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�Editor:
Leo Raditsa
FROM OUR READERS
ON MARRYING
Managing Editor:
To the Editor the St. John's Review:
Thomas Parran, Jr.
Editorial Assistant:
Susan Lord
Consulting Editors:
David Bolotin
Eva Brann
Curtis A. Wilson
Unsolicited articles, stories, and poems are welcome,
but should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed
envelope in each instance. Reasoned comments are also
welcome.
THESTjOHNSREVIEW (formerly The College) is published by
the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland
21404. Edwin J. Delattre, President, Samuel S. Kutler, Dean.
Published thrice yearly, in the autumn-winter, winter-spring,
and summer. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions:
$12.00 yearly, $24.00 for two years, or $36.00 for three years,
payable in advance. Address all correspondence to The St. John's
Review, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland 21404.
Volume XXXIV
WINTER/SPRING 1983
Number 2
© 1983, St. John's College; "Adam Smith: Political Economy as
Moral Philosophy," © 1983, Gertrude Himmelfarb; "The Media-Shield of the Utopians," © 1983, Rae! jean Isaac and Erich
Isaac; "Benjamin Constant on Ancient and Modern Liberty,"
© 1983 Stephen Holmes. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Cover: Left: Americans advancing for attack on Hindenburg Line, 1918,
superimposed on American flag girl, Cambridge, Mass., 1977,
by Dimitri Fotos (with homage to Delacroix). Right, upper: Joseph
Dzhugashvili, police photographs, 1908; Right, lower: Benjamin Con·
stant, silhouette, 1792.
Composition: Action Camp Co., Inc.
Printing: The John D. Lucas Printing Co.
I find two things fuildamenta11y wrong with Ms. Jenson's essay
"On Marrying" (Autumn/Winter 1982-83).
One is what she has chosen to ignore. While she deplores the
ease and rapidity with which unmarried relationships dissolve,
she has ignored completely the very high divorce rate. Currently,
for every lOO people who marry, 50 are divorced. To acknowl·
edge this fact is to take away the basis for her argument that marriage makes love permanent.
In fact, few things last very long in this age. As a society, we
take for granted the ability to move around at great speeds; we
expect to change careers at least once in our lives; we hold jobs,
on the average, for just two years; and we fully expect the various
cars, computers, telephones, and other machines we use every
day to be outmoded in less than a decade. It shouldn't be surprising to note that our love relationships~ whether married or unmarried-partake of the same speed and impermanence that in·
forms everything else we do.
So there is something very much beside the point about Ms.
Jenson's focus on marriage as the salvation of love and permanence in human relations. I might argue for people to plan never
to marry if they would like to stay together, but it would seem a
little irrelevant. When there are structural problems in the
house, it's foolish to argue over what wallpaper to buy.
The second point is somewhat smaller, but still disturbing. Ms.
Jenson does not acknowledge the desire for long-term relation·
ships between homosexuals. Many gay men and women would
like to be married to their partners, but few religious authorities
will perform such a ceremony, and no legal authorities recognize
it. Does this mean all gay love relationships are doomed to impermanence? I don't believe Ms. Jenson cares less about this significant minority than she does about heterosexuals, but she fails to
mention them or the unique problem they face as people who
might wish to marry, but cannot. If she really believes that marriage is what makes love last, it is strange that she doesn't advocate the availability of marriage for gay men and women.
Successful long-term love relationships I'm familiar with are
the result of the individuals' emotional maturity and strength,
and having nothing to do with whether or not the parties involved have cleared their union with the authorities.
