necessity. There is then no outright self-contradiction in PH if
it makes a "distinction between the historicist scenario and human
knowledge of the scenario" (93). Inevitable parochiality militates
against universal knowledge-claims, but not against universal practical-regulative claims. Surely something like this has to be the ground
for the striking fact that historicists have not been much disturbed by
all of the talk since Husser! of their apparent self-refutation. But this
does entail that ultimately PH is based on a "leap of faith" to its
universal claim (96).
�VELKLEY
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This "practical faith" at the basis of PH is a fatal weakness in Page's
eyes. His argument against it, at one point, is similar to Hegel's
argument against Kant's claim that practical reason has primacy. In
other words, Page is at times inclined to refute the claim that rational
necessities are available to us through self-knowledge without noetic
adequacy to reality. Indeed Page's strong sympathy for Hegel is quite
apparent. Hegel's thought, of course, is not an instance of PH since
he regards reason's historical parochiality as only provisional. Hegel,
unlike PH, has more right to the universal idiom that stipulates
reason's being conditioned by time and history; he has a metaphysics
of time that can undergird such an idiom. Absolute knowing avoids
the vitiating effects of inescapable contingency. As when Hegel
criticizes Kant, Page argues against PH that its assertion of a limit to
reason implies that it knows something beyond that limit. Or, limitdrawing implies a metaphysical stance (absolute knowledge of reason's nature) that PH tries, at the same time, to disavow.
But perhaps the real point is this: One cannot allege the necessity
of a universal practical-regulative idea without having some knowledge of reason as requiring it. This knowledge (contra Hegel) may
imply only knowledge of some feature of human reason without any
more comprehensive metaphysics, thus without absolute knowledge
of human reason. But it is knowledge of a universal all the same, and
to rely on it contradicts historicist claims of pervasive contingency.
PH, it could be said, inconsequently grafts a universal Kantian
regulative idea on unrestricted cultural relativism. Its alleged "leap of
faith" is a practical ideal that makes sense only as a rational insight
about reason's nature, which PH should be unable to allow itself. On
the other hand PH will not refute itself if it makes a true leap offaith
with respect to something radically particular (insight about particular deities, say). But then it will also not be a philosophical doctrine
about knowledge and reason.
N
In my view the most interesting and effective part of Page's
account of PH is his challenge to it on the non-Hegelian ground
(without any move toward FP as the claim of noetic adequacy to
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
reality) that it simply misrepresents human reason. The critique is
grounded in self-knowledge. At these points Page indicates that the
issue revolves around the practical imperative' governing PH and
distorting reason's potentiality. What is that imperative? Injunctions
against trying "to escape history" come up most frequently (50, 66,
71). These are related to calls to "avoid fatuous abstractions of
rationalistic and transcendental thinking" (84) and to proposals for
"taming reason" in its drive for metaphysical knowledge (77). Gadamer states the broad theme with learning and eloquence when he
counsels philosophical thinking to strive for "the sense of what is
feasible, possible, correct, here and now," in connection with the
Enlightenment's misguided critique of prejudice (63, 68).
Such pronouncements show that recent manifestations of PH
continue the efforts ofVico, Hume, Burke and Herder to reconcile
theory and practice by appeals to the primacy of custom, tradition,
and folk-wisdom against the disruptive speculations ofFP. In reality,
those efforts were continuing the modern cause of Bacon and
Descartes by other means: to bring philosophical speculation
down to earth through harnessing theory to the relief of man's
estate. The reaction in many eighteenth century authors against
the new mathematical natural philosophy and attendant distortions
of moral and political discourse was not, however, a rejection of
the basic universalist and humanitarian telos governing modern
philosophy. By attempting to make that project politically more prudent
and "responsible," thinkers like Hume and Burke turned to "history"
as the proper realm of action, the true "home," for human reason.
A further element in PH since Hegel, however, is the absorption
of the Idealist notions of freedom originally inspired by Rousseau,
with their claim to satisfy the deepest longings of FP. Absolute
unity and totality of knowledge is, in Kant's formulation, attainable
only through an account of reason as the spontaneous power of
self-determination that projects ultimate ends. This emphasis on
freedom as the only possible source of ends is what gives the postIdealist tradition of PH its particular radicality and stringency, and
what enables it to pose as the "renovation" of philosophy: practical
reason is the true metaphysics. Hegel is the figure who brings this
new account of freedom as the highest point of metaphysics into full
�VELKLEY
97
identity with history as the self-development of Geist. Thus in his
account of political life as Objective Spirit or Sittlichkeit, Hegel
reconciles the counterrevolutionary critique of "abstract thinking"
in Burke and others with the revolutionary implications of autonomy
in Rousseau, Kant, and Fichte.
To draw together these historical reflections, one could say that
historicist thinking arises out of a twofold failure in the original
modern effort to reconcile theory and practice, centering on its
account of nature: The new account of nature failed as a basis for
"phenomenological" accounts ofhuman moral-political practice and
discourse, and it failed as a source of "metaphysical" concepts of
ultimate ends for reason. Both failures could be viewed as teleological
deficiencies in the modern account of nature.
While Page does not explore this philosophical background to
speculative Idealism, the reconciliation of theoretical reason with the
requirements of practice is central to his reading of Hegel. This
philosopher "seeks to reconcile reason's moment of negativity, its
infinite freedom from the given with the bounds ... of the here and
now"(155); Hegel confronts the "uncanny restlessness" of reason,
"the immediate negativity of reflective, critical intelligence" that
"produces a sense of homelessness" (161). By embedding critical
reason in an historical context it cannot transcend, and arguing that
spirit gradually evolves a context for complete self-knowing, Hegel's
doctrine produces a profound sense of reason being at home in the
world. Unlike PH, which ties reason inescapably to contingency, the
"noetic adequacy" of Hegel's logic can consistently ground the coincidence of reason and history. Page all the same questions that claim
to adequacy, or Hegel's assertion of knowing that philosophy is
necesarily concordant with the fate of the political community in
which it arises (199-200).
This critique of Hegel brings to the fore the heart of Page's
argument with PH. This is not PH's self-contradiction, or its failure
to attain a noetically adequate account of reality. What PH shares with
Hegel (who lacks PH's metaphysical weakness) is the effort to
domesticate the infinity of reason. On this issue even Hobbes has
things better, for he grasps the character of human "rational imagination" distinguishing it from animal sensitive imagination: "the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ability to picture as yet unrealized possibilities" (110). Drawing the
same lesson about reason from mathematics, Page argues that it is
"incoherent to combine finitude as inevitable parochiality with the
capacity to envision a totality of possibility" (111-112). But another
aspect of infinity comes into focus, for which Plato, not Hobbes, is
the authority, when Page asserts "there is no escape from the imperative toward illumination, toward seeing by the light of the Good"
(123); simply to think the better "is to have an idea that creates an
infinite distance, since the good thus becomes intelligible" (153; also
79). In sum, reason and speech institute a human distancing on the
world which in principle has no limits. Such potential for distancing
is never exhausted by the concrete actualizations of reason in history.
The "betrayal of First Philosophy" is, it turns out, PH's evasion-for
the most part-of this potential, not its rejection of metaphysics of
first causes of being.
Indeed, if I understand Page correctly, this infinity of reason is
incompatible with attaining the ideal of noetic adequacy to reality.
The version ofFP Page defends is hence not "Platonistic," but more
truly Platonic (131, 154) .5 This enables Page to speak highly of claims
in PH about "the hermeneutic character of human experience, the
openness of inquiry and the nonalgorithmic character of progress,
the value of discourse's nontheoretical ends, and the rationality tacit
in tradition" (128). In the final analysis, Page is actually closer to
Heidegger than to Hegel. Page thus credits Heidegger with having
an acute sense of the negativity of reason or the radical freedom of
philosophy, which places Heidegger poles apart from Gadamer's
"good-natured optimism" about philosophy's accommodation with
the present. Heidegger is more Socratic in avowing an element of
irremovable homelessness in reason (150-155).
Yet Heidegger also is not true to his own insight when he insists
on "fated" constraints over reason's openness, such that man as the
site of Being's dual concealment-unconcealment loses any destiny
of his own in Heidegger's later thought (152). Page expresses admiration for Being and Times transcendental regress to the conditions
of experience in the temporality of care, but questions the move
already in this work toward regarding all objects of care as finite,
temporal and mortal (147-149). Why must Heidegger suppress the
�VELKLEY
99
infinity of reason with the demand that every chosen fate be "local"?
Heidegger encounters a clash of two imperatives: the infinite striving
for the Good (the imperative to question the given), and the refusal
to escape history (the imperative to affirm the given). His choice
finally is for the second. What is the ground for that choice?
In my estimation the sentence that sheds most light on this matter is
Page's reflection (with reference to Plato's Phaedrus) that Heidegger
"reserves for philosophers the role of poet-prophet, following essentially in the footsteps of Nietzsche, who conceived the strategy of
hiding philosophy's negativity in art.Amorfoti is the evident progenitor of Gelassenheit, though it serves a more vigorous sense of
purpose" (152). This suggests that the deepest (hence less prevalent)
level of PH is not the turn to practical reason that evades the infinity
of reason, but the turn to art that would both transform and conceal,
but not deny, infinity. Nietzsche and Heidegger suppose that only
as poetic can philosophy be at home with homelessness, with philosophy's radical freedom. The parochiality of poetic dwelling is then
the necessary mask (but not the whole point) of philosophy; the
philosopher sees through and past this mask in the very act of
assuming it. Yet one may still inquire: is then the philosopher-poet's
insight not universal and in the spirit of First Philosophy?
Notes:
1. See S. Rosen, The Question of Being: A Reversal ofHeidegger (New
Haven, 1993), p. 37: "Strictly speaking, Aristotle's doctrine of
thinking casts no light on how individual human beings ('substances' in the earlier terminology) are able to cognize the forms
that (in some sense or another) are universally enacted, not by
their particular intellectual faculties, but Gy the propertyless or
formless nous."
2. See G. Gentile, Giordano Bruno e il pensiero del Renascimento
(Florence, 1925), 224-248; Machiavelli,Discorsi I, 3; Bacon,Novum Organum I, 84; Kant, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des
Himmels, III; compare with Plato, Statesman 268d-274e. From
Fontenelle'sDigression sur les anciens et les modernes(1688) Gentile
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
100
quotes a passage that shows how such reflections may relate to
later notions ofhistory as self-actualizing Weltgeist: "U n bon esprit
cultive est, pour ansi dire, compose de tous les esprits des siecles
precedentes; ce n'est qu'un meme esprit qui s'est cultive pendant
tout ce temps-!a."
3. L. Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, 1953), pp. 145-46:
"Human nature is one thing, virtue or the perfection of human
nature is another. The definite character of the virtues and, in
particular, of justice cannot be deduced from human nature.
Human nature 'is' in a different manner than its perfection or
virtue."
4. See amongmanyT. Nagel, "~ubjective and Objective," in Mortal
Questions (Cambridge UK, i979);]. Searle, Mind, Brains, and
Science (Cambridge MA, 1984). For recent entries in this debate,
see H. Putnam's review of Galen Strawson,Mental Reality, in
London Review of Books, 18/3 (8 February, 1996).
5. Also as regards the ideal of noetic self-adequacy, Page might
acknowledge more difficulty in its attainment on non-historicist
grounds. For some thoughts on this see P. Dews, "Modernity,
Self-Consciousness and the Scope of Philosophy: Jiirgen Habermas and Dieter Henrich in Debate," in The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy (London, 1995).
�i._·_
~
To See The World Profoundly:
The Films Of Robert Bresson
Shmuel Ben-Gad
Learning to see-habituating the eye to repose, to
patience, to letting things come to it; learning to
defer judgement, to investigate and comprehend
the individual case in all its aspects. This is the
first preliminary schooling in spirituality...
Friedrich Nietzsche
That a filmmaker can lift us to these levels of
contemplation and speculation is proof of that
filmmaker's greatness.
Andrew Sarris
Despite awards and high critical praise, the films of French minimalist Robert Bresson are screened much more rarely in the U.S. than
those of many other directors of art films. However, there seems to
be something of a Bresson boom oflate.In 1994,L'Argent (1983), an
adaptation of a Tolstoy short story, became available in subtitled
video; that was followed by Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945),
based upon a work by Diderot, and Lancelot duLac (1974) in 1995;
and in 1996 we have seen the similar release of Une Femme Douce
(1969). He has made fourteen films in all, among which are two
based upon works by Dostoevsky and two upon works by Georges
Bernanos. He first attained his mature style in his fourth film, Diary
of a Country Priest (1950), a style which he refined until it reached
rarified heights in L 'Argent.
What sets Bresson's work apart from that of virtually every other
director is his insistence on filming only "real things." As he himself
has written in his Notes sur le Cinematographe(1975), "To create is not
to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships
between persons and things which are, and as they are." (Italics are
Shmuel Ben-Gad is a librarian at George Washington University and the author of
"Robert Bresson: A Bibliography ofWorks By and About Him, 1981-1993," which
appeared in the Bulletin ofBibliography.
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THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
in the original.) His minimalism is really a way of not "deforming"
reality but of allowing us to concentrate on the real persons and things
he presents to us. Indeed his films are a series of images of remarkable
purity. Because he eschews mood music, as well as expressive camera
angles and movements, and pares away inessential elements from his
compositions and dialogue, he achieves what he calls "insignificant
(non-significant) images."
Wyndham Lewis can, I think, help us understand what this means.
In his book Men Without Art, Lewis defends what he calls an "external"
approach to art, in particular, to literature. He writes that if authors
who relate their narratives internally-that is, by letting readers "into
the minds of the charatters" (like James Joyce or Henry
James)-were painters, their works would consist of "plastic
units ...suffused with romantic coloration." They would be overcharged with literary symbolism; their psyches would have got the
better of their Gestalt-the result a sentiment, rather than an expressive form." These imagined paintings by James and Joyce are the
exact opposite of Bresson's films. In Bresson's minimalistic stylization-which is nothing if not rigorous form-there is an intense
concentration on essential images but no symbolism, no romanticism, no spectacle. Instead, carefully chosen, spare images follow one
upon the other and affect one another. It is precisely through this
method that Bresson's rigorous formalism is ultimately moving. He
achieves emotional resonance not through expressive "coding" or
rendering of images that provide the audience with cues both for
interpreting and reacting to the images, but through a cool yet
intense presentation of uncluttered compositions of images and
natural sounds in a certain order.
Br.esson also insists on realism in a less subtle way, namely, in his
avoidance of acting. He does not use actors, and refers to the people
who appear in his films as "models." Through extremely precise
direction of speech, movement, and gesture, and also much repetition before shooting scenes, he manages to have his models move
and speak in an automatic way, that is to say, without attempting
either to project or suppress emotion. \lllhile Bresson recognizes the
legitimacy of acting in the theater, he does not approve of it in films,
where he regards it as "inventing" or "deforming" persons. According
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103
to him, it violates the particularity and purpose of the cinema-the
most realistic of the arts-which is to show realities. Turning to his
"Notes" once again, we read: ''What our eyes and ears require is not the
realistic persona but the real person." And again, concerning models:
"Movement from the exterior to the interior. (Actors: movement from
the interior to the exterior.)" Acting is the projection of simulacra of
emotions that the actor does not feel. It is a simulation meant to make
visible and obvious what the character is supposedly thinking and feeling.
There is a credibility to Bresson's models: They are like people we meet
in life, more or less opaque creatures who speak, move, and gesture.
Bresson believes, and I concur, that the words he has his models utter
and the movements and gestures he has them make in an automatic,
non-intentional way, invariably, if subtly, evoke human depths because
the models, after all, are human beings. Acting, on the other hand, no
matter how naturalistic, actively deforms or invents by putting an overlay
or filter over the person, presenting a simplification of a human being and
not allowing the camera to capture the actor's human depths. Thus what
Bresson sees as the essence of filmic art, the achievement of the creative
transformation involved in all art through the interplay of images of real
things, is destroyed by the artifice of acting. For Bresson, then, acting is,
like mood music and expressive camera work, just one more way of
deforming reality or inventing that has to be avoided
Bresson's filmic universe is one of real, simply presented persons,
objects, and sounds (no one uses the soundtrack more effectively
than he), and each thing that is observed or heard is granted its own
integrity; yet it is also wrapped up in the same mysterious realm as
all the other items. It is a part of the genius of Bresson, through his
composition of images and ordering of their presentation, that he
discovers and captures the subtle strangeness of the mundane. His
spare presentation of objects manages to reveal their essences and the
mystery attached to them. As a whole, the universe he presents is a quiet,
austere, mysterious one with the pervasive mysterious atmosphere
evoked by the lack of acting and also ofany other clues to, or explanations
of, psychology and motivation, as well as by the remarkably unyielding concentration on bodies and objects. His universe seems cold
and indifferent and also pregnant with possibilities, dominated by
fate and with room for human freedom. It is, in fine, as ambiguous,
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THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
because as opaque, as the people in his films. In its ambiguity it is
both frightening and awe-inspiring. Regarding story line, unlike
Antonioni and the later Godard, Bresson's films have strong plots,
although they are presented elliptically. Yet, ultimately, plot is in
service of the minimalistic style, not vice versa.
While recognizing full well that Bresson's films are not at all
didactic, it seems to me that in them Bresson provides us with a way
of seeing, of relating to, the world. Bresson's filmic art, in fact, is a
way of seeing. Whatever his personal belief concerning what may lie
behind the images the world presents to us (and Bresson, a Christian,
presumably believes in invisible realities as do, among others, more
traditionally-minded Jews), in his films he has a profound respect for
this "surface", if you will, of r eality. That his austere, "external," and
1
minimalistic style creates films of such passion (however restrained)
and authentic interiority indicates, it seems to me, the only way for
us to try to understand the world, to try to see it most profoundly.
We do this not by avoiding or annihilating or even seeing through
the images the world presents to us; we do it, on the contrary, by
paying the closest attention to those images, by concentrating on
seeing them with supreme clarity, and by doing so without any prior
assumptions, which tend to cause us to discover only what we already
think we know. (In an interview in which he discussed his deliberate
decision not to explain, or even hint at, motivations and psychology
of characters in his films, Bresson acutely remarked, "The psychologist discovers only what he can explain. I explain nothing.")
Bresson's art has often been called "spiritual," but I am inclined to
think of it as highly materialist in that, as I have noted, it is most
respectful of material reality. (What I mean may be illustrated by a
notable instance in which his adaptation of the plot of his source
material coincides with his materialist techniques. In the novel
Diary of a Country Priest by Bernanos, the central character has a
religious vision while walking alone. Shortly after that he faints and
is assisted by a girl from his catechism class. In his film version,
Bresson conflates the two incidents so that a vision never occurs. The
priest faints and thinks he is having a supernatural visitation, but it
turns out to be the girl kindly helping him in his need.) We know
what ·we see. The more intensely and clearly we see, the more deeply
�BEN-GAD
105
we know. What I call Bresson's materialist art, with its emphasis upon
unadorned, undramatized images, is very far from a playful postmodern celebration of the superficial that provides striking images
and spectacles in order to tease or overwhelm the visual sense. Rather,
his precise, ordered presentation of carefully chosen and composed
non-significant images invites the viewer to what Andrew Sarris calls
"contemplation," though not a contemplation of vague, spiritual
notions. It is rather, at least at first, of physical realities like faces and
hands, doorways, and axes. If anything-"spiritual" or otherwise--exists beneath or behind material reality, if physical reality is
in fact a surface, then the only possibility ofknowingthis other reality
will be through a profound gaze at this surface. I want to be clear
·here that I am not claiming, or even trying to describe or explicate
Bresson's own philosophy. It may be that he thinks the only way to
indicate supernatural realities in filmic art is through an intensely
materialist method, but believes some other ways of perceiving such
realities exist in life. Yeti believe that a work of art does have a certain
autonomy from its creator and thus I am trying here to understand
and explicate what Bresson's films show us as films, not what
Bresson the man may believe.
In Bresson's films (and the purer his art has become the more this is
true) persons and objects are neither explained nor interpreted; nor is
the universe which comprises them. We are presented tales whose
meanings are left as unexplained as are the motives of the people in
them. As Tom Milne, the fine English film critic, has said of one of
Bresson's greatest films, Une Femme Douce, "By the end, in a sense, one
is no wiser than before. Was it because he [the husband]loved her too
much or too little, because he gave her too little money or too much,
because he felt she was too good for him or not good enough? The
extraordinary thing about the film is that any or all of these interpretations can be read into it ... " (This first of his films in color is based
upon a Dostoevsky tale which deals with the suicide of a young wife)
I have said that in my opinion Bresson's films provide us with a
way of seeing, of relating to the world, and I have already discussed
what I think that way of seeing is-namely, careful, contemplative
attention to the essence of physical realities without prior assumptions.
But relating to reality, as shown in Bresson's films, also involves, I think,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
clearly recognizing the deeply enigmatic nature of what is real. To
interpret is to impose meaning rather than to perceive it. I dare say
that in Bresson's filmic universe there are no interpretations, only
facts; in it, to perceive is to become aware how enigmatic is the
universe and the human beings who dwell therein.
In addition to being considered a spiritual director, Bresson is also
considered a dark, pessimistic one (and this is not, of course, a
contradiction). The obvious reason for this is that conventional
happy endings are rare in his films. Yet it seems to me that his
rigorous minimalism and materialist method, which amazingly yield
the most credible sense of mystery, are also causes. In an interview
Bresson replied to the characterization of his films as pessimistic by
saying, "The word 'pessimis~' bothers me because it is often used
instead of the word 'lucidity'.' Many people are uncomfortable with
lucidity. Many wish to interpret the sense of all-encompassing
mystery in Bresson's films as intimations of an invisible reality
behind the material universe and thus as offering hope. Yet I think
it must be recognized even by such viewers that, if indeed there are
such hints of the invisible in the films, both the hints and the realities
are grand and awesome, not mawkish or easily comforting, and that
the way to knowledge of them can be quite terrible. It is a widespread
and natural phenomenon for people to seek some escape from
materiality and its concomitant, death, and to look for hope in
spiritual realities. But, in my opinion, to avoid materiality in this
search is to fall into sentimentality at best and lunacy at worst. (It is
interesting, at least for me, to recall that in the Jewish religious
tradition speculations about redemption are quite varied but that one
of them, and it is perhaps the oldest, portrays redemption in rather
material terms: Jewish sovereignty over the entire Land oflsrael and
the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem.) Bresson's art, it seems
to me, is rooted in the material and lucidly recognizes the importance
of this "surface" of reality. It recognizes the resulting inescapably
enigmatic nature of the universe to human beings. Bresson, an artist
of the very highest order in my judgement, does not offer meanings,
explanations, or answers but rather lucidity, reality, and profound
mystery. Indeed I am bold to say that Bresson's films are not merely
the most lucid made, they are, in essence, lucidity itself.
�
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Kraus, Pamela
Brann, Eva T. H.
Carey, James
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Bojaxhi, Gjergji
Sachs, Joe
Lenkowski, Jon
Salem, Eric
Lalande, Andre
Krivak, Andrew
Velkley, Richard
Ben-Gad, Shmuel
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The St. John's Review
Volume XLIII, number two (1996)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
James Carey
Beate Ruhm Von Oppen
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Gjergji Bojaxhi
The St. John's Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's
College. Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Eva T. H. Brann,
Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $15.00
for three issues, even though the magazine may sometimes appear
semi-annually rather than three times a year. Unsolicited essays,
stories, poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John's College. P.O. Box 2800; Annapolis,
MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available. at $5.00 per issue, from
the St. John's College Bookstore.
©1996 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole
or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
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�Contents
Essays and Lectures
Hegel's Logic of Desire
Peter Kalkavage
1
An Ennobling Innocence: . . . . . . . . . 21
The Founding of Socrates' Republic
David Lawrence Levine
The Past-Present
Eva T. H. Brann
. . . . . . . . . . 39
Interpreting Genesis Through
The Foundational Symbols of
Earth, Water, and Air
Harvey L. Gable, Jr.
. . . . . . 55
Book Reviews
A Handbook That Provides No Help
. . . 79
William Packard's A Poet's Dictionary
Elliott Zuckerman
Theater and Polity . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Mera Flaumenhaft's The Civic Spectacle
Arlene W. Saxonhouse
The Human Sense for Justice
. . . . . . 101
Clifford Orwin's The Humanity ofThucydides
Henry Higuera
��Hegel's Logic of Desire
I
Peter Kalkavage
There is such divine hannony in the realm oflifeless
nature, why this discord within the rational?
Schiller, The Robbers
To open the pages of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is to enter a
labyrinth. The Minotaur of these regions, the Demon of Difficulty,
haunts every chamber. The difficulty of Hegel is both legend and
cliche. It tends to be so great and so persistent, so much a part of
how Hegel thinks and speaks, that we rtsk losing our way at every
tum. Early on, Hegel tells us that the Phenomenology chronicles no
mere path of Cartesian doubt but a way of despair. And yet, how little
he seems to realize that his book, intended as a ladder to the absolute,
is itself a way of despair for the would-be reader.
This essay is an introduction to the Phenomenology ofSpirit. I shall
try to provide a thread to guide us through Hegel's labyrinth. The
center of this labyrinth is the self; it is the point around which
everything else in the Phenomenology tums. The word "spirit" or Geist
that appears in the title, a word that also means "mind," is just
this-the condition of fully developed selfhood. Hegel's book tells us
how this condition is achieved. In his commentary on Hegel, Alexandre Kojeve begins with the following definition: "Man is self-consciousness." My efforts take their cue from this definition and are devoted
to an exploration of what Hegel means by the self.
For the most part, I will be dealing with the chapter on self-consciousness. But before plunging in, I want to say a word about the
Phenomenology as a whole and discuss a few of Hegel's basic terms.
The Phenomenology belongs to a quartet of greatest works on the
theme of education. The other three members of the quartet are
Plato's Republic, Dante's Divine Comedy and Rousseau's Emile. Despite their profound differences, these works have important similarities. For one thing, each reflects on education through some
over-arching story or muthos. In the Republic this muthos is the
Peter Kalkavage is a tutor at the Annapolis campus of St. John's College. This essay
was first delivered in lecture form on the Annapolis campus in March, 1995.
�2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
founding ofthe best city in speech; in the Divine Comedy it is Dante's
journey to God; in Emile it is Rousseau's fiction of playing governor to
a child not his own by nature. In the Phenomenology, too, education
is not simply talked about but presented as a drama or story. It is the
story of how spirit, which for Hegel is somehow both human and
divine, struggles to attain self-knowledge. Another similarity is that
each of these stories is a tale of liberation. Each tells of how man is
freed from some bad qnd enslaving condition~from either a cave, or
a dark wood, or the coiTupting influence of society or, in the Phenomenology, from what Hegel calls "natural consciousness." Finally, and
most importantly, each work in the great quartet explores the relationship between reason on the one hand and action and passion on
the other, between man as a thinker and man as the being who acts
and feels.
Hegel educates the reader by initiating him into the minds of others.
To use a metaphor that occurs in the final chapter, the Phenomenology
is a picture gallery (492). * It presents us with a colorful array of human
characters or types. Hegel calls these types "shapes of consciousness." These shapes are the phenomena or appearances for which the
Phenomenology seeks to provide a logos or reasoned account. In the
course of the book we encounter all manner of characters, much as
we do when we read the Platonic dialogues or when we journey with
Dante through his three-fold cosmos. We meet the scientist and the
warrior, the Stoic and the Sceptic, the unhappy consciousness and
the beautiful soul. Sometimes we meet characters lifted from the
realm of fiction: Faust, Karl von Moor, Don Quixote, Antigone and
Rameau's crazy nephew. All have their place within Hegel's picture
gallery; all are stages on the way to the fully developed selfhood of
spirit.
The single most important feature of this array of human types is
that each embodies or personifies a specific claim to know. This claim
is put forth by the character as unquestioned and unqualified, in other
words, as absolute. Absolute knowing is not just in the final chapter
but permeates the whole. It is present in all the preceding chapters,
present not as genuine absolute knowing but as the unsubstantiated
claim to know absolutely, that is, divinely. This clalm to absolute or
divine knowing Hegel calls "certalnty." Hegel's phenomenologist is a
combination of impersonator and spy: He must infiltrate all these
appearances of absolute knowing, enter into the spirit of their characteristic certainties, and expose them for what they are-mortal
shapes or, to use one of Hegel's most beloved words, moments. The
shapes that come before the phenomenologist, the shapes he has
* Numbers in parentheses refer to page numbers in the Miller translation, from
which I have occasionally departed.
�KALKAVAGE
3
critically "taken on," are self-refuting; they are consumed in the very
process of articulating themselves. In the course of witnessing this
process, a process Hegel calls "experience," the phenomenologist sees
something positive: He sees the logical order of generation by which
one shape gives birth to another. In this way he reconstructs the path
that leads to genuine absolute knowing, to the truly divine.
Hegel tells us in the Introduction that the Phenomenology depicts
the education of natural/ consciousness as it "presses on to true
knowing"(49). The Phenomenology is not about the education of single
human individuals. As we shall soon see, the individual is at the heart
of what Hegel's book is all about; nevertheless, no single human
individual traverses the stages of consciousness. becomes a Stoic at
one point in his life and gets converted to scepticism at another. It is
mind or spirit in its universality, what Hegel provocatively calls "the
universal individual''(l6). that makes the transition from stage to
stage. The universal individual manifests itself in the valious epochs
of world history, epochs summed up by the characters I mentioned
earlier: Antigone, for example, sums up one aspect of Greek ethical
life. while Rameau's nephew sums up the perversity of the modern
world of culture. The individual reader, to be sure, goes through all
the stages; but he does so from the standpoint of "true knowing," that
is, dialectical knowing. He enters into the labyrinth of each mode of
certainty vicariously, playfully. He does not lose his way-at least, he
is not expected to-and he does not share the self-ignorance and
self-deception of that mode. As Hegel tells us in the Preface, philosophy in the form of science has already come on the scene. In tracing
out the logical thread that runs through all the shapes of consciousness, the reader vindicates what he already possesses rather than
learns what he did not know. Education in the Phenomenology. then,
is the education not of conscious individuals but of consciousness, of
universal mind struggling to know itself. What, then, is consciousness? Clearly, we must ask this question if we are to understand what
Hegel means by self-consciousness.
Consciousness for Hegel is any mode of thinking that is characterized by a strict distinction between a thinking subject and an
external object. "External" here means "external to thinking." Consciousness is the subject-object opposition. It is inwardness that is
outer-oriented, outer-directed. Ordinruy sense experience offers a
simple instance of consciousness. I see an apple before me. It is one
thing; I am another. My gaze is directed, vector-like, away from myself
and towards the apple. This is the attitude of consciousness. Consciousness does not give subject and object, perceiver and apple. equal
�4
THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW
weight The apple is there, it exists. It would be there if I weren't
looking at it The apple is assumed by the attitude of consciousness
to be the real, the substantial, the true, while the light of consciousness that falls on the apple is assumed to have nothing to do with the
apple. In short, consciousness does not merely perceive the object
but values or esteems it insofar as it is an object; and furthermore. it
values or esteems it at the expense of the conscious subject. This may
be termed the prejudic~ of consciousness.
To educate natural Consciousness is to lead it out of this prejudice
that "holds up" objects and "puts down" subjects. Natural consciousness is man in an intellectual "state of nature." In this state he
identifies the true with the natural. Now "natural" here means more
than the apples that exist outside the perceiver. It refers to anything
that is assumed to have either an immediate existence or an immediate
truth. "Natural" means "logically undeveloped." It refers to anything
that is assumed to be true simply and solely on the grounds that it is
given. This realm of the natural as the mind's undigested "other"
includes not only sensuous givens like the apple but also, and more
interestingly, intellectual givens like innate ideas, intellectual intuition,
the categorical imperative and conscience. Man can even adopt this
natural atiitude towards himself He can think of himself as having a
fixed "nature" llke the apple, a nature that is simply given. Dialectic
in the Phenomenology is the logical process by which the immediate
is mediated or thought through, As the systematic destruction of all
givenness, it embodies Hegel's attack on the merely naturaL
Consciousness, for Hegel, is the human condition from a certain
point of view. It is a divine condition, too, a mode in which God as
universal mind appears on earth, appears in and through man: but
for now I want to focus on the human side ofHegel's man-God identity.
In the condition of natural consciousness, man finds himself thrown,
unaccountably, into a whole world of extemal objects. This world
includes laws, customs and prohibitions as well as apples. In his
natural or pre-educated condition, man regards all these things not
only as objects over and against him but also as objects over and above
him. With all their apparent determinateness and solidity, all their
naturalness, they lise up before man llke an overbearing autholity
figure. The attitude of natural consciousness makes the world seem
that way, invests the merely given with authoritativeness.
With these observations we begin to see the moral dimension of the
Phenomenology. Natural consciousness is man's cave and dark wood,
his condition of bondage. The education of this consciousness is the
path by which man becomes fully himself or free, free of the tyranny
�KALKAVAGE
5
of nature and all the undigested othemess that nature implies.
Dialectic, as the mediational process by which all givenness is destroyed, is not only the path to the true; it is also the path to man's
highest good in the form of freedom. As we shall see, this good can
be attained only on the basis of a revision of how we understand
human desire. Consciousness must get beyond merely looking at the
apple: It must eat the apple and then suffer the consequences. This
is what happens at the level of self-consciousness.
The chapter on self-conSciousness is the most important as well as
the most dramatic in the whole Phenomenology. It is the point at
which the book finds its center and true beginning. The three preceding stages of sense-certainty, perception and understanding, important and interesting as they are, form but the prologue to Hegel's
impelial theme of the self. Now the whole Phenomenology is the study
of the human-divine spirit in the mode of consciousness, spirit or mind
caught up in the subject-object opposition. That is why every character in the book is said to be a shape of consciousness. But the three
opening stages represent consciousness in its narrower sense. Here
the thinking subject places the truth squarely in a non-thinking
object: sense-certainty in the sensuous This, perception in the thing
and its properties, and understanding in force. These stages are
objective, not only because they locate truth in an object but also in
the colloquial sense: They are objective in the sense of being detached
or uninvolved. The subject here merely "takes" its object. The subject
is neither practical nor productive; it neither acts nor makes. Nor is
the object in any way a reflection of the thinking subject: . It neither
lives nor thinks. The "cool" detachment of these modes of certainty
stands in sharp contrast with the "heat" of self-consciousness. Selfconsciousness is passionately involved with its objects. As we see
from the opening "fight to the death," its very first manifestation is
that of extreme violence. When self-consciousness bursts upon the
scene in the Phenomenology, it does so like Alcibiades in the Symposium-drunk, tyrannical and full of a truth it does not understand.
The key to the self-consciousness chapter, and indeed to Hegel's
book as a whole, is the violence with which self-consciousness first
appears. This violence exerts its influence over all the characters we
meet in the chapter, not only the warrior and the lord, but also the
Stoic, Sceptic and unhappy consciousness. Hegel's technical word for
this violence is negativity; the experiential word for it is desire. In the
introductory section entitled 'The Truth of Self-Certainty," Hegel tells
us: "Self-consciousness is desire"(l05, 109). The remainder of my
essay is an effort to understand this sentence.
�6
THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW
In order to get at why self-consciousness is violent. let us ask a
more basic question: Wbat does Hegel mean by the self? Towards the
end of the Phenomenology, Hegel utters a surprisingly helpful answer
to this question. He says: "The 'I' is not merely the self, but the identity
of the self with itself"(489). The self, in other words, is a relation, the
relation of identity. More precisely, it is the act of self-relation. One
is tempted to coin the verb "selfing." The self is not something I have
but something I do;. and this doing is what I most deeply am.
Ordinarily, when I refer to my self, I refer either to my body or to
something mysteriously lodged in or attached to my body. I treat the
self as though it were an object that is simply there-like the apple.
To recall the three stages of consciousness, I treat the self as though
it were a unique This that detles language, or a thinking thing with
properties, or a psychic force. For Hegel all these ways of thinking
about the self belong to natural consciousness, the condition of
bondage from which philosopher and non-philosopher alike must be
delivered.
Self-consciousness is the spelling out of selfhood as the act of
self-relating. It is the experience of what it means to say, not just "I"
but "I am myself." Self-consciousness is the so-called "law of identity,"
"A=A," that has "bubbled up" to the surface of human expe1ience in
the form of "1=1." My selfhood, my act of relating myself to myself, is
the law of identity brought to life. For Hegel, this act of self-relating is
negative or self-contradictory. The reason is that, in being aware of
myself, I hold myself before myself: I am both subject and object. To
pursue the spatial metaphor, I generate an inner "distance" between
myself and myself. In logical terms, I generate the condition of
selfothemess. Were it not for this self-otherness, I could not be
self-aware. But clearly I cannot stop at this moment of distance or
self-otherness, for then I would not be aware that what I hold before
me is myself. In order to be aware of myself as identical with myself,
I must generate a distance and overcome that distance in one and the
same act. Self-consciousnesss is this single act: it is the experience of
being at once self-same and self-other. We have here the paradigm of
what Hegel calls determinate negation. This is negation that preserves
what it negates. In being self-conscious, I negate my simple or
immediate self-identity, my naturalness, and simultaneously negate
the negating. Determinate negation is negation with a positive result.
In this case the result is-me as a self-conscious individual. All this
explains why the "law of identity," "1=1," is an incomplete or what Hegel
calls "abstract" truth. It is incomplete because it conceals and even
seems to deny the moment of self-otherness, without which my
�KALKAVAGE
7
selfhood would be impossible. To be grasped in its wholeness, and
therefore in its truth. self-consciousness must be regarded as the
unity of the self-same and the self-other. If the logical dissonance
within this unity ever came to be resolved in the sense of obliterated,
if logical dissonance were like musical dissonance, I would cease to
be self-aware, I would cease to be.
Earlier I sald that self-consciousness was the spelling out of what
it meant to say "I am myself." What are the moral consequences of
defining man as self-conSciousness, as the being who says "I am
myself'? To address this question, we must bring in one of the most
important terms in Hegel's book-individua1ity. The chapter on selfconsciousness is Hegel's exploration of what it means to be an
tndividual. "I am myself' is the maxim of individuality, the claim that
captures the individual's certainty of himself as an inward or self-relating being. No one who utters this sentence or hears it uttered can
fail to note its assertive, even militant tone: "I AM MYSELF." "I am
myself' is not a mere proposition, the mere statement that I happen
to be identical with myself, but an affirmation, an act of will. In saying
"I am myself," I stand up for myself; I affirm the value and dignity of
my being not just human but this human, my value and dignity as an
tndividual. Furthermore, I assert that this value and dignity derive
from my ability to say "I am myself," that is, from the sheer fact of my
inwardness or self-consciousness. In saying "I am myself," in affirming his individuality, man says: "I am an end and not a means, a whole
and not a part-and I am to be respected as such." In short, this
self-affirmation, this battle cry of the tndividual, is man's ·:declaration
of independence." It is man's unwillingness to bow before any authority other than himself.
The willful or militant character of "I am myself' brings us back to
the violence that defines self-consciousness. The violence we witness
in Hegel's drama derives from the fact that self-consciousness, as
Hegel tells us, is desire. What, then, does Hegel mean by desire? And
why does desire serve to define self-consciousness?
Like every other character in the Phenomenology, self-consciousness starts out in the condition of mere certainty, as an unsubstantiated claim to absolute knowing. Here the self is certain, not of
external objects but of itself. The most immediate or natural form of
this self-certainty is egotism or amour-propre. Hegel's technical term
for this egotism is "simple being-for-self'(ll3). At this primitive level
of selfhood, the individual is all wrapped up in his own utterly private
perspective on the world. He is, in the colloquial sense of the word,
subjective. Because of his intense concentration on his exclusive
�8
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
selfhood, the individual is at war with the whole external world, at war
with otherness. As consciousness, the self was mesmerized by the
apparent solidity of external objects. This worship of objects vanishes
with the individual's certainty of himself. To be sure, the external
world is still there; but it has been demoted. No longer a regulated
cosmos of independent beings, the world is now fuel for the engine of
selfClove.
This negative attitude towards externality or otherness is what
Hegel means by desire: Self-consciousness is desire because, in the
condition of radical egotism, self-certainty at its most immediate level,
the individual asserts himself at the expense of the world. I return to
the apple of my earlier discussion of consciousness. As a self-conscious individual, I no longer want to look at the apple; nor do I want
to understand the natural laws by which the apple grows or falls to
the ground. I want to eat the apple. The desire to eat the apple, as
Hegel sees it, does not derive from my hunger for apples. It derives
instead from my belief, my certainty, that I am substantial while the
apple is not. I set out to eat the apple in order to prove that this is
the case, to demonstrate my being and its nothingness. We recall
Hegel's praise of the animals in the sense-certainty chapter: "They do
not just stand idly in front of sensuous things as if these pos·sessed
intrinsic being, but, despairing of their reality, and in complete
certainty of their nothingness, they fall to without ceremony and eat
them up"{65). Self-consciousness is deeper than consciousness because it knows the wisdom of the animals: it knows that objects are
insubstantial. But, as we shall see, it is also more deeply tragic. In
seeking the annihilation of the world, in giving way to desire, self-consciousness kills off the necessary condition for self-fulfillment.
Hegel's logic of desire is clearly a radical departure from how we
ordinalily think about desire. Desire in its ordinary sense is positive
and other-directed. By this I mean that it is the desire for something,
and that it is the desire for something other than myself. The ordinary
view is echoed and elaborated in various ways by Plato, Aristotle,
Aquinas and Dante. Hegel inverts the two characteristics of desire in
its ordinary use. Desire for him is negative and self-directed. It is
negative because it is the impulse to destroy rather than to acquire;
it is more like hatred than love. And it is self-directed because the
whole point of all this negativity is the selfs affirmation of itself. A
necessary consequence of this inversion of desire is a radical shift in
the meaning of a final cause. Man, for Hegel, is not evoked, called
forth, by some being outside him, neither by the Platonic forms nor
an unmoved mover nor the grace-bearing Beatrice. He is driven from
�KALKAVAGE
9
within, impelled by his very self-certainty to seek the truth of that
certainty through antagonism towards the external world. What man
strives for, desires in the broad sense of the term, is not an object other
than himself, nor a divine condition to which he aspires without ever
attaining, but his own full self-expression. Man, for Hegel, is his own
end. This autonomy first shows itself in man's radical egotism, his
simple being-for-self.
·Desire as the will to negate is most clearly present in the fight to
the death, with which the drama of self-consciousness begins. The
individual in his condition of amour-propre fmds himself in a world
that includes, not only external objects but also other self-conscious
individuals, other beings who say "I am myself." From the individual's
perspective, these other individuals must be "phonies"-thieves and
usurpers of the sacred pronoun "I." Now, certain as he is of his own
selfbood, the individual is also aware that that's all he has-mere
certainty, the untested assurance that he is the legitimate bearer of
the name "I." Out of this awareness is bom the individual's insecurity
and his need to "prove himself." In Hegel's language, he is driven to
raise his mere certainty to truth. Positively, he must prove himself to
himself. show that his self-certainty is even more important than his
life. Negatively, he must destroy the merely apparent or false selfhood
of his opponent, who, we must remember, is also driven to prove his
self-worth.
To say that self-consciousness is desire is to say not only that the
self wishes to destroy but also that it thrtves on what it destroys. If
the object were irrevocably consumed, consumed once and for all, the
self would have nothing to "feed off." Since self-consciousness derives
its sense of self from the negation of an other, the other must somehow
be preserved even as it is destroyed. In the very first experience of
self-consciousness, the individual realizes that killing one'S opponent
is ultimately unsatisfying, that what he really wants is recognition.
The individual who fights for recognition desires to annihilate the
otherness of his fallen opponent. He wants to deprive the other self
not of his life but of his selfbood and individuality, his right to say "I
am myself." He does so by making the other individual his slave. The
warrior at this point loses his nobility in becoming a lord. He is now
"free" to indulge his lower desires: He can eat the apple pie that the
slave has made. But the slave, precisely through his subservience to
his master in the form of work, rises above his master. He does so
because his condition of servitude, not to mention his overwhelming
fear of violent death, has stifled his former will to destroy, his former
desire. The apple pie may he food to the master, but to the slave it is
�10
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
a work of art, an independent thing that the slave makes but is not
permitted to consume. In the independence of the thing, the apple
pie, the slave sees the embodiment of his own independence as a
maker or producer. The pie is not just the product of his work but
the objectification of the slave's act of working, the slave's investment
of himself in an external object. The lord, on the other hand, remains
in his condition of desire. Partly, this is because desire, once gratified,
only repeats itself. I eat the pie, and an hour later I am hungry again.
The result of giving in to desire is just the reappearance of the desire.
But even more importantly, the lord can hardly derive much satisfaction from the recognition that comes from a debased human being, a
being who lacks independence. The mastery of other selves is necessarily self-defeating.
The initial war of the selves cannot help but remind us of Hobbes's
state of nature. Hegel appropriates Hobbes's view that man is by
nature competitive or warlike and gives it a logical grounding, that is,
a grounding in the logic of selfhood. What for Hobbes was a fact-the
first fact-of human nature, is for Hegel the logically necessary
outcome of the selfs dialectical identity, its dissonance of"same" and
"other." The individual is by nature at war with other individuals
because, as a self-consciousness, he is at war with himself. Earlier
we saw how selfhood for Hegel was the unity of the self-same and the
self-other. The clearest indication that I am a divided being is the fact
that I am alive; I am a self-consciousness sustained by and rooted in
an organic body. My body is an "other" that is at the same time also
myself. It is also that aspect of my existence that does not have to do
with dignity and worth. At its most immediate and therefore most
violent level, self-consciousness, since it is obsessed with self-sameness as the sole basis for its absolute worth. is at war with its own
body and life. It feels its manhood undercut or rendered questionable
by its animality. That is why the waning individual risks his own life
in seeking to destroy the life of the other, why the fight to the death is
combat rather than murder.
The dual or self-divided nature of the self has profound consequences for the desire for recognition. For many authors, pagan and
Christian alike, this desire, so closely connected with amour-propre,
is held in low esteem. Perhaps the author who puts the desire tor
recognition in its worst light is Rousseau. For Rousseau this desire is
not natural to man but artificial: It is aquired as a result of man's
membership in civil socierty. Towards the end of the Second Discourse
we are told that whereas natural or savage man lives "in himself,"
societal man "is always outside himself and knows how to live only in
�KALKAVAGE
II
the opinion of others." Against Rousseau, Hegel upholds the inherent
goodness of the desire for recognition. He does so by making it literally
and necessarily the case that man lives "outside himself." In the fight
for recognition, this other who stands before me, strange to say, is
myself. As Hegel tells us early in the chapter, self-consciousness "has
come outside itself' as an opposition between two tndividuals (111).
Self-consciousness is one universal self actually divided into two
individual selves. This numerical duplication is the selfs inner dissonance made actual in the external world. If indeed the other
individual is my own selfbood thrown out in front of me, then my fate
as an individual is utterly bound up with the fate of this other. I no
longer have the option of saying: "It doesn't matter what other people
think of me; I know my own worth." Such "self-esteem" that seeks to
do without the esteem of others is meaningless: it is a falsification of
one's own individuality. Hegel gives cognitive value to recognition:
The violent desire for recognition is in fact the first or most immediate
manifestation of my desire to complete my vision of myself in this other
individual, to reconcile the two warrtng aspects of my own se!fbood
through a reconciliation with this externally existing, actual other.
The desire to be known by another is in fact my desire to /mow myself
in the context of a human community. What the combatants do not
yet know-because they have not yet experienced it-is that genuine
recognition comes about only if it is reciprocal or shared, only if the
one who recognizes me is not a slave but my equal. Nevertheless, fuis
later, mature stage cannot be attained without the oliginal violence:
Progress for Hegel is made not through smooth degrees, nor through
the tempering of extremes, but through the pushing of extremes to
their logical and self-defeating conclusions. The Hobbesian state of
war, the violence of desire, is the very principle of man's education
and refinement.
The negative spirit of desire continues into the second section of
Hegel's chapter, the section entitled "Freedom of Self-Consciousness."
The Stoic, Sceptic and unhappy consciousness are all instances of the
will to negate the world in order to affirm the self. On the surface, the
Stoic seems to be motivated by will rather than by desire. The Stoic
affirms himself. He does so not in the external world-for that is the
place of suffering-but in the unperturbed realm of thought. The
stubborn inwardness of the Stoic, his will to be himself regardless of
what happens to his life in the external world, is what makes the Stoic
violent or, in Hegel's technical meaning of the term, desirous. Scepticism is the truth of Stoicism because it unleashes this violence. The
Sceptic actually carries out the destruction of the world that the Stoic
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
implies and presupposes but is too noble to carry out himself. In the
move from Stoic to Sceptic, arguments replace platitudes. Through
his endless paradoxes, the Sceptic shows that the external world is
riddled with contradiction, that it is altogether tnsubstantial.
Hegel's account of the Stoic is two-fold: lt consists of both praise
and blame. The Stoic's freedom is abstract, just as his talk about virtue
is empty. But the Stoic seeks to express himself and his freedom in
the realm of pure thtnktng, thinking that is no slave to pictures or
images. This bond with pure, pictureless thinking does more than
ennoble the Stoic; it also makes him the precursor of philosophy in the
form of system, tn particular the precursor of the science of logic.
Unfortunately, the Stoic resolves to "think positive"; he disdains the
negative activity that alone could give his thinking and freedom some
filling or substance. The account of the Sceptic is similarly two-fold.
The Sceptic frolics tn negation and so holds in his hands the key to the
divine logos. He, too, is a precursor of sorts. The problem is that the
Sceptic, who is a child at heart, frolics rather than thinks; he does not
see the determinate or positive character of his randomly produced
negations but delights in negation for its own sake.
We TIO'?f come to the crowning moment of the chapter, to the
character Hegel dubs "the unhappy consciousness." It is extremely
important here to remember where we are in the dialectic of
self-consciousness. As I mentioned earlier. self-consciousness, like
every other shape in the Phenomenology, starts out in certainty and
ends up in truth. The truth always contradicts the original certainty.
The unhappy consciousness, in other words, is not merely the last
character in the chapter but the negative truth of self-consciousness
as a whole, the truth that undermines the original effort at self-affirmation. The individual started out as a proud warrior. He wanted
to prove that he was simply for himself, that he was "the genuine
article." In the course of Hegel's drama, the warrior falls; he is reduced
to the status of the humble Christian, who lives only for Another. The
wnour-propre or egotism that fueled the whole project of self-affirmation
at this point is transformed into the obsession with annihilating
amour-propre, into the hatred of self-interest. the desire of desire. The
violence of desire, formerly directed towards the extemal world, is
now tumed back on the self; negativity is now self-sacrifice, and
self-certainty self-condemnation.
The unhappy consciousness emerges from the dialectic of Scepticism. The Sceptic is self-contradictory. On the one hand, he says,
"All things are relative"; on the other, he puts forth this teaching as
absolute truth. This contradiction reveals that there are in fact two
�KALKAVAGE
13
modes of thinking, two selves, within the Sceptic. One self is defined
by its contact with unchanging truth; the other self is defmed by
thoughts that constantly fluctuate and contradict one another. Now
the Sceptic, in his childish way, keeps going back and forth between
these two selves. He is a unity of opposites, but he does not know
that he is a unity of opposites. The unhappy consciousness is the
explicit awareness of this unity within opposition. It is, to quote Hegel,
"the consciousness of Ot;leself as a doubled, merely contradictory
being"(l26). Ever since sense-certainty, the force of contradiction has
been at work in every shape of consciousness. But only now does a
shape actually experience contradiction as such. That is why the
unhappy consciousness is unhappy. not because there is something
outside it that it wants and cannot get, but because its "inside," its
very se!fhood, has been divided and set at variance with itself. To be
unhappy, for Hegel, is to be "not oneself."
Hegel's account of unhappiness is logically complex. It is also
steeped in Christian imagery. I will here confine myself to showing how
Hegel's sentence, "Self-consciousness is desire," continues to be operative. Desire comes up in the unhappy consciousness in three guises.
The first I've already mentioned. Since it is painfully aware of its own
egotism or "sinfulness," the self is continually "down on itself"; it
desires to be rid of its self-love, which it identifies with the unessential
or fickle aspect of its being. Secondly, there are, of course, all those
desires it is seeking to negate, desires that it considers "dirty." But
the third guise of desire is the most interesting and important. This
is the longing for union with the one true Self, the "infinite yeaming,"
as Hegel calls it, for God. This is the first time that God comes up in
the Phenomenology, although, to emphasize God's function in the
argument, Hegel prefers to call Him "the unchangeable."
Man started out in the self-consciousness chapter wanting to affirm
himself as an individual. He tried to validate his self-certainty by
negating the world. In the unhappy consciousness this negativity, the
violence of desire, circles back on the self. But in this reflexive and
self-defeating moment, desire has accomplished something: It has
generated the new experience of infinite yearning. To the unhappy
consciousness, this yearning is directed towards God as the sacred
Other. The unhappy consciousness is the lover, and God the beloved
object. What the self longs for is to be with God in some hoped for
beyond. In other words, the unhappy individual labors under the
illusion of natural consciousness; he is enchanted with some immediate given, in this case, a timeless and infinitely remote God. What
the unhappy consciousness regards as an infmitely remote object is
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
really the divine or unchangeable aspect of itself. This follows from
the defmition of the unhappy consciousness. The unhappy consciousness is a mortal self and a divine self in one and the same
consciousness; or, as Hegel puts it, it is "the unity of pure thinking
and individuality"(l30), where thinking is my self-sameness or divinity, and individuality is my otherness and mortality. If rightly understood, the divine is not a beloved object but man's own selfhood in its
purely divine aspect,, the moment of man's selfhood that is purely
self-same. What the self-consciousness chapter dramatizes, then, is
the logical generation of the divine nature out of the human, the
generation of the universal self out of the particular. It shows us how
man, for Hegel, is the father of God.
What, then, is the true nature of the infinite longing for God? It is
what we have seen all along as the abiding goal of human striving:
Man's inner compulsion to be himself, to be fully htmself. What the
unhappy consciousness interprets as man's erotic longing to be with
God is in reality man's will to be God, the individual's \vill to be
universal. Self-affirmation, having fallen to the ground, rises up
again, this time at a new and higher level, a level that is not characterized by desire. Hegel's name for this higher level of self-affirmation
is-reason.
In spite of its many subdivisions, the Phenomenology as a whole is
composed of only three main parts: Consciousness, Self-Consciousness,
and a third part, which Hegel leaves untitled. Consciousness, we
recall, was the self's fascination with objects. The apple was an object
of intellectual reverence rather than something to eat. At the level of
self-consciousness, the individual regarded the apple only as food,
regarded the whole external world with all the other sgJves in it only as
fuel for the engine of self-love. At Hegel's third level. the individual stops
trying to destroy the world in order to afiirm himself. Here the
individual allows the world to be substantial. He sets out not to destroy
the world but to find himself in it. to give worldly substance and solidity
to his otherwise abstract and purely subjective selfhood.
In this third and untitled part of the Phenomeno1ogy, the longest
part by far, man's quest for selfhood is completed. Man becomes
complete when the logical implications of his self-identity rise to the
level of conscious experience, when man is explicitly or actually what
he is implicitly or in his concept. But what is man implicitly? What
is man's concept? This we have already seen in the earlier account of
self-identity. Man as self-consciousness is the unity of the self-same
and the self-other. Man is the being w~jo beholds himself. How, then,
is man to experience himself for what he is? What can it possibly
�KALKAVAGE
15
mean to experience the determinate negation that is logically inscribed
in man's self-awareness, in man's concept?
With these questions, I reach the last leg of my journey through
Hegel's labyrinth. Consider the title of Hegel's book: The Phenomenal·
ogy of Spirit. Phenomena or appearances, whatever else they may be,
are outward or showy, while spirit is inward and deep. To give a
phenomenology of spirit, then, is to give a reasoned account, a logos,
of what it means for spitit to appear, what it means for the inner to
make itself outer, for the deep to be showy while still remaining deep.
For Hegel, the inner and the outer, self and world, are both necessary
to the full expression of selfhood. That is why desire failed. It failed
because the individual wanted to affirm himself at the expense of the
world. If there is no world, or if the world is just a vale oftears, then
there is nothing solid, nothing objective, in which I might contemplate
my worth, in which I might behold myself. Just as consciousness, in
its unreflective piety towards objects, lost sight ofthe true goal, so too
does self-consciousness in its effort to destroy objects. Complete
selfhood demands that the purity of thinking and the showiness of the
world somehow come together, come together in a way that is not a
mere contradiction or dissonance, as it was for the unhappy consciousness. In the account of natural consciousness I gave at the
beginning of this essay, I laid particular stress on the tyranny of the
external world. But that is not the only tyranny that besets man in
his quest for selfhood. There is a worse monster than the extemal
world. This monster is man's fascination with his own spirituality or
inwardness, man's tendency to become~a beautiful soul.
The beautiful soul is a more deeply tragic version of the unhappy
consciousness. It is also more perverse. The unhappy consciousness
was a lover; it longed for union with an infinitely remote God. The
beautiful soul, too, is a lover, but not of an object. It is in love with
its own inner purity, in love with itself as the Holy of Holies. Whereas
the unhappy consciousness distanced itself, infinitely, from the one
true Self, the beautiful soul identifies with this Self, with God in all
His purity. The unhappy consciousness found itselfhopelesslyworldly
and carnal; the beautiful soul, on the contrary, foreswears the world
and the flesh. Regarding itself as "too rich for use, for earth too dear,"
it treats itself as though it didn't even have a body. In Hegel's
characterization, "It lives in dread of besmirching the splendor of its
inner being through action and existence"(400). Having turned its
back on the world, the beautiful soul simply dies for want of a life. It
vanishes, Hegel says, "like a shapeless vapor into thin air"(400).
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The beautiful soul dies because it throws away the self-otherness
that is necessary to man's self-identity. Man cannot be fully himself,
cannot behold himself, unless he somehow preserves the world that
stands before him as his "other," comes to regard that world as his
"significant other." To fulfill the destiny of his self-otherness, man
must become reconciled to the world's externality. Man's inwardness,
his spirituality, must somehow come to terms with the outward and
showy realm of action p.nd existence.
The phenomenon of reconciliation is the climax of Hegel's story of
consciousness. At this point God comes on the scene, not as an
infinitely remote beyond, but as a living presence within a community
of selves, as the spirit of that community. The last two chapters on
religion and absolute knowing are Olympian reflections on the relation
between God and time; they stand above the "way of despair," the
Golgotha, which the Phenomeno1ogy attempts to give rational or
scientific form. In this last moment of the phenomenological journey,
two individuals confront one another, as they did in the earlier fight
to the death. One judges; the other is judged. The judging individual
has become enchanted with his own moral austerity, his moral purity.
He has looked upon the Gorgon's head of pure spirituality and has
been tumed to stone. His stoniness takes the form of condemning
others who are not pure like him, the Napoleons of the world, who
have "sold out" and traded in their purity of soul for outward show
and worldly preoccupation. The self-righteous individual judges the
other to be immoral, not because that other has done something
wrong, but simply because he has done something, because he has
allowed himself to have an outward existence and a concern for action,
because he is worldly or secular. To the judgmental individual, this
worldliness is the greatest betrayal of which a human being is capable,
the betrayal of the sacred inwardness that alone makes us worthy of
respect. The judge judges the other to be a hypocrite, someone who
claims to be spiritual or inward but in fact prostitutes this inwardness
by worldly action and concern. The judge is the Napoleon of pure
morality, the emperor of inwardness. He is also a hypocrite, an even
bigger Tartuffe than the individual he judges. The reason is that
judgement, which for Hegel must take the form of outward speech, is
itself an act, a moment of entrance into the external and secular world.
The judge cannot pass judgement on the other individual without
becoming like him. He cannot denounce hypocrisy and also remain pure.
Reconciliation occurs when both individuals admit to being worldly
and in that sense the betrayers of spirit. Each must confess his
worldliness. This is clearly a much more dramatic and difficult
�KALKAVAGE
17
moment for the judge, since he has to sacrifice his purism, abdicate
as the emperor of inwardness. As the judge confesses his own
hypocrisy and forgives the hypocrisy of the other, he gives his blessing
to the secular world he once had cursed. In this moment of reconciliation, each self sees itself in the other and admits to this seeing. Now
hypocrisy is self-otherness: it is the knowing concealment of one's true
selfhood, in particular, the concealment of one's worldly self-interest
and amour-propre beneatl;:t a pious "front." When each self admits to
seeing itself in the other, self-otherness, the moment of self-identity
that had been denied for the whole course of the book up to this point,
at last receives its due. The long-suppressed self-otherness rises to
the surface of human experience. The most important feature of
reconciliation is the change that takes place in the relation between
self and world. With the confession of self-otherness, the external
world ceases to be the inimical "other" over and against the self; it is
now the horne of spiritual manifestation, the place of God.
Reconciliation, for Hegel, is a human experience with a conceptual
or philosophical meaning. Much more is going on in this phenomenon
than the individuals involved realize. In the act of forgiveness, the
hard heart melts. This softening of the hard heart is, in truth, a
dialectical or intellectual accomplishment. The softening of the heart,
the loosening of hard being-for-self, is the feeling of dialectical fluidity,
the feeling of thinking. Now it is the peculiar power and sublimity of
reconciliation to retain past enmity as something that has been
overcome. In other words, reconciliation is the experience of determinate negation, negation that preserves what it destroys. In this feeling
of determinate negation, man can experience, at last, the complete
unity of his self-identity, the being-together of the self-same and the
self-other. In the section on revealed religion, Hegel gives us his
definition of spirit. He says: "Sptrit is the knowledge of orteself in the
externalization of oneself; the being that is the movement of retaining
its self-identity in its othemess"(459). This is precisely the condition
that has been dialectically generated in the phenomenon of reconciliation. In the confession ofhypocrisy, the two selves "come out" of their
private selves, become external to themselves while remaining inward
or spiritual beings. There is now mutual recognition of selfhood,
unlike the one-sided kind we had earlier. The individuals here have
experienced the divine in time: They have become reconciled, not only
to one another but also to the universal self that the individual self
had unhappily fathered.
All this, we must note, takes place in and through language. For
Hegel, the inner must become outer. The inner is by definition the
�18
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
drive or compulsion to be an extemalized inner, an inner that has
some substance to it. The self-righteous judge must not simply think
his condemnation of the other; he must utter it, indeed, throw it in
the face of the other individual. So too, in the moment of reconciliation, the two hypocrites must confess their hypocrisy openly to one
another.
Now language plays a central role throughout the Phenomenology.
Even sense-certainty, 1J.P to a point, speaks. But language acquires a
special importance in the context of reconciliation. For Hegel, language is not 1nere communication but spiritual or intellectual presence. In Hegel's words, it is "the being-there or existence of
spirit"(395). Simply put, language is the outward expression of inward
thought. When I speak, I translate my inwardness into something
outer and real. I make my thought present for my listener and also
for myself. Language is thought standing in its own presence, thought
that beholds itself as thought. But this outward expression is not a
direct and smooth translation of the inner into the outer; it is not
without its moment of conflict. To speak is to betray a thought. In
uttering a thought, I betray it in the negative sense that I tum against
my own dear inwardness and hand it over to its enemy-the extemal
world. To speak is to act. Now comes the magic oflanguage, the magic
that distinguishes language from every other human action. Even as
I betray my inward thought by making it outer, I turn against this very
betrayal and defeat the "bad effects" of externality: I betray my
thought in the positive sense that I express or reveal it as thought. In
other words, language, the quintessential act of man. is the most
immediate, most obvious instance of spirit as Hegel defines it-the
retaining of inwardness in the very act of externalization. Like forgiveness, language is the overcoming of betrayal in its negative sense.
Reconciliation is for this reason not just an instance of Speech but the
logic of the very act of speaking brought to the level of experience.
In the phenomenon of reconciliation man experiences his true
identity, experiences himself as the dialectical unity of same and other.
But man is not fully himself for Hegel until he gets beyond this
experience and thinks his identity, until he thinks the reconciliation
of opposites at the level of pure conceptuality-thought without
pictures. This is the level we reach in the final chapter on absolute
knowing, the level Hegel calls science. At this level, mind, having been
purged of all naturalness or anti-mind, wins the condition of complete
self-identity and freedom. Mind is free to be itself, to lead the life that
is completely its own. In the Phenomenology, man does not simply
come to know the truth; he comes to know that he is the truth. He
�KALKAVAGE
19
comes to know that his concept as a self-conscious individual is
identical with the Concept, with the divine intelligibility, the divine
1ogos, that steers its way through all things. This divine 1ogos, the life
of pure intelligibility, is embodied in the magnificent Science of Logic.
By entering into this life of the mind, man enjoys the divinity that is
inscribed in his self-consciousness. In the spontaneous unfolding of
what Hegel calls the Concept or Notion-Hegel's analogue to the Platonic
Good-man enjoys the very principle of his cherished freedom and the
pure play of his self-identitY. He is transported to the true heaven.
But the divine life of thinking does not spring full-blown from the
head of the philosopher. For Hegel, philosophy in the form of science
is the product of history, the product of human self-identity working
out its many contradictions in time. The Phenomeno1ogy is the history
of consciousness, the history of man as a thinking being, put into
rational form; it is time looked at from the standpoint of mind. The
world for Hegel is not a cave from which the philosopher tries to escape.
For one thing, he cannot escape. As we hear in another work, The
Phitosophy ofRight: "Each individual is in any case a chitd of his time;
thus philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts"
(Preface). But more importantly, the true philosopher will not want to
escape. AE the friend of reason, he will acknowledge that the world in
its historical unfolding, the outer world of action and struggle, is
precisely the path along which wisdom is attalned, or rather, generated out of man's self-conciousness. To be rational, for Hegel, is to give
the external world its due, while still revering the inward purity of
thought. It is to acknowledge the world as the home of thinking. This
acknowledgement is the wisdom at which Hegel's book aims. In the
Phenomeno1ogy the philosopher "recollects"-to use Hegel's word-the
laborious process that gave rise to the philosopher's own act of
thinking. As phenomenologist, the philosopher returns, knowingly, to
his prephilosophical origins. He enacts what might be called intellectual gratitude, gratitude towards Time as the mother of Wisdom.
I now take my leave of Hegel's labyrinth; I bid farewell to all its
monsters and heroes. Hegel ends on a grand theological note. He speaks
of time as the Place of Skulls, where spirit suffers and reveals its glory.
My clostog note will be far simpler. Hegel cautions us in the Preface about
our enchantment with things uplifted and remote; he warns philosophy
agalnst ingratitude toward its worldly orgins. This warning is echoed by
Zarathustra, whose plea captures the spirit of Hegel's Phenomenology:
"I beseech you, my brothers, remainfaithjUL to the earth"
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�An Ennobling Innocence
The Founding of Socrates' Republic
David Lawrence Levine
Even the wolf... Phaedrus, has a
tight to an advocate, as they say.
Plato, Phaedrus
Practical wisdom makes provisions
to secure theoretical wisdom.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
The Greeks were superficial ... out
of profundity.
Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom
I
l. The Deed of Book I
The Republic opens with an act of force.' Socrates is prevel)ted from
returning to Athens, restrained by the others to remain below and join
them in viewing a novel religious procession after dinner (I 327a-8b,
V 450a, VII 514a-515c; cf. X 614e). He cannot prudently protest. He
is outnumbered. But nor, they say, will they listen to him. Polemarchus challenges Socrates to prove stronger than they are (I 327c; cf.
34lb, V 449b, 450a, 45lb, 474a, VI 500d, 509c). The community of
interlocutors here constituted is initially founded on force, the fundamental fact of politics.
Nevertheless Socrates will try to persuade them of an alternative
course of action (I 327c, II 357af.). Otherwise he will have to pay the
penalty of being ruled by lesser men than himself (I 347c). It is the
task of the wise ruler to seek to transform the city based on force into
one based on speech (if only on myths and noble lies). This is no
different for a founder of a community of discourse than for a founder
of cities. The primary task of Book I of The Republic, then, is the
foundation of a human mutuality based on an openness to speeches
David Levine is a tutor at the Santa Fe campus of St. John's College. This essay
was originally presented as part of a series of faculty colloquia at Oklahoma State
University (1984). A revised form was delivered at St. John's College, Santa Fe, in
the summer of 1995.
�22
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
(logical moderation).' Socrates' efforts toward this end, however. are
complex and, on the surface, quite puzzling.
2. Thrasymachean Justice
Following the discussion of Polemarchus's common, partisan
understanding of justice as "helping one's friends and harming one's
enemies" (I 33ld-336a, N 442e). Thrasymachus, no longer able to
restrain himself (cf. I 352c). protests that Socrates' view renders one
defenseless and vulnerable. Harming one's enemies, according to
Socrates, was said to be incompatible with justice. Far from sometimes
having to inflict harm, as Polemarchus thought, justice should seek
to make us all better.
"Hunched up like a wild beast," Thrasymachus flings himself into
the discussion ready "to tear [the interlocutors] to pieces" (I 336b). It
would appear that Thrasymachus is himself an enemy of logos and
that Socrates is up against a "wild beast" (cf. III 4lld-e, VI 493b-c,
496d). But are Socrates and his city in fact as defenseless as Thrasymachus presumes? Socrates made it plain in the foregoing that one
sometimes misidentifies one's enemies (I 334cf.; cf. VI 498c-d). The
question arises what fitting response there is to a Thrasymachus.
As the Greek proverb has it, Socrates has had his eye on the wolf
all along (I 336d; cf. III 416a, VIII 565d-566a, IX 576d). One could even
say that his "nonsensical" and "foolish" argument with Polemarchus
was designed in part to incite this wolf. Socrates knows Thrasymachus. 3 He now appeals to him on the (false) grounds that they,
Socrates and Polemarchus, must have been incompetent." They need
rather to learn from someone who "knows," correction and betterment
being the fitting punishment for mistreatment of arguments. Thrasymachus at first understands this to be yet another case of injustice
on Socrates' part. Socrates, he thinks, is being his usual self, deliberately evasive and disingenuous; he misleads the argument at will. 4
That's "the habitual irony of Socrates" (I 337a)! Thrasymachus thinks
he knows with whom he speaks.
Surprisingly, Socrates' insistence that the just punishment for
ignorance is correction through learning is accepted byThrasymachus
(along with some added compensation), For all his supposed wildness,
is Thrasymachus more moderate and tractable than the city of Athens,
the city that not only accused but convicted and sentenced to death
this man who appears to shrink in the face of hurting anyone, even,
it would seem, his real enemies?5
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Thrasymachus is willing at least to teach the transgressor a lesson,
if not of the sort that would make the deficient Socrates better. He
says: "Now listen ... the just is nothing other than the advantage of the
stronger" (I 338c; cf. III 412d, IV 442c). This rightly famous statement
is definitive. But Socrates knows that it needs a closer look.
3. The Elicitation
The manner of eliciting Thrasymachus's fuller understanding is
surprising. Socrates' method involves us in an unusual course of
reasoning. To begin with, he seems to insult Thrasymachus's and our
intelligence by introducing an apparently inappropriate counter-example: Poulydamas the pancratist. Because the latter is strong and
eats great quantities of meat, does this mean that we too, the weaklings, must eat large amounts of meat? An oblique example to be sure,
but one that makes plain the distinction between equalitarian and
distributive justice. Thrasymachus seeks unequal treatment.
In his defense Thrasymachus makes it first appear that he holds a
common view. one shared by many: govemments are the expressions
of the strongest group (a theory of comparative legitimacy). However,
in such a view, all govemments are equally legitimate. Were this his
real opinion, Thrasymachus would be a defender of the legal and the
status quo.
To make it clear that this is not so, Socrates reverts to the problem
of mistakes earlier raised in connection with Polemarchus's·understanding of justice. Thrasymachus is no less prone to trip over this
than Polemarchus, for neither considers adequately the role that
knowledge must play. Thrasymachus is led to make the extraordinary
claim that he intends "the ruler in the precise sense" only, that is, one
who not only intends but achieves his own benefit. Socrates cannot
but wonder what is at the heart of this understanding of human
excellence.
Indeed Thrasymachus now insists on this "precise" ruler. The
presumption implicit in the notion of the precise sense is that oftotal
mastery: the perfect ruler, infallible, simply does whatever he or she
thinks. But taken in this way, the ideal of pure action, of acting out
one's intentions faultlessly, is dangerously ambiguous. 6 Present in
Thrasymachus's formulation are the ideals both of the philosopher-,
king (the knowledgeable ruler) and the tyrant (the knowledgeable
exploiter) (1336a, II 36lb, III 409c-d, V 477e, VII 517c, 518d-e, 519a).
Though abstracting from the problem of the imprecision of the
world-one of the fundamental political problems is precisely that
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
people do not know their own good, their own advantage, with
precision-this formulation will require that we rethink our ambiguous thoughtfulness.
To b1ing the problem ofThrasymacheanjustice to a head, Socrates
introduces the analogy of the arts. Now art might be seen as concerned
with its object exclusively, other interests being inessential and ancillary. As such, an art can be understood (ambiguously) to "rule over"
its subject matter. Tflis Thrasymachus readily concedes, but in so
doing he does not realize that the notion of selfless dedication entailed
in such a view leads to the opposite of his real intention. Add to this
Socrates' hasty generalization-"there is no kind of knowledge that
considers or con1mands the advantage of the stronger, but rather of
what is weaker and ruled by it" (I 342c)- which in tum is hastily
generalized still again as "therefore ... there isn't ever anyone who holds
any position of rule, insofar as he is ruler, who considers or commands
his own advantage" (I 342e), and we have a conclusion that confounds
not only Thrasymachus, but us as well.
Unable to see his way clear of this thicket of tacit presuppositions
and hasty generalizations, Thrasyrnachus resorts to defamation of
_character: the sniveling Socrates must have been overprotected by his
wet-nurse (I 343a). Of all men, he would appear to be ignorant of what
in Thrasymachus's view-and not only his-is the most significant
fact of life: the fundamental difference between the shepherd and the
sheep. It is clear to everyone who has not lost his good sense (I 348d)
and his way amidst the tangle of abstract arguments that the shepherd
fatten3 his sheep for slaughter, for dinner and for his and his master's
bank account, in short "for his own advantage."
While appearing blind, Socrates' obtuseness yet forces Thrasymachus to be more explicit. Indeed, only now is the latter candi(l. As
Socrates suspected all along, Thrasymachus here admits that it is
rather injustice that leads to happiness: justice only leads to "getting
less" (I 343d). Not the higher ground of comparative governments,
then, but the lower ground of acquisitiveness and "getting more"
(pleonexia) recommends his view.
By leading Thrasymachus to think that justice understood as an
art can only serve the good of that over which it is an art "in the precise
sense," Socrates has forced him to say what he really thinks but had
been reluctant to put into words (cf. I 336c and 338b). Thrasymachus
now declares: "as I have said from the beginning"-that is, as he has
secretly thought and intended from the beginning-injustice is "freer,
mightier, and more masterful than justice" (I 344c). This is his final
word. So, having made known his "better opinion" (I 337d), and with
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no further sense of obligation to the others (I 344e), he prepares to
leave this community of discourse.
4. A Questionable Analysis
The justice of Socrates and the others, however, prevents Thrasymachus from leaving (cf. I 327a-c). The question of injustice after all
is not an indifferent one (cf. IX. 545f.). Tyranny is a deep human
temptation (the dialogue proper is framed by the question of tyranny,
cf. II 358-367, IX 57lb-d, 592b, X 615a-6b, 618a, 619a, b-d). Behind
our uncertain conviction that justice is a good lies our experience and
doubts to the contrary-, as well as the indiscriminateness of our desires
(cf. I 347e, II 359bf., IX 572b, 588c-9a). 7 Socrates is especia.lly
concemed with the effect that such praise would have on Glaucon and
the others (I 34 7 e). He must do what he can.
Socrates begins his exposition by pointing up a contradiction that
follows from Thrasymachus's newly revised view. The secret admiration of the unjust man clearly violates their earlier agreement to think
of the artisan in Socrates' precise sense. Precise speech divorces the
other-concern of the arts from the accompanying self-concern of the
artisan. Moreover, it makes it appear that the former cannot be a
means to the latter but is exclusively an end in itself. By appearing
blind to what in Thrasymachus's view is man's underlying essence-his acquisitiveness and desire for more-Socrates again flabbergasts his interlocutor.' He perplexes him still further when he
makes it appear that the sought after offices of the rulers are not only
not choiceworthy in themselves but actually onerous burdens, the
precise opposite of what Thrasymachus holds. Socrates' arguments
are stunning; the wolf ceases to howl.