jOAN KOCSIS '78
Jamaica Plain, MA
Kari Jenson replies:
I wrote, precisely, to address Ms. Koscis's "structural prob·
lems." I cannot share the seeming equanimity with which she
lumps "love relationships" together with cars and computers. It
is one thing to expect my telephone to be outdated in five years,
quite another to expect the same of my lover. When we use peo-
�'HESTJOHNSREVIEWWINTERSPRING 1983
3
Adam Smith: Political Economy as Moral Philosophy
Gertrude Himme!farb
15
Ambiguities in Kant's Treatment of Space Arthur Collins
34
Black and White (poem) Elliott Zuckerman
35
The Media-Shield of the Utopians
Rae/ jean Isaac and Erich Isaac
50
Arrival (poem)
51
Benjamin Constant on Ancient and Modern Liberty
Stephen Holmes
64
65
Sixteen Eighteen (poem) Elliott Zuckerman
Elliott Zuckerman
The Holdup at Tiflis on June 26, 1907: the "Exes"
Mark Aldanov
77
Poems
81
Letters on Legitimacy
87
Guglielmo Ferrero and Legitimacy
93
My Memoir of Our Revolution
Rachel Hadas
Guglielmo Ferrero-Gaetano Mosca
Carlo Mongardini
Daniel Ardrey
110
With Orjan at the GreatJapan Exhibition (poem)
Elliott Zuckerman
111
The Division of the West-and Perception Leo F. Raditsa
REVIEW ESSAY
140
On Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth
review essay by Gregory S. jones
Inside front cover:
FROM OUR READERS
On Marrying joan Kocsis
�ple in the same way that we use machines, when we regard others as means towards our gratificatio,il, rather than as ends in
themselves, we are indeed in trouble. I intended to sort out a few
of the problems we have with commitment to another human
being, and to learn both what prevents us from forming such a
commitment and, in part, what breaks the tie once formed.
Our high divorce rate is part of the general problem. For the
same reasons that we are so reluctant to marry in the first place,
marriage itself is no longer seen as irrevocable. (Now when we
marry we make financial plans in case of divorce. Even more
laughably, many of us conveniently change the marriage vows to
specify faithfulness "until love ends," rather than "until death
parts us.") When marriage is not understood as a binding institution, as a promise which means something, it must lose much of
its effect.
Only a fool would claim that marriage automatically makes love
permanent. But marriage provides those conditions essential to
love's growth, and without which love will almost surely die. That
the couple who has decided to make their love permanent must
work constantly, and like crazy, goes without saying. Even if I
divorced my husband tomorrow, it would say little about the truth
of my argument, only that I had failed in practice.
I suspect homosexual relationships are in fact more difficult to
sustain for many reasons-among them, the absence oflegal recognition. Homosexual and heterosexual relationships, however,
strike me as essentially different.
2
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Adam Smith: Political Economy as
Moral Philosophy
Gertrude Himmelfarb
If there was a "chasm" in the history of social thought,
as R. H. Tawney held-a chasm between a moral society
and an immoral one, between one organized on the principle of the common good and another one on the principle
of self-interest-it must surely, one would think, be attributed to Adam Smith. John Ruskin called Smith that "halfbred and half-witted Scotchman," who deliberately perpetrated the blasphemy, "Thou shalt hate the Lord thy God,
damn His laws, and covet thy neighbour's goods." 1 It cannot have been an accident that the publication of Smith's
heretical work coincided with two major revolutions: the
American Revolution which professed to speak in the
name of a new Hscience of politics," and the ulndustrial
Revolution" which created the material conditions for both
the new political science and the new political economy.
This theory invites the obvious demurral, that the
Wealth of Nations was not all that revolutionary, either in
its ideas or in its effects. Even the distinctive terms associated with it antedated it by many years. "Political economy" made its appearance as early as 1615 in Antoyne de
Montchretien's Traictii de l'oeconomie politique. The term
was introduced into England by William Petty later that
century, and received wide currency with the publication,
almost a decade before the Wealth of Nations, of James
Steuart's Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy.
Another French import was ulaissez faire," which goes
back at least to the time of Louis XIV, when a merchant is
reported to have pleaded with the king's minister, Colbert,
Distinguished Professor at the Graduate School of the City University of
New York, Gertrude Himmelfarb has written On Liberty and Liberalism:
The Case oflohn Stuart Mill (1974), Victorian Minds (1968), Darwin and
the Darwinian Revolution (1959) and Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience
and Politics (1952).
The above essay comes from a forthcoming book, The Idea of Poverty:
England in the Early-Industrial Age (Knopf, falll983).
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
"Laissez nous faire." The phrase was later popularized by
the French Physiocrats in their struggle against the highly
regulated economy of the old regime. Petty preferred the
Latin version, Vadere sicut vult. 2 Smith himself used nei-·
ther the French nor the Latin phrase in the Wealth of Nations. Nor, more surprisingly, did Malthus or Ricardo, although the phrase had come into general usage by their
time. It is ironic that this doctrine, which is thought of as
distinctively English, should have retained its French form
and that to this day there should be no satisfactory English
equivalent. (Neither free trade" nor jjindividualism" expresses quite the same idea.)
The "division of labor," which Smith did use frequently-which was, in fact, the keystone of his workwas adopted, complete with the famous pin-factory illustration (and with the same eighteen operations), from the
Encyclopiidie, the latter probably inspired by the account
of the same manufacturing process (this time in twentyfive operations) in Chambers' Cyclopaedia, published almost three decades before the Encyclopiidie and almost
five before the Wealth of Nations. One historian, claiming
Plato as the source of the idea, pointed out that Smith's
library contained three complete sets of the Dialogues. 3
But Smith could as well have come upon the concept in
Thucydides or Aristotle, or in the work of his own friend
Adam Ferguson, whose Essay on the History of Civil Society appeared in 1767. Every manufacturer, Ferguson casually remarked, knew that "the more he can subdivide the
tasks of his workmen, and the more hands he can employ
on separate articles, the more are his expenses diminished,
and his profits increased."4
The question of originality had been anticipated by
Smith himself. In 1755, before the publication of the Theory of Moral Sentiments and long before the Wealth of Nations, he wrote a paper claiming priority for some of the
leading ideas of both works, including the principle (al11
3
�though not the phrase) of laissez faire. This and other of
his ideas, he pointed out, had been. the subject of his lectures in 1750, his last year at the University of Edinburgh,
and in the dozen years (1752-64) during which he occupied the chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of
Glasgow. The lectures had been written out by his clerk in
Edinburgh, and he could "adduce innumerable witnesses,
both from that place and from this, who will ascertain
them sufficiently to be mine."5 If Smith's claim was unduly proprietary (and uncharacteristically immodest), it
had objective merit. While specific ideas in the Wealth of
Nations were not entirely novel, the implications of the
work as a whole were. Walter Bagehot put the matter well
when he said that the doctrine of free trade was indeed "in
the air," but it was not accepted or established; "on the
contrary, it was a tenet against which a respectable parent
would probably caution his son; still it was known as a
tempting heresy and one against which a warning was
needed." 6 What Smith did-and this was his historic
achievement-was to convert a minor heresy into a new
and powerful orthodoxy.*
Another kind of priority raises more serious questions.
Was it the intellectual revolution wrought by the Wealth of
Nations (assuming there was such a revolution) that was
decisive, or the industrial revolution presumably reflected
in that work? What in fact was the relation between the
two? It is interesting that after several decades during
which the expression "industrial revolution" fell into disrepute, it has recently been revived and is now used less
apologetically. The timing has been somewhat changed,
the preferred date today being 1780 rather than 1760,
which was the date assigned it by Arnold Toynbee when
he popularized the term a century ago.B The chronology
points to the problem. According to Smith himself the basic thesis of the Wealth of Nations had been conceived as
early as 1750, which suggests that it anticipated the industrial revolution, at least as that revolution is commonly defined (not, to be sure, the division of labor or factories,
both of which existed at the time). Most economic historians, acutely aware of the chronology of technological and
economic developments, tend to minimize the connection
*Joseph Schumpeter was far harsher in his judgment. The Wealth of Nations, he said, contained not a "single analytic idea, principle, or method
that was entirely new in 1776," nothing that would entitle it to rank with
Newton's Principia or Darwin's Origin as an "intellectual achievement."
Conceding that it was nonetheless a "great performance" deserving of its
success, he then went on to explain that this success was due to Smith's
limitations.