Yet the claims for injustice, though silenced for the moment, have
not in fact been refuted (II 358-367). The question remains whether
" ... the life of the unjust man is [indeed] stronger than that of the just
man" (I 347e). Socrates therefore undertakes to counter this.
In Thrasymachus's view what we call justice is, quite frankly, a kind
of "noble innocence." By contrast, injustice is "prudent counsel" (I
348c; cf. X 598d). The implicit equation here of the unjust with the
good and the wise needs to be put into question. Socrates does this
by interpreting him to mean that "the unjust tries to get the better of
the like and the unlike" (I 350b), therewith highlighting its implicit
claims to domination. With the very questionable, indeed false, premise that "each is such as those of whom it is like" (I 349d)-because
this looks like a good argument surely does not mean that it is a good
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
argument (cf. V 476c)-along with the ambiguous use of the expression "to get the better of," Socrates manages to invert the matter and
conclude that "the just man is like the wise and the good and the
unjust man like the bad and the unlearned" (I 350c). Again the very
opposite of what Thrasymachus holds is made to appear to be so.
Thrasymachus, silenced again, now sweats, indeed even blushes. 9
He feels what he cannot see for himself, the lack of sufficiency of his
views. But the cause pf the reddening is not logic, the victory not one
of reason. He blushes because he has been defeated by rhetoric, by
his own craft. Thrasymachus has been given a taste of his own justice
and he doesn't like it. The "advantage of the stronger" all of a sudden
doesn't feel like justice to him (cf. IX 582a). Nevertheless we witness
a surprtsing reversal of aggression. Thrasymachus surrenders. From
now on, he says, he'll just "nod" like an old woman listening to tales
(I 350e).
This is not the end of Socrates' logical rapaciousness, however. Next
he considers whethe_r injustice is "more powerful and mightier" than
justice (I 35la). Shunting the question of the injustice of others from
view, Socrates points out that injustice seems to lead to "factions,
hatreds and quarrels." In light of this it would appear that an unjust
society is inherently unstable, indeed bent on self-destruction. Applying this to an individual, it would seem to follow that injustice renders
one "not of one mind with himself" and "unable to accomplish
anything" (I 35le-352a). History notwithstanding, the unjust would
seem to be intrinsically ineffective. Tyrants are not capable of the
enslavement of whole peoples. Indeed it appears to be a logical
impossibility.
Socrates' amazing resourcefulness-his word wizardry-proves too
much for Thrasymachus (and us?). If Thrasymachus was compliant
before, he is totally acquiescent now. The wolf bares his belly. Recognizing Socrates' logical ravenousness, Thrasymachus concedes yet
again: "Feast yourself on the argument, for I won't oppose you ... " (I
352b). He is defenseless (an oblique proof that tyrants are inefficacious?). Yet he should oppose Socrates. That there is some measure
of disorder among thieves surely does not mean that thieves are totally
ineffective. Socrates has only shown that it is not the injustice in the
"precise sense" that Thrasymachus imagines. This is hardly decisive
(as Socrates admits at I 352b-c, 11 361 a).
The banquet and the feasting are not quite over, though. "Come ...
fill out the rest of the banquet for me," is all the word-weary Thrasymachus can now muster. His innermost thoughts have been made a
meal of. The last argument in this three-course dinner concerns the
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question whether the unjust "live better." "They look as though they
[do] ... ," Socrates grants (I 352d; cf. II 358-367, III 379c, X 613a). His
reply tums on the meaning of the middle term arete, or excellence.
Socrates would have it that each species, indeed each functioning
being, has a special "work" (ergon) that "one can only do with it or best
with it." Indeed the soul has its excellence as well. The good life, then,
is not possible without it. Therefore the life of injustice cannot be better
than that of justice. ClearlY the argument rests on ambiguity: the
ambiguity of "the good life" and of excellence itself. w
After such a dizzying argument, Thrasymachus can only hope that
Socrates' logical indulgence is at its end, that he has had , as he says,
" ... his fill at the festival of Ben dis" (I 354a). Socrates' eagemess has
led him to giuttony, however. Indeed he even regrets what he has done:
I am like the gluttons who grab at whatever is set
before them to get a taste of it, before they have in
proper measure enjoyed what went before ... I have not
had a fine banquet, ... it's my own fault ... " [I 354b; cf. I
337a, 340d, II 357a, 358b, Ill 413b).
Above all, the question of the supelimity of justice to injustice
remains. The claims for injustice are only further accented by Socrates' own actions. Hasn't Socrates unjustly treated the arguments,
unjustly treated Thrasymachus?
II
5. Socrates' Self-indictment
What is one to conclude from this strange business? Socrates was
indiscriminate, Thrasymachus undiscriminating. Socrates' own selfassessment is categorical: "as a result of the discussion, I know
nothing" (I 354c). This is neither modesty nor irony. Indeed the fearful
prospect presents itself that we are in an even worse position with
respect to the question of injustice than when we began (as Glaucon
and Adeimantus see well, II 357a).
Thrasymachus was light: Socrates feasted himself on the arguments. And although it was the case that he saw what Socrates had
done to the other interlocutors better than he was able to see what
Socrates did to him, still it was true, as Thrasymachus observed,
Socrates did not come out from behind his questions (cf. I 338b). And
if one can infer the intention from the result, one might suspect with
Thrasymachus that Socrates was bent on victory and advantage after
all. This supports the popular suspicion of Socrates' dialectic as
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
essentially dissembling and destructive. But do Thrasyrnachus and
the populace know Socrates?
This master of the logos and of question and answer astonished us
with his numerous fallacies and paralogisms, yet he was victorious.
(If we could offer a casual list, it would include: oblique examples,
deflecting abstractions, rampant ambiguity, obtuseness, evasion of
the issue, and, for want of a better phrase, preposterous counterfactualism.) Although e)ements of his arguments were defective, the
argument proved overwhelmtng as a whole (cf. VI 487b-c). We cannot
avoid the conclusion that Socrates not only knows rhetoric in the
abstract, but that he is a master of it in practice. 11 Horrible to think,
he knows how "to make the weaker argument the stronger." This
disappoints our modem expectations. We would rather have seen
Thrasyrnachus defenseless before the onslaught of a rapier-like and
trenchant logic. 12 This wasn't what happened. Thrasymachus "was
tom to pieces" (cf. I 336b) to be sure, but he is a victim of his own
sophisticated trade.
This is potentially disillusioning. We are made to wonder about this
figure before us. Was the respect we had for Socrates not based on
careful insight into who he is? He used word wizardry: he violated
logical rules. The question is what he does with this ambiguous
knowledge. Has he committed an act of injustice? If so, should we not
join with the people of Athens and indict Socrates for-sophistry? But
"like" is not the same as "is," no matter what Socrates may have said
earlier to the contrary (cf. V 476c, X 596e, 598a, 60lb, 607a).
6. Prelogical Prologue
Indeed before we condemn him, let us recall the cin:;umstances and
context of the discussion. At the very outset of the dialogue. we
encountered the basic fact of political life: force. There it was made
clear that unless people are willing to listen, force will rule unchallenged. In this way we were brought to realize too that a community
of discourse should never be taken as a preexistent given, for it is not
"by nature" but is a human accomplishment and as such is precartous. A community of speech is always vulnerable to deteriorating into
a community of force. Logos, then, is not the uncontested ruler of
human affairs. There are preconditions to its holding sway. Socrates,
then, has first to attempt to lay the foundations of an altemative, more
rational and juster community.
And it was the figure ofThrasyrnachus, more than any ofthe others,
that threatened the openness and mutuality necessary for discussion.
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·Thus, before Socrates could persuade Thrasymachus of any
truths-and before logic in its refined and schematic forms could have
any approprtateness and reasonable effectiveness-the "wild beast"
either had to be done away with (cf. the treatment of Cephalus) or
"tamed" (cf. I 354b, V 470e). Socrates chose the less violent, altemative
course. He knows Thrasymachus (cf. I 327c, VI 498c-d). But even so,
one does not, indeed cannot, tame with logic those who do not listen.
In this political sense, logic is not an independent science, nor is it
first in the order of human things. Even it presupposes the political
arts.
13
We need, then, to acknowledge the political function of speech, the
founding function of speech above all. Without it there exists no arena
for dialogue or for thought. A contextiess speech falls to communicate;
"mere words'' do not speak "to" anyone. It is thus a very great reduction
to think that logos can be properly translated by "reason" or "logic."
There is more to logos than in our overly abstract and reductively
narrowed sense of philosophy.
Otherwise, we will not be able to see that, despite the "blunders,"
what is enacted here is a just logos in deed. Book One ofThe Republic
is precisely what it is, the first and preparatory book to that which
follows. As such it is also an indispensable prtmer in political founding.
7. The Logos of Force
One may object that Socrates has gone too far in his forceful
"taming" ofthe "wild beast." Even accepting the necessity of moderating and taming that which, if given enough rein, would overthrow the
very basis of the life of dialogue, we might yet regret that the vital
Thrasymachus has not only been logically reproached but, further,
denatured and incapacitated (cf. VII 519e, IX 590c-d).
Such a view rests on an underestimate of opinion. Despite the fact
that Socrates everywhere insists on a distinction between opinion and
knowledge, it is yet a significant misunderstanding to think that for
him opinions are ever "mere opinions." Although knowledge has "a
greater reality" (V 477e-8a), opinions should not be discounted to the
point that we no longer see their consequential natures and human
or political significance. Above all, they are not a thing of the mind
alone, confined to some restrtcted sphere of self-relation called "subjectivity" and thus a matter of "personal perspective" with no beartng
on life and action. The medium of the polis and of human life is opinion.
We are doxic beings.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Opinions, then, are not disengaged abstractions but first of all
expressions of a particular opiner. Truly candid opinions {those not
interposed to camouflage our secret thoughts). once elicited, are
revelations of the being of the speaker, who he or she is. We choose
what we think; we act out what we think; we live what we think; we
are what we think (the multiple difficulties therewith notwithstand·
ing). Opinions define the person, then. They are formative-preform·
ing, informing, transforming, deforming-and thus they bespeak and
perform a life (IX 574d). Socratic discussions seek to go to the quick
and expose the deeper "logic" beneath: the defining logos of a soul,
and thus constitute a philosophical psychoanalysis ("the art of creep·
ing into souls": IX 576a·7b, 578d, 579e; cf. VI 500d).
Thus it is not a matter of abstracted definitions, but of the lives
they bespeak-here the secret admiration for the tyrant-that needs
to be our principal focus. And it is this "opinion," given its potential
for immoderation and anti-political "getting more" (a more serious
form of ravenousness) that has to be called up short, not for Socrates'
"advantage," but for the community of those around him, especially
the young Glaucon. Beneath the appearance of a defense of what is
properly "one's own," the city. is hidden Thrasymachus's profound
longing for that which would ravish the city. an offensive and glutton·
ous self-assertion (a more serious form of dissembling). It is thus just
punishment and necessary corrective therapy that such persons be
stunned, deflated, and dispirited, at best as a preliminary step toward
their improvement, but if not as a way of preventing harm to others.
And this is what Socrates seeks to do at every turn by demonstrating
that not only is Thrasymachus wrong but the very opposite of what
he says is true.
Despite the fallacies, can such a therapeutic and prudential1ogos 14
be considered unjust. indeed illicit? At the very least: it is dedicated
to the well·being of "that toward which the art is directed" and thus
epitomizes the true art of the guardian "in the precise sense. " 15 The
just guardian, we learn later, cares for the city as a whole (V11 519d·e,
IX 586d·e). Is this the "foolish shepherd's art" of which Thrasymachus
was so contemptuous?
8. Socrates' Contrariness
Socrates then is not simply being contrary. True, everytimeThrasy·
machus asserted something, Socrates sought to "prove" the very
opposite, 16 and this even if it meant proving the contrary of what
everyone knows to be true. The term "contentious" thus fails to
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describe his activity. Socrates appeared to deny the importance of
such central issues as self-defense, human error, and self-interest for
this discussion of justice (and by extension for political philosophy).
He began by appearing to deny the right of self-defense. He seemed
to deny the traditional conviction that the city must protect itself and
restrain, indeed punish, wrongdoers. The ever-present threat of external enemies did not ever seem to warrant doing them harm. From this
it appeared that there was, no such thing as a just restraint. This rightly
tnfuriated Thrasymachus's sense of order (if only that of the rule of the
stronger), for such a view undermines the security of any city.
Then Socrates proceeded to deny the political importance of human
error (despite 1334cfand 339bf, VI and VII). The discussion of the arts
"in the precise sense" eclipsed the matter of misjudgment and errancy.
Would that errors were not a serious problem and we did not have to
pay for the consequences of people's mistakes.
But above all, the discussion of the arts and their total dedication
to that toward which they are directed eclipsed the fundamental
question of self-interest. The result was that human acquisitiveness
and pleonexia were rendered secondary in this, a discussion of
political philosophy. The human being was equated with the artisan
and thus. confined to a single, selfless interes tin the good of his subject
matter alone. There are numerous consequences of such a simplification of human intentions (IX 57lb, 572b, 573a, 588b-589b), but by
far the most significant is the apparent denial of any human desire
for domination (cf. X 615bf. and 619bf). He denied, on the· one hand,
that rule could ever be to anyone's advantage and thus was not
choiceworthy, and on the other hand, that rule, if ever secured, could
ever be harmful. Sheep are not ever the victims, in short, of anyone's
self-interest. As such he totally obscures what in Thrasymachus's
view, and not only his, is the fundamental fact of politics. Such, then,
were Socrates' arguments.
Thus the question emerges, why would anyone interested in political philosophy ever want to consult The Republic? Why such political
innocence, if not blindness? 17 The answer is not simple. Formally this
is the price one has to pay for premises that demonstrate that injustice
is not simply to be equated with worldly wisdom or human excellence
of any sort, that human history and experience notwithstanding,
injustice is not mightier than justice but is the opposite, impotent and
incapable of wreaking havoc on us all (II 358b, 367d-e, III 392b, V
472e, VI 497c, X 612c). This is a comforting thought, worth hanging
one's hopes on (II 368b). The overall effect of this section, then, is to
quiet our concems about the injustice of the world and to temper our
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
political ambitions to get for ourselves what we would not, in our
unjust world, otherwise receive. Is this not an act of justice in its
noblest, if innocent, sense?
But our first response may not be adequate. If we look at the
dramatic argument as a whole, and not simply at some abstracted
segment. we see that Socrates, far from denying these things, has in
fact defended himself quite well (V 464e), that he has ensured that his
greater self-interest not be denied, all in his overall attempt to forestall
the destructiveness of human error. To illustrate how the deed may
well be different from the word, let us recall the logos that seemed to
argue against any restraint, even a just restraint. Was not its effect
an exemplification of the proper exercise of such restraint? Wasn't its
intent to restrain logically Thrasyrnachus's excessive readiness to
inflict harm on others and dominate the discussion? Indeed its
consequence was the total suppression of his dialogic ambition or
thumos. Thus only on the surface did the logos make it appear that
political life is to be disarmed and rendered vulnerable. The deed
makes manifest what the words shrink from overemphasizing for fear
of fanning the indiscriminate fires of righteous indignation. 18 The
argument at its core and taken as a whole is fully cognizant of the
need for a just restraint but aware also of the possible abuse to which
such a conviction could lead in the hands of some. Justice is more
than right arguments or over-generalized principles.
9. Frtendship and Community
Socrates knows Thrasymachus. Above all he knows that he is not
an irreconcilable opponent (V 470e, VI 498c-d). Thrasymachus, a
professional rhetorician, is open to, indeed vulnerable to logos. Socrates has thus sought to tame him with words. Once confuted, the
beast grew gentle. Thrasymachus is thus susceptible to a persuasion
of a higher sort than brute force, susceptible therefore to an act of
helping and moderating justice (V 47la, X 599c-600e, 604c-d).
Because of this, Socrates tn this case could defend himself without
hurting others (cf. VII 525b). Justice, then, is not a matter of the
extremes, "helping one's friends and harming one's enemies." Socrates
demonstrates a third possibility (1327c): he tums an apparent adversary into a potential, if precarious, compatriot (Vl 498c-d, 598d).
Sophists are not always the unalterable opponents of the city they are
sometimes made out to be (cf. VI 492a). In some cases there is an
alternative.
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The capacity of speech to influence others is thus broader and more
mantfold than we are accustomed to grant. As we saw, it is not the
trenchant cutting of an incisive logic but that of his own craft that
brings about the reversal. Though self-conscious, Thrasymachus is
not fully self-knowing. Despite his profession, he does not realize the
full potency of logos. Above all, he does not realize that questions can
be as devastating as any authoritative declaration: they may not have
the face of wolfish boldness. yet they can go for the jugular.
What is undeniable about Socrates' peculiar manner of speech and
argumentation is that it opens up opinions and reveals their innermost
intentions. He brings the interlocutors to say what they think but
would not otherwise say, and to say what they did not expressly think
but harbored deep within. He pries open what is sealed with embarrassment, lack of candor, self-ignorance, or by our numerous mechanisms for not facing ourselves or the truth. His irony, his feigned
obb.:;seness, his purported incompetence, his exaggerated self-depreciation, all serve as negative pressure, so to speak, to force into the
open those cherished and protected self-defining opinions that we
would prefer remain behind the scenes. Such a diagnostic logos is
worth our attention.
Such an exposition, then, is undertaken by Socrates, also in the
interests of friendship or justice (1 35ld, X 62lc). This is not sufficiently appreciated. The most unexpected and significant event of the
whole of The Republic is Thrasymachus's staying and growing involvement in the common task of disclosing this complex thing called
justice. Logos has had a moderating effect even on him and has thus
made it possible for him to become a participating member of the very
community that he earlier sought to abandon, if not also to dominate
(cf. I 336d, V 450h, VII 52la, X 600d). This is both good for him and
for those around him. For now, this city won't have this wolf threatening its fold (III 415e-6a, V 450c).
10. Socratic Justice
It is thus the case that throughout the discussion Socrates' phronesis and justice is more outstanding than his truthfulness. The reasons
begin to emerge.
Above all we recall the lesson of the discussion with Cephalus.
There it becomes plain that simple truthfulness fails to fulfill the
greater demands of human responsibility. Simple truthfulness can be
indiscriminate and lead to harm (V 459c-d). Opinions, too, can be
harmful, as we saw from the exposition of Thrasyrnachus's secret
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
intention. If arete follows logos, then discretion is the better part of
nurture and politike. Socrates' argument was thus at pains to conceal
wherein danger was to be found. The action of the conversation
exemplifies the broader notion of justice and responsibility implicit in
Socrates' criticism of Cephalus's traditional view. Justice is surely not
something that can be indifferent to human consequences.
So too, we see that the careful notion of justice implicit in Socrates'
actions is imbued witl;l the positive element of Polemarchus's definition of justice. Socrates seeks to help his frtends and not let them
harm themselves (nor does he precipitously and falsely judge as an
enemy one who isn't [Ill 414b, V 450 a·b, 45la, 470b·c, Vl 498d, IX
589e, X 62lc]). It was for their well-being that Socrates obscured the
problems of human nature and power {or in the modem sense, of
politics as such). He- has· sought to prevent the excesses of an
unreflective self-interest and partisanship, that is to make his friends
and us better, not worse.
And, lastly, in seeking the true advantage of those over whom he
rules in speech, and not his own advantage narrowly conceived, he is
the just ruler "in the precise sense" (cf. Vl 503b). Thus he even fulfills
the unintended truth ofThrasymachus's definition. In every way that
the discussion considered in short, Socrates' logos is a just speech.
The price of such justice, however, is not small; his cause for
dissatisfaction is genuine. The gain is not small either. His salutary
distortions allow those present to think of politics, not in its most
reduced form as a matter simply of self· preservation (cf. VIII 547e)-a
negative and defensive form of politics (realpolitilc)-but in a positive
and formative way, as the precondition of human excellence. By
obscuring the threat from without and from within, we can now look
undistracted to ourselves and consider what is necessary, not simply
for survival, butfor higher human accomplishments (a partial antidote
to cynicism. estrangement, and disaffection). Socrates' discussion
with Thrasymachus thus shows that. while he is not blind to the truth,
neither is he blind to the good.
Book One of The Republic is thus an act of political justice as well
as political founding. Socrates has laid the foundations for a commu·
nity of speech and human excellence (VI 540a·b, X 613d). As part of
its founding and refounding, a city requires the continual reintegration
of centrtfugal individuals. Polemarchus, in contrast to his father, has
stayed, and so has, to our great surprise, Thrasymachus. Though not
disposed to at first, people have been opened up and are listening.
They can now become participating citizens of their community (i.e.
�LEVJNE
35
are properly politicized). We are in the company, after all, of the sons
of the Best (VI 500d)."
But even more than that has been accomplished. By eclipsing
certain issues for now, Socrates has simplified and moderated the
participating reader's thumos; by pricking our logical interest, he has
at the same time engaged our thumos (IX 58la, 586d). Ever since we
too have been committed to the perpetuation of this community of
speech (cf. V 450a-b). The )1igh art of the founder, psychagogia or the
leading of souls, works its' powers on us as well (VI 500d, VJI 519c-d,
X 599c-600e, 604c-d). 20
Notes:
1. All quotations are from The Republic of Plato, translated by Allan
Bloom, (New York, 1968). On the title see; The Repubtic I 348c; also II
377d et passim, 378d; lit 409a and VII 539a. This interpretation has
sought to follow the commentators in the dialogue, Socrates, Glaucon,
Adeimantus, and even Thrasymachus, noting their dissatisfaction
with the course of the discussion in particular (I 337a, 340d, 341b,
354b, II 357a, 358b, III 413b). Our premise is Jacob Klein's insight
into the mimetic character of the dialogues: a dialogue about justice
has also to be an instance of justice. Cf. Aristotle, Poetics l447b9-l0;
Klein, A Commentary on Plato's Meno, (Chapel Hill, 1965), pp. 3-31;
Leville, "Plato's Arithmological Order of Being," The Southwestern
Joumat of Philosophy, XI (Summer 1980). pp. 109-128.
2. This community at the very least needs to be one that will free Socrates
from the restraints of others and at its best do justice to his and our
natures (VI 497).
3. By contrast, Channides and Critias, far less dedicated to speeches,
are not so resistible, and thus their dialogic future (the one to be
numbered among the Ten of the Piraeus, the other among the Thirty
Tyrants). Cf. Channides 157c, 176d; Levine, "Tyranny or Ignorance:
On the Enigma of Socrates," Essays inHonorojRobertBart, (Annapolis). 1993, pp. 143-154.
4. Cf. The Republic III 394d where Socrates says ambiguously that he is
following wherever the argument, compared to a wind, leads. But an
unpredictable wind can in no way serve as an image of logical
necessity or of prudential guidance. Openness to new implications is
not the same as insight therein.
5. Apotogy of Socrates 18a-19a.
�36
6.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
That this is an exaggerated response, Glaucon makes plain at II 36la.
7, Cf, TheRepublicX619b-d.
8. The distinction between a self-interested and a selfless or otherdirected art is odd (I 345d-7b). How can one serve one's own interest
without doing something in particular? Thus, although they are
distinguishable in speech, are they separate in being?
By distinguishing the art of moneymaking or the wage-eaTiler's art,
Socrates does acknbwledge that there is at least one self-interested
art. Moreover, as the city in speech is constructed, there is not a
separate sub-class of moneymakers, but all artisans are "wage-earners." And given the extraordinary restrictions placed on the guardians
(above all V 457d-47ld), one comes to see that one of the foremost
problems dealt with by the founders is the self-interest of all the
citizens. The soul, uniquely self-relating, is an essentially self-referential, if not also a self-interested being. While a complicating factor,
the issue is thus unavoidable (cf. III 409d-e, 4llc, lV 430e-2b;
Timaeus 98a, Phaedrus 245c-6d, Laws X 895e).
The introduction of the distinction does invert Thrasymachus's
self-priority, making what he thinks primary, self-interest, supplemental at best to the non-self-serving aspect of the arts, that for him
are but the means to his securing his advantage.
9. Blushing might be thought the quintessential self-reflexive human
act. Is it not Montaigne who gives us the epigram, "Man is the animal
that blushes?" {Nietzsche's Zarathustra also says that "Man is the
beast with red cheeks.") While this moment of uncontrollable selfdemonstration shows that Thrasymachus is no more than a man, the
question remains how deep and defining his or anyone's sense of
shame is. Is it more than a momentary or situational reddening?
10. The latter pervades The Republic, The question from the very beginning
has been the question of arete: whether natural individual perfection
is the same as moral or political excellence, especiaily conventional
moral excellence.
11. Socrates' persuasion is not simply for the sake of victory, omarnent
or self-aggrandizement. His rhetoric is rather in the service of his
newly founded community. Above all it isn't blind to the consequences
of its speech {I 33lc). His is a mode of political discourse that first
seeks to establish the conditions on the basis of which something like
a responsible "rational speech" can have a place in human affairs.
One may object to such an instrumental {prelogical} use of speech.
But does the means negate the end? And is a city of force preferable
to a more refined community?
12. This hope has led to a scholarship of rationalization or an attempt to
justify and validate invalid and uncogent arguments, a modern ver-
�LEVINE
37
sian of the ancient skill. Is not one of the principal functions of logic,
though, the identification of the weaker argument as weaker?
13. If changing a soul is not the same as refuting an argument, if Socrates
is genuinely concerned with his interlocutors and not simply with
their abstract "positions," and if those with whom he speaks aren't
listening (I 327c) and aren't tnterested in "the choice oflives" (I 344e,
X 608b}, then "logical refutation" amounts to "smoke and non-sense"
(IX 58ld). Socrates' response, his elenchus, has to find a different
mode of access, one that makes dialogue-a community of speechpossible in the first place (IX 582a), Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics,
VI 1145a6
14. On the therapeutic logos, see The Republic II-III, X 608a. It is difficult
for some to allow that Plato is practicing what he has his character
Socrates recommend (cf. III 387c).
15. Compare the discussion of"the true political artist" at Gorgias 521c.
16. Cf. Symposium 214d; Klein, J., Greek Mathematics and the Origin of
Algebra, translated by E.Brann, (Cambridge, 1968) p. 97 (alsop. 95).
17. Cf. Callicles' criticism of philosophy as politically naive (Gorgias 486f.).
18. To pacifY the overly aggressive is not the same as passivism. Hence
Socrates understands Thrasyrnachus's criticism of the dream of the
latter as dangerous. He proceeds stepwise: first tame the wild, then
enlist the moderated, and only thereafter can one prepare the judicious use of what otherwise would be reckless.
19. Hegel too has seen that the face of the dialogue is a problem, although
his account is quite different. For him The Republic is an atavistic
document: "the want of subjectivity [in The Republic with its "denial
of individuality"] is really the want of [subjectivity in] the Greek moral
idea" Lectures on The History ofPhilosophy, translated by Haldane and
Simson, (Lcndon,1892; 1968), vol. II 113-114; also "Preface," The
Philosophy of Right, (Oxford, 1967), p.10. However, as he also recognizes with notable penetration, the introduction of the sophistic
principle of individuality comes with great risks (Lectures on the
History of Philosophy, I 365, 373, 354-5, 433; also Philosophy of
History, New York, 1956, pp. 265, 269). As a result, one might for good
reasons not want to overemphasize and promote it. Hence the extraordinary care with which Socrates treats Thrasyrnachus.
20. Everybody who will listen has remained. Those who were problematic
have been tamed~a wonderful, if improbable, outcome. Justice based
on a just rhetoric has brought about an uncommon harmony and
friendship (I 351d, 369b, N 443d). But a city based on friendship is
not the typical political community. For this reason, it is emphasized,
we are tn the company of "the sons of the Best" (cf. II 368a, N 427c, V
450d, 479a, IX 580b-c, also I 338d, 351d, II 381d, V 477d, VII 536e).
�38
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Plato thus poses the prospect that one can be civilized and political
without becoming slavish (cf. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, sect.
11).
2l.Alexandre Kojeve's claim that "history" is the perfecting, i.e. moderating, influence on the tyrant thus appears dangerous wishful thinking
(".Tyranny and Wisdom," in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, New York, 1963
pp. 143-188). That the tyrant will not remain an island of self-seeking
unto himself but ~11 submit to others for "recognition" is a hopeful
sentiment. It is optilnistically rendered here but not borne out by the
rest of the dialogue. Thrasymachus does seek reputation and recognition. But were it not for Socrates' skill, it would only fuel his desire
for mastery. A more extreme case is Critias in the dialogue Channides.
The historical figure's "tyrannical procedures"~Kojeve's value-free
euphemism for the tyrant's cruelty-are adopted without reservation
precisely because others always remain a means to his private
advantage.
Ifhistmyis allowed to judge for us, then we do not judge for ourselves.
"Liberty is endangered when its power finds no obstacles which can
retard its course, and give it time to moderate its own vehemence"
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated by Reeve and
Bowen, (New York, 1945), p. 260. Dialectically put: has it not been
the sad history of those who have allowed the tyranny of the actual
that it led ineluctably to the actuality of tyranny?
�I
The Past-Present
Eva T. H. Brann
Tonight I want to state, and even to overstate, what I believe to be a
tnlth about the Program of St. John's College. What makes the tnlth
worth considering is that it goes against the plain appearances and
against what people, quite understandably, say about us.
I want to state this truth especiaily for the freshmen, the newest
members ofthe college, who might be surprised to hear it. And I want
to overstate it, because a sharp finite pronouncement is probably the
most productive prelude to the chief part of any Friday evening, which
is the question period. It is then that I can modifY, qualifY, perhaps
even retract what I am about to say. But before I state my truth, let
me say something to the freshmen about all such opinions. Many of
you have probably already guessed that this Program of learning is
like an iceberg, which has a visible tip that swims along on a
subaquatic mass nine times the size of the visible part. It is perfectly
fine and profitable to attend entirely to the brilliant tip, to study the
superlative books and acquire the liberal skills set out in the Program.
But some of you will wish to dive from time to time into the murky
depths to inspect the contestable theory that supports the Program.
The statement I am about to propose belongs to this netherworld.
I say that as students of the St. John's Program we have no interest
in the Past. None. What I mean is that care for the past is not one of the
features that makes this curriculum what it is meant to be. This school
has no institutional interest in what has gone by and passed away. You
might say that we let bygones be bygones. I assert this in the face of the
obvious fact that almost all our books, scores, theorems, and experiments
have authors that are, as human beings, long dead and gone.
When I say that we do not care about the past I am not particularly
thinking of the fact that we do not study history as a field. After all,
we do not study any of the other normal university disciplines either
-sociology, geology, psychology. We do read the two authors who are
generally agreed to be the founders of history. However it is not clear
just how much interest these writers had in the past. Herodotus
The Dean's lecture was delivered on September 2, 1994, al the Annapolis campus
of St. John's College
�40
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
introduced the word history, historia, for his composition concerning
the Persian War, but the Greek word means primarily an inquiry. It
has the same origin as the verb for knowing: a histor is someone who
knows, not necessarily things remote in time. Even when it is taken
in the current sense, history has a relation to the past which is anything
but straightforward. After all, History with a capital H, that is, the
public memory of events in the past, comes into being after history with
a small h, the work of reconstructing the past, has been done. Some
people go so far as to claim that historians in telling their plausible and
timely tales do not reconstruct so much as construct the past, so that
the past is an invention ofthe present. I might say that I cannot quite
believe so extreme a claim, because I know of some histmians who are
less truthful than others and therefore of others who are more truthful
in trying to determine the deeds done (these are called facts) and the
times assigned to them (these are called dates). Facts and dates form,
of course, the skeleton of history. I do believe that something definite
in fact happened at a certain date, but I doubt that it is in principle or
in practice possible to find out what that was, and I am pretty sure that
it ought not to be our business here to learn what others thought
happened or to try to find out for ourselves. The reason is that the
recovery of the past from its fragments is a practically infinite and
intellectually tricky task that requires a completed liberal education.
In short, you learn to do it in graduate school.
Yet, as I said, the fact that we have no department of history, or
that some of us have misgivings about the relation of history to the
past that was (meaning the past that really was and is really gone). is
not what makes me say that we have no interest in the past.
Nor could I possibly say that as private persons many of us lack
interest in the past. Many of us are ardent time-travelers. We like to
go sight-seeing in temporally distant places. For example, in my free
time I like to read about the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru.
Part of that interest is, to be sure, intellectual and is closely connected
to the fact that I function in a program that deals exclusively with the
Euro-American West, so that any light that is thrown on this tradition
immediately draws my attention. In the case of the Aztecs and the
Incas it is the evidently irresistible potency of the West, the power to
conquer, to coopt and to corrupt that is sometimes luridly and
sometimes tragically illuminated. I have in mind the awful fates of
those two great kings, Montezuma of the Aztecs and Atahualpa the
Inca. Both of them-canny, sophisticated potentates-gave themselves, like rabbits frozen in a trembling panic, into the treacherous
hands ofthose two conquistadores Cortez and Pizarro, whose scruffy,
�BRANN
41
diminutive bands had only a few horses, a few guns, limitless greed,
and impregnable faith in the Cross, to oppose to the two huge
magnificent royal armies. Naturally I would like to know, if history can
tell me, why the West always conquers and conquers so completely
that all resistance assumes the means and terms of its enemy.
But learning lessons, if there are any, is not my best reason for
reading books of history. Mostly I want to see new worlds. No city,
except perhaps Athens, has a more beautiful past behind its ugly
present than Mexico City. Bernal Diaz, the soldier-chronicler of the
Conquest. who rode with Cortez, says this of ancient Mexico City,
Tenochtitlan, set in a great lake covered with floating gardens:
When we saw so many cities and villages built in the
waters of the lake and other large towns on dry land,
and that straight, level causeway leading into Mexico
City, we were amazed and we said that it was like the
enchanted things related in the book of Amadis because of the huge towers, temples, and buildings
rising from the water, and all of masonry. And some
of the soldiers even asked whether the things we saw
were not a dreaJTI.
The book of Amadis, Juniors will know, is the romance that inspired
Don Quixote.
The hanging city ofMachu Picchu, a fortified outpost of the Inca empire,
rediscovered accidentally in 1911, also has a weird and wonderful beauty,
which I simply have in my mental picture book of ancient marvels.
And that seems to me to be the main attraction of the past- that
it adds worlds to my world, and bygone beauties to a present diminishing in beauty. It does so much as does fiction, only with the
strangely moving modifier of real past existence. I read history dutifully for information, I consult historians somewhat skeptically for
illumination, but I am in the past unclitically as in a romance, like
Bernal Diaz when he saw Tenochtitlan. For the past is primarily a
place (we will see that all talk of time is infected by spatial metaphor),
a romantic place, as the present is prosaic and the future uncanny.
Perhaps we can talk about this claim, that the past is the place of
romance, in the question period.
II
This might be a proper spot to collect the reasons I can think of
why anyone should, and why many of us do, care about the past, if
not as students and tutors in the Program, then as human beings.
For the two are not entirely coincident.
�42
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
1. Well, then, I have just mentioned the romance of time travel. I am
persuaded that all devoted archaeologists and historians begin as
temporal romantics, though it is their professional obligation not to
let on. When, some thirty-six years ago, I was a practicing archaeolo·
gist-which means someone who gives an account of very old things
-I was not too young and naive to get pleasure from watching each
of my revered elders in the excavation at Athens talking in carefully
damped scholarly prose about the particular period for which I well
knew each cherished a hopeless passion. It was like listening to a
lover giving a disingenuously objective account of the one face about
which that is really impossible.
2. A second reason why people do care about the past is, as I have
already mentioned, that they hope to learn its lessons. Sometimes they
mean to use the past to lay the past to rest, for it is said that those
who are ignorant of the past are doomed to repeat it. One book of
essays we study, the Federalist Papers, is full of such a use of the past.
The eighteenth paper, for example, written by James Madison, is a
study of failed Greek confederations, intended by horrible counterex·
amples to point the way to a successful federal structure. In other
words, the past can be used like our personal memory, as the
depository of accumulated experience.
3. For some, the past is treasure trove and the way to it a treasure
hunt. The origin of archaeology was largely in grave robbing and gold
digging.
4. Eventually the passion for lost beauty and lost treasure turned into
a sober science of carefully recorded diggtng below ground and meticu·
lous mapping above ground. The passion of discovery and acquisition
yielded to the more temperate but equally tenacious passion for detec·
tive·like tnduction, and for accuracy, cataloging, and tabulation.
As the past below the earth is carefully brought up and recorded,
so the past above ground is carefully preserved and restored. Time·
reservations, such as Williamsburg, are established somewhat in the
same spirit as that in which in Victorian times the woman of the house
would maintain a "good" parlor-a place protected from the wear and
tear of daily life.
Thus nostalgia is legitimized by academic discipline, and the past
is ·preserved in a form more pristine than it had as a present.
5. A peculiarly contemporary way of dealing with the past is to put
energy not into digging out the roots of the present but into inventing
them. Such inventions are platn lies, told by people, usually profes·
sors, who should and do know better, to people who have no way to
�BRANN
43
be critical-told for dubiously therapeutic reasons. The people who
participate in these self-deceptions tend to understand that the
passage of time confers honor and that the past plays a role in
establishing what is nowadays called "identity.''
6. On the opposite end with respect to motive and honesty is an
academic way of occupying oneself with the past that is exemplary in
its rigor. It is represented by the university discipline called "history
of ideas." Here past and bygone notions evoke a meticulous reconstructive interest, and are objectively reported as beliefs that used to
be believed. I have always been puzzled by the strong attraction of so
bloodless an activity.
7. A last, and to my mind best, way of having close relations to the .
past that I have observed is the way of revival, rebirth, recovery,
renascence. It is an act of pure imaginative vitality, of which the
greatest histmical example is the period called the Renaissance. Its
mode, which can be reactivated anytime, and certainly right here and
now, is to attempt to revivifY a golden antiquity while succeeding in
bringing to life a resonant modernity.
Each of these ways ofbeing involved with the past has its dangerous
and debilitating aspects. The romantic attachment to the past, which
is called nostalgia, is a form of sentimentalism. The lessons of history
teach everything and nothing. The earth's treasures are no longer for
the taking, and robbing graves is in most countries plain illegal. The
exact recording and reconstruction of the relics of lost worlds imposes
an abstracted rigidity on the messy life that was. Self-invention with
respect to the past is also self-delusion. The meticulous study of
superseded opinions is even drearier than the trendy courting of
current ones. There are two ways of mummifYing the past: by not
letting it die and by not letting it live.
On the other hand, to be disconnected from the past is also a
pathology. A human being that lives merely in the present is less than
Euclid's point that has no parts-it is a dimensionless being that lacks
even a location. For such a memoryless being has no path behind, no
human lineage .. It seems to me part of our human location in the world
to feel sometimes some sorrow at all the worlds that are lost and gone
and some elation at all the civilizations to which we are heir. This
function of pity and love for the sheer goneness and absence of
previous worlds and people, a sense not so much of personal as of
generic loss, seems to me a necessary part of one's humanity .
Therefore I do think we ought to be sometimes somewhat in love
with what I shall call the past-perfect, the past that is finished, has
passed away.
�44
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
III
I think the time has come to analyze more soberly what is implied
in caring about that past-perfect, that fmished past. In all such caring,
this seems to me to be the essential element: The past is the temporally
absent. As students are not usually marked absent from a class in
which they have not been previously present, so absence in time
implies an earlier presence. The future is not. to my mind, temporally
absent, because it h&sn't yet been present. Therefore the essence of
caring about the past-perfect is a relation, be it of love, hate, or
fascinated indifference, to what was. "Was'' is the past tense of "is."
"Was" is an "is" that is no more. (Let me interject here the thought
that "no more" need not mean "nevermore," for I am not at all sure
that the adage about not turning the clock back is true. I think we can
turn the clock back at a blink ofthe will. It is only a question of cost.)
"Temporal" as in "temporal absence" is the adjective formed from
time. To think about the past it is thus necessary to think about time.
I have read an estimate of the number of publications conceming
time: Since 1900, there have been 95,000 books, and since 1990 well
over 90,000 articles. Of these writings I've read perhaps forty-five,
among them the eight or nine that seem to matter most. They do all,
apparently, agree about this-that time has two major aspects: Now
and Then. They also agree that Then in tum has two aspects: Before
and Mter Now or Past and Future. Beyond these three aspects or
phases of time, Present, Past, and Future, everything is debatable.
The Now presents a set of puzzles first set out by Plato in the dialogue
Parmenides. The order of importance of the phases, the direction in
which they advance, the substantiality of time itself, the relation of
time to soul-these and many more issues are treated by Aristotle,
Augustine, Plotinus, Kant, Hegel, Husser!, and Heidegger. Most of
these you will in fact read in the next four years. What I will say tonight
will be almost culpably sketchy.
And first I have to observe once more, without stopping to dwell on
the reason, that it is practically impossible to speak of time and its
phases without using spatial metaphors. The past particularly is in
its very name metaphorical, for "past" is related to "pace" or step, and
to "passage" or a going by; past means, as I have said, by-gone.
Let me now give you the features that I think of when I reflect on
the meaning of the word "past."
l. It is one of three times or phases of time "in" which an event can be.
Notice the space-like location of events implied by the preposition "in."
�45
BRANN
2. It is what was. Notice the apparently unavoidable contradiction of
the tenses used in this description.
3. It is present for us in two ways, externally and internally. Notice
that the past is present for us as memory (an insight I have borrowed
from Augustine's Confessions), and that memory has two storage
spaces, so to speak. One is in our souls. It is described beautifully by
Augustine as a "spacious and infinite inner sanctum" (X, 8). A being
without such an inner rodm is one for whom nothing has significant
connotations or imaginative penumbras.
The other memory space is outside. It consists of all the testimonials, be they writings or objects, that have survived into our present
as evidence of past life. As I have already said, it seems to me that a
person who has no knowledge of these reminders of our human
antecedents is an unanchored and untethered being.
4. My fourth and final feature of the past is the one I have just
mentioned: the gravity of our attitude toward it, whether it is to be
deliberate denial, laborious reconstruction, shameless invention, nostalgic luxuriating, or free appropriation. Notice the implication that
our position with respect to the past is at some point a most deliberate
choice with wide consequences to our life.
IV
I now feel entitled, and perhaps even obligated, to say outright how
I think we should bear ourselves toward the past and how We should
live with it.
There are past-related pathologies that seem to me particularly
sick. One is the condition of those people, descrtbable as galvanized
zombies, who live in a frantic present, without a moment's collected
contemplation. This mode is practically definitive of contemporary
life. The other is the luxuriating nostalgia of Poe's Raven, who croaks
"Nevermore." This mode is practically definitive of romanticism.
For my part I think the past is indeed a place in which to take refuge
when it is necessary to pull back, to contemplate life and mull things
over. The present is the phase for brisk deliberation, decision, and
action, for being in that sleepwalking state in which we do, more or
less surefootedly, the one thing needful just now. In visiting the past,
whether in books or places, we get longer, more serene views.
In the past too the open-ended passage of moments turns into
completed tales, from anecdotes to myths.
In it, moreover, are to be found the models for our actions and the
patterns for our demeanor, without which it is impossible to shape a
distinctive self.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
46
And finally the past is to be appreciated as a double source of
dimensionality, a source of solidity and ghostliness at once. For, as I
have already intimated, it is the past that adds a dimension to the
here and now, which would otherwise be a mere momentary facade,
a painted curtain stretched over nothingness, floating into a shapeless
future. It is the past that gives this moving front of present appearances some sense of solidity, of having endured and betnghere to stay.
The ghostliness I pave mentioned is really the same effect tn a
different mood. When I was in Japan I saw in the enclosures of
Buddhist temples trees with prayer strips affixed to the branches,
fluttering in the wind. So also memories of the past attach themselves
to places and flutter about them, giving them an attendant ghostly
life. To be sure, not all locations are equally good ghost-catchers-for
example, to my mind, this auditorium is not as good at it as our Great
Hall over in McDowell.
v
Now I want to recall to you the claim that set me off. paradoxically,
on this praise of the past. The claim is that whatever attachment we
do and ought to have to the past privately, as students in the St.John's
Program we have none whatsoever. It is a claim I mean to argue even
in the face of the fact that we study hardly any contemporary book or
subject, and that almost everything we pay attention to is rather old
-or as Francis Bacon says, very young, since the older a production
is, the closer it is to the childhood of humanity.
To develop my opinion, I want to put before you, and to distinguish,
three terms. They are History, Tradition, and Past. I don't feel much
obligation to define them here. When people say "Define your terms,"
they usually mean to turn a conversation into a debate. But although
I am putttng forth my claim with a certain panache, I would like it to
be the beginning of a conversation rather than an argument. So I shall
offer a mere collection of the connotations that I personally intend,
first putttng some prelimtnary effort into distinguishing these terms.
I have already said something of the Past. The past, I say, is what
is absent tn time, bygone. It is a kind of folk wisdom that the past
was, meaning that it is a bygone present, and that it is therefore in a
way that neither the moving now nor the unhappened future is .
. History, of which I have also spoken before, is the deliberate
account given of selected past events or conditions by historians,
whom we may call public memory-experts. History depends on the
fact that human affairs assume distinct shapes, either as discrete
notable events like revolutions or as continuous but noticeable con-
�47
BRANN
ditions like social movements. History with a capital H is reconstructed in histories with a lower-case h by means of written and
tangible testimonials. The writing of history is therefore, as I said, a
research activity, and its study from books requires the experience
necessary for a critical review of the use to which the testimony is put.
All writing of histories that 1 know of rests on the faith I have already
mentioned, that human time on this earth organizes itself into discernible entities that hape some relation of cause and effect. This
fundamental axiom of all History is no stronger than a hypothesis
because, since events are always demonstrably unique, no one is in
a position to show for sure that a given outcome was lawfully caused
by a given antecedent. You might call this historian's faith a post hoc,
ergo propter hoc disposition. This Latin tag means: "After the event
and therefore because ofit," and we all tend to believe it. I'll give you
two personal examples: I ardently believe that I could be bam in
Europe only because Leonidas and his three-hundred Spartan held
Thermopylae for a while against the Persians, and I ardently believe
that I could flourish in America only because Abraham Lincoln was
president when the Union was threatened. But who could prove that?
The deeds that make up History are alive insofar as we feel their
effects reaching into the present and dead insofar as the sheer increasing weight of intervening human moments push them tnto the ineffective distance. Since the fall of Troy in 1183 B.C., 100,189,872,000
seconds have gone by-and anyone who has ever had a sharp pain or
keen sorrow knows what a second is, each an etemal moment. Most
of History is truly gone by, only dimly and diffusely related to our lives.
The historical past is prologue but not present.
VI
So we are left with the third term, Tradition. The word literally
means a "handtng down" of the past to the present. Often it means
ritual that has been taken over and respected because it has long been
established; thus Shakespeare speaks of"respect, tradition, form and
ceremonious duty" (Richard II, III, ii. 173). There is however, another
strong and significant usage. The word is often used of the literary
and textual tradition, the set of books that have survived because
people have respected and protected them and have handed them
down, mostly in those book-reservations called libraries. This tradition includes only a small part of the writtngs of the past. We can hope
that it is an advantageously sifted past, and that the best books are
the ones that survived, but we cannot be sure. For example, of
Sophocles' 123 dramas only seven are extant, one eighteenth of the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
output of Athens's central tragedian. From the vicissitudes of war,
like the-allegedly-accidental burning of the huge library at Alexandria during Caesar's siege of the city in 48 B.C., to the deliberate
torching of books conducted by the Nazis in Berlin in 1933, from the
mildew of forgotten trunks to the acid bum that is eating up old books
in contemporaxy libraries, circumstance has played a large role in the
selection of the written tradition, since it is handed down physically.
That we are lucky both in the losses and in the survivals, that what
survives is both the best and somehow coherent, is a faith, a reasonable faith we have in the discrimination and care of our predecessors.
In sum, we believe that the past has preserved for us plenty of great
books, and they seem to speak to each other.
How does this tradition of texts, be it texts of words, or mathematical
symbols, or musical notes, differ from the other remains of the past?
Let me use as an example our own McDowell Hall, the pride of the
Annapolis campus. Our Director of Admissions, John Christensen,
probably the faculty member best known to the freshmen, has put
together a handsome and informative volume about this "historical"
building.
McDowell was begun in the 17 40s and by 1799 it housed all the
functions of St. John's College, which had been chartered in 1784. In
1909 it was burned down to just above the first story. The then-principal,
Dr. Fell, wrote that the students "ruined their suits of clothing to save
the building and its contents." This dreadful catastrophe inspired
some dreadful student poetry about old McDowell, who, it was written
in the yearbook, "has perished in the flame ... and she's nought now
but a name." Which was as wrong as the poem was bad, because she
rose, like a phoenix: from the ashes, to be continually used as our main
building. In 1989 McDowell was again gutted, this time for a deliberate and beautiful renovation and modemization.
Here is the contrast between our building and our books, the
contrast that is relevant to my point: We can modernize old buildings,
install new operational systems, modifY unsafe or inconvenient features. We cannot do that to our books. Modem paraphrases or
bowdlerized versions will not give us new improved up-to-standard
texts, but travesties. Secondly, we can live comfortably and purposefully in our building without understanding it, or with only a dim sense
of esthetic satisfaction, yet without knowing the underlying construction or even seeing the elegantly rational hierarchy of its elevation. But
we can't live with our books unconsciously. Everything depends on
maximum awareness of detail, structure, purpose. A dim sense of a
great text is almost a contradiction in terms.
�49
BRANN
Therefore, the books of the past differ from the buildings of the past
in the manner of their renovation-the renewal of the books excludes
comfortable remodeling and trouble-free use. We have to do it their
way. They would seem to impose their past on us.
VII
But actually the case is just the opposite. Because we have to
engage the books of the tr'lldition as they are and with all our available
awareness, they are notin the past, but in the present. There are not.
except in incidentals, bygone. What they say to us is what they have
always said, and they say it now and always now.
There is the simple past, the once-and-for-all past, which is absent
except in memory or in monuments. But there is also a past which
may be named after the grammatical tense from which I took my title:
past-present. It is a nice fact that there are certain verbs in English
as well as in Greek that display this past-presence dramatically. The
English "can" as in "I can" is actually a past from a verb meaning to
know, as in "cunning," or German, kennen. Past knowing is present
power; to have learned is to be now able. Similarly, the Greek verb
for "I know," aida, is a past form of the verb for seeing; to have seen
is now to know. That is what the grammarians call the past-present.
It brings a past form into the present tense.
The tradition, as I understand it, does the same. It presents a past
thatis not absent but present- if we let it be. I can think of a powerful
image for what I mean. When Odysseus goes into the undetworld the
diaphanous shades flutter about him and cannot attain to living
presence until he lets then drink from the pit of sacrificial blood (Book
XI). The books are, with our encouragement, capable of taking life.
VIII
To understand the tradition of books consciously as I have delineated it, you have to be willing to entertain a very powerful-and very
controversial-set of beliefs. There is, I hasten to add once again, also
the possibility of just reading the books receptively. It is perfectly
profitable, and even sound, for students to read thoughtfully without
reflecting very often on the conditions for reading. But you might want
to consider them sometimes, so here are the beliefs that I think
support the idea of the tradition as a past-present.
First: I think that, in order to believe that there is a past that is
present, you have to believe in the unity of literate humanity. You
have to imagine the thinking and writing human species as living
below the threshold of natural evolution and also as standing in some
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
part outside the vicissitudes of history. For example, I believe that a
certain young man called Glaucon, one of Plato's older brothers, if he
were present tonight, might be puzzled and disgusted to see a female
in unbecoming dress address the public and utter decided opinions.
But although he might not get over the indecency of it in one lifetime,
I believe this time-immigrant would undergo the same naturalization
as does a contemporary space-immigrant. He would pick up our
customs and prejudic\'s and begin to be involved with us. He might
even enroll in the Graduate Institute. His intellect would be engaged
even tf his sensibilities continued to be outraged. My guess is, he
would imperceptibly become acclimatized until he loved this place
better than that time and could bear to return to Athens only in the
manner of a loquaciously superior tourist, as happens to most of us
immigrants when we try to go "home."
So much the more readily would his quicker and deeper younger
brother be naturalized, especially since he would already have understood, and as I think, respected, democratic life. For he had observed
that the kind of free discussion concerning the choice of a way of ltfe
and of a political constitution that his Socrates carries on, happens
naturally in democracies (Republic VIII, 557). So conversely, since we
can readily imagine him thinking with us, we can pick up his writings
and think with him. For these writings are meant to be ahistorical in
the sense that we can, in imagination, discount historical circumstance. Of course old books will refer to past prejudices and preoccupations, but we, by trying to understand what it means to be
prejudiced and preoccupied, will soon learn to read around what is
simply past in old books.
Second: A closely related belief maintains that we have not only been
the same rational species throughout recorded time, but that we do,
in fact, have the same preoccupations, the same queStions as even
our remotest ancestors, provided only the level of formulation is deep
enough. We must feel a little queasy at the sanctimonious superiority
with which people who think they preeminently tnhabit the present
condemn the opinions of people who lived in the past. But let me
choose items on which positive contemporary opinion probably really
is on safer moral ground, say, the position of women, the exposure of
children, the owning of human chattel. We do, whatever our local
conclusions may be, at the least share the questions (perennial
questions, as they are rightly called) concerning human equality, the
right to ltfe of the very young, the inalienable freedom of individuals.
These problems you will recognize as not dated at all.
�BRANN
51
But the argument that we are, at least in our questions, alike
through time, could be tumed against the tradition. If at a level
properly established nothing changes, neither human nature nor
human preoccupations, why bother with older, Jess accessible versions? If concems are perennial, why not seize hold of them in the
present from?
Third: Yet two additional beliefs address this reasonable point. One
is the belief hom of experience, which I for one hold with equal
amazement and fervor, that there is a palpable distinction between
good and great. Good books are written all the time and they lean in
fuendly fellowship on their great relatives. But those great ones are
few and far between. There seem to be times, to be sure, when they
are bunched together. It is probably that inexplicable fact, that
miracle of history, that makes us think of centuries as if they were
breeding grounds: the fifth century B.C. for Parmenides, Aeschylus,
Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, Plato; the sixteenth century for
Luther, Bacon, Shakespeare, Galileo. But however they seem to be
bunched or strung out on the tablets of time, these writers are rare
and-I will say this most controversial thing-absolutely great. As you
know, this faculty, your tutors, claims for itself-some might say
arrogates to itself-the judgment and the choice of books. We have
many gross and subtle criteria, which we might wish to discuss in the
question period. The first one for me was formulated by the teacher
who introduced me to Homer and won me for Classics, back in
Brooklyn College in 1950. I recall a student asking her in a bright
and impertinent tone-we were a bright and impertinent lot-what
made her know a great book, and she said in the throwaway voice of
utter conviction: "It makes my hair stand on end."
One answer, therefore, to the desirability of taking up books
ostensibly written in the past is that the tradition is a very slowly f.tlling
treasury. We are too poor in the present to be able to afford the loss
of this inheritance.
Fourth: But one more belief, complementary and even antithetical, is
needed. When the past is regarded as presenting unique and irreplaceable treasures to the present, one dimension of human thinking
and imagining is disregarded. We live, as I said before, at the front of
a facade of time, a facade propped up and given solidity by the past
behind it. It is not that we need to think of the past as determining
our thinking. Thought is by its nature capable of thinking anything
at any time. Yet it is a fact, perhaps a paradoxical fact, that we live
with inherited opinions. It is a paradoxical fact because most opinions
are held thoughtlessly; they are unthought thoughts. It is a very
�52
THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW
different thing to inherit a book and to inherit an opinion, not only
because the books reach much farther back than the opinions, but
because the books become ours only by an effort of appropriation,
while the opinions are what we effortlessly just have. They are part
of that ever-advancing, ever-changing facade called the present.
There is no denying that the facade progresses, not necessarily in the
optimist's sense of getting better but in the neutral sense of going on.
For while the questiops may stay recognizably similar, the answers
change drastically, by creeping evolution or abrupt revolution. Yet it
seems that the more radical a new departure in thought is intended
to be, the more it is shaped by its origin, be it through the precise
contradiction involved in a sharp rejection, through the careful reconstnlction required by a conscious recovery, or through the conversational continuity encouraged by a receptive response.
It follows that the tradition, as I understand it, is for us not only a
treasure house for any time but also a key to our specific present
condition, to our understanding of private and public humanity, of
nature and of divinity. One way or the other-as suppressed antithesis, as deliberate reacquisition, or as conversational partner- it props
up our present, and on our knowledge of it depends our critical
appreciation of our time.
I speak of time, but, really, time, datable time, has little to do with
it. I can think of several ancient authors who are nearly two millennia
away from us in time, but two seconds away from us in thought-two
seconds being what it takes to conceive a tremendously new idea. The
order in which these authors appear probably matters but not the date
of their birth, just as in our thinking the sequence of conception, the
genesis of understanding, is significant, but very rarely the exact time.
This notion of mine, that order matters but not dates, is, I must tell
you, pagan; in fact it seems to me to be the gist of Paganism. It is
therefore highly debatable, and I hope we will talk about it in the
question period.
In any case, the point I want this notion to reinforce is that
absorbing the tradition is not the same as studying history or caring
about the past. For we study these books not insofar as they tell us
of bygone times but because they tell us of the present. They are not
absent in time, as is the past, but present (and perhaps even out of
time altogether). They are the past insofar as it is present; they are
effectively present; they are in the terms of the title of my lecture, the
PAST-PRESENT.
But that is not quite the last word. The books of the tradition, our
books, become present, as I have said, only when we let them. We
�BRANN
53
revivifY them and make then vital. Therefore they stand by us and
speak as does that shade in Hades whom Odysseus calls ""the prince
of those with gift of speech.'" It is the seer Tiresias, and he pleads:
Let me but taste of blood, I shall speak true.
(Odyssey XI, 96, Fitzgerald)
�54
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�Interpreting Genesis Through the
Foundational Symbols of
Earth, Water, and Air
Harvey L. Gable: Jr.
There have of course been many commentaries on or readings of
Genesis, but while much progress has been made in identii'ying source
material and refining etymological precision, it remains an open
question what the book as a whole is intended to be about. I am
speaking here of the intention of the compiler in choosing to select,
edit, and arrange the selections as he has done, since ultimately it is
this and not the sources of the original fragments, or even their original
meaning, which is cogent. 1 While a definitive answer to this question
may be impossible, there are certain "structuralist" principles of
interpretation which can give us some insight into the kinds of
elements that hold these stories together. 2 As I will show in this essay,
if we regard the second Genesis creation story (Gen 2:4ff), which
describes the construction of man, as setting the terms by which the
book is to be read, we can see the subsequent stories as something of
an owner's manual, describing how and how not to opel-ate this
mechanism that God has created, but left us to run.
The second creation story focuses on man as a composite being,
structured from three basic elements: earth, water, and air or breath,
each of which has its symbolic meaning. It is essential to remember
this simple recipe for making a man, since in all the pre-patriarchal
stories of Genesis 1-11, whenever the creature, man, malfunctions,
the fault can inevitably be traced to an excess or deficiency of one of
the three elements in his mixed nature. These stmies operate consistently, I will argue, on a cause-and-effect model, each describing an
imbalance of earth/water/air and showing its consequences. Taken
together, they make a point about who man is and what he must do
to remain balanced and healthy; they also define an ontological system
which, in the second half of the book (after chapter 11), becomes the
implied backdrop against which the lives of the Patriarchs are played
out. In this second section, the characters and the landscape are more
life-like but the issues at stake are still those defined by the act of
creation in Genesis 2.I argue, in other words, that the central question
Harvey L. Gable, Jr. holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has taught
at Chicago and the U.S. Naval Academy.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
of Genesis is "what is man?" and the answer is "a creature formed of
earth, water and air"-an answer that has significant moral and
historical consequences.
Chapters 1-ll: Eden and the Fall
For man, the first consequence of his mixed nature is instability:
he has been concocted from three essentially incompatible things
which only the grace of God can keep in harmonious balance. A second
consequence is that man feels blood-kinship with earth as well as with
things of the air. An ignorant man, not aware that earth is only a
secondary manifestation of God, is likely to regard himself as a child
equally of father God and mother earth-with, perhaps, even a
stronger tie to mother than father. Together these two consequences
make sin inevitable: man is inherently unstable, and he is weighted
toward the material. 3 Genesis is remarkably thorough in describing
each possible kind of imbalance, but this material weight is the primal
fault, and the most common.
Man's !Adam's] original sin takes exactly this form: God commands
"no" from above, while the snake/earth says "yes" from below. One
offers the fruits of the spirit; the other, the fruit of earth. God's voice
here is the voice of air or spirit in this oppositional sense, but more
correctly it is the voice of balance: He enjoins man to live on the earth,
but to avoid being fully absorbed by it; the tree at the center of the
garden provides an "other," a kind of spiritual navel which balances
the purely material with the anti-material. Kept sacred, as God has
enjoined, the idea of the tree permeates all physical things with a
spiritual awareness: each bite of allowed fruit reminds man that other
fruit is not allowed because of a law other than the merely physical
law. In this sense the tree acts as a link binding heaven to earth, much
as, in man, water binds earth and breath. The call of the earth, of the
serpent who is mere formed' earth and of the tree that is also earth, is
the call to forget this sacred navel, to cut the umbilical cord as it were,
and declare that all is earth-that the other world is a fiction. 4
The question remains: why does this tree, sprung from the earth,
promise knowledge of Good and Evil? The traditional explanation that
Good and Evil refers to sexual knowledge or sexual shame is inadequate, since man was commanded at creation to be fruitful and
multiply. We notice, too, that Adam and Eve do not hide from each
other, but from God. Adar (among others) argues that the words "good
and evil" "lend themselves to interpretations other than moral; they
allude to the ability to distinguish between pleasant and unpleasant,
between useful and harmful. "5 Read in this way, God's prohibition
�GABLE
57
against eating the fruit amounts to saying "so far, you have known
only pleasant earthly things, but if you eat from this tree you will learn
that earthly things can also be unpleasant." Eating the fruit provides
this experience because disobeying the prohibition creates these
unhealthy material things: The balanced system in which material
things were suffused with a spiritual presence becomes unbalanced
when man chooses to break the spiritual connection with God. In effect
the act closes the navel (or· severs the umbilical cord) through which
true life flowed into material objects, leaving the material world dried
and unhealthy. This transformation occasioned by man's choice
explains why there is confusion in the text about whether there is one
tree or two: The tree that gives knowledge of Good and Evil is the Tree
of Life, the navel through which Life flowed into the world. Man's
decision to cut the link makes that tree unavailable to him in the
future. I said above that Genesis operates on a cause-and-effect model,
and this case is a perfect example: The sentence by which God
excludes man from further contact with the Tree is not so much a
punishment as a verbal recognition of the inevitable consequences of
what has been done.
Likewise the curses or punishments meted out to man are really
the predictable results of the imbalance that he has created. First, a
separation from the spiritual: God, once their companion, must now
seek them out. Second, an excessive identification with the physical:
They became aware of their nakedness. Third, and most significant,
their earthly encrustation creates a barrier against the entry of spirit
into the world of flesh. For woman, bringing a new soul into the earth
is no longer an act of joy but one of great effort and pain. Likewise for
man in his sphere, cultivation of the earth, the creation of new life
requires great effort. Adam's curse, "In the sweat of thy face shall thou
eat bread" (3: 19) really encapsulates the meaning of the Fall. Water
symbolizes God's blessing, and here it has been withdrawn (or ra!he~,
refused): the luscious garden is replaced by arid desert, and man must
now supply the missing fluid with his own sweat, and replace the
missing fecundity with his labor. In effect Adam's sin has partly
reversed the creation, and unmixed what God had mixed. Thereafter
Adam must do the mixing himself: Only through his own hard labor
will his earthy nature be "cultivated" sufficiently to receive the blessing
again and bear fruit. Presumably the slowly diminishing life spans of
the patriarchs are also an indication that the life-giving spirit is
receding from earth.
Scholars have argued that in the Biblical context "nakedness"
usually means something akin to "lacking all possessions"; "not
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
sexuality at all but a state of defenselessness and helplessness,
without possessions or power. "6 Eating from the tree leaves man naked
in this sense; He is uncomfortably exposed and dispossessed, poised
between God's order which he has rejected and a new matertal order
uninformed by God's spirit, from which he is also alienated because
he no longer possesses it through the spirtt but merely lives in it as a
discrete object. The new awareness that Adam and Eve gain is a
product of redefining themselves as purely physical beings, mere
naked and helpless animals. In this sense the Fall is that moment
when the earth/water I air balance is 1\rst tipped and man remakes
God's creation into an earth-dominated mixture. This understanding
of the Fall, or something quite like it, was shared by "many of the early
kabbalists," who, according to Paul Morns, "understood that before
Adam's sin there was as yet no material world at all .... Adam was a
wholly spirttual being and his exile from the upper world represents
the beginnings of corporeal existence. "7 This kabbalist reading portrays Adam as one who "misperceived the nature of the Godhead and
took the Shekhinah [the divine presence on earth] to be the Godhead
itself," and that therefore "this is the esoteric meaning of the commandment not to 'eat' of the Tree of Knowledge, that is, not to cleave
· to the Shekhinah alone." 8 My argument would suggest that Morris (or
the kabbalists) are overstating the case, since the Fall is not from spiiit
to earth but from a balanced state of earth/water/air to an earth·
dominated imbalance. Nonetheless, the kabbalist reading provides
historical precedent for reading the events in the Garden in this way,
and also reinforces the sense of this text as a philosophical allegory of
the highest order.
Cain and Abel
In Cain and Abel are displayed humanity's old (and potentially
recapturable?) self, which is eventually slain by the new self. Abel, as
a keeper of sheep, is living the role of an Eden-dweller, whose job is
to have dominion over the creatures of the earth; in Cain we see the
new man, the "tiller of the ground" condemned to struggle, with only
partial success, to bring back some semblance of the old balance,
endeavortng to wrestle God's blessing from the earth which used to
bear it spontaneously in abundance. He is one, in other words, who
struggles in vain to infuse his earthy self with a spiritual nature and
so achieve a sustained balance. He fails, as his nature dictates, and
in the process becomes a worker against God's balance, spilling the
life-giving fluid from his brother's vesseL He acts, apparently, from
sheer frustration at his now less prtvileged position. This frustration
�GABLE
59
may also explain his decision to become a citydweller: The city is man's
attempt to recapture Eden, insofar as it represents comfortable life
without the need to wrestle sustenance from the ground. 9 The Cain
story shows how man, once unbalanced, becomes a dangerous d.estabilizing force that tends to spiral further out of balance.
Cain's punishment is again less of a curse than a predictable
consequence of his actions. God does not abandon the gift of life but
hears its voice calling to him "from the ground"; his waters descend
and then retum to him but are never lost. But for Cain the seminal
blessing of water, once squandered, cannot be recovered again, and
so "when [Cain] tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto
[him] her strength" (4: 12). His sin is similar to Onan's: He lacks a
proper sense of the sacredness of God's gift of life. w Henceforth Cain
lives in the city, which may be thought of as the grossest of gross earth,
the land on which no water of God's blessing falls, and no spirttual
life can spring forth. The children of Cain become, typically, those who
have no contact with the living earth, but instead make their living
manipulating the dead matertal world: Tubalcain, for example, "an
instructor of every artificer in brass and iron" (4;22). ''And predictably,
Cain's lack of balance only engenders further imbalance, as subsequent generations become increasingly perverse in a similar vein.
The sanctity with which God has invested life, the mark of Cain,
becomes for Lamech a mere excuse for taking life casually.
Conversely, the competing line of man, which descends from the
better-constructed Seth, is able to maintain the balance of Eden
longer; they "walk with God" (5:24) as men did in Eden. But of course
even in this line of descent, the inherent balance of earth, water, and
spirit is precarious.
The Nephilim
This disturbing incident, in which "the sons of God" breed with the
daughters of men to create a super race whose spirits contend with
God (6: 1-4) is best understood (as are all these incidents) in conjunction with its immediate consequence, the flood. In terms of the
earth/water I air balance, the problem being addressed here is plain
enough: A race of men have surreptitiously enriched man's mixture,
filling him with more spirtt than is allowable." The result is not a race
of spiritual men, as we might expect, but a race who have contempt
for the earth, as Cain had contempt for the spirit: men of great
dating-the "men of renown" of classical antiquity who love glory and
not men. That this is a problem of improper mixture becomes apparent
in God's solution, the flood. Bearing in mind that water symbolizes
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
God's grace, the glue which binds earth and air together, we can see
the flood as an effort to separate earth and spirit, to pull apart what
has been joined, by injecting an excess of water to lift the breath from
earth: "All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in
the dry land, died" (7:22). God unmixes the three ingredients of life so
that he can mix them again in proper balance. This plan would seem
to be undercut by His mercy to Noah, but it is in this mercy that we
see the unsolvable problem inherent in man's mixed nature. Noah is
a 'just man and perfect in his generations" who "walks with God" (6:9);
presumably God recognizes that in Noah the best possible mixture
already exists. Yet Noah still displays in his seed the chronic instability-an instability that is apparently simply inherent in the mixture.
Only the grace of God, actively sought and given, can hold the balance
in harmony.
One might ask, why did God not withdraw his blessing? i.e., why
was the catastrophe not a drought rather than a flood? On the one
hand the flood provides an image of God's active power, rather than
his passive disapproval. His grace actually lifts the breath out of man,
a case of active intervention· rather than passive neglect. Yet at the
same time this image of an active God is:also nicely consistent with a
cause-and-effect model, showing excess answered with excess: The
spiritual excess of the Nephilim is answered with a flood of God's
power I grace, which it cannot withstand. Since all the cases of abuse
and punishment in Genesis rely on a principle of natural reaction, it
seems reasonable to suggest that the influx of floodwaters is a natural
consequence oftoo great an influx of spirit: that opening the gates of
heaven too widely (cf 7: 11). the Sons of Heaven have generated
unexpected consequences.
The Drunkenness of Noah
After the flood, the inherent instability of man is demonstrated
again in Noah's drunkenness. The incident may be regarded as an
echo of the Eden story. Noah's drunkenness iS a kind ofFall: He drinks
of the fruit of the vine and, like eating the fruit of the Tree, the act
brings shame into being in the new world. Indeed we sense in the line
"Noah began to be a husbandman" (9:20) an echo of the curse of Adam
creeping into Noah's perfection. Noah's son Ham reaps the consequences of this inherent sin-perhaps, we feel, unfairly. But this is an
ontology of cause and effect, not of legalistic punishment: "If thou
doest not well, sin lieth at the door" (4:7). The story of Noah's
drunkenness does not deal directly with images of earth/water/air,
but it clearly begins to focus on the implications of this model. On every
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occasion for sin we face the choice of Adam, to respect the father and
so reassert the balance of spirit, water and earth. or choose to treat
the Father as merely another man or even an object, and so assert a
purely material ontology. In creational terms. we might think of reality
like a cake: Each act either whips air into the batter making it lighter
and more savory, or draws air out, making life dry and unpalatable.
The Tower of Babel
The Tower of Babel story describes a third kind of imbalance
different from Cain's contempt for the spirit or the Nephilims' contempt for earth. Here there is contempt for the water of God's grace.
In this tncident, mankind attempts to forego grace. the normal glue
that unites spirit and earth, and instead build a man-made union in
a gross physical way, using "slime" to unite earth and heaven via a
tower. This "slime" is an earthy and polluted form of water: God's
grace, not in its pure form but as given to man and then contaminated
and misused by him. The project can be seen as an effort to recreate
Eden on a secular basis, since the tower will replace the function of
the Tree in Eden as the central navel uniting heaven and earth. By
uniting individual men (bricks of earth) into a whole, they hope to
reach heaven: in other words, to create a purely material religion, a
humanist philosophy "blessed" by the "slime ... The error here is similar
in kind to the original sin of mistaking a secondary manifestation of
God (there, earth; here, water) for an independent force. Of course this
attempt by man to recreate himself according to his own- recipe is
doomed, because there is no glue that will bind the two radically
different substances of earth and spirit. except the purest form of God's
grace. The consequences of the attempt are predictable: The glue fails,
the unity collapses. and its pieces are flung abroad with a force
proportional to the great height it had reached. The central point of the
story is not. as so many perverse commentators have argued, that God
is "inimical to the laudable human striving for progress."" The real
moral iR man's perversity. God is both wise and kind: His recipe for a
man cannot be improved upon, and He has repeatedly warned us that
it is dangerous to try. Yet we insist on doing so.
Chapters 1-11
The first eleven chapters of Genesis, then. show us the various
possible kinds of human imbalance, and their consequences. They
also implicitly defme the proper balance that should be maintained.
This information can be summed up in two propositions: first, we must
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
accept that our nature is a perfect yet always potentially unstable
mixture of three elements. We must accept that it is perfect. because
any attempt by us to adjust God's mixture results in a free fall spiral
of ever-worsening consequences; We must accept that it is always
unstable, because only our act of will-our willingness to "walk with
God"-can keep the mixture in balance. Secondly, we must understand the unique role that God's grace plays as the water that binds
the two halves of our,nature together, and also realize that our fallen
nature makes it difficult for this fluid to do its job properly. Because
we are fallen we must work to maintain the balance: We must plow
and work our earthy nature, struggling to mix the waters of grace into
them. In other words, our plight as men in the material world is the
plight of a people in the desert: To live we must dig; we must break
beneath the hard crust of a dead material world to find the blessed
waters of life beneath.
In this way the moral system constructed in chapters 1-11 is
transformed into a landscape agalnst which the Patriarchs play out
their lives; the story of survival in the desert becomes also the story
of spiritual struggle. Nowhere is this more clearly evident than in the
story of Abraham and Lot.
Abraham and Lot
The story of Abraham and Lot parting ways (chap. 13) is a fable
about how one perceives the world, and the consequences of that
perception. The story juxtaposes two styles of choosing, based on two
differing assumptions. Lot, faced with the choice between the fertile,
well-watered plains of Jordan and the arid regions of Canaan, naturally chooses the former. His choice is logical, and seems acceptable
within the structure of the metaphor of balance as well: The well-watered plain suggests a land blessed by God. As far as.we know Lot is
an unexceptionable man; but as with all these stories, we see after the
fact, in the consequences of his action, the mistake he has made and
the flaw that it reveals. Lot's choice betrays that he still has what we
may call an Edenic mind, relying on God to rain blessings down for
man to enjoy in leisure. The space that he chooses is charactertzed by
this attitude. The cities of the plain, Sodom and Gemorrah, are
populated by those who share the curse of Cain: they do not dig the
earth, but irresponsibly exploit the blessings given by God.
Abraham, by contrast, does not appear to favor either fertile or arid
region. The excellence that distinguishes Abraham from Lot is not one
of faith, as is so often argued. Lot questions God's choice of destination
when he is warned away from Sodom, certainly: but Abraham and
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Sarai laugh at the absurdity of God's promise to give them a child, and
Abraham also argues with God when the fate of Sod om and Gemorrah
is at stake. Worst of all, Abraham repeatedly doubts God's power to
fulfill His promise of seed, even jeopardizing the future of the promise
by attempting to pass off his wife as his marriageable sister." Faith is
not the issue between Abraham and Lot, but rather the fact that
Abraham has absorbed the lesson taugbt by Genesis 1·11, while Lot
has not. Abraham understands the curse of Adam: he knows that the
world is a desert, that the true water must be found beneath the
surface, and man must struggle to find it.
The differing fruits born to these two attitudes become apparent in
the stories that follow, in which Abraham and Lot come to be opposed
in various ways: Abraham becomes a mighty prince, Lot a captive slave
(14; cf Ham); Abraham is given land, Lot has his land destroyed;
Abraham's wife bears fruit, Lot's wife dies. In every case Abraham
ripens while Lot withers. The difference is water. Abraham was given
a desiccated land in which to dwell and a wife who is dried up ["it
ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women" (18: 11); "who
would have said with Abraham, that Sarah should have given children
suck?" (21:7)], but God's hidden waters revivi:fy both land and wife.
Lot's experience is the opposite: Living in a well-watered land he makes
no effort to dig beneath the surface. The earthly waters give him no
sustenance, and his wife, once fertile, is dried to a pillar of salt. The
choice that Lot's wife makes when fleeing Sodom emphasizes this
family flaw; she must choose between looking up the mountain toward
the face of God, or looking down longingly at the pleasures of the flesh.
She chooses the latter, and as a result the water of blessing is lost:
She becomes a dry pillar of salt. Her choice echoes the choice of her
husband, and that of the original sin; it reveals an i:mbalanced soul
weighted dangerously toward the physical. Abraham prospers and Lot
suffers based solely on their willingness to "walk with God," in the very
technical sense defined in chapters 1·11: accepting the
earth/water /air balance that God has ordained, and cultivating a
receptivity to the fecund waters He offers. The same angels bring
waters of life to Sarai and fiery death to the cities of the plain. It all
depends on how one greets them. 15
The Lives of the Patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac
The lives of the Patriarchs all follow a common pattern, the point
of which is to take men who may, at first, resemble Lot more than
Abraham, and train them to live a life of balance in which earth is
softened with water, and suffused with air/spirit.ln other words they
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
must be "rebom" into the kind of understanding that Genesis 1-11
implicitly urges us to have, in which we die to the Eden mentality of
privilege and enter tnstead into the post-lapsarian or "desert" awareness of precarious balance held in equilibrium by an ongoing act of
the will. Each patriarch must learn for himself that the physical world
is dead and attachment to it leads to death, while true life is found in
cultivating our earthy nature to receive spiritual force into it. The point
of this exile into the desert is to enable a retum-not to the mundane
family home, but in the larger sense to the state of Eden, now redefined
16
in terms appropriate to a spiritual rather than a physical awareness.
The story of Abraham begins with a call to material glory. Abram
will become a great nation (12:2) and will be given a land to inhabit
(12:7). From a purely literary point of view this promise motif becomes
a cruel but sometimes quite amusing joke, as Abraham again and
again fulfills God's conditions, only to have additional conditions laid.
Harold Bloom calls this relationship "a cruel pattem of power.'o~ 7 This
process of divine backpedaling reaches the level of absurdist theater
by chapter 17, when God again renews his promise to Abram, but
demands that the poor fellow change his name (17:5) and circumcise
himself and all his followers (17: 10-12). At the end of his life Abraham
is still wandering, still waiting for the promise to be fulfilled.
From a more sympathetic point of view, however, we can see that
God has a purpose in his backpedaitng, which is to make Abram into
a digger of wells. To move him forward from the man he was, who
presumably would not have answered any call but one promistng
material wealth, to one whose promised land is a purely inward,
spirituai garden. This process is not rigid, but for all the Pairiarchs it
tends to involve certain typical elements: an early demonstration of
spiritual proclivity; a rituai death in which he dies to his old life and
is bam to a new one; a vision or drean1 in which he concretely
experiences the reality of another world; a period of apprenticeship
during which he makes mistakes but progresses toward spirituai
understanding; and typicaily, a finai demonstration of his achieved
prowess.
That Abram was strongly predisposed to this spiritual outlook is
evident when he and Lot part ways, the second incident recorded after
his call. That he still requires an apprenticeship period is demonstrated by the first recorded incident, his joumey into Egypt, when he
allows his wife to be wooed by Pharoah in a botched attempt to avoid
unpleasantness. The awareness that Abram shows here, one that
gives priority to physical security and the experiences ofthe moment,
is directly opposed to the awareness that God is trytng to teach. We
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see that higher awareness demonstrated in Abram's vision, in chapter
15. This eerie incident, in which God [again] reasserts His promise,
begins with a ritual sacrifice during which Abram is thrown into a
trance-state:
And he said, Lord God, whereby shall I know that I
shall inherit it?
And he said unto him, Take me a heifer of three years
old, and a she goat of three years old, and a ram of
three years old, and a turtledove, and a young
pigeon.
And he took unto him all these, and divided them in
the midst, and laid each piece one against another:
but the birds divided he not.
And when the fowls came down upon the carcasses,
Abram drove them away.
And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell
upon Abram: and lo, a horror of great darkness fell
upon him. 18
In that trance, Abram has a vision:
And [God] said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy
seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs,
and shall serve them, and they shall afflict them
four hundred years ...
But in the fourth generation they shall come hither
again, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.
And it came to pass, that, when the sun went down,
and it was dark, behold a smoking fumace, and a
buming lamp that passed between those pieces.
(15: 13,16-17)
It is of course significant that God reveals to Abraham that the nation
of Israel must pass through the same ritual pattem of death (or
"descent" into Egypt) and rebirth (retum) that each individual patriarch must undergo. But for Abraham the real significance here is the
opposition between real life and dream/ spirit life. It is here that God
first begins to show his intention for Abraham, by essentially inviting
him to take up residence in an altemative reality. God is saying to
Abraham: "ignore what your senses tell you to be true: the truer reality
is within." Of course the promise of land does eventually come true (if
not exactly in the terms that Abraham originally understood); but it
is also clear that the retum to Eden (which is ultimately what the
Promised Land represents) will not take place on the physical plane,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
but must take place as a spiritual journey undergone inwardly. 19 By
luring Abram from his old ways with the ever-receding promise, God
is effectively training him to live, not for immediate gain in the material
world, but for the relationship with God, the locus of which is another
world.
There then follows a lengthy apprenticeship period, in which Abraham absorbs this lesson. His main problem, the area in which his faith
seems weakest, is the most material of areas, reproduction. This is no
doubt the reason behind the pact of circumcision: Circumcision marks
the organ and serves as a reminder to Abraham and his descendants
that the sexual function too is dedicated to God's purpose-a lesson
that he is nonetheless slow in learning. Sexual misconduct is the most
common sin in Genesis, and the result is always, of course, renegade
or "unbalanced" offspring whose hand is set against the Hebrews (e.g.
16:11-12; 19:36-38.)
In this context the culminating event of Abraham's life, the "sacrifice" of Isaac, can be seen as a metaphor for Abraham's final triumph
over his physical self. Abraham shows that he is not attached to the
physical, not even the most cherished of physical things, representative of the most uncontrollable of human instincts, reproduction.
However, read as an injunction to absolute faith, Abraham's willingness to sacrtfice Isaac is a troubling incident, one that no reasonable reader could endorse, since to do so would serve to justifY the
most horrible acts of zealotry. Instead I would argue that the incident
serves as the symbolic culmination of Abraham's life because it
demonstrates Abraham's knowing acceptance of God's balance.
Whereas before Abraham had doubted the efficacy of God's waters in
what appeared to be a purely material world (how can God wet the
womb that Earth has dried?) he now knows their power: For the mock
sacrifice of Isaac to make moral sense, Abraham must be fully aware
that Isaac will not die, despite the material appearance to that effect.
In other words Abraham's experience should not be summed up in
the words "God gave, and God can take; my own heart's desires are
meaningless," but rather "I know God's waters are upon my son, he
will not bum." (cf. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in Daniel3.) In
this way the incident can be seen as a parallel to the death of Lot's
wife. As that incident shows, it is up to man to maintain the balance
of earth/water/air by an act of will. If his attention wavers, as Lot's
wife's did, he will lose the blessed waters, and so burn.
Presenting the incident in these terms, we can also begin to see a
second function of the incident. It is not only Abraham's last act, but
Isaac's first, a kind of rite of initiation in which Isaac is shown the
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truth about man. The sacrifice by fire is an image of desiccation: of
God forcibly removing the blessing waters, and the ritual of "trial by
fire" to which Isaac is subjected is a way of showing the boy how fully
he is dependent on the blessing. It is God's way of holding the boy over
the fire, like Jonathan Edwards's sinners in the hands of an angry
God. ln this way the boy learns, through ritual instruction, what his
father learned through experience. This sense of passing on a spiritual
tradition is present throughout the story in Abraham instructing the
boy how to conduct himself.
Indeed arguably, Isaac's initiation is the centra[ focus of the story
(despite the narrator's-perhaps inserted?-commentary to the contrary.) Every other story in Genesis couples an event with its consequences in order to make its point. If this story is about Abraham then
it is unique in that there are no recorded consequences for Abraham.
But there are consequences for Isaac. It seems likely, at least, that the
seemingly unique incident of the sacrifice might be the cause of the
equally unique life lived by Isaac, the only Genesis patriarch who does
not have a problematic apprenticeship in his relationship with God.
Isaac's rich spiritual life is beautifully summed up in one sentence:
"And Isaac digged again the wells of water, which they had digged in
the days of Abraham his father" (26:18). Isaac's spiritual precociousness is also indicated by the fact that he is named by God in the
womb-rather than initiated later into full Patriarchal status with a
new name, as Abram and Jacob are. Perhaps the memorable experience of being held over the fire by God, and understanding in a
palpable way how essential the blessing is to man's existence, has left
Isaac in need of no further instruction.
Other parallels within the lives of the Patriarchs also support this
interpretation. Each Patriarch in Genesis must undergo a rite of
passage (exile or ritual death) before achieving spiritual maturity.
Joseph's is the purest case of the pattem: Before he can begin his
spiritual joumey he must be cast into the pit, left for dead, and then
brought up again. This ritual death releases him from the old life and
into a new one. 2° For Jacob and Abraham, exile from home performs
this function: They must leave all they know-" country ... kindred ...
thy father's house"- and begin anew, eventually achieving a new
identity marked by a new name. For Isaac this transformation occurs
instantaneously in one act of ritual violence. He is jolted from his old
life into a new one by an abrupt combination of ritual death (being
held over the fire). spiritual vision (he communes with God on the
mountaintop, perhaps for the first time); and accelerated apprenticeship (leaming the ritual from his father, by preparing for his own
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
physical death). Thus Isaac is pushed through all of the necessary
stages of development in a single incident, and we may regard him as
spiritually mature from that point onward (although he does repeat
his father's sexual error in the episode with Abimalech; chapter 26).
Jacob
For Jacob the symbolic descent and rebirth follows a lengthy arc
of exile and retum, but the same goal is achieved through the same
means. Jacob's early life and his struggles with Esau may reasonably
be compared with Abraham and Lot, and the point is similar. God
chooses the boy predisposed to spiritual things and cultivates his
understanding, while the more physical of the two is allowed to sink
deeper into his earthiness. To them that have, more is given. {The root
of Jacob's naiile, which means "heel," comes from the Hebrew verb "to
follow," suggesting, perhaps, among its other connotations, that he is
a natural follower on the path.) This distinction also operates on the
telltale sexual level as well, Esau choosing two nearby, and presum·
ably attractive Hittite women, while Jacob chooses a more distant
mate suitable for perpetuating the blessing. Like Isaac before him,
Jacob finds his beloved by a well, symbolizing that she is an appro·
priate mate in the truer reality, and a spiritual resource.
Following demonstrations of his spiritual propensity Jacob then
undergoes a ritual death, in which he is expelled from his horne. The
double explanation of his departure, that he is forced to leave because
he stole the blessing (27:41·45) or that he leaves in peace with his
father's blessing to get a suitable wife (28: 1·4) are really one in the same
from the point of view of the characteristic structure: He is forsaking
the old life of"country, kindred, and father's house" to enter a new life
driven, ultimately, by the desire for a relationship with God.
Jacob's departure is immediately followed by a dream vision similar
to Abraham's:
And Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went
toward Haran.
And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried
there all night.. ..
And he dreamed, and behold a ladder was set up
on the earth ....
And behold, the Lord stood above it and said I am
the Lord God ...
the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give
it....
(28:10·13)
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The dream/vision is intended to draw Jacob into the altemative
reality, as it did Abraham. This vision reveals an inner Eden where
once-sundered heaven and earth are reconnected (here by a ladder
rather than a tree.) But Jacob is not yet prepared to live in such a
world. The experience exacts only a tentative commitment of future
interest from him. And, as with Abraham, it is an interest based on
material gaJn: "If God will be with me, and will keep in the way that I
go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on./ So that I
come again to my father's house in peace; then shall the Lord be my
God .... " (28:20-21.) There follows a long and, it would seem, largely
unsuccessful apprenticeship period in which Jacob's primary interest
appears to be the acquisition of women and property-indeed, having
taken up Esau's blessing he seems to have also assumed his personality, no longer a "plain man, dwelling in tents," but a rough adventurer. Within the context of the larger metaphor however, we can see
the change as positive: Jacob has outgrown his anachronistic Edenic
consciousness in which he expects to be blessed withoUt eaming it,
and adopted a post-lapsarian (or "desert") mentality in which, Adamlike, he labors to extract blessings from the land, and, metaphorically,
to spiritualize his rough earth. The penultimate scene in his story, in
which he spends an entire night wrestling with God, finally managing
to extract a blessing, suggests the same motif of an essentially earthy
nature struggling to achieve some spiritual insight. While Jacob never
reaches the goal of full integration of earth and spirit that was held
out to him in his ladder dream-never regains Eden-he doeS. manage,
in his own way, to make a retum of sorts to the gates of the garden,
in his reunion with Esau. This encounter has all the elements of the
Cain and Abel conflict: two jealous brothers, a disputed blessing,
long-simmering resentments. But Jacob manages to rever$£ the decline of that second fall, making correct choices where Cain (and Jacob
himself in his earlier manifestation) had made wrong ones: Cain was
jealous of the blessing his brother had received; Jacob offers his own
blessing back agaln to his brother (33: ll "Take, I pray thee, my
blessing that is brought to thee.") Cain is ungrateful for the blessings
he has received; Jacob is thankful, despite his long suffering ("because
God hath dealt graciously with me,"), and Jacob is satisfied with his
lot ("I have enough"); Caln lacked respect for the spirit within Abel;
Jacob regards his brother's face as equivalent to the face of God ("I
have seen thy face, as though I had seen the face of God," 33:10); and
therefore is happy when that face is pleased ("thou wast pleased with
me.") Jacob has achieved an impressive degree of spiritual success.
But his iriumph is not complete; he has reversed the historical decline
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
of man back to the gates of the Garden, but is unable to press further,
into the New Eden.
Joseph
The story of Joseph again follows the same pattern, but with a twist
in the return: Rather than being gathered unto his fathers, Joseph
gathers his father unto him. As in the case of Abraham and Lot, and
Jacob and Esau, Joseph's story begins with a distinction being made
between the spiritual tendencies of the special son, and his more
worldly brothers. Joseph has the power of prophetic dreams. This
power occasions some pride on his part and jealously on the part of
his brothers (reiterating the Cain motif again), which sets the stage
nicely for the next step in the pattern, the ritual death in which the
hero is ostracized and humbled. In this case, as with Isaac, the ritual
death almost becomes a literal one: He is thrown into the pit, and his
brothers report him as dead. The coat of many colors serves as a
literary device to provide proof of the dead one's identity, but it also
makes a significant point about the arena in which God's chosen ones
should seek glory, and why the Patriarch must die to this world. The
same point is made also at the end of the story, in the wonderful scene
in which the old shepherd Jacob stands before Pharoah on the throne
(47:7-10.) In this single image of spiritual wealth facing material
wealth, much of the message of Genesis is encapsulated. Only here,
perhaps, do we begin to see the artistry of the text in drawing us into
its own world-view: Absorbed in the drama of the Patriarchs' quest we
had never stopped to think how ordinary these men appeared to their
fellows at the marketplace, or along the road. The scene of Jacob before
the throne of Pharoah jolts us into the awareness that despite the
promises of land and great nations, these material th.ings are not at
all what God's promise is about. The patriarchs are not kings of
government or commerce, but of an inward land.
Like Isaac, Joseph needs only one hard demonstration to learn this
lesson well. After his ritual death Joseph passes easily into his new
life, never again displaying the slightest degree of pride or resentment.
Whatever his circumstances, life is all one to Joseph, in a way that
reminds one of an eastern swami. Whether servant. prisoner or ruler
of all Egypt, he never changes, and never displays any attachment
whatsoever to his material surroundings. Although the text never
expltcWy says so, his equanimity must result from his firrn foundation
in the alternative reality of dreams. Knowing what the future holds,
and that it is ordained by God, he is at peace with both appearances
and reality.
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In this sense Joseph is already possessed of the Promised Land, a
new inward Eden which is his true home, no matter what his outward
circumstances may be. Like the original pre-lapsarian state, this new
Eden is characterized primarily by balance, in two senses: His spirit
is completely at peace, and his nature is a balanced mixture of earth,
water and breath, according to the original recipe. That is, his physical
life is fully permeated by spiritual awareness, as rich soil is permeated
by water, and so is fertile ground for fruits of the spirit. When Jacob
summarizes his son during his deathbed blessing, this image is
exactly the one that he chooses: "Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a
fruitful bough by a well; whose branches run over the wall. .. " (49:22).
Judah
Like Isaac, Joseph has a very brief apprenticeship and a lengthy life
of grace. His final test (which like Jacob's, involves overcoming the Cainite
desire for revenge agalnst his brothers) is largely a perfunctory exercise,
and is really less of a test for Joseph than an initiation for Judah, in
which Judah must prove himself by offering his body as a saclifice to
redeem Benjamin. In this way the incident is structurally similar to
Abraham's binding of Isaac: The final test in which the Patriarch proves
his own excellence also serves as an initiation for his protege.
Judah, however, disturbs the pattem of succession that has been
so consistent throughout Genesis and also undermines Joseph's
stature when, in the final verses of the book, he appears to take the
prominent place, even above Joseph, in his father's blessing: Judah's
prominence may be, as some have argued, simply an insertion to
adjust the text to later historical reality. Or, perhaps, it is not
necessarily inconsistent with the message of Genesis as a whole, since
Judah's reign is in the temporal world, as a "law-giver," while Joseph
reigns in the higher world of dreams. But it is also true that it is from
Judah, not Joseph, that the most prominent line of descent comes.
The line of Judah results in both David and Solomon (1 Chronicles 2).
and Christ (Matthew, chapter I). Judah hardly seems to be an
exemplary Patriarch, however, and the details surrounding his progeny is also troubling: The line is perpetuated through a woman
previously married to two of Judah's sons, who poses as a harlot to
become impregnated. We can only conclude that this complex story
is meant to impress us with the lengths to which God is forced to go
to keep the Hebrew lineage pure, in the face of man's lack of cooperation. Purity is essential because those lineages that have strayed too
far from God's balance cannot be rebalanced, and will only serve to
unbalance others. When Joseph marries an Egyptian (given to him
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
not by God but by Pharaoh). and Judah marries a Canaanite woman,
the purity of the line is in jeopardy, but despite all, God manages to
remove any obstacles and unite Judah with a Hebrew woman.
From the Chiistian point of view, which asks us to explain Judah's
as the lineage of Chiist, we can argue for Judah's greater worth in
light of the fact that he offers his body to redeem Benjamin from the
bondage of sin, lest his father be saddened by the loss. The language
here is strongly evocative of Christ's mission: "Now therefore," Judah
tells Joseph, "I pray thee, let thy servant abide instead of the lad a
bondsman to my Lord; and let the lad go up with his brethren./ For
how shall I go up to my father, and the lad be not with me?" (44:33-34).
Such a reading of Judah's role may disrupt the neat narrative pattern
of Genesis, but fulfills the larger message of the book. Since the trend
from Abraham to Joseph has been to replace the lure of mateiial gain
with that of spiiitual wealth, Judah's life story could profitably be seen
as the fulflllment of that trend, the first stage in a new order tn which
men live not for their own gain but for the good of others. This is an
appealing readtng, and has only one source of lingeiing doubt. Since
Joseph's experience is arguably also one of sacrificing himself for
others ("God did send me before you to preserve life," 45:5). it is
difficult to see how Judah's sacrifice takes precedence over Joseph's.
But perhaps the fact that Judah appears to be the lesser man may
really be the point. The shift from Joseph to Judah does seem to
suggest almost a changing of the guard. Perhaps it is most profitable
to see Joseph as the last of the great "demigod" patiiarchs and Judah
as the start of a new era, in which the best of men are good enough,
but none too good by Patiiarchal standards. This idea is supported by
the metaphors of Jacob's fmal blessing. While Joseph is called a
"fruitful bough by a well" (49:22). Judah is a "lion's whelp," one who
"binds his foal unto the vine, and his ass's colt unto the choice vine"
(49: 9, II). The metaphors suggest a piimary quality about Joseph's
spiiitual life that is missing in Judah: Joseph has his roots sunk
directly into the waters of life, while Judah is merely tethered to the
vine whose roots feed on these waters. Judah has access to these
life-giving waters only in adulterated, second-hand form, through the
fruit of the vine. (Here, as in the story of Noah's drunkenness, fruit
evokes the taint of the Fall.) The same point is latent in the image of
Judah as a lion crouched over his prey: Judah's blessing is a secondhand sort-life drawn from another life, not anginal in itself.
The overwhelmtng preponderance of evidence, then, seems to mark
Jacob's blessing as a turning point in the history of God's chosen
lineage, tn which the generation of Patriarchs has ended, to be
�GABLE
73
replaced by a race of "law-givers," men whose most direct access to
God is through the letter, and not the spirit. Speaking of himself to
his brothers, Joseph says "God did send me before you to preserve
life," words that are perhaps meant to link his activities to that of the
last great member of an earlier race, Noah. Their roles are certainly
similar. Noah collected the animals to preserve them from a flood;
Joseph collects the grain (epitomized as seven fat cows in Pharoah's
dream) to preserve life from drought. But the most important similar·
ity, perhaps, is that both'men are the last of a past, greater race, a
superior generation who "walked with God."
For in fact, the God of Genesis is a receding God. In Abraham's day
God spoke to Abraham as man to man, even coming to his tent in
human form (18:lff) and debating with Abraham and his wife. By
Jacob's time God comes in dreams only, speaking, indeed as man to
man, but only in the visionary state, and never as a physical presence.
(I assume that Jacob's wrestling match with God occurs within a
vision.) Joseph, despite the many blessings he receives, and despite
his great wisdom and insight, never sees God or speaks face to face
with him, or even hears his voice. For Joseph, God comes only veiled
in prophetic dreams. Unmistakably God is receding fi:·om the world in
Genesis. The reason appears to be that He came here only to lead his
people out. He was active in men's affairs when He needed to be, during
man's infancy when man was not able to maintain the earth/water I air
balance himself. But He has receded as men begin to learn the secret
themselves. This is not to say that He is no longer available to men,
but rather, that he is available through different channels, and that He
typically does not come to us, but waits for us to find the way to Him.
Notes:
1.
"One should not think," writes Von Rad, "that the many individual
traditions about the patriarchal period in circulation came together
by themselves into such an artful and theologically deliberate composition." (Gerhard Von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1961, p. 159.) On the issue of source research,
Van Rad asks rhetorically "What is the content of chapter 22 if the
narrative no longer legitimizes the abolishment of child sacrifice?
What is the meaning of chapter 28 ... if the narrative no longer legitimizes the sacredness of Bethel and its customs?" The answer, of
course, is that they mean what the compiler has designed them to
mean within the larger context of the work.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
See also Zvi Adar, The Book of Genesis: An Introduction to the Biblical
World (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press of Hebrew Univ., 1990). p. 9ff:
"Even on the assumption that the Book of Genesis is composed of
different elements, it is clear that they have been blended into one
integral whole."
2. By "structuralist" I mean, here, a way of reading that begins by first
considering the internal ontology of the text, rather than, say, its plot
or characterization, on the assumption that the meaning of characters
and events deperid significantly on their ontological ground. This
analysis is accomplished by considering the specific meaning of
particular images (or words or ideas} first within the structure of the
text as a whole, rather than in their discrete contexts: In other words,
I assume that certain words can take on special meanings in a text
because of the way they are used. This is similar in many regards to
traditional interpretive reading, except that in locating these "special"
meanings this method does not distinguish between "real" objects and
images in the text: It doesn't matter whether the water is real water
or metaphorical water, or even water used as a metaphor by a
character and hence doubly removed from "real" water. I am concerned, instead, with what water means to the author of the text.
Presumably, such knowledge is indispensable if one is to understand
the full meaning of a sentence like, for example, "And Isaac digged
again the wells of water, which they had digged in the days of Abraham
his father" (Genesis 26: 18).
In some texts, of course, this method of reading will yield little of
interest. It is most useful in texts that have a strongly symbolical bent,
and it is especially appropriate for a text like Genesis, which claims
to speak about the Word become concrete reality in Creation, and
which claims a special status for itself as a living Word: In Genesis,
matertal substance is more than mere substance, and metaphors are
always somehow more than just metaphors, because in the ontology
of the living Word all ideas are really both metaphor and substance.
Under such circumstances, it would be a mistake not to read the text
with an enlightened disregard for the boundary between symbol and
reality,
3. The one really significant difference between Adam and Eve is seen
here, in the degree of their closeness to the Earth/Mother principle.
In the second Creation story (2:22 ff) Eve is said to be made from a
rib of Adam's; she is therefore presumably embedded one level deeper,
as it were, in the material Creation, and so is one step further removed
from the breath that originally gave Adam life.
In the same vein, it is significant that Eve is described as being
"made" rather than "created." The first· creation story (Genesis 1)
draws a significant distinction between those things that God created
(i.e., ex nihilo) and those he made: For example, the first appearance
of a "moving creature" (1: 20-21) is described as an act of creation,
�GABLE
75
but subsequent different forms of that original concept are described
as being "made." It seems likely that the making of Eve in the second
creation story is designed to follow this pattem. This fact can be
interpreted in two ways. It could be argued simply that Eve is a
subsequent production in the same line, and so would naturally be
"made" and not "created." But the more traditional view would suggest
that Eve has contact with God mostly secondartly, through Adam, and
the fact that she is made from Adam's substance, rather than simply
made, would seem to support this idea. The point of this hierarchy is
presumably to maintain a family structure headed spiritually by the
husband~to make him the broker through which the female receives
God's blessings. It must be said, however, that ultimately the impact
of this male-female difference on the larger picture is fairly minimal:
The spiritual health of both male and female depend on the same
things, only the norm would be for the female to access those things
primarily [or partly] through her husband.
4. The idea of the tree as navel, derived here from the imagery of joined
opposites that is characteristic of the earth/water /air imagery in
Genesis, may in fact have deep roots in early cosmological conceptions. See for example, Shemaryahu Talman, Literary Studies in the
Hebrew Bible: Form and Content, (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press of
Hebrew Univ., 1993) pp. 50 ff, 'The 'Navel of the Earth' and the
Comparative Method." Talman points out that "the representation of
the world in the form of a human body, a disc, or a square whose
center is marked by a tall mountain which represents its navel, is
prevalent in the mythical traditions of many cultures." In Genesis 2
of course we are dealing with a tree rather than a mountain, but other
imagery in Genesis, notably the tower of Babel and Jacob'S dream of
the ladder, suggests that the Biblical cosmology may well implicitly
assume the idea of a lost "navel" connecting heaven and earth.
5. Zvi Adar, An Introduction. p. 25. This reading is based on a comparison with li Samuel 19:36 (and other passages): "] am this day
four-score years old, can I discem between good and bad? Can your
servant taste what I eat or what I drink?"
6. Jonathan Magonet, "The Themes of Genesis 2-3," A Walk in the
Garden: Biblical, Iconographic and Literary Images ofEden, ed. by Paul
Morris and Deborah Sawyer, Joumatfor the Study of the Old Testament, Supplemental Series 136, (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992) p. 43.
7.
Paul Morris, in Morris and Sawyer, Walk, p. 130.
8.
Ibid, p. 135.
9. Robert Sacks, A Conunentary on the Book of Genesis. Ancient Near
Eastern Texts and Studies Volume 6 (Lampeter. U.K.: The Edwin
Mellon Press, 1990) makes an interesting point regarding Cain's
frustration and his inability to accept his new status: "Cain's decision
to return east establishes a pattem which will be followed throughout
�76
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the whole of the book. ... there is something radically wrong with going
east, insofar as it is a partial retum to Eden. Those men who do so
will all tum out to be cowards. It is a manifestation of man's attempt to
return to Eden rather than to face the world as it lies before him" {p. 43).
10. Onan spilled his seed upon the ground rather than sowing it in his
brother's widow, as his father (Judah, and, arguably, God) had
commanded, because he "knew that the seed should not be his"
(Genesis 38: 9). This is a waste of God's gift of potency, as Cain had
wasted his brother's life-blood. In the context of the earth/water /air
imagery, this curious incident of Onan's disobedience also has overtones
of an incestuous and idolatrous love of the earth/mother {again like Cain,
who is the earthy brother): His effort to inseminate the earth directly
seems to suggest, through impious parody, an attempt to usurp God's
power to make the earth fecund by wetting it. Like Cain, he fails to see
that there is no way but God's way to be fruitful and multiply.
11. Umberto Cassuto, among others, hypothesizes that "Cain" refers to
a tribe "designated by the name Cain, or by the appellative Kenite,
which is mentioned several times in Scripture .... The name of the tribe
indicates that it was engaged in metal work .... Hence the tribe of
Kenites was utterly despised in the eyes of neighboring tribes, just as
in Arabia today the wandering tribes of smiths are held in utmost
disdain by the Arabs" (A Commentary on the Book of Genesis,
Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1961 p. 180).
The mention of "such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle"
in the list of Cain's descendents has seemed inconsistent to many
critics. Isaac M. Kikawada and Arthur Quinn (Before Abraham Was:
The Unity of Genesis 1·11, Nashville: Abington Press, 1985) make a
fairly convincing stab at explaining this apparent enigma. The word
translated as "cattle" here is Miqneh, which means "a living possession
... [for which] the possessor has legal title as he would for something
commercially bought." (p. 56). Such a word, they argue, would be
inappropriate to describe the relationship that Abel had with his
animals, and suggests that Cain's descendents are the originators of
commercial farming.
12. See Von Rad (Genesis) p. 110: "Because of the union of these heavenly
beings with earthy women, God's spirit and life-giving power entered
mankind far beyond the original design at creation."
13. Calum M. Carmichael, "The Paradise Myth," p. 47 of Morris and
Sawyer, Walk.
14. Various explanations of these sister/wife incidents have been advanced, but the undeniable fact is that whatever the intended point,
even the participants recognize that Abraham is not protecting his
wife's body and so his own future progeny as he ought to do.
15. Since both Abraham and Lot are shown entertaining the angelic visitors
(chapters 18 & 19), it seems likely that we are meant to locate
�GABLE
77
significant differences in the styles of their hospitality. The differences
between the two are subtle but consistent. Abraham sits in the door
of his tent, Lot at the gates of Sodom; both first offer water to bathe,
rest, and later food, but Lot's offers seem frenzied ("he pressed upon
them greatly," 19;3) and more designed to impress ("he made them a
feast"); Lot insists that they "tarry all night" (19;2), while Abraham
asks only that they tarry until their hearts are "comforted "(18;5); and
of course Lot's entertainment draws significant interest from his
neighbors. Most importilJltly Abraham seems to know who his guests
really are, while Lot apparently does not. Taken together these details
suggest a distinction consistent with the rest of the story: Abraham
is a thoughtful man of spiritual insight, a man who minds his own
business but is also concerned about others. Lot is more interested
in worldly pleasure, and in impressing others. What, after all, can
have been his purpose in sitting at the gate of Sodom, if not to mind
other people's business, and to intercept interesting-looking strangers
to entertain?
16.See Paul Morris, "Exiled from Eden," pp. 117-166_ in Morris and
Sawyer Walk: According to the Midrash, "these 'histories' ... are
focussed on the punishment of exiles and the overcoming of such
pnnishment {'retums') ~Israel's sin and exile are a reiteration of
Adam's sin and exile ~".
17. Harold Bloom, ed., Modem Critica1 Interpretations: Genesis. (NY:
Chelsea House Publishers, 1986) p. 4.
18.15: 8-12. E. A. Speiser (The Anchor Bib1e: Genesis, Garden City, NJ:
Doubleday & Co., 1964, pp. ll2ffl among others, notes that this is a
contemporary covenant ritual, in which the parties to a contract
incant formulas inviting the powers that be to split them asunder like
these beasts should they breech their promise. Since God is the
promiser here, the lamp and fumace that pass between the pieces of
carcass {15: 17) suggest the physical presence of God. Possibly in this
context we are meant to think of the fire as separating the two halves
of the beasts~a negative image of God's water which would normally
hold the two halves of the creatures together. In any case the image
of split halves as a punishment is quite appropriate in light of other
similar imagery in Genesis .
19. See Von Rad, Genesis, p. 158: "the fulfillment of this promise lies
beyond Abraham's own life, and it is scarcely thinkable that the
Yahwist considered it as fulfilled in his day."
20. See James S. Ackerman, "Joseph, Judah, Jacob," in Bloom, Interpretations, p. 103: "The brothers see Joseph coming and ambiguously
refer to him as "ba'al of the dreams." This means something like
"hotshot dreamer"; but the allusion to Ba'al~the Canaanite vegetation God who annually descends into the pit and then arises~under
scores the mythic descent pattem of the hero."
�78
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�A Handbook
That Provides No Help
Elliott Zuckerman
I have read a good number of books about poetic devices, and from
almost all of them I have learned something new, usually about some
· detail or distinction in the realm of rhetoric. But the account of verse
itself will typically sbike me as unclear and incomplete. On those rare
occasions when I can piece together a clear and coherent account of
the meters of English, I am relieved, for at least I can begin to consider
the differences between the author's views and my own. But most of
the time there is no theory of verse discoverable amidst the comments
on random details and the vague waving in the direction of pieties
about poetry in general. And so my reading of books about verse, even
those considered important and definitive, has been an unrewarded
search for how the author would answer this or that clear question.
Although they call themselves prosodists, most of the authors do not
seem to recognize that the theory of verse, like the theory of meter in
music, is a bounded subject requiring decisions about how to read
and scan and count. and that it is not for nothing that poets once
talked of "measures" and "numbers."
Recently I came across a handbook in paperback that I had
somehow missed when it first appeared in hard cover. The author is
William Packard, who (according to my brief researches). has been a
professor of poetry at New York University and edited a magazine -for
some years in New York but later in Maine-devoted to what he calls
the craft of poetry. The Poet's Dictionary: A Handbook of Prosody and
Poetic Devices was published in 1989 by a reputable publisher and
reissued in paperback in 1994. * It carries a foreword by the poet and
prosodist Karl Shapiro, who himself wrote one of the standard
handbooks of the sixties; and there is a blurb on the cover of the
paperback -placed in quotation marks but unatbibuted, like a sign
in a supermarket-asserting that "both novice and professional poets
and all afficionados [sic] of verse should rejoice over" the book. (The
mis-spelling might serve as a warning to readers who still expect
accuracy in such details.) Although I am something more than a novice
poet yet not a professional (whatever that may be), I do, I think, qualiJY
*The Poet's Dictionary: A Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices (Harper & Row,
1989). HarperPerenniel Paperback Edition, 1994.
Elliott Zuckerman is Tutor Emeritus at St. John's College.
�so
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
as an aficionado of at least some kinds of verse. But far from pleasing
me, the book made me indignant -indignant enough to write this
unsolicited review. I do thtnk that the best reason for writing criticism
is to call attention to a good book that might otherwise be overlooked.
But sometimes a review has to be written as a waming against a
presumed authority who misleads and misinforms.
I
Like many handbobks, this one is written in short titled articles
arranged alphabetically. There are about a hundred and ten articles-from ACCENT to ZEUGMA-in a little more than two hundred
pages. I like to read such books by starting with one ariicle and then
going on to wherever the references lead me. In this case I started at
the beginning, because the article on ACCENT promised to lead me
right away to the important entry called METER. It is in METER that the
ktnds of feet are briefly defined, and illustrated with passages of verse.
I deduced from the brief naming and illustration of the kinds of feet
that the author seemed to subs crtbe to a fairly common view of how
to expound meters, which I call the Substitution theory. An iambic
tetrameter, for example, in its simplest fonn will consist of four clear
iambs. Then for any iambic foot (but particularly the first in the line)
another kind of foot can be "substituted." In my opinion, this theory
is by no means so straightforward as it sounds. It almost invariably
ignores the question of where the stress of the substituting foot lies
in relationship to the stress of the hypothetically underlying foot. To
put the important question slightly more generally: Does the theorist
subscribe to a more or less isochronous placement of the stressed
syllables? Are the stresses more or less equidistant in time?
Let's take as an example the simplest case. The most common
"substitution" that occurs 1n English iambic verse is the use of a
trochee in the opening foot:
The Gods, that mortal Beauty chase,
Still in a Tree did end their race.
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that She might Laurel grow.
In these couplets from Marvell's "Garden," the second and fourth
lines display an opening inversion. And perhaps that is all that needs
to be said about the scansion-unless one ventures into the realm of
interesting prosodic questions, which, in my opinion, begins with the
question of where the stresses of the trochees lie in relation to the
stresses of the underlying iambs. Should we, that is to say, posit an
isochronous, or evenly spaced, set of stresses, which underline both
�ZUCKERMAN
81
the regular meter and the meter that is vaned with so-called substituted feet? Are the stresses on "Still" and the first syllable of "Only" in
the same place (so to speak) as the stresses on "Gods" and the second
syllable of "Apollo"?
Let me repeat these questions with reference to a purely metrical
schema. Here is a representation of the underlying iambic tetrameter,
the regular meter that is unchanged in lines one and three:
ulululul
And here is the common variation in which a trochee replaces the first
iamb, as in lines two and four:
luululul
Now if the stresses are meant to be more or less equally distant from
one another, the two lines would line up in this way:
ulululul
luul u I u I
-which is what I think happens metrically. Of course there are
prosodists who refuse to posit isochronous stresses at all, and although I think they then have a great deal of trouble defining what
they mean by meter, I welcome learning of their refusal, because it
clalifies where they stand.
I would, with some interest, have started to search for Mr Packard's
views about this question, but I was stopped short by certain details
in his exposition that were misleading about far simpler'- matters. I
quickly began to see that questions about isochronism were far too
subtle for this book, and that innocent readers were in danger of being
confused by statements and examples about elementary definitions.
Consider the first example given to illustrate the trochaic, which is
from the first act of Macbeth, a witch speaking:
I'll drain him dry as hay:
Sleep shall neither night nor day
Hang upon his penthouse lid;
He shall live a man forbid:
To be sure, once it gets going the meter here can be called trochaic;
but with all the clear and even sing-song trochaic tetrameters to
choose from, why use one that begins with an iamb, in a line that is
plainly iambic? Even the subsequent lines are not lucid examples, for
in this meter the row of trochees is catalectic, or missing the final
unstressed syllable. Lines two, three, and four look like this:
luluful
�82
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Are those four trochees wHhout a tail, or are they four iambs without
a head? But that is hardly a question one should have to begin with
when simply being shown what a trochee is. Anything from Hiawatha
would have made the point impeccably.
Mr Packard's second example of the trochaic is King Lear's line of
culminating negatives:
Never, never, never, never, never!
Here are five incontrovertible trochees, but in a line that I and others
have used often enough to display the painful distortion of five iambs
into their opposites. To be sure, the suggestion that there is something
metaphorical of Lear's despair in the very prosody of the line would
seem high-powered in the context of simply introducing the trochee
as a foot. So why choose this example, which, for any reader who
knows that it comes from a context of iambic pentameter, brings up
questions far in excess of the matter at hand? As blank verse, for
example, the line could be construed as five iambs with a feminine
ending and misstng the first upbeat-a five-footed equivalent of the
ambiguity in the previous example.
Mr Packard's illustrations of the spondaic likewise skips over
essentiai aspects of the definition, while at the same time prompting
perplexities for which the reader has been given no preparation. The
first example is once again from Macbeth -I am not questioning the
quality of the examples, only their illustrative adequacy:
Out, out brief candle ...
These are not clear spondees at all. In the context of blank verse there's
no reason why the first "out" shouldn't be taken as an upbeat to the
stronger second. Or, to put it another way, this "spondee" could be
construed as an iamb in which the light syllable has been "promoted"
to almost equai status with the stressed syllable. But nowhere in the
book is there the slightest mention of the useful idea of the promotion
or demotion of stresses. The question of the relation of the spondee to
an underlying iamb arises in full force with Packard's next example,
a famous one from Paradise Lost:
Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and Shades of Death.
Here at least I can (with no help from the teacher) pair up the first six
monosyllables into three iambs-or I suppose I should say three
spondees that are substituting for the iambs-and then be left at the
end with two incontrovertable iambs: "and Shades/ of Death." Not a
bad example at all, if only the reader had been told what to look for:
�ZUCKERMAN
83
certamly better than Mr Packard's third and last example of the
spondaic, from Ginsberg's Howl:
I saw the best minds of my generation ...
The only presumed spondee I can find here is "best minds"; but if I
construe the line (or fragment of a line) according to traditional
scansion and discover that it falls (not surprisingly) into blank verse,
it turns out that "best" and "minds" belong to different feet:
I saw I the best/ minds of/ my gen/ er·a/ tion
And if I don't scan the line tn any traditional way-and one might well
question whether an introduction of the standard feet ought to use
lines, or part of lines, from free verse-there's not much point in the
close analysis offeet at all.
It is something of a give-away that Mr Packard follows his brief
exposition of the various kinds of feet with a note of warning, along
with quasi-scriptural quotations from Shelley and Emerson and Col·
eridge which really have very little relevance to his warning. Here's
what Packard himself says:
No matter how adept one becomes at metrical scansion,
one should remember that poets have always insisted
that the intuitive music of poetry must come first.
It is hard to know how "tntuitive music" might differ from any other
music of verse, but the connotation seems to be that_ something
intuitive must be better than something that sounds as mechanical
as "metrical scansion." There is anyway little danger that a reader of
this book will become adept at scanning, mechanically or otherwise,
since nowhere in the book are there indications of how to scan
according to any clear set of rules.
II
So far I have complamed of theoretical vagueness and misleading
examples-not quite enough to precipitate an extended attack. But it
was not long before I met the first of the many expositions that display
deep-seated misunderstandings. The unlikely location was the section
on RHYME--and I say unlikely because tn my experience there is not
much that can go wrong when expounding something so straightfor·
ward. Packard has no trouble distinguishing tersely between mascu·
line and feminine rhymes: he gives examples of each, and tells us that
the masculine rhyme falls on the last syllable of the line and the
feminine on the next-to-last. So far so good.
�84
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
He then introduces a poem of Herrick's that "altemates masculine
and feminine rhymes ... until the final couplet, which employs a monosyllable masculine rhyme." Anyone who knows the usage should know
what to expect: a poem in which a couplet the two lines of which end
in one kind of rhyme, the masculine, is followed by a couplet whose
lines end in the other kind, the feminine, and so on in alternation:
mmffrnrnff.... Such altemation happens to be the staple prerequisite
for all rhyming in French verse (where of course a fmal schwa-like
"silent e" provides the second syllable of the feminine rhyme). and
because of the altemation it can safely be said that the totality of
French verse displays an equal number of each sort of rhyme. In
English, however, such strict altemation is rare, and I looked forward
to seeing it done by Herrick. Instead this is what Packard quotes:
A sweet disorder in the dresse
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
A Lawne about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction:
An erring Lace, which here and there
Enthralls the Crimson Stomacher:
A Cuffe neglectful!, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly:
A winning wave (deserving Note)
In the tempestuous petticote:
A careless shoe-sbing in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Doe more bewitch me, then when Art
Is too precise in every part.
Anyone acquainted with the stmplest facts of rhyming can see that atr
the rhymes here are masculine. There is indeed something going on
that is worthy of comment-and not easily noticed unless one starts
looking for what aspect of the rhyming Mr Packard could possibly be
pointing to. It seems that in almost all the couplets except the last,
the first syllable of the rhyming pair happens also to be a monosytrabic
word, while the responding syllable of the rhyming pair is the final
syllable of a polysyllabic word. When Packard asked us to notice
altemating masculine and feminine rhymes, I could only take that to
mean altemating pairs of such rhymes, for we all know (and I think
he knows elsewhere) that it is nonsense to speak of a single stressed
syllable as "rhyming" with a disyllabic combination of stressed-andunstressed (or stress plus enclitic). Moreover, even if what happens
in the Herrick poem could be called a sort of unusual rhyming, then
the "rhymes" called feminine would have to be characterized as doubly
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ZUCKERMAN
feminine, for the stressed syllables are followed by not one but two
unstressed syllables. Packard's confusion is deeply embedded, for the
"rhyme" that he refers to is that of a stressed syllable with the second
of two unstressed syllables. But Herrick's rhymes are not "dresse" and
"wantonnesse," etc., but "dresse" and "nesse," "thrown" and "on,"
"there" and "cher," the second of each pair counting as a masculine
single stress, just like the first-and indeed there is an over-rhyme in
the case of"tye" and "ty," an identity of sound of the sort that is sought
after in French but discouraged in English.
Another way of putting all this is to acknowledge that all the lines
are in the same meter, an iambic tetrameter (in which, as we have
already noticed, the opening foot can be a trochee, as in lines two and
four). Hence the rhyme, is always the eighth syllable, regardless of
whether that syllable is a single word or the last syllable of a polysyllable. Nowhere is there a ninth syllable (necessarily unstressed) to
provide a feminine ending, and if there were such an ending there
would of course have to be a pair of them to make a rhyme. This is a
wordy way of putting things, and I used to think of such matters as
too obvious to be written out-before I encountered the strange
mistakes of Mr Packard. Imagine the perplexity of some beginner who
thought he grasped the easy distinction between masculine and
feminine rhymes and then was presented with the Herrick example
and its introduction.
III
It is under the entry ALEXANDRINE that Mr Packard makes his
worst set of mistakes, and shows that his confusion about English
verse is matched by his confusion about French verse, despite the fact
that the book includes many examples of his translations of the
French masters. Right away we are told that in the classical French
alexandrine-which is, of course, to French verse what iambic pentameter is to English-there is a caesura that divides the line into two
half-lines "of three feet each on either side."
I remember when, during my first encounter with French verse, I
tried to read the French alexandrine as though it were pretty much
the same as the English; it seemed reasonable enough to do so: there
are six syllables on either side of the pause, and since the hemistich
often enough had its stresses-different, of course, from English or
German stresses, but still discernible-on a combination of the second
and the sixth, or the fourth and the sixth, it was possible to pair up
the six syllables as iambs. This: • • I • • I, and this: • • • I • I, could
both be read as • I • I • I. But I was disabused soon enough, most
immediately by the sort of line I had to call "anapestic":
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
••I ••I
As an example of that sort of line, I'll use one that Mr Packard himself
quotes elsewhere in his book, displaying as usual his taste for great lines:
Je levis, je rougis. je palis
a sa vue ...
No amount of wishful scanning could force the two trisyllable divisions
of each hemistich into three disyllabic feet. This line from Phedre also
happens to be the line'that is cited in the article on the ALEXANDRINE
in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics, where there is a correct
reference to "the fluid 4 accents ... " of the French line. Mr Packard even
quotes the evidence against his own statement right after he makes
it, for there he gives us the inevitable opening lines of the play:
Le dessein en est pris: je pars, cher Theramene,
Et quitte le sejour de l'aimable Trezene.
Dans le doute martel dontje suis agite,
Je commence a rougir de mon oisivete ...
Although there are some half-lines in this speech (the second half of
line one, for example) that could, for speakers of English, fairly
naturally be construed as having three iambs, I should think that
there is strong enough evidence here against the notion that anything
like three feet can generally be found. The most common forms of the
hemistich show two stresses-on syllables two and six,
Je pars, cher Theramene
Et quitte le sejour
or furee and six-what I have called the "anapestic" hemistich:
Le dessein en est pris
De l'aimable Trezene
or four and six. (In the hemistiches quoted, those ofthe first two lines,
note the chiasmus.) When the hemistich is the first half of the line,
the sixth syllable is the stress preceding the caesura; in the second
half, it carries either the masculine rhyme-syllable or the stressed
syllable of the feminine. And with this way of putting it, there is no
need to speak of "feet" at all.
But Mr Packard's misconstruction of French verse is merely a
prelude to some deeper confusion about the scansion of our native
tongue. Although the English Alexandrine has the same name as the
French, it is something quite different: an iambic hexameter, with the
usual break after the third iamb:
u I u I u 1. u I u I u I
�ZUCKERMAN
87
After translating the Racine into fairly wooden but correct English
alexandrines, Mr Packard summons an authority:
C. S. Lewis in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century ... explains the departure in English from the
neoclassic conventions of the alexandrine ...
Since the only "neoclassic convention of the alexandrine" so far quoted
or referred to is that of the French classical drama, the reader may be
understandably puzzled to'hear that sixteenth-century English poets
departed from the practice of the French poets of the next century.
But in the passage that Mr Packard is quoting, C. S. Lewis is clearly
making a general comparison of the two alexandrines, French and
English; tf there is a chronological reference, it must be to the French
alexandrines ofthe sixteenth-century poets.
The quotation of Lewis goes on:
The medial break in the alexandrine, though it may do
well enough tn French, quickly becomes intolerable in
a language with such a tyrannous stress-accent as
ours: the line struts. The fourteener has a much pleasanter movement, but a totally dtfferent one; the line
dances a jig, Hence in a couplet made of two such
yoke-fellows we seem to be labouring up a steep hill in
bottom gear for the first line, and then running down
the other side of the hill, out of control, for the second.
A new term has been introduced, the "fourteener," that has no entry
of its own tn Mr Packard's dictionary. What he says about it here, in
the article on the alexandrine, is entirely wrong. He quotes a Spenserian stanza, and tells us that the final line is "a loose alexandrine, or
what Lewis calls a 'fourteener. "'
Now the alexandrines that end the Spenserian stanza are always
easily scannable iambic hexameters. After the first eight lines of
pentameter, the line with the extra iamb serves to give the reader a
sort of shove into the next stanza-a little push that is, I should think,
needed by readers of The Faery Queen. What Mr Packard calls a "loose"
alexandrine seems to be one in which the caesura is not strictly in the
middle of the line, like the one he quotes:
Of huge Sea monsters, such as living sence dismayd.
Whether or not one wants to call this line loose, there are clearly no
more than the correct twelve syllables. Such lines are emphatically
not what Lewis, or anyone else, would call a "fourteener," which (not
surprisingly) is a line that has fourteen syllables, or seven disyllabic
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
88
feet. In the Princeton Encydopedia it is discussed under the heading
HEPTAMETER. and is clearly no more related to the English alexandrine, or hexameter, than the pentameter is. The three long iambic
lines are of course quite different in character. The longest, the
"fourteener," is usually criticized as "monotonous"; it is the meter of
Chapman's Iliad, and may be the reason why (as someone once joked)
that book can't be read, by Keats or anyone else, much beyond one's first
looking into it. But gi.yen a pause after the fourth foot, the fourteener
reveals itself as one of the most common meters in our language-that
of the ballad, or the Common Measure of the hymnbooks:
ujujujujujujuJ~
uju/ujuj
ujujuj
The kind of "couplet" that C. S. Lewis is referring to is clearly not,
as Mr Packard has it, a mixing of mid-caesura alexandrines and what
he calls "loose" ones, but a coupling of alexandrtnes with fourteeners,
or, to give them the names that show their kinship, of iambic hexameters and iambic heptameters. In its day the coupling was nicely called
"Poulter's Measure," after the presumed practice of poulterers to give
twelve eggs in the first dozen and fourteen in the second. Princeton
quotes an example from Fulke Greville, one in which he turns into
trochees the opening iambs in both lines, as well as the line after the
caesura of the hexameter:
Silence augmenteth grief, writing increaseth rage,
Staled are my thoughts, which loved and lost the wonder of our age.
IV
In the space of a page. Mr Packard as been wrong on many counts.
He has unci early distinguished a "loose alexandri:Oe." incorrectly
identified it with Lewis's fourteener. despite the obvious difference in
syllable-count, and shown his ignorance of the existence of Poulter's
Measure. As to the first, I have so far assumed that by "loose" Mr
Packard simply means that the caesura is placed not strictly after the
third foot. But in the rest of the article, even that becomes unclear.
After quoting the Spenserian stanza. Mr Packard quotes a sonnet from
Astrophet and Ste11a, telling us that there "Sir Philip Sidney used loose
alexandrines." It is not clear from that locution whether he means that
all of the lines or only some of them belong to the category: as it
happens. twelve of the fourteen lines are strongly stopped strictly in
the middle, and only one line-it happens to be the first-is interestingly divided otherwise: 2 - 2 - 2:
�ZUCKERMAN
89
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show ...
The next "loose" alexandrine that Mr Packard quotes-the last line of
one of the (Spenserian) stanzas of Keats's "Eve of St. Agnes"-conforms
to the definition, for the caesura is a syllable late:
Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.
-but the line of Dryden quoted next and also called "loose" has the
caesura in the middle:
But mellows what we write to the dull Sweets of Rhyme.
Perhaps a few additional sentences could have cleared up such
ambiguities. But the matters about which Mr Packard was plainly
wrong clearly required apology and revision, not republication five
years later in paperback.
v
So far I have discussed only two or three of the entries in this
dictionary. A selective miscellany of other references will show that it
is wrong or misleading almost everywhere. In the following lines of
Desdemona's, we are told that lines 3 and 5 and 6 are hexameters:
My noble father,
I do perceive here a divided duty:
To you I am bound for life and education;
My life and education both do learn me
(5) How to respect you; you are the lord of duty;
I am hitherto your daughter. But here's my husband,
And so much duty as my mother show'd
To you, preferring you before her father,
So much I challenge that I may profess
Due to the Moor my lord.
But lines three and five are clearly pentameters that require only a
minimum of elision-"I'am" and "you'are"-and even line six is more
easily scannable as a extrasyllabic pentameter. The hexameter always
seems to be a source of trouble in this book, but Mr Packard goes on
to tell us something else: that "Lines 1 and 10 are foreshortened lines."
Nowhere in the book could I find out clearly what he means by
"foreshortened," but surely in the context of this quotation the reader
ought to be reminded that line one completes the end of the preceding
speech, and line ten is completed by what follows.
No era of English verse is left unmarked by error, confusion, or
neglect. We are told that in Beowulf "there is usually a single
alliteration in each line"; but putting it that way hardly suggests the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
known pattern in which there is alliteration of three of the line's four
strong stresses. There is no mention of the question of the "silent" e's
in Chaucer, and the opening line of the Canterbury Tales is given in
one of its versions, without the instructive inclusion of the other. A
version of one of the Psalms is given as an exan1ple of Free Verse, but
without any mention of how the lines of the Hebrew are organized. The
Limerick is more or less rightly introduced as an anapestic meter,
but-without any wqming apart from saying that it is the "earliest
record of the form"_:_the first example rtngs out with dactyls and
ian1bs:
Hickory dickory dock
The mouse ran up the clock
The clock struck one
The mouse ran down
Hickory dickory dock.
Poe's "Raven" is the example of octarneter, but there is no mention
there or anywhere else of the concept of dipodic verse, in which
trochees or iambs are construed as pairing up to form double feet of
four syllables. Poe's line:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while 1 pondered, weak and weary,
is probably too ponderous to be construed as anything other than
eight trochees. But there are trochaic octameters that can be fairly
schematized as four "feet" looking like this: uu/u. Such dipodic verse
is the staple of Victorian comic verse:
This particularly rapid unintelligible patter
Isn't generally heard, and if it is it doesn't matter.
Many years of reading manuals of meter and poe"tic rhythm have
taught me that it is better to begin the study with comic verse. or
so-called Light verse, and then work one's way to the freer forn1s. just
as the analysis of a subtle minuet or a grand symphonic waltz
movement might best begin with a study of the mere formalities of the
dance itself.
VI
The poem "Sprtng and Fall" of Hopkins is wrttten with four stresses
in each line, without regard to the unstressed syllables. Sometimes
the n1eter may coincide exactly with a traditional trochaic tetran1eter:
By and by, nor spare a sigh
�ZUCKERMAN
91
And sometimes the line has to be marked with special accents that
show where to fmd the stresses that would otherwise be unknown or
ambiguous:
Ali. as the heart grows older
(with accents over the vowels of"Ah" and "as"). In the opening couplet,
the second line is traditionally trochalc, but the first line requires extra
notation:
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
(with accents over the vowels in the first and third syllables of
"Margaret," to show the odd double stress on the name of the child
addressed). In his brief discussion of "sprung rhythm," Mr Packard
gets that first line wrong:
Margaret, are you grieving ...
(with accents over only the first syllable of "Margaret" and on "are").
Now it is of some help to be told to stress the questioning verb, but
surely it is the stressing of the last syllable of the girl's name that we
must be specifically told to do. By omitting that accent-mark, yet
retaining the now unnecessary mark on the opening syllable, Mr
Packard's version seems to prescribe the very reading that Hopkins
had to warn us against, the "normal" reading of only one stress on the
name, hence only three stresses in the line. If Mr Packard's accent-marks represent a printer's error, then of course it ought to have been
corrected when the paperback was issued. But his brief description
of the Hopkins technique suggests that he did not understand what
was going on). "Sprung rhythm," he says, "counts the number of
stresses per line as normally sounded in everyday speech .... " I think
the experience that most people have with the technique is that they
don't "get" the line until they find the right syllables to stress (and,
correlatively, those syllables that have to be glossed over); and that,
far from always being the stresses of ordinary speech, we sometimes
have to be specifically told to stress what would ordinarily be an
unstressed syllable-as we are throughout "Spring and Fall."
VII
Mr Packard has an entry for PROSODY itself. most of which is taken
up by a quotation of someone else. The statement is so uninformed
and so tasteless that I wonder why anyone would choose to quote it.
Here's Mr Packard's reason:
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In addition to the introduction of entirely new elements into contemporary prosody, there has also been
a radical revision of the way traditional prosody is
viewed. Thus Michael Moriarty, the poet and actor,
described his own approach to prosody in an NYQ
Craft Interview.
The New York Quarterly is the magazine that Mr Packard founded and
edited; itfeatured in~erviews with contemporary poets, and with those,
like Mr Moriarty, who combined poetry with other pursuits. In fact,
Mr Moriarty begins by telling us what he does, and what his various
activities have in common:
The basic common denominator I have through writing poetry, prose, or acting, is music ....
The pleonastic diction and the unbalanced syntax remind us that this
is part of an interview, presumably recorded as spoken:
And that's my own approach, my only aesthetic now. With
each breath either of prose or of poetry there are certain
principles of balance to music. Then, no matter what's in
it, I never question its integrtty or its authenticity...
I'm not sure what the antecedents are of "that" and "it," but the display
of fashionable vocabulary is exhilarating-almost as exhilarating as
the outrageous historical sketch that follows:
And, the more I look at the world through musical
terms, the more I shed outwom modalities, outwom
paradigms. And, as example: the diatonic system in
Bach's time reached its highest level-then it had to
be re-examined, and so the Romantics and the twelve
tone series came along, and their creators said: "I don't
care what people say; certain notes can live together
and ought to live together." And they've proven that
point well. And the same thing exists in plays and
exists in life, like living in New York City. New York is
a perlect example where not only certain notes can live
together, but certain people can live together brushing
elbows every day ....
Packard and Moriarty have performed a service for me, for their
writings have removed whatever vestige remained of my wish to retum
to New York City.
�ZUCKERMAN
93
VIII
It occurred to me to look up the original reviews of the Packard
book. The only one I could easily find was in Choice, where there are
brief reviews to aid librarians. Here are the last two sentences of that
review:
Reliability and authenticity are hallmarks of this dictionary. which deserves strong recommendation for
both public and academic libraries. It should also be
on tbe desk of all teachers of literature.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�Theater and Polity
I
Arlene W. Saxonhouse
When we go to our local Vldeowatch or Blockbuster and rent, let's just
say Lawrence Olivier's Henry V or Kenneth Branagh's version of the
same play-or perhaps even Batman Forever-and then bring the
tapes home to watch of our own VCR, with or without friends and
family, we are participating in a mode of activity that began more than
two-and-a-half millennia ago in rustic festivals of ancient Greece.
From those festivals emerged the dramatic form that makes us
observers of actions that we know are representations of actions that
may or may not have taken place as we see them performed. Whether
we watch videotapes or a theatrical production, we know that what
we observe is not what we observe, that we are seeing people who are
not the people (or the animals) that they portray. While we watch this
fantasy world, we engage ourselves in it, and we make it real by the
very process of watching-looking upon the actors as if they were the
people they portray.
The Greeks watching the drama of the Oresteia or the Oedipus
trilogy or the Bacchae knew that they were not seeing Agamemnon,
or Oedipus, or Dionysus. They were seeing representations of those
individuals, men with masks to hide their true identities: by those very
masks, the actors confirmed that they were not the individuals they
were portraying. And yet, "fear and pity" filled the spectators as they
observed events whose representations were performed ~n a defined
stage, employing defined conventions. The characters whose faces
appear on our television sets via the VCR are the same. The actors
may no longer wear masks, but we know that they are not the
characters they portray: while we watch the screen, though, they are
real. We allow illusion to control us and, most important, as Mera
Flaumenhaft develops in The Civic Spectacle*, her elegant study of the
theater and the polity, we allow those illusions to educate us.
Two central themes run through Flaumenhaft's work: first, the
community that is (or is not) created among those sharing in the
illusion of theatrical performances and second the educative role of
these shared (or not shared) illusions. The history that she traces
takes us from the profoundly political, community-building experiences of Greek drama to the isolated individual experiences of the
* Mera J. Flaumenhaft, The Civic Spectacle: Essays on Drama and Community
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 1994).
Arlene W. Saxonhouse is James Olin Murfin Professor of PoliUcal Science at the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW
contemporary movie houses and theaters, with their dimmed lights
and their seats all facing forward towards the stage or screen with the
consequence that we have little sense of the others who share the
experience with us. Through a focus on four different plays, Aeschylus's
Oresteia, Euripides' Bacchae, Machiavelli's Mandragola, and Shakespeare's Henry Vas interpreted in the movie versions by Olivier and
Branagh, Flaumenhaft explores the different political (or non-political)
teachings that emergeJrom each production, teachings that must be
directly related to the context in which the play is produced. Thus, we
move with her from the ancient amphitheater where the plays are
performed by actors with their masks, where from sunrise to sunset,
the entire city watches, to the living room where, with a few others or
perhaps alone, we observe at close range faces that reveal the psychological drama of characters the actors are representing. From a public
grandeur and speech, from a political community observing the
exploration of the principles of justice, of membership, of order, we
end up in a private, intimate world of personal pain, anguish, and, on
occasion, joy.
Flaumenhaft begins this joumey with an essay on the Oresteia. For
those of us saturated with the 0 .J. Simpson trial that was performed
almost daily on the TV screen, Flaumenhaft's discussion reminds us
of the very important connection between theater and the judicial
system. Her discussion focuses on how the trilogy captures the
emergence of the polis in the process of making justice visible. By
bringing the execution of vengeance, the execution of justice, out of
the hidden recesses of the house into the open forum of the polity,
theater becomes the model for the trial. Flaumenhaft's analysis made
this reader, at least, a bit more tolerant of the events which took place
in the Los Angeles courtroom. A trial is a form of theater and, as the
Oresteia illustrates, we should be thankful. Through the theater /trial,
the public community becomes invested in the exercise of justice, we
share in a "common looking," and thus we share in the transition made
so many centuries ago when the execution of justice moved from the
responsibility of the kin of injured to the polis, when the political
community on took the task of remedying harms committed.
The trial as portrayed on the Attic stage or on our televisions is the
retelling of the story, a re-enactment of what was. We may find some
of the stories more petty than others, we may prefer that the story deal
With kings and queens caught in webs of cosmic necessities to stories
that deal with jealous, abusive husbands, but the publicity of both
tums audiences 1n to communities grappling with the necessity of
justice, with understanding the meaning of evidence, of motives, of
�SAXONHOUSE
97
passions, of human desires-and the need for public institutions to
address these issues. The trial as theater and the theater as trial draw
us together and as the play-(trial-)watchers we are united and educated in the ways of justice.
To discuss one of the greatest pieces of Western literature and the
0 .J. Simpson trial in the same paragraph may perhaps seem an act
of sacrilege, but Flaumenhaft's book is constantly taking us persuasively from the ancient st~ge of our world, showing us the continvities
and the differences, helping us reflect on the cultural significance of
modern festivals and even of scripts without page numbers (p. 78).
Even though we no longer sit on the stone seats from sunrise to sunset,
we engage in the activity that began in the Greek amphitheater and
the variations that we have brought to that experience reveal much
about who we are and what our politics has come to mean.
Flaumenhaft's discussion of the raw and difficult to watch Bacchae
continues her theme of theater as a community of voyeurs, but in this
essay Flaumenhaft points more powerfully to the differences with
modem theater. We are reminded of how theatergoing in ancient
Athens was a civic festival. However much we may advertise "festivals"
today, a Shakespeare festival at Stratford, a Shaw festival at Niagara,
and so forth, in no way do these festivals capture the experience of
parading by torchlight through the city in politically defined divisions
in honor of the god of the theater and/or the city. But it is not only
the differences between ancient and modern festivals the at interest
Flaumenhaft. Through an analysis of the Bacchae she illustrates how
that particular tragedy is a commentary on the community activity
entailed in going to the theater in the ancient world. "In the theater,
spectators must face what is mixed and mingled, mangled and impure" (74). The boundaries that defme where the citizens and spectators march in the parade, where they sit when they are in the theater,
how they vote (or do not vote) as citizens, appear, under the influence
of Dionysus, the god of the theater, permeable and uncertain.
Dionysus wanders through the drama taking place before the
audience, breaking down all distinctions between male and female,
god and human, animal and human, city and country. Pentheus, the
ruler of Thebes, whose body is to be tom to pieces and gnawed upon
by his mother, tries ineffectively to affirm distinctions, political
boundaries between cities, between male and female, between free and
impiisoned. Those boundaries charactertze the city and are essential
for the functioning of the political unity. But the theater, already
questioning the boundaries between what is real and what is illusion,
forces the audience to acknowledge how boundaries are constructed
�98
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and not natural, how the orderly procession that preceded the performance is a human assertion of st:Iucture against the formlessness
of the very god of the theater. Yet, in the theater, "looking together,"
as Flaumenhaft points out, "they can face what, if experienced first
hand or seen privately, might destroy their humanity" (77).
It is precisely this "looking together," so emphasized in Flaumenhaft's argument, that enables the many gathered to become and
remain one together, a r.ity, even as they observe a fractured world on
stage. Modem dramatic productions, often drawing from ancient
themes, point as well to a fractured world. It is world view that,
Flaumenhaft suggests, builds of the cubist artists' representations
"unbounded by frame or linear, articulated forms" (77), but the
modem dramatic performances lack the unifying context of the
Dionysian festival, the insistence the we "look together," that we
remain a city while observing a "mangled" world. Modem drama thus
re-enforces the chaotic world rather than controlling it.
The experience of play-watching is quite different when we consider
Machiavelli's comedy the Mandragola. It is not performed before the
citizens of a polis or the random audience of the modem theater. Its
political role is not to unity- or create a political community out of the
spectators. Performed in private, before a small group of young man,
the Mandragola is a subversive work not only in that it shows the
pleasing victory of what conventionally would by called a sin (adultery)
and praising that victory for making so many happy by it. It is even
more subversive, Flaumenhaft suggests, by the very fact that as a play,
it draws those watching it psychologically into the action. As such, the
members of the audience become co-conspirators with the actors,
subverting traditional political, social and religious values and delighting in the victory of that subversion.
The private comic theater is didactic, but not as traditionalists
might like. Flaumenhaft cites Bacon's claim that "poesy" teaches us
about the world as it ought to be and that history teaches about it as
it is. Flaumenhaft's argument is that the Mandragola performs just
the role that Bacon assigns to history, but the play goes even beyond
the didactic role of history of showing us the world as it is. It draws
the spectators into the subversive role that Machiavelli seeks to teach
to the young. These young men, so educated, will be able to transform
society according to Machiavellian principles. Drawn into the conspiracy they will cast off conventional assumptions and move forward
according to the Machiavellian teachings they have learned from the
comedy, teachings ever so much more acceptable when we as specta-
�SAXONHOUSE
99
tors have been co-opted to applaud their success in a comedy than
when we are confronted by their harshness in The Prince.
In her last chapter Flaumenhaft helps us understand how play
watching has changed in the modem day as she explores the different
textures of the two movie versions of Shakesperare's Henry V, a play
that. with its chorus, is explicitly self-conscious about its role as
representational. In particular, Flaumenhaft develops the differing
political contexts as a way, to illuminate the different aims of the two
directors-one eager to draw together a nation during wartime and
the other addressing an audience disillusioned by war after Vietnam
and the Faulklands. In Olivier's version we see the director aiming to
draw together a war-weary nation. The ambiguities to which Shakespeare's Henry V alerts us, about war itself. about nationhood and
national unity, about friendship and its relation to political responsibilities are muted by Olivier so that the king's exhortations to battle
for the glorious English nation can speak sincerely and directly to the
modem Englishman and urge him, as Henry had urged his man, to
go "once more unto the breach" (145). The director's role is here a
political one and those seetng the movie, captured by the brilliant
colors, motivated by Olivier's forceful portrayal of Henry, are swept up
by the patriotic, ennobling power of the play.
Not so with Branagh's version. The ambiguities of Shakespeare's
play are ever present; the uncertatnty of whether the war is justified,
the anguish of sendtng men to their death for a nation that may itself
have no legitimacy other than force, all these questions play vividly in
the close-up portraits of Branagh's face. Psychological introspection
marks this Henry produced for a population still struggling to make
sense of senseless wars. However much beauty and eloquence mark
Olivier's Henry, his movie seems dated and stilted at the end of the
century. It shone on screens before television brought tape'd versions
into our living rooms. The Branagh version, while certainly more
powerful on the large screen, does not suffer in the intimacy of the
living room. As a psychological tale of a king's anguish, it captures
the individual anguish that we too must suffer and that we sometimes
must cause others to suffer. As such, Branagh's version eschews the
political power of the other works Flaumenhaft has discussed and, as
such, captures the decline of the "civic spectacle" into a private.
internalized, and perhaps even isolating experience.
Flaumenhaft never lets us forget the didactic role that the theater
plays, but real strength of this book lies in the insistence that we can
only understand that didacticism if we attend to the context in which
we are observers of representations. That context reminds us, the
�100
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
observers, the producers, the directors, that representation is a
political act-whether we talk explicitly about what appears on stage,
the VCR, or in the retelling of stories in the courtroom. And as a
political act, it can build or it can undermine community, it can train
leaders as in the Mandragola or it can turn an almost random mass
into a nation as in Olivier's Henry V. Flaumenhaft's book keeps us
wonderfully alert to how much we can learn about ourselves, about
others, about the nature of communal life by studying the politics of
play watching.
�The Human Sense for Justice
I
Henry Higuera
Clifford Orwin is a political theorist who has written several articles
on Thucydides. With The Humanity ojThucydides*, his first book on
the subject, he establishes himself as one of the most solid and
profound political interpreters of Thucydides. Orwin makes the case
more compellingly than any other recent critic that Thucydides is an
original political theorist as well as an historian. Thucydides does not
have a theory about the best regime in the style of Plato's Republic or
Laws or Aristotle's Politics. Nor does he expound theories of the human
soul or the cosmos and work his way from these through ethics to
political norms. Nonetheless, Orwin persuasively argues that his work
is a penetrating examination of the limits of reason and the meaning
and status of justice.
In arguing that the History focuses on justice, Orwin must combat
the notion that Thucydides is only interested in "causes," i.e. nonmoral explanations. In perhaps his most crucial discussion Orwin
builds an intriguing case that the famous passage at !.123 about the
"cause" of the war should be translated as follows: "As to why [the two
sides] broke the treaty ... the truest a11egation (prophasin), although
least conspicuous in speech, I hold to be that the Athenians by
becoming great and provoking fear in the Lacedaemonians compelled
them to resort to war. As for the grievances ]aitiai ]openly spoken on
either side, ... they were as follows" (32: emphasis in original). In other
words, translating this passage as being about "the truest cause" of
the war versus the "pretexts given out" for it is a serious mistake.
Prop has is means "accusation" or "casus belLi" rather than "cause."
Aitia means "blame" before it means "pretext." In this passage Thucydides is talking about the blame for the war.
But, in a further twist, Thucydides is here silent as to whom the
truest allegation fingers as the culpable party. Is it the Athenians for
expanding, or the Spartans for acting on their fears? Thus this
statement actually sets up a mora[ problem about blame, and it is the
task of the rest of the history to solve it. In the greatest war known to
Thucydides, which side had justice on its side, and why?
Now this interpretation of 1.123, while impressively grounded in
both Greek and Thucydides' own usage, is based on a silence rather
*Clifford Orwin. The HumaniLy ojThucydides (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University
Press, 1994}
Henry Higuera is a tutor at the Annapolis campus of St. John's College.
�102
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
than an explicit utterance. Accordingly one wishes that Orwin had
discussed at greater length why Thucydides is so muted in setting up
the problem, and in general one wishes that Orwin had provided more
analysis ofThucydides' rhetoric. His not doing so seems to result from
the very tight focus in his book on the difficult lessons Thucydides
wants to teach his n1ost perceptive and persistent readers, rather than
the effect he wants to have on the general reader. Still, this latter is
itself an ilnportant topic, and one feels somewhat deprived at not
having Orwin's take on these matters.
At any rate, according to Orwin the History addresses the problem
of true blame for the war primarily through an examination of what
he calls "the Athenian thesis." This thesis is a novel justification for
the Athenian en1pire, and indeed for any aggressive imperialism, via
"a particular interpretation of fimperialisnl] as disclosing a natural
necessitl.)" (86). !fit is right, the Athenians are exculpated for expand·
ing, and thus for the war. It is first propounded by the Athenian envoys
at Sparta just before the war and is repeated with important variations
at Dehum, at Melos, by Diodotus before the Athenian Assembly, by
Alcibiades at Sparta, and by the Athenian Euphemas and the
Syracusan Hermocrates in Sicily. At Melos it is made to include the
clairn that this compulsion justifies imperialism even in the eyes of
the gods, who "would not be so inconsequent" (106) as to punish a
con1pu!sion which they must recognize in themselves. By Alcibiades
it is further widened to include individuals.
To show that Thucydides takes the problem of justice so seriously
in his work, Orvvin must do so in his own. OIWin defends and criticizes
the Athenian thesis with admtrable intelligence and honesty. He has
a positive revulsion against an unthinking acceptance of justice; he
appreciates how cheap, i.e., unjust, that ultimately is. Again and again
one must adn1ire how he refuses easy ways out. He dOes not give up
on justice in a smug way after detailing some problems with it, nor
does he neglect to discuss difficulties after his most impressive
vindications of it. Three examples must suffice here to give some sense
of the range and seriousness of Orwin's discussions.
First, many have seen that the Athenian speeches at Sparta and
Melos, if taken to their logical conclusion, lead to Alcibiades: to
competition within the city and the destruction of the common good.
Many accordingly take Alcibiades as a refutation of the Athenian
thesis. But Orwin argues that this is a non sequitur. These speeches
might be right; if so, then Alcibiades and others like him are ine\~table.
The deleterious effects of Alcibiades' frankness about his opinions are
real enough. But again, the harm his frankness did was not in turning
�HIGUERA
103
all Athenians into versions of himself but in making the populace
distrust him more than was reasonable. This mistrust reflects a
political and theological conservatism deeply rooted in the nature of
the many.
Second, Orwin refuses to regard either the plague or the Sicilian
disaster as divine retributions. His discussions of these are very
complex and evenhanded, but he ultimately argues that the few
explicit things which Thucydides says about them are determinative;
and, as he shows, these go against regarding them as punishments.
He says dryly, "The sequence Melos [Book V]/Sicily[Books VI-VII] is
poetic, that is, more beautiful than true" (1 I 1). In fact, Orwin argues that
it was the Athenians' very piety that caused the Sicilian disaster-first
in turning from Alcibiades to Nicias, and then in the fatal delay of the
retreat from Syracuse.
Finally, Orwin gives due prominence to the moral debunking of the
Spartans' justice which Thucydides carries out-their behavior at
Plataea and during the siege of Melos, and above all their subjugation
of the Helots. He shows admirably how consistent these phenomena
are with the fact that the Spartans are extremely just and moderate
much of the time.
Ultimately, Orwin argues, much of the Athenian thesis is left
standing. As a whole, however, it meets an ironic fate, for Diodotus
and Hennocrates see things in it which, on one level, stand it on its
head. It is not true that cities pursue imperial imperatives out of
necessity. By natural necessity cities pursue what they take to be
imperial imperatives; and cities are, by that same necessity, very
foolish in interpreting those imperatives. Imperialism is a natural
compulsion for cities; but so is folly, the illusion that one is justified,
and the further illusion that one's justice guarantees one's success.