Had he been more brilliant, he would not have been taken so seriously. Had he dug more deeply, had he unearthed more recondite
truth, had he used difficult and ingenious methods, he would not
have been understood. But he had no such ambitions; in fact he disliked whatever went beyond plain common sense. He never moved
above the heads of even the dullest readers . ... And it was Adam
Smith's good fortune that he was thoroughly in sympathy with the
humors of his time. l-Ie advocated the things that were in the offing,
and he made his analysis serve them.7
4
between the industrial revolution and the new political
economy. Intellectual historians, on the other hand, seeking to ground ideas in sOcial and economic history, use
such words as <~insight" and <~foresight" to signify some
kind of connection, however tenuous.9
Whatever the resolution of this debate-whether it was
from <~ideas" or "reality" that Smith drew his inspiration,
whether the Wealth of Nations was primarily prescriptive
or descriptive-the effect of Smith's work was to give
technology and industry a new and decisive role, not only
in the ·economy but in society. The division of labor (if
only the relatively primitive kind found in a pin factory)
became the harbinger of a social revolution as momentous
as anything dreamed of by political reformers and revolutionaries. It is in this sense that the book was genuinely
revolutionary, in creating a political economy that made
the wealth and welfare of the people dependent on a
highly developed, expanding, industrial economy and on a
self-regulating "system of natural liberty."
Perhaps it was because this revolutionary thesis
emerged so naturally in the course of the book, starting
with the homely illustration of the pin factory, that it was
accepted so readily. Some of Smith's friends were afraid
that the book was too formidable to have any immediate
impact. David Hume consoled Smith that while it required too close a reading to become quickly popular,
eventually, by its "depth and solidity and acuteness" as
well as its "curious facts," it would "at last take the public
attention." 10 In fact, in spite of its forbidding appearance
(two large volumes, a total of eleven hundred pages), the
work achieved a considerable measure of popularity, and
sooner than Hume had anticipated. Within a month of its
publication, the publisher reported that sales were better
than might have been expected of a book requiring so
much thought and reflection, qualities, he regrett~d, that
<~do not abound among modern readers." 11 The first edition sold out in six months, a second appeared early in
1778, and three others followed in the dozen years before
Smith's death. It was translated into French, German, Italian, Danish, and Spanish, and received the ultimate mark
of success in the form of a lengthy abridgement. Smith's
first biographer, writing three years after his death, was
pleased to report that Smith had had the satisfaction of
seeing his principles widely accepted during his lifetime
and witnessing their application to the commercial policy
of England.
There were some critics, to be sure: the economist and
agriculturist Arthur Young, who thought the book full of
((poisonous errors," and the Whig leader Charles James
Fox, who said that he had never read it (although he cited
it in a debate in parliament) and claimed not to understand
the subject but was certain that he heartily despised it. 12
But even the radicals offered little serious objection to it,
some (Thomas Paine and Richard Price, for example) actually declaring themselves admirers of Smith. For a short
time after his death, when anti-French feelings ran high,
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�the charge was heard that his teachings were hostile to
government and therefore subversive. Apart from that
brief period, the prevailing attitude was overwhelmingly
favorable, with some of the most prominent men of the
time-Hume, Burke, Gibbon, Pitt, Lansdowne, Northproudly proclaiming themselves his disciples.
The ultimate accolade, the comparison of Smith with
Newton, 13 recalls the reception given to that other latterday Newton, Charles Darwin. Indeed, the Wealth of Nations and the Origin of Species had much in common: Both
were classics in their own time, and for some of the same
reasons. Each had been amply prepared for by the reputation of its author, by the importance he himself attached
to it and the many years he devoted to it, and by tantalizing previews in the form of conversations, letters, and lec-
tures. And each announced itself, by the boldness of its
thesis, its comprehensiveness, and its imposing title, as a
major intellectual event. Whatever questions might be
raised about its originality or validity, its importance and
influence are hardly in dispute. For good or ill, An Inquiry
into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations heralded the beginning of "political economy" as that term
was generally understood at the time-"classical economics" as a later generation was to know it.