These last two illusions are cherished by the Athenian many, as
Thucydides states in connection with Sicily. They even affect the
envoys to Melos, as Orwin argues persuasively in a very sensitive
interpretation of their contempt for Sparta and their annoyance at the
Melians for refusing to be talked into surrendering.
Full understanding of the Athenian thesis leads to appreciating the
difference between true compulsions and the illusory yet irresistible
ones that always accompany the true ones. It destroys admiration and
eros for imperial cities and is ultimately incompatible with an intelligent individual's dedication to empire. Still, it mutes moral indignation
at the spectacle of imperialism. One cannot blame either Athens or
Sparta for causing the war, although one also cannot admire either
one very much for fighting it.
�104
THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW
Probably the most challengmg part of the book (a frustratingly brief
part) is Orwin's discussion of domestic politics. Domestic politics is
where justice is supposed to reveal its power and attractiveness and
indeed to reveal just what it is. Thucydides' position in general,
according to Orwin, is that the human sense of justice is not merely
conventional or artificial. Even the most dartng Athenians cannot
shake the feel1ng that freely-chosen and active concern for other
people's well-being is one of the noblest things and is also somehow
demanded of us-that it is justice, in short. But according to this part
ofOrwin's book, domestic justice forThucydides is not an absolute or
categorical imperative. It can be outweighed by other goods. Above all,
far from being master over our bodies, domestic justice depends on
them: 'There is no greater political misfortune for human beings than
to be freed from the constralnt posed by their bodies .... Society proves
to depend more fundamentally on our hopes and fears for our bodies
than ... on our capacity to overcome these" (182).
The hun1an sense for justiCe is also flexible: it can be changed under
pressure of necessity. That does not change the justice of the case,
however; Thucydides is not a relativist. Under necessity. as in the
plague or in stasis (civil strife), we lose our healthy feel1ng for justice
and honestly regard as noble what truly is not. Plague and stasis are
not uniquely revealing conditions for Thucydides the way the war of
all against all is for Hobbes: they are political pathologies and produce
pathological moral reactions.
What is the source of the healthy, correct feeling? Thucydides,
Orwin seems to indicate, gives no answer but human nature, because
he believes that there is no other powerful entity in the universe which
cares about justice the way we do. Perhaps the austerity of this
position is one reason why Thucydides has not be~n considered a
political philosopher. Most people who think that justice lacks cosmic
support conclude that it is artificial (i.e. cultural) and/or 1llusory: It is
much more picturesque to speculate about entities which support
justice, and, if one cannot find any of these, it seems deeper to reject
any stable standard of justice. Thucydides merely insists that healthy
human beings will always respond to what even the most hardened
Athenians did: that it is somehow demanded of them to make exertions, freely, for others. History, not metaphysical speculation, teaches
us this.
History also teaches us that some human beings achieve this
freedom or mastery over compulsion; Orwin cites Diodotus, for one.
The admiration people have for their cities is a confused divination of
truly admirable but very rare people. Hence the importance for Orwin
�HIGUERA
105
of to euethes, "noble guilelessness," and to po1ytropon, Odyssean
wiliness, the two virtues which suffered the most during the civil strife.
These old virtues are real. Thucydides' regret at their destruction by
stasis is genuine and deep. In their nobility they are akin to justice:
They can both help one rise above compulsion. Justice and freedom
are not wills o' the wisp; they are "demanded" of us in the sense that
we can all sense our inferiority to those fortunate few who possess
them. Hence, too, in the final analysis Athens really is higher than
Sparta. Sparta represents compulsory law-abidingness masquerading
as the whole of justice. Athens aspires to the real thing and is more
likely to exhibit it in her flnest individuals.
The Humanity ofThucydides is much too compact and some of the
explications just given are uncomfortably co'!iectural and vague. Still,
the book amply rewards extra effort in trying to understand it. Orwin is
trying to teach readers what he thinks Thucydides has taught him about
justice: The confrontation he sets up between us and one of the greatest
of all political thinkers is immensely challenging and enriching.
��
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Carey, James
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Bojaxhi, Gjergji
Sachs, Joe
Kalkavage, Peter
Levine, David Lawrence
Gable, Jr., Harvey L.
Saxonhouse, Arlene W.
Higuera, Henry
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The St. John's Review
Volume XLIII, number one (1995)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
James Carey
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Joe Sachs
John VanDoren
Robert B. Williamson
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Gjergji Bojaxhi
The St. John's Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's
College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Eva T. H. Brann,
Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $15.00 for
three issues, even though the magazine may sometimes appear semiannually rather than three times a year. Unsolicited essays, stories,
poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the
Review, St. John's College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404·2800.
Back issues are available. at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John's College
Bookstore.
©1995 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or
in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
Marcia Baldwin and Th.e St. John's College Print Shop
�With this issue begins Forewords, containing the editor's notes
and comments, to appear occasionally.
�Contents
Forewords
John Keats' Bicentennial
Essays and Lectures
1 . . . . . Dyn:;tmical Chaos:
Som'e Implications of a Recent Discovery
Curtis Wilson
21 . . . . . Tragic Pleasure
Joe Sachs
39 . . . . . Faustian Phenomena:
Goethe on Plants, Animals,
and Modern Biologists
John F. Cornell
59 ..... 'I Have Become a Problem to Myself':
Augustine's Theory of Will
and the Notion of Human Inwardness
Lester Strong
Book Reviews
71 ..... T.S. Eliot: The Varieties of
Metaphysical Poetry
Cordell D. K. Yee
85 . . . . . Vikram Seth: A Suitable Boy
Eva T. H. Brann
91 ..... Jorge H. -Aigla: Karate Do and Zen
James Carey
95 ..... Jacob Howland: The Republic
Carl Page
Crossword Contest
100 ..... Solution to Crossword Number 7
"Let's Be Liberal" by EZRA
�1
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�I
FOREWORDS
John Keats
1795- 1821
As we note the birth of John Keats we inevitably remember his death. IDs
robust gifts, both personal and poetic, destined him for extraordinary
achievement, but the frailty of his physical constitution guaranteed that
we would never know the full reach of his potential. Even those who have
faulted his character in some respects-one thinks of Matthew
Arnold-have acknowledged overrtding virtues to which his letters attest,
letters which T. S. Eliot has called "the most notable and most important
ever wrttten by any English poet." In poetry, from the earliest his aims
were high-he took Milton and Shakespeare as his teachers-and his
assimilation and progress was swift and sure. By the time of his death,
at age 25, if he had not mastered the long, heroic poem, or found a
successful dramatic mode, he had written a heady body ofwork, including
odes that are among the greatest in the English language: "Ode to a
Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Ode to Psyche," and 'To Autumn."
Ambitious, and gifted, and cruelly short-lived, on the one hand he is
sometimes apotheosized, along with others of his generation, as a luminary in the typical mythology of Romanticism; on the other hand, he is
sometimes delivered into the pathos of his biography. These are ways of
disappearance to which he would not willingly succumb. Ufe is not, he
wrote, "a vale oftears," but "a vale of Soul-making." The making of Keats'
soul required the making of poems. It has been said that he alone among
the poets of his era sought "to escape from self-expression into Shakespearean impersonality." Thus we best honor Keats where we least find
him-in his poems.
The time of his birth and of his last days, the time most like a recurring
paradox he thought upon, the time of the writing of the great ode to that
time, autumn was Keats' season. The ode 'To Autumn" contains no "Cold
pastoral," but is a meditation upon nature's fullness. Fruition and death,
twin fuces of life, are poised in their togetherness and held beautifully
before us. There is no moment of disillusion, nor is there any "irritable
reaching after fact & reason." There is hardly any movement in this
intensely replete, serene poem. Partly for this reason, even some who
know that poems are not statements think that this poem, though "nearly
perfect," has "little to say." But on the matter of the poem, Keats has
captured the essentials both in substance and tone. Poet, nature, and
poem are one.
�\
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�Dynamical Chaos:
Some Implications of a
Recent Discovery
Curtis Wilson
lVIy subject is a peculiar behavior of dytmmical systems that has come
to be recognized only during the last thiriyyears, In i975 James Yorke
christened this behavior chaos~pethaps a misnomer. Chaos is a
dteek word that has no plural. Since Besiod it has meant the nether
abyss, the first state of the utilverse, or tdtal disorder. 1'he dynamical
behavior that James Yorke called chaos is order and apparent randoitihess lhtertwined.
A dynamimtl system is~ what? How abtlut this? It is a set of entities
that lhterad so as to undergo a development The erttities could be
plartets or billiard balls: maybe cardiac muscle fibers or neurons: maybe
even bidders on the New York stock Exchartge: but let that go. In my
illustratltms, the components will be chunks of matter, unbesouled.
1'o umlerstand why dynamical chaos was recognized only recently
takes a bit of mathematical i:mckgrourtd. Mathematically, dynamical
systems are represented by dliferent:it.il equations, Differential equa"
lions are distinguished by containing instantaneous rates of change,
velocities, say, ot accelerations. Now empirically you cannot measure
an l!tstantaneous rate of chartge, but only chart!Jes over firtite intervals
of time, A differential equation, therefore, is a hypothesis. 'I'll veri:ly the
hypothesis you must first solve the equation, or l!ttegrat& it. 1'hat
means, you must somehow eliminate the rate or rates of change, artd
obtaltl the value of the dependent vatiable~whkh is what you ru-e
interested in~as a function of the Independent variable, which is
usually time. 1'hus you will have a relation you cart cheek empirically.
Procedures ftJr solving a good many differential equations were
Wtlrked outin the seventeenth and eighteenth Cetlturies. 1'he solutions
turn 011 what Is called the ftmdamental theorem of the calculus,
disMvered by Newton and Leibniz. 1'he procedures, like the differential
equatitJns, assume that time is ctlntinuous.
Not all dlffere11tial equations are thus soluble "analytically," as we
say. it may be impossible to disentangle the dependent variable from
its rate of change: or, if there is more than one dependent variable, to
Cuflis Wllsort is Tutor ffimetltus at St. John's
Ca11~g~.
�2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
disentangle these variables from one another. Then you can't arrive
at a formula giving each variable as a function of the time.
All linear differential equations are soluble. In these equations, the
dependent variables and their rates of change occur only to the first
power, and don't multiply one another. An equation in just two
variables occurring only to the first power can be graphed as a straight
line; hence the name linear.
But there are nonlinear. differential equations, in which some of the
dependent variables, or their rates of change, are raised to powers, or
multiply one another. Some of these equations are analytically insoluble.
In fact most dynamical systems in the world can be modeled
accurately only by nonlinear differential equations, most of which are
insoluble. It is dynamical systems modeled by such differential equations, nonlinear and insoluble, that exhibit the behavior that James
Yorke called chaos. Here a small change in the independent variable
can produce a sudden large change in a dependent variable. Such
phenomena, we're told, flourish in nature; for instance, in the dripping
of a faucet.
How can insoluble differential equations be studied? The chief way
is by what is called numerical integration. This differs from the
analytical integration I previously spoke of, which relies on the fundamental theorem of the calculus. In numerical integration the independent variable is not varied continuously; instead, it is increased
by finite jumps. Starting with certain initial values of the variables,
numerical integration assumes that the initial rate of change remains
constant for some small, finite interval, say a second, and on that
assumption computes the values of all the variables at the end of the
second. Then with the new values it goes on to compute the values of
all the variables at the end of the second interval. And so on. The
procedure is not strictly accurate. But if the intervals are made small
enough, it can give a good idea of what is going on; it can even, in
many cases, be made to yield predictions as accurate as the observations.
The first large-scale numerical integration ever performed was carried
out in 1758, to compute the return date of Halley's Comet. It took six
months' work by three people, morning, noon, and night. Their final
prediction was a month off, and even then they were lucky, because their
computation contained some partially compensating errors.
Recognition of the chaos named by James Yorke came only in the
decades since 1960, with the development of high-speed electronic
computers that could carry out numerical integrations no one had
previously thought practical.
�WILSON
3
I am going to now illustrate this kind of dynamical chaos, and to
talk about some of its characteristics. My interest in this subject arose
because for some years I have been pursuing the question of how
planetary astronomy became a precise predictive science, and since
1980 it has become apparent that planetary astronomy involves
James Yorke's chaos.
This chaos limits predictibilty. Philosophers, I suspect, should
learn about it. New perspectives open up if we recognize how widespread it is. More on this later.
I begin with the simple pendulum. It consists of a heavy bob,
suspended by a weightless, inextensible thread-mathematical physicists love to invoke such things. If we draw the bob aside and let it go,
it oscillates back and forth. Let me derive its equation of motion and
show it to be nonlinear (Figure 1).
We measure e, the departure of the thread from the vertical, in
radians, defined as arc-length divided by radius. So the arc-length will
be given by the radius-arm, or length of the thread, here 1, times e. In
the science of dynamics as founded by Galilee and Newton, we are
interested in accelerations, that Is, rates of change of velocity; velocity
itself being a rate of change of position. Acceleration is thus a rate of
change of a rate of change. In our case, we are interested in the
acceleration of the bob, hence of its position as measured by the arc 1•e.
But 1 is a constant; so the acceleration we are Interested In is 1 times
the acceleration of e, which I write as theta with two over-dots, 1i.
The reason the bob accelerates Is that it Is pulled downward by
gravity. The acceleration of gravity at a given spot on the Earth is a
constant, which we call g. But the bob cannot go straight down, with
the acceleration g, because it is suspended by the thread. To find how
much of g accelerates the bob along its path, we "resolve" g into
components, one in line with the thread-this component merely tenses
the thread-and the other component at right angles, along the path
(Figure 2). The latter component is g • sin e. Our equation is then:
C\·8"C\
v=TSlTiv,
Figure 1 ·
Figure 2
,.
�4
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
where, remember, the double over"dot means acceleration, radians
per second per second.
I say that this equation is nonlinear. Sine 9 is given by an infinite
sertes-I will not prove this, please take it on faith:
• • •
If only the first term were present, we would have a linear equation.
But there are higher powers, going on forever.
Now it turns out that this nonlinear equation is soluble. I Will not
wnte down the solution, which is somewhat complicated. It implies
that the pendulum is not isochronous: Wider-angled sWings take a
little longer. Galileo, gazing at the suspended lamps tn the Cathedral
of Pisa, guessed the pendulum was isochronous, and wanted so much
to believe this, that he never made the simple expertments that would
have shown this assumption false.
Of course, the simple pendulum is apgroXimately isochronous, for
small-angled sWings, Suppose that 9 is 6, about 1/10 of a radian. In
the sertes expansion for the sine, if the first term is 11 10, the second
term iS 1/6000. We can choose to ignore it, along with all the higlier
terms. That is called lineariZing the equation, Mathematical physicists
have been doing it for nearly three hundred years, in order to obtain
neat, soluble equations. The hope is always that the linearized equations give good enough approximations, And so they do, When the
system iS close enough to a stable equilibrium.
Suppose, then, we limit our simple pendulum to swings of 6° or
less. The effects of nonlinearity Will be present, but tiny. And now let
us introduce a perturbation, When the word perturbation is used, we
mean that there is some motion we can regard as fundamental, anti
some other tiisturbtng motion that is superimposed. The Earth's
motion is controlled primarily by the gravitational action of the sun,
but it is perturbed detect<lbiy by the Moon, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn,
and so on.
Suppose the point of suspension of our pendulum is put into a
small osdliation, tn the very plane in which we first set the bilb to
oscillating. We couiti use a crank mechanism for this. Let the arnpli"
tude of this perturbing motion be a sm<111 fraction of the length of the
pendulum. Let the pertod of the forcing motion be one we can vary:
call itT. And suppose we set T to be somewhere neat the period of our
�WILSON
5
linearized simple pendulum, whith I shall call T0 • To is given by a
fonnula some of you have learned, 2it times the square root of 1 over g.
The equation of motion for the new set~up, which I Will not Write
down, is not soluble analytically: it Will not yield a formula for a as a
function of time. But a numerical integration can be carried out. John
Miles ofUCSD did this in 1984, 1 to determine the position of the bob
ench time the perturbing motion reaches the righthand end of its
range. starllilg from below To. he increused the period T of the
perturbing motion. At a' certaln point, the motion of the bob, in Its
original direction of motion, which I Will call the x~direction, became
unstable. But meanwhile there were two possible motions that were
stable~motitms that included a sideways Mmponent, a y~component.
The motion of the bob made a gradual transition to one or the other
bf these stable motions.
When T=0.9924T0 , the position of the bob each time the perturbing
motion comes to the righthund limit of its excursion moves irt this
figure (Figure 4). You probably wunt to ktiow what the whole motion
of the bob is. It is in a slowly rotating ellipse With slowly Varying axes.
But let me focus solely on the position of the bob et~ch time the
perturbing motion reaches the righthand end of its runge. tfTis 1.0 i 50
T0 , our point moves in u doubled curve (Figure 5): whut is called a
bljllteatlnrt hM occurred. A small quuntitutive change has produced n
sharp quulitative chlillge. td the period be inctensed so that T is
1.02131'0 (Figure 6): unother bifurcation has occurred. A cascade of
futther bifurcations occurs, as 't is intreased. When we teach 1' =
L0225Tb (Figure 7). the figure appears smudged, With muny pt~ths
Close together. The pattern, if accumulated over a long enough time,
appears to be symmetric With respect to the x~axis, although the bob
may spend substantial intervals In either the top or bottom hillf of this
pattern, trMsferring from one to the other at seentlngly random times.
Figure 3
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
6
Random is-what? The word comes from old French randir, to run
or gallop; the French knight, having donned his armor, and drunk
certain flagons of wine, was hoisted by crane onto his horse and
galloped about the field, doing random mayhem. The Anglo-Saxon, by
contrast, wore bearskin, drank mead, and on the battlefield went
berserk, a word meaning bearskin. To define random mathematically,
is something else again. Perhaps we can say what it is not. If our
pattern were two or more periodic motions superimposed, it would be
what is called quasi-pertodic; if the periodic motions were incommensurable, there would be no exact repetitions, but the motion would
not be random or chaotic. But our motion does not look quasi-periodic,
with those sudden shifts from one part of the pattern to another.
Figure 4
Figure 5
''
2.5
~
0
/,
0
-2.5
•
7.[,
2.>
c9
0
4r/l
4xjl
T = 0.9924 To
T = 1.0150 To
Figure 7
Figure 6
''
~
~
-2.5
4zfl
T =1.0213 To
/,
,,
.
"
-2.5
4z/l
T = 1.0225 To
I.
'·'
�WILSON
7
Let's tum to an actual physical experiment. Al Toft, assisted by Otto
Friedrich-machinist and carpenter for the laboratory-made this pair
of double pendulums in tandem, in accordance with a description
given in the American Journal of Physics in 1992 2 (Figure 8). Each
double pendulum consists of an upper and lower part, turning on
bearings, so that the friction is small. Each pari of each double
pendulum, both the upper and the lower, has its own natural period
for small-angle oscillatiqns. The situation for the lower pendulum is
similar to that of the p'erturbed simple pendulum I previously described. But now the perturber (the upper part) is itself significantly
perturbed; we have what is called feedback, circular causation.
The two double pendulums are identical twins. They are mounted
together on a sturdy support, so that neither will influence the other.
If I start one of them in an oscillation, the other does not pick up the
motion. If! start both together in a small oscillation, they play together
nicely (Figure 9).
With a large initial displacement, however, the pendulums don't
stay together (Figure 10,11). Nor, if we try the experiment over again,
does either do exactly what it did the first time. I hope this surprises
you. Before trying to account for it, let's see how we might show
quantitatively that the repetition isn't exact. We could use a rigidly
mounted electromagnet to hold the pendulum in a fixed initial position, to the side. Suppose the switch releasing the pendulum started
a stroboscopic flash camera, that took photos every 25th of a second.
On each exposure we could measure the angular deviations from the
vertical of the upper and lower paris. Then we could proceed to
compare different trials. This has actually been done.
In explaining this, I shall introduce a bit of the relevant mathematics. Take a look, for just a moment, at the differential equations of the
double pendulum (Figure 12). On the lefthand side, on top, you see
liJ, the angular acceleration of 81, the deviation of the upper pendulum
from the vertical. And below, on the lefthand side of the second
equation, you see 82, the angular acceleration of 82. the deviation of
the lower pendulum from the vertical.
Figure 12
~I
~2
g(sin .12 cos(.lt1)- /L sin .1,)- (12 0 l
+I, Ui
cos(.lt1))sin(.lt1)
11 (/L- cos (dt1))
2
g/L(sint1 1 cos(.lt1) -sinii2 )+(/LI 1 Ui
+I,Ul
12 (/L- cos 2 (.lil))
cos(.lil))sin(.lt1)
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
8
Figure a
Figure 9
Swing it low - Little Difference
Photography by Mr. John Bildahl
�9
WILSON
Figure 10
Figure 11
Swing it high- Big Difference
�lO
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
On the righthand sides you see a number of constants: g, 11. and
h. the lengths of the two parts of the pendulum; p, the ratio of their
masses. Also involved are sines and cosines of the two angles, and
also of their dtfference, 1\.6; these are variables. And two more variables
are i)Jand Sz, the momentary angular velocities of the upper and lower
parts of the pendulum. Both lit and 1lz thus depend on four variables,
e1 and ez. 1lJ and ih
The equations are not .soluble; we can't get separate formulas for
the two angles, as functions of time. But our system at any moment
depends on the four variables 6t, 62, 6t and ez. In the 1830s William
Rowan Hamilton proposed representing the evolution of such a system
in hyperspace, with a number of dimensions equal to the number of
variables on which the state of the system depends. Then a point in
this space would correspond to a momentary state of the system, and
a succession of points, or trajectory, would show how the system
develops. The space is called phase space. In our case, the space is
four-dimensional, and you can't visualize it. You can nevertheless
conceive it without contradiction. In the 1890s Herrrt Potncare undertook to study insoluble, nonlinear differential equations, by examintng
the ensemble of possible trajectories in phase space.
In our case, let's consider a few trial runs with our double pendulum, say four, and compare the points in phase space at the successive
moments when the photographs are taken. For a given moment, the
potnts in the four different trials will not be the same. There will be a
"distance" between any two of them, and we can get numbers for these
distances, using the four-dimensional analogue of the Pythagorean
theorem; that is, we take the square root of the sum of the squares of
Figure 13
4
Q
x
0
o
••
•..
"'
"'P"•tion bot"""'n trU.i> t •nd J
tri.lls 2 •r>d J
S<por•tionbttwornlri.ll• 1 •nd 4
"1'"""'" he!W<'<n Ul>ls 2 and 4
.. porolion betw .. n tfi•ls J ond 4
.. p•r•rion b<twe<1> num<ncol tri•ls
. . porotionbelw~n
Time (setonds)
"
"·'
�WILSON
ll
the components. In this figure (Figure 13). the experimental separations are plotted for the first half second. The solid line was obtained
by numerical integration of the differential equations, using two
slightly different sets of initial conditions. The separations increase on
the whole. That the separations have downswings at certain places is
due to the fact that, at the end of each swing, when the lower pendulum
is starting down again, it pulls down on the upper pendulum, and this
is a relatively stable situation.
A statistical study of'these numbers shows that, on the average,
the separation increases geometrically. Suppose the initial separation
between two trajectories in phase space is IVCo. Then the separation
at timet is
where e is a constant greater than 1, and ).. is a positive constant,
called Lyapunov's exponent, after the Russian who first discussed its
import. The separation doesn't just increase by the same additive
increment in each unit of time, but gets multiplied by the same factor,
so that the increase is exponential.
Of course, our data is only for the first half-second. Strictly speaking, ).. should be determined as a limit as t goes to infinity. But you
can't get funding for experiments that long. The chaos is apparent,
but is it real? How explain it?
First, however, what does a positive '/.. do to prediction? Recently it
has been shown that the long-term orbital evolutions of the inner
plants, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, are characterized by positive Lyapunov exponents. For instance, certain perturbations of the
Earth are in near resonance with its annual motion, in close analogy
with the case of our perturbed simple pendulum; and the same kind
of chaos results. Now we never know, with infmite precision, where a
planet is. By numerical integration it has been shown that initial
uncertainties for the Earth increase by a factor of 3 every 5 million
years. An initial error of 15 meters produces an error of 1.5 million
kilometers after 100 million years.
Yes, we'll all be dead, but my concern is a theoretical one, about
the nature of our knowledge. Can we understand a little better what
this chaos is, and whence it comes?
Back to phase space and another of Poincare's new techniques.
Here (Figure 14) is the four-dimensional phase space of our double
�12
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
pendulum, somehow represented in a pseudo-diagram; q1 and qz are
the coordinates, in our case angles, and PI and pz are the corresponding momenta, products of velocity and mass. The presentation of the
equations of dynamics in terms of the p's and q's is due, once more.
to William Rowan Hamilton. H, called the Hamiltonian, is the energy
of the system, expressed in terms of the p's and q's. We'll assume for
the present argument that His a constant: H=H (pJ. pz, q1. qz) = const.
In the pseudo-diagram H is represented as a surface; but it is really
a hypersurface in four-diffiensional space; the pseudo-visualization is
only to help you identify the terms I am using.
The constancy of H will allow us to express pz as a function of pJ,
qJ, and qz: pz = pz(pJ, qJ, qz). We can thus consider the projection of
any possible trajectory in the four-dimensional phase-space onto a
three-dimensional volume. That projection will contain all the information that the four-dimensional trajectory contained. The reduction
in the number of dimensions brings us back to somethingvisualizable.
Poincare carrted the process a step further. If the trajectory is
bounded-doesn't go off to infinity-then its projection in the threedimensional space will intersect some plane in that space repeatedly,
say the plane qz = 0 (Figure 15). Such a plane is called a Poincare
surface of section. What sort of pattem will the intersections make?
In the 1960s two astronomers, Henon and Heiles, were studying a
nonlinear differential equation intended to model the motion of a star
around a galaxy. They used numerical integration to find successive
intersections of the star's trajectory with a Poincare surface of section.
When the energy of the system was relatively small, the intersection
lay on certain distinct curves (Figure 16). With an increase in energy,
the pattem became this (Figure 1 7). There were still islands where,
for certain initial conditions, the trajectory remained on nice curves:
Figure 14
Figure 15
�13
WILSON
but otber trajectories proved to be chaotic, giving seemingly randomly
placed intersections. When tbe energy was increased still furtber, tbe
islands disappeared (Figure 18).
The motion is deterministic; tbat is, given tbe state of tbe system
at any moment. tbe equation of motion determines its state at tbe
moments tbat follow. The initial conditions detennine a position and
a velocity, and tbe equation of motion tben determines an acceleration.
Given position, velocity, and acceleration, tbere is only one way to go.
But tbe resulting pattein looks crazy. Again I ask, how should we
understand tbat?
Consider a plane of section witb tbe dimensions p and q; suppose
the successive points of section are confined to the unit square (Figure
19). A tbeorem in Hamiltonian dynamics says that, if tbe energy of a
dynamic system remains constant, tbe volume occupied by tbe a!·
lowed trajectories is also constant. But in truly chaotic dynamics, tbe
trajectory never retums to the same point, or even to any identifiable
curve. The volume of allowable patbs gets dispersed, mixed up witb
bubbles of tbe unallowable.
Some Russian matbematicians have sought to describe tbis mixing,
using a cocktail shaker, rum and cola. Sorry, we're stuck witb their
noxious example. Initially, tbe rum and cola are separate. Mter a few
Figure 16
Figure 17
Figure 18
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
14
shakes, if we imagine the cola as divided up into moderately small
cells, we find some rum in each cell. Later, the subdivision can be
made finer and finer, with each cell containtng some rum. This is called
a mixing transformation. Some dynamical systems have been proved
to evolve in this way, for instance a gas consisting of spherical elastic
molecules. Nearby possible trajectories necessarily spread apart, defocus. But because their energy is finite, they don't go off to infinity,
but get folded back into 1;he same space. The rule is Stretch and Fold.
It may be characteristic of chaotic dynamics generally. For illustration,
I shall present a particular mixing transformation, called the Baker's
Transformation (Figure 20).
Let the square, as of it were dough, be first squashed down tnto a
rectangle twice as long and half as high; then let the right half of it be
set atop the left half. We get back a square. What happens to a point
(p,q) within the square? Both p and q are numbers between 0 and l.
By squashing, all p's are doubled; but then, by the operation of placing
the right half atop the left half of the rectangle, the p's that became
greater than 1 are reduced again, by subtraction of the unit 1, to
numbers between 0 and 1. We can write this: p -> 2p (mod 1).
As for the q's, if our q was in the left half of the original square, it
is simply halved: q -> q/2. If it was in the right half, after halving it
we add 1/2: q -> q/2 + 1/2.
Figure 19
Figure 20
0
0
�15
WILSON
It will be helpful to think about p and q as written in binary notion,
so that each p and q will be written as, first, a zero, followed by a binary
point (replacing our decimal point), followed in tum by a string of zeros
and ones, infinitely long. All numbers between 0 and I can be written
thus. 0.1 means 1/2, 0.01 means 1/4, 0.001 means 1/8, and so on.
We use powers of 2 instead of powers of 10. Let our initial p and q be:
where the letters with subscripts are zeros and ones. Now a neat thing
about binary notation is that multiplying by 2 just amounts to shifting
the binary point to the light, whlle dividing by 2 just amounts to
shifting it to the left. If our initial point was in the left half of the square,
then PI was 0, and after the squashing, the transformed p will be
O.p2p3p4 ...
But the same result holds if our initial point was in the light half of
the square, for then p 1 was 1, and after the binary point is moved to
the right, 1 must be subtracted. In successive transformations p will
become
and so on.
What about the q's? If our original point was in the left half of the
square. then we want thP, halved value of q, which is
O.Oq1q2qs ....
I have moved the binary point to the left one place. If our original point
was in the light half of the square, then q first gets halved, but we
must add 1 /2 when the light half of the rectangle is put atop the left
half. Now, in this case PI was 1, which in the first binary place after
the binary point, means 1/2. So the transformed q can be written
O.p!q1q2q3 .... Actually, this works for q's in the left half of the original
square as well, for there p 1 was 0. A little reflection will show you that
the succession of transformed q's will be
O.p!q1q2 ... O.p2p1q1q2 .. O.psp2p1q!q2 ... , and so on.
As the successive pairs of transformed p's and q's emerge, the
important digits, the digits up front, come from ever farther to the light
on the original coordinate p. Initially, they looked insignificant. Yet
however far to the light they were ortginally, they become crucial as
the returns continue. The sensitivity to initial conditions is infinite.
Suppose, though it is empirically impossible, that we knew our
initial p and q exactly. The differential equation for the motion is not
soluble; our only resource is numerical integration, for which we tum
�16
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
to a high-powered computer. The computer, however high-powered,
cannot give us the chaotic trajectory precisely. That is because it is a
finite-state machine. It cannot accept a number expressed by an
infinite number of digits; it automatically rounds it off. With our p's
and q's undergoing a mixing transformation, the rounding, after a
while, will be disastrous; we will lose essential information. Whether
the p or the q, at some later stage in the succession of transformations,
starts with a 0 or a 1 will be as uncertain as the toss of a cotn.
Let me now, by way of conclusion, state some thoughts as to the
import of noniinear dynamics.
1. According to Laplace, wrtting in 1814:
An intelligence that knew, for a given instant, all the forces
by which nature is animated, and the respective situation of
all the beings that compose it, if it were vast enough to subject
these data to analysis, would embrace in a single formula the
motions of the largest bodies of the universe and of the
smallest atom; nothing would be uncertain to it, and the
future, like the past, would be present to its eyes. The human
mind, in the perfection that it has been able to achieve in
astronomy, presents a pale image of this intelligence. 3
Laplace is expresstng a universal determinism, which he equates
with predictability. Such a determinism. presenting the world as a
closed causal network. has often been taken as a dogma of science;
but its universalism appears to make the activity of the scientist
unintelligible.
Voltaire swallowed the doctrine whole:
everything [he wrote] is govemed by immutable laws ...
everything is prearranged ... everything is a necessary effect.. ..
There are some people who, frightened by this truth allow half
of it ... There are, they say, events which are necessary and
others which are not. It would be strange if a part of what
happens had to happen and another part did not.. .. I necessarily must have the passion to write this, and you must have
the passion to condemn me; we are both equally foolish, both
toys in the hand of destiny. Your nature is to do ill, mine is
to love truth, and to publish it in spite of you. 4
Post-Newtonians, impressed by the success of the new dynamics,
did not consider that the new methods might prove limited in scope.
The success of this dynamics was a success in solving linearized
differential equations. The world was taken to be an integrable system,
�WILSON
17
each variable being finally expressible as a function of time, independent of the others. So the world would be made up of non-interacting Leibnizian monads, each experiencing its own private cinema,
the harmony between them divinely preestablished.
This view, I say, was mistaken, because the differential equations
required to model processes in the real world are mostly nonlinear,
and most nonlinear differential equations are insoluble. It is from
insoluble, nonlinear differential equations that dynamical chaos
arises. Here determinism and predictability part company; Laplace's
demon, to do what he required of it, would need to compute with
numbers that it would take an infinity of time to write down. Successive approximations, which are the human way, wouldn't suffice.
I have spoken so far as if of a closed dynamic system, insulated
from the rest of the universe. But mixing systems such as I have
described are hypersensitive to initial conditions, and therefore hypersensitive to tiny perturbations. The flash of an electron in a distant
star may affect our mixing system. The intelligence that Laplace
imagined, however vast, being yet discursive, will suffer from overload.
If there is a God that knows the future, it is by means inscrutable to
human reason.
2. I want now to go beyond chaos. There is more to nonlinear
science than chaos. As we have seen, the chaos we have been
concerned with is not simply disorder; it is approached in an orderly
way; it is describable in a coherent way. Can nonlinear dynamics lead
to more interesting sorts of order? In fact, in dissipative systems far
from equilibr1um, new and surprising kinds of order arise. Some of
these are described in the book by Prigogine and Stengers entitled
Order Out of Chaos, cited above.
An example. The Benard instability is due to a vertical temperature
gradient set up in a horizontal liquid layer. The lower surface is heated
to a given temperature, higher than that of the upper surface. Thus a
permanent heat flux arises, from bottom to top, and for a low temperature gradient, this occurs by heat conduction alone, while the
Figure 21
Figure 22
iiii
0000
�18
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
liquid remains at rest (Figure 21). But when the imposed gradient of
temperature reaches a certain threshold value, a convection involving
the coherent motion of ensembles of molecules is produced. Millions
of molecules move coherently, forming convection cells of a characteristic size (Figure 22). At higher temperature gradients there occur
periodic fluctuations in temperature and in the spatial arrangement
of the cells; finally there is turbulent chaos, which, again, is not
without its order.
Similar kinds of order arise in dissipative chemical systems. With
reactants entering and products leaving, the system may organize
itself spatially, or may come to act like a chemical clock, beating
rhythmically. Such coherent behaviors on the macroscopic level do
not appear to be reducible to the dynamics of atoms and molecules.
We have what may be called emergence.
3. According to a fairly broad consensus among scientists today,
living things are among the entities that have so emerged. We are, in
some sense of the word "are", stardust. Living things are complex,
dissipative structures, to some extent self-regulating, but maintained
ultimately by the flux of energy from the sun. If the geological
time-scale is represented as a thirty-day month, then life appeared in
the oceans by the fourth day, but became abundant only on the
twenty-seventh. The first land plants and the first vertebrates appeared on the twenty-eighth day; most of human culture appeared
only in the last thirty seconds. All this, at least up to the last thirty
seconds, is understandable in terms of evolution by random variation
and differential reproductive success.
Living things are not only embedded in the surrounding geological
world, but by their activities they have altered that world; at an early
stage, for instance, ancient relatives of present-day algae produced
the oxygen of the atmosphere. In various degrees, living things have
a circumscribed autonomy; it is wider for those with homeostasis of
the blood, wider still for those who can reason before reacting. These
are beings with desires, aims, purposes. The world lines of such
semi-autonomous entities, with their separate agendas, may intersect. A man goes to the agora, in the case imagined by Aristotle, and
meets someone who owes him money. Neither planned this encounter;
it is by chance. Species migrate or spread, encounter one another,
interact, find new ecological niches.
A world evolving through chancelike encounters, in which new
entities emerge in time, including intelligent beings, is unintelligible
if, with Leibniz or Voltaire or Laplace, we take that world to be an
integrable system. In an integrable system, the mere reversal of
�WILSON
19
velocities sends time backwards. There is no essential distinction
between future and past. The smoke can go down the chllnney and
reconstitute the firewood.
Why can it not? In the middle of the nineteenth century the law of
entropy was discovered: in any closed system, a certain mathematical
function tends to a maximum, and there is thus a fmward direction
to time, diametrically opposed to the backward direction. This law is
of everyday use in physi~s and chemistry, to predict the outcome of
experiments. But it contradicts dynamics, if the world of dynamics is
an integrable system. Physicists like Boltzmann sought to derive the
law of entropy from dynamics; irreversibility from reversibility. By the
1890s it was clear that it couldn't be done; a statistical or probabilistic
assumption, distinct from the dynamics, was necessary. Chance had
to be assumed to be real. This is an empirical assumption, warranted
by experience. Probability theory, at its core, is an empirical science,
which assumes the future to be different from the past.
Also toward the end of the nineteenth century, the American
philosopher C.S. Peirce suggested that the dissipative tendencies of
entropy could be balanced by the concentrative effects of chance.
Chance can have an integrative role, in the emergence of new entities
like us. Thus dissipative processes intertwine with integrative ones.
Nowhere is this more the case than in the activity most distinctive
of humans, that of learning and communicating. It is not possible
without a functioning brain, dependent on a flux of energy; the
reactions involved are dissipative and therefore irreversible. When we
learn a Greek paradigm, we change the physiology of the brain. We
learn not as beings detached and separate from the world, but as parts
of it, by engaging in activities of exploration, hypothesis, construction,
testing. Here there is an interplay between chance and reason. And
this is especially true in learning about nature: such learning requires
that we enter into a dialogue with nature. Thus I think that Einstein,
when he sought a vision of the world from totally outside it. and denied
the reality of time, was mistaken.
The perspective I am suggesting leads to a new respect for nature,
of which we are not the overlords but in which we are both embedded
and emergent. In this perspective, there are no guarantees; we live in
a chancy world. Nevertheless, a qualified hope is rational. Human
knowledge increases, not always steadily, sometimes by surprising
zigzags or even reversals; but the trend is unmistakably incremental.
It is not a deductive chain. It is a rope, no single strand of which is,
by itself, of incorrigible strength; but different strands, by pulling
against one another, constitute a fabric stronger than any of its parts.
�20
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In this lecture I have sought to signalize a mistake into which
dynamicists and philosophers of the past three centuries fell, imagining the world to be an integrable system. The biological perspective I
have been sketching can be a corrective. Our survival depends on
recognizing and respecting our own complexity and that of the nature
in which we are both embedded and emergent.
According to rabbinical commentary, the first word of Genesis,
Berechit, means not "In thf beginning," but "In a beginning." Twentysix attempts, say the rabbis, preceded the present Genesis; all ended
in failure. Holway sheyaanod, exclaimed God as he created the world:
"Let's hope that this time it works."
*
*
*
*
Notes:
l. Physica 11D (1984). 309-323 (North Holland, Amsterdam).
2. "Chaos in a Double Pendulum," AmericanJoumal ofPhysics 60, (June
1992). 491-99.
3. P.S. Laplace, EssaiPhilosophique sur Les Probabilites (Paris: Courcier,
1814). 2-3.
4. Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, quoted in I. Prigogine and I.
Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (New York: Bantam Books, 1984) 257.
[Note: The foregoing text is identical with the lecture delivered on 7 October
1994, except for two paragraphs relating to incomputable numbers, which I
have deleted. Questions raised in the question period by Michael Comenetz led
me to recognize that these paragraphs were dubious.]
�Tragic Pleasure
(A lecture on Aristotle's
Poetics
with excerpts appended)
Joe Sachs
Aristotle's Poetics is a much-disdained book. So unpoetic a soul as
Aristotle's has no business speaking about such a topic, much less
telling poets how to go about their business. He reduces the drama
to its language, people say, and the language itself to its least poetic
element, the story, and then he encourages insensitive readers like
himself to subject stories to crudely moralistic readings that reduce
tragedies to the childish proportions of Aesop-fables. Strangely,
though, the Poetics itself is rarely read with the kind of sensitivity its
crttics claim to possess, and the thing crttlcized is not the book
Aristotle wrote but a cartcature of it. Aristotle himself respected
Homer so much that he personally corrected a copy of the lliad for his
student Alexander, who carried it all over the world. In his Rhetoric
(III, xvi, 9), Aristotle crtticizes orators who wrtte exclusively from the
intellect, rather than from the heart, in the way Sophocles makes
Antigone speak. Aristotle is often thought of as a logician, but he
regularly uses the adverb logikos (logically) as a term of reproach
contrasted with phusikos (naturally or approprtately) to descrtbe
arguments made by others, or preliminary and inadequate arguments
of his own. Those who take the trouble to look at the Poetics closely
will find, I think, a book that treats its topic appropriately and
naturally, and contains the reflections of a good reader and charactertstically powerful thinker.
The first scandal in the Poetics is the initial marking out of dramatic
poetry as a form of imitation. We call the poet a creator, and are
offended at the suggestion that he might be merely some sort of
recording device. As the painter's eye teaches us how to look and
shows us what we never saw, the dramatist presents things that never
existed until he imagined them, and makes us experience worlds we
This lecture was delivered at Santa Fe and at Annapolis in the Summer of 1994. It
could not have been written without a number of things I learned from Bill O'Grady,
both before and after his death. The memory of things he said is still a living guide
to learning. -J.S.
Joe Sachs is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
could never have found the way to on our own. But Aristotle has no
intention to diminish the poet. and in fact says the same thing I just said,
in making the point that poetry is more philosophic than history. By
imitation, Aristotle does not mean the sort of mimicry by which Aristophanes, say, finds syllables that approximate the sound of frogs. He is
speaking of the imitation of action, and by action (praxis) he does not
mean mere happenings. Aristotle speaks extensively of praxis in the
Nicomachean Ethics. It is ,not a word he uses loosely, and in fact his
use of it in the definition of tragedy recalls the discussion in the Ethics.
Action, as Aristotle uses the word, refers only to what is deliberately
chosen, and capable of finding completion in the achievement of some
purpose. Animals and young children do not act in this sense, and
action is not the whole of the life of any of us. The poet must have an
eye for the emergence of action in human life, and a sense for the
actions that are worth paying attention to. They are not present in
the world in such a way that a video camera could detect them. An
intelligent, feeling, shaping human soul must find them. By the same
token, the action of the drama itself is not on the stage. It takes form
and has its being in the imagination of the spectator. The actors speak
and move and gesture, but it is the poet who speaks through them,
from imagination to imagination, to present to us the thing that he
has made. Because that thing he makes has the form of an action, it
has to be seen and held together just as actively and attentively by us
as by him. The imitation is the thing that is re-produced, in us and
for us, by his art. This is a powerful kind of human communication,
and the thing imitated is what defines the human realm. If no one
had the power to imitate action, life might just wash over us without
leaving any trace.
How do I know that Aristotle intends the imitation of action to be
understood in this way? in De Anima, he distinguishes three kinds
of perception (II, 6; III, 3). There is the perception of proper sensibles----colors, sounds, tastes and so on; these lie on the surfaces of
things and can be mimicked directly for sense perception. But there
is also perception of common sensibles, available to more than one of
our senses, as shape is grasped by both sight and touch, or number
by all five senses; these are distinguished by imagination, the power
in us that is shared by the five senses, and in which the circular shape,
for instance, is not dependent on sight or touch alone. These common
sensibles can be mimicked in various ways, as when I draw a messy,
meandering ridge of chalk on a blackboard, and your imagination
grasps a circle. Finally, there is the perception of that of which the
sensible qualities are attributes, the thing-the son of Oiares, for
�SACHS
23
example; it is this that we ordinarily mean by perception, and while
its object always has an image in the imagination, it can only be
distinguished by intellect, nous (IJI,4), Skilled mimics can imitate
people we know, by voice, gesture, and so on, and here already we
must engage intelligence and imagination together. The dramatist
imitates things more remote from the eye and ear than familiar people.
Sophocles and Shakespeare, for example, imitate repentance and
forgiveness, true instances of action in Aristotle's sense of the word,
and we need all the human powers to recognize what these poets put
before us. So the mere phrase imitation of an action is packed with
meaning, available to us as soon as we ask what an action is, and how
the image of such a thing might be perceived.
Aristotle does understand tragedy as a development out of the
child's mimicry of animal noises, but that is in the same way that he
understands philosophy as a development out of our enjoyment of
sightseeing (Metaphysics I, 1). In each of these developments there is
a vast array of possible intermediate stages, but just as philosophy is
the ultimate form of the tnnate desire to know, tragedy is considered
by Aristotle the ultimate form of our innate delight in imitation. His
beloved Homer saw and achieved the most important possibilities of
the imitation of human action, but it was the tragedians who refined
and intensified the form of that imitation, and discovered its perfection.
A work is a tragedy, Aristotle tells us, only if it arouses pity and
fear. Why does he single out these two passions? Some interpreters
think he means them only as examples-pity and fear and other
passions like that-but I am not among those loose constructionists.
Aristotle does use a word that means passions of that sort (toiouta),
but I think he does so only to indicate that pity and fear are not
themselves things subject to identification with pin point precision,
but that each refers to a range of feeling. It is just the feelings in those
two ranges, however, that belong to tragedy. Why? Why shouldn't
one tragedy arouse pity and joy, say, and another fear and cruelty?
In various places, Aristotle says that it is the mark of an educated
person to know what needs explanation and what doesn't. He does
not try to prove that there is such a thing as nature, or such a thing
as motion, though some people deny both. Likewise, he understands
the recognition of a special and powerful form of drama built around
pity and fear as the beginning of an inquiry, and spends not one word
jusW'ying that restriction. We, however, can see better why he starts
there by trying out a few simple alternatives.
Suppose a drama aroused pity in a powerful way, but aroused no
fear at all. This is an easily recognizable dramatic form, called a
�24
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
tear-jerker. The name is meant to disparage this sort of drama, but
why? Imagine a well-written, well made play or movie that depicts the
losing struggle of a likable central character. We are moved to have a
good cry, and are afforded either the relief of a happy ending, or the
realistic desolation of a sad one. In the one case the tension built up
along the way is released within the experience of the work itself; in
the other it passes off as we leave the theater, and readjust our feelings
to the fact that it was, after all, only make-believe. What is wrong with
that? There is always pleasure in strong emotion, and the theater is
a harmless place to indulge it. We may even come out feeling good
about being so compassionate. But Dostoyevski depicts a character
who loves to cry in the theater, not noticing that while she wallows in
her warm feelings her coach driver is shivering outside. She has
daydreams about relieving suffering humanity, but does nothing to
put that vague desire to work. If she is typical, then the tear-jerker is
a dishonest form of drama, not even a harmless diversion but an
encouragement to lie to oneself.
Well then, let's consider the opposite experiment, in which a drama
arouses fear in a powerful way, but arouses little or no pity. This is
again a readily recognizable dramatic form, called the horror story, or
in a recent fashion, the mad-slasher movie. The thrill of fear is the
primary object of such amusements, and the story altemates between
the build-up of apprehension and the shock of violence. Again, as with
the tear-jerker, it doesn't much matter whether it ends happily or with
uneasiness, or even with one last shock, so indetenninate is its form.
And while the tear-jerker gives us an illusion of compassionate
delicacy, the unrestrained shock drama obviously has the effect of
coarsening feeling. Genuine human pity could not coexist with the
so-called graphic effects these films use to keep scaring us. The
attraction of this kind of amusement is again the thrill of strong feeling,
and again the price of indulging the desire for that thrill may be high.
Let us consider a milder form of the drama built on arousing fear.
There are stories in which fearsome things are threatened or done by
characters who are in the end defeated by means similar to, orin some
way equivalent to, what they dealt out. The fear is relieved in vengeance, and we feel a satisfaction that we might be inclined to call justice.
To work on the level of feeling, though, justice must be understood as
the exact inverse of the crime-doing to the offender the sort of thing
he did or meant to do to others. The imagination of evil then becomes
the measure of good, or at least of the restoration of order. The
satisfaction we feel in the vicarious infliction of pain or death is nothing
but a thin veil over the very feelings we mean to be punishing. This is
�SACHS
25
a successful dramatic formula, arousing in us destructive desires that
are fun to feel. along with the self-righteous illusion that we are really
superior to the character who displays them.
The playwright who
makes us feel that way will probably be popular, but he is a menace.
We have looked at three kinds of non-tragedy that arouse passions
in a destructive way. and we could add others. There are potentially
as many kinds as there are passions and combinations of passions.
That suggests that the theater is just an arena for the manipulation
of passions in ways that are pleasant in the short run and at least
reckless to pursue repeatedly. At worst. the drama could be seen as
dealing in a kind of addiction, which it both produces and holds the
only remedy for. But we have not yet tried to talk about the combination of passions characteristic of tragedy.
When we tum from the sort of examples I have given, to the
acknowledged examples of tragedy, we find ourselves in a different
world. The tragedians I have in mind are five: Aeschylus, Sophocles,
and Euripides; Shakespeare, who differs from them only in time; and
Homer, who differs from them somewhat more, in the form in which
he composed, but shares with them the things that matter most. I
could add other authors, such as Dostoyevski, who wrote stories of
the tragic kind in much looser literary forms, but I want to keep the
focus on a small number of clear paradigms.
When we look at a tragedy we find the chorus in Antigone telling
us what a strange thing a human being is, passing beyond all
boundaries (lines 332 ff.). or King Lear asking if man is no more than
this, a poor, bare, forked animal (Ill, iv. 97ff.). or Macbeth protesting
to his wife "I dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more
is none" (I. vii, 46-7). or Oedipus taunting Teiresias with the fact that
divine art was of no use against the Sphinx, but only Oedipus' own
human ingenuity (Oedipus Tyrannus 390-98). or Agamenmon, resisting walking home on tapestries, saying to his wife "I tell you to revere
me as a man, not a god" (925), or Cadmus in the Bacchae saying "I
am a man, nothing more" (199). while Dionysus tells Pentheus "You
do not know what you are" (506), or Patroclus telling Achmes "Peleus
was not your father nor Thetis your mother, but the gray sea bore you,
and the toweling rocks, so hard is your heart" (lliadXVl, 33-5). I could
add more examples of this kind by the dozen, and your memories will
supply others. Tragedy seems always to involve testing or finding the
limits of what is human. This is no mere orgy of strong feeling, but a
highly focussed way of bringing our powers to bear on the image of
what is human as such. I suggest that Aristotle is light in saying that
�26
THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW
the powers which first of all bring this human image to sight for us
are pity and fear.
It is obvious that the authors in our examples are not just putting
things in front of us to make us cry or shiver or gasp. The feelings
they arouse are subordinated to another effect. Aristotle begins by
saying that tragedy arouses pity and fear in such a way as to culrrtinate
in a cleansing of those passions, the famous catharsis. The word is
used by Aristotle only the .once, in his preliminary definition of tragedy.
I think this is because its role is taken over later in the Poetics by
another, more positive, word, but the idea of catharsis is important in
itself, and we should consider what it rrtight mean.
First of all, the tragic catharsis rrtight be a purgation. Fear can
obviously be an insidious thing that underrrtines life and poisons it
with anxiety. It would be good to flush this feeling from our systems,
bring it into the open, and clear the air. This may explain the appeal
of horror movies, that they redirect our fears toward something
external, grotesque, and finally ridiculous, in order to puncture them.
On the other hand, fear rrtight have a secret allure, so that what we
need to purge is the desire for the thrill that comes with fear. The
horror movie also provides a safe way to indulge and satisfY the longing
to feel afraid, and go home afterward satisfied; the desire is purged,
temporarily, by being fed. Our souls are so many-headed that oppo·
site satisfactions may be felt at the same time, but I think these two
really are opposite. In the first sense of purgation, the horror movie
is a kind of medicine that does its work and leaves the soul healthier,
while in the second sense it is a potentially addictive drug. Either
explanation may account for the popularity of these movies among
teenagers, since fear is so much a fact of that time of life. For those of
us who are older, the tear-jerker may have more appeal, offering a way
to purge the regrets of our lives in a sentimental outpouring of pity. As
with fear, this purgation too may be either medicinal or drug-like.
This idea of purgation, in its various forms, is what we usually mean
when we call something cathartic. People speak of watching football,
or boxing, as a catharsis of violent urges, or call a shouting match
with a friend a useful catharsis of buried resentment. This is a
practical purpose that drama may also serve, but it has no particular
connection with beauty or truth; to be good in this purgative way, a
drama has no need to be good in any other way. No one would be
tempted to confuse the feeling at the end of a horror movie with what
Aristotle calls "the tragic pleasure," nor to call such a movie a tragedy.
But the English word catharsis does not contain everything that is in
the Greek word. Let us look at other things it rrtight mean.
�SACHS
27
Catharsis in Greek can mean purification. While purging something means getting rid of it, purifying something means getting rid of
the worse or baser parts ofit. It is possible that tragedy purifies the
feelings themselves offear and pity. These arise in us in crude ways,
attached to all sorts of objects. Perhaps the poet educates our
sensibilities, our powers to feel and be moved, by refming them and
attaching them to less easily discernible objects. There is a line in The
Wasteland, "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." Alfred Hitchcock
once made us all feel a little shudder when we took showers. The poetic
imagination is limited only by its skill, and can tum any object into a
focus for any feeling. I suppose some people tum to poetry to find
delicious and exquisite new ways to feel old feelings, and consider
themselves to enter in that way into a purified state. I have heard it
argued that this sort of thing is what tragedy and the tragic pleasure are
all about, but it doesn't match up with my experience. Sophocles does
make me fear and pity human knowledge when I watch the Oedipus
Tyrranus, but this is not a refinement of those feelings but a discovery
that they belong to a surprising object. Sophocles is not training my
feelings, but using them to show me something worthy of wonder.
I believe that the word catharsis drops out of the Poetics because
the word wonder, to thaumaston, replaces it, first in chapter 9, where
Aristotle argues that pity and fear arise most of all where wonder does,
and fmally in chapters 24 and 25, where he singles out wonder as the
aim of the poetic art itself, into which the aim of tragedy in particular
merges. Ask yourself how you feel at the end of a tragedy. You have
witnessed horrible things and felt painful feelings, but the mark of
tragedy is that it brings you out the other side. Aristotle's use of the
word catharsis is not a technical reference to purgation or purification
but a beautiful metaphor for the peculiar tragic pleasure, the feeling
of being washed or cleansed.
The tragic pleasure is a paradox. As Aristotle says, in a tragedy, a
happy ending doesn't make us happy. At the end of the play the stage
is often littered with bodies, and we feel cleansed by it all. Are we like
Clytenmestra, who says she rejoiced when spattered by her husband's
blood, like the earth in a spring rain (Agamemnon 1389-92)? Are we
like !ago, who has to see a beautiful life destroyed to feel better about
himself (Othello V, i, 18-20)? We all feel a certain glee in the bringing
low of the mighty, but this is in no way similar to the feeling of being
washed in wonderment. The closest thing I know to the feeling at the
end of a tragedy is the one that comes with the sudden, unexpected
appearance of something beautiful. In a famous essay on beauty
(Ennead I, tractate 6), Plotinus says two things that seem true to me:
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
"Clearly [beauty] is something detected at a first glance, something
that the soul...recognizes, gives welcome to, and, in a way, fuses with"
(O'Brien translation, beginning sec. 2). What is the effect on us of this
recognition? Plotinus says that in every instance it is "an astonishment,
a delicious wonderment" (end sec. 4). Aristotle is insistent that a
tragedy must be whole and one, because only in that way can it be
beautiful, while he also ascribes the superiority of tragedy over epic
poetry to its greater unity and concentration (ch. 26). Tragedy is not
just a dramatic form in which some works are beautiful and others not;
tragedy is itself a species of beauty. All tragedies are beautiful.
By following Aristotle's lead, we have now found five marks of
tragedy: (1) it imitates an action, (2) it arouses pity and fear, (3) it
displays the human image as such, (4) it ends in wonder, and (5) it
is inherently beautiful. We noticed earlier that it is action that
characterizes the distinctively human realm, and it is reasonable that
the depiction of an action might show us a human being in some
defmitive way, but what do pity and fear have to do with that showing?
The answer is, I think, everything.
F1rst, let us consider what tragic pity consists in. The word pity
tends to have a bad name these days, and to imply an attitude of
condescension that diminishes its object. This is not a matter of the
meanings of words, or even of changing attitudes. It belongs to pity
itself to be two-sided, since any feeling of empathy can be given a
perverse twist by the recognition that it is not oneself but another with
whom one is feeling a shared pain. One of the most empathetic
characters in all literature is Edgar in King Lear. He describes himself
truly as "a most poor man, made tame to fortune's blows,/ Who, by
the art of known and feeling sorrows,/ Am pregnant to good pity" (IV,
vi, 217-19). Two of his lines spoken to his father are powerful evidence
of the insight that comes from suffering oneself and taking on the
suffering of others: "Thy life's a miracle" (IV, vi, 55), he says, and
"Ripeness is all" (V, ii, 11), trying to help his father see that life is still
good and death is not something to be sought. Yet in the last scene
of the play this same Edgar voices the stupidest words ever spoken in
any tragedy, when he concludes that his father just got what he
deserved when he lost his eyes, since he had once committed adultery
(V, iii, 171-4). Having witnessed the play, we know that Gloucester
lost his eyes because he chose to help Lear, when the kingdom had
become so corrupt that his act of kindness appeared as a walking fire
in a dark world (III, iv, 107). There is a chain of effects from
Gloucester's adultery to his mutilation, but it is not a sequence that
reveals the true cause of that horror. The wholeness of action that
�SACHS
29
Shakespeare shapes for us shows that Gloucester's goodness, displayed in a courageous, deliberate choice, and not his weakness many
years earlier, cost him his eyes. Edgar ends by giving in to the
temptation to moralize, to chase after the "fatal flaw" which is no part
of tragedy, and loses his capacity to see straight.
This suggests that holding on to proper pity leads to seeing straight,
and that seems exactly right. But what is proper pity? There is a way
of missing the mark that js opposite to condescension, and that is the
excess of pity called sentimentality. There are people who use the word
sentimental for any display of feeling, or any taking seriously of feeling,
but their attitude is as blind as Edgar's. Sentimentality is inordinate
feeling, feeling that goes beyond the source that gives rise to it. The
woman in Dostoyevski's novel who loves pitying for its own sake is an
example of this vice. But between Edgar's moralizing and her gushing
there is a range of appropriate pity. Pity is one of the instruments by
which a poet can show us what we are. We pity the loss of Gloucester's
eyes because we know the value of eyes, but more deeply, we pity the
violation of Gloucester's decency, and in so doing we feel the truth that
without such decency, and without respect for it, there is no human
life. Shakespeare is in control here, and the feeling he produces does
not give way in embarrassment to moral judgment, nor does it make
us wallow mindlessly in pity because it feels so good; the pity he
arouses in us shows us what is precious in us, in the act of its being
violated in another.
Since every boundary has two sides, the human image is delineated
also from the outside, the side of the things that threaten it. This is
shown to us through the feeling offear. As Aristotle says twice in the
Rhetoric, what we pity in others, we fear for ourselves (11.5 1382b 26,
II.S 1386a 27). In our mounting fear that Oedipus will come to know
the truth about himself, we feel that something of our own is threatened. Tragic fear, exactly like tragic pity, and either preceding it or
simultaneous with it, shows us what we are and are unwilling to lose.
It makes no sense to say that Oedipus' passion for truth is a flaw,
since that is the very quality that makes us afraid on his behalf.
Tragedy is never about flaws, and it is only the silliest of rnistranslations that puts that claim in Aristotle's mouth. Tragedy is about
central and indispensable human attributes, disclosed to us by the
pity that draws us toward them and the fear that makes us recoil from
what threatens them.
Because the suffering of the tragic figure displays the boundaries
of what is human, every tragedy carries the sense of universality.
Oedipus or Antigone or Lear or Othello is somehow every one of us,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
only more so. But the mere mention of these names makes it obvious
that they are not generalized characters, but altogether particular.
And il we did not feel that they were genuine individuals. they would
have no power to engage our emotions. It is by their particulality that
they make their marks on us, as though we had encountered them in
the flesh. It is only through the particulality of our feelings that our
bonds with them emerge. What we care for and chelish makes us pity
them and fear for them, ;md thereby the reverse also happens: our
feelings of pity and fear make us recognize what we care for and
chelish. When the tragic figure is destroyed it is a piece of ourselves
that is lost. Yet we never feel desolation at the end of a tragedy,
because what is lost is also, by the very same means, found. I am not
trying to make a paradox, but to desclibe a marvel. It is not so strange
that we learn the worth of something by losing it; what is astonishing
is what the tragedians are able to achieve by making use of that
common expelience. They lilt it up into a state of wonder.
Within our small group of exemplary poetic works, there are two
that do not have the tragic form, and hence do not concentrate all their
power into putting us in a state of wonder, but also depict the state
of wonder among their characters and contain speeches that reflect
on it. They are Homer's Iliad and Shakespeare's Tempest. (Incidentally, there is an excellent small book called Woe or Wonder, the
Emotional Effect of Shakespearean Tragedy, by J. V. Cunningham.
that demonstrates the continuity of the traditional understanding of
tragedy from Arts toile to Shakespeare.) The first poem in our literary
helitage, and Shakespeare's last play, both belong to a conversation
of which Artstotle's Poetics is the most prominent part.
In both the Iliad and the Tempest there are characters with arts
that in some ways resemble that of the poet. It is much noticed that
Prospera's farewell to his art coincides with Shakespeare's own, but
it may be less obvious that Homer has put into the Iliad a partial
representation of himself. But the last 150 lines of Book XVIII of the
Iliad desclibe the making of a work of art by Hephaestus. I will not
consider here what is depicted on the shield of Achilles, but only the
meaning in the poem of the shield itself. In Book XVIII, Achilles has
realized what mattered most to him when it is too late. The Greeks
are dliven back to their ships, as Achilles had prayed they would be,
and know that they are lost without him. "But what pleasure is this
to me now," he says to his mother, "when my beloved fliend is dead,
Patroclus, whom I chelished beyond all fliends, as the equal of my
own soul; I am bereft of him" (80-82). Those last words, as our dean
once pointed out in a lecture, also mean "I have killed him." In his
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desolation, Achilles has at last chosen to act. "I will accept my doom,"
he says (115). Thetis goes to Hephaestus because. in spite of his
resolve, Achilles has no armor in which to meet his fate. She tells her
son's story, concluding "he is lying on the ground, anguishing at heart"
(461). Her last word, anguishing, acheuon. is built on Achilles' name.
Now listen to what Hephaestus says in reply: ''Take courage, and
do not Jet these things distress you in your heart. Would that I had
the power to hide him fqr away from death and the sounds of grief
when grim fate comes to him, but I can see that beautiful armor
surrounds him, of such a kind that many people, one after another,
who look on it, will wonder" (463-67). Is it not evident that this source
of wonder that surrounds Achilles, that takes the sting from his death
even in a mother's heart, is the iliad itself? But how does the iliad
accomplish this?
Let us shift our attention for a moment to the Tempest. The
character Alonso, in the power of the magician Prospero, spends the
length of the play in the illusion that his son has drowned. To have
him alive again, Alonso says, "I wish/ Myself were mudded in that oozy
bed/ Where my son lies" (V, i, 150-2). But he has already been there
for three hours in his imagination; he says earlier "my son i' th' ooze
is bedded; and/ I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded/ And
with him there lie mudded" (III, iii, 100-2). What is this muddy ooze?
It is Alonso's grief, and his regret for exposing his son to danger, and
his self-reproach for his own past crime against Prospero and
Prospero's baby daughter, which made his son a just target for divine
retribution; the ooze is Alonso's repentance, which feels futile to him
since it only comes after he has lost the thing he cares most about.
But the spirit Ariel sings a song to Alonso's son: "Full fathom five thy
father lies; I Of his bones are coral made; I Those are pearls that were
his eyes;/ Nothing of him that doth fade/ But doth suffer a sea
change/ Into something rich and strange" (I, ii, 397-402). Alonso's
grief is aroused by an illusion, an imitation of an action, but his
repentance is real, and is slowly transforming him into a different man.
Who is this new man? Let us take counsel from the "honest old
councilor" Gonzalo, who always has the clearest sight in the play. He
tells us that on this voyage, when so much seemed lost, every traveller
found himself "When no man was his own" (V, i, 206-13). The
something rich and strange into which Alonso changes is himself, as
he was before his life took a wrong tum. Prospero's magic does no
more than arrest people in a potent illusion; in his power they are "knit
up/ ln their distractions" (III, iii, 89-90). When released, he says, "they
shall be themselves" (V, i, 32).
�32
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
On virtually every page of the Tempest, the word wonder appears,
or else some synonym for it. Miranda's name is Latin for wonder, her
favorite adjective brave seems to mean both good and out-of-the-ordinary, and the combination rich and strange means the same. What
is wonder? J. V. Cunningham describes it in the book I mentioned as
the shocked limit of all feeling, in which fear, sorrow, and joy can all
merge. There is some truth in that, but it misses what is wonderful or
wondrous about wonder. ,.It suggests that in wonder our feelings are
numbed and we are left llmp, wrung dry of all emotion. But wonder
is itself a feeling, the one to which Miranda is always giving voice, the
powerful sense that what is before one is both strange and good.
Wonder does not numb the other feelings; what it does is dislodge
them from their habitual moorings. The experience of wonder is the
disclosure of a sight or thought or image that fits no habitual context
of feeling or understanding, but grabs and holds us by a power
borrowed from nothing apart from itself. The two things that Plotinus
says characterize beauty, that the soul recognizes it at first glance and
spontaneously gives welcome to it, equally describe the experience of
wonder. The beautiful always produces wonder, if it is seen as
beautiful. and the sense of wonder always sees beauty.
But are there really no wonders that are ugly? The monstrosities
that used to be exhibited in circus side shows are wonders too, are
they not? In the Tempest, three characters think first of all of such
spectacles when they lay eyes on Caliban (II, ii, 28-31; V, i, 263-6),
but they are incapable of wonder, since they think they know everything that matters already. A fourth character in the same batch, who
is drunk but not insensible, gives way at the end of Act II to the sense
that this is not just someone strange and deformed, nor just a useful
servant, but a brave monster. But Stephana is not, I think, like the
holiday fools who pay to see monstrosities like two-headed calves or
exotic sights like wild men of Borneo. I recall an aquarium somewhere
in Europe that had on display an astoundingly ugly catfish. People
came casually up to its tank, were startled, made noises of disgust,
and turned away. Even to be arrested before such a sight feels in some
way perverse and has some conflict in the feeling it arouses, as when
we stare at the victims of a car wreck. The sight of the ugly or
disgusting, when it is felt as such, does not have the settled repose or
willing surrender that are characteristic of wonder. "Wonder is sweet,"
as Aristotle says (Poetics 1460 a 18).
This sweet contemplation of something outside us is exactly opposite to Alonso's painful immersion in his own remorse, but in every
other respect he is a model of the spectator of a tragedy. We are in
�SACHS
33
the power of another for awhile, the sight of an illusion works real and
durable changes in us, we merge into something rich and strange, and
what we find by being absorbed in the image of another is ourselves.
As Alonso is shown a mirror of his soul by Prospera, we are shown a
mirror of ourselves in Alonso, but in that mirror we see ourselves as
we are not in witnessing the Tempest, but in witnessing a tragedy.
The Tempest is a beautiful play, suffused with wonder as well as with
reflections on wonder, bu,t it holds the intensity of the tragic experience
at a distance. Homer, on the other hand, has pulled off a feat even
more astounding than Shakespeare's, by imitating the experience of
a spectator of tragedy within a story that itself works on us as a
tragedy.
In Book XXN of the lliad, forms of the word thambos, amazement,
occur three times in three lines (482-4), when Priam suddenly appears
in the hut of Achilles and "kisses the terrible man-slaughtering hands
that killed Ws many sons" (4 78-9), but this is only the prelud< to the
true wonder. Achilles and Priam cry together, each for his ow grief,
as each has cried so often before, but this time a miracle happens.
Achilles' grief is transformed into satisfaction, and cleansed from his
chest and his hands (513-14). This is all the more remarkable, since
Achilles has for days been repeatedly trying to take out his raging grief
on Hector's dead body. The famous first word of the Iliad, menis,
wrath, has come back at the beginning of Book XXN in the participle
meneatnon (22), a constant condition that Lattimore translates well
as "standing fury." But all tills hardened rage evaporates in one
lamentation, just because Achilles shares it with his enemy's father.
Hermes had told Priam to appeal to Achilles in the names of his father,
his mother, and his child, "tn order to stir his heart" (466-7), but
Priam's focussed misery goes straight to Achilles' heart without diluting the effect. The first words out of Priam's mouth are "remember
your father" (486). Your father deserves pity, Priam says, so "pity me/
with him in mind, since I am more pitiful even than he;/ I have dared
what no other mortal on earth ever dared,/ to stretch out my lips to
the hand of the man who murdered my children" (503-6).
Achilles had been pitying Patroclus, but mainly himself, but the
feeling to which Priam has directed him now is exactly the same as
tragic pity. Achilles is looking at a human being who has chosen to
go to the limits of what is humanly possible to search for something
that matters to him. The wonder of this sight takes Achilles out of his
self-pity, but back into himself as a son and as a sharer of human
misery itself. All Ws old longings for glory and revenge fall away, since
they have no place in the sight in which he is now absorbed. For the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
moment, the beauty of Priam's terrible action re-makes the world, and
determines what matters and what doesn't. The feeling in this moment out of time is fragile, and Achilles feels it threatened by tragic
fear. In the strange fusion of this scene, what Achilles fears is himself;
"don't irritate me any longer now, old man," he says when Priam tries
to hurry along the return of Hector's body, "don't stir up my heart in
its griefs any more now,/ lest I not spare even you yourself' (560,
568-9). Finally, after they. share a meal, they just look at each other.
"Priam wondered at Achilles,/ at how big he was and what he was like,
for he seemed equal to the gods,/ but Achilles wondered at Trojan
Priam./ looking on the worthy sight of him and hearing his story"
(629-32). In the grip of wonder they do not see enemies. They see
truly. They see the beauty in two men who have lost almost everything. They see a son a father should be proud of and a father a son
should revere.
The action of the iliad stretches from Achilles' deliberate choice to
remove himself from the war to his deliberate choice to return Hector's
body to Priam. The passion of the iliad moves from anger through pity
and fear to wonder. Priam's wonder lifts him for a moment out of the
misery he is enduring, and permits him to see the cause of that misery
as still something good. Achilles' wonder is similar to that of Priam,
since Achilles too sees the cause of his anguish in a new light, but in
his case this takes several steps. When Priam first appears in his hut,
Homer compares the amazement this produces to that with which
people look at a murderer who has fled from his homeland (480-84).
This is a strange compartson, and it recalls the even stranger fact
disclosed one book earlier that Patroclus, whom everyone speaks of
as gentle and kindhearted (esp. XVII, 670-71), who gives his life
because he cannot bear to see his friends destroyed to satisfY Achilles'
anger, this same Patroclus began his life as a murderer in his own
country, and came to Achilles' father Peleus for a second chance at
life. When Achilles remembers his father, he is remembering the man
whose kindness brought Patroclus into his life, so that his tears, now
for his father, now again for Patroclus (XXN, 511-12), merge into a
single grief. But the old man crying with him is a father too, and
Achilles' tears encompass Priam along with Achilles' own loved ones.
Finally, since Priam is crying for Hector, Achilles' griefincludes Hector
himself, and so it turns his earlier anguish inside out. If Priam is like
Achilles' father, then Hector must come to seem to Achilles to be like
a brother, or to be like himself.
Achilles cannot be brought to sucb a reflection by reasoning, nor
do the feelings in which he has been embroiled take him in that
�SACHS
35
direction. Only Priam succeeds in unlocking Achilles' heart, and he
does so by an action, by kissing his hand. From the beginning of Book
XVIII (23, 27, 33). Achilles' hands are referred to over and over and
over, as he uses them to pour dirt on his head, to tear his hair, and
to kill every Trojan he can get his hands on. Hector, who must go up
against those hands, is mesmerized by them; they are like a fire, he
says, and repeats it. "His hands seem like a fire" (XX, 371-2). After
Priam kisses Achilles' h'}nd, and afier they cry together, Homer tells
us that the desire for lamentation went out of Achilles' chest and out
of his hands (XXIV, 514). His murderous, man-slaughtering hands
are stilled by a grief that finally has no enemy to take itself out on.
When, in Book XVIII, Achilles had accepted his doom (115), it was part
of a bargain; "I will lie still when I am dead," he had said, "but now I
must win splendid glory" (121). But at the end of the poem, Achilles
has lost interest in glory. He is no longer eaten up by the desire to be
lifted above Hector and Priam, but comes to rest in just looking at
them for what they are. Homer does surround Achilles in armor that
takes the sting from his misery and from his approaching death, by
working that misery and death into the wholeness of the iliad. But
the iliad is, as Aristotle says, the prototype of tragedy; it is not a poem
that aims at conferring glory but a poem that bestows the gift of wonder.
Like Alonso in the Tempest, Achilles ultimately fmds himself. Of
the two, Achilles is the closer model of the spectator of a tragedy,
because Alonso plunges deep into remorse before he is brought back
into the shared world. Achilles is lifted directly out of himself, into the
shared world, in the act of wonder, and sees his own image in the
sorrowing father in front of him. This is exactly what a tragedy does
to us, and exactly what we experience in looking at Achilles. In his
loss, we pity him. In his fear of himself, on Priam's behalf, we fear for
him, that he might lose his new-won humanity. In his capacity to be
moved by the wonder of a suffering fellow human, we wonder at him.
At the end of the iliad, as at the end of every tragedy, we are washed
in the beauty of the human image, which our pity and our fear have
brought to sight. The five marks of tragedy that we learned of from
Aristotle's Poetics-that it imitates an action, arouses pity and fear,
displays the human image as such, ends in wonder, and is inherently
beautiful-give a true and powerful account of the tragic pleasure.
*
*
* * *
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Excerpts from Aristotle's Poetics
Ch. 6 A tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious and has
a wholeness in its extent, in language that is pleasing (though in
distinct ways in its different parts), enacted rather than narrated,
culminating, by means of pity and fear, in the cleansing of these
passions ... So tragedy is "1" imitation not of people, but of action, life,
and happiness or unhappiness, while happiness and unhappiness
have their being in activity, and come to completion not in a quality
but in some sort ofaction ... Therefore it is deeds and the story that are
the end at which tragedy alms, and in all things the end is what
matters most...So the source that governs tragedy in the way that the
soul governs life is the story. 1149b23ff
Ch. 7 An extended whole is that which has a beginning, middle
and end. But a beginning is something which, in itself, does not need
to be after anything else, while something else naturally is the case or
comes about after it; and an end is its contrary, something which in
itself is of such a nature as to be after something else, either necessarily or for the most part, but to have nothing else after it...lt is
therefore needful that well-put-together stories not begin from just
anywhere at random, nor end just anywhere at random ...And beauty
resides in size and order ... the oneness and wholeness of the beautiful
thing being present all at once in contemplation .. .in stories, just as in
human organizations and in living things. 1450b25ff
Ch. 8 A story is not one, as some people think, just because it is
about one person ... And Homer,just as he is distinguished in all other
ways, seems to have seen this point beautifully, whether by art or by
nature. 145lal6
Ch. 9 Now tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action,
but also of objects of fear and pity, and these arise most of all when
events happen contrary to expectation but in consequence of one
another; for in this way they will have more wonder in them than if
they happened by chance or by fortune, since even among things that
happen by chance, the greatest sense of wonder is from those that
seem to have happened by design. 1452alff
Chs. 13-14 Since it is peculiar to tragedy to be an imitation of
actions arousing pity and fear ... and since the former concerns some-
�SACHS
37
one who is undeserving of suffering and ihe latter concerns someone
like us ... ihe story ihat works well must ... depict a change from good
to bad fortune, resulting not from badness but from some great error
of someone like us, or else better raiher ihan worse ... One must not
look for every sort of pleasure from a tragedy, but for ihe one native
to it. And since it is ihe pleasure ihat results from pity and fear ihat
makes ihe work a tragedy, and ihe poet needs to provide ibis pleasure
by means of imitation, it. is evident ihat it must be artfully embodied
in ihe actions (and not rely on visual effects). 1452b30ff, 1453b5
Ch. 16 The best sort of revelation in a tragedy is one ihat arises
from ihe actions ihemselves, ihe astonishment coming about ihrough
ihings ihat are likely, as in ihe Oedipus of Sophocles. {A revelation,
as ihe word indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, ihat
produces eiiher friendship or hatred in people marked out for good or
bad fortune. The most beautiful of revelations occurs when reversals
of condition come about at ihe same time, as is ihe case in ihe
Oedipus.-Ch. 11) 1455bl7, 1452a30
Chs. 24-5 Wonder needs to be produced in tragedies, but in ihe
epic there is more room for that which confounds reason, by means
of which wonder comes about most of all, since in ihe epic one does
not see ihe person who performs ihe action; ihe events surrounding
ihe pursuit of Hector would seem ridiculous ifiheywere on stage ... But
wonder is sweet ...And Homer most of all has taught ihe rest of us how
one ought to speak of what is untrue ... One ought to choose likely
impossibilities in preference to unconvincing possibilities ... And if a
poet has represented impossible ihings, ihen he has missed ihe mark,
but ihat is ihe right ihing to do if he thereby hits the mark that is the
endojthe poetic art itself, ihatis, if in ihat way he makes ihat or some
oiher part more wondrous. 1460al2ff; 1460b23ff.
�38
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�FAUSTIAN PHENOMENA:
Goethe on Plants, Animals, and
Modern Biologists
John F. Comell.
When Faust strikes his deal with Mephistopheles, it is neither for mere
material gain nor for romantic conquest, nor even for power or
knowledge. It is for experience without end.
If I to any moment say:
Linger on! You are so fair!
Put me in fetters straightaway,
Then I can die for all I care!
(Faust L 1699-1702) 1
The challenge is at the heart of the Faustian legend for Goethe. The
desire to reach a point exceeding all hope of further striving is the most
diabolical desire he could imagine. It is mere love of one's own past
achievement-self-complacency. And in self-complacency man essentially delivers his soul to death because he gives up the devotion to
forward movement which is life. He renounces the very thing existence
asks of him, awareness of himself through increasing awareness of
the world. Goethe himself never rested in the struggle to unfold the
forms within and to understand the forms without In old age he even
jested that his soul deserved other embodiments in which to continue
its ceaseless activity.2
But Faustian striving was not for Goethe only an archetypal human
theme. He beheld the same soulful drama throughout the plant and
animal realms, too. The drive to excess, the restlessness for change,
the blind impulse toward a fuller existence that might finally attain a
novel form-these were also manifest in organisms of every kind. And,
as a naturalist who had rejected the special creation of species and
genus, Goethe could speculate that a continuous creative "urge" 3 in
organisms had even given rise to their diversity of kinds.
The present essay will look with Goethe at plants and animals with
this Faustian theme in mind. This is no idle literary exercise. For the
important contention of his biological essays is that an upspringing
movement is essential to all the phenomena of life. Moreover, he
argues that a dispassionate contemplation of living things reveals
John F. Comell is a tutor at the Santa Fe campus of St. John's College.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
such vital striving over and above the functions necessary to survival.
This is one of the essential principles of the philosophical study of
organisms for Goethe. Unfortunately the practical and technological
interests of biologists increasingly distracted attention from this possibility. Many of his contemporaries already theorized, like ours, about
the organism as a conglomerate of mechanical processes, thus highlighting instead its susceptibility to ever more refined human control.
Goethe does not concede. however, that advanctng analysis of the
organism into simpler inorganic components must shed light on its
essential activity as a living whole.
Whoever wants to know and write about
A living thing, first drives the spirit out;
He has the parts withio his grasp,
But gone is the spirit's holding clasp.
(1.1936-9)
This does not mean that he actually posits a mysterious force to unite
the constituents discoverable by histology and biochemistry and so
on. He supposes no ultimate explanation of the organism in terms of
its parts or its whole. The aim of his biological method is simply to
study vital phenomena at the level of the active, already organized
being. He thus attends to properties overlooked by analytic methods,
the most important of which properties is the upward-driving urge,
discemible in both plants and animals, iotensified and extended in
manifold ways. His studies in "morphology" (as he called them) thus
represent avant la lettre a phenomenology of nature, an investigation
of the life-world independent of both traditional metaphysics and the
apparatus of experimental science. Perhaps it goes without saying that
these studies can help us appraise our conventional scientific conceptions of life that may rather mirror a technological mastery of the
organism. In any case I shall suggest a few comparative observations
along that ltne.
Let the plant and animal heroes come onto the stage.
To begin with Goethe's most famous character, the plant. The
unfoldiog of the plant's life is narrated tn the relatively popular
Metamorphosis of Plants of 1790 4 Its general theory of plants is
well-known enough to be subject to a common misconception. It is
often reduced to the doctrine that the organs of the annual plant are
io essence the same: the sepals (or the segments of the calyx holding
the flower), the corolla (the petals of the flower), the nectaries, and the
reproductive parts are in fact transformed leaves, reshaped to suit
their various functions. (Charles Darwin in the Origin of Species
�CORNELL
41
speaks of this doctrine as "familiar to almost everyone".) 5 The idea of
such homological relation among the plant's organs is an important
morphological insight that Goethe advanced. But it had been foreshadowed by earlier botanists, as he acknowledged (paragraph 4). 6
What is more remarkable in his account is how these form-elements
of the plant betray the direction of its ·movement, its "striving" toward
the flowering stage. For instance, Goethe devotes a whole chapter to
something seen in many, garden plants, that as the leaves ascend on
the stem they become more "developed"-more richly veined, more
notched and elaborate in pattem (Plate 1). This differentiation of form
may well be explained by intemal functions, for example, the refinement of the plant's saps (par. 39), but that in no way compromises the
fact that the phenomenon of growth follows a single apparent direction.
Other little irregularities in the plant's organs reveal how distinct
their forms may be from purely functional features. The forms of some
organs "anticipate" those higher up in the plant's ascent. The calyx,
or cup that holds the floral corolla and is ordinarily green, sometimes
takes on the coloring of the petals " ... at the tips, margins, back, or
even over its inner surface while the outer surface remains green. And
always we see a refinement [of form] associated with this coloration"
(par. 40). Goethe cites numerous morphological disruptions of the
supposedly strict functional series of appendages, and shows how a
sequence of form-elements may only by degrees achieve some functional organ. (par. 75, 83. Plate 2 shows marigold seeds making up
such a sequence.) Perhaps one remarkable instance he cites will
illustrate just how powerfully form can supervene function, and
express the weird upward striving of the plant. In a tulip, a stem-leaf
can rise to new heights and participate dramatically in the overall
pattem of the floral petals. "Such a leaf-petal," he observes, "is half
green, and divided into two parts, the green half being related to the
stem remaining attached to it, and the colored part being lifted up with
the corolla." (par. 44). Goethe supervised the drawing of a colored plate
to document this extraordinary but telling occurrence (Plate 3).
Goethe is showing not just the plant's composition from leaf-like
elements, but a powerful "urge" throughout its growth as these parts
successively appear. The ascending forms of the organs suggest the
plant's thrust beyond vegetative activity. Repetitive foliar growth
(which can be made indefinite by overfeeding) is progressively left
behind for the higher stage of sexual reproduction (par. 30). According
to another paper, he experimented with preventing the plant's elaboration as it grows from node to node and puts out a new leaf at each
step 7 He could continually produce near identity in every nodal
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
42
1) Sa pi us saponaria
after DeCandolle
arvensis
~~~It·~
pluralis
2) Fruit of marigold,
after Gaertner
3) Tulip with
extraordinary leaf-petals
Plates 1·3 appear courtesy of Ox Bow Press, Woodbridge, Connecticut.
�CORNELL
43
segment and every new leaf (and thus prevent the normal foliar
refinement) simply by detaching every new shoot and replanting it in
soil. Thus he showed that the graded elaboration up the stem is
intrinsic to the plant's accumulation of the nodal series. In the life of
the complex single being, development appears to be necessary.
Botany demonstrates what Faust feels.
Goethe also inquired into how these stages of transformation arose,
but in doing so stayed clqse to an intuitive sense of life. Noticing that
the plant-organs developed in an alternating sequence of expansions
and contractions-expanded leaves, contracted sepals, expanded petals, contracted sexual organs, expanded fruiting organs-he naturally
asked what two forces struggled back and forth within the plant to
produce this rhythmic alternation of outward form. On an anatomical
level, Goethe could discern a related duality in the plant's two chief
tissues, the spiral vessels (or tracheids, usually on its periphery) and
the vertical fibre (in the interior) 8 But again the overall effect invites
another description: everything takes place as if two creative sources,
the male and female poles in the vegetative system, generate the
individual's growth by their opposition, in dialectical steps up a
"spiritual ladder" (par. 6). For the plant no less than for Faust, "two
souls abide" within its breast (1. 1112).
Goethe's nature-researches not only advance careful comparative
observation of living things but also typically reflect on the human
relation to them. Both moments together constitute his practice of
biology. This becomes particularly vivid in his zoological notes and
essays. Enter the artimals.
Goethe recogruzes a hidden similarity between plants and animals.
"Scarcely distinguishable" in their rudimentary stages, plants and
animals have taken opposite courses of development, plants toward
fixity and security, animals toward mobility and freedom. But fundamental to both, he explains, is the serial homology of their component
parts, the regular repetition of form elements-be they leaves, a sequence of nodes along an extended stem, the series of vertebrae in the
skeleton, or the segments of insects and crustaceans. (The serial
aspect of some invertebrate forms are evident in Goethe's own drawings, Plates 4 and 5.) But as with the plant, the animal form is raised
above a series of similar structures. Its differentiation admits of
degree: "The more imperfect a creature is, the more do these parts
appear identical or similar to each other and the more do they resemble
the whole. The more the creature is perfected, the more dissimilar its
parts become .... Subordination of the parts betokens a more perfected
creature."9 (By perfection, Goethe only means this morphological
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW
44
distinction, and not any natural hierarchy: elsewhere he speaks of the
"so-called" perfected animals, sogenannten vollkommenem Tieren.) 10
In some animals, looking at their skeletal structure, an excessive
vitality is expressed by the sertes of caudal vertebrae which repeat
indefinitely and taper off. The tail, he observes, "may be considered as
suggesting the infinity of organic existences." In other cases, structure
supervenes on this repetitive growth. There is a "curtailment," for
example, in the snake's,.transformation into a long-legged frog. 11
Thus, compartng the general appearances of skeletons, we interpret
forms as elaborated upon ortginal serial processes.
In vertebrate zoology, because of the extensive reshaping of sertal
elements, the pattems of bones built up are more prominent than the
sequential foundations. Such visible pattems have been known since
Artstotle as anatomical "types." The typological approach to animal
forms is now discredited by historians ofbiology, who associate it with
a metaphysical interest in "Platonic" ideas. Yet one must be wary of
cartcaturtng typologists as idealists whose cherished types dissolve
once we recognize the flux of evolutionary change, the phases of which
are not all represented in extant species. The point of Goethe's typology
was not to establish any abstract animal ideas. 12 His ortginal report
on morphological types (1 795) stressed the practicality of establishing
a lexicon of basic pattems: the construction of general types would
organize new osteological data and facilitate the advancement of
science.
13
In fact, Goethe did not imagine the type as static. Like Faust, a type
is not permitted to rest thanks to the tension of forces within and
without. "What has been formed," he wrote later in an introduction to
his morphological papers, "is instantly transformed, and if we would
arrive, to son1e degree, at a vital intuition of Nature, we must strive to
keep ourselves as flexible and pliable as the example she herself
provides.'' 14 Perhaps Goethe implies that were we less rtgid we might
discem his hints at organic evolution? As the plant is compelled to
elaborate leaves up the stem, so the animal cannot remain fixed but
must evolve and differentiate into a multiplicity of genera. Significantly, the animal's bUnd drtves-the strtvings of instinct- havea major
role.
Among Goethe's zoological studies, one on rodents shows well how
he conceives evolution. Like the premier French anatomist Georges
Cuvier, he focuses on the rodents' powerful teeth. Their well-developed
upper and lower incisors offer an extreme example of how determined
animals are by their mode of feeding. Full of nervous, gnawing energy,
rodents take nutrttion to a Faustian excess: their teething, he says, is
�CORNELL
45
"vehemently compulsive, unintentionally destructive.'' 15 It is also
creative. Cuvier had noticed that rodents' incisors could develo&
monstrously, especially if unopposed by the teeth above or below.
Goethe sees them as conditioned more deeply by dental excess. He
contrasts their overactive incisors with the balanced set of teeth
possessed by carnivores, and considers how their gnawing gives rise
to a "capricious" range of forms. As the rodents' superfluous energy
is redirected toward the l;msiness of life, it fills various needs such as
making dams or burrows and storing food. Gradually the rodents
explore the main options for adapted living, which their generic forms
represent by striking parallels. Rats correspond to carnivores, hares
to ruminants (for lagomorphs were then classed as rodents), beavers
are swinish swamp-dwellers, and squirrels and flying squirrels parallel the apes and the bats respective!y17
Goethe's essay on rodents pauses to contemplate the common
squirrel with its capacity to stand upright. In quadrupeds, he notes,
the general tendency is that the posterior parts raise themselves above
the frontal ones. The contrary frontal elevation occurs in such "capital"
animals as the lion and elephant, whose heads are further emphasized
by ornament. He calls this elevation a "striving" (using the Faustian
word Bestreben). 18 Now among the rodents, he notices, it is the
ape-like arboreal acrobats, the squirrels, that have approximated an
upright beartng. They grasp small nuts and spruce cones with skillful
hands and, as they play mischievously with their food, we take
particular pleasure in watching them. Then Goethe imagines something like the rodents' social history.
[Gnawing] promotes a superfluous consumption of food for
the purpose of materially filling the stomach and might also
be regarded as continuous exercise, a restless urge to be
occupied which may ultimately lead to destructive fighttog ...After satisJY!ng immediate need to the liveliest way, they
would still like to live in more secure plenty. From this arises
the gathering-drive and the handling of materials which
might appear to be very similar to deliberate ariisiry. 19
Of what use to serious science is this reflection on the squirrel as
mirror of our own activity? First, with respect to the problem of upright
posture, note that although it represents a "contrary" tendency in
nature, a redirection of life's impulses, Goethe does not hold frontal
elevation to be especially rare. The upward tendency has a parallel in
members of several orders of animals; the urge it represents is not
restricted to human beings or even to primates. One might object that
�46
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
this is some kind of anthropomorphic reading of other forms, but I
believe this objection will not stand. The fear of anthropomorphism in
studying nature assumes a fundamental separation of human essence
and experience from the rest of the world. On that assumption, human
activity is a prohibited model for interpreting animals, which must
rather be understood in the presumably non-anthropomorphic terms
of mechanism, along with the rest of nature. But Goethe, without
repudiating mechanism, Jets us glimpse nature's unity precisely by
generalizing the human way of being. We are literally on more equal
footing with other animals, but without (so to speak) a loss of standing.
The story of rodents' behavioral evolution similarly affirms our
solidarity with other beings. The perpetually nervous rodents, as
Goethe describes them, display greed and warlike habits and even
invent something like the arts. This is Goethe's version, or better, his
inversion, of sociobiology, his way of seeing the naturalness of our
"cultural" activity. Animals remote from human beings are beset with
similar blind drives which open up similar outlets, elaborated in
different degrees. It is noteworthy that he remains silent about mechanistic or teleological causes of these developments while illuminating
their connection with the animals' exuberance of life. For him the most
striking principle of animal behaviors is not "behind" the outward
phenomena, in the hereditary substance privileged by twentieth-century sociobiology. Nor, in the teleological sense of cause, is the
essential thing about animals the urge to disseminate genes through
reproduction, as sociobiology teaches under the influence of Darwin
and Malthus. There is excess in nature, but why confine its expression
to reproductive competition? Goethe does not so underestimate the
kinship between human beings and other organisms. If we reduce
human beings and all animals to reproduction machines, we miss the
analogical fact that hyperactivity and conflict might engender new
exertions of animals' energy. A rechannelling of animal force "upward,"
toward expression in art, might occur in squirrels no less than in
humans.
Scholars tell us that Goethe was not an evolutionist, that species
transformation was for him an absiract relationship rather than a
principle of genealogical kinship over time. They do not find in his
works a discussion of particular phylogenies linking living and fossil
species, nor do they find reference to evolutionists such as Lamarck
or Robinet. 20 But take care: the most convinced evolutionist cannot
necessarily offer convincing phylogenies. (Darwin did not, and Goethe
wrote decades earlier.) Further, it is known that Goethe sometimes
endorsed evolution with intimate friends; and in writing on evolution-
�47
CORNELL
.,..._....
...
114 I Pt
"':
;.,,~
4)
5)
Segmentation in insect
and crustacean,
by Goethe's hand
6)
3-toed and 2-toed Sloths_, or
Ai and Unau, from the
English edition of Cuvier
�48
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ary speculations by Kant and Eduard d'Alton, he alluded to his own
belief in species descent. 21 Delicate public treatment of sensitive
subjects was a matter of principle for Goethe. He followed what he
called "the higher maxim of pedagogy: not to disturb children or the
un[educated] and half-educated in their reverence for higher things. "22
Was the poet merely judicious about the topic of evolution? We have
seen, I think, that Goethe's scientific writing is many-layered-provocative rather than demonstr.ative. Always the playwright, he does not
force ideas on his audienc~ but lets them consider implications of the
dialogue, the action, and the scene. Yet there is more than circumstantial proof of Goethe's evolutionist inclinations. Let us tum to an
essay where he in fact indulges in phylogenetic speculation, speculation leading even to the genesis of human beings.
In the middle of an essay on "Sloths and Pachyderms" Goethe asks
permission to resort to "poetic" expression, necessary (he says) to
reach where prose may not. He launches into an evolutionary fable.
The story begins With a "colossal spirit" [ungeheuerer Geist]. specifically a beached whale, a mammalian fish out of water. The animal
regrets its uncertain fortunes even as it begins to settle in its swampy
home: "... it feels as if it belongs half to earth and half to water." Its
inner turmoil passes "through whatever filiation" to its descendants,
who, having made their way into a drier, less confusing environment,
still do not develop harmoniously. As if vexed by some former constraint, as if impatient to exercise some freedom, they stretch out their
limbs and grow claws "... almost Without limit." These new beasts-the
sloths-are a genus in which Goethe recognizes a counter-spirit or
contrary-spirit, an Ungetst. But they are destined for "something
more," only temporarily unable to manifest it in its "principal appearance" [Haupterscheinung]. Gradually, the more integrated members of
the sloth genus, the species called the Unau, raise themselves to a
more versatile level of animality, and enter the scene as the highly
mobile apes. The story closes With a quick but arresting phrase. Still
referring to the great destiny of this animal spirit as yet unfulfilled,
Goethe concludes, "... and among the apes surely there are a few that
might show the way to it" ("man denn unter den A.ffen gar wahl einige
23
findet, welche nach ihm hinwetsen mogen").
Clearly Goethe's fable of the evolution of a spirited ape entails other
than literal meanings. The natural images not only hint at our origins
but also invite us to consider what new self-knowledge such conjecture would afford. Indeed his images tell a Faustian tale: painful birth
and ambivalence about life, slothful inactivity and Withdrawal from
the task of adapting to reality, unproductive vexation and finally, the
�CORNELL
49
beginning of a resolution, intense activity that realizes the potentials
hidden within. Further, as with Goethe's rodents, what at first seems
like monstrosity turns into creativity. The whale's maladjustment
presses him on, by stages, to a nobler destiny. 24
But in addition to these meanings, notice a particular scientific
sense in Goethe's tale. His ancestry for anthropoids suggests a
Faustian career by incorporating real zoological problems. Why the
whale and the sloth as h,uman progenitors? What links them in the
naturalist's mind? Both these animals are among the most extraordinary: they have proven especially hard to classify scientifically. Only
in modem times has the whale been made a mammal. In evolutionary
discussions during the past century, scientists have doubted whether
this superbly adapted sea creature, without hind legs, could possibly
have descended from a four-legged land dweller. Even today the
classification of whales is in dispute. Despite the taxonomic trouble
they have made, the whales' social structure and high intelligence
have always been admired. One hardly needs reminding that the
cachelot, the blunt-headed sperm whale, was a spiritual adversary of
seafaring mankind at the tum of the nineteenth century. Cuvier's
English editors record the sperm whale's bloodthirsty tyranny of the
sea and its vindictive pursuit of prey. This behavior, they say, "... has
scarcely any parallel in animated nature"-an ironic phrase, as they
later mention the notorious excesses of the whaling industry. 25 The
sperm whale and man are natural Faustian animals.
The sloths are also great eccentrics in biology, animals that, like
whales, have defied the authority of European classifiers. Cuvier called
them "imperfect and grotesque" because they violated his rules about
how the parts of animals should be functionally correlatedl 26 The
tree-hanging sloths, neither lovely nor lively, were also thought to lead
a painful existence, which Goethe concedes in attributing to them a
negative spirit. His claim that they are destined for something more,
alluding to their almost human form, is not so far-fetched. Some
species of sloth, after all, are good swimmers and have dexterous
hands. One can see the anthropoid bearing of the sloths pictured in
the English edition of Cuvier (Plate 6).
In brief, the ancestors Goethe selects for humankind have surprising zoological credentials. Sloths and whales are outstanding as the
natural rebels of nature, and as outlaws to scientific legislation. Their
conspicuous place in the human family tree accounts then for the
evolution of the human species with its own ambiguous stance In the
world. For Goethe, all life is at odds with mere being, all organisms
�50
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
overreach themselves. But even this excess exceeds itself in the case
of our anthropoid precursors.
We have arrived with Goethe at the human animal. We may turn
now to the question of how not just biological phenomena but biological practice itself reflects the Faustian theme. Let us bear in mind the
historical uniqueness of Goethe's biological work, the audacity of his
integration of a science of organisms with a poet's vision of life. Wh!le
his researches have appealed to philosophical scientists-T. H. Huxley,
Claude Bernard, and Freud-and to ph!losophers such as Hegel and
Nietzsche, they did not advance the progress of quantitative and
experimental biology. Goethe's place in the history of life science is
what he might have expected. He is history's deviant-not the sloth in
his genealogical tale, but perhaps the Leviathan on the shore who,
wh!le not in his proper milieu, is an enormous creature all the same.
One may appreciate better the role of this strange giant in biology
by comparing him to another towering naturalist, Charles Darwin.
Indeed, by comparing Goethe with the greatest evolutionist since his
time, both of their enterprises might come into clearer focus. So, too,
might the Faustian d!lemma of contemporary biology.
Let us begin the comparison by citing Goethe's most "Darwinian"
text. He penned this speculation at the age of sixty:
The skeletons of some marine animals show plainly that, even
while fashioning these, Nature was already feeling her way
toward the higher idea of land animals ... ! would call them
marvelous, these transitions in nature, if in nature the marvelous did not happen to be universally common ...You can
imagine Nature standing at a gaming counter, as it were,
constantly shouting "Double" and continuing to play with her
winnings in all her domains with unfailing luck ad infinitum.
The stone, the animal, the plant-after a number of such lucky
throws they are all put at stake again; and who knows but
that man himself is not in his turn just another throw for
higher winntngs?27
The theme of "chance" is not prevalent in Goethe's biological
writings. But if chance is understood as what appears in creation
without design, it is certainly consonant with his idea of evolution. It
is consonant with the idea of nature experimenting with so-called
monstrous forms, blindly groping toward possibly higher destinies.
On the other hand, we discern something "Goethean" in Charles
Darwin's eloquence about the natural world. Recall how in the Origin
ofSpecies Darwin holds nature to be a tense harmony of sublime forces
superior to, and in a sense wiser than, human beings. He tried to
�CORNELL
51
establish the doctrine of natural selection by analogy from the inferior
methods of man's selective breeding. A deductive argument for natural
selection from wild populations alone was not conclusive. One needed
to see something about creative processes in order to imagine natural
creation as a whole. In the Origin, Darwin applied what we know about
making domestic breeds (e.g., greyhounds, wolfhounds, dachshunds)
to nature's "making" of species. One can find in his notes and
published pages other analogies from human artistry to nature's
process of creating. 28 Darwin the fertile theorizer, who piled up
insights in his notebooks and artfully sifted his best ideas, knew
something about the process of intellectual creation. It occurred to
him that nature's mode of creation, natural selection, is like all
ingenuity, a testing and refinement of half-conscious and unaccountable effusions. 29 From this perspective, Darwin's doctrine seems closer
to Goethe's Faustian theme: both would capture that blind purposiveness and creativity that makes nature the model of human ari.
This is not the place to show that the inspiration of the "romantic"
strain in Darwin might be traced ultimately to the German poet. 30
The history of science makes clear in any case that a difference
between the two nature researchers becomes far more important.
Natural selection is simple and universal mechanism, grounded positively in studies of plant and animal population. What Darwin called
his "long argument" of the Origin of Species inaugurates a new era in
life science, one based on natural selection, while there is nothing in
Goethe to compare. But this points us to a deeper disagreement, a
philosophical disagreement between Darwin and Goethe that sometimes surfaces in contemporary biology.
The disagreement has to do with the representation of nature not
just as universal mechanism but as any totality at all. Goethe's
researches, although consistently suggestive, were never systematized, his essays were not organized into a whole. The unity of living
nature remained an intuition that did not attain the architectonic
structure of positive science, according to the imposing Newtonian
model. Goethe mistrusted the Newtonian precedents for systematizing
researches into generalized, mathematics-like doctrine. 3 His biological writing thus reflected what he once said about dramatic composition-that it should have significant general features,
incommensurable, however, in representing the whole, so one is
drawn to study it again and again. 32 With all his Faustian urge to
understand life, Goethe supposed one limit in our quest for science:
every all-embracing scheme of natural history must be premature.
�52
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Darwin's metaphysical preconceptions denied this. Heir to the
Newtonian legacy that Goethe renounced, he supposed that some
simple, general law of natural genesis would eventually link all
particular biological problems. This supposition was grounded in
liberal theological belief. To Darwin it was reasonable to posit a God
creating through general laws in contrast to multiple, miraculous
creations. (I acknowledge in passing the historical irony: one of the
founders of agnostic scie¥ce was himself decisively influenced by
monotheistic creed.) A scientific natural history, more or less Newtonian, might then be possible. If one could present a new observational
law, a mechanism producing new species from old, the essential
phenomena of natural history might follow from this law of creationby-genealogical-descent. (This would become the main strategy of the
Origin of Species.) This metaphysics of Darwin's had momentous
consequences for his interpretation of his eventual discovery. When
he discovered the "natural selection" of organisms' individual variations through their life-and-death struggles, he understood this
process as no mere conditioning principle, no mere constraint on
whatever should evolve, but as the hidden creative law he was
seeking. 33 Natural selection seemed to be creation's supreme law also
because special creationists had stressed organisms' specially designed adaptations-and Darwin could reinterpret the feats of special
design as so many means of survival acquired through ages of
environmental pressure. He could interpret them as all acquired
through one simple law. 34 The theological presuppositions about
universal adaptation and universal law had reduced the vast problems
of evolution to one apparently solvable form.
Darwin's work developed in the open-air traditions of geology and
field natural history which studied the environmental contexts and
reticular interdependencies of living things. But under the shadow of
the theology of law and adaptation, the recognition of all meanings of
organic diversity was simply not possible. Morphological patterns or
tendencies in evolution, if decipherable through the comparison of
forms, could not impinge on a theorizing that concentrated on adaptive
success. As Darwin worked out his theory, he relegated part of
Goethean morphology-e.g., the theme of serial patterns and their
differentiation-merely to the list of evidences for evolutionary descent
(and indirectly for natural selection). 35 He classed other morphological
phenomena with the facts of organic variability, again a demotion
since variation was deemed consequential only if it led to adaptational
advantages. 36 In the end, Darwin's view of nature paralleled closely
that of the agricultural breeders whom he studied. For the breeder
�CORNELL
53
sees in the wealth of plant and animal variation not data of natural
history with interesting connections among other phenomena, but
accidental possibilities to be used or eliminated. Darwin regarded
organic variation as "accidental" only after turning to the breeders and
adopting the idea of a selective agency external to the organisms and
responsible for their evolutionary changes. 37 The extravagant multiplicity of nature thus receded as an essential fact when reduced to the
problem of more trivial vapation, that is, when a technological attitude
was imported into theoretical biology. The present-day marriage between biology and genetic technology dates from the reliance of the
Origin of Species on agricultural breeding.
By contrast, Goethe's phenomenological biology did not strive to
formulate one mechanism producing organic diversity, let alone one
aligned with human technique. He kept his distance from theology
and technology and all simplifying principles alien to the multiplicity
of beings. The comparative method assumed that the astonishing past
and present diversity of beings might teach us something about the
laws of these possibilities of life that a generalized mechanism, based
in the universal necessity of survival, could not. Goethe would have
seen the philosophical Iisk in minimizing the actual profusion of
nature's products by modeling It on accidental varieties and Individuals of a species. On the contrary, did he not thematize excess even in
particular living beings? His reluctance to assemble a complete doctrine of nature suggests a further point: Is not the ongoing investigation of visible growth processes and forms logically prior to the final
explanation of the evolution of these processes and forms? Comparing
phenomena could still lead to evolutionary stories, but they would be
stones told In a spirit of conjecture and even irony, whose plots would
involve the specific characters of the organic protagonists. The power
of a method like Darwin's, on the other hand, was also the problem
with it: it could prejudge the significance of all phenomena according
to its global type of Insight. The differences of species could not make
a lot of difference If the last word on their appearances was their
submission to a single law. 38 We might discern the meaning of the
Many only If they are not effaced to nothingness by the One.
Goethe admitted that Interpreting nature required method, and
that method In turn implied bias. The act of theorizing was like
creating the scene of a play where some truth is put In the spotlight
and some recedes into the background. 39 He thought that biological
researchers In particular would concede the infinite superiority of
Nature's resources to their own Ingenious ideas.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
54
When a man of lively intellect first responds to Nature's
challenge to be understood, he feels irresistibly tempted to
impose his will upon the natural objects he is studying. Before
long, however, they close in upon him with such force as to
make him realize that he in tum must now acknowledge their
might and hold in respect the authority they exert over him.
Hardly is he convinced of this reciprocal influence when he
becomes aware of a twofold infinitude: in the natural objects,
of the diversity of life and growth and of vitality interlocking
relationships; in himself, of the possibility of endless development through always keeping his mind receptive and disciplining it in new forms of assimilation and procedure. 40
The receptive biological mind had to appreciate a variety of methods
even if it devoted itself to one. Students of biology were to be like so
many Fausts, together pursuing a many-sided experience oflife. With
a plurality of approaches and viewpoints, enlivening particular inquiries even through conflict, 41 biology would not attach its fortunes to a
single doctrine of the organism. As in Faust's original bet, theorists
might seem to reach that "fair moment," the final vision of truth. But
then they might only have succumbed to the self-satisfaction that is
the essence of Mephistophelean temptation.
Faust does not give up easily. He learns that the instrumental magic
of Mephistopheles has its limits, and he will not be constrained to that
circle. At a crucial point Mephistopheles reluctantly acknowledges the
higher powers of the "Mothers," the possessors of the secrets of form
and transformation. He tests Faust's true mettle, describing to him
the vast void and terrible solitude he must brave in order to reach their
heathen dwelling. Faust dares to abandon his demon and take the
lonely route. For Goethe, the philosophical biologist cannot renounce
his Faustian desire. He cannot ignore the mystery of organic forms,
resting content with their physical mastery. The daring student of the
multiplicity of living beings might say, like Faust about to travel to the
goddesses of form,
All right! We'll try it out! In what you call
Sheer nothingness I hope to find the All!
(11.6255-6)
"'
"'
*
"'
�CORNELL
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Notes:
1.
J. W. von Goethe, Faust, Part I and Part II, trans. Charles E. Passage
(New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 61. Hereafter references to Faust
appear without footnotes, with part and line number simply.
2. J. W. von Goethe, Conversations withEckermann (1823-1832), trans.
John Oxenford (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984). 233.
·'
3. On the difficulties of oUr linguistic terms for expressing life's essential
powers, see J. W. von Goethe, ''The Creative Urge," (Bildungstrieb) in
Goethe's Botanical Writings, trans. and ed. Bertha Mueller (Woodbridge, Connecticut: Ox Bow Press, 1989), 233-4.
4.
Goethe, 'The Metamorphosis of Plants," in Mueller, 31-78. References
will be to Goethe's paragraph numbers.
5. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, (London: Murray, 1859),
436.
6. Goethe's predecessors here were N. Grew and C. F. Wolff. See Agnes
Arber, The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form (Darien, Conn.: Hafner,
1970). 40.
7.
J. W. von Goethe, "Vorarbeiten zur Morphologie," in Die Schrijten zur
Naturwissenschafi, ed. by Dorothea Kuhn (Weimar: H. Bohlaus Nachfolger, 1964), vol. lO (series not complete), 56-59.
8.
Goethe, 'The Spiral Tendency," in Mueller, 127-130.
9.
Goethe, "Formation and Transformation," in Mueller, 24.
10. Goethe, "lnwiefem die Idee: SchOnheit sei Vollkomrnenheit mit
Freiheit," in Kuhn, 10:125.
ll. J. W. von Goethe, "Concerning Types To Be Established for The
Facilitation of Comparative Anatomy," in A Source Book in Animal
Biology, ed. by Thomas Hall (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1970). 67.
12. E. Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1950); R. H. Brady, "Form and Cause in Goethe's Morphology,"
and T. Lenoir, "The Eternal Laws of Form: Morphotypes and the
Conditions of Existence in Goethe's Biological Thought," both in
Goethe and the Sciences: A Re-Appraisal ed. by F. Arnrine, F. Zucker,
and H. Wheeler (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1987).
13. Goethe, "Concerning Types," cited in Note ll. For a modern assessment of type as an irreducible principle, see 0. C. Reippel, Fundamentals of Comparative Biology (Boston: Birkhauser Verlag, 1988).
�56
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
14. Goethe, "Formation and Transformation," p. 24. On Goethe's dynamic
notion of type, see also Brady, "Form and Cause In Goethe's Morphology," p. 274.
15. J. W. von Goethe, "Die Skelette der Nagetiere," in Die Schrijten zur
Naturwissenschajt, ed. Dorothea Kuhn (Weimar: Bohlaus Nachfolger,
1954), 9:377.
16. Georges Cuvier, AnimalXingdom., ed. by Griffith, Smith, and Pidgeon.
(London: Whittaker, 1827), 16 vols., 1:190.
17. Goethe, "Die Skelette der Nagetiere," 376-7.
18. Ibid., 375.
19. Ibid., 377.
20. D. Kuhn, "Goethe's Relationship to the Theories of Development of
His Time," in Goethe and the Sciences, 14-15.
2l.lbid., 10-12; Goethe, "Intuitive Judgement," Goethe's Botanical
Writings, 232-233; and "Die Faultiere und die Dickhautigen," 246-7.
22. Goethe, Diary, April 24, 1831, cited in Goethe: Wisdom and Experience, selections by Ludwig Curtius, trans. by Hermann Wiegand. (New
York: Pantheon, 1949), 197.
23. Goethe, "Die Faultiere und die Dickhautigen," 248.
24. Goethe's whale is a likely progenitor of the estranged water-animal
Nietzsche takes as our grandparent in the Genealogy of Morals, II, sec.
16.
25. Cuvier, Animal Kingdom, 4:473.
26.lbid., 3:261.
27. Goethe to Falk, June 14, 1809, cited In Goethe: Wisdom and Experience, p. 90.
28. Darwin Notebooks pp. (orig.) M 69, 154e: N 14, 36, 94, MacCulloch
11. See Charles Darwin's Notebooks, 1836-1844, transcribed and ed.
by P. Barrett, P. Gautrey, S. Herbert, D. Kohn, and S. Smith (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987).
29. This indeed was William James' reading of Darwin. See Robert
Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987), 431-440.
30. A book that initially fired the young Darwin up Into a "burning zeal"
to contribute to science-he says in his Autobiography [The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, ed. Nora Barlow. (London: Collins, 1958),
�CORNELL
57
67-8]-was an account of nature-explorations by one of Goethe's
closest scientific admirers. The book was the Personal Narrative of
n-avels by Alexander von Humboldt, and it gave Darwin one of his
models for a poetic amd speculative natural history. See Alexander
von Humboldt, Personal Narratives of n-avels to the Equinoctial Regions of America during the Years 1799-1804 (London: Longman,
1821-1829) 7 vols., especially val. l. Like Darwin later, Humboldt
takes nature and art as fundamental categories, and emphasizes the
superior majesty of nature over civilization. He also makes analogical
connections among particular facts to raise them into general ideas,
and keeps in the reader's view the human relation, the "dramatic"
relation to the physical world.
3l.J. W. von Goethe. Theory of Colors (Cambridge: M.l.T. Press, 1970),
p. xl.
32. Goethe, Conversations withEckerrnann, (1823-1832), 307.
33. See J. F. Cornell, '"God"s Magnificent Law: The Bad Influence of
Theistic Metaphysics on Da.IWin's Estimation of Natural Selection,"
Journal of the History of Biology 20, (1987): 381-412.
34.lbid., 397-398.
35. Darwin, Origin of Species, chapter XVII!, especially p. 435.
36. Origin of Species, e.g., pp. 146. 149, 153, 436.
37. Darwin"s NotebookE, orig. p. 111-112. SeeJ. F. Cornell, ""Analogy and
Technology in Darwin"s Vision of Nature,·· Jour. ofHist. Biol. I 7 ( 1984):
323.
38. Darwin's Notebook B. orig. pp. 207, 231-2. It appears that (at a point
before hitting on natural selection) Darwin saw evolution embracing
a plurality of goals; so the question may be whether the English
naturalist tradition tumed this plurally-purposed evolution into an
illusion overcome with the theory of a rigorous selection. Yet how is
adaptation manifest as an extravagant diversity of adaptation, if
diversity is not itself an essential principle in nature?
39. Goethe, Theory of Colors, x1vi.
40. Goethe, "Formation and Transformation," 21.
4l.J. W. von Goethe, "Principes de Philosophie Zoologique discutes en
Mars 1830 au sein de l'Academie Royale des Sciences," in Die Schriften
zur Naturwissenscha.fi, 10, esp. pp. 324-325.
�58
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�'I Have Become a Problem to
Myself': Augustine's Theory
of Will and the Notion of
Human Inwardness
Lester Strong
The theory of will has been discussed in many contexts, among them
religion (Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, and other Christian thinkers).
deterministic philosophy (Hobbes). psychology (Nietzsche), and modem physics (Bergson), each containing its own presuppositions and
each relating will to other areas connected with its own field of interest.
In this essay I would like to examine will as discussed by Augustine,
which means an examination of will in the light of such notions as
moral choice, sin, and redemption, cast against the background of a
world created. by a Deity who is also the lawgiver and judge of his
creation.
Why Augustine? Because his discussion of will was pivotal in the
Western philosophical approach to the subject, and ultimately in the
Western approach to understanding what it means to be human. In
his complex theory, developed as it was over a long period of time, in
a variety of circumstances, and with different purposes in mind, the
problem of human inwardness ftrst emerges philosophically and there
occurs, as I shall later indicate, an important shift in the Western
intellectual outlook.
The concept of will was introduced in late Classical antiquity
through the Stoics, whose philosophy, like most philosophies before
it. was based on a tradition at least as old as Pythagoras-the notion
that "the real is the rational." This meant that in Stoic ethical theory
the will was the rational will, for in the hierarchy of mental faculties
as the Stoics (and earlier philosophers) conceived them, reason was
at the pinnacle and was therefore the essential expression of human
nature in the moral realm. At the beginning of the fourth book of his
Discourses, Epictetus says: ''That man is free, who lives as he wishes,
Lester Strong (SF'68) has lived and worked in New York City since 1968 as a writer
and editor. The original version of this essay was written for a philosophy seminar
in the History of Will given by Hannah Arendt at the Graduate Faculty of the New
School for Social Research in New York during the early 1970s.
�60
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
who is proof against compulsion and hindrance and violence, and
whose impulses are untrammelled, who gets what he wills to get and
avoids what he wills to avoid." 1 For the Stoics, the will, the power of
"getting and avoiding," was omnipotent in its own domain, totally free
from all outside interference in seeking to fulfill the good of the
individual. The problem for Stoic philosophers was to determine by
reason-the power of discrimination-the exact limits of the domain of
the will, so that within th<;m each person could successfully set about
securing serenity and happiness.
Augustine too, early in his career as a Christian thinker, seemed
to hold a similar position. In his dialogue On Free Choice ojthe Wi!1, 2
written between 388 and 395 A.D. to refute the Manicheean doctrines
with which he had earlier been associated, he argues that, because
the human will is omnipotent in regard to choice in the moral sphere
of the created world, it alone is responsible for both the existence of
evil and the fulfillment or frustration of the tndividual's happiness.
However, later, in his disputes with the Pelagians, he argues that,
because the will is in bondage to sin, the individual requires the grace
of God both to will rightly and to achieve happiness and and salvation.
The two positions of free will and the will's bondage to sin seem
contradictory, for on the first hypothesis the individual should merit
salvation or damnation, happiness or unhappiness, on the basis of
the will's free choice alone, while accordtng to the second no one
should be held responsible for acts committed by a faculty restrained
from willing the good by its bondage to the law of sin. And yet it is
significant that Augustine never repudiated either doctrine. Indeed,
tn the Retractations, written in 425 to 437 near the end of his life, he
held that both are necessary for the correct, i.e., the Christian,
interpretation of human nature and the relationship of human beings
to God. But what can have led him to adopt such a stand?
For Augustine, the validity of his polemics against the
Manicheeans and the Pelagians was evident: the truth, through God's
grace, has been revealed to him. If reason is confounded, reason itself
is at fault, not the divine truth it finds untntelligible. His arguments,
indeed, were of secondary importance to him, for regardless of contradiction, the truth had been been revealed and had to be proclaimed.
But there must have been something within Augustine's experience
that prepared him to accept what was for him the truth of divine
revelation. In the Retractations he mentions God's grace, "by which He
so predestines who the elect shall be that He even prepares the will of
3
those among them who are already making use of their free choice.''
But how does this preparation manifest itself? In the following pages
�STRONG
61
I shall analyze Augustine's arguments concerning will in such a way
as to lay bare the presuppositions and attitudes upon which they were
founded. By doing so, I think there can be discovered a phenomenon
of human experience in which as a touchstone of Augustine's (and
Christianity's) interpretation of human reality, both freedom of choice
and the will's bondage to sin are revealed to cohere and even support
each other.
What specifically, then, does Augustine say of the will? Why does
it exist and how does it function in its freedom and unfreedom?
A reading of Augustine's various writings on the will, especially of
On Free Choice of the Will, indicates that will is the mental faculty by
means of which individuals choose and are able to live and act either
rightly and honorably or wrongly and sinfully. As Augustine states,
"without it men cannot live rightly" (OFC, Book 2, I, 5). Will therefore
grants individuals the ability to choose for themselves between good
and evil. Within the hierarchy of goods available to them from without,
individuals remain morally free, that is to say, responsible, agents.
They freely choose their own manner of living and thus freely merit
happiness or unhappiness and the divine judgment of salvation or
damnation:
Thus it is no wonder that unhappy men do not attain what
they want, that is, a happy life, for they do not also will to live
rightly-a thing which accompanies the happy life, and with
which the happy life can be neither merited nor attained by
anyone. The etemal law ... establishes with immutable frrmness the point that merit lies in the will, while happiness and
unhappiness are a matter of reward and punishment. (OFC,
Book 1, XIV, 101)
Merit lies in the will. Granting the hypothesis of creation, from
this view of the individual and his or her relationship to the world and
God the notions of responsibility and freedom follow quite logically.
On the one hand there is the created world, a hierarchy of goods
ordered according to eternal and divine law ["that law by which it is
just that everything be ordered in the highest degree" (OFC, Book 1,
VI, 51)] and the divine justice andjudgmentimplied by the existence
of eternal law. On the other hand there are human beings, creatures
of free will whose freedom consists in their ability to order their own
lives as they so choose. The freedom is not completely unbounded in
that they can only choose from among those goods presented to them.
For example, they cannot choose nonexistence over against existence
since nonexistence is not a created good; rather they can only choose
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
among vartous kinds of existence-peaceful, unpeaceful, happy, unhappy, wise, or foolish. Nevertheless, their freedom of choice is such
that people can willingly sin or remain righteous, can choose lower
goods as opposed to higher, can fail to order their lives to that degree
consonant with their nature or can seek the best order possible.
Nothing it would seem, therefore, can abrogate the free wiil of the
individual. "For what lies more truly in the power of the wiil than the wiil
itself?" (OFC, Book I, XII, 1;!6). The wiil alone wills itself to wiil, and nothing
can force it to wiil against its own wishes. And if the wiil itself is
responsible for whatever sin or evil there is in the world, that is, if it is
the cause of all turning away from the higher (eternal) goods to the lower
(temporal and therefore corruptible) goods, the individual is accountable
before divine justice because he or she is free to make choices.
The above delineation of the nature of the will was drawn from
Books 1 and 2 of On Free Clwke of the Will, and, although based on
a Christian outlook, agrees with the Stoic emphasis on freedom of the
will. Yet when we tum to Book 3 of On Free Choke and to relevant
passages from Augustine's later works (for the purposes of this essay
to the Confessions and The Trinity), a quite different and in many ways
more complex position emerges. Wholly inconsistent with free will, it
is rather in line with Paul's statement in Romans 7:15: "For I do not
do what! want, but! do the very thing I hate" (Revised Standard Version).
A good transition to this different view is found in Book 3, where
Augustine writes, "When we speak of the will that is free to do right,
we speak of the will with which man was (first) made" (OFC, Book 3,
XVIII, 179). The doctrine of free choice, then, is only one aspect of
human existence in the moral sphere, for there is also a sense in which
the will is not free. Complementing the doctrine of free will is the
doctrine of original sin, humanity's fall from perfection and the
consequent need of divine grace for redemption and salvation. From
the discussion of the freedom to choose between good and evil, and
thus the implied responsibility of the individual, we must tum to a
discussion of the inability of the individual to will the good, and thus
the implied bondage to the law of sin.
The most graphic presentation of Augustine's arguments for the
will's lack of freedom is perhaps found in the account of his conversion
in Book VIII of his Confessions. 2 There we find Augustine in conflict,
tom between his wish to become a Christian and his inability to
renounce his former mode ofliving. This is a hiatus in Augustine's life.
He has overcome the intellectual obstacles on the journey to his
conversion and has acknowledged all of what he considers to be the
truth of Christian teaching. But he cannot achieve the final step. He
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63
is held down and chained to his past as if all his intellectual understanding were of no importance whatever.
The climax of this inner battle occurs one day when he is sitting
with a friend in a garden. In his agony he tears his hair, beats his
forehead, begins to cry. Going off alone, he throws himself on the
ground and prays to God for an end to his misery, when suddenly,
from a neighboring house, he hears a child saying, "Take up and read;
take up and read." Returning to where his friend sits, he takes a
volume of Paul, opens it, and reads the first passage his eyes encounter: "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in strife and envying; but
put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh,
in concupiscence" (Romans 13:13. King James' Version). Instantly,
"by a light as it were of serenity suffused into my heart, all the darkness
of doubt vanished away" (C, Book VIII, XII, 29), and Augustine finds
that through the intervention of divine grace the long-hoped-for
conversion has taken place.
Reflecting later on this day, Augustine tries to understand the
nature of the will as it manifested itself in this event. "Whence this
monstrousness?" he asks, "and to what end? The mind commandeth
the body, and it obeys instantly; the mind commands itself, and is
resisted" (C, Book VIII, IX, 21). If Augustine could tear his hair, beat
his forehead, and throw himself on the ground in such a way "that
command is scarce distinct from obedience," why could he not freely
will his conversion?
The problem as Augustine understands it lies in the fact that, as
a "son of Adam," he has inherited a blemished will. Because of original
sin, the will is divided against itself:
It commands itself, I say, to will, and would not command,
unless it willed, and what it commands is not done. But it
willeth not entirely: therefore doth it not command entirely.
For so far forth it commandeth, as it willeth: and so far forth
is the thing commanded, not done, as it willeth not. For the
will commandeth that there be a will: not another, but itself.
But it doth not command entirely, therefore what it commandeth, is not. For were the will entire, it would not even
command it to be, because it would already be. It is therefore
no monstrousness partly to w111, partly to nil!, but a disease
of the mind, that it doth not wholly rise, by truth upborne,
borne down by custom. And therefore are there two wills, for
that one of them is not entire: and what the one lacketh, the
other hath. (C, Book VIII, IX, 21)
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Human beings are subject to the struggle between opposing Impulses
of a divided will. Individuals cannot will the good because the "disease
of the mind" called sin divides them against themselves.
But what does this dividedness mean in terms of the functioning
of the will itself? In Book XI of The Trinity, 2 Augustine states that the
will functions as a kind of unifier, which it does by fixing the attention
of the mind upon an object. Thus light enters the eye In a purely
mechanical manner, but the person sees, that is, becomes aware of
the object presented, because the will fixes the attention of the mind
upon it. In the moral sphere, where the attention is fixed upon goals,
the will attaches the individual to the good, and should ultimately
allow one to ascend to God, who Is the source of absolute good, truth,
and being.
The Inner force by means of which the will accomplishes Its work
is love 4 : "But we must remain in this (good) and cling to it by love
[dUectione), that we may enjoy the presence of that from which we are,
In the absence of which we would not be at all'' (T, Book 8, 4, 6). It
follows, then, that sin represents a rejection oflove In its highest sense
and a fall into imperfect forms of Jove-into lust [libido]. for example,
which Augustine characterizes at one point as "blameworthy desire"
[improbabanda cupidite) (OFC, Book 1, IV, 28). This means, finally,
that sin is the rejection of God, for according to 1 John 4:8, "He who
does not love does not know God; for God Is love" (Gr. agape; Lat.
caritas) (Revised Standard Version).
The blemished will, the will of natural human beings after the Fall,
cannot will the good because, having rejected God, it has rejected the
principle of love which would allow It to unite with and "cling" to the
good. From the, for Augustine historical, fact of humanity's Fall, the
bondage of the will to sin is the theoretical correlate. Love for Augustine
is essentially the experience of oneness with the object loved, a binding
together which involves a respect for the beloved's rights and wishes
to the degree that they become one's own rights and wishes and which
Is achieved through a reciprocity 1n the love relation. The blemished
will, though, constitutes a denial of reciprocity because it sets Its own
desires apart from and above those of the beloved. For example, the
lusting will desires to possess even at the expense of the individual or
object possessed.
It is here that we meet the contradiction in the will that defines it
as blemished since it divides it from Itself. The blemished will, just
because It Is will, whose Inner force is love, expresses some form of
love, and indeed this must be so since it is merely blemished and not
nonexistent. Even lust is a form of attempted oneness with another,
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65
no matter how misguided or blameworthy the attempt may be. The
blemished will wishes to unite with the good, but cannot do so. It tries
to love, but is too much in bondage to its own dividedness to succeed.
It pulls itself both ways, and the result is perpetual struggle. And so
love must be bestowed on it from without and grace it with the only
experience which can free it from its bondage and make it whole.
Augustine cannot freely will his own conversion, but must accept it
as a gift from God.
As is evident. the irrgument for the individual's need of grace
proceeds from a radically different perspective than the argument for
free choice of the will. Whereas in the latter people confront the moral
universe as free agents and sponsors of good or evil, in the former they
find themselves in their most intimate experience already determined
by evil intentions and acts. The one position emphasizes the presence
of freedom, while the other emphasizes its lack. Each seems incompatible with the other, for if the will is free it cannot be in bondage,
and vice versa.
And yet for Augustine freedom and unfreedom were related
aspects of willing, and not only in the historical, sequential sense of
the Biblical account of Adam's and Eve's disobedience to God and the
consequent blemished freedom each later generation has inherited.
Original sin is the theory that accounts for an experienced fact; it is
the Apostolic interpretation of the Genesis story, the reading of which
convinced Augustine and other Christian converts of the truth of
Scripture. But this conviction must have arisen from a prior experience of a phenomenon in the human realm that reveals the factual
interrelationship offreedom and unfreedom which the theory is meant
to explain. Augustine substantiates the claim that freedom and unfreedom are interrelated experientially in his Confessions when he
writes:
Therefore was I at strife with myself, and rent asunder by
myself. And this rent befell me against my will, and yet
indicated, not the presence of another mind, but the punishment of my own. Therefore it was no more I that wrought it,
but sin that dwelt in me: the punishment of a sin more freely
committed, in that I was a son of Adam. (C, Book VIII, X, 22)
And in another passage he writes, "For the law of sin is the violence
of custom, whereby the mind is drawn and holden, even against its
will; but deservedly, for that it willingly fell into it" (C, Book VIII, V,
11). The reality of human freedom and the reality of human unfreedom
�66
THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW
are experienced as a unity, the manifestation of one involving the
manifestation of the other.
But where does the unifYing experience lie? It is not found in a
feeling of spontaneous freedom, for by the very terms of Augustine's
understanding of humanity such a feeling can never occur: The
individual after the Fall, the individual in bondage to sin, is a divided
self and trapped within the split, unable to feel the wholeness and
integrity of being that spontaneity Implies. Nor can the experience be
found in the feeling of bohdage alone, for without some feeling of
freedom, bondage could never be recognized. The experience, therefore, must lie In some phenomenon the occurrence of which reveals
the actuality of human freedom despite the feeling of bondage and
coercion and yet which exhibits the actuality of bondage beyond the
feeling of freedom that is the precondition for the recognition of its
presence. And that phenomenon, I think, is the experience of guilt.
In what manner does guilt manifest both freedom and unfreedom?
The relationship is difficult to articulate, for by analyzing the components one risks losing the sense of the integral feeling itself. Guilt is
essentially an awareness that one has committed or desired to commit
an act of intended harm toward another and the wish to make amends
for it-more, to erase the intention as though It had never existed.
Looking back toward the former intention, the guilty individual says,
"I am responsible for the act or desire: I wanted to harm another, but
need not have wanted to." At the same time, the person asks him- or
herself, "If! need not have wanted to harm another, why then did I do
so? I did so because I was coerced into my decision by the evil
intentions themselves." Guilt presupposes both one's freedom (and
consequent feeling of responsibility) and one's lack of freedom (and
consequent feeling of coercion). In some manner guilty individuals feel
both that they freely chose to intend harm and that they could not
have so chosen unless those intentions had coerced them into it. They
feel at once the sponsor and victim of their evil intentions. And without
the presence of both feelings, the sense of guilt would not arise.
On the other hand, the guilty individual also actively wishes to
make amends for those former intentions. Such a wish involves a hope
to return to the situation that prevailed before the decision was made:
a hope to heal the breach that has sprung up between oneself and the
person one intended to harm and a hope to heal the breach that the
decision and resultant guilt have caused in oneself. It is in this context
that phrases such as "make one's peace with someone" or "make one's
peace with oneself' are used. But to make one's peace in either sense
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67
is to escape one's feeling of guilt since it is guilt that maintains the
feeling of breach.
This aspect of guilt thus reveals the presence of freedom, for the
guilty individual is at last free of the former evil intentions. It also
underlines the presence of bondage, however, for the person can only
be absolved by the injured party. "Why not now? why not is there this
hour an end to my uncleanness?" asks Augustine shortly before his
conversion occurs (C, Book VIII, XII, 28). Guilty individuals cannot
absolve themselves becau~e the feeling of guilt itself pronounces them
unfit to do so. Although they are free of their earlier intentions, they
still feel sinful. The feeling of freedom, therefore, merely serves to
underscore the actuality of bondage.
Guilt, then, is both a judgment (a self-judgment, as it were) of
responsibility and a recognition of bondage-the two conditions from
which Augustine argued for the freedom and unfreedom of the human
will. It demonsirates human accountability before the law and the
need for redemption and grace, which is the message of Chiistianity
as Augustine construed it.
But although I have discussed guilt mainly in terms of occurrences
between human actors, this was not the only moral sphere against
which Augustine earned out his own discussions of freedom, unfreedam, and sin. Nor did he have in mind the purely legalistic sphere
within which guilt denotes the simple determination that someone
indeed committed an act with which he or she has been indicted. "But
Thou, 0 Lord my God, hearken; behold, and see, and have mercy, and
heal me, Thou, in whose presence I have become a problem to myself;
and that is my infirmity" is the way Augustine expresses it in his
CorifessiDns as he surveys the inextiicable tangle of good and evil in
his life (C, Book X, XXXIII, 50). This passage points to the Chiistian
notion of universal guilt, 5 or the individual before the bar of his or her
own conscience and his or her very existence decreed in need of
salvation and justification.
It is here, I think, clothed in the language of theology and born
out of the intensity of ills religious expeiience, that Augustine's
discussion of will discloses its wider significance. "And heal me, Thou,
in whose presence I have become a problem to myself": with these few
words Augustine lifts the inner, specifically human realm of existence
into a new kind of prominence.
Inwardness is, of course, as old as self-reflective humanity itself,
and its lise as a theme of thought can be traced back from Augustine
through Paul, through the Greek poets and dramatists, through the
Book of Job and other Jewish Biblical stones, and perhaps even
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
further through more ancient writings. It is the problem of the
individual's relationship to him- or herself in the world, or rather the
relation between that part of the individual which lives in the world
(physical and social) and relates to the world's demands and that part
which stands free, which contemplates, criticizes, perhaps even approves of and loves the worldly creature, but which stands apart from
it. Inwardness, then, is precisely the realm of human freedom and
unfreedom par excellence,, the domain beyond politics or physical law
in which individuals discover whether they are free or not, and in what
manner they can act on that freedom if it does exist. It is this complex
inner realm to which Augustine refers when he writes of the struggle
between the parts of the blemished will, and never before had it been
given such philosophical importance.
What shift in intellectual outlook did his concern with inwardness
introduce? I spoke earlier of the traditional notion that "the real is the
rational." Augustine's theory, however, breaks with that tradition, for
in fallen humanity, human beings unhealed by the gift of grace, reality
is also the irrational, the divided and conflicted inner self with all its
contradictory desires and needs; and feelings such as guilt, despair,
or love are its "signs and portents," the careful study of which reveals
the metaphysical condition of being human. If previous thinkers
emphasized reason as the essential characteristic ofhuman existence,
as the distinctive feature by which humanity's place in the world is
defined, Augustine focused on the inner relationship of the individual
to him- or herself, with all its conflicts and dividedness, as the essence
of humanity. That essence might be distorted for Augustine because
in his view humanity is fallen. But inwardness for him was still the
central locus from which emerges the definition of what it means to
be human. 6
Karl Jaspers wrote, "The self-penetration that set in with
Augustine continued down throu~h the Christian thinkers to Pascal,
to Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche." But indeed, the influence of his
self-penetration, and of his manner of self-definition, has been felt in
circles far wider than those of strictly Christian or philosophical
thinkers. For example, it marks the difference between the Orestes of
Aeschylus, whose experience of guilt for murdering his mother the
playwright portrays as an external flight through the world pursued
by vengeful Furies, and the tormented heroes of Kafka's novels and
stories, whose external surroundings have become reflections of the
self-vengeance meted out to them by their own guilty consciences; in
a less somber mood, it marks the contrast between an Odysseus
seeking to escape the enchantments of Circe, and a Don Quixote
�STRONG
69
willingly trapped in the illusions of his own imagination. Whether one
agrees with Augustine' religious convictions or not, his discussion of
will has had a decisive impact on intellectual attitudes. "I have become
a problem to myself." With the birth of Augustine's perplexity, Western
humanity's method of interpreting itself enters a new phase .
• • • •
Notes:
l. Arrian's Discourses on Epictetus, trans. P. E. Matheson, in The Stoic
and Epicurean Philosophers (New York: Modem Library, 1940), p. 406.
When I speak of similarities between Augustine's arguments and Stoic
theories, I refer solely to their common conviction that the will is free.
Augustine did not agree with the related Stoic doctrines of Fate and
apatheia (suppression of the passions) and in fact vigorously denounced them.
2. Quotations in English from Augustine's writings used in this essay
are taken from the following three works: On Free Choice of the Will,
trans. Anna S. Benjamin and L. H. Hackstaff (Indianapolis: The
Library of the Liberal Arts, 1964); The Corifessions of Saint Augustine
(New York: Airman! Classics, 1969); and The 1Tinity, trans. Stephen
McKenna (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1963).
Because Augustine's works have been published in so many editions,
quotations are referenced in text not by page numbers, but instead
by the letters OFC, C, or T, respectively, followed by book, chapter,
and section numbers.
3. Quoted as part of the Appendix to the Library of the Liberal Arts edition
of On Free Choice, p. 152.
4. A small library of articles and books could be cited on Augustine's
philosophy oflove. Not only is the subject very complicated, but in his
writings he often uses different terms to mean approximately the same
thing (i.e., caritas and amor Det1, or sometimes the same term in
different contexts to carry different connotations (i.e., amor sui, or
self-love, which can be viewed either positively or negatively). In regard
to this essay, the highest or purest kind oflove would be that signified
by the Latin term caritas, or the Greek agape (in English "charity"),
used in 1 John 4:8 to mean divine love. This divine love is the power
by which the world is brought into harmony with itself and with God
("ordered in the highest degree"). For Augustine, all other forms oflove
have a relationship to caritas, no matter how evil or misguided they
may be, because everything that exists has a relationship to God.
DUectione, derived from the Latin term dUigere, has a positive conno-
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
tation, meaning love in the sense of "to esteem highly": libido and
cupidite, both negative in connotation, are disordered (overly possessive or greedy) forms of love. Whenever I use the word "love" in the
essay, I mean it in the highest sense of "charity."
This note and the discussion of love in the essay's main text are
based mainly on two sources: Karl Jaspers, Plato and Augustine (New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962). pp. 95-99; J. Burnaby, Anwr
Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (London: Hodder, 1938).
pp. 85-179.
5. Kierkegaard comes to mind immediately when one speaks of universal
guilt, or as he terms it, "essential guilt." But the notion runs throughout Christian theology and thinking. "In the state of sin, the guilt
remains as a permanent awareness of willful disorder, viz., the willful
'separation from God ... "' [The New Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. VI (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 854]. In the state of sin, therefore,
individuals live with the permanent awareness of a breach with God
and thus a breach in the foundations of their own being.
6. Augustine expresses this metaphorically in his well-known phrase
pondus meum amor meus ("my weight is my love"): "The body by its
own weight strives toward its own place. Weight makes not downward
only, but to his own place .... My weight, is my love: thereby am I borne,
whithersoever I am borne" (C, XIII, IX, 10). Augustine never denies the
importance of reason, and in many instances explicitly says the
human soul is the rational soul. But when the topic of humanity's
place in the world is under consideration, it is the will that is most
important, with love as its motive force.
7. Karl Jaspers, Plato and Augustine, p. 119.
�The·Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry:
The Clark Lectures at Trinity
College, Cambridge, 1926, and
the Turnbull Lectures at the
Johns Hopkins University, 1933.
by T.S. Eliot.
edited by Ronald Schuchard.
Harcourt Brace, 1994, 343 pp.
Cordell D.K. Yee
T.S. Eliot's reputation as a literary critic rests largely on a few of his
essays. His most widely read essay is one of his earliest, ''Tradition
and the Individual Talent," which first appeared in 1919. In it Eliot
exhibits his skill at phrase-making, particularly in making the claims
that poetry is an escape from personality and from emotion, and that
the object of literary study is the poetry itself. These two claims have
exerted a powerful and lasting influence on the study of literature, at
least in the United States. Despite the various waves of critical fashion
that have come and gone in the past few decades, attention to the
poetry itself, explication of text, still predominates in the undergraduate teaching of literature. Literary works are studied apart from other
kinds of works-this in accordance with Eliot's notion that they
comprise a monolithic but dynamic whole, a tradition.
It is customary to divide Eliot's career into two phases-his modernist phase and his post-conversion phase, which begins some time
after 1928 when he, an American raised as a Unitarian, declared
himself to be "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglocatholic in religion." 1 The influence of ''Tradition and the Individual
Talent" has led to some neglect of Eliot's later critical writings. Eliot
is remembered most for a kind of formalism, impersonalism, and
anti-historicism, all somewhat revolutionary in the academic world of
the early twentieth century. The moral and religious emphasis of his
later essays-for example, The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and
Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948)-is often regarded as
Cordell D. K. Yee is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis
�72
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
retrogressive, anti-modemist, even counter-revolutionary, in that it
seems to repudiate Eliot's earlier insistence on the autonomy of art.
The publication of Eliot's eight Clark lectures, delivered at Cambridge
University in 1926, may force some revaluation of Eliot's critical
work-as Ronald Schuchard, the editor of the lectures, suggests. The
lectures show that Eliot's critical thought, even rather early in his
career, resists easy reduction into a set of "-isms."
The subject of the lectyres is metaphysical poetry. The term is
usually applied to sevente.!nth-century English poets like John Donne,
but Eliot seeks to extend its application to Dante in the thirteenth
century and to Charles Baudelaire and Jules Laforgue in the nineteenth. The lectures are an exploration of the ways in which it makes
sense to bring such different poets together under the same rubric.
Eliot recognizes the difficulty of his enterprise. Midway through the
lectures, Eliot says that the term metaphysical poetry escapes precise
definition. Nevertheless, he does identifY what he considers the key
characteristic of metaphysical poetry. Such poetry fuses thought with
feeling: "it elevates sense for a moment to regions ordinarily attainable
only by abstract thought, or on the other hand clothes the abstract, for
a moment with all the painful delight of flesh" (55) 2 · Here Eliot extends
to intellectual statements his notion of the "objective correlative," once
described as a concrete image-"a set of objects, a situation, a chain
of events"-that serves as the formula for a particular emotion· 3
Intellectual statements can also be translated into sensible form, thus
enlarging the world of sense. An illustration of this is Donne's "fusion
and identification of souls in sexual love" (54). Donne affords access to
the immaterial through the sensible; he is able to feel an idea so as to
make it yield its emotional equivalent. Thus one cannot think with Donne
unless one can feel with him: "In order to get the full flavour out of Donne,
you must construe analytically and enjoy synthetically" (124).
The rationale for Eliot's emphasis on the fusion of thought and
feeling is his belief that a precondition for great art is an alliance of
poetry and philosophy: poets at their best have a role in the life of the
mind. It is thus no surprise that Eliot's varieties of metaphysical poetry
tum out to be products of similar historical circumstances. They all
appear against a background of coherent systems of thought, or at! east
fragments of such systems. For Dante it is Thomist-Aristotelian
thought. For Donne it is "the fragments of every philosophical system
and every theological system up to his own time" (203), but primarily
Jesuitism and Calvinism. For Laforgue it is Arthur Schopenhauer and
Eduard von Hartmann. Differences in intellectual background account for the stylistic variations in metaphysical poetry:
�YEE
73
the acceptance of one orderly system of thought and feeling
results, in Dante and friends, in a simple, direct and even
austere manner of speech, while the maintenance in suspension
of a number ofphilosophies, attitudes and partial theories which
are enjoyed rather than believed, results, in Donne and in some
of our contemporaries, in an affected, tortuous, and often
over-elaborate and ingenious manner of speech. (120)
The stylistic differences show up most clearly in the poets' handling of
figurative language. Dante's similes and metaphors have a "rational
necessity": "the adjectives are chosen as they might be in a scientific
treatise, because they are the nearest possible to approximate what he
is driving at" (120-121). With Donne and those like him, the characteristic device is the conceit, the intricate development of an image or the
juxiaposition of discordant elements. Conceits entail risk since they can
lead to a loss of the clarity and precision achieved by Dante: a conceit is
"the extreme limit of the simile and metaphor which is used for its own
sake, and not to make clearer an idea or more definite an emotion" (138).
Conceits, however, can be used as a crtterton of excellence. They often
involve a fusion of thought and feeling. As Aristotle suggests in the Poetics
and Rhetoric, good metaphors have clarity, sweetness, and strangeness:
to metaphorize well means to contemplate likenesses between things.
Metaphysical conceits, at their best, lead to a strange sort of beauty: 'To
contemplate an idea, because it is my idea, to observe its emotional
infusion, to play with it, instead of using it as a plain and simple meaning,
brings often curious and beautiful things to light, though it lends itself,
this petting and teasing of one's mental offspring, to exiremities of
torturing oflanguage" (85).
The peak of metaphysical poetry is represented by Dante: he
"always finds the sensuous equivalent, the physical embodiment, for
the realisation of the most tenuous and refmed intensity . . . of
experience" (57). With Donne, there is some decline in quality, because in Donne there is no structure of thought. Mter Donne, poetry
progressively deteriorates because of what Eliot calls a "disintegration
of the intellect." Poets no longer try to develop both thought and feeling,
but emphasize one over the other. Not until the nineteenth century in
France are poets seen working to right the imbalance.
The brief literary history that Eliot offers is notable for some of its
omissions: Homer and Shakespeare, to name only two. 4 Eliot concedes that not all great poetry is metaphysical, but in explaining the
omissions, he says that metaphysical poetry was an impossibility for
the ancient world, and that Shakespeare was not philosophical. Eliot
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
perhaps had second thoughts about such claims. Shortly after delivering the Clark lectures, Eliot judged them as "full of hasty generalisations[,] unsubstantiated statements and unverified references," and
written in an "abominable" style. It is not hard to justifY this judgment.
The lectures were composed in haste and suffer occasionally from
a lack of focus and clarity, desJ?ite Eliot's profession of Cartesian
strivings to be clear and distinct. The major points of the individual
lectures are not always qbvious, and the course of the lectures does
not always conform to Eliot's announced purposes. For example, in
one lecture Eliot proposes to discuss "the studies of Donne and their
influence upon his mind and poetry" (67). The lecture does give an
account of some of the authors and subjects Donne read in, but their
influence on Donne is hardly illustrated. Eliot says that Donne is to
be distinguished from the writers of the Middle Ages, but by the end
little light is shed on how Donne belongs to his own time and not to
the Middle Ages. What Eliot presents are some generalizations: for
example, that Donne "read a great deal without order or valuation"
and that he "thought in a spasmodic and fragmentary way when he
thought at all" (83)-all this without recourse to Donne's writings,
poetry or prose. Along the way, Eliot gets sidetracked by scholarly
debates and quibbles, despite his statement that he is attempting not
a work of scholarship, but of literary criticism.
As criticism of Dante, the lectures elaborate on what Eliot had said
in an essay dating from 1920. There Eliot refers to Dante's comprehensiveness and his success at making the intellectual perceptible.
He also hints at some similarities between Dante. "the great master of
the disgusting," and nineteenth-century French poets like Baudelaire:
''The contemplation of the horrid or sordid or disgusting, by an artist,
is the necessary and negative aspect of the impulse toward the pursuit
of beauty. "6 Eliot began to compare those French poets to the "school
of Donne" in ''The Metaphysical Poets," an essay dating from 1921.
But as far as I know, it is not until the Clark lectures that Eliot links
Donne directly to Dante to form a line of metaphysical poetry.
As criticism of English metaphysical poetry, the Clark lectures do not
go much further than the 1921 essay. There Eliot had already drawn
attention to the use of conceits by seventeenth-century English poets,
proposed fusion of thouglit and feeling as a gauge of literary merit, and
posited his theory of the dissociation of sensibility, which, according to
Eliot, has hampered poetry since some time in the seventeenth century.
In addition, some of the explanations and analyses in the earlier essay
are unsurpassed in the lectures. A case in point is Eliot's treatment of
�75
YEE
this line by Donne from 'The Relique": "A bracelet of bright haire about
the bone.'' 7 In the lectures Eliot says that this line
is an example of those things said by Donne which could not
have been put equally well otherwise, or differently by a poet
of any other school. The associations are perfect: those of
"bracelet", the brightness of the hair, after years of dissolution, and the fmal emphasis of "bone", could not be improved
upon. (125-126)
In the essay less seems to say more. Alter observing that "some of
Donne's most successful and characteristic effects are secured by brief
words and sudden contrasts," Eliot goes on to say that in the line
quoted above "the most powerful effect is produced by the sudden
contrast of associations of 'bright hair' and of 'bone. "'8 Eliot's account
in the lectures, though lengthier, omits mention of what makes the
line striktng (beyond the incongruity between a grave and a bracelet
of bright hatr)- the sudden contrast of associations: for example,
softness versus hardness, warmth versus coldness, life versus death. 9
At other places in the lectures Eliot does not take the time to discuss
the workings of the imagery. It is almost as if the lectures presuppose
knowledge of the essay.
All this is not to say that the lectures are not worth reading. They
are, though not primarily because of what Eliot says about Dante,
Donne, Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley, Baudelaire, Lafargue, or
any of the other poets he treats. The lectures do hold some interest
for what they reveal about Eliot. Eliot was notorious for his reticence
and coyness about himself and his work, but there are places in the
lectures where Eliot's dry humor comes through, as in this belittling
remark about Crashaw:
Subtract from Donne the powerful intellect, substitute a
feminine for a strongly masculine nature, posit a devotional
temperament rather than a theological mind, and add the
influence of Italian and Spanish literature, take note of
changes in the political and ecclesiastical situation in England, and you have Crashaw. (162)
The mathematical form of this statement-it is phrased in part as a
subtraction problem-follows its function, to diminish Crashaw's reputation. Eliot himself may also be a target here. He may be engaging in
self-parody, making fun of his efforts to raise criticism to a science.
Despite this apparent gibe at critical pretension, the value of the
lectures does lie partly in the illustration of critical practice. In them
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Eliot attempts to practice kind of criticism he advocates in essays
published in the wake of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent." These
essays qualifY, if not repudiate, the earlier essay's claim for the
autonomy of literature. In "Hamlet and His Problems" (1920) Eliot at
first seems to uphold this claim: "Qua work of art, the work of art
cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret; we can only
criticize it according to standards, in comparison to other works of
art." 10 Insofar as criticiSJTI involves comparison of works of art, the
study of literature seems 'to be an autonomous activity. Eliot, however, adds that "for 'interpretation' the chief task is the presentation
of relevant historical facts which the reader is not assumed to know."
This statement seems to call for some historical research, but Eliot
does not elaborate. In "Metaphysical Poets" Eliot gives an example of
how historical facts can be used-he relates historical circumstances
to literary style. 'The Function of Criticism" (1923) re-affirms the use
of history: a critic must have a "highly developed sense of fact." A
critic's function is not to interpret, to communicate his understanding
of a work, but to compare and analyze works and to furnish readers
with facts they "would otherwise have missed." Fact cannot cormpt
taste; at worst it can gratifY a taste for history "under the illusion that
it is assisting another." 11
In the Clark lectures, Eliot enlarges the scope of criticism further.
He says that a critic cannot afford to study literature in isolation:
The literary critic must remain a critic of literature, but he
must have sufficient knowledge to understand the points of
view of the sciences into which his literary criticism merges.
You cannot know your frontiers unless you have some notion
of what is beyond them. (226)
Eliot admits that his expectations of critics are formidable. For a
model he looks to Aristotle, the "only writer who has established a
literary criticism which both sticks to the matter in hand and yet
implies the other sciences." Unfortunately for the modem critic,
Aristotle is a model that cannot be equaled, because his comprehensiveness, "in the expanse of modem science and knowledge," is
impossible (226). Nevertheless, in the lectures Eliot tries to practice
what he preaches: on the poetry, he brings to bear history, philosophy, and even psychology. An understanding of Donne's poetry, he
says, depends on some understanding of what Eliot, for lack of a better
word, calls "personality" the very thing that a poet is said to extinguish
in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent." The impersonality he advocated in that essay might apply to practicing poets, but can be
�YEE
77
jettisoned when it comes to criticism. Eliot's polymathic view of
literary criticism precedes by more than a half century the rise of the
interdisciplinary study of literature in the form of the "new historicism," which does not seem quite so new, especially in light of the
Clark lectures. In the lectures Eliot has clearly departed from the
formalist emphases of the New Criticism, and it has taken some time
for literary critics and scholars, in the United States at least, to come
to a similar view.