The basic themes of the Wealth of Nations are too familiar to need elaboration: the division oflabor making for increased productivity and thus the increased "opulence" of
all of society; the fundamental facts of human natureself-interest (or "self-love") and the "propensity to truck,
barter, and exchange" -which were the generating force
of the economic process; the "invisible hand" (a metaphor
used only once but implied throughout) which made the
individual's interest an instrument for the general good;
and the "system of natural liberty" which was the only certain means to achieve both the wealth of nations and the
welfare of individuals.l 4 The argument was worked out in
great detail under such headings as money, trade, value,
labor, capital, rent.
One subject that did not appear in the chapter titles or
sub-heads was poverty. Yet this was as much a theme of
the book as wealth itself. Indeed, it may be argued that if
the Wealth of Nations was less than novel in its theories of
money, trade, or value, it was genuinely revolutionary in
its view of poverty and its attitude toward the poor.
It was not, however, revolutionary in the sense which is
often supposed: the demoralization of the economy resulting from the doctrine oflaissez faire, the demoralization of
man implied in the image of "economic man," and the de-
moralization of the poor who found themselves at the
mercy of forces over which they had no control-over
which, according to the new political economy, no one
had any cpntroJ.15 This is a common reading of the Wealth
of Nations, but not a just one. For it supposes that Smith's
idea of a market economy was devoid of moral purpose,
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
that his concept of human nature was mechanistic andreductivist, and that his attitude towards the poor was indifferent or callous. Above all it fails to take account of the
fact that Smith was a moral philosopher, by conviction as
well as profession. As the Professor of Moral Philosophy at
the University of Glasgow and the celebrated author of
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he could hardly have
thought it his mission to preside over the dissolution of
moral philosophy.
Published in 1759, The Theory of Moral Sentiments went
through four editions before the Wealth of Nations appeared, and another edition a few years later. Its three
French translations made Smith almost as well known
among the philosophes as Hume was. Today Smith's fame
rests so completely upon the Wealth of Nations one might
be tempted to dismiss the earlier work as just that, an early
work that was overshadowed and superseded by his later,
major work. In his own time, however, his reputation de-
rived at least as much from the earlier book, and this even
after the publication of the Wealth of Nations. (In the
Memoir of Smith written three years after his death, Dugald Steward devoted twenty-six pages, one-third of the
whole, to Moral Sentiments and only seventeen pages to
the Wealth of Nations.) Smith had always planned to revise
Moral Sentiments, and the last year of his life was devoted
entirely to that task. The new edition expanded upon, but
did not substantively alter, the thesis of the original. The
most important change was the addition of a chapter, the
title of which testifies to his abiding concern: "Of the Corruption of Our Moral Sentiments, Which is Occasioned by
this Disposition to Admire the Rich and the Great, and to Despise or Neglect Persons of Poor and Mean Condition." 16
A major theme of controversy among Smith scholars
has been Das Adam Smith-Problem, as a German commentator portentously labelled it-the question of the
congruence of Moral Sentiments with the Wealth of Nations.l7 About the doctrine of Moral Sentiments itself there
is little dispute. The operative word in that book was "sympathy." Sympathy was presumed to be as much a principle
of human nature as self-interest; indeed it informed selfinterest since it was one of the pleasures experienced by
the individual when he contemplated or contributed to
the good of another. "To feel much for others and little for
ourselves, ... to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human
nature; and can alone produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists their
whole grace and propriety." Smith distinguished his idea
of sympathy from Hutcheson's "moral sense," which was
so radically at variance with self-interest that it supposed
virtue to reside in the denial of one's interest and the defiance of one's nature. But Hutcheson's doctrine, Smith ar-
gued, at least had the merit of maintaining a distinction
between virtue and vice, in contrast to the "wholly pernicious," "licentious system" of Mandeville, which made no
such distinction and recognized no motive, no principle of
5
�conduct, other than self-interest.l 8* Unlike Mandeville or
Bentham, Smith was able to credit such sentiments and to
use unapologetically such words as sympathy, beneficence, virtue, humanity, love of others. There were occasions, he insisted, when the interests of the individual had
to make way for the interests of others, and this regardless
of any calculations of utility.