Eliot's attempts to exp'and the domain of criticism help to make
clear his place in the Western literary tradition. A tendency of recent
scholarship has been to elide Eliot's differences from his predecessors,
for example, the Romantics. Eliot's focus on emotion and feeling in
'Tradition and the Individual Talent," for example, might suggest that
Romanticism had influenced him more than he thought. That may
be so, but to be influenced by Romanticism does not necessarily make
one a Romantic. Influence, as Eliot points out, does not preclude
revolt. Eliot's addition of thought to feeling typifies his reaction
against Romantic notions about poetry, especially as exemplified by
Wordsworth's famous and still influential formula that poetry is the
"spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Poetry, for Eliot, as he
makes clear in the lectures, is not simply a matter of emotional
expression. At its best it also involves intellectual effort and struggle.
By widening criticism's scope, Eliot seems to be trying to emerge
from the shadow of Matthew Arnold, whom he faulted for not being
enough of a critic. Eliot took issue specifically with Arnold's tum
toward politics, and implicitly with Arnold's much-maligned "touchstones"-specimen passages quoted with the expectation that their
value required little or no elucidation. Arnold represents a danger for
Eliot: his advocacy of treating poetry as poetry could lead to another
version of Arnold's gem-studded crtticism. In the Clark lectures Eliot
frequently resorts to Amoldian touchstones, trusting that lines from
Blake, for example, will appear unpoetic, or that lines from Crashaw
will obviously lack intellectual effort.
Nevertheless, Eliot does succeed in going beyond Arnold's dictum
to see "the object as in itself it really is." On the whole, the lectures
succeed in illustrating Eliot's fusion of the critical and the creative-a
rejection of Arnold's separation of the two. His juxtaposition of Dante
and Donne is bold, conceited even. Some of his critical claims serve
to illustrate poetic technique. They reveal Eliot to be a practitioner of
what might be called "metaphysical criticism." In the Clark lectures
the form of Eliot's criticism follows that of his subjects.
�78
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The lectures are useful as criticism in yet another way: they help
one to understand Eliot's own work. Nowhere in the lectures does Eliot
mention self-commentary as an aJm explicitly or even implicitly. But
as Eliot was fond of repeating, a poet does not always understand his
own purposes, is not always the best judge of his work. This applies
also to the poet-critic.
Eliot was too self-effacing to say so, but his poetry up to the time
of the Clark lectures fits !)is characterizations of metaphysical poetry.
In "The Metaphysical Poets" he says that modern poetry must be
difficult, for precisely the same reasons that Donne is difficult. In his
own time Eliot perceives a background of disorder:
Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity,
and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined
sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The
poet must become more and more comprehensive, more
allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if neces-
sary, language into his meaning. 12
Eliot's championing of Donne has an ulterior motive. By claJming
Donne for the "direct current of English poetry," Eliot tries to make
his own place in that current, or in more contemporary terms, he
attempts to re-form the canon. Like Donne, Eliot is conceited. The
opentng lines of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in which the
evening sky is compared to "a patient lying etherised upon a table,"
are as incongruous with their context as what one finds in Donne.
Also like Donne, Eliot is sometimes given to obscurity and displays of
learning. The best example of this is The Waste Land whose allusiveness, indirectness, and comprehensiveness are apparent from a glance
at the references in Eliot's notes. A defense of Donne fro~ charges of
excessive ingenuity and erudition is thus in effect a self-defense. A
statement Eliot made in 1942 lends support to this view:
the critical writings of poets, of which in the past there have
been some very distinguished examples, owe a great deal of
their interest to the fact that the poet, at the back of his mind,
if not as his ostensible purpose, is always trying to defend the
kind of poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind that he
wants to write. 13
In the Clark lectures Eliot is engaged in the activities of defending and
formulating. He uses Donne to defend the kind of poetry he had
written. In Dante he begins to see the kind he wants to write. His
elevation of Dante's poetry seems to have led him to search for the
�YEE
79
intellectual order he saw behind Dante. Eliot thought that he had
located it in "anglo-catholicism," and this changed the character of his
poetry. To appreciate the change, one needs only to compare Four
Quartets with The Waste Land.
Eliot said that poets do not seek to become great, but simply to
make a contribution. In the Clark lectures, however, we see Eliot
himself striving covertly for greatness, placing himself in the company
of Dante, Donne, and Baudelaire, and setting the terms for the
comparison. What Eliot Wl'ote in "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
applies here: "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning
alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his
relation to the dead poets and artists." 14 One of the functions of
criticism, Eliot says, is to help decide what is useful. Understanding
Dante, Donne, and Baudelaire, Eliot implies in the Clark lectures, is
useful for understanding his own work. If one function of criticism is
also to help us read better, the Clark lectures seem to fulfill that
function best with the works of their own author.
Eliot had intended to rework the Clark lectures into a book entitled
The School of Donne, but did not get around to it. Perhaps it is more
accurate to say that he did rework the lectures, not tnto a book, but
into shorter essays. Eliot later published essays on Dante and
Baudelaire, which expand on generalizations made in the lectures.
The essay "Dante" (1929) develops further the notion that Dante is a
model of precision, clarity, and intensity. The essay "Baudelaire"
(1930) takes up the moral theme introduced at the end of the Clark
lectures, where Eliot suggests that a renewed interest in questions of
good and evil contributed to the metaphysicality of nineteenth-century
French poets. The essay discusses Baudelaire's moral preoccupations, arguing that his sense of evil implies good. It also commends
Baudelaire for elevating imagery of the "sordid life of a great metropolis" to the ''first lntens!ty." 15 As in the Clark lectures, Eliot seems to
be defending his own work, poems such as "Preludes" and The Waste
Land, which employ images of the sordidness of metropolitan life, and
in which a sense of evil might be said to imply good.
In 1933 Eliot revised and condensed the Clark lectures into the
Turnbull lectures, given at the Johns Hopkins University and now
published together with the Clark lectures. In the revised lectures he
is more forceful in advocating a historical approach to literature, but
is less sanguine about the certainty attainable by the critical enterprise. There are also foreshadowings of later essays: in the Turnbull
lectures Eliot speaks of poetry as "incantation," looking forward to his
interest in the music of poetry-a contrast with his earlier focus on
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
imagery. He also speaks of metaphysical poetry as "civilised poetry,"
a shift in terminology that looks ahead to his essay "What Is a Classic?"
(1944).
By the time of this essay, "metaphysical" had long been superseded
by another term of approbation, "classic." The classic has the same
characteristics as the metaphysical: universality, comprehensiveness, and fusion of thought and feeling. In addition, Homer and
Shakespeare, just as th~y were not metaphysical, are not classic
either. Now, however, Eliot is better equipped to state his reasons:
their societies were not "mature." He had argued in earlier writings
that the worth of a poet's work should be measured by the greatness
of the underlying philosophy: Shakespeare's age was not a mature
time for philosophy. Eliot had also stated that literary criticism was
only the beginning of the study of poetry: it should be completed by
criticism from a "definite ethical and theological standpoint." 16 In
Shakespeare's work Eliot has trouble detecting a deep religious sensibility. This limited religious sensibility is a sign of the fragmentation
of common culture in Europe since Dante's time. Eliot's interest in
the historical background of literary production might seem to imply
a denial of the possibility that poets can transcend their historical
circumstances. This denial might seem consistent with Eliot's earlier
statement that poets surrender themselves to their tradition and with
his preoccupation in his own poetry with the problem of transcending
time. But the denial is only apparent.
Eliot's excursion into literary history in the Clark lectures leads him
not to critical relativism, but to some criteria of poetic worth. Literatures develop and mature. As a result, literary works can be ranked.
"A mature literature," Eliot was to write later, "has a history behind
it"-history defined as "an ordered though unconscious progress of a
language to realize its potentialities within its own lirnitations." 17 In
anticipation of this later formulation, the Clark lectures show that
historicism need not mean neglect of questions of value. For Eliot,
history does not provide grounds for forsakingjudgments of value, but
constitutes a basis for standards of transcendent value. Eliot is a
historicist, but his historicism is in the service of classicism.
This all-too-brief survey of Eliot's later criticism should suffice to
show how regularly Eliot retumed to the Clark lectures. With the
lectures out of view, the issues and themes taken up in the later essays
seem newer than they would otherwise: Eliot appears to be dealing
with fresh thoughts. With the lectures in view, Eliot's criticism seems
more static and richer than it once appeared. It seems doubtful that
he ever really belonged to the period of the New Criticism, though he
�YEE
81
may have helped to initiate it. 18 If in moving beyond formalism,
literary critics and scholars of the last three decades or so had thought
they were leaving Eliot behind, they were wrong. Eliot had already
gone beyond formalism and been where they are now. Literary theory,
it seems, is still trying to catch up with him. 19
*
*
*
*
Notes
1. T. S. Eliot, For LancelotAndrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London:
Faber & Gwyer, 1928), ix.
2. All parenthetical page references are to the work under review,
Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry.
3. Eliot, "Hamlet and His Problems," in his The Sacred Wood: Essays on
Poetry and Criticism (7th ed. London: Methuen, 1950), 100.
4. Another omission is non-Western literatures. It is not clear whether
Eliot believed metaphysicalit;y belonged exclusively to Western poetry,
but it is clear that Eliot valued his reading in Eastern literature: "I am
not a Buddhist, but some of the early Buddhist scriptures affect me
as parts of the Old Testament do" (The Use of Poetry and the Use of
Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England
[Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933], 82). In After Strange
Gods, a piece noted more for intolerance than for tolerance, Eliot wrote
that his study of Sanskrit and Patanjali's metaphysics at Harvard had
left him "in a state of enlightened mystification." He also professed
"the highest respect" for the Chinese mind and Chinese civilization:
at its highest Chinese civilization has "graces and excellences which
may make Europe seem crude." He noted a current fashion for
Confucius, observing that linguistic and cultural distance made it
difficult for a Westerner to understand his philosophy. (See After
Strange Gods: A Primer of Modem Heresy [London: Faber and Faber,
1934], 40.) In later years Eliot seems to have changed his mind about
the accessibility of Eastern works to Western readers. In Notes
towards the Definition of Culture he writes of the influence of the
poetical translations from the Chinese made by Ezra Pound and
Arthur Waley; they "have probably been read by every poet writing in
English." Western literature may constitute a unity, but not one cut
off from the East. Through interpreters "specially gifted for appreciating a remote culture, every literature may influence every other." (See
Notes towards the Definition of Culture, in Eliot's Christianity and
Culture: "The Idea of a Christian Society" and "Notes towards the
Definition ofCulture"3 [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968],
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
191.) Those who seek refuge in Eliot from multiculturalism probably
ought to look elsewhere.
5. In fairness to Eliot, it should be pointed out that he composed the
lectures under trying circumstances: he was not in the best of health,
and he was experiencing marital difficulties.
6. Eliot, "Dante," in his The Sacred Wood, 169.
7. John Donne, 'The Relique," l. 6, in Herbert J.C. Grierson, ed .. Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921). 21. Eliot used this anthology as
a source of examples for the Clark lectures. AB Schuchard documents in
his footnotes to the Clark lectures, Eliot frequently did not transcribe his
examples accurately. In one case, he miscopied "thee" as "tree," so that
two ltnes from Abraham Cowley's ode, 'To Mr. Hobs," become: "1 never
yet the livtng soul could see./ But in thy books and tree" (196).
8. Eliot, 'The Metaphysical Poets," in his Selected Essays (new ed. New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950). 242-243.
9. But in neither the essay or the lectures does Eliot mention how
alliteration helps to unite the disparate elements.
10. Eliot, "Hamlet and His Problems," in The Sacred Wood, 96.
11. Eliot, 'The Function of Criticism," in Selected Essays, 19-21.
12. Eliot, 'The Metaphysical Poets," in Selected Essays, 248.
13. Eliot, 'The Music of Poetry," in On Poetry and Poets, 26.ln 1961 Eliot
said that in his early criticism he was "implicitly defending the sort of
poetry that 1 and my friends wrote." See his To Criticize the Critic and
Other Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965), 16.
14. Eliot, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent," in The Sacred Wood, 49.
15. Eliot, "Baudelaire," in Selected Essays, 377.
16. Eliot, "Religion and Literature," in Frank Kermode, ed., Selected Prose
ofT.S. Eliot(NewYork: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; Farrar, Straus and
Gtroux, 1975), 97.
17. Eliot, "What Is a Classic?" (1944), in his Poetry and Poets (London:
Faber and Faber, 1957). 55-56.
18.ln 1956 Eliot declined to take credit for the New Criticism: "1 fall to
see any critical movement which can be said to derive from myself,
though 1 hope that as an editor 1 gave the New Criticism, or some of
it, encouragement and an excerise ground in The Criterion." See Eliot's
essay, "The Frontiers of Criticism," in On Poetry and Poets, 106.
�YEE
83
19. I will cite one example of the Eliotic tincture of some current literary
theory: "there can be no general theory of canon formation that would
predict or account for the canonization of any particular work, without
specif'ying first the unique historical conditions of that work's production and reception. Neither the social identity of the author nor the
work's proclaimed or tacit ideological messages definitively explain
canonical status" (John Gu!llory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of
Literary Canon Fonnation [Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993]. 85). This seems . to be a more Latinate version of much of what
Eliot says in "What Is a Classic?" I don't think that I have caught up
with Eliot either, since I am hardly as comprehensive as Eliot would
have demanded. But I owe thanks to members of a preceptorial in the
fall of 1994 for helping me make up some ground.
�84
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�A Suitable Boy: A Novel
by Vikram Seth.
(First published in India in 1993)
Harper Collins, 1993, 1379 pp.
Eva T. H. Brann
What are book reviews for? Some are to vent righteous spleen-a
scribbler has wasted our time, and here is the moment for revenge.
Some are to establish superiority-what an author has made a critic
can now break. Some are to whet the appetite-a writer has captivated
our attention, and now we want to entice others into the same
delighted captivity.
It is this third motive that causes me to report on my recent reading
of A Suitable Boy by Seth (pronounced to rhyme with "gate" or "great").
To persuade one's friends to read even an ordinary-sized novel is a
responsibility. They part with some of their money and invest some of
their life. But here is a huge book, a three-weeks' book for a gulping
reader like myself, or a three-months read at a more moderate pace.
I will venture to attempt to snaffle you into it, and upon my head be it.
Moreover, while you are at it you might as well, I suggest, read
Seth's two earlier books, From Heaven Lake (1983) and The Golden
Gate (1986).
From Heaven Lake is, as far as I know, the latest in that proud
procession of"making it to Lhasa" books. I have a love for.trave1 books
which has become a passion since I spend most of my life in an office.
[fhis passion is aided and abetted by one of our alumni, Jerry Caplan,
A'73, with whom I exchange title for title and sometimes book for book.
In fact, From Heaven Lake went out to him yesterday.) Among travel
books I read most avidly the Tibetan type, for the intrepidity required
of the travellers, for the stupendousness of the Himalayan "Roof of the
World," for the romance of the real Shangri-la, for the mystery of
forbidden Lhasa, for the grandeur of Potala Palace, for the strange
plausibility of Buddhist practice, and-this reading is in a different
key-for the pathos of the destruction wreaked on this vulnerably
beautiful civilization by the Communist Chinese in the sixties. Before
getting back to Seth, I cannot resist here recommending the Tibetan
books of Alexandra David-Neel. the most adaptable, courageous,
Eva T. H. Brann is Dean at St. John's College, Annapolis.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
86
learned and funny member of that astounding tribe of women travellers who for three centmies now have been making distant worlds
unsafe for officialdom.
Seth's Tibet book makes delightful reading, but l mention it here
really mostly because on occasion it breaks into verse. Such occasional verse foreshadows his next book and first novel, The Golden
Gate: A Novel in Verse. (Versification is, it seems, a different art from
poetry; Seth has also published two books of poems, one of them called
The Humble Administrator's Garden, which I have not read.) The
Golden Gate is a California novel-and thus for us orientals a kind of
travel book-written entirely in an iambic tetrameter stanza with a
complex rhyme scheme borrowed from Johnston's "luminous translation" ofPushkin's Eugene Onegin. (On Seth's versified recommendation I bought it, and spent several happy nights discovertng that the
Russian national epic is, of all things, witty.)
"A Novel in Verse" may sound unlikely if not repellent. Seth reports
attending a party
Hosted by (long live) Thomas Cook
Where my Tibetan travel book
Was honored
and an editor
seized my arm: "Dear fellow,
What's your next work? "A Novel... Great!
We hope that you, dear Mr. Seth-"
"... In verse," I added. He turned yellow.
In fact, it turns out to be more readable than many a prose novel, and
for all its playfulness, quite moving. It also seems to me to prefigure
one of the qualities that makes A Suitable Boy so engaging a work-involvement. I mean that each of the cast of characters is involved with
all the others, in selies or in parallel, in accordance with the recognized
register of traditional and contemporary "relationships"-lover, exlover, divorced lover, paterfamilias, materfamilias, counsellor, physician, husband, wife, fliend, fellow-demonstrator, support-giver, and
suitor, unsuitable or suitable. The verse novel and the prose novel-A
Suitable Boy is subtitled A Novel as if to set it off from The Golden
Gate-have this feature in common, that the author has an easy
command of every local tradition and every latest trend, yet presents,
for all his huge absorptive virtuosity, no superciliously scintillating
comedy of manners, but a warm, even loving, account of the human
�BRANN
87
nodes in which these conventional relations terminate, in California
or in India.
Why, besides the reason given, is A Suitable Boy subtitled A Novel,
I keep wondering. What else could it be? Well, judging by its length,
it my be taken for another Anglo-Sanscrit epic. (There is actually such
a book by Shashi Tharoor, a very funny book full of English and
Sanscrit literary allusions, called The GreatlndianNovel, 1989, based
on and named after the JVahabharata.) Or it might be read as a social
history oflndia, (Seth did do a lot of research) or as seven novels bound
in one (Seth had actually planned a series of novels covering half a
century). In fact, it is all of these. But it is, I suppose the author meant,
above all and unabashedly a novel at a time when the novel has been
pronounced a finished genre. Critics have remarked that Seth is quite
unaffected by this news and that he is determinedly unexperimental,
just as if straight novel-writing were still an option.
Here I cannot resist recurring to a favorite observation of mine, a
secret by now so open that the critics have begun to bruit it about. It
is a fact designed to make those of us who wield English As A Second
Language proud and pleased. The English language is about the nicest
thing that happened to us immigrants. It is the thing we gained,
whatever else we lost, and now our debt is being repaid. For while the
language and its literature is under assault by popular carelessness
and intellectual wilfulness in its home countries, the fom1er margins
are coming to the rescue. The most agile, handsome, freshly traditional
Engiish is being written by bilingual authors at home in Chinese,
Japanese, Arabic, and Hindi-to name some I know, by Timothy Mo,
Kazuo lshiguru, Tayeb Salih, and Vikrarn Seth himself. They display
an unselfconcious sense of possession and an unabashed English
literacy. (The character who seems to represent Seth himself in the
book, the eligible young writer Amit Chatterji, has it said of him that
"Jane Austen is the only woman in his life," and Amit himself excuses
the over-a-thousand page novel he is writing by reference to Middlemarch-now on our program, I am happy to· say.) And their novels are
full of novelistic invention-so rich in current content. who cares if the
form be passe.
I have heard, and could in any case have guessed, that the use of
English is a fiercely touchy issue in India, but while the nationalists
and intellectuals argue, the writers write. Seth went home to live with
his family in New Delhi to write his novel, and it appears to me to be
an Indian Novel. At least I seemed to learn a lot about a time in India
of special interest to me, the years 1951-52, half a decade after
Independence and Partition. As readers of my reviews in this journal
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
may recall, I am a great admirer of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, and Seth's
period falls between that work and its sequel, Staying On. (I hope one
day to learn what Seth thinks of this predecessor work, which he must,
somehow, have taken into account. There is, for example, an invented
city, Brahmpur, in Seth's book, of which "a few misguided souls"
assert that its name means "the city of illusion and error;" such a city
name, Mayapore, also occurs in Scott's Jewel in the Crown.) But then
agaln A Suitable Boy is an.Anglo-Indian novel, and the mode of being
Indian that several of its protagonists display is to out-English the
English. This mode may seem shameful or comical to people devoted
to ressenttment, but to me the point is that these devotees to anglicization succeed so well. Their English is pleasantly and playfully
correct, they have appropriated Shakespeare, and they can quote
more English poets than I have even heard of. ''They," of course, means
Seth himself, whose gift for language play is marvelous. Indian English
is many-voiced, and Seth renders the variants with affection. There is
the nonchalant idiom of the Oxbridge graduate, the just-off diction of
the Midlands university student, the over-correctness of the hometralned official, and, most delightful, the inspired solecism of the babu,
the Hindu clerk. A family retalner, Biswas Babu, has a genius that
way: "a different kettle of tea," advice that "runs off your back like
duck's water," and "commenstruable" for "commensurable." The most
hilarious passages in an often very funny book are Seth's renditions
of the English verses written by the members of the Brahmpur Literary
Society.
The authmial voice is, in contrast, smoothly unobtrusive, to let the
various flavors of spoken speech come out. Seth, wisely, makes no
concessions to the non-Indian reader's ignorance of the ordinary terms
of Indian life, such as titles or colloquial terms like angreziyath,
evidently something like "anglomania". (This guess was confirmed by
a friendly functionary at the Indian Embassy.) In particular, there is
incessant reference to delicious sounding but image-void foods and
drinks. What for example, might a gulabjumam be? A sweet, it is clear
and appetizingly gloppy-sounding, but made of what? So, like life, this
novel requires us to live with and around these terminological mysteries. No doubt a future edition will give in and supply a glossary.
Besides the pervasive comedy of language, the book has some
lovably, comic characters. If you like the literature of the Jewish
Mother, you will love emotive Mrs. Mehra, whose daughter, Lata, is
the heroine of the book, the one for whom "a suitable boy" is to be
found. There is also an irresistible child. (To me the presence of such
a personage, like Petya Rostov in War and Peace, is the penultimate
�89
BRANN
test of an author's skill.) His name is Bhaskar Kapoor. and he is Lata's
little nephew. He is a mathematical monomaniac. For example, here
his favorite uncle. Maan, is taking his leave:
'Bye. Maan Maama ... oh, did you know that if you have a
triangle like this, and if you draw squares on the sides like
this, and then add up these two squares you get a square,'
Bhaskar gesticulated. 'Every time.' he added .
..
'Yes. I do know that.' Smug frog, thought Maan. ·... Do you
want a good-bye sum?'
We would have to invent an AP Freshman mathematics tutorial for
that little genius.
This same Bhaskar nearly dies. This is a novel of ordinary life, and
mostly of middle class life at that. Seth has a gift for making the
narrative run along like a colorless stream of water with a constant
rippling of events. again like life. And then suddenly. and yet again
like life. a torrential disaster comes rushing down. There is the horror
at the Pul Mela. the venue of a great Ganges festival, where crowds
panic, a thousand are dead in a quarter of an hour, and Bhaskar's
hand slips "digit by digit" out of his mother's grasp. The reader, this
reader at least. immersed tn the stream of action thinks. "Oh no, not
Bhaskar!" and an instant later, stepping outside. "Must he-Seth-do
that to us?"
Seth's ability to build up a catastrophe. be it for a crowd or for a
character, by a slow-rising of the narrative flow. to write a tempestuous
episode. and then, as happens in life, to let it die down and stream
away. is remarkable. Equally accomplished is his weavtng of the web
of involvement I spoke of before.
There are four families: the three Hindu clans, the private middle
class Mehras. the political Kapoors. the literately chattertng, coupletmaking Chatterjis, and fourth. the demoted, post-Independence nawabs. the Muslim Khans. The Hindu families are related to each other
by marriage and to the Muslims by friendship. The author has kindly
supplied a family chart.
The bar to tnterreligious marriage is one of the novel's lines. In a
bookstore, Lata meets a handsome young Muslim. "the most unsuitable boy of all," Kabir. She is flipping through Tennyson and he
recommends to her Courant and Robbtns (a delightful all-purpose
mathematics text which we once used in the junior mathematics
tutorial). Passionate love develops. but ultimately. by her own will. she
yields to her mother's wishes. It is neither tragedy or sudden glory,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and it reminds us that a novelist's proper function is to make the
non-tragic and the inglortous, that is, ordinary life, deeply satisfying.
Other issues are unobtrusively broached: the obsessive intra-Indian color consciousness, the unextirpated caste system, the struggles
of the energetic commercial classes (we learn a lot about the shoe
trade), the ramshackle and rambunctious new democracy, and the
tenacious struggle of an old religion against modem imputations of
superstition. The point is ,that it is all done through the lives of people
who are knit into a network of blood and social and emotional
relations. Seth's control, his ability to yield to his characters the
freedom to be, while keeping them enmeshed each with all, is what
seems to me his main novelistic virtue, over and above even his
linguistic and observational virtuosity.
To the West, India seems infinite, but A Suitable Boy is only long.
Seth by craft has managed to impose closure on his temporal slice
through her enormous life-though, happily, without foreclosing a
continuation, in Indian fashion. The versified table of contents ends
with a half-promise:
The curtain falls, the players take their bow
And wander off the stage-at least for now.
�Karate-Do and Zen:
An Inquiry
by Jorge H. -Aigla
Do Press, 1994.
James Carey
This book deals with the question of how Zen Buddhism as a practice
can be realized in a setting which might at first glance seem altogether
antithetical to it. The author, Jorge H. -Aigla, has been practicing the
martial arts for the past 25 years, and is currently ranked fifth Dan
(i.e., holds a fifth degree black belt), master instructor, in Wado Ki
Kai Karate- Do, a style of Shoto Kan Karate-Do. His famfiiartty with
the martial arts is broad and deep. After practicing medicine in San
Francisco for six years, he joined the teaching faculty of St. John's
College in 1985. Over the past decade he has offered free classes in
Karate-Do to interested members of the college community. During this
time he has also read widely and has deepened his understanding of
Eastern and Western thought. His book is a readable, intelligent account
of both the spirttual roots and the physical principles of Karate-Do.
Most people in this country think of Karate only as a bare-handed
fighting method of Asian migin. Few, even among its practitioners.
think of it as a Do. The Japanese word "Do" is derived from the Chinese
word "Dao'' (sometimes spelled "Tao''). and is conventionally translated
as "way". Karate- Do might then be construed as a way oflife infused
with the principles of Karate. This formulation is insufficiently exact, for
almost any set of principles, drawn from any sources however dubious,
could be said to constitute a way of life, for better or worse. But Karate,
along with several other Asian martial arts and activities such as
calligraphy, flower arrangement, and the tea ceremony, is held to be a
means of access to and a wakeful participation in the Way, the latter
being understood as an impersonal and underlying, though largely
concealed, principle of harmony immanently governing the world.
Karate-Do and Zen- An Inquiry elucidates the concept of the Way,
which is of Taoist origin, in relation to the Buddhist concept of
emptiness (Sunyata). Mr. Aigla presents a thoughtful account of how
an individual who would take his bearings by these concepts should
regard himself in relation to the environing world, and to his fellows
Mr. Carey is a tutor at St. John's College in Santa Fe and coordinator for the new
Graduate Program in Eastern Classics. He has been a practitioner of Genji Kai
Karate for the past eight years.
�92
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In particular. Sunyata as a principle applicable to man means primarily emptiness of ego, absence of self-centeredness. In the course of
practicing a martial art one discovers that solicitude for the self Is a
gross Impediment, most conspicuously In those situations where it
might have seemed least dispensable. Indeed, the very expression
"self-defense" Is misleading, certainly as a name for the goal of
learning a martial art, since focussing on the self Is a principal
hindrance to proper execution of the movements that comprise the
art. The more one forgets 'oneself and allows these movements to take
on a life of their own, to happen automatically, so to speak, the greater
one's prospects of achieving technical proficiency and, paradoxically,
the greater one's prospects of successful self-defense should the
extreme situation arise In which one is forced into a fight.
Karate-Do, as an attunement to the Way, comprises specific features that are unique to It and to a few other martial arts. One of these
is the Kata, which is a form, a set of movements and techniques
performed in a prescribed sequence. Each style of Karate has Katas
that are unique to it, though there is considerable overlap, and the
number of Katas included in the different styles varies widely. Some
Katas are quite old. There is nothing comparable to them in Western
boxing or wrestling, or in Western sports generally. The closest parallel
could be found in gymnastics, although there the order of movements
is not entirely prescribed. The foundations of any Kata are the basic
techniques: blocks, strikes, punches, and kicks, executed from a
variety of stances. Mr. Aigla laments the custom in many schools of
rushing the beginning Karateka (or practitioner of Karate) from these
basics into Kata. "Basics are never to be quickly gotten over with: they
are to be gone through patiently and with full commitment; they are
to be lived "(p.55). Only if a Kata is fmnly grounded in the basic
techniques can it be performed with spirit. As the Karateka becomes
more and more experienced in the performance of a given Kata, he
reaches a point where the movements begin to come of their own
accord. "When a Katais well done it actually ends up being embodied
in the practitioner: a Kata is said to be learned only when it is done
with full spirit and emotional content. I say the Karateka 'does a Kata';
it would be just as accurate to say that 'the Kata does the Karatekd
by carrying him through its movements" (p.56). After many years of
practice, "the Karateka realizes that the rhythm and timing of the
particular Kata seem to spring out of the Kata itself: the Kata is
teaching itself' (p.62). Since the movements of the Kata are the very
ones that would come into play in a combat situation, the Kata is
�CAREY
93
properly performed with gravity as well as with spirit. "Kata is the
heartbeat of Karate -Do, one indispensable way into the Way." (p.65)
It should go without saying that the true Karateka hopes that
actual combat will never take place. He is deterrn1ned to stay out of a
fight at almost any cost, though he has developed the confidence that
if he is forced into one he will give a respectable account of himself
and his art. In place of fighting, the Karateka engages in Kumtte, or
controlled sparring. Wh~ther the Kumite is highly formalized and
prearranged or whether it is "free," the Karateka, as Mr. Aigla stresses,
must regard his opponent not as an enemy but as a "partner," and
the exchange of techniques as a kind of"conversatlon." Kumite "is one
of the highest and most beautiful forms of intercourse, conversation,
and empathy; it requires care, restraint, and acknowledgment of
another's humanity" (p. 74). Contrary to the common impression, the
genuine Sensei, or instructor, is not someone at whose feet disciples
reverently sit as recipients of an esoteric teaching delivered from on
high. In spite of the formality that reigns in the Do-jo, the Sensei is a
partner in the learning that takes place. He learns with his students
and from them. Nowhere is this fact more conspicuous than in Kumite
between Sensei and aspirtng Karateka.
AB Mr. Aigla insists, the goal in Kumite is never to hurt the
opponent. Indeed, since self-mastery is the central goal of Karate, the
real opponent is ultimately oneself. Even if and when forced into an
actual combat situation, the Karateka is obliged to use no more force
than is needed to convince his assailant of the pointlessness of further
aggression. Karate-Do is essentially an ethical Way, and the formal
Katas habituate the Karateka into this ethical Way. "Karate-Do is
moral training as well as physical conditioning" (p.l8). Mr. Aigla notes
that most Katas begin and end in exactly the same spot, even though
the intervening motions have coursed widely from this spot. He
interprets this as embodying the Zen Buddhist conception of the
identity of beginning and end. "Katais mora! geometry" (p.61). Approprtately, the sign of accomplishment in Karate is the belt, its color
indicating the rank attained by the wearer. "A belt crosses the tanden
or hara-the belly. It envelops and supports the moral center of the
practitioner" (p.l45). These quotations give one a sense of the prevailing tone of Karate-Do and Zen.
Mr. Aigla treats a variety of other features of Karate with the same
sensitivity and perspicacity that characterize his treatment of Kata
and Kumite. Among these are the way in which the Karateka is to
regard the Do-Jo, or training hall, the bow and what it signifies, and
the Kiai, which is the charactertstic shout that takes place at certain
�94
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
points in the performance of a Kata and during Kumite. Mr. Aigla's
treatment of the Kiai draws from his extensive knowledge of anatomy
and physiology. Without attempting to give a comprehensive physiological account of all the remarkable things a trained Karateka can
do, Mr. Aigla refutes the more preposterous claims that have been
made by instructors who in their zeal to attract students overlook the
fmdings of basic physics and biology. In fact, Karate-Do and Zen is
unusual among books in the martial arts in its combination of
scientific learning and detachment, on the one hand, and openness
to experiences that do not yield to a reductive analysis. on the other.
At the conclusion of a scientifically compelling account of how even
slightly built Karatekas are able to concentrate an exceptional amount
of power in their techniques, Mr. Aigla offers some intriguing suggestions on the physiology that lies behind the increase in power contributed by the KiaL But, conceding that these suggestions are highly
speculative, he concludes, "this augmentation of power comes from
Mushin [no mind] during a true and deep Kiaf' (p.l38). Earlier in the
book Mushin has been described as a "mode and type of emptiness."
(p.57) and as a deep "mystery" that defies logical analysis (p.58).
Karate-Do and Zen contains, as a corollary to the Buddhist principle of Sunyata, an argument against the substantial identity of the
mind over and against the transient biological processes that constitute the body. The arguments and the evidence Mr. Aigla adduces
against "mind-body" dualism, drawn largely from the experience one
has of being a "creature of movement," are provocative and illuminating. Even intractable dualists, such as the Wliter of this review, have
to concede that none of the traditional philosophical conceptions of
the mind-body relationship, from the more subtle accounts one finds
in Greek antiquity to the cruder (and justly parodied) "ghost-in-amachine" models of early modern philosophy, render altogether comprehensible the intimacy of this relationship.
Mr. Aigla has written a book that is informative and balanced. It
is replete with specific references to authors read on the program at
St. John's, and is written virtually in the form of a continuous
conversation with them. The book constitutes a bracing response to
those who are inclined to deride the body as a mere appendage to the
intellect. particularly those by whom the body is alternately despised,
pampered, and debauched. The author makes a compelling case for
how the discipline of the martial arts can assist in habituating
"creatures of movement" into inner harmony, integrity. self-mastery,
and generosity. Karate-Do and Zen-An Inquiry admirably conveys the
ethos of Karate at it is best.
�The Republic: The Odyssey
of Philosophy
by Jacob Howland
Twayne's Masterwork Studies no. 122
(New York: MacMillan, 1993). xiv + 187.
Carl Page
Each volume In the Twayne's Master Studies offers a "lively critical
reading of a single classic text." The readings are Intended to be
Introductions, aimed principally at undergraduates but also at anyone
looking for an Informed yet uncluttered guide to entering-or re-entering-the essential plain of thought in a classic work. Jacob Howland's reading of Plato's Republic does the job splendidly. It is concise,
readable, and animated by a deep grasp of the dialogue as a whole,
brimming over with discussable topics and Inviting elaboration at
every tum. As is fitting for such an Introduction, not everything the
author might have said has been said. Howland has admirably
balanced authorial restraint and pedagogical provocation, without
falling into over-simplification and without patronizing his audience.
In all likelihood there is no comprehending Plato's Republic in a single
book, but Howland leaves no doubt that he has his finger on its pulse.
I know of no other book devoted to the Republic that so straightforwardly furnishes a healthy orientation to Plato's philosophic intentions. It will be of unqualified interest both to first-time students of
the Republic and to their teachers. Yetlt will also intrigue those looking
for further, responsible light on apparently well-worn paths. A most
inviting, helpful reading.
What sort of background material is appropriate for approaching a
Platonic dialogue? Howland deals with the issue straightforwardly and
sensibly. There is a chronology of Plato's life and works (pp. xl-xiv).
detailed in precisely the way beginning readers want and need. The
book proper begins with a short chapter on cultural context (pp. 3-9)
whose topics are: (1) the contest (agon) regarding the best life, (2) the
unique character of the polis, and (3) the dangerously fruitful tensions
associated with the love ofhonor and striving for excellence. Howland's
sense of context is thus far from historicist; it is topical and thematic,
Carl Page is a tutor at the Annapolis campus of St. John's College.
�96
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
therefore useful. This observation applies throughout. Three further
chapters-also short, informative, and cleaving to essentials-address
the intellectual, critical context of Platonic writing (pp. 10-31). Remarks on the Republic as political philosophy precede a discussion of
Aristophanes' contemporary challenge to Socratic philosophizing,
Aristotle's qualms about Socratic extremism, and Karl Popper's wellknown if misconceived diatribe. This puts the topics of sophistry and
political responsibility on the table. A brief section on poetry and
tragedy follows, with special reference to Nietzsche and a mention of
recent scholars such as Martha Nussbaum (The Fragility of Goodness].
In all cases, Howland uses the familiar names to raise and represent
deep, pervasive themes evident in Plato's own work. A chapter on
Platonic dialogue as philosophic drama completes the orientation. It
emphasizes how the poetics of the Republic explicitly and self-consciously draw from tragedy, comedy, and epic all at once, permitting
eros and order, irony and death to become commensurable in the
genre of Platonic dialogue, a genre akin, perhaps, to the all but lost
form of the satyr-play (p. 31).
The Republic emerges as an artwork whose supporting web is drawn
directly from the practical, political realities of the ancient polis and
from the theoretical, intellectual concerns of a literate culture intensely aware of the dynamic, unstable relations between speech
(logos) and deed (ergon). It is far from spectatorial, accidentaL uncommitted; it enters fully-armed into the agon for wisdom, challenging all
previous authorities from Homer on. The tapestry of allusion that gives
so much body to the dialogue, therefore, is essential to its purpose-a
tapestry that Howland's reading makes both compelling and unavoidable.
His subtitle-The Odyssey ofPhilosophy-points to a central motif
of Plato's tapestry: "the homeward quest of Odysseus is woven into
the dialogue as a mythical subtext ofits philosophic action" (p. 32).
meaning that "philosophy ... attempts a kind of 'homecoming' for human beings-not a literal, physical homecoming but a metaphysical
homecoming of the soul" (p. 49). Such homecoming gets its sense from
an embattled estrangement caused by "the multifarious attractions of
full-blown erotic liberty," against which "Socrates must defend both
philosophy and justice" (p. 39). The outwardly political problem of
justice cannot but return to the problem of intelligently rectil'ying
desire. Howland places emphasis on the latter throughout.
More specifically, however, Odysseus's own famous voyage is directly reflected into many details of the text (pp. 4 7 -54). The framework
has three main parts: (1) Odysseus's fantastic adventures amongst
monsters, goddesses, and dead souls (cf. books 1-5). (2) his sojourn
�HOWLAND
97
with the Phaeacians "whose nearness to the gods and freedom from
cares, pain, and toil betoken their distance from things human" (p.
47) (cf. books 5-7), and (3) his retum to the real potis of Ithaca (cf.
books 8-1 0). The three waves that mark the apparently digressive
transition from the severe, purged version of the city-in-speech of the
earlier books to the Kallipolis of the middle books mark "a transition
analogous to that undergone by Odysseus when ... he leaves Calypso's
island cave" and is even~ually thrown up onto the sands of Scheria.
The parallel is suggestiVe. Calypso enchants, yet Odysseus cannot
hide his human longing, just as the purged city attempts but fails to
draw a veil over eros. Yet Kallipolis, too, is defective. It is defective in
direct proportion to the ways that the fantastic kingdom of the
Phaeacians cannot be the real kingdom of Ithaca-an incommensurability implied by the permanent isolation of the Phaeacians after
Odysseus's visit. ''The Phaeacian rulers Alkinoos and Arete-King
'Mighty Mind' and Queen 'Virtue'-provide a Homeric analog to the
humanly impossible hegemony of intellect and virtue in the Kallipolis"
(p. 53). The impossible Phaeacian monarchs are the paradigm of
Socrates' Philosopher King. Socrates, in contrast, "is far closer to the
roving, polytropic Odysseus" (p. 117).
Howland's commentary proper begins at chapter 6, "A Host of
Challenges" (pp. 56-76). He reads the wonderful drama of book 1 with
fine attention to detail, interpreting its development as a display of the
"birth of philosophic discourse" (p. 77), inflected by the as yet unexamined tensions and relations between virtue, eros, spiritedness
(thumos), poetry, and skill or art (techne). Glaucon's interruption at
the beginning of book 2 brings to the fore the problem of "the tyranny
of desire" (pp. 79-84), seconded by his brother's moral indignation (pp.
84-86), a ragged reflection of virtue's discipline. Kallipolis, on the one
hand, and the purged city of the militarized Guardians ("the City of
Adeimantus"), on the other, will become coordinated with the two
brothers in a hunt for the polity that combines the moderation of
Adeimantus's first approximation ("the City of Pigs") and the humanity
of Glaucon's ("the Feverish City"). The fundamental tension is eros vs.
education: "insofar as eros is tyrannical and unjust, it must be
subdued by the city; insofar as it is essential to being human, it must
be nurtured" (pp. 92-93).
The main constructive part of the city-in-speech (roughly, books
3-6) is a ''Tale ofTwo Cities" (pp. 94-118), told as asortofAristophanic
comedy against the epic backdrop already explicated. The tragic
perspective will be integrated later as Kallipolis unravels (cf. RP
8.545e). Adeimantus's city of dyed-in-the-wool Guardians seems to
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
tame Glauconian thumos, but evidently falls to educate potentially
philosophic eros (pp. 94-104). It is not even clear that Guardian dogs
might not yet still be wolves, an instability flagged by the expulsion of
divinely inspired poets and the political need for Noble Lies. Polemarchus's interruption, at the beginning of book 5, on behalf of ordinary
sexual eros and its natural, familial attachments prompts the second
phase of Socrates' epic comedy, an essay in the suppression of "erotic
necessity" (RP 5.458d). "Necessity is precisely what Socrates, with
Promethean arrogance, attempts to overcome in the Kallipolis" (pp.
111-12). Beauty and sex are sundered, as Socrates argues custom
away in favor of nature. Auxiliary Guardians tum into beasts, bred
like the dogs after which they were oliginally modeled, and by the time
Socrates is done with Philosopher Kings they have correlatively turned
into abstract, all but motionless and certainly anerotic gods.
With the image of Philosopher Kings, Socrates has provoked in
Glaucon a culiosity about the nature of philosophy. But the image is
a piece of philosophic poetry, a comic mask, whose partial truths need
fuller explication. Howland thus turns to the different style of imagery
presented in books 6 and 7. The images of Sun, Line, and Cave
"illuminate the 'wandering,' stliving character of Socratic philosophizing" (p. 118). They embody the resources of"Philosophical Imagination
and Prophecy"-the subtitle to Howland's chapter 9. His reading of
these much discussed passages keeps philosophic eros and Socratic
craft (poiesfs) in view throughout. The account of the Divided Line
draws heavily on and duly acknowledges Jacob Klein's Meno book,
while Howland offers his own, relatively extended interpretation of the
Cave in terms of"what could be called the locatedness-within-detachment of the human place" (p. 133). In his lich account, Howland shows
how that predicament is differently approached by the philosopher.
the prophetic poet, and the sophist, a reading that lays the foundation
for appreciating the deep kinship between poetry and philosophy in
particular. For although eikasia ("Imagination") Is necessary for philosophic education, its work belongs to poetry: "the responsibility must
lie with prophetic imagemakers. whose craft reflects and preserves
within the tradition at least some part of the truth about the noble,
the just, and the good" (p. 142).
A final chapter deals bliefly with the dissolution ofKallipolis, a tale
showing that "although our erotic natures bear the impress of custom
and convention they are never wholly mastered by nomos" (p. 150).
The emphasis then falls on the Myth of Er, in particular on the "lottery
of lives," which makes about as clear as can be "the superficiality of
all nonphilosophical 'education'" (p. 151).
�HOWLAND
99
Most students reading the Republic for the first time-though not
only they-are puzzled, not to say frustrated or even outraged, by the
mounting oddities and ironies of the city-in-speech as Socrates and
company move from the City of Pigs through to Kallipolis. Justice does
not seem to get satisfactorily defined, as the reader is led to believe it
might, and Socrates, so skeptical and liberal in other dialogues, seems
distressingly sanguine, paternalistic, and even patronizing in his
apparent political recom!Jlendations. Howland's treatment forestalls
these problems, by simply and convincingly revealing how to begin
reading a text as peculiar as Plato's. He shows how to take seriously
the dialogue's playful, shimmeringly variegated (potkilos) exteriors
without losing sight of its thoughtful interiors. All summaries and
introductions run risk of becoming cartoons, but this is not the case
here. Thoughtful readers are initiated into the demands of Plato's
unique art. From there they may proceed to the hard work of making
Platonic insights their own.
�Results of
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Let's Be Liberal
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They have won $35 credits at the St. John's College Bookstore.
The crossword contests have now come to an end.
�101
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��
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Kraus, Pamela
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Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
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Sachs, Joe
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EZRA
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The St. John's Review
Volume XLII, number three (1994)
Editor
Elliott Zuckerman
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Joe Sachs
Cwy Stickney
Jolm VanDoren
Robert B. WilliamSon
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Gjergjt Bojaxhi
The St. John's Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's
College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Eva T. H. Brann,
Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $15.00 for
three issues, even though the magazine may sometimes appear semiannually rather than three times a year. Unsolicited essays, stories,
poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the
Review, St. John's College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800.
Back issues are available, at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John's College
Bookstore.
© 1994 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction In whole or
In part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Prtntlng
Marcia Baldwin and The St John's College Print Shop
�This is the last issue to be published under the editorship ofElliott
Zuckerman. The new editor of the Review is Pamela Kraus, also
a Tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
�Contents
1 . . . . . Telling Lies
Eva T.H. Brann
17 ..... A Biological Theme in Aristotle's Ethics
Jolm White
45 . . . . . Where Is Greece?
Radoslav Datchev
65 ..... Two Poems by Sandra Hoben
67 ..... Book Review:
Two New Books by Alumni
Eva T.H. Brann
75 ..... One Man's Meter
Elliott Zuckerman
93 . . . . . Results of Crosswords
Numbers Five and Six
97 . . . . . Crossword Number Seven:
"Let's Be Liberal"
EZRA
��Telling Lies
I
Eva T. H. Brann
The first lecture of the school year Is, by an old tradition. dedicated to
that portion of the college new to this Friday-night ritual, the freslunen
among us. Yesterday, Thursday night, you participated In the first of
many seminars where you yourselves do all the talking. Tonight you
are present at the onlyweekiy event where someone else gets to speak
to you, a dean or a tutor or a visitor. One thing stays the same. Whether
you are speaking or listening, you are Intended to hear and to judge.
Although you may have allowed the talk of the world to persuade you
that "being judgmental" Is a social sin, judgments are what you are
Intended to render- on the words of others, though above all on your
own.
For example, this lecture Is entitled "Telling Lies." "What," you are
Intended to ask yourselves, "Is she up to?" Is she going to start us off
here by giving lessons In lying? Or, what Is worse, by preaching
honesty to us, good people all? If she Is so preoccupied with telling
lies, that's perhaps what she does.
And In fact I have already engaged In false speech. That "old"
tradition of dedicating this opening lecture to you, the freshmen - I
made It up myself and It Is only three years old. To recognize this and
similar lies you have to know some facts, and to judge their seriousness you have to have some appreciation of rhetoric.
For the bravado of rhetorical overstatement seems to be a species
of the so-called white lie. Perhaps such a colorless lie Is better than a
blazingly scarlet one, perhaps it Is not. You will spend time In the
language tutorial distinguishing and analyzing the rhetorical deceptions of!anguage and formingjudgments about them. To top It off, for
your last seminar, not only of your freshman year but again of your
senior year, you will read a dialogue by Plato, the Phaedrus, In which
questions of love, rhetoric, and truth are Intertwined. Unfortunately,
the knowledge that initiates you Into judging speech cannily can also
be construed as lessons In lying - an uneasy fact to which I shall
return.
But I have put the cart before the horse. Before you can judge
whether an utterance Is a lie, you have to be able to discern what It
means: meaning first, then judgment. For example, what does 'Telling
Lies" mean? Does It mean "what sort of a topic Is Telling Lies' for an
This was the Dean's opening lecture for the academic year 1993-94.
�2
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
opening lecture? or does it mean "uttering untruths," as in "She stands
up there and keeps telling lies"? Or does it mean "revealing," as in
"Achilles' lies are always telling lies, since they tell us a lot about him"?
In order to establish possible meanings you have to know some
grammar. You have to know that "telling" can be a gerund, and then
"telling lies" is a subject to be talked about, or a participle, and then
"telling lies" is something a speaker does. Or "telling" can be an
adjective modifying "li~," and then "telling lies" are lies that tell you
something. 'Telliog lies" is in fact a pun, and puns exploit the
squlrminess of language, while gr.ammar nails down the choices. You
will be studying a great deal of grammar In your language tutorial. (If
that prospect does not delight you, do but consider that grammar is
etymologically connected to glamour, a most telliog relation.)
There is one more study that completes the traditional trio making
up the art of language. Besides grammatical regularity and rhetorical
effect you will also be studying logical validity. I shall return to the
relation oflogic to lying later.
All three studies are intended to make you canny and witting
hearers and speakers, able to discern meaning imd judge truth, to
have your wits about you. You will need these skills here, becauseyou
have joined a community that engages in a very peculiar activity. We
ask after truth. We ask whether the books we read contain something
true, and we ask on occasion not only what truth herself might be,
but also what the truth is, independently of books. I will say something
later about the reasons why It is unusual for a college to admit these
questions after truth and what the conditions are that make them
possible.
Whatever the conditions, let me point out one consequence of trying
to live In a truth-seeking community. Members of such a community
should probably try not to tell lies. It Is conceivable that there might
be one who earnestly seeks the truth for himself while determinedly
telling lies to others. But such a person is probably a loner, not a friend
among friends.
Let me give you two reasons that may be new to you why members
In any intimate community, such as ours, should be truthful with
each other.
We are able to tell lies because we who speak are encased in a
cocoon, in our opaque body. Some people think that they can see
through others and that others are transparent to them, but where
they think they see through our exterior as through a pane of glass
they are in truth apt to be looking into a mirror. There are no certain
somatic signs oflylng. The nervous reaction to being suspected Is not
�BRANN
3
discernibly different from that of being guilty. Consequently even lie
detectors are known to be unreliable. The human carapace Is really
Impenetrable.
Now when people live as closely together as you will on this campus,
a certain decent distance is essential to comfort. You will not want to
observe each other too penetratingly. But a bodily presence that hides
a lie draws attention, and a face suspected of being a fa~ade Invites
searching curiosity. Telljng lies In close quarters Is a temptation to
breached privacy and to sorry Involvements. Under these circumstances there Is no harm that Is not compounded by lies.
The same mortal sheath that hides thoughts can be used to express
them. I say "can be used" because every adult expression is part
performance. A small, close,lively community acts at its best like those .
revolving stone-polishing cylinders that take off the rough edges and
bring out the natural markings of a piece of rock. Those markings
represent the personal rhetoric, the gestures and the diction, that a
community of learning brings out in people. It is a curious fact that
adult nature has to be brought out by polishing.
Consequently there Is nothing straightforward about uttering which literally means "outerlng" -your meaning. Some of you may
think that spontaneity and sincerity are natural and therefore easy
and that controlled expression is hypocrisy, an elderly vice. I think
Intended spontaneity is a self-contradiction, and sincerity is a sappy
virtue, the virtue of Insisting on being always one's - possibly
reprehensible- self. And Isn't it a strange fact that people indulging
in natural expression tend to look dramatic and self-dramatizing to
their neighbors?
So I think I need to say something in favor of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy
derives from the Greek work for actor, hypokritiis. It Is a necessary
part of adult conduct because it prevents something worse. Hamlet
urges his adulterous mother to "assume a virtue, If you have it not"
(III. iv, 158). She Is to make a pretense of purity so that it might turn
Into truth. There Is a stage of badness beyond being bad, and it is not
caring how one looks. Hypocrisy. they say,ls the compliment vice pays
to virtue.
There is another similar word that brings out my point. The word
"person" comes from the Latin persona. an actor's mask. A person is
a being behind a mask, a self-made fa~ade through which come
utterances. The lower animals at least do not seem to have such
masks, because they have no conduct, only behavior. Perhaps one
should say that they are masks, masks through which nature expresses herself. But we have masks, and we conduct ourselves. I mean
�4
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
that there can always be at least a brief check between our impulse
and our expression. Horner uses a wonderfully apt figure: ''What word
has escaped the barrier of your teeth!" one person will say to another,
implying that the words should have been held back. We can maintain
silence, and we can shape our speech and its expressive accompaniments. In fact we cannot do otherwise, for all human conduct is a kind
of self-presentation, and being natural is a great feat. (A sociological
classic on this subject is, Erving Goffrnan's 'The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life [1959[.) ·
Suppose I am right in intimating that learning to be oneself, to be
a person in a community, is an arduous work of mask-making,
requiring much biting back of words, some white lying, and continual
attempts to find expression that Will do justice to one's meaning. Then
to derail these efforts at sculpting one's own expressive persona by the
strong jolt of a crude lie would be a clime against your own developing
personality, particularly when you have looked someone in the eye
and sworn that what is about to come out of your mouth is the truth.
In Robert Bolt's play about Thomas More, A Man for aU Seasons,
Thomas says:
When a man takes an oath, Meg, he's holding his own self in his
own hands. Like water. (He cups his hands.) And if he opens his
fingers then- he needn't hope to find himself again. (Act Two)
So these are my two arguments - I don't think they are preachments - against outright intended lying. Telling such lies prevents
intimacy and wrecks self-formation.
There are plenty of authors who disagree with me in both directions.
Kant, whom you will read in your junior year, will condemn every kind
of lie, from the whitest social lie to the heroic lie told to protect an
innocent life. For lying, he says, is "the obliteration of one's dignity as
a human being" ('The Metaphysical Principles ofVirtue, 429). He thinks
so because he thinks that the Will to communicate our thought is part
of what it means to be a person, and thus to misuse speech is to
abrogate our personality, to undo the intention of our own rational
will, which must be to utter truth.
There are, on the other hand, authors who advocate lying like hen.
Machiavelli advises his prince to be like a fox and to deceive when it
is to his interest ('The Prince, Ch. XVIII). Rousseau blithely confesses
that he often lied from embarrassment just to keep the conversation
going. In fact, he does talk a suspicious Jot about lying, in his Reveries
of a Solitary Walker (Fourth Walk), a book we don't read. Nietzsche
inveighs against veracity as the impossibly naive Wish to come clean,
�BRANN
5
to expose oneself, and he praises the bracing tonic of a falseness
perpetrated without guilt (The Will to Power, 377 -78).
For my part, I am not entirely persuaded by Kant's absolutism and
more than a little repelled by the others' equivocations.
There is, happily, an author who seems to me to speak sweet
reason, and that is Thomas Aquinas, who treats of lying in a book of
which you will read parts next year, the Swnma Theologica (II, 2, ques.
110, art. 4 ff.). He gives various useful classifications of lies and
concludes that not ail lies are mortal sins, sins that ental! damnation.
Lies that injure God and your neighbor are mortal, but lies told with
no intention contrary to charity, are not. This judgment leaves room
for white lies and seems to me pretty good for practical purposes.
(Practical lying is treated by Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public
and Private Life [1978[.)
But it was not really my purpose to talk about the practice of lying,
either whether to do it or how to go about it. What! want us to consider
is the theory of!ying: What are the conditions of human nature and
the world that make lying possible?
It seems to me that the inquiry Into telling lies is particularly
appropriate to a school devoted to the truth. You will discover in the
next four years that the most convenient access to the house of truth
is often through the back door. The assumption in the back-door
approach is that truth precedes falsity, that it is the original positive.
Our language seems to imply the priority of truth, since we speak of
untruths but not of unlies or unerrors. Yet, your reading will often
take the back-to-frontway: In Homer and Tolstoy, War precedes Peace.
In Dante and Milton, Hell comes before Heaven, and Satan, the lord
of lies, comes before God, the fountain of truth. In Plato, error
explicates knowledge. And In Aristotle, art elucidates nature.
Before I proceed to lies, I want to pause a moment to reinforce the
claim that in this school we seek truth. Of course that is not the only,
or even the first, Interest we have. We also acquire skills and learn
arguments and even gather some facts. But we do have a remarkable
hypothesis. We ask ourselves and each other: "Is what I am reading
true? Should I let it enter my life or must I fend it off?" Here are two
special conditions that support our search for truth. One is that we
are not ashamed to be discovered in error. When I say ''we," I mean
we - tutors along with students. We go so far as to regard the
recognition of ignorance in ourselves as a high achievement. The other
condition is that we admit no institutional truth, no authoritative
dogma. If we had the truth, we would not need to inquire about it.
�6
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
This hypothesis of ours is peculiar and hard to defend. At most
academic Institutions the professors deny It and take precautions
against it; they bracket the question of truth and set it aside. They
have good reasons: They think many old books by now have historical
Interest only, treating by-gone problems and providing "Irrelevant"
answers. They think it is a sort of Intellectual tactlessness to get too
close to students' lives In the classroom, and they distrust the
authority such Inquiries, might give the professor who directs them.
They think there Is no fried public meaning In texts, that the meaning
Is construed anew by each reador, and often they also think that a
question after the truth Is In principle nonsense, because truth Is a
private or senseless notion.
All of you will be corning to grips with some of these notions right
in the seminar. For example, you will be tempted to say that a
proposition is "true for me," if not for another, and then you will have
to consider whether the word "true" can be used In that way. Meanwhile we will ask you to act provisionally on our hypothesis that truth
may be pursued, to be shamelessly open to the pursuit, to trust your
tutors as fellow learners, to work at discovering the meaning of a book,
and to treat authors as fellow human beings who raise questions you
can care about. In short, we will ask you to engage In what Francis
Bacon calls "the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making and wooing
oflt" ("OfTruth'1.
By way of beginning the inquiry Into telling lies as a prelude to
searching for truth, I want to add a classification of lies to those given
by Thomas Aquinas: Some lies are subjective, others are objective.
The subjective lie is the one Kant defines and proscribes so absolutely: willful, intentional falsehood. Your straight basic liars intend
to tell lies and know they are doing it. But there is also the objective
lie, an unintentional falsehood, a failed willingness to tell the truth.
Being willing to tell the truth but failing at It is usually called being in
error. At this point I might be accused of the rhetorical trick of
metonymy, a figure of speech In which the speaker confuses species
and genus. For here the genus seems to be the False and the species
seem to be the Ue and the Error. An error Is not really a kind of lie,
but one of two parallel species of the False, the Unwitting and the
Witting Falsehood. Errors are all the unintended misses of targeted
truth: mistakes, rnls-speakings, misjudgments, rnlsperceptions.
Now there will be a man, the guardian angel or perhaps the goblin
of your first year, Socrates, who will claim that Ignorance, and
therefore error, is the genuine or "true lie" in the soul (RepubUc 382b).
He is helped in saying so by the fact that in Greek the word for error
�BRANN
7
and lie is the same. It Is pseudos, which you know, for instance, in
the word pseud-onym, a false name. But he also really does mean to
identity lie and error, and his thinking is roughly like this: He will try
to persuade you that effective virtue is a kind of knowledge. If he is
right. then it is at least likely that ignorance Is a kind of vice, and that
the particular ignorance manifested In error is not far from the vice of
lying. After having studied some logic in the sophomore year you will
be able to show diagrammatically that these consequences are not
logical entallments butjust thought-possibilities.
If you find reason to accept them, then there is no truly unwilling
falsehood; our errors become our responsibilities, and we are charged
with exorcising the unwitting lie in the soul. This Ignorant lie Is what
I call the objective lie.
Socrates has something to say not only about the untold lie hidden
in the soul but also about the outward telling oflies. There is a dialogue
we don't read, called the Lesser Hippias, so called because it is the
shorter of two dialogues featuring a sophist called Hlppias. Sophists
figure in many of the Platonic dialogues, above all In the dialogues
called 'Theaetetus and Sophist, In which Plato deals respectively with
error and the possibility oflying. I can tell you that no book has affected
me more than the Sophist.
A sophist is the most fascinating creature In the world, and Plato
Is never through with htm. The sophist has a name that begins with
the word for "wise," sophos, and ends In -ist, a suffix that denotes an
Imitator and an operator. For Plato ordinary sophists are wise guys,
smart and dumb at once, by profession evasive, tricky, and deceitful,
though sometimes in person endearingly naive. The sophist extraordinaire Is Socrates himself, a canny wise man, whose mode is Irony,
a wily sort of self-deprecation that Aristotle does not hesitate to classit'y
among the lying deviations from truth (Nicomn.cheanEthics II, vii, 12).
Now In the dialogue Socrates carries on with Hippias, two characters that will soon be very familiar to you come on the scene: Achilles
and Odysseus. Hlppias, who can quote Homer, cites passages to show
that Achilles is a true and simple fellow, who tells Odysseus that he
hates lies worse than hell (IUadiX, 312). Odysseus, on the other hand,
Is a habitual teller of lies. The two men differ as truth-teller differs
from liar. Now comes Socrates to prove that Achilles sometimes tells
lies. For example, he informs Odysseus that he will leave Troy so that
"on the third day he would come to fertile Phthia," his home - and
yet he makes no move at all to go. Hlppias objects that Achilles tells
untruths unwittingly, while Odysseus lies by design. Socrates then
tricks Hlpplas into admitting that it is the person with the more
�'!HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
8
capable soul, the one who knows exactly what he Is doing, who Is best,
and that therefore the voluntary liar Is better than the unwitting teller
of falsehoods. The claim that the true lie Is a kind of guilty Ignorance
Is here complemented by the not altogether playful assertion that the
truer and more genutoe person Is the liar who knows the truth and
determines not to utter it. Athena, the goddess of wisdom, agrees with
Socrates' estimation of Odysseus, for she declares her love and loyalty
to him as a cunntog knave and a witting liar (Odyssey XIII, 287 ff.).
Not only, I conclude, i~ the silent lie In the soul to be held against
us as a weakness because it betokens a culpable Ignorance, but the
utterance of a lie confirms our strength, because It presupposes
knowledge of truth. As Nietzsche puts It: 'The recognition of reality...
has been greatest exactly among liars" (Will to Power 378). More
generally, anyone who grants the possibility of!ytog reveals a commitment to the existence of truth.
With subjective and objective lies established, let me now list the
rubrics of conditions that make the telling of a lie possible. I will read
them off before explaining them:
·
I. Will
II. Knowledge
III. Negation
N . Necessity
V. Freedom
I. First, then, for a lie to be told there has to be the will. This Is the
main condition for the pure subjective lie. Perhaps will Is too strong a
word, since much lie-telling results not so much from strong choice
as from a weak willingness. In the lingo of this decade: We give
ourselves permission. Sometimes lytog Is even a mere default position
of the will. But one way or another the capacity for choice, for letting
the words escape from the barrier of our teeth, is involved. What the
human willis, and how the will comes not to will, are a long story for
another night.
Of course, as I have said, the exterior has to cooperate: The body
has to be opaque and the world obtuse. If every lie caused our noses
to grow proportionately, or If a spade when falsely called a shovel
protested loudly, we would In time lose the will to lie.
II. Second, for a lie to be told there has to be, as I have Intimated,
knowledge. As Socrates shows, a liar has to know the truth, all sorts
of truth. but particularly the truth about words. Otherwise the uttered
lie may be a false lie, an unwitting truth. uttering unwitting truth Is
just what happens to Achilies, when he says that on the third day he
will come to Phthia but stays In Troy. He does not know the truth of
the name of his all-too-attainable home. The knowledge of such truth
�BRANN
9
is called "etymology," and etymos Is a Greek term for word-truth.
Socrates has such knowledge. For In prison two nights before his
execution he dreams that a beautiful woman quotes Achilles' words
to him (Crito44b), and he clearly knows what "coming to Phthia" must
mean. It means death, for Phthia means "Land of the Dead," from the
verb phthinein, to destroy (H. Frisk, Griechisches Etymologtsches
Woerterbuch II, 1015).
You have to know both what is the case and what you are saying
to tell a proper lie. They say there are no atheists In the foxholes of
war, and there are surely few relativists among the true tellers oflles.
Consequently, as I have said, this condition for lying Is an odd cause
for cheer: Every telling of a lie Is a reaffirmation of the possibility of
truth.
III. The third and central of my five conditions for telling lies Is a
human capacity, which Is an Incapacity as well. I will call it the power
of blind negation.
In the dialogue the Sophist that I mentioned before, the main
speaker (not Socrates) says:
To believe or to say the thlngs that are not~ that Is, it seems, the
lie arising in the mind and in words. (260c)
More than two millennia later Captain Gulliver Is, in the course of
his travels, set ashore by his crew of mutineers in a land governed by
noble horses who call themselves Houyhnhnms. The land also harbors
some savage, repulsive two-legged ape-like creatures, theYahoos, with
whom the horses identifY Gulliver, calling him their "gentle Yahoo."
Gulliver tries to give his equine master an account of the mores of the
European Yahoos, but the noble horse Is hard put t<i comprehend the
Yahoo custom of telling lies, which is, Gulliver notes, "so perfectly
understood, and so universally practiced among humari creatures."
The noble horse calls it "saying the thing which is not," to him a most
self-defeating use of speech.
By this testimony, we may begin to define lying as saying the thing
which is not. So, of course, Is speaking in error, as Socrates had
already Intimated In the dialogue on error that precedes the Sophist,
the Titeaetehts (199d; see also Aristotle, Metaphysics 10llb27.)
In fact, in logic the two falsehoods are indistinguishable. For logic
abstracts from what Is called the pragmatic aspect of speech, the
internal intention and the social use. I might put it this way. In the
full human context, lies have something Infernal about them; they are
under Satan, the prince of lies and of denial. In the bright and
weightless realm oflogic, denial is a mere squiggle or "curl"('-')-just
a symbolic operator. It Is defined by a table of so-called truth-values.
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TiiE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
("Value" In logic as In life denotes an arbitrary as opposed to an
intrinsic worib.) If a proposition, little p, is assigned !be truib-value
T, then squiggle-p (·-vp) is F, false, and conversely. T and Fare mere
symbols; T has no prtmacy over F and imparts no particular significance to a proposition. (While It is !be case !bat logicians ibink about
what truib is, they do not feel equally obligated to ibink about what
is true, !bough it may be finally tmpossible to separate the iwo
questions.)
Now in real life people do not talk "propositionally"very often, except
in courts of law, under cross-examination: "Is it or is It not the case
!bat your mother told you someibing significant? Just answer yes or
no, please." In ordinary speech !be negative does not stand outside an
Impregnable proposition but Invades it and is deeply implicated in it.
Traditional logic does In fact recognize iwo additional possibilities for
the position of !be negation. Textbooks on logic seem quite unamazed
by these possibilities, which !bey bliibely declare to be equivalent (e.g.
I. M. Cop!, Introduction to Logic, p. 223), though iboughtfullogiclans
have had ibeir preferences. In what follows, S stands for the subject,
capital P for !be predicate of a proposition. We can say:
l. S (is not) P. Here !be proposition itself. internally, is said to have
the "quality" of being negative or positive: Achilles is-not a liar. Some
auibors maintain that ibis form alone Is correct because logical quality
belongs strictly to the copula connecting !be subject and !be predicate
(Marltaln, FormoiLogic, p. 110). I ibink that view is too restrictive.
2. S is (not P). Whether !be speaker Is telling !be truth or a lie, this
form posits a "!bing !bat is not": Achilles is a non-liar. It therefore
supports the doctrine of lies adopted by the Sophist and the
Houybnhnms.
3. Not (S is P), i.e . .v p. The negative is outside the proposition: It
is not !be case !bat Achilles is a liar. This is how the modern logic
called propositional places !be negative, !bough !be !bought goes back
to !be Stoics and to Abelard (W. and M. Kneale, The Development of
Logic, p. 210). Here the whole proposition is externally negated.
Thereallifedifferencesamongibethreeformsareremarkablewhen
!be logical bones are fleshed out wiib meaning. For while the negative
!bat has got Inside !be sentence wreaks havoc ibere wiib meaning,
!be denial of !be whole proposition leaves it intact, as putting a
negative sign before a number leaves It Its absolute value. Look at the
example of the truibful Achilles, !be unwitting liar.
Early on, In !be first book of !be Iliad (352). we see him wiibdrawn
from his friends, weeping on !be shore and calling his mother.
"Moiber," he says, addressing her plainly and Intimately; "Moiber, you
�BRANN
ll
bore me to be short-lived"; the Greek word is minnnthindos- minutelived. The son states it, and the mother confirms it: Achilles will die
soon. Now listen to a later episode. In the ninth book (410) Achilles
tells Odysseus, who has come to talk him into returning to the battle,
that his mother - she is now grandly "the goddess, silver-footed
Thetis"- has said that he has a choice of two fates. He can go home
and forego fame or stay and die soon gloriously. Unless mother and
son have been talking behind our backs, Achilles is engaging in sheer
hopeful invention, attributing it to his divine mother. And fmally, in a
still later passage in the sixteenth book (51) he answers the concerned
and suspecting question of his friend Patroclus, whether his mother
had told him something from Zeus: "Neither do 1 care about any oracle
that I know nor has my mistress mother [as he now calls her formally
and coolly] told me anything from Zeus." This answer betokens what
we like to call "going into full denial." Note the progressluenegation of
the truth. At first Achilles admits the hard fact: I and my mother both
know 1 shall die young. The second version is: My mother has told me
that! have a choice of fates. Here Achilles begins to say "the thing that
is not": SIs not-P. For he does not deny that his mother has been in
communication with him, but he undoes and denies her message. And
third he says: It is not the case that my mother has told me a thing.
Now he is denying the whole proposition: not (S is P). This is not
altering the message and saying the thing that is not. This is a more
radical lie, that of denying blindly that anything whatever has been
said. Such is the progress and the pathos of Achilles' peculiarly telling
lies, lies that reveal the young warrior's fear of facing death.
Let me step back for a moment. It seems to me that we can think
more than we can say. The papers you write this year will probably
demonstrate that fact. We can also say more than we think. Some of
your colleagues in seminar will seem to you to give examples of that
fact. Moreover, while the world contains more things than we can
enumerate, it is also true that we can say what corresponds to no
thought and no thing. We can speak without meaning. The word can
become footloose.
One good example of a word rattling around by itself is the
pseudo-name by which Odysseus introduces himself to the Cyclops,
No-One (Outis, IX, 364-412). The poor monster literally does not know
what he is saying when,· having been brutally blinded by Odysseus,
he calls on his neighbors for help. Who has hurt you, they ask, and
he answers "No One." Nor do they know what they are saying when
they go off shouting something to the effect: "Well, if no one has hurt
you, you must be sick. Go see a doctor." For in conditional contexts
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the form otitis turns Into me tis, which means again "No one," but it
also sounds like metis, which means "cunning, craftiness": "Cunning
has done you in, go see a doctor" - that Is what the Cyclopean
neighbors truly but unwittingly say.
But particularly to my point are the words no and not and the
prefixes Wl and non. The first philosopher, Parmenides, said that
"neither could you know that which Is not (for it is impossible), nor
could you say It" (Diels Fragment 2). I think he holds too nobly simple
a view of speech. I agree that It Is not possible to think what Is not.
The intellect is Incapable of the p.ure negative. When it tries to think
not or non or unIt always finds Itself attending to something different
or other rather than to nothing. For example, Un-rest is not No Rest
but Motion, and Non-being Is not Nothing but something Different or
Other. I think that In perception too there is never nothing but only
difference. Even the Imagination cannot practice negation effectively.
For an Image of the Imagination may be nullified, as a stamp is
canceled so that Its value Is gone- yet its face, though smudged, Is
not obliterated. In the imagination and In visual thinking- which is
what we mostly do- negated being nearly always has a positive look.
Denial produces a murky or perhaps a monstrous shape, but never a
nonentity.
In speech alone can we say the negative and for a moment really
mean nothing. It is, I think, this potent Incapacity that makes lying
possible. So let me sketch out for you how telling lies seems to me to
come about as a product of negating speech and defective will.
There is a crucial moment- for Achilles it comes last, but often it
is first- when we say a blind and ignoble no to the truth, when we
will to tell the lie. The proposition that we know to be true remains
untouched but we determine In our hearts to reject it, ignorantly and
uncircumstantially: "Not (SIs P)." The hero decides to mamtain: "It is
not the case, Patroclus, that my mother confirmed my pending death"
-without thought for the consequence to the Interior of the sentence.
We say no and think nothing constructive, only "I shall not tell the
truth whatever follows." Our two strange negative capacities for
exercising an Infirm will and for uttering an unmeaning word come
briefly but momentously together.
In the second and third moment the negation Invades the sentence
and begins to generate meaning. Perhaps it first attaches itself to the
copula so as to disjoin subject from predicate: Achilles and his death
are not to be conjoined In speech. But eventually the negation ends
up attacking the predicate Itself; S Is not-P: My mother told me not
what you all think, Odysseus, but something else, that my death is
�BRANN
13
still my choice. That "not" when stuck to the predicate no longer
betokens pure blinding negative non-truth, but signals an alternative
to the truth, a positive invention; the lie goes out of control and
becomes baroque. Here cross the activities of telling lies and telling
tales. Both tell the thing that is not.
Let me conclude this section on lies and negating language by
reminding us that except for the willing, all I said holds also for error:
Lies differ from errors only in beginning wilfully and then sliding out
of control, while errors begin inadvertently and then settle in. I cannot
resist adding that telling lies is also close in form to asking questions.
A lie is in fact a kind of inverse question. For a question is a directed
receptivity, a shaped expectation of a truth as yet unknown. And a lie
is a directed rejection, a determined negation, of a truth already
known. Since we are a school for questioning, lies, the diametric
opposite of questions, would seem to be, on occasion, a proper
preoccupation for us.
N. I would phrase the fourth condition of lytng, necessity, in this
way: We can lie because we must lie. I am thinking not ofthe subjective
pseudo-necessity of lying from fear or need, but of unavoidable
objective lytng. If human speech is to be efficacious it must accommodate itself to a world about which it is, as I have already intimated,
simply not possible to speak with total truth.
Let me quote an author of the junior year with whom I maintain a
-necessarily one-sided but cordial-friendship, Jane Austen. She
says:
Seldom, vecy seldom does complete truth belong to any humao
disclosure; seldom cao it happen that something is not a little
disguised or a little mistaken. (Erruna, Ch. 49)
It is an ever-rewarded effort to try to tell the truth, but to tell the
whole truth is beyond our cognitive abilities and to tell nothing but
the truth is outside of our linguistic equipment. Anyone made to swear
to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is being
asked to stretch it.
We cannot utter exactly what It is we think because the qualil'ying
internal histocy behind evecy thought is enormous. It cannot be put
in finite words. Similarly we cannot tell all that we perceive, because
the world's space Is indefinitely extended and infinitesimally detailed,
and In addition every spatial point has behind it an infinite history in
time.
The case is not entirely hopeless and offers no excuse for not trying.
Our cognitive constitution, our capacity for speech, and the external
world all do seem to be to some degree geared to each other. OL
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
attention highlights parts of the world that seem to be meaningful
wholes. The parts of speech seem to fit the behavior of the world, and
the words oflanguage seem to be able to collect items scattered widely
In space. Sometimes many things can be said "In a word." The
constitutional limitation on our truth-telling, our necessary objective
lying, is therefore also an incitement to subjective truthfulness, to the
effort to do what we can with such telltog speech as we have.
V. There Is, finally, fl fifth condition, freedom, the condition for
telling true lies of a marvelous sort. Here Is an activity in which the
reckless will, the footloose word, and the feckless world Intersect. This
activity produces the freely willed lie called fiction (feigning wonderful
worlds in words) or poetry (making splendid fabrics out of words).
The notion that fiction and poetry are a kind of lie is attributed to
Socrates, and you will hear him say so when you read the dialogue
called the Republic (Bk. II). Yet it was not a philosopher who first
published this slander, but a poet, Hesiod, Homer's younger rival, for
whom we have no time in the program. He takes seriously what Homer
takes lightly: the aboriginal birth of the gods and the daily work of
men. This peasants' Homer tells how the Muses spoke to him, a
shepherd of the wilderness, and said:
We know how to tell many lies that are similar to true words, and
agato, when we wish, we can utter true things. ('Theogony 27-28)
These are wonderful lines because they introduce a distinction into
the truths that are opposed to lies. There are what I will call worldtruths, alethea, and there are word-truths, etyma, the term I mentioned before, the one that goes into the word etymology. Hesiod's
Muses tell lies that are stmilar to true words. These are the free lies I
am talking about: words freely chosen to tell lies that are true to the
world of words. How Is it possible that such liberated lies should
acquire the force of a peculiar and special truth? The answer is to a
strange capacity we share with the world, the power of entertatotog
certato half-existences called images. But like the will, the tmagination
Is a mystery for another night.
I am nearing the end, and your turn to express your judgments of
my lecture tn your questions for me Is about to come. Let me, on the
way out, return once more to the second hero of this lecture, Odysseus.
When he is about to become the teller and poet of his own travels, he
Introduces and reveals himself in this fashion to the Phaeacians, who
will be the first folk to hear his odyssey:
I am Odysseus Laertides; I am the preoccupation of mankind for all
my deceits ... But I dwell in lucid (eudeie[os) Ithaca (IX, 19-21).
�BRANN
15
Telling false lies and telling true lies, telling lies from necessity and
for pleasure, Odysseus attains the sunlit clarity of the home he loves.
Not, I think, the worst way to home In on truth!
But there is a better way still, Socrates' way: the unwillingness to
tolerate the unwitting, untold lie In the soul, and the wit and wisdom
to transmute the unavoidable lying of any utterance li:tto the telling
lies that reveal truth.
�16
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�A Biological Theme
in Aristotle's Ethics
I
John White
Before we look at Aristotle's discussion of virtue- before we can look
at any discussion of virtue - we have to look at an inquiry about
virtue. The first inquiry about virtue begins this way:
Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue can be taught, or is it
acquired by practice, not teaching? Or if neither by practice nor by
learning, does it come to mankind by nature or in some other way?
The dialogue Meno begins with that question. Socrates never
answers it. Socrates doesn't even take the question seriously. The
content of the question is serious, but beneath the words is an attitude
which is not serious. Meno's attitude is not the openness of seeking,
but is in fact the opposite: "answering" and the closedness of habit.
By ignoring Meno's question, Socrates shows that he has no respect
for questions as such. When Meno asks Socrates a question (75d),
Socrates says that there are two ways to respond. If he thought the
question was argumentative, he would say "Prove me wrong." If he
thought the question was genuine, he would try to answer it. Socrates
begins to make us self-conscious, aware of the attitudes that underlie
our questions.
Socrates also makes us self-conscious and critical about answers.
Meno (76d-e) likes the definition of color in terms of "effluences" and
"pores" (cf. Phaedo96e). But Meno here submits to a style of answering
(a "tragic style," 76e) because he is used to the words; he has no
insight. The occasion of this superficiality in Meno is Gorgias and his
ability to answer questions. Gorgias has given Meno a habit of
answering "fearlessly and magnificently'' because Gorgias lets anyone
ask him questions, and he is never at a loss. It has been a long time
since anyone asked him anything new (Gorgias 448a). Because of this
habit, Meno's opening question is not serious as a question.
We can see naivete and lack of seriousness in the attitude behind
Meno's question when we learn that he is not prepared for Socrates'
answer, "1 don't know." Meno is baffled by it. He cannot take it
John White is a Tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. This lecture was first given
at the College in Santa Fe, in Februruy, 1990.
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
seriously because he cannot take seriously the ignorance that seeking
implies. Attitudes collide in this dialogue (and in Gorgias too). There
is no disagreement about substance between Socrates and Meno.
What is at stake in the collision is seriousness. Which is more serious:
answering or asking?
In this struggle between question and answer, Meno will "lose." He
loses not because he is wrong but because the attitude behind his
questions makes him unprepared for what now happens, after
Socrates' admission oflgnorance. When Socrates said "I don't know,"
Meno thought that Socrates was admitting failure. But Socrates'
ignorance was for himself the occasion to ask a question. Meno has
never heard a question like the one Socrates now asks and he does
not know what to do with it. The question Socrates asks, "What is
virtue?" is Socrates' own discovery, and it makes him "like nothing in
the ancient or modem world" (Symposium). He discovers the question
"What is?"
"What is?" is a universal question and can be asked about anything
(Meno74b). But even though the question can apply to anything, it is
not a success when we ask it about a technical matter, seeking the
answer of an expert. Ignorance about technical things is ordinary. But
If the question is asked about what we think we already know,
something we know just by living in the human world, then the
question has enormous power. For example, I think I knowwhat virtue
is, and Socrates must be using trickery. But If I know, why don't I
know that I know? Why am I not even more knowledgeable about my
own possession of knowledge than I am about its content? And If
Socrates is right and I don't knowwhat virtue is, something even worse
and more embarrassing has happened: I don't know that I don't know.
My real ignorance is not about virtue; my ignorance is about my own
self and what I know. The absence of that knowledge is now painfully
present to me.
Socrates completes this riddle of self-knowledge with the slave boy.
When the slave boy thinks he knows, Socrates shows him that he
doesn't; when the slave boy thinks he doesn't know, Socrates shows
him that he does. Whether or not I know what virtue is, I am ignorant
about myself. We become self-conscious and aware of ourselves in a
new and baffling way. Socrates tells a myth of reminiscence (8lb;
Phaedo 73a ff.) along with the slave-boy play. The myth says that the
soul is immortal. Originally it knew all things, but it has forgotten
them. Learning Is recollecting. Whether the myth is true or false,
whether learning turns out to be teaching or recollecting, I have
learned things- haven't I?- so why don't I know the answer to this
�WHITE
19
question about learning? Whether the myth is true or false "objectively," itis still true. The myth turns knowledge and ignorance upside
down.
Meno sees the slave-boy play and agrees that an inquiry about
virtue is possible. But then he returns to his opening question (How
does virtue come to us?). The "forgetting" part of the myth is no longer
mythical. Maybe the slave-boy episode "proves" recollecting; maybe
not. But forgetting is right there in front of us. Forgetting is deeper
and truer than remembering; it is the unknown basis of human
self-knowledge. Even if someone "proves objectively" that learning is
not recollecting, the shock of recognition we feel at forgetfulness ignorance not about things but about ourselves - would not be
overcome. No "objective" proof or knowledge can deal with this problem. To be human is to be forgetful.
The changes brought about by Socrates' question and the myth
cannot be reversed or ignored. There is no return to the situation
before this question was asked. For example, although Meno (or Polus
or Callic!es) may eventually discover arguments to prove the truth of
his belief about virtue or justice, his belief would no longer be a belief
but the conclusion of an argument. After his proof he might think that
he is back where he was before Socrates intruded, since only the form
of his belief has changed while the content has not. But mere change
of form brings other changes with it, because the change in form is a
change in one's self-understanding. Knowledge goes inside and invades the privacy of a person. Since people's beliefs are disappearing
as beliefs, Socrates' question makes people fear that they are "disappearing" somehow. For example, when Polus talks to Socrates in the
Gorgias, what he discovers about himself is not just that Socrates is
somehow stronger than he is, but that Polus is unknown to Polus.
Polus has within himself beliefs that are different from what he thinks
he believes. Polus discovers that he is unknown to himself, and the
person he believed himself to be begins to disappear.
One becomes aware of one's self as !tis by itself, as "numb in tongue
and soul" (SOb). One's ordinary"social" or "political" self fades into the
background. Naivete and worldliness begin to change places. Now we
are not in the position to judge the relative merit of answers. The
question has somehow begun to "measure" us or do something to us.
Asking is more important and serious than answering; what looked
like a form of activity is a form of passivity. Being numb is waking up.
Ignorance is interesting and deep; silence is eloquent.
Socrates' question reveals naivete or superficiality in people, rather
than mere mistakes. But being naive is worse than being wrong in
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Athens (and in freshman seminar, as most of us discover to our
discomfort; we have opinions that aren't even good enough to be
wrong). We are shown to be frivolous and superficial because we are
full of "opinions" In an uncritical, naive way. We weren't aware that
we could understand all our opinions as "answers to questions." We
are shown something that is "prior" to our opinions: Since an opinion
is an answer, surely the question is prior? Our opinions are seen to
be "answers" to questions that we are no longer aware of having been
asked. We have forgotten how these opinions became part of us. We
have forgotten a state of ourselves prior to "answers" and opinions, a
pre-existent state behind the self we are aware of. Our naive selfawareness Is an astounding kind of forgetting. We have become what
we are, in our ordinary and everyday understanding of human life and
human beings, by this forgetting. Only forgetfulness makes us appear
transparent to ourselves, whereas a few minutes conversation with
Socrates might tum all this upside down. The "what is" question rules
all of this.
The "what is" question Is prior to any discussion because It reveals
"presuppositions" that underlie discussion. There can be no discussion without this new kind of Inquiry. Moreover, besides being prior
to any discussion about anything, the ''what is" question appears to
be the question- a question that must not only be asked first, it must
also be answered before any other questions can even be asked.
Answers to other questions presuppose an answer to this question.
Other questions, Insofar as they are questions, presuppose this
question.
So, on the one hand, how could this question conceal anything?
"What" could be hidden by asking "what Is"? Nothing that Is a "what"
could be concealed by this question. Thatis, nothing that can be asked
about can be hidden by the question. And on the other hand, how
could there be any other question that does not conceal this question
within Itself simply by being a question? That Is, how could there be
a question that has no ''what," that Is not "about" anything? This
question Is the question. So, In fact, actually and beneath the surface,
this question Is the only question one hears, If one listens seriously to
questions as questions.
I began with Meno because It is presentln the NichomacheanEthics
in many ways - questions from Meno are sometimes repeated,
sometimes even parodied. The most obvious difference between the
attitudes of the two books Is that Aristotle's Ethics shows respect for
"answers" as such (e.g., he says the young can gain from listening to the
opinions of elders even when they can't argue for them or explain them).
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If Aristotle wishes to praise habit- even to go so far as to talk of
something like a "habit of thinking" (Meta. 993b 15) -we want to be
sure that he understands Socrates' question. We have to acknowledge
the force of Socrates' question. There is no return to the uncritical
acceptance of habit, unless one can believe in self-conscious naivete.
Socrates has discovered the question and a new, disorienting seriousness. The Platonic dialogues, by their very form, enshrine questions
and the seriousness of an unappeasable longing.
On the other hand, Aristotle seems to respect the form of an answer.
Aristotle certainly appears as if he has all the answers. And if he
doesn't have the answer, or tf he usually has two or three possible
answers, at least the form of seriousness that underlies "answering"
might come to light. Aristotle is in pari a return to Gorgias, in style
and content.
But if Aristotle is going to do anything "new" - and a return to a
prior position is new if the return is not naive and uncritical- he has
to show how inquiry has presuppositions that could not be discovered
by asking "what is." Inquiry must have presuppositions that cannot
be discovered by asking questions. If an inquiry and the "what is"
question can discover all presuppositions (even their own), then
inquiry can always be deepened and it has no limits. Aristotle has to
show that there are presuppositions that are concealed by asking this
question. He will do so.
Presuppositions
When we attend to the content of what we are saying, we assume
things on the level of "It goes without saying," things obviously true
but not explicitly stated. We do not say all that we mean. We can say
all that we mean only by attending to the form of what we say. A
particular form of saying, "argument" or "proof," is a standard by
means of which these hidden steps come to light as gaps. The search
for presuppositions looks for logical steps that have been skipped. And
the "obvious but hidden things, " things at the edges or borders of our
attention, once discovered and explicitly stated, are no longer "obviously true" [and true because obvious). They cannot be taken for
granted; they have to be argued for. Once a belief has been questioned,
the question takes root. Beliefs can never again "go without saying"
(RepubUc539b-c). And when these beliefs have been stated and argued
over, It doesn't matter if the argument Is successful or not. If you can
prove the belief, the belief is no longer held as a belief but as a
conclusion; if you can't prove the belief, it remains suspended in the
field of explicit attention. You might then decide to call it an axiom or
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
postulate, but these names mean only "the assumed part of a system
of proofs." The form of the belief has changed; Its form Is now
determined by its role in a system of proofs.
TWs kind of presupposition, an unexpressed or hidden content, is
brought to light by a ''what is" question and the reflection it Involves.
The presuppositions we discover are things necessary if we want to
prove something, If we want to be able to think it rather than feel it or
sense it or point to it. This search turns all beliefs into propositions
- conclusions or axioms of a system of arguments.
Within any proof system, there can be many proofs of the same
theorem; no proof is unique. (Even if there Is only one proof, Its
attachment to the theorem Is not unique.) A proof can show only the
truth of a proposition about an object, Its possibility or Its thinkability.
Logical presuppositions reveal how the truth of a proposition Is
possible. In the search for presuppositions we might uncover the
"being" of something in the sense of "being-true." But odd as this
sounds, this kind of being and this kind of inquhy are not what we
need.
To put the claim In Its boldest form: the search for logical presuppositions assumes that we are looking for the truth. But we are not
lookingforthe truth. Philosophy as the search for truth Is not what we
need. Aristotle says:
As for being in the sense of being true ... falsity and truth are not in
things, but in thought- for example, it Is not the good by itself that
Is true, nor the bad by Itself that is false. As for simple things and
that whatness of them, not even in thought Is there truth and falsity
of them... We must leave aside being in the sense of being true ... ;
it does not make clear any nature of being as existing outside.
(Metaphysics 1028a2)
Odd as it may sound, the kind oflnqulry that seeks the truth cannot
uncover the light kind of presupposition. There Is another group of
presuppositions -not of the "truth" or "possibility" of an object, but
presuppositions oflts actuality. Thatls, what things are presupposed
If something Is to be perceived as well as thought, to be "meant" by
speech/thinking as well as to be "present" to perception (to be present
as "particular" for perception as well as "universal" for thought or
speech-De Anima 417b20)? To be a tode tt. a ''this-there"? (See
Husser!, Ideas #14.) What are the presuppositions if something Is to
"be there" rather than "be true"?
If we want to search for "a nature of being as existing outside," we
need a new understanding of whatness and a new way to think it.
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Thinking about actuality Is different than thinking about possibility,
even though the actuality of something does not differ from Its
possibility in any determinate way (i.e .• a determinate difference is a
something, a "what"). For Aristotle, the difference in the kinds of
thinking appears In the difference between mathematics and physics.
Knowledge In physics, to be actual knowledge of the actual, has to
grasp the difference between actuality and potentiality.
We need to compare IJlathematical and physical thinking about a
thing. in one sense we are far from the Ethics. But if we tmderstand
the different ways mathematics and physics think of their objects, we
might be able to understand the ethical difference between the old and
the young- the young are good at mathematics and abstractions but
are not good at ethics (also physics and biology - "concretions,"
specifications).
The mathematical way of understanding the being-there of a thing
(tode tt) begins this way:
If the place of each body Is what primarily contains it, it would be
a boundary; so ... the place of each body is Its form or shape, by
which [It] is bounded ... But Insofar as place Is regarded as the
Interval of the magnitude, It would be the matter of a body... , and
this Is what is contained or limited by the form ... Now such are
matter and the indefinite ... (209b2)
If we think about a thing mathematically, we speak of a border or
edge as the limit of the thing. A thing, a "this-there," is "there" within
its borders, Its limits. We understand the spatiality, the being-there,
of a thing as the limit oflts extension, as the "outside of what is Inside"
a thing. Shape is the fundamental idea. For mathematics, the "being
as existing outside" -borders and edges as part of the outside - is
not part of what a thing is. Mathematical objects exist only in their
definitions, their explicit content. The definitions have to be "clear and
distinct" because they are the beginnings of a proof (rather than an
action; Physics 200a24).
But if we think of a thing physically, the place of a thing is neither
its form nor its matter, because they don't exist apart from the thing,
while the place of the thing can exist separately (209b22). So the way
that physics understands a thing's place, the thing In its existence, is
as the "boundary of that which contains" (212a20). For physics, "If a
thing ls somewhere, ... both the thing Itself is something and also
something else is outside of It (209b33). We do not want "clear and
distinct" ideas here. We need ideas with messy edges- a thing and
also something else outside It - In order ·~o make clear "being as
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TIIE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
existing outside." We need ideas that have a "beyond" as part of them.
For physics the place of a thing is not the same as its shape. Now the
boundary of a thing does not belong to it but to its surroundings; it is
the limit as belonging to the outside.
Now "the limit of what contains and what is contained coincide.
Both are limits [the same limit in fact] but not of the same thing. The
one is the form of the thing; the other is the place of the containing
body" (2llbl3). For mathematics the limit belongs to the inside as the
limit of extension, of the non-dynamic occupation of space. But for
physics the limit or border beloJJ.gs to the outside because it is the
outside which contains the motion of the thing. For mathematics, the
border is the "outside ofwhat is inside"; for physics, place is the "inside
of what is outside" a thing, the container of motion, for only then is
location actuaL and physics thinks about things as actualities.
The difference between shape and place, potentiality and actuality,
does not exist for mathematics. Since "no interval exists [between] the
body which is enclosed by the border" and the border (2llb7), there
is no quantitative, mathematical difference between the mathematical
and physical understanding of the being-there. There is nothing for
mathematics to think about. Mathematics can't think about the
difference between itself and physics, so mathematics can't understand itself. (But physics can.) For example, in a tank of water the
cubic foot in the middle has boundaries geometrically, but this
boundary cannot belong to what physically contains the cubic foot,
because the contained and the container are continuous. If the parts
were separate but in contact, as they would be if a cube of ice sat on
a table, the cube would have a place. Aristotle says that the first
example, the water, is potential place; the second is actual place. Place
makes clear these dynamic relations of containment:
The locomotion of physical bodies and simple bodies ... makes it
clear not only that a place is something, but also that it has some
power. For each of these bodies travels to its own place, some of
them up and others down ... Now such directions ... do not exist only
relative to us ... By nature ... each of these [sets of directions] is
distinct; for the up direction Is ...where fire or a light object travels....
as if these directions differed not only In position but In power.
Mathematical objects ... are not In a place, and with respect to
position it is [only] relative to us that they have a right and a left;
so the position of [mathematical objects] has no nature but is only
conceived [by the soul]. (Physics 208b9)
Mathematical objects have right/left, etc.. only by convention,
whereas physical elements have these distinctions "Inside" them-
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selves, as principles of their motion or of their rest: up/down is not
only true about the motion of fire and earth as described from the
outside, it is also true for them on the inside. And in cases of rest, an
ashtray is on the table while a balloon is nnderthe ceiling- a dynamic
relation to what contains it.
There is a further stage to the analysis of the being-there of
something. There is also a sense in which elemental bodies (like
mathematical shapes) have the directions only by convention. Elements such as fire or earth are never fully "there" in their place
because they are at rest by constraint or they are part of a whole. But
for living things the situation is different: "Above and below belong to
all living things, plants as well as animals". Sometimes the difference
is in function only, sometimes in shape as well" (285al5). The study
of actual things, beings, is itself most actual when we look at living
beings and the way in which they are "there":
Above and below, right and left, front and back, are not to be looked
for in all bodies alike, but only in those which, because living
[besouled]. contain within themselves a principle of motion; for in
no part of an inanimate object [without soul] can we trace the
principle of its motion. Some do not move at all, whereas others,
though they move, do not move in every direction alike. Fire, for
instance, moves upward only, earth to the center. It is in relation
to ourselves that we speak of above and below or right and left in
these objects. But in the objects themselves we detect no difference.
[That is, the "body" of fire or earth is mere extension, whose parts
differ only in geometrtc location. The parts of an organic body differ
in function, so the spatial relation of the parts to each other is
imporiant.]
This is a pari of biology, for in living creatures it is obvious that
some have all these features - right and left and so forth - and
others some, whereas plants have only above and below. Each of
the three pairs Is In the nature of a principle. These three-dimensional differences may reasonably be supposed to be possessed by
all reasonably complete [teleios] bodies. Their nature as principles
may be defined with reference to motions ... Growth is from above,
locomotion from the right, the motion which follows sensation
[appetite] from in front (since the meaning of"front"ls that towards
which sensations are directed). (On the Heavens 284bl4-285a26)
"Being as existing outside" is present in a new way: the three
dimensions of space are not merely true about a "complete" organic
body; they are also true for it. A living, sensing body has all three sets
of oppositions always significantly true about its spatial presence
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
wherever it Is- e.g., it can never be "up" nor can it move "up" in the
way fire does because an animal's position Is not indifferent to
right/left, etc., as Is the position of fire. This means that space Is
organized as being "around" the living body (and. thereby space and
place start to become "environment"). In animals, back/front,
right/left, up/down are three sets of spatial opposites related to and
radiating from a "Here," an origin (arche). In an animal, to exist, to
be-there, is to be "Here",(Progress. 707a7).
The new distinction of front/back, which allows all three sets of
oppositions to be actually distinct and which unifies them in a "Here,"
depends on sensation and the way that the animal exists in the world
In order to sense things. The physical presence of an animal, given In
sensation for the one doing the sensing, Is not the relation of "place"
or "a thing and also something else outside," but a new relation that
contains and goes beyond them.
In sensation. the spatial relations are changed, but the change is
subtle. Since "sensation consists In being moved and acted upon" (De
Anirria 416b32), physical presence and contact (having the same
border or limit) Is necessary (touch is the primary sense, 413b9), so
one might think that "place" is sufficient. In fact, in touch the physical
contact and the sensation seem to be the same thing (unlike vision,
where I see things at a distance). While the physical contact in
touching is mutual (my hand Is in the same kind of contact with the
table as the table Is with my hand), the sensation rejects the mutuality
of physical contact: I sense the table and It does not sense me. The
word "external" in the context of "sensation of external objects" (and
the meaning of "being as existing outside") cannot be the kind of
externality that objects have In the Physics, where objects are external
to each other mutually and dynamically in the relation called "place."
The sensed body is external because it Is sensed. In sensation, even
In touch, my body is not present as a body (which it surely is and has
to be for the possibility of sensation). Rather, In sensing the table, my
body "mediates" between me and the table. My body is the transparent
medium of my presence (Parva Naturalia 436b8): "the faculty of
sensation has no actual but only potential existence" (De Anirria
417a2). When I sense something, I do not sense the thing directly
(without my body as a medium), nor do I sense the medium directly
- I do not sense my hand touching the table. When I see something,
my body Is not present as a visible object. My body Is present in vision
as a "point of view." The "Here" of my body is present in sensation as
a perspective; "Here" becomes a "from over Here." I see something from
a perspective (from over Here), and I am aware of this perspective (my
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Here) as one actual out ofmany possible perspectives. The perspective,
the "from over Here," is what makes vision a sensation rather than a
thought. The perspective is the "particularity" of sensation (De Anima
417b20). Sensation senses particulars, but not because particulars
are what Is "really there."The.particulars that are present in sensation
are "the one actuality out of many possibilities"- a One out of Many,
a One against the background of a Many. This "One out of Many" is
present In sensation as th.e perspective, the "from over Here" (existing
outside the "Here," a difference that Is not mere otherness), the "One
actual out of Many possibles."
In addition, when one analyzes the spatial existence of the animal
body, the form of an animal is not "shape" in the mathematical sense,
because organic bodies are not geometric forms, are not an arrangement of surfaces in space to be reduced to an arrangement of elemental
particles (Driesch, Science and Philosophy of the Organism, p.8).
Organic bodies have "non-homogenous parts" such as face or hand or
foot (Parts of Animals 640b20). These parts are united (and distinguished) by their functioning, and they do not exist independently of
the whole. Because these parts are not quantitative parts, an organic
body is not the sum of its parts. Because the parts are unified by their
functioning together with each other, the spatial relation (and distinction) of the parts to each other is essential to what their whole is. The
three spatial dimensions are most clearly present and articulated in
human beings because humans are "most in accordance with nature"
(706al9). 'The principles 'up' and 'front' are in humans mostin accord
with nature and most differentiated." (In four-footed animals, "up" and
"front" are not differentiated. Humans and birds have the differentiation [706a26;706bl2].)
Organic form Is expressed by the functional relations of the parts
to each other reciprocally. But there is also a function for the whole
(Parts 645bl5). Thereby a living body is related to space in a new way.
The being-there of an active animal is not grasped by "place" nor by
the "from over Here" of sensation. The active body is located and
spatially unilled only as "Here" in this new sense, as the origin (arch£)
ofits actions, and the surrounding space has afunctional organization
with respect to the living body; right/left, up/down, front/backthree sets of opposites related to and radiating from a "Here" which,
as a beginning of action, is also a "Now." We live in anticipation of a
future.
Because "form" takes on this new, functional meaning for organic
bodies, functions and motions take on a new significance. Not only is
the organic whole different from its elemental matters and "homage-
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
nous parts" (where the whole is the sum of the parts); the living being
is even opposed to its own matter, its physical nature (and this means
that elemental nature is not "natural" in the ruling sense):
Loss of power is contrary to nature. All instances of loss of power
are contrary to nature, e.g., old age and decay, and the reason for
them is probably that the whole structure of an aniroal is composed
of elements whose proper places are different; none of its parts is
occupying its proper plitce. (On the Heavens 288b5)
Because organic forms are ultimately built from elemental matters
(like fire and earth), they consist of contraries, motions in opposite
dtrections. There is no special "elemental matter" for organic forms,
so their form insofar as it is organic is not a static "shape." Organic
form is an achievement.
Wbat is it that holds frre and earth together [in a living body] when
they tend to move in opposite directions? [Their bodies] will be tom
apart, unless there is something to prevent it... (De Anima 416a5)
Form is not something an animal has so much as it is something
an anhnal does to keep from being tom apart. The animal body
demands effort and action from within for the motions which produce
and sustain it. The adult organic form is produced by growth. Once
grown, the living body is not in a state of rest, because the living body
is always being "tom apart." The state of rest (no growth) is another
set of form-producing motions (DeAnima416blO). Rest involves the
metabolic replacement of cells which age and decay, the healing of
cuts and fighting of disease (259b9). A part lost in a struggle may
regenerate. If regeneration is not possible, the anhnal might compensate for the loss by the functional reorganization of the remaining parts.
The animal cannot save the whole as a sum of parts, but it might be
able to save the whole as a function.
We are in a realm of "ideas with messy edges," where we wish to
see something as well as think it. Mathematical thinking, with its
"clear and distinct" definitions, cannot grasp actual beings, rather
than possibilities, because the distinction between potentiality and
actuality doesn't exist for mathematical thinking. The distinction is
"there" only if we are "there" as the relation of perceiving and speaking.
We should not seek a defioition of everything, but should also perceive
an object by means of an analogy. As that which is awake is to that
which is asleep -let "actuality" sign!Jy the first term of such relations
and "potentiality" signify the second. (Metaphysics 1048a34)
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These beings are "there" if we are there as the relation of perceiving
and speaking. The perception or knowledge of these living beings Is
actual only If we are already "internally related" to the object. This Is
odd language. I will try again.
The actuality of a thing Is different from its possibility (and the
difference Is not a mathematical difference) If the thing is in-between
what Is eternally necessary and what is accidental, chance - most
clearly If the thing Is a living, mortal being. The "in-between" Is
perceived as an in-between thing (living but mortal) only if the knower
Is of the same kind. The knower is internally related to, while also
distinct from, the thing known. This sameness of knower and known
Is a relation deeper than knowing, if knowing is the knowing of
whatness, because this sameness Is not the logical identity of A=A.
This sameness makes the relation of knowing possible as an actuality.
Knowing is now possible as an actual knowing of the actual. Perception
is recognition (Ethics ll39al0). A look at the study ofbiologywill make
this clearer.
A condition for understanding biology, a presupposition whereby
we do not "see" something unless we are internally related to It, where
perception Is recognition, Is indicated by Aristotle in the following line
of thought. There are two kinds of works of nature: those which come
Into being and perish, and those which do not perish. The Imperishable are divine, but we have few opportunities to study them because
there Is little evidence available to our senses. We have better information about mortal things because we live among them. Our knowledge of mortal beings is greater "because they are nearer to us and
more akin to our nature," and that is compensation for the relative
Inferiority of the object. Knowledge about mortal things Is one we get
from the "tnside" as It were, betng mortal ourselves. Knowledge of
mortal beings is not available to someone outside the mortal situation,
to someone who is not "there." The prime mover does not contemplate
the world nor does he know other beings. In his "thinking of thinking,"
animals are not "there" for him.
The more usual pre-conditions for understanding biology come up
in the more ordinary discussions. When people discuss a science of
animal life (paraphrasing and re-arranging Parts 639b20 ff. and
Physics l98b10ff.), they divide into two parties. One group wants to
talk about a creating god or demiurge behind the being of animals.
The other group wants to talk about matter and chance combination.
Biology turns into theology or physics. It looks as if biology must begin
with one of these two presuppositions, for they are the only possible
presuppositions here.
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
But, according to Aristotle, either presupposition makes the actual
subject disappear, Life may be more "thinkable" with either presupposition, and the science of biology may be more understandable as
a science, but neither "life" nor "biological knowledge Is any more
actual. If we look at the world "objectively" and see only the parts that
are Immortal, parts whose mere possibility means actuality, the
eternal actualities of matter or god, we would not be able to see animals
or plants a tall, the living/ dying beings, the beings whose "being-there"
is a set of motions, a function, a doing. We can "see" this in-between
possibility (between necessity ami chance) in all things that grow:
When we say that nourishment is necessruy, we mean "necessary"
in neither of the former modes, but we mean that, without nourishment, no animal can be. This is "conditional necessity" or "hypothetical necessity." (Parts ofAnimals 642a8)
"Hypothetical necessity" -another idea that is unclear and indistinct, that appears to combine opposites. But it does make the
actuality of a living being more understandable.
For example ,look at the rabbit. There is no "transcendental deduction" of a rabbit; lt is not "necessary." A rabbit does not have to be the
way it is: there are many kinds of animal life. A rabbit's kind of life is
conditional or hypothetical; it has to be "given." But, on the other
hand, there is a kind of necessity to the rabbit. If there are going to be
rabbits, they"make sense" in a particular way. For example, !fi try to
"improve" a rabbit by adding a better weapon - by giving it fangs I see that, for the actual possession of such large teeth by a rabbit, I
have to make another change: the jaw has to be larger. If the jaw is
larger, then the neck has to be stronger and heavier. If the neck is
heavier, then the front limbs have to be stronger to support the larger
mass. With a heavier head and neck and front limbs, the rabbit won't
be able to hop; it will need a new way to move. And it needs a new way
to nourish Itself; the rabbit is no longer an efficient eater of grass. If
its nourishment changes, chemical changes will be necessary- a new
set of digestive enzymes, a new Immune system that recognizes the
new parts as "same" rather than "other," and so on. So there is a
necessity that follows the "hypothetical" glvenness of any one function
and animals are eternal "in the manner which is open to them."
Of the things which are, some are eternal and divine, others admit
of being and now-being... Being is better than non-being, and living
than not living. These are the causes on account of which the
generation of animals takes place, because since the nature of a
class of this sort is unable to be eternal, that which comes into being
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is eternal in the manner that is open to it. Now it is impossible for
it to be so numerically, since "the being" of things is to be found in
the particular, and if it really were so, then it would be eternal; it
is, however, open to it to be so specifically [in eidos]. That is why
there is always a class of men, animals and plants. (Generation of
Animals 731 b25)
Animals as a whole are not necessary. Because there are many
species and many ways ofliving, no particular way is necessary. But
there is a necessity in the unity of the parts because of the relation "if
this particular way of eating, then this particular way of walking." All
of these hypothetical statements have attached to them an "in order
to survive." There is no other ground of necessity here. The rabbit is
not "necessary," but this particular group of properties and weapons
and organs "makes sense" under the conditions oflife, if the rabbit is
going to survive, if its own survival is an issue to it. There is no way
to imagine an improved version of an animal. Although animals are
not perfect or divine, somehow they are "at an end." There is no good
for them that is beyond them. There is only life, "this" kind of life. All
animals are intelligible in this way: whale, shark, hawk, cockroach,
horse, tiger, bower-bird - even such pieces of apparent whimsy as
the fringed lizard and the ostrich (a parody of a human face with its
eyelashes and almost-binocular eyes; Its tiny wings; its legs which
bend the wrong way- Prog. Animals 714al8). It looks like a parody
of human form because both humans and birds have "top distinct
from front" (706a26).
Nature makes nothing without purpose but always with a view to
what is best for each thing within the bounds of possibility,
preserviog the particular essence (to tt. en einai) of each. (Frog. of
Animals 708a11)
In the theoretical sciences we begin with "what always is" and
Necessity [Parts 639b23-640a4). But in the knowledge of nature, the
sciences of the actual. we cannot begin with what always is. If we
begin with "what always is," the implicit temporality ofthe statement
would misrepresent living nature. Aristotle says that in natural science we do not begin with "what is" but "what will be' (Parts 639b23).
In the sciences of the actual, of living things which become and are
themselves, we have to begin with a beginning, with "what wiU be" or
what is going to be, a goal or project, a future, an actual possibility,
an aiming. Life is something that is never simply possessed but is
always the object and product of our continual effort, always the
future, because of mortality. Life always has the real possibility of
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
being "torn apart." This Is why biology and science of nature cannot
study "abstractions" (64lbll). Nature makes things for a purpose,
things that have a future built Into their present because they have
mortality built ln. The existence of these things Is not merely an "is."
If we are to have a science of biology, "what Is" needs temporal
qualifications because the present of living beings is not a simple "is."
Because we must begin with ''what will be" In the study ofliving beings,
their present Is the past of that future, a ''what was to be," to ti en
einaL
The reason why earlier thinkers did not arrive at this method of
procedure was that in their time there was no notion of to ti
en einai
and no way of dividing/deftotng betng. (Parts 642a26)
In ethics also the future Is built Into the present - a possibility
opened up by life Itself - In two important ways. In choice: what
distinguishes choice (proaires!s) from behavior that Is voluntary (atres!s)? Animals and children have voluntary behavior, an idea that Is
needed in biology as the complement and completion of "form."
Pro-aires!sls the future thatls builtinto decisions made In the present.
A decision is always made in the present, but moral virtue and
character allow us to pre-make our choices, to choose the kind of
choosing we will do, to put an atres!s before the atres!s, a pro-aires!s,
to begin with the beginning of actions (the beginning as the archei. to
make present choices the "past ofaji.Jture." This possibility- of deeds
needing both a beginning and an origin, arche - is groWlded by the
other crncial idea of ethics, habit, hexis (which comes from the future
tense of echo).
To say that "Perception is recognition" means that the outer, what
Is seen, Is the expression of the Inner and cannot be seen or understood without the looker, looking at the outside, Inwardly being the
same as the observed, having a "key'' or lexicon to decipher or translate
the outer as a sign of the Inner. This means that when we look at an
animal, we are looking at Form. not geometric shape, and the motions
that we see are not motions but actions, behavior. This kind oflooking
Is as actual, as real, as the animal we see because looking also Is an
action of a living being, not the "objective" observations of "consciousness." When I go to the Washington zoo and look at the hippopotamus
or the giraffes or Mark, the kodiak bear, I become aware of my own
looking. To look at these antmals you have to sit down and give yourself
a long time. As you watch them move around, you feel your inner pace
changing, slowing down. And the animal begins to appear. The animal
has been "there" as a shape, but now It begins to "be there" as a form,
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a functional whole, a being-there that Is for Itself a Here, a center. Its
motions begin to appear as behavior emanating from a center, as
action with an origin (archii). The animal and the seeing come Into
being along with each other and for each other. They are equally
present to each other. Looking Is a kind of attunement.
Of these two Ideas, form and action, form Is the one that Is usually
emphasized In biology - especially prominent In the readings and
dissections of Freshman laboratocy. But the idea of action Is equally
Important because It completes the biological understanding of form.
Form only appears as something expressed by actions. A form Is a
functional whole, actual when functioning. A hand severed from the
body is no longer a hand.
Action, choice, appetite, voluntary behavior- these are biological
ideas that are taken over and completed In the first half of Aristotle's
Ethics, the part about moral virtue. If these ideas belong to both biology
and ethics, then ethics is able to understand moral virtues on their
own terms and not tum them into intellectual virtues. Aristotle's
Ethics, in its ablllty to understand moral virtue, knows that the
problem of virtue is not to make us "act rationally,'' but rather almost
the opposite: How can the intellect become part of human virtue
without undermining moral virtue even while attempting to support
It (Magna Moralia 1182al5; cf. Republic 365a5). Intellect is a danger
because it destroys the innocence necessacy for moral virtue by
encouraging the self-consciousness that drives inqulcy. The danger
represented by the Intellect Is countered and overcome by the most
extraordinacy and deep thing about human beings: forgetting. The
Meno discovers and wonders at this forgetting. Aristotle's Ethics uses
forgetting In the form of habit to let self-consciousness and the intellect
disappear into the background.
Now we will look at the first part of the Ethics, moral virtue and Its
aesthetic/religious climax In "greatness of soul." Moral virtue culminates In this virtue because moral virtue begins with the problem of
the relation of virtue and self-consciousness in the desire for honor.
In Book I (1095bl5), Aristotle says that men of action agree that the
practical human good Is honor. But the desire for honor reveals the
difficulty of being virtuous and knowing that you are virtuous at the
same time.
Honor seems too superficial [to be the practical good for man, even
though men of action pursue it] ... slnce It appears to depend on
those who confer it rather than those upon whom it is conferred ... Men's motive in pursuing honor seems to be to assure
themselves of their own merit; they desire to be honored on the
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ground of virtue. (!095b25) Tbose ...who covet being honored by
good men [rather than powerful men], and by persons who know
them, do so from a desire to confum their own opinion of themselves; so these like honor because they are assured of their worth
by their confidence in the judgment of those who assert it.
(1159a20)
In ethics as well as biology there is also a privileged state for
observation, a mature state, in which seeing and being seen are most
actual. The young cannot understand the science of ethics, nor are
they capable of ethical action- they cannot see or be seen here. Only
the mature human Is capable of understanding and performing action,
behavior that springs from character.
Animals and the young are not capable of ethical action; their
behavior is only ''voluntary," a biological character. Their behavior
does not spring from a fixed disposition, from character. They live in
a "Now" of acting, and thereby they are closer to the internal and
external conditions of doing. They are not yet separated and isolated
from the conditions. Proairesis, the way a mature being chooses, is
not made simply in the Now; It is made before the moment of decision,
never simultaneously with it. It endures into the present moment
because of training and habit, and It allows us to have character.
Animals and the young do not have character. Their lives aren't
temporally integrated; the "before" (and "after") are not part of the deed
for them. "Action" and "character" are the two ideas we need In order
to enter ethics. These notions (and "choice") are not simple. We will
look at their roots and growth briefly.
The young are good at mathematics. (There are youthful prodigies
In mathematics, music, and chess, sciences that are "abstract.") But
"mathematical speeches have no ethos (custom, habit),. since they do
not involve any choice [proairesis]. For they do not have 'that for the
sake of which'" (Rhetoric 1417al9). In mathematics there are no
decisions that involve the separation or opposition of means and ends.
There is no ambiguity or tension (a possibility opened up by the
opposition of form and matter in biological form). All decisions and
actions within mathematics are determined by knowledge of the
object. There is no need for a choice which can be justified only by the
character of the subject.
A human understanding of human beings begins when we recognize ambiguity and tension. We first meet this tension in our
youth, the tension between thinking and feeling. The young excel
in mathematical thinking; in action, the young are led by their
feelings. The difference between these two faculties, thinking and
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feeling, characterizes young people. Mathematics and rhetoric (usually
in the form of music) are their possibilities. Morally, the young are
capable of startling amounts of generosity and terri1YJng amounts of
self-righteousness. Youth is a time of either/or: something is either
precise or imprecise, thinking or feeling, right or wrong.
The young are wrong. But I want to qualify this. Their mistake is
not a "logical" mistake. Their mistakes shows vitality, the presence of
a particular form of life, youthfulness. If we look at a ''youthful"
question about thinking and feeling and say, ''You'll grow out of It" or
"Just do It; don't dither about it so much," we would be making
another kind of mistake, the mistake of being old. Age tends toward
Impatience and coldness. Tension withers because feeling withers
(their friends often are useful to them rather than pleasing 1156a25). An impatient intellectuality gets stronger. Habit begins to
suffocate nature.
This youthful mistake is just the first form of the human problem
- relation of emotions and intellect, nobility and justice. This ambiguity, first present in youth, continues. There are many ambiguities
or tensions in the Ethics. Choice is the fullest expression of this tension
and unity. Choice, proairesis, Is "either thought related to desire or
desire related tp thought; and man, as an origin of action (archei, is a
Wtion of desire and inteUect" (1139b3). Moral virtue is a habit of
choosing, a Wtion of desire and principle- "if choice is something
serious" (1139a24).
The answers for which Aristotle is famous or notorious are very
often a paired set of two answers (thoughtful desire or appetitive
thought, the actuality of a potential, hypothetical necessity, etc.).
Sometimes they seem to be merely lwo opposites just stuck together.
With these answers, one sometimes feels that one is just hearing the
question again (Is motion an actuality or a potentiality? What is it in
its self-same simplicity?) What is good about this kind of answer, even
though it can't be separated from its context like a mathematical
theorem, is that it tries for visibility as well as thinkability. Such an
answer is really and obviously connected to the question; the answer
doesn't destroy the question. The answer is often only the "mature"
form of the question, where a question in its maturity is the answer
in its freshness.
The "paired set" of answers that holds together the science of ethics
appears when "the good for man" is first investigated. When Aristotle
asks "What is the good for man?" he gives two answers. The good for
man Is both "Happiness" and "the function of man, which is doing
virtuous acts." Despite ''virtuous action" being the explicit content of
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the book, it is not the most Interesting and serious question of the
book, which Is, what Is the relation of these two answers?
"Happiness" as the goal of human action makes sense as a theory
of human actions when one looks at the variety of human actions and
tries to fmd a common goal. But it Is too general to be practically
useful; It cannot be "aimed at"; there is no goal for striving, no future,
In it. The other answer, "the function of man, doing virtuous acts," is
very practical and can c~rtainly be a goal for aiming and striving, but
It Jacks the confident self-consciousness that goes with happiness.
Aristotle says that the two answers are related by ''visibility" or
explicitness (1097b24; cf. 1107a28): Doing vtrtuous acts is an explication or specification ofhappiness. This, "specification, actualization,
application, becoming visible," is the center of moral virtue and the
key to understanding choice as the relation of thinking and feeling.
On the one hand, ethical action is the specifYing of the general rule,
where the general rule gets applied. On the other hand, ethical action
is where very specific doings and happenings get generalized, get a
general and universal character- where "this act" becomes a "noble
act" and where "this person" gets character. Character gives our
actions a universally recognizable quality, and we are able to appear.
Action
So we will look at action and habit briefly. Then we will look at the
climax of moral virtue In "Greatness of Soul."
An action is not merely doing something. That kind of doing is best
exemplified by making. In making (producing an object by labor or
craft) the end of the doing lies outside of the doing. The maker doesn't
appear in the thing made- at least he doesn't appear as a doer with
character; he appears as skillful or clumsy.
Actions allow me to appear as a doer, as having character, as being
a source of the shape of the doings. The soul must actively appear in
Its actions; it must not disappear as it disappears into the object of
labor or of knowledge. The moral good as giving a shape to doings is
"something to aim at" in my actions rather than something to know.
If the vtrtuous action Is given by a rule specifYing what to do, then
vtrtue is actual as virtue when the rule is followed because it is a rule.
The character that would appear would be a person who Is a rule-follower,
someone with a compulsive personality disorder. If I want to become
just actually- not merely "do the just thing," mere behavior - I do
not want to go to someone who knows what justice is and is able to
tell me the correct thing to do. Because he is able to do that, my action
would not have an "aiming." My action would be mere doing and would
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not point beyond Itself. If I myself want to become just, I want to see
someone who is aiming at justice. He Is the only one useful to me
because I want to see his aiming, his action. Aiming presents the
person and the goal, character and virtue, as distinct and yet related.
Aiming presents the universal and the specific at the same time, so I
can look at an action and separate the Important from the unimportant parts- the just part from the merely specific parts of the action.
This separating is the Part of the doing that makes it mine. With the
separating, I come on stage pointing: "There, that is what's just or
noble to me." We want to see In actions their aiming rather than their
"knowledge of the whatness" of justice so we can see the hidden part
of an action, the pro part of pro-oiresis. Aiming is both the specifYing
of the general and the generalizing of the specific.
Virtues, as objects of"aiming," are one pole of the relation of aiming.
Virtues themselves have a certain relational structure. They are not
simple positive presences. They are a mean between two extremes, a
not-this and not-that, a doubled negation. This structure, a mean and
extremes, is a necessary feature of an object of choice qua choice, i.e.,
as something aimed at. If I look at a portion of food, I might observe
Its properties and weigh it- i.e., treat it as an object of knowledge.
Butlfl am to choose or reject it, it must be either just right, too much,
or too little. It is Imprecise mathematically but is something appealing
to me. The mathematical value of the mean can change, if I go on a
diet. What formerly appeared to me as "just right" now appears as "too
much." But the mean/ extremes structure ls still there. It Is a universal
structure of object of choice.
Practical wisdom first appears to us as paired sets of opposites
without a mean, a large dose of the kind of answer that Aristotle often
gives. These generalities often make sense as a reflection about human
action, but there Is little hope of using them as a guide to action. When
I was growing up, my grandmother would watch me do something and
say "Haste 111akes waste." Then she would watch me again and say "A
stitch in time saves nine." I should not be "Penny wise and pound
foolish." However, I should remember that "A penny saved is a penny
earned." This aspect of growing up Is maddening and hilarious- was
she trying to help me or drive me crazy? Eventually, a way of doing
things begins to appear, almostofltself-amean, a waythatls "mine."
There Is no way that Is "the" way (universal) nor Is there a way that Is
"merely mine" (specific), but there Is "my way" ofbelng temperate, "my
way" of doing the general goals. The mean and the "mine" of character,
the universal and the specific, come into being at the same time.
The goal of training Is not mere behavior but a stage where the
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
boredom and the struggle recede into the background because of
habit, allowing for a new possibility, action and character.
Choice is a more certain sign of character than is action (Ethics
llllb4). While a choice is made before the moment of doing and
choice is made possible by ptior training, choice is more visible after
the moment of doing, when someone reflects on what they did and
shows regret or satisfaction. Afterwards they claim the action as their
own or reject it; they ('how whether or not they meant it (rather,
whether they now intend to mean it). We have all received apologies
along the lines of ''I'm sorry, if you were offended. But! had a bad day,
too much to drink," etc. You are seeing the choice made again, but
not under the pressure of ctrcumstances. As the qualifications to the
apology pile up, the deed and its circumstances as a whole are being
chosen tight now. The pro part of the pro-airesis appears in thought
about the deed afterwards. This thinking takes place at the edge of
the moment of action. It is the transition from the general to the
particular (and also the reverse). The present moment, the moment of
doing, is the past of a future. It is a reflective affirmation of what we
approved of in advance, in deliberation. Before the deed, the object of
choice or voluntatiness is too general, a mere rule, and it needs
specifYing, shaping. After the deed, the deed by itself was far too
specific (was the sneeze part of the deed or not? the color of my shirt?)
so the "factual" doing needs shaping, a separation of the important
from the unimportant. I as a doer need to be sorted in the same way,
Important from unimportant. Choice does this; it both chooses and
recognizes (as Its own- ''Yes, that's what I meant") the shape of the
action. Without those two kinds of shaping and specifYing, there are
no actions. There is only behavior, mere voluntary happenings without
shape. Proairesis allows me to "make an appearance" in the world as
a doer, a source and origin of action. Without character. deeds have
a beginning- a unique place in the series that is physical time- but
they have no otigin (arche).
The climax of moral virtue is a virtue called "Greatness of Soul."
What this person sees in his aiming is not so much a mean between
two extremes but the distinction between the important and the
unimportant, the great and the petty. He has a reflective and poetic
grasp of deeds. This man is the climax of the imprecise side ofvtrtue,
for we know that he is idle and slow to act, but we don't know what
he does, only that it is great.
Aesthetically and religiously, however, he is very precise. He has a
deep voice and walks slowly. He likes beautiful and useless things.
(He himself is beautiful and useless for the most part.) He is worth the
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greatest of external goods, honor- the kind of honor we offer to the
gods as a tribute. He Is moderately pleased with honor from "serious"
people, but no honor Is adequate. He does not care much even about
honor. It is "small" to him because he Is aware of the greatoess of his
own soul and its worth. Human life itself is not too "serious" to him.
In this he approaches the insight given later In the book, that "it is
absurd to think that political knowledge or prudence Is the most
serious kind of knowledge, inasmuch as man is not the best thing in
the universe" (ll4la20j. He has insight about limits and transcendence. To understand Wm as a limit- that he is worth th~ greatest
honor but he doesn't pursue honor; that honor is small to him, but
he deigns to accept It from serious people despite its inadequacy we have to remind ourselves of the difficulties moral virtue and
self-consciousness have with each other.
In Book I (and again in Book VIII) Aristotle said that although men
of action pursue honor, honor is superficial. Honor is superficial
because It has a hidden part, a choice hidden underneath the surface
choice ofhonor. "Men's motive In pursuing honor seems to be to assure
themselves of their own virtue." Men pursue honor because of a
weakness or difficulty with self-consciousness, self-knowledge.
Later in Book I (llOlblO), Aristotle distinguishes honor from
praise. When we praise just men, we approve of their actions. But
when we praise the gods, it is absurd that they be measured by our
standards, but this Is what approval is. So when dealing with the gods
(or godlike people), we give them honor. Honor here Is not an occasion
for self-knowledge in the one honored, but In the one doing the
honoring. Honor is a recognition of our own incapacity to recognize
the worth of the virtuous soul. The man of greatoess of soul, In his
self-knowledge and his worth, his grasp of the limits of honor, and as
a occasion for our self-knowledge, Is godlike. He is an aesthetic and
religious climax.
When Hobbes looks at ancient thought, he doesn't think that It was
''wrong." Hobbes doesn't even ta:ke It seriously. The ancients don't
understand the problems deeply enough. They are superficial because
they are "uncritical" - naive - about thinking. The mind can't be
objective or find truth without some preliminary critical work.
First, ancient thought uncritically and naively believes that we can
begin to think without understanding language first and without
getting true defmitions. Words in their daily use appear to have their
meanings "simply there," as the diagrams of Euclid are simply there,
open to vision with nothing hidden, nothing in;tplicit, ,noth.lng. prec
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
40
supposed. But this is a deception. Words are not simple presences.
Words do have a natural core of meaning, but they also have an overlay
of the accidental, an historical accretion of evaluative judgments
(which often can be traced back to Artstotle). Hobbes gives an analysis
of the word "tyranny" as an example. The natural part of a word's
meaning has to be separated from the historical part before we can
think without hidden prejudice.
Second, the other source ofthe,anclent's naivete and superficiality
was their religion.
There is almost nothing that has a name that has not been esteemed
by the Gentiles as a god ...The Gentiles make images and statues so
that we might stand in fear of various objects of devotion: [the
Gentiles have worshipped rivers, trees, mountains,] men, women,
birds, crocodiles, snakes and onions ...
Ancient religious thought concerns poetic fancies, mere "figures of
honor." A plurality of gods Is needed to express their love of comparing
and competing. Even the Prime Mover in Artstotle's Metaphysics is
"prime" rather than "only." He is the chief or first mover rather than
a god beyond comparing. The hidden presence of polytheistic religion
makes Artstotle's philosophy an unsystematic doctrine of separate
essences or actualities or substances. The only thing that is striking
about his thought is his use of "insignificant speech" and self-contradictory defmltions. Aristotle fools no one who can listen deeply to
speech and hear what is being said. (Hobbes is a great translator, able
to hear beneath the surface of words.)
The Bible, whether true or false, makes it possible for us to be
"deep," serious and rational in a way that was not possible for the
ancients. Monotheism is not truer than polytheism. Monotheism is
more rational than polytheism because It allows us to be more serious
and rational.
Both ways of being uncritical make ancient thinkers naive. This
naivete shows up as an inability to see through the deceptions of honor
and its poetry, the mists with which honor hides and decorates the
ordinary, the natural. Honor decorates and hides nature and natural
justice at every opportunity. Hobbes exposes honor continually. For
example, even laughter is unmasked as being a kind ofhonor, "sudden
glory." Aristotle's Ethics Is impossible because it tries to hold together
honor (nobility) and justice.
The particular book that Hobbes takes as a standard- to show us
a new sense of seriousness, a way to see the world and people not
hidden by honor -Is Job. There the world is filled with figures of power
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and pride: lioness, raven, wild horse, ox, vulture, and leviathan. The
strangest being on God's list is the ostrich. It doesn't even care for its
eggs. God says it is the silliest animal. But the ostrich, despite its lack
of seriousness, rises up and outruns the horse, that figure of pride
and courage in war. I look at the animals and I see that I am not the
most serious thing in the universe, but I do belong in it- I do belong
to that series of beauty and power, where power is justified by Its
serious beauty. But then I look at the ostrich. It is almost insulting.
It Is In bad taste, an aesthetic mistake, to put the ostrich on this list.
The other way in which Job turns against ancient standards and
makes them look naive and not serious is its ending. If the ancient
pagans had written Job, they would not have written that short,
annoying ending, where Job gets everylhing back and gets a new
family. They would not have allowed such a spiteful, mocking turn of
the religious against the aesthetic. They would not have allowed such
a short ending to overbalance the long beauty of Job's suffering. The
disproportion of the length and content of the ending is as if, at the
end of Oedipus at Colonus, Apollo would come on stage and say, "On
second thought, never mind." Oedipus would have been furious. This
book should end with Job repenting. His suffering is justified aesthetically because he suffered beautifully, fearlessly, and magnificently.
Job would have greatness of soul and belong In the world with
leviathan and the crocodile and the hawk and Oedipus.
But the book doesn't end there, nor did God end creation before
the ostrich. Not only does Job get a replacement family, he loves them.
How can he love them so simply? It is disloyal to his first family and
his own suffering at their loss. If Job forgets his own suffering and its
magnificence - if he does not respect his own suffering - how can
we take him seriously? Ifwe can, Job is something stranger and deeper
than Oedipus.
Endings
There Is no one way for me to end these thoughts. I have two
endings. One is "philosophic." The other is an aesthetic and religious
image.
First, the philosophic ending. Suppose that Hobbes is wrong about
Aristotle. Suppose that Aristotle i1> right about actuality and that
speech, when It tries to talk about fundamental things, is at best a
kind of pointing or aiming. Suppose that circular and self-contradictory words are designed to bring out this pointing, that they are not
"insignificant speech," as Hobbes claims, but speech transcending its
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
limits. Suppose that Hobbes's criticism is the thought of a prosaic
man, one who clings to the ordinary because of fear and a lack of
vitality, one who admires the orderly but slavish East (and Egypt) over
the disorderly freedom of Greece.
Even if all that were true, thtngs that cannot be clearly said, things
that can only be pointed at, tend to disappear in the course of time;
and we are not even aware of their disappearance. We repeatAristotle's
definitions. Unlike Euclid's definitions, which do not wear out so
easily, the words become more familiar, more ordinary, the basis of a
"habit of answering fearlessly and magnificently" rather than the
"actualization of knowing."
This wearing out or mortality of words makes us desire something
more than mere knowing from philosophy and its interpreters, something more poetic and aesthetic than mere concepts. What we want is
to regain the freshness or immediacy that was there in the original
pointing. We want the aiming, the striving, the pointing from the
philosopher. What we need from philosophy is not so much "knowledge of what is" as the recovery of that lost sense of being, of actuality,
that drove the inquiry before there were answers, the actuality of the
attitude behind the knowledge that knows the world. But philosophy
must resist this wish to be uplifting. Poetic talk about seriousness and
pointing can have an empty depth, an intensity without content. This
depth is not distinguishable from superficiality. Philosophy must
beware of the desire to be exciting.
The most important look at choosing and the effort to understand
it is in Exodus (18). Jethro visits the children of Israel at their camp
in the wilderness after their escape from Egypt. Jethro is the priest of
another religion or sect (a priest ofMidian; he is Moses' father-in-law).
Before the escape, God said that He intended to bring Israel out of
Egypt in order to prove to them he was their god and also, at the same
time, to prove to Pharaoh that he was the god. But it is impossible to
do both, especially at the same time. God has to be either the God of
Israel or the god of all. His choice of Israel is a rejection of Pharaoh.
Both Pharaoh and Israel will think that Lord is Israel's god and not
Pharaoh's god, hence not the god. Jethro, being neither Pharaoh nor
Israel, might be in the best position to understand what has happened.
He listens to the story and he does understand. He says, "Now I know
that the Lord is greater than all gods." The story worked somehowGod did do both things at once, to be both "the" god and "this" god.
The particularity of Lord's choice does not undermine his universality.
Jethro somehow understands this. He sees that Lord is the god, the
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only god who is a god, because He makes choices, not in spite of His
choices. Lord, instead of having the Impassive universality best expressed by a statue, makes choices and performs actions. He is a living
god.
Once Jethro has seen that Lord is the god and has chosen Israel,
how could Jethro not stay with Moses, taking a new family and
religion? But, unlike Job, he can choose to return to his old life. Jethro
offers a sacrifice and goes back to his own country. He goes back to a
mistaken religion and empty ceremonies, back to what is now merely
"his own," one actuality among many possibilities that are false maybe even irrelevant. What can the life he chooses mean to htm?
Although Jethro knows that Lord is the god because of His choice, the
god is not his god. God did not choose him. God did not even reject
him.
A Note on Sources:
Kurt Goldstein, The Organism
Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon ofLife
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure ofBehavior,
Sense and Nonsense, The Primacy ofPerception
Erwin Straus, Essays in Phenomenological Psychology
Leo Spitzer, Essays in Historical Semantics
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'!HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�I
Where Is Greece?
Radoslav Datchev
EUROPE
A
L
I
s
I
A
B
I mean the question of my title literally. To find Greece on the map is
what I would like to try to do tonight. And I think that this Is worth
talking about, because, it seems to me, It Is not at all clear which map
Is the map to check. Worse, it seems to me that even if we had the
right map, It still wouldn't be clear how to identity Greece on it.
A modern map wUl not do. The Greece that we care about, the
Greece of Homer and Plato, of Sophocles ·and Aristotle, is separated
by an abyss of discontinuity from the Greece that we would find on a
modern map. It has to be an old map: ideally, a contemporary map.
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Now, an old map means Ptolemy. Ptolemy wrote a Geography, and
just as astronomy for the next thirteen centuries meant Ptolemy's
astronomical treatise, geography meant Ptolemy's Geography. For the
next thirteen centuries if anyone wanted to draw a map or to travel
far afield, they turned to Ptolemy. But we would be researching the
maps of Ptolemy in vain. Greece is not one of the thousands of names
on these maps. There is no Greece on Ptolemy's maps.
Ptolemy is all tables, charts, and maps. But there is another
geographer, Strabo, who wrote a voluminous descriptive Geography a
little over a centmy before Ptolemy. Can Strabo help?
Strabo speaks of the Greeks all the time. But according to his book
there are Greeks in Rome and there are Greeks in Spain, and also in
Africa, in Asia Minor, in Phoenicia, even in India. Something seems to
be wrong.
One thing that is certainly wrong is the time. Ptolemy and Strabo
lived in Roman times, five to six centuries after the time of Aeschylus
and Socrates, of the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars. It seems that
we should turn to Herodotus and Thucydides rather than Ptolemy and
Strabo.
But again there is a difficulty. Without hindsight we simply cannot
extract a map from Herodotus and Thucydides. There is no reasonable
way to draw a map based on identification of places by "further and
above," "notfar from," or "they sailed for three days." We need latitudes
and longitudes to draw a map, and we have no latitudes and longitudes
before Strabo and Ptolemy.
So I have compromised. My map is drawn from Ptolemy and Strabo.
I have done my best, however, to reduce it only to what is explicitly
mentioned in Herodotus and Thucydides.
It is a map of the world. The world is divided into three parts:
Europe, Asia, and Libya. On the fringes is the Ocean, the river,
according to Homer, that encircles the land, but whose existence
Herodotus doubts. In the middle of the land, as its name still indicates,
is the Mediterranean, the sea which the Romans of Ptolemy and
Strabo's time called mare nostnun. our sea, and which the Greeks
before them called simply ecimcma, simply the sea.
And just as the map is a compromise, so is this lecture. It is a
compromise between what Ptolemy says geography should be, and
what Strabo says that it should be. Ptolemy begins his Geography by
saying that geography, being the business of the mathematician,
should represent the whole known world exactly. Strabo begins his
Geography by saying that geography, being the business of the
philosopher, should serve the study of the art of life. So I have tried
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to follow Ptolemy's dictum and stick to maps and, possibly, exactness.
But towards the end of the lecture I have taken Strabo seriously, too,
In order to see whether geography may tnrn out to be philosophically
significant.
But first, how do we find Greece on this map of the world?
In no Greek book Is there a hint of an entity, political, economic, or
religious--of an institutional entity of any kind-demarcated and
denoted as "Greece." As a matter of fact, the very word "Greece" occurs
seldom in Greek books.' Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle,
Strabo, all talk instead, almost eJtclusively, about "the Greeks."
We need a criterion, then, to identifY the Greeks, to identifY in this
manner the place where the Greeks lived, and thereupon, perhaps, to
say that this is Greece.
Now the question of who the Greeks are is explicitly addressed in
a famous passage in Herodotus (VIII, 144). The Athenians are speaking
to some Spartan envoys. We cannot submit to the Persians, the
Athenians say, because we are Greeks, we are one in blood and one
In language; the shrines of the gods belong to all of us in common,
and the sacrifices are In common, and there are our common habits
and our common customs.
Blood, language, the shrines of the gods, sacrifices, habits, and
customs. This Is what Herodotus says the Greeks share. Are these the
criteria we need?
We can discard blood, habits, and customs out of hand. For are the
Greeks who build bridges for Xerxes and lead him through the
mountain passes, are these Greeks in the Persian army of the same
blood, habits, and customs as the three hundred Greeks who fight,
all by themselves, several hundred thousand Persians at Thermopylae? We see in Herodotus half the Greeks allied with the Barbarian
Persians against the other half. In Thucydides, too, we see half the
Greeks against the other half eagerly slaughtering one another. We
could see in later times half of them again, with Philip the Macedonian,
subjugate the other half. And still later, we could see half the Greeks
join the Romans against the other half. Needless to say, the halves in
all these Instances do not coincide.
How are we to reconcile this picture of Greeks endlessly killing
Greeks, relentlessly slaughtering and enslaving one another, with the
notion of common blood, habits, and customs? It seems that to
understand the Greeks who were constantly warring against Greeks
as an ethnic unity, as an entity with common upbringing and common
practices, we first need to know who the Greeks are. Blood, habits,
customs, seem to be part of the riddle of where Greece is, not part of
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the solution.
And unfortunately, so are the rest of the criteria suggested by
Herodotus: language, the shrines of the gods, and sacrifices. Shrines,
gods, and sacrifices, or what we would generally and misleadingly call
the religion of the Greeks, are simply phenomena too unstable to
provide a meaningful guide for identifying the Greeks. The Olympian
pantheon included several dozens of gods of several generations.
Different gods were venerated differently and to a different degree in
different paces. A countless number of heroes were honored with
shrines and sacrifices locally. Rivers and trees and winds were venerated. Ancestor worship, always of course local, was central to their
beliefs. The hearth of each house was sacred.
Then again, none of these cults and practices were exclusively
Greek. Greek shrines seldom shunned Barbarians when they brought
appropriate gifts to their divinities. Apollo's Delphi had no qualms
about quietly siding with the Persians when the threat. of being burnt
down became too real. And If their rites were open to the Barbarians,
so were the Greeks open to Barbarian rites. Allen gods and their cults
were routinely adopted, and among these were some of the most widely
venerated. Dionysus and the Bacchae, for Instance, are of Eastern
origin, the Orphic mysteries ofThraclan. Plato's RepubUc, by the way,
begins with the return of Socrates and Glaucon from the festival of a
newly introduced Thracian goddess. Religion, again, is part of the
problem, not of the solution.
And finally, so Is language. We know the neighbors of the Greeks
almost exclusively from Greek sources. Lydians, Carlans, Phryglans,
Scythians, Persians, speak in Herodotus and Thucydides nothing but
Greek. We do know that they had distinct languages. But the degree
to which the Hellenization of thelr habits, upbringing, blood, and
language stems from our sources, or is rather a matter of fact, is in
each case an extremely difficult question.
Indeed, it was a question which the Greeks themselves found very
hard to answer. There is a story in Herodotus about a Macedonlan
king (V, 22). The Macedonians, apparently, spoke a Greek dialect,
participated eagerly in the Greek wars, and sacrificed to the Olympian
gods. They shared, it would seem, language, habits, and gods with the
Greeks. Still, when the king tried to take part once In an Olympic
footrace restricted to Greeks, he was asked to prove that he was not
a Barbarian. And a century and a half later, when Philip, Alexander
the Great's father, threatened to conquer the Greeks (the Greeks, that
Is, who had no doubt about themselves being Greek), Demosthenes,
the Athenian orator, argued at length that Philip was a Barbarian (PhiL
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3,31). And Demosthenes had to pay for being wrong with prison, exile,
and eventually his death. He had to pay because Philip and Alexander
settled the question by conquering the arguing sides, both those who
took the Macedonians seriously when they claimed to be Greek, and
those who did not.
Instead of one more or less clearly demarcated language, we see
Greek as numerous dialects blending into one another, not always
mutually comprehensible, gradually merging into Barbarian tongues,
borrowing heavily from them. Language, too, is part of the problem:
knowing who the Greeks are is more likely to help in the examination
of whether a dialect is Greek or not, rather than the other way around.
All along I meant by "Greeks" and "Greece" what in Greek itself is
''EAAT)VES and EMus.
In Homer EAA<is is an alternative name only of the region ruled by
AchU!es (IL II, 683; Od. XI, 496; etc.), and the 'EI.AT]v<s are just one of
the numerous tribes whose leaders besiege Troy. Later 'E!.Ms came to
mean the North of the mainland as a whole and as opposed to the
Peloponnese peninsula as a whole. Still later, 'EI.AT]v<s became the
generic name for all the traditional Dorians. Ionians, Aeolians, and so
on, but why 'EI.AT]v<s came to be the common name, rather than some
other, is obscure. It was already obscure by the time of Herodotus and
Thucydides, who could only derive the name 'EAA<is from a myth about
a legendary descendant of the man who survived the deluge (Her. I,
56; Th. I, 3).
The etymology may be obscure but by the fifth century, by the time
of Herodotus, Thucydides, Aeschylus, and Socrates, the name is
employed routinely.
Herodotus, for instance, begins his Histories by saying that he
wants to record the deeds of Greeks and Barbarians. Thucydides
begins the history of the Peloponnesian War by introducing the war
as the greatest turmoil ever to befall the Greeks and even some of the
Barbarians. Both historians speak of the Greeks all the time, without
much ado, In a matter-of-fact kind of way, apparently with no doubt
that their audience would knowwhat they mean. And so do Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides. To speak of the Greeks, In short, has
become commonplace.
And here Is an instance of how Aeschylus speaks of the Greeks.
The king in The SuppUants (913-15) scolds the Egyptian herald: You
Barbarians, the king says, you Insolently bother the Greeks, you do
nothing right, you stand upright in nothing. Is the poetry and the
passion of Aeschylus, a veteran of the Persian War himself. overdoing
the opposition Greeks/Barbarians?
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In both Herodotus and Thucydides the Greeks are always very
explicitly meant in opposition to Barbarians. Persians, Egyptians,
Lydians, Scythians do not seem to be names on the same level of
generality as the name "Greeks." They seem to belong to sub-classes
of the class Barbarians, rather like the Athenians and Spartans, or maybe
the Dorians and lonians, who are sub-classes of the class Greeks.
The opposition Greeks/Barbarians seems to signify a division that
goes deeper than geography, a division of the world as a whole, of
nature, of cjJims. Listen to Plato in the RepubUc (470c): Barbarians and
Greeks are enemies by nature, cjJvon, Plato says. Or to the Statesman
(262d). The stranger from Elea is illustrating a dichotomy. He says it
is like dividing the whole human race into two by separating the
Greeks from all other races, which are countless in number and have
no common blood or common language, and giving them the name
Barbarians, as if they were all of one kind. Aristotle is, as usual, even
blunter. He says in the PoUtics (l252b5-9) that among Barbarians
there is no difference between the female and the slavish, because
there is no ruler by nature (cpvcm) among them, and they are all a group
of slaves, male and female. That is why the poets say that the Greeks
should rule the Barbarians, because the Barbarian and the slave are
by nature (cpvcm)one and the same.
cpvan, "by nature," recurs in these passages. The distinction
Greeks/Barbarians is by nature. It is on the level of distinguishing,
say, plants from animals.
It is worth noting also that the usage of "Greeks" and "Barbarians"
becomes common in the years of the Persian conquest of Asia Minor
and the invasion of Europe afterward. The oldest surviving tragedy,
and the only one based not on myth but on experience, The Persians
of Aeschylus, abounds in appreciation of the Greeks and wonder at
the hubris of the Barbarians. And the oldest clearly pejorative use of
"Barbarian" is in Heraclitus (fr. 107), who was a Persian subject all
his life. The rise of Persia, a threatening alien force nearby, apparently
strengthened the sense of unity of the Greeks and presented the
distinction Greek/Barbarian as more than ethnic, as Implying a
judgement of value, good and bad, as well.
Greeks and Greece, then, are first of all a cultural denotation-"cultural" in its most general, broadest, and vaguest sense. "Greeks," as
the Greeks used the word, is not on the level of generality of, say, our
Brazilians, Canadians, or Pakistanis. It is closer to what we mean by
Christian or Muslim, but that would be misleading by implying religion
too strongly. It is closest, perhaps, to whatever it is that we mean when
we speak ofWestern civilization, for instance. But even this would be
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Inadequate. The distinction Greek/Barbarian Is a distinction by nature, <jliJon, a division of the world as a whole, of the cosmos rather
than just the surface of the earth. Plants are different from animals,
gods are different from men, and so too the Greeks are different from
the Barbarians.
Can geography, then, describe a cosmic distinction; {:an It describe
the division of the world as a whole into Greeks and Barbarians?
Well, in a vague way t:pe distinction is also cultural. And culture
does leave tangible remains. Books, for Instance. Then, even though
Jacking criteria to !dentllY the Greeks, we can try to compile a Jist of
the places where, according to the Greek books, the Greeks lived, and
we can put these places on the map. And a picture-a more or less
clear geographical picture-may emerge.
This is what I have done with my map. I have marked some 75
places which seemed to me to have the strongest claim of belonging
on a map of Herodotus' and Thucydides' time. These are the major
participants in the two wars, the Persian and the Peloponnesian. I
have also put on the map the places associated with the authors and
characters of our great books: their home cities, the cities where they
were active, and the cities where they died. I have also marked places
like Cyrene In \'lorth Africa, and Massalia In the Far West, which are
often mentioned as comparable In size to the two largest Greek polels,
Athens, and Syracuse in Sicily. Athens and Syracuse, and perhaps
Cyrene and Massal!a, should have had populations of over 200,000
each, a respectable number even today. I have also put on the map
the chief sources of the main commodities that Greek cities exchanged, grain and slaves, most of them on the Black Sea. Slaves from
these regions, where the stupidest people in the world Jived, according
to Herodotus (N, 46), had very high reputation. I have also marked
Tanais and Emporiae, the cities at the far points, East and West, of
the Greek world. There are reports of cities even further away, on the
Atlantic, for instance, but those are most probably spurious.
And It seems that a very clear picture-geographical pictureemerges. What these places seem to have in common Is that they are
all on the Mediterranean coast. Greece appears to be the Mediterranean coast.
There are exceptions, but very few. And Ignoring for the moment
Sparta, the quintessential land power of Greece, and Boetia and
Thessaly, the picture of Greece as the sea coast, as the littoral, seems
to me compelling.
And we shouldn't find this surprising at all. The Greeks were a sea
people. I don't know of any other people whose epics are so closely
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
linked to the sea. The invading army In the IUad stays on its ships for
ten years, and it is a catalogue of ships. of course, that lists all its
contingents. And Odysseus wanders for ten years at sea, not on land.
Herodotus calls the Barbarians landlubbers. And there is the
famous passage (VIII, 61) where Themistocles proudly says of the
Athenians, who have just lost all their land and all their shrines to the
Persians, that as long as they have two hundred ships they have land
and they have a polis greater than anyone's. There is the story also of
Xenophon's Anabasis (N, 7). An army of Greeks, over ten thousand
strong, was stranded in Barbarian territory, in the heart of Persia.
After an ordeal of many months through a thousand miles of desert
and mountains, having left thousands of def).d behind, Xenophon
suddenly heard the soldiers cry ea.wuoal eawuoal They had seen the
sea. And having seen the sea, they were finally home, right there, on
the Black Sea coast. It becrune a catchphrase. Like "Know yourself,"
which became attached to philosophizing, eawoua! eawoaa! came to
mean that after a long and dangerous journey one was finally home.
I should mention that the Greeks never built roads. There are
incredible instances. Sybaris, a city in the West, founded a colony on
the opposite side of its narrow peninsula. But close interchange
between the two cities did not make them use the convenient valley
that connected them, rather than the sea route around the peninsula,
which was dozens of times longer, more dangerous, and more expensive.
They did not build roads, but ships the Greeks built by the hundred.
Their triaconters and pentaconters were unmatched in the Mediterranean and the Greeks' domination of the seas was taken for granted
by their neighbors until Roman times. And I can't help mentioning
that in the Politics (1256a35) Aristotle lists the five ways of obtaining
a livelihood as farming, animal husbandry, hunting, fishing, and-of
all things-piracy. Some people, Aristotle adds (1256b2), are engaged
in two employments: a farmer may also be a hunter, and a shepherd
also a pirate. Piracy was so trivial that a contract between two cities
has survived, regulating-not outlawing but regulating~piracy.
There is no phenomenon di:;;playing the ties of the Greeks to the
sea in a more powerful way than their colonization. "Colonizat:on" Is
the name given to a huge wave of resettlement, of founding cities along
the Mediterranean coast, which began In the middle of the eighth
century and did not subside for two centuries.
Colonization is well documented. Founding a city was an important
event, important enough to record on stone, and to celebrate and
remember for a long time afterward, On the criterion of memory nnd
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records, no event was comparably important in the first couple of
centuries of Greek history: not wars, not building, not poetry. The
oldest and most abundant dates are the foundation dates of cities.
Herodotus, Thucydides, Strabo abound in information on how and
when cities were founded.
We know today of some seven hundred Greek cities, ten times the
number I have on the map. What I render here as "city" is In Greek
n6Ms, of course. And these n6/.ns were all independent cities. And the
substantial majority of them were founded after 750, in the age of
colonization.
It was a huge wave. By 750 Greeks Inhabited the Southern Aegean
coasts. Two centuries later, by 550, by the time the Persian threat
appeared in the East, the Mediterranean coast was crowded with
Greeks.
Why in the world did the Greeks colonize the coast?
The Greek word for what we call colony is O.notKla, a home that is
away. It was always meant in opposition to lJ.llTp6noMs, the mother-city.
Here is how a mother-city founded a home away.
First, as with everything that really mattered, a god was consulted,
usually Apollo at Delphi. If Apollo was interpreted to promise success,
a leader, called olKwTJ\s, a founder of a home. was appointed or
sometimes chosen. The colonists were usually volunteers. But not
always. Sometimes they would be drafted. In either case they were
people with little or no land in the mother-city. More often than not,
they were only men. and they were young, the sons of landowners
rather than landowners themselves. Numbers were usually in the
hundreds. They knew where they were going. When Apollo was asked,
he was asked about a specific place, a place rumored to offer a good
location. Then they sailed off and they settled.
Settling meant distributing the arable land in the colony fairly,
building temples of the gods, establishing local government, and
building houses, usually in that order. Sometimes additional colonists
might join them. Usually, local women would be heavily relied upon
to insure the procreation of the colony.
Other than marrying local women, relations of the colony with the
native people were limited. With very few exceptions, the Greeks just
didn't bother with regions where they expected to meet resistance.
They chose sparsely populated areas where the native people, even if
they wanted to, could not resist the heavily armed, technologically
superior Greeks, secure on their ships for as long as needed. Settlement in Carthaginian territories was attempted once, for instance. It
met with disaster, however, and Apollo was not tempted again to send
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
colonists there. The Greeks stmply left alone the heavily populated
and armed coasts of Phoenicia, Egypt, and Carthage. AB Thucydides
says, the Greeks never left their home to conquer other people [I, 15).
Colonization, apparently, he did not think of as conquest.
The ties of the colony with the mother-city tended to be symbolic.