One individual must never prefer himself so much even to
any other individual, as to hurt or injure that other, in order to
in the charges of "impertinent jealousy/' "mean rapacity,"
umean and malignant expedients," "sneaking arts," "interesting sophistry," "interested falsehood."24 One of
Smith's main criticisms of the mercantile system was that
it encouraged merchants and manufacturers to be selfish
and duplicitous.
Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of
the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby
lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They
benefit himself, though the benefit to the one should be
say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are
much greater than the hurt or injury to the other.20
silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains.
The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his
own private interest should be sacrificed to the public interest
of his own particular order or society. He is at all times willing,
too, that the interest of this order or society should be sacrificed to the greater interest of the state or sovereignty, of
which it is only a subordinate part. He should, therefore, be
equa1ly willing that all those inferior interests should be sacrificed to the greater interest of the universe.21
The argument of Moral Sentiments is subtle, complicated, and not without difficulties, but even the barest
statement of it is enough to demonstrate that Smith was
hardly the ruthless individualist or amoralist he is sometimes made out to be. Whatever difficulties there may be
in the reconciliation of Moral Sentiments with the Wealth
of Nations, it is clear enough that Smith intended both as
part of his grand "design", that he had the Wealth of Nations in mind even before he wrote Moral Sentiments, and
that he remained committed to Moral Sentiments, reissuing and revising it long after the Wealth of Nations was
published.22
A close reading of the Wealth of Nations itself suggests
that political economy as Smith understood it was part of a
larger moral philosophy, a new kind of moral economy.
Schumpeter complained that Smith was so steeped in the
tradition of moral philosophy derived from scholasticism
and natural law that he could not conceive of economics
per se, an economics divorced from ethics and politics.2l
The point is well taken, although not necessarily in criticism. The bias and the rhetoric of the moral philosopher
crop up again and again in the Wealth of Nations: in the
condemnation of the "vile maxim," "All for themselves
and nothing for other people"; in the proposition that the
trade of the nation should be conducted on the same principles that govern private affairs; in the denunciations of
manufacturers and merchants who were all too willing to
sacrifice the public interest for their private interests and
were prepared to use any strategem to achieve their ends;
7
*By the same token Smith would have rejected the kind of utilitarianism
espoused by Jeremy Bentham, who said that he could not conceive of a
human being "in whose instance any public interest he can have had, will
not, insofar as it depends upon himself, have been sacrificed to his own
personal interest." In fact, Bentham did conceive of one such human
being-himself, whom he once described as "the most philanthropic of the
philanthropic: philanthropy the end and instrument of his ambition." !9
6
They complain only of those of other people.
The clamour and sophistry of merchants and manufacturers easily persuade them that the private interest of a part,
and of a subordinate part of the society, is the general interest
of the whole.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for
merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise
prices.
The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce
which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to
with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after
having been long and carefully examined, not only with the
most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It
comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly
the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.
It is the industry which is carried on for the benefit of the
rich and powerful, that is principally encouraged by our mercantile system. That which is carried on for the benefit of the
poor and the indigent, is too often, either neglected, or oppressed.25
These attacks on "private interests" that were in conflict with the "public interest," especially with the interests of the "poor and indigent," may seem difficult to reconcile with the famous dictum: "It is not from the
benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that
we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own
interest." 26 But this principle of self-interest was predicated on certain conditions: that the butcher, brewer, and
baker not take unfair advantage of others, that they abide
by the rules of the free market, that they not "conspire,"
"deceive," and "oppress." Under these conditions self-interest was itself a moral principle-not as lofty as altruism,
but, in the mundane affairs of life (the provision of "dinner"), more reliable and effective.
Hovering over these individual interests, ensuring that
they work together for the greater good of the whole, the
Hpublic interest," was the benevolent, ubiquitous uinvisible hand." 27 The "invisible hand" has been much criticized. If only, it has been said, Smith had not introduced
that unfortunate metaphor with its teleological overtones,
if only he had confined himself to the austere language of
mechanics and nature, he would have avoided much misWINTER/SPRING 1983
�understanding. There is some justice in this complaint.
The invisible hand