As a sign of independence the founder of the colony, the olKtonjs, was
venerated, rather than the mother-city's hero. Even though in war a
colony tended to ally itself with Its mother-city rather than against it,
a generation or so after foundation, with its ethnic mix likely to be
already different, it became a full4ledged polls. In Thucydides, Nicias,
the leader of the Sicilian expedition, argues that amidst alien and
hostile people the Athenians can only survive as a polls; without a
polis they will fail [VI, 23). And we know that when Corinth tried to
meddle in the affairs of Its colony at Corcyra [I, 34), the Corcyraeans
turned to Athens for help. We were not sent out to be the slaves of the
Corinthians, they said, but to be their equals. The Athenians found It
convenient to agree, and so the Peloponnesian War began.
There is something de!YJng belief in Greek colonization. Mlletus, an
Ionian city of perhaps forty thousand, is reported to have sent out
ninety colonies. Even if this is an exaggeration, cities of two to three
thousand people are known to have founded colonies. What made
these tiny independent cities found other independent cities at the
opposite end of the world?
Lack ofland is the answer ofThucydides (I, 15). The pressure of
insufficient territory, says Plato [Leg., 708b). Were the Greeks really,
in the course of a couple of centuries, continuously lacking land,
continuously under the pressure of insufficient territory?
Well, the Greeks were certainly an agricultural society. Selfsufficiency, explicitly meaning food, was the ideal for a polis from
Hesiod to Aristotle. The Greeks lived off the land, and considered
commerce and the trades, as Aristotle says in the PoUtics [l258bl-8),
dishonorable and unnatural. Piracy may have been a natural way to
earn a living, commerce and the trades were not.
But land was not just a means of livelihood and not just a means
of production. In a lengthy discussion of wealth and properly in the
PoUtics (1256al-8b9), Aristotle does not once mention land among the
objects of acquisition and wealth. Properly and wealth meant movable
things to Aristotle--chattel, slaves included, but never land. Land was
something more than property, actually much more. It was where the
bones of ancestors were burled, and the bones of ancestors, as in the
Oedipus at Colonus, were sacred. Numerous gods dwelled in the land.
It constantly gave birth to gods, to rivers and trees. The land was a
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goddess herself, the mother, in Heslod (Th 45), of all gods.
In very few cities was It lawful to buy and sell land. land had strong
ties to the community, to the polis as a whole, stronger indeed than
Its ties to whoever happened to work it. In the rare Instances when It
was lawful to sell land, foreigners were explicitly prohibited from
buying it. And foreigners here means not Barbarians (such a thought
would be a sacrilege) but alien Greeks, Greeks from outside the
community, citizens of o):her poleis, the so-called llETOLKoL, those who
have come home, but are-as the word Implies-not home.
Like the old man Cephalus In the beginning of the RepubUc, these
llETOLKOL, aliens, sometimes lived for generations In a city and sometimes amassed substantial wealth. They still could not marry a citizen,
and they could not own land. Aristotle, a wealthy llETOLKOS' In Athens,
could not own his own school, the Lyceum.
Tied by deep tradition to the land, citizenship was jealously
guarded. There was no naturalization; one had to be born of citizens
to be a citizen. Pericles, the leader of the most permissive of democracies among the Greek poleis, Introduced a law revoking the citizenship of those who had one rather than both parents Athenian. In
enforcement of the law, five thousand llETDLKOL were sold Into slavery
(Plut., Per.).
In this sense, colonization, being acquisition of land, was also
acquisition of sovereignty. The perception of lack of land was also a
search for a stronger hold on one's bond to a city. The perception of
opportunity more than the pressure of circumstances made colonization an unabated wave.
That colonization was perceived as an opportunity rather than an
escape Is strongly suggested by the fact that the Greeks expanded
overseas rather than inland: that they preferred to sail into the unseen
rather than fight their way against the neighboring Barbarians. With
Themistocles, who believed that as long as the Athenians had 200
ships they had land, the Greeks felt certain that the sea would give
them land, somewhere. Inasmuch as they really needed land, they met
the challenge extensively: the thought of trying to increase productivity or perhaps to exploit part of the citizenship, notions economically
as sound as there are, never seems to have occurred to anyone as an
alternative to colonization. Land, in this sense, was a means, not an
end. It was a means to acquiring a city.
I have spent all this time talking about colonization in an effort to
present it as a unique phenomenon, as something pertaining uniquely
to Greeks.
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'IHE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In a broad and vague way it can be said that all more or less
homogenous, organized, and dense centers of population have always
tended to expand. In particular, all ancient civilizations, empires,
societies-whatever we may have to call them-did expand. None of
them expanded by sea.
Egypt filled the valley of the Nile and stopped on the borders of the
desert, remaining for the last 5,000 years one of the most densely
populated regions on Earth. The tiny warlords of Sumer in Mesopotamia expanded northward along the Tigris and Euphrates, and so did
the Assyrians and the Babylonians after them. The settlement of
Phoenicians overseas at Carthage remained an Isolated affair, and it
was only after the appearance of huge numbers of Greeks In their seas
that the Carthaginians were provoked into consolidating their position
in the Western Mediterranean.
The very fact that the Greeks found the Mediterranean coast
available for colonization also shows the uniqueness of Greek colonization. Egyptians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Carthaglnlans, had remained, essentially, closed within their lands-landlubbers,
essentially.
It Is probable that their environment-long, dented coastline,
countless islands, dearth oflarge fertile valleys-made the Greeks turn
to the sea rather than inland in search ofland. But colonization seems
to suggest that the ties of the Greeks to the sea were deeper than just
being a response to natural limitations. Colonization was the foundtng
of cities, hundreds of independent poleis, not just a movement of
populations. The ties of the Greeks to the sea were motivated politically, religiously, and culturally as much as they were the result of
natural pressure. Their will, rather than nature, seems to have given
the Greeks the direction and limits of their expansion.
But I still have to address the question of the exceptions to the
image of Greece as exclusively the Mediterranean littoral: Sparta; the
home country ofHesiod and Plutarch, Boeotia: and Thessaly, the land
of wealth and horsemanship, where Meno hailed from.
Thebes, the main center of Boeotia, is some thirty miles north of
Athens. North of Boeotia along the Aegean coast Is Thessaly. And still
further north, also along the coast, is Macedonia.
Now tn Greek usage the further north you went, the farther away
you were from culture. "Boeotian" came to mean in Greek, as It has
come to mean in English, too, uncultured, dull and stupid. As to
Thessaly, when Socrates laughs at Meno in the beginning of the
dialogue because the Thessalians have suddenly become wise next to
being famous for horsemanship and wealth, he is belaboring a joke
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that was already in the language. And, of course, north ofThessaly
one doesn't even know whether one is in Greece anymore-one Is In
Macedonia.
Boeotia and Thessaly remained for a long time loose and rather
disorganized confederations of tribes rather than poleis. Boeotians
and Thessalians lived In villages, not cities. They had no ships and no
determined governments to oppose the Persians. Spartans and
Athenians and Corinthiai)s had to defend them. They never sent out
colonies. And having said all that, I should mention that Boeotians
lived within twenty miles of the sea, and Thessalians within thirty.
Sparta, the quintessential land power, the unchallenged master of
the land battle, seems to defy the picture of the Greeks as sea people.
The Spartans not only lived inland, they were peculiar In every respect.
The only polis with mandatory education, with state-regulated marriage, with both persistently authoritarian and at the same time stable
government, with restricted access to sacrifices and rites, with prohibition of individual ownership of practically everything, the Spartans
were universally recognized by the Greeks themselves as different.
But curiously both Herodotus and Thucydides speak of "the
Lacedaemonians and their allies" rather than the "Spartans" when
recounting battles. A common expression In Xenophon and Aristotle
as well, "the Lacedaemonians and their allies" appears to be a cliche.
Who are the Lacedaemonians, then, and who are their allies?
Lacedaemonians were the inhabitants of Laconia, the region surrounding Sparta. And It turns out that the cliche Is correct; it turns
out that the Spartans rarely, if ever, went to war as Spartans alone,
as an army of the ten thousand citizens only. They would rather go
into battle taking along the inhabitants of Laconia, the so-called
rr<plmKoL, those who lived around the home. The rr<plmKOL were Greeks
like the Spartans. They had no polis of their own, however, and the
Spartans decided for them who their enemies were.
Laconia, the country of the rr<plmKoL, is actually a sea country, a
long and narrow valley on the Peloponneslan coast. Is there in this
fact a hint that Sparta may not be so detached from the sea as it
appears?
Sparta came to dominate the Peloponnese peninsula after a series
of wars during the seventh century with Argos, the ancient city of
Agamemnon. In the course of these wars the Spartans subjugated
Laconia, and most Importantly they gained control over the three main
openings of the peninsula to the sea, Pylus In the west, the island of
Cythera in the south, and Praslae In the east. In Thucydides those
three are the main objectives of the Athenian offensives, and the
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Athenian capture of two of them, Pylus and Cythera, in the first phase
of the war, created panic tn Sparta.
These, and a few other ports in the Northern Peloponnese, were
consistently the "allies" of the expression "the Lacedaemonians and
their allies." Sparta, it turns out, was the land power that it was by
being secured by sea. Needless to say, the Spartans always maintained
control over many ships tn the ports of their allies, and, like the
maritime poleis, sent out dozens of colonies.
And, once again, Sparta, too, is less than twenty miles from the sea.
I am tempted also to note that Sparta's most memorable victories, in
the Persian and in the Peloponnesian Wars, were decisively and [even
if with unmatched heroism) unambiguously lost on land, and won
eventually at sea-when the Persian navy was destroyed first at
Salamis and once again later off the coast of Asia Minor, and when
the Athenians firstlostmore than 200 ships in their Sicilian expedition
and later 171 more ships in the Northern Aegean. Reduced to a
handful of ships, the Athenians capitulated.
Sparta, Boeotia, and Thessaly were socially, politically, and economically an aberration among the Greeks. A fossil of an earlier ethnic
distribution, they preserved a vanishing tradition which was struggling (in the case of Sparta successfully) against new times. To
Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle, Boeotia and Thessaly
appeared simply primitive. Sparta, on the other hand, both when they
admired it and when they criticized it, reminded them of the East, of
Persia and Egypt. And this is, probably, how we should see Sparta as
well: as marginally belonging to Greece, or, perhaps better, as belonging to an earlier age of Greece. Notably, there are no Spartans among
the authors of our great books.
There is one last place that I would like to mention: Arcadia, still a
byword for shepherds, peace, and tranquility. Arcadia is in the middle
of the Peloponnese, in the heart of the Greek landmass. In the time of
Herodotus and Thucydides it was inhabited by mountain people, wild,
speaking an incomprehensible tongue, eaters of acorn, Delphi's Pythia
called them (Her. I,66). In all their countless wars, their neighbors,
and Sparta among them, avoided the Arcadians. When they wanted
to fight each other, they circumvented Arcadia. Arcadians lived in the
mountains until the fourth century, when Thebes, having for the first
time in memory defeated the Spartans on land, decided to create in
Arcadia a buffer between itself and the Spartans. The Thebans herded
the mountain people tn the middle of Arcadia and forced them to live
in a big city, and that's what they called it: Megalopolis, the big city.
Polybius, the third Greek historian, was born in Megalopolis a century
�DATCHEV
59
later. But the age of Megalopolis, of Arcadia and big cities inland, was
not the age of Greece anymore. Even though he wrote in Greek,
Polybius wrote about Rome.
It seems, then, that geographically it should be claimed that Greece
Is not just on the Mediterranean coast, but in a very strong sense is
nothing but the coast, nothing but the littoral of the Mediterranean,
which the Greeks called 96.N1aaa, the sea.
We should probably i.qlaglne Greece as seven hundred small islands. Or, perhaps better', as three concentric circles: the sea in the
center, the land, and the ocean-or rather the unknown-outside. On
the Inside of the land, on the coast of the sea, lived the Greeks; inland,
blending Into the unknown, outside, lived Barbarians. It is a simple,
symmetrical picture of a simple and symmetrical world, similar to the
depletion on the shield of Achilles. And It Is a very Platonic picture,
too, and also Aristotelian, of circles and symmetry.
This Is the geographical answer that I have to the question where
is Greece. And for only a few more minutes I would like to say what
this picture suggests to me.
I will begin with a few numbers. A difficult estimate derived from
limited data suggests that In the fifth century there were some seven
to eight million Greeks In the world. This Is seven to eight million
people distributed along a coast over 10,000 miles long. And the
distance between the southwestern end of the Mediterranean and the
northeastern end of the Black Sea is, as the crow flies, well over 3,000
miles, more than the distance between New York and Los Angeles.
Now, these seven to eight million Greeks lived in at least seven
hundred, and possibly many more, independent cities. The average
number for the population of a polis is in the range of. say, less than
10,000. Plato recommends 5,000 households as the optimal number
(Leg .. 740e). The Greeks, then, lived in tiny communities, miles away
from all other Greek communities, isolated from April until October
by long and treacherous sea passages. From October until April, when
navigation was Impossible, they were totally cut off. They lived on
islands surrounded by the sea and Barbarians.
It seems to me an unbelievable picture. What motivated these
people? What sustained them in their tiny isolated communities?
What made them fiercely independent? What made them belong to
some abstract unity of Greeks whom they seldom saw and seldom
heard from?
It seems to me that the uniquely Greek phenomenon of the polis Is
the answer to these questions.
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
micra rr6Ais <jloon <crTlv, Arlstotle says in the Politics (1252b31), each
polis is by nature. And a couple of lines later he repeats and adds: mt
b /ivepwrros <jlucrn rroXLTLKI>v (<\)ov, not only Is the polis by nature, but
man also Is by nature a polis animal (1253a3). A man without a polis,
Aristotle continues, Is either a beast or a god (1253a29).
We should take Aristotle seriously when he claims that each city is
<jluan, by nature. And we should probably refuse to translate rr6Ais.
Like Myos, it does not se,ern translatable.
But we could, perhaps, approach the polis by following the Greek
words. There Is one root that kept recurring among the Greek words
that I had to mention, the root -oLK-, as in oLKos, one's horne. A colony
Is arroLK(a, a horne away; the leader of a colony is an olKcanjs. a founder
of a horne; the resident aliens are f!ETOLKoL, those who are at our horne;
Sparta's subordinate people are the rr<plmKoL, those around the horne.
The dwellings of the gods are olKlm; to inhabit a place is ocK<'w; from
Horner to Thucydides all Greece happens to be called o\Kla. And to live
In a city Is avvmKtw, to share a horne; to be a citizen is awocKos; and
auvocKLa Is synonymous with polis.
This Is what a polis is. It Is home.
There was no distinction In the polis between being a citizen,
rroXl TT)S, and taking pari in politics, as the word still indicates. If a city
had a popular assembly, It was exactly that, the assembly of all
citizens. There was no distinction between being a citizen and being
a soldier. Anyone under stxty procured his own arms and served,
period. I don't know of a record of anyone who ever refused to serve.
Aeschylus served, Sophocles led an army, Thucydides led a navy,
Socrates was famed for his courage In battle. There were no priests In
the cities either. Attending to the gods, taking care of shrines, sacrifices, rites, even discussion of religious dogma, were trivial matters,
open to everyone as a matter of course, or rather as matter of nature,
<J>oon.
The polis had no institutions, in short, that were religious, political,
educational-no Institutions of any kind, no archives and no bureaucracy. Armies were put together as circumstances required. Children
were taught whatever the father's appreciation of tradition suggested.
Religious ceremonies were organized by whoever could afford it.
Legislation was initiated by real or contrived emergencies; there was
no body sitting in sessions, making laws.
The idea of rights of the individual as opposed to the polis would
be a misunderstanding. The notion of criminal prosecution, for Instance, was never born in the polis. As In the trial of Socrates, an
individual had to Initiate a case of supposed violation of the body
�DATCHEV
61
politic. The notion of someone detached from the polis. opposed to it.
independent from It, suggests to Aristotle not individual rights but a
beast or a god.
Even in what we would think as economy, the polis as a home
motivated the citizens. Which Is what the word implies anyway:
otKovof1la is house management. Aristotle says in the Politics (1258bl)
that In obtaining property only taking care of one's home is honorable,
any kind of trade outsid~ the home Is unnatural and disreputable.
Surprisingly perhaps from our point of view, the rich bore almost
exclusively the financial burden of the city. They were required to build
and maintain the ships of the city, to organize Its religious festivals,
to support public building. The poor were maintained at public
expense, and proving need was less Important than proving citizenship In order to quality. Dealing with money, profit, Increasing production, remained matters alien to the polis, and if they nevertheless
occurred, they were the doing of aliens.
If It overgrew Itself, a mother-city simply built a new home, an
lmocKla. And like a true home the polis made one feel Intimately
belonging-cozy, I suppose, may be the right word. In the Crito,
awaiting his execution in prison, Socrates speaks of Athens with a love
that seems to transcend philosophical arguments.
Well, If the polis was home, there were about 700 of them. Geographically they had no center. Geographically the center of Greece
was In the sea. Greece was nothing but periphery geographically,
many homes without a center.
The history of Greece begins with the foundation dates of independent cities. And I don'tknow of any other culture whose written history
begins with anything but a succession of kings.
In Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in Persia, in the Mycenaean civilization
before Greece, there always Is a very strong center: a palace or a
temple. To one degree or another this center dominates the lives of
everybody within its reach. Religiously, the center has prerogatives
over the relationship of the community with the divine. In Egypt, in
Sumer, In Assyria, the ruler Is a direct descendant of the gods,
god-like, and all too often god himself. Politically, within the reach of
the center, there are only different levels of the ruler's dependents.
They work his land, they owe him their labor and the food that their
labor grows. They owe him their lives as a matter of course.
Even the little writing that was done In the East was all done In the
palace, on the order of the palace, and for the sake of the palace. No
writers' names survived in the East because there were no writers in
the East, just scribes. The largest collection of writing that has been
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TiiE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
unearthed there, some 20,000 clay tablets, contains Inventories,
ordinances, messages to the gods, and not much else. The collection
was tn the center, of course, in the palace of the Assyrian king
Ashurbanipal.
If the Greek polls had a center at all, it was the lryopa, the place
where the assembly of the people took place. The market-place also.
And from ayopa a verb developed: ltyop<vw, to speak In the assembly,
and generally to speak. No wonder that books could be bought In the
agora. The book of the philosopher Anaxagoras is the oldest book
reported, by Plato in the Apology: Sold cheaply, too.
This apotheosis of the Greeks is leading toward freedom, of course.
Having no political, no religious, no economic, no cultural center of
any kind, feeling at home in their tiny cities, the Greeks discovered
freedom. They are slaves to no one, no one rules them, the Chorus
answers in The Persians (243) when the Persian queen wonders who
the Greeks are. Not tied to the land, if they felt uncomfortable In their
surroundings, they just sailed away and founded a new home for
themselves. Not tied to a divine court and Its rule, they began
questioning the divine, questioning nature itself, proving theorems,
and so on. The fact that the Greeks discovered freedom, I take it, is
all around us.
But freedom is EA<uB<pla In Greek. And <A<ulkpla has also the
disturbing meaning of manumission, of letting a slave go free.
If the Greeks discovered freedom, this Implies that no one was free
before, not even pharaoh, owntng all Egypt. Thinking of philosophy,
mathematics, things like that, we can probably appreciate such an
idea. But If freedom is also necessarily In opposition to slavecy, does
that mean that the Greeks discovered slavecy, too?
I think that it does.
The rise of the polis was typically accompanied by legislation
against debt-bondage. Outlawing debt-bondage was the cornerstone
of Solon's laws, for instance. Debt-bondagewas the practice of offering
oneself, one's own person, as security on a Joan. Default, then, meant
bondage. Debt-bondage remained trivial practice In the East and
contributed substantially to creating populations that were tied to the
land as a group.
The abolition of debt-bondage in the Greek polis enhanced enormously the privilege of being a citizen. It created the unprecedented
phenomenon of poor but free people, for instance. But it had the effect
also of robbing the citizens, more or Jess all of them landowners, of an
easy opportunity to labor Jess than their fields demanded. The solution
was chattel slavecy.
�DATCHEV
63
The image of the Greeks as slave-owners should not be exaggerated.
The polls was never anything but a community of small-holders. But
the more a small-holder perceived himself as superior to Barbarians,
and the more he appreciated the superiority of his ships, sword, and
ideas, the more likely he was to own a slave or two.
And not having obedient subjects to build pyramids for it, the polis
kept its projects small. But still, It did have some projects, and since
the citizens were busy discussing public matters in the market-place,
the polis relied more and more on slaves for Its projects. Athens
maintained no standing army, but had a police force of a thousand,
all of them Scythian slaves, replenished as need required. The citizens
abhorred the idea of taxes, and being the government themselves,
taxes no one but aliens. The treasury of a big polis like Athens, then,
had to rely on the production of public mines worked by tens of
thousands of slaves. All record keeping, temple maintenance, harbor
repairs, construction of new walls, was done by slaves.
Enslaving entire populations and conquering other peoples might
not have appealed to the citizens of the polis. But they discovered
chattel slavery, the counting of a few men or women among one's
belongings, and they appreciated it enough to make it trivial.
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle take slavery for granted. Aristotle also
takes It to be by nature, <f>uaEL. But there are more disturbing instances.
In his Ways and Means (IV, 13-32), Xenophon proposes that the city
of Athens purchase enough slaves (three per capita, to be exact) and
put them to work in mines so as to ensure free maintenance for all
Athenians. Athenians then, whether merchants or philosophers (V,
3), Xenophon says, would be happier.
There Is also a speech by Lysias (24.6), the orator ridiculed in the
Phaedrus, In which a poor fellow argues In the popular assembly that
he deserves free maintenance, on the grounds that he Is not rich
enough to buy a slave.
How well the discovery of chattel slavery was liked may be judged,
perhaps, by the letter that a few centuries later a minor philosopher,
Libanius, wrote to the Roman authorities (Or. 31.11). He asked for
money, pleading the poverty of the scholars in his school, who could
barely afford, he said, three slaves each.
So when Plato and Aristotle suggest that philosophy requires
leisure, this may be a disturbing thought.
But I don't want to finish on this gloomy note. Both Plato and
Aristotle suggest also that curiosity is the source of philosophy. And
I'd rather finish with an image of curiosity. It is the Image I have of
Heraclitus of Ephesus, one of the first philosophers.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
We know little of Heraclitus. He wrote no books, it seems. He had
no students. He avoided the market-place. He never married. He never
left Ephesus. So what did he do?
Heraclitus is the first philosopher who survived in a number of
fragments-131, most of them complete sentences. And among
Heraclitus' seventy to eighty sentences the names of three contemporaries of his are mentioned, Pythagoras among them. Now how in the
world did Heraclitus ge,t to know of his contemporaries?
The sea was the only medium of communication, of course.
Ephesus was an importsnt city of perhaps thirty thousand. But how
many ships would dock at the self-sufficient Ephesus every year, April
through October? Ten? Maybe twenty? Just possibly thirty? Now, how
many of these ships may have come from another self-sufficient city,
Croton, at the other end of the world, in Italy, a city of hardly more
than twenty thousand, where Pythagoras had established his school?
One every year? One every ten years? One during Heraclitus' entire
lifetime? And could any ofthe sailors, or more likely pirates, could any
of them really have known, or cared about, Pythagoras?
The only way that I can imagine is a Heraclitus obsessed with
curiosity. A Heraclitus talking to every sailor on every ship. Going from
sailor to sailor, instructing them one by one to ask any sailor, in any
port where they might stop, and to ask them, too, to ask other sailors,
so that if any of them happen to come to Ephesus, they might know
something, anything, to tell Heraclitus.
I Imagine Heraclitus sitting on the docks, staring into the distance.
�1 Two Poems by Sandra Hoben
Odysseus and Calypso
He didn't go willingly. He laughed
when she suggested building a raft
and sailing back to Ithaca;
and poured more wine,
stoking the fire, which cast
their shadows on the thick rugs.
He had everything: a goddess,
her fertile island, the sun
coming out of the sea each morning
like a small aruma! searching
for food. The nlghts were endless,
her body stronger than a man's.
Suspending himself above pain and death,
he drank her immortality and looked out
over the sea through her gray eyes.
He stood speechless while she
hacked down her favorite grove,
lashed the logs together then pointed
for him to board and sail alone
across the infinite sea with a few meals
of water and dry bread,
to live out the last painful years
as king of a land that didn't need him,
beside a woman with liver-colored spots
on her hands, her memory fading
like clothes hung so long in the harsh Aegean sun
that she no longer knew his name.
�TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
66
St. John's College
That's where we should have met,
thirty years ago. The worst
that could have happened! would have rolled away from you
to light a cigarette.
Or beat you at a game of chess.
And though you wouldn't have inhaled,
we could have tried a little dope:
We could have read Marx together
and Hobbes, and while we wouldn't have understood
taxes yet, we could have explored together
the idea of taxes.
Sandra Hoben, a graduate of the College, has published a volume of poetry, Snow
Flowers, with the Westigan Press. These poems are from her latest colfection, Stage
Money, which was a fmalist in this year's Brittingham Prize at the University of
Wisconsin Press. Her poems have appeared earlier in the Review.
�Book Review:
Two New Books by Alumni
I
Eva T. H. Brann
Neal 0. Weiner. The Hannony ojthe Soul: Mental Health and Moral
Virtue Reconsidered. Albany: State University of New York Press.
1993.
Grant P. Wiggins. Assessing Student Peiformance: Exploring
the Purpose and Ltmits of Testing. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
Publishers, 1993.
Yielding to the influence of our context-conscious age, I sometimes
play the game - to my credit be it said, half-heartedly- of trying to
ferret out the facts of authors' biographies from their writings. In the
case of the two books here to be reviewed I think I could have guessed
that they were alumni of St. John's or some similar school (a small
field), even if I had not koown both of them as students.
I am not sure the college can claim credit for the virtues the books
seem to me to have in common, those the Greeks called sophrosyne,
"sound rnindedness," and phronesis, "mindfulness,"- sanity and
thoughtfulness. There is, however, a mode of inquiry they share
that is recognizable as an Intended result of the Program. In both
books the intellectual tradition Is employed to sustain as well as to
subvert the current condition. Both authors move fluently across
the mU!ennia and use their learning to appreciate and to criticize
the present situation. To put it more sharply, both authors appear
on the surface to be attuned to the going pieties In their area of
interest, and both tactfully turn them upside down to effect an
adaptive recovery of old truths.
There is one more rare excellence both books display for which the
college can take little credit - more's the pity. Both are written in
humane, communicative, and vigorous English .
•
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
68
Neal Weiner's Hannony of the Soul offers a "reconstruction" of
ancient virtue for modern life. It seems, as a matter of fact, to fit Into
a current tendency of which Alasda!r Mcintyre (who lectured in
Annapolis some years age) Is a leader. There Is now a trend to recover
antique conceptions of virtue as a counter both to the rule-governed
rationalistic morality of modernity (p. 14) and the groundlessness of
postmodernlty. But Weiner's book Is the least tendentious imaginable.
Though he takes respectful account of current writing, his book is
manifestly the issue of intensely personal experience and reflection.
It Is the vety opposite of an inteHectual exercise in staying current.
Not that it Is unduly personal - It preserves a dignified distance of
tone. The resulting combination of palpable personal conviction and
presentational prudence is one of the attractions of the book.
The mode of inquity Weiner has chosen is expressive of these
characteristics. He presents a strong, even repulsive thesis, "the worst
possible news for the human spirit." He posits it, however, not In the
mode of a thesis but of a hypothesis, a conjecture or likelihood whose
consequences are to be worked on an "as if' basis. The conjecture is
that
human consciousness is a thoroughly natural thing and that we
are mere parts of nature, not as different from the rest of animate
nature as it has flattered us to think. (p. I)
The project then becomes to find a way to reconcile our brute nature
and our human goodness, or, in more conventional terms, to compose
the notorious fact-value opposition. The bridging notion will be the
"harmony of the soul." It is a theoty of human health as psychological
balance, such that even under merely natural conditions, that is to
say, in the absence of any transcendence, "only the best would follow."
One way to put Weiner's aim is this. He wants to test an understanding
that construes human nature as continuous with the whole of nature,
requiring no extrinsic teleology to define its proper goodness. The
naturalistic term for "good" is, of course, "healthy." Weiner wants to
see if he can delineate a sound-mindedness whose picture jibes with
ordinary notions of goodness.
This endeavor Is carried out in three parts of geometrically ascendIng lengths, ''The Body," ''The Soul," and ''The Good."
Physical health is understood as an evolutionary and social adaptation of a functionally integral body to Its tasks. Health Is therefore
relative to situation, but in a given time and place It Is a knowable
entity. "It Is a tattered, empirical Ideal, but autonomous and natural"
(p. 37).
Psychic health Is, again, a vety broadly conceived sort of functional
�BRANN
69
ideal, the soul In a condition of balanced adequacy. I would like to
point out here that it takes some courage these days to use the word
"soul" In a publication expecting to be taken seriously by the philosophical and psychological professions. As Bruno Bettelheim pointed
out a decade ago in Freud and Man's Soul (1983), Freud's English
translators betrayed his humane intentions by systeniatically erasing
the original German references to soul in favor of the more technicalsounding "psyche" or the, more intellectual-sounding "mind." Weiner
Is doing a good deed of terminological recovery in his bold use of the
word soul. Like Freud, Weiner intends to strike a tone of humaneness;
like Freud he intends no overtone of transcendence; like Freud he
evades an essential definition. The Index will send an interested reader
to whole sections and then to "Human Nature" and "Self." I found
nothing explicit.
My guess Is that Weiner would say that it is pure Platonic prejudice
always to demand to know what an entity is before being willing to be
told how It functions well. And I would agree, but with the proviso that
to go along with this book for the practical wisdom it offers is to
reconfigure It from a pure inquiry Into a handbook, an enchiridion in
the antique sense, that is to say, a book prescriptive of conduct. I mean
that not as a criticism but as an admiring observation.
In respect to "soul" Weiner considers first behavior, then motivation. Under the naturalistic hypotheses the central motivational mechanlsm is pleasure, which Is, in certain circumstances, the relief of
pain. Pleasure is presupposed to be harmoniously related to naturally
and socially adaptive behavior. By and large, well-functioning feels
pleasant. We are naturally sound and originally well.
"What then makes an individual sick?" Weiner's answer seems to
me to be at the credal heart, as it is at the literal center, of his work.
Mental sickness Is anxiety.
Anxiety, objectless fear and indeterminately directed worry, is
recognized by Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger as the mark of Cain
branding modernity. Weiner takes his analysis of this illness largely
from Freud, and then proceeds, In the name of moral responsibility,
to stand Freud's concept of the unconscious on its head.
Anxiety Is, more specifically, self-condemnation on a level too deep
for self-conscious recognition. Hence the concept of anxiety requires
an unconscious to which guilt-inducing experiences are relegated or
"repressed." Weiner accords Freud's unconscious the "purgation,
simplification and resurrection" It needs (p. 86). Instead of being
understood as a demon-like alien agency or place within us, that is,
topologically, the unconscious is taken as an evidential fact, phenom-
�TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
70
enologlcally. It is not placed as a power within the soul but observed
as a
commonplace phenomenon. It can be understood as nothing more
than the familiar but puzzliog mental state called "self-deception."
(p. 88)
Here then Is the bridge between pathology and responsibility. The
Freudian unconscious w:as a moral convenience, a locus of self-serving
Ignorance. Weiner's resurrection ofa harmonious soul returns responsibility for self-knowledge to the.conscious individual. In particular,
all the neurotic or false or dysfunctional pleasures which, being
intended to relieve anxiety. constitute mental illness, become accessible to self-therapy [p. 147).
Once again, Weiner has emphatically sidestepped a foundational
question, this time the question of the existence of self-condemnation
as a deep and determinative human affect (p. 84). Not everyone's
Introspection will yield the same sense of the cause of anxiety. For my
own part, I am convinced that guilt-feelings are the residue of wilfully
unexpiated guilt, and that at some point we are meant to decide either
to rectif'y our post-original sins (mostly stupidities) or to fold them
away in our memory of exhausted facts. Yet also once again, there is
much to be learned by going along, particularly In the last long section
on the Good, where the practical, prescriptive conclusions are drawn.
Weiner now Introduces another and a very sensible hypothesis, that
of"rough decency" as a basic inclination of human nature to compassion. It is not a rational moral principle but a psychological, affective
force, "a part of the original configuration of pleasures (p. 115). This
pre-rational morality (to employ a contradiction In terms) is identified
by Weiner with ancient- Aristotelian- virtue, for like virtue It has
a structure conformable to mental health, as vice has to" illness.
Weiner urges a tum away from rule-ridden legallstic morality and
a return to spontaneous psychological virtue. All that Is needed to
achieve "the union of spontaneity and goodness" [p. 125) that Is true
happiness Is to rid ourselves of anxiety, so that "primitive virtue" that
Is, rough decency, may surface.
The task that then remains Is to establish and to trace out naturalIstic routes first to self-knowledge (with its concomitants. freedom and
conscience) and finally to ethical knowledge. Under the naturalistic
hypotheses, self-knowledge is knowledge of one's own true desires, and
ethical knowledge is not primarily dialectical but persuasive. Weiner is
here preaching what he has all along practiced. The final chapter, in
which these points are made, Is much richer in observation and
analysis than this summary conveys.
�BRANN
71
Anti-foundationallsm Is yet another tendency of the day. Weiner's
approach Is In this spirit In a double sense. He presents as an exercise
In the "as If' mode reflections that tum Into the most earnest practical
- In fact thempeutlc - prescriptions. And he invites us to assume,
without theoretical underpinning, the existence as well as the meaning
of a number of entitles, for example, the soul. primitive virtue, and,
above all, nature. In the context of the Harmony of the Soul nature is
represented most poignantly In the human being by the body, and
the body is a moral presence as desire - as the collection of what
are called the "bodily desires," which Is really the collection of all
desires Insofar as they stem from the natural forces that have made
us. Whoever understands these desires ... is thought to possess a
kind of knowledge worth calling "wisdom." (p. 7)
And this is surely a perfectly sensible, but not at all a necessarily true,
version of human nature, whose glory it may well be that it is fundamentally unharmonious. At any mte, the point is that Weiner evades
all foundational claim-making and argumentation In order to get the
sooner to the coherent and healthful consequences of his hypotheses
and its attendant assumptions. It Is the sound-mindedness of this
enterprise that is its justification.
One last tiril.e it must be said that Weiner has adopted a mode
without joining a trend. What I mean Is that, far from displaying a
postmodem taste for groundlessness, he has simply chosen a fitting
way to communicate the reflective and wise result of a vital personal
experience.
Neal Weiner is Professor of Philosophy at Marlboro College tn
Vermont. He graduated from the Annapolis campus in 1964.
•
Public preoccupation In education used to change with the generations, every quarter century or so. Then every decade brought a new
issue. And now a novel notion agitates the educational establishment
quinquennially. The current obsession is "assessment," and though
the excitement may pass, its Institutional residue Is bound to last quite
a while. Among the hypotheses of the assessment movement are these:
(1) This country needs the kind of education that results in nationally
assessable outcomes. (2) Assessing students improves institutions
from primary school to college. There is a great likelihood that under
the coming assessment regime schools of all degrees will become more
homogenized, but there Is no assurance that they will become better.
A lay person would have thought that to improve education one would
�72
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
first of all address the learning of students. Such approaches are,
however, always small-scale and consequently maladapted to the
Intentions of a regulative bureaucracy. They seem to have receded Into
the background In the current preoccupation with "accountability."
Having read my ill! of the periodical literature on the subject, I
would have expected the worst of a whole book on assessing student
performance. Grant Wiggins's book is, It turns out, a glorious disappointment. He shows how assessment can be a benign and even
necessary element of learning.
The title of the first, introductory, chapter sets the tone. One of its
sections is called "Assessment versus Testing" (my italics). Let me
quote some key sentences:
Assess is a form of the Latin verb assidere, to "sit with." In an
assessment, one "sits with" the learner. It Is something we do with
and for the student, not something we do to the students [p. 14] ....
The assessor tries to ferret out all of what the student knows and
can do by various means [p. 16] .... At the very least, assessment
requtres that we come to know the student In action [p. 17].
Wiggins's chief complaints against testing as the main instrument
of assessment are that tests tailor the task to the tester's need to get
a score and that they are systematically unresponsive to the individual
learner. What Wiggins Is mindful of- and what educational officialdom is unmindful of - Is the educational function of assessment
properly understood as that attentiveness to students' learning which
emphasizes overt production of some sort, that is, daily performance.
Tests subvert this function In a way Wiggins feels entitled to regard
as immoral. The main issue of the Introduction Is therefore the
morality of testing. The reason that tests are dubiously moral is
Kantian. They invariably treat the child as an object; they show it
disrespect,
because a test, by Its design, is an artifice whose audience is an
outsider, whose purpose Is ranking, and whose methods are reductionist and Insensitive. (p. 7)
The Introduction consequently ends with an "Assessment Bill of
Rights" that details the rubrics of respect for students. Its nine articles
can be summarized by saying that assessment should be as humane
In the largest sense as possible. I might go so far as to offer our oral
examinations, especially the senior essay oral as an exemplification
of the ode of assessment Wiggins's Bill of Rights calls for: a worthwhile
common Inquiry In the course of which, under the guidance of models
of excellence, the student gets to take up questions, justit'y answers,
�BRANN
73
and hear contrary opinions. (I must, however, report that Grant has
told me in a private letter that he missed detailed feed-back while he
was a student, and he may well be light. Sometimes our watchful
non-intervention goes over Into simple slackness. )The second chapter
asks: "Assessment of What?' Recalling the horrible example of Meno,
the memorizer, Wiggins delineates a liberal sort of!earhlng that is the
opposite of thoughtless mastery- if there Is such a thing. Thoughtful
mastery Is the object of sound assessment, but It Is evident that there
are dilemmas here, and Wiggins makes them explicit. For example,
liberal learning requires not only skill but also what Wiggins calls
"intellectual character," very nearly what Aristotle would call "Intellectual virtue." Intellectual character includes both discipline and independence. It ought therefore to be assessed in ways that are "enabling,
fatr, and responsive." Wiggins accords such modes of examination In
the title of "Socratic tact." He concludes with nine Postulates of
thoughtful assessment, which include detailed desiderata: Students
should have a chance to justifY their understanding. They should be
presented with good models and feed-back, and be judged by non-arbitrary criteria. They should engage In self-assessment, and be performers and not mere spectators of! earning. They should develop their
individual ''voice," and be assessed through their questions as well as
their answers. They should be encouraged to articulate critically the
limits of the theories they have learned, and have their intellectual
virtue taken Into account.
The remaining six chapters amplifY these ideas through an abundance of conceptual explications, applicable experiences, and imaginative examples.
Assessing Student Perjo1TTI1Jllce Is therefore an eminently practical
book. Grant Wiggins understands what the educational establishments seems to be professionally prevented from apprehending- that
with respect to humane learning, efficiency is the enemy of practicality.
How I wish that this book might gain some influence!
Grant Wiggins is the president of the Center on Learning, Assessment and School Structure (CLASS), a non-profit organization In
Geneseo, New York. He graduated from the Annapolis campus In
1972.
�74
THE ST. JOHN"S REVIEW
�I
One Man's Meter
Elliott Zuckerman
Part 1
I spent much of my high-school and college years in the noisy and
uneven trains of the Interborough Rapid Transit System. The full
name, as you have just heard, constitutes a good line of iambic pentameter
with a feminine endtng-the Interborough Rapid TrW!Sit System-but
it was nevertheless known for short as the I R T. Accordtng to an
antiphonal ditty that is now known only by agtng New Yorkers, the I
R Twas, along with its sister subway, the B MT, one of the routes on
which you Could Not Get To Heaven.! The New York City subways did,
however, take you anywhere else that could conceivably be of tnterest.
The borough I commuted from was Brooklyn, where I dwelt tn a
neighborhood called Crown Heights. My streets were just to the west
of the area that has recently been in the news. My neighborhood was
identifiable as the location of Ebbets Field, whose outfield was visible
from the roof of my apartment house, and the Brooklyn Museum, on
whose imposing frieze I first encountered the names and figures of
Socrates, Zoroaster, I..ao-Tse, and Saint Paul.2 Behind the Museum
stretched the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It was there, in the appropriate setting of nature controlled and manicured by artifice, that I began
to read poetry. More accurately, I should refer to what! did as intoning
verse--for the poets I recited more or less out loud were Edgar Allan
Poe, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and others more noted for what
was glibly called the "music" of their verse than for what was, with
111is was the Homecoming Lecture in Annapolis on October 1, 1994.
1
The B M T, of course, provided the first and famous verse:
Oh you can't get to heaven
On the B MT
FortheB MT
Will be emp TEE...
but at least in my linguistically advanced crowd other verses were composed, the
point of which was that they were pointless.
1-here was no guide to pronunciation, and some of my initial construals have
remained with me. I remember wondering about the chiseled U in HAMMVRABI.
They were all, I realize now, law-givers, prophets, and founders of religions. On the
main building of the nearby Gardens were inscrtbed botanists, some of them
obscure. I kliew foreigners who found it characteristically American to label
buildings in that way, like our preference for written-out road signs instead of the
international symbols, and our invention of the talking T-shirt
�TilE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
76
like glibness, called their "thought." They tended to have three names.
I Intoned another poet, also not of the highest rank, but quieter and
less ornate. Within the Garden there was a particularly pleasant
section that was known until the end of 1941 as Japanese. As part of
the War Effort it was renamed Oriental. It featured an avenue of
flowering cheny trees. I think of It now as having been metrical-which
is to say that the trees were planted equidistantly from one another.
The distances had once ,been measured by the planter and could still
be paced out by the walker. If the rows had been wider apart and
repeated, It would have qualified "san example of the best of all those
groves In which we show our agricultural talents: the orchard. The
orch-yard is a kind of orchestra, and the orchestra was, as you know, the
space where the members of the Greek Chorus danced. When they recited,
the chorus members probably stood apart from one another at equal
Intervals, like the living pillars In Baudelaire's natural temple-articulate
evergreens In a pine-forest, or perhaps columns In a man-made space,
like those, striped In red and white, that support the arches In the Grand
Mosque at Cordoba. Trees and columns and arches: as the language of
art-criticism reminds us, we can look at rhythms as well as hear them.
But when looking we have to keep our eyes open and our heads still.
At the time of my intoning I took the cheny trees In Brooklyn to be
indistinguishable from those that had been the subject, fifty years
earlier, of a famous poem by A. E. Housman. Hot;sman does not
describe his trees; the poem depicts nothing except their color and
something akin to the rhythm of their arrangement. 3 The titleless
stanzas come early In the collection named for an anonymous and almost
featureless Shropshire Lad, and meant, I think, to be spoken by one:
[l]
Loveliest of trees, the cheny now
Is hung with bloom along the bough.
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
5
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
9
And since to look at things In bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cheny hung with snow.
3
Housman's poem is of course very much better than what at the time was the
world's most famous poem about trees, which happens to be in the same meter and
to have the same rhyme-scheme as Housman's, and also starts out with the notion
of loveliness, but goes on to say too much about its tree, for each image contradicts
the others. Some of the worst poems in our language have been inspired by dendrophilia.
I knew the song-setting ofJoyce Kihner's 'Trees," often sung at our piano. I therefore set
Housman's poem to music, without knowing that other poetic and musical teenagers
had also done so. My setting was for tenor and piano.
�ZUCKERMAN
77
Housman devoted most of his scholarly life to producing an edition
in five volumes ofManilius, a Latin author who has never made it into
a list of Great Books. In spite oflong years of careful and presumably
brilliant emendation, Housman described his subject as "a facile and
frivolous poet, the mightiest facet of whose genius was an eminent
aptitude for doing sums in verse." The middle stanza of the poem
before us could easily represent Housman's bid for the same distinction in English. 4 Soon we shall look at the prosody of that stanza.
Meanwhile, I do hope that the meaning of it does not have to be
explained. Just in case the first couplet of the stanza presents a
difficulty, the second couplet says the same things again. The poem
used to be set as a high-school test of reading comprehension. The
question about the middle stanza was "How old is the poet?"
Before we look at metrical details, I should say that I find that the
only question of semantic interpretation lies in the fmal word of the
poem, and even there I may be seeking out ambiguity. Do we take
"snow" as an easy figure for the stuff of white blossoms, or does it refer
literally to snow? When reading the poem aloud I had to choose
between these interpretations-! chose the first-for they require
different patterns of intonation for the final line, and it is impossible
to straddle them. Here are the two interpretations:
(1) Premise: The cherries are in bloom. Second premise:
I have only fifty years left. The conclusion: I'll go look at
them.
(2) Premise: The cherries are in bloom. Second premise:
I have only fifty years left. The conclusion: I'll go look at
the trees in the winter, too.
The second interpretation, with real snow, requires the emphasis on
the final word:
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
But the first interpretation is much the likelier, as well as being the
'1: recently came across a stanza recorded about 1615, probably decades older, in
which Tom o 'Bedlam recites the following madness:
Of thirty bare years have I
twice twenty bin enraged,
& of forty bin
three tymes fi:fteene
in durance soundlie caged ...
The alignment is meant to reflect the view that the verse is a proto-limerick, b,
the third and fourth lines are set as a single third line, the resemblance to Howe
even more stron@y suggests that there is a history of what could be called artthm~.w~.
quatrains in English.
�78
TilE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
less fancy. It Is, in fact, of some Interest that the plainer reading is the
one that takes the ambiguous word .figuratively. But it Is hard to work
up much more Interest in that final word, largely because both
Interpretations rest on an assumption that is psychologically unlikely.
I wonder how many twenty-year-olds who .are expecting a normal
life-span are likely to be seriously worried that they don't have all that
many years left for looking. It is granted that most of the lads in
Housman's Shropshire <tre destined to die young. But in the case of
the cherry-tree watcher I fail to find room for irony in his confidence
that he will enjoy a full sevenf¥ years. If I am missing something
Important about the poem, I hope someone will set me straight, for
the poem ought to mean more than I have mentioned. Not only did the
poet place it second In his collection, but it has since been included
In any number of anthologies.
Meanwhile, if it is only the end of the poem that provides any
ambiguity of meaning, It Is interesting that It is also only there that
the poem reaches-or succumbs to---<:omplete metrical regularity.
Only there do both rhyming lines have four full iambs:
v/c'lv
tv;
About the wo6dlands I will go
T6 se/ th~' ch/nj htkg vXth sn6w.
The entire third stanza would be perfectly regular if it weren't for the
line that begins with the word "fifty," lacking an opening upbeat:
Xnd s{nce t!5'Jo6k !it th{ngs \h b!oo"m
/.v/vlv/
Fifty sprmgs are little room ...
We do leave a little room for that missing upbeat, of course. It Is one
of the truths about rhythm that we can't utter a downbeat without a
preceding upbeat, just as we can't exhale without inhaling first. 5 Still,
It does matter a little whether or not the upbeat Is actually sounded.
That It Is not sounded here places emphasis on the word "fifty," just
as, at the same place in the second stanza, the word "twenty" Is
emphasized. Our other number, "seventy," on the other hand, acquires its distinction from the extra syllable that must unobtrusively
be slipped In, "seven" being our only disyllabic digit. If there is
undeniably a music of numbers. there is also a music of the names of
numbers. Making poetic capital of the equation Twenty plus Fifty
5
1 have eschewed the terms "arsis" and "thesis," which have hopelessly exchanged
meanings at varlous times.
�ZUCKERMAN
79
equals Seventy may rival In Its way the profound judgment, In the
realm of philosophy, that Seven and Five equals Twelve.
What happens at the lines beginning with "twenty" and "fifty" Is not
the same as what happens at the beginning of line five:
Now of my threescore years and ten ...
-I am assuming that "Now" takes an opening stress. But that line
does have Its full quota of '>Yllables. It is just that-as is very often the
case In iambic lines-the' opening iamb (da-dwn) is replaced by a
trochee (da-dum). We are still given the material for saying the iamb
"now of" Any handbook about meter will tell you when an iamb is
replaced by a trochee. What is at the same time never made explicit,
and what I ask you to observe now, Is that the stress remains in the
same place. When one stresses the downbeat of the trochee "now," the
stress occurs right where it would have occurred on the word "of," if
one had chosen to say an iambic "now of"
The lack of clarity in this example Is owing to the fact that one can
also say "now of" or, to put it another way, that the metrical shift Is
not sufficiently clear-cut. When contemplating this weakness, I was
forced back over the rest ofthepoem, and discovered that semantically
the "now" that starts the second stanza uncomfortably repeats the
"now" that ends the first line. Should we suspect the earlier "now" of
being necessary for the salre of the rhyme? And is the second "now"
supposed to be wavering between the temporal and the resumptive?
These doubts serve to show that metrical questions often lead to fresh
questions about content.
In any event, let me switch to another couplet where an opening
iamb has been converted to a trochee, this time unambiguously. Here,
In the same meter (and coincidentally with a similar rhyme) Is a
couplet of Andrew Marvell's:
[2]
My vegetable love should grow
V~stf~ thi:in /mpires and more slow...
We are concerned only with the first halves of the lines. Later we'll
pick up on the secondary stress that amusingly extends the adjective
''vegetable." Right now we are listening to the assertive trochaic
conversion that begins the second line. If the line had opened with the
regular lamb, It could have gone like this:
�80
THE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
[3]
My vegetable love should grow
v I
1\S vast
1.}
as
I
~mplres ...
When ''as VAST' is changed to ''VASTer" we do not lose any syllables,
and to my sense of rhythm the ''VAST"in "VASTer" is In the same place
as the "VAST' In "as VAST." Since this Is one of my main points, I'll
say It still another way: The ''VASr' of ''VASTer" Is still on the
downbeat, and we breathe or think an unspoken upbeat for It, just as
we did In the Housman poem for "fifty" and "twenty." The only
difference between the defective lines and the line with the reversal is
In the number of syllables between the initial downbeat and the next
stress.
It should be helpful to compare all the lines in question. For the
sake of the timing, in each instance I Include the preceding line:
[4]
(a) And since to look at things in bloom
FiftY' sprfugs are little room ...
(b) My vegetable love should grow
V
/
V I
As vast as Empires,
and more slow ...
(c) My vegetable love should grow
)
\)
\]
!
V:l.ster than :gmpires, and more slow...
(d) Fffty'spdngs ...
As v.ist \is tmplres .. .
V~ster thll.n tmplres .. .
(N6w l>'f
rriy threL.)
Marvell's couplet was not chosen at random. Soon afterward in the
poem there are some famous lines that ask to be compared with
Housman's:
[5]
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine Eyes, and on thy Forehead gaze.
Two hundred to adore each Breast:
But thirty thousand to the rest ...
The numbering here is beyond arithmetic; and there is more than
�ZUCKERMAN
81
hyperbole in the unexpected geometric leap.
But we must return once more to the Housman poem, because we
have not yet reached the beginning of it. We started with the final word,
a kind of rhetorical climax, such as it is. But metrically it is the very
opening of the poem that is most memorable. It is, in fact, so arresting
that it sustains the rest of the poem, and carries it right into the
anthologies. Nothing later on matches the musical call-to-attention.
The poem starts out with a metrical conversion of the "vaster than"
or "Now of my" sort. But when we count "loveliest" as trtsyllabic, then
there are not two but three unstressed syllables between the downbeat
and the next stress:
I v v
I
Nowofmythree ...
[6]
L6've-ii'-¥st .\'f tre/s ...
Since the scansion requires that there be only two, we can reduce the
middle syllable to a semivowel:
v
I v
I
[7] LOve-lyest of trees ...
But whether it be a trochee or a dactyl, "loveliest" stands in place of
the lamb asked for by the meter, as the meter might be in the following
line, where I have kept the final sound of "loveliest" but stressed the
syllable:
u
I v
I
[8] Tlie best of trees, the cherry now ...
Move from there to this mis-stressed version-to hear what's happening we must dare to distort:
v
I v
I
[9] Love(l)yest of trees ...
And from there to the correctly stressed but disyllabic
[10]
Lov/(l)y~st &tre/s ...
-which corresponds to "Now of my three", and finally to the poem
Itself:
[ ll] Love-li-est of trees ...
�82
1HE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
Substituting for the standard meter
[12]
ulululul
we have not simply the still usual
[13]
IuuIuIuI
but the remarkable
[141
IuuuIuIuI
Part II
In everything that has been noted so far I have taken for granted
an underlying meter, which was easy to deduce even though the poem
begins Irregularly. Here it is represented on the page-it can be spoken
using "da" for the unstressed and "dum" for the stressed syllables, a
familiar "da-dturi':
[151
uI u I u I uI
ulululul
ulu/u/ul
ulululul
Four lines ofverse with four stresses in each line. Notice that I have
represented the stresses as equidistant on the page-as though
charting an avenue of trees-and suggesting that the soundings of
them should be equidistant In time, Isochronous or Isochronal. I am
representing the meter itself, not any particular rendition of a verse
that is, as we say, In that meter. Even the rendition of the meter in
nonsense-syllables is already a particularization, for those syllables
aren't entirely tuneless. The stresses are the same-though the placement of the short syllables Is not the same-as they are in the couplets
of four-beat nursery rhymes:
[16] One, two, buckle my shoe.
Three, four, knock at the door ...
Or, if you consider those lines not four-beat lines but pairs of two-beat
lines:
[17] Eeny, meeny, miney, mo ... _
Or, If you think we're being Irrelevantly trochaic:
�ZUCKERMAN
83
[18] One, two! One, two! then through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack. ..
Remember that the opening numbers here are meant to be a pair of
iambs, 6 and we're back to Housman's meter. !tis hard to recite nursery
rhymes or comic ballads without showing the isochronality of the
stresses. But the stresses can be spaced similarly evenly in more
solemn verse, even though the performance need not be quite so
Insistent.
Taken alone, without considering the meter of the rest of the poem,
the opening line of Housman's poem could easily be construed as
having five stresses, with an official stress on the third syllable of
"loveliest":
[19] Love-li-est of trees, the cherry now ...
If we provide the line with a sounded opening upbeat, we have a full
and normal iambic pentameter, the staple meter for English poems
that are neither nursery, comic, nor ballad-like:
[20] The loveliest of trees, the cherry now...
In an idle moment I have gone on to stretch the other lines of
Housman's quatrain into pentameter, as in example 21. The expansion of line three-the standing in tears-owes something to the
sadness of Ruth in the Ode to a Nightingale; and in line four I couldn't
help completing for the celibate Housman the tncipient suggestion of
marriage. It Is in anticipation of such desecrations that I chose a
mediocre poem to work on. Yet there really Is no good reason why we
shouldn't perform such experiments on the most sacred passages of
poetry, just as we can profitably tamper with the tunes of Mozart and
Bach, hoping to understand how they work or come closer to spotting
where the mystery lies. Anyway, a well-made melody can easily survive
a temporary dislocation:
[21]
The loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is pendulate with bloom along the bough
And stands In tears about the woodland ride
Wearing a bridle white for Eastertide.
A good deal that Is new emerges simply from the change In meter
Itself. Notice, for example, that with a bit more formality of expression
we would be bordering on the end-stop couplets of the eighteenth
century. Which is to say that now the tendency Is to walt at the end
6
Compare the separate stresses-"one,two,"-in example 16 with the iambic "one·twosn of example 18.
�84
TilE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
of each line-to wait metrically, for what amounts to the beat of a sixth
stress. It is as though the stresses asked to be paired. When there are
four in aline, as in Housman's tetrameter, we can go straight on. When
there are five, the fifth stress expects its silent partner, a sixth. You
may feel that I have exaggerated the defmite counting-out of all this.
But I hope It will at least be granted that each meter has Its own
character.
Partm
That meters have their own character is one of the main points of
this lecture. The other is that once a meter is established, the metrical
stresses in each line have what may be thought of as their established
places. I would like to examine each of these assertions a little further.
For the first, let us return to the established meter of the Housman
poem, which is pictured back in Example 15. But this time, Instead
of expanding into pentameter, let us subtract, starttng with the
omission of the last foot of the even lines:
[22]
uI uI u I uI
ululul
ulululul
ululul
Now we have the most common of ballad meters, most common in
both popular ballads and literary imitations. Housman himself seems
to have preferred this form, a preference not surpristng In a poet who,
when asked about his influences, listed not only the songs of Shakespeare but Heinrich Heine and the Scottish Border Ballads. About this
meter let me call your attention to somethtng so obvious that It Is
seldom registered in the discussion of verse. It Is that we still have the
same lengths-tn musical terms, the same number of measures-as
we had tn the sixteen-foot meter. No doubt there are many ways a
reader or reciter can perform a common ballad. There is one way,
however, that is rhythmically impossible, and that Is to go right on
from the short line to the next without a pause, as in this rendition of
Example 22:
ulululul
u I u I u I (go right on)
ulululul
ululul
There are annoying people who sometimes showup at song fests. After
one phrase of the song seems to them to end, they begin singing the
�85
ZUCKERMAN
next phrase without waiting for the first phrase really to finish, without
waiting the amount of time required by the meter-as though the
musical time was in session only when the tune of the song was
actually being sounded. I think even those people feel compelled to
walt the required foot-length at the end of the second and fourth lines
of the meter In Example 22.
Let's attach the meter to a poem. Though I was tempted by some
rousing ballads-and even by a purple cow-l owe It to you at last to
give you something better. So here's one of the most beautiful lyrics
in the language, Wordsworth on the loss of Lucy:
[23] She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
-Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
.When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and oh,
The difference to me!
It has some kinship with the Housman poem. There is something
that borders on counting, and, although there are two similes, they
are confined to the middle stanza. The last stanza is iroageless, and it
is one sign of its beauty that when speaking it we want to leave a lot
of space. Space and silence are required by the plainness, and by the
combination of exclamation and understatement:
[24]
But she is in her grave-and ohThe difference-to me-
When contemplating the pauses in the poem, one should distinguish
between those that belong to performance and those that are requi]'ed
by the meter. What, for example, allows us to postpone the last foot of
the next-to-last line?-so much so that a listener might mistake it for the
opening of the final line? And what has happened to the second stress
in the final line, the metrtcal stress on the last syllable of the word
"difference"? Where are the stresses In that poigoantly laconic ending?
�86
THE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
For now, let us continue with the subtraction from the original four
times four. This time we'll end every line with a rest, and for the
embodiment In a poem we can return to Housman, who, in a famous
Shropshire lament, has lost not one Lucy but a whole crowd of lads
and maidens, all of them nameless:
[25[
With rue my heart Is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.
As with most ofthe poems that take me back to the Botanic Garden,
it would be morally useful to analyze the factitiousness of the sentiment. How seriously are we to take the difference between the fate of
the boys and the fate of the girls? But in this lecture I only have to
note the metrically Important fact that we still have sixteen feet per
stanza-that now every line carries a rest. One could easily be driven
to some theory about the evenness or dupleness that we seem to
require In ourverse-meters,justas we do in our dances. But whenever
I delve Into that matter, I rediscover the truths that we walk with two
feet, and that two is an even number.
There's not enough time to ring aU the changes of what happens
when we leave off various measures ofthe original quatrain. So far we
have looked only at 4-4-4-4, 4-3-4-3, and 3-3-3-3-but those combinations do underlie most of the great ballad-like poems in the language, whether by Wordsworth, Blake, Emily Dickinson, or one or two
others. But I can't resist listing one more, the fairly unlikely 3-3-4-3:
[26]
u I u I u I (u ll
u I u I u I (u I)
ulululul
u I u I u I (u ll
.;:
Now put that into measures with a triple beat, whether you want to
call the result anapestic (uul) or dactylic (fuu) or related to that foot
known as the amphibrach, a stressed syllable between two unstressed-ulu-which for me always summons up the vigor of
Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony. Here is the new quatrain:
�ZUCKERMAN
~n
87
uluuluulu~l~
u I u u I u u I u (u I ul
uluuluuluulu
u I u u I u u I u (u I u)
We now have a meter in what amounts to six-eighths time-a meter
that tends to be comic. To make it fully so, we'll leave out two shorts
In line three:
[281
uI uuI u uI u
uluuluulu
uluul uluul
uluuluulu
Even though I haven't mentioned a Man from Calcutta or the Countess
Lupescu, I hope you recognize the form, which Is that of the Limerick.
It Is usually laid out on the page like this:
[291
uI u uI uuI u
uluuluulu
uluul
uluul
uluuluulu
But that Is merely a convention to show the rhyme, which could have
remained Internal. There Is really nothing metrically five-like about
the Limerick; as we have just seen, It Is simply a variant of a
fundamental four-times-four, which also hems in most of our favorite
melodies. The same 'scaffolding holds up a poem by Edward Lear, a
· ballad by Jerome Kern, Schiller's Ode to Joy, and Beethoven's Ode to
Joy.
PartN
I promised to return to Marvell's line about his "vegetable love,"
when I said that the meter Informs us that the word "vegetable" has
four syllables with a subsidiary stress on the third. Even If we choose
not to emphasize the secondary stress, the meter still should prevent
a reading of three Isochronous stresses, like this:
[30]
Myv~g(e)table Jo've should grbw...
What's wrong here Is not that there are only three enunciated stresses,
but that they are in the wrong place. They should not be equidistant
�1HE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
88
from one another. but In an Isochronous set of four stresses they
should occupy positions one, three, and four:
[31[
My veget-a-ble love should grow...
1
(2)
3
4
The nature of my assertion will be clearer if we expand to the
ten-syllable line. It Is anyway In the realm of Iambic pentameter that
the controversy usually takes place.
Some years ago an Influential critic of rhetoric and myth wandered
Into the field of prosody and observed that a great many lines of iambic
pentameter have only four enunciated stresses. The observation was,
of course, right. and It happened that he could adduce as examples
the opentng ltnes of the most famous speech In Shakespeare. Here It
is, with that critic's stressing:
[32]
I
I
!
I
To be or not to be: that is the question.
Wh{ther 'tis n6bler in the mfud to su'ffer
I
/
I
I
The shngs and arrows of outrageous fortune ...
In the first ltne one may prefer, for existential reasons, to retain the
metrical stress on the second statement of the infinitlve-''To be or not
to be"-but certainly in the second and third lines there is no spoken
emphasis on "in" and "of." These lines, then, not only have four
stresses each, but those stresses group Into pairs on both sides of a
central unstressed preposition. Let me add to the collection an equally
well-known line of Pope's:
[33]
The proper study of mankind is man.
Although there can be little controversy about how many stresses
there are, there should be greater attention paid to where they are. By
where I do not, of course, mean which syllables, but how those
stressed syUables accord with the stresses of the Wlderlying meter. By
now you should have predicted that I will maintain that the meter
should prevent the performance of four equidistant stresses tn the
pentameter lines. Listen to what I consider the wrong reading of
Example 32-the reading implicitly recommended by the misguided
critic, using four equidistant stresses:
�ZUCKERMAN
89
1
To bt or n6t to be, tM t Is the qu/stion
Whither 'tis n6bier in the mfud to s&'trer
The sJ(ngs and £rrows of outra'geous f6'rtune ...
And even, encouraged by what I hope is an anachronistic pronunciation of the chief word:
The pr6per stt{dy of m£nklnd Is mk..
The stresses should not march as though they were one, two, three,
and four In a four-stressed line, but as though they were at positions
one, two, four, and five of a line that leaves room for the central stress
even when It Is not uttered:
[34[ (a)
To b( or neSt to be (/) that Is the qu(stion.
Whether 'tis n6bler (/) In the rnfnd to stltrer
The srfugs and okrows (/) of outrfgeous fo'rtune ...
(b)
The pr6per stddy (/) of manklhd is mhn.
(c)
I
I
"'
.I
I
The pr6per study of mankind Is man.
The pentameter of Shakespeare and Pope-and Milton and Wordsworth and Keats-normally counts out a single short syllable In each
foot; the meter Is not purely accentual but what is called accentualsyllabic. You will note that reading pentameter lines with four equal
stresses Ignores this fact. Shakespeare and Pope are not Imitating the
meter of Beowulf, nor do they anticipate the sprung rhythms of Gerard
Manley Hopkins.
One final example. This time it is Macbeth, beginning to contemplate the parade of his magnificent despair:
[35]
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...
If you choose to stress only the three tomorrows, there are still,
between each pair of stresses. silences that are as strong as stresses.
Indeed, I hear a certain advantage In articulating all five stresses of
the pentameter:
[36]
Tombrrow kd tomdrrow kd tom6rrow...
�1HE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
90
When properly stressed, the little word "and" can be the most weary
of common words. It can also connect worlds of hopelessness. as lt
does here and (say) at the dead center of Wagner's Tristan.
PartV
In speaking this lecture I have used certain nonsense-syllables
when I wanted to conve:\f the meters without the words that embody
them. I didn't always know in advance what syllables I was going to
use. Recently I have found myself suggesting to the next generation
that some linguists ought to do a study of the syllables people use for
such renditions. And while they are at It, they can do the same for the
related renderings of the motifs of music:
ba-ba-ba-bwn
da-da-dum da-da-dum da-da-dah-dum
La-da-dee-dah-dum-da-dee-dah dee-dun?
Actually there would be at least two branches of that study. one of
vowels, the other of consonants. It Is a rich field, and, so far as I know,
It Is quite untilled. Such studies would Inform us about the nature of
language itself, and about the character of individual languages-not
to mention the tnsight tnto a person's psyche. Is the subject labial or
dental, and what childhood doings determined the preference?
All that the syllables for conveying meter really needed to convey
was stress, and not even degrees of stress but simply whether or not
a syllable is accented. It turns out that the differentiations ofverse are
far simpler than those of prose, where, according to most analyses, we
need four degrees of emphasis In order to convey the significant
contours of syntax and meaning. The merely binary difference between
syllables tn verse-all we need to know is whether the stress Is on or
oJf--can be viewed as representing a selection and stylization of the
more complex elements of ordinary language.
The analogy can be carried through. The poetic foot can be regarded
as a simplified and stylized all-purpose word: each carries only one
main stress, but In the case of the word the placement of that stress
Is harder to specifY. The poetic colon Is comparable In turn to the
phrase, and the poetic line Is the stylized analogue of the sentence.
7These three sets of syllables were sung, respectively, to the opening motif of
Beethoven's Fifth, the opening of Mozart's Fortieth, and the big tune in the second
movement ofTchaikowsky's "Pathetlque."
�ZUCKERMAN
91
And so on to the longer forms, via the stanza of verse and the
paragraph of prose. And tn every comparison the element on the metlical
side is easier to discern and less ambiguous than the prosaic parallel.
More to the point of this lecture, it has been observed that the
stricter isochrony of the stresses of verse is a stylization of the
tendency to equalize the stresses tn our speech. If you have any doubt
of that tendency, then listen to the stress patterns of the responsive
readings in church and SYT~agogue, or at any occasion where a number
of people are asked to recite in chorus not verse but heightened prose.
Or, to take a slightly different turn in this quick comparison ofverse
and heightened prose, consider a formal recitation of this well-known
bit of our prose tradition, which I have suggestively re-aligned:
We hold these truths to be self-evident
That all men are created equal: that
They are endowed by their creator with
Certain unalienable rights; that among these
Are life, and liberty, and the pursuit
Of happiness ...
To get my five and a half lines of rather good blank verse, I may have
had to be a bit Yeatsian in the line containing the "unalienable rights," 8
but otherwise all I did was add a single "and."
If the reading of prose benefits from knowtng the parts of speech
and where the jotnts are, it is a small wonder that the attention to
metlic elements should improve one's performance of verse. Everything artistic seems to me to benefit from having been put into a
roughly suitable Bed that may seem to some to be Procrustean. The
freedom of the dance is derivable from the discipline of rigid and
sometimes awkward exercise. One of the most flexible and emotional
sopranos of our century used the word "straight-jacketing" to describe
the first stage of studying a new role-the phase when she was learntng
exactly what the composer wrote. And we have a wealth of statements
by poets themselves about the importance of the underlying symmetlies--even the underlying monotonies-of verse. T. S. Eliot spoke
famously of the life of verse as a contrast between flux and what he
called Fixity. We can't notice flux without the help of that fixity. And
stnce I have fallen tnto the sententious mode, and wish at least to be
classically sententious, I'll remind you that the river we can't step into
twice is the same river.
But too much attention has been paid this evening to the performer.
&yry thinking a stress on the fifth syllable of "unalienable," and a reversal of the
proper stressing of "among."
·
�92
1HE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
The chief reason for attending to the details of meter should be not
performance but plain knowing. Among performers there may even be
some merit In the common sentiment that attention to the mechanical
might subvert the natural, and that the metronomic can stifle rhythm.
But I believe there is no room at all for that sentiment when It comes to
our more Important business, wWch we engage In not as performers but
as students. As students we leave beWnd the sentimental notion that
dissection means murder, and that "analysis" can kill the "creative." The
attempt to force a phrase Into a pattern, whether It fits or not, is bound
to be revealing. And, as I said earlier, I have yet to find a good poem or
piece of music that doesn't survive such fittings with a newly noticeable
richness. The workable criterion for a poor poem or piece Is that It fails
to withstand the rough treaiment the analysis calls for.
Everything that is rhythmic or melodic or poetic must have an
Ingredient that is rational and logical and subject to some sort of
simple numbering. The word "meter" carries that truth, along with
that other apt word for lines written in feet, the word "numbers" itself.
I recently picked up what turned out to be an Informative book on
the various dances used in the music of Bach. I must say I was
surprised and then puzzled by a sudden caveat in the book's introduction. The authors (there are two of them) say it byway of what they
call" a personal word of advice." I have as much trouble with the word
"personal" there as I have with the advice itself, which is that they
urge their readers "not to Intellectualize rhythm."They go on to explain
that "many problems arise when rhythm is analysed as a thing to be
understood by the mind, rather than as an activity perceived primarily
by the body and only secondarily by the mind." I find myself ballled
by an epistemology that has the so-called body somehow making sense
of tWngs before the so-called mind is brought into play. I am also
annoyed by the easy invocation of the buzz-word "Intellectualize,"
which depends for its pejorative effect upon the just barely justified
foolishness that hovers over the noun "intellectual."
But most of all I am taken aback by the objection that in the course
of analysis "many problems might arise." That analysis should uncover difficulties Is surely something to be welcomed-which is my
way of reminding you that the main reason for lectures given in this
room is to introduce the Question Period. Notice that I called It by what
I believe to be Its proper name: the Question Period, not the Question
andAnswer Period. Perhaps I can re-assert an old tradition by putting
It into a line of iambic pentameter:
It isn't Q and A but just plain Q.
�I
Results of
Crosswords Numbers Five and Six
The winners of the $35 book tokens, redeemable at the St. John's
College Bookstore, Annapolis, are, for #5:
Larry S. Davis, Austin, TX
Peter Norton, Acton, MA
Geoffrey Rommel, Oak Park, IL
for #6:
Nathaniel Cohen, Washington, DC
James Craig, Havre de Grace, MD
Jean Stephens, Annapolis, MD
�94
TIIE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Solution to Crossword Number Five
(' ' [Sins] of Omission' ' )
1
A
2
v
3
A 14 p._
I
L-
Be
0
N E:
y
N
5
v v s
c..
6£
10
9
v y M
N A
11
G
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e
y
15
e
E
13
25f
s
21
20
E
X
M E.
14
R E
A 1 N
R E -r
A
J)
R A
16
19
12
v
23
0
I
R A-
...,-
27
L
E
L
A- M B
D
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18
17
£
R
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22
G
L
I
0
u s
T
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H
24
26
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y
c N
E
£
7
D
Editor's Note:
When I was editing the solution, it seemed to me that one of the
seven deadly sins appeared twice-as AVARICE and as GREED-while
GLUTTONY was omitted. I consulted "Cassandra," who said that
GREED stood for GLUTTONY. I detect the influence of the British usage
of the adjective "greedy."
�CROSSWORD
95
Solution to Crossword Number Six
C'Porcus")
A c.
3
5
4
6
E: L Cl R I R u E
8
9
10
11
7
p 0 R K p {<..
0 v A A I< A
13
12
J) E" R L p A s 0 N
0 N
1£
2H
w
14
16
15
M I N -r M p
17
18
p I:: R A I
0
u E
P- E
)<
24
As L
26
L 0
N NH 0 p
11
J)
22
E p IJ I
25
u
uT
Editor's Note:
Porcus"=Pig
I N
0
~
19
21
20
s -r
N G 6 D I
-r
0
e
s
23
E
y
27
Latin
A R R 0 G A I
1E
�Crossword Number Seven:
"Let's Be Liberal"
By EZRA
The six solutions without clues share a conunon theme. The puzzle
contains three acronynl.s and an unusual spelling at 24A.
ACROSS
1. Cheerleaders have It according to commanding officer and nurses found in
some mills (11)
8.Anclent enemy departs,
fooled (3)
11. Unending worry? Rebound
with a forward direction (5)
13.To the Romans, Jesus was
among their main rivals (4)
14. Place to wash a brass bass
(4)
15.Curt western lawman Is a
descendent of Muhammad
(6)
17.Bug detected in the colic
(abbreviation and word) (5)
18.Do you know what comes
after pro and con? (4)
19. Fixes radios (4)
21.Even stake on outcome of
bout (abbreviation) (3)
22. Gale blows one end to the
other making French equal
(4)
24. Stitch a Ramadan veil for
variant concubines or
Turkish city (5)
26. Bore coffin (4)
27.Giver of oneself and
Wurllixer? (two words) (10)
29. By virtue of being at heart
the same (3)
30. French well operates the
first half of every other year
(4)
31. Oddly, tonite is still explosive (3)
33. It's a nuisance to take a
half-step back and a halfstep forward (4)
34.Author Bagnold returned
to eat (4)
35. Up to the time that they
returned Illuminated (3)
36.Alien switches sides In femInine ending (4)
38. Cyclone's eye is a nuclear
spiral (3)
39.Prude, grief stricken, Imagined with anticipation
(10)
40. Look with desire at dance
turns (4)
41. Profane rancher backing
stadium (5)
43. Vocals are ... are unusual?
(4)
.
45. Family finds rich cloth
without starting south (3)
48. Tsongas' troubled end or
Reagan's last comeback, either one is an unexpected
obstacle (4)
50. Better to marry than to ...
be a Scottish stream? (4)
51. The Aegean coast Is in a
region I adore (5)
53. Wrinkled mother fell back
in pit (6)
54.Eastern religion lacks
quiet: In the beginning was
the word from a division
problem (4)
55.C m tee (4)
56. Poles are a trap (5)
57.Drag back abandoned,
careworn crone (3)
�97
CROSSWORD
II"
or
rr
"
"
II"
w
["
II<'
["
p
pr
11~
p,-
I"'
I"
pr
11~
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,-,-
II"
.
II"
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DOWN
1. Upset dupe with the hollow
stick (5)
2. Foretell WJC era (7)
4. Widespread flare-up of fire
(4)
5. Heard choice word about
mineral (3)
7. Feel splenetic compound of
half sulfur, potassium (4)
8. Final notice: love stung (4)
9. Dull? Trace skull fractures
(10)
lO.Abandoned a Kennedy underneath of sun in Spain
(9)
12. Hope is embraced by the
foremost of willing hearts
(4)
14. In Boston, error makes
copies black (5)
16.Wanderlng players in
street, they are high In Las
Vegas (9)
25. Undisguised pleasure In
contemplating the beautiful but disheveled maid
with soldier's chow (I 0)
26. Early Christian saint suffered pain, bore up (two
words and number) (10)
28. Crank fastener (3)
32. Identify game In which it
becomes you. Just the opposite! (3)
37. Emotional shocks drain energy from destabilized amateurs (6)
39. Quietly transcendental, a
negation (5)
·
42. For example, the last shall
be first In as many generations (4)
44. Without starting up flipped
over (5)
46. Nine Inches missing from
front end of brand-new
ruler (4)
47. In Greece, I bit (4)
49. In re: coast revision - sea
sound out (two words) (2-2)
52. Grp. of physicians wet
nurse (3
Note: A larger version of the Crossword Grid appears on the next page.
�98
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Let's Be Liberal
BY EZRA
I"
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The St. John's Review, 1994/3
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Zuckerman, Elliott
Brann, Eva T. H.
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Sachs, Joe
Stickney, Cary
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Bojaxhi, Gjergji
Sachs, Joe
White, John
Datchev, Radoslav
Hoben, Sandra
EZRA
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Volume XLII, number three of The St. John's Review. Published in 1994.
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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St. John's Review
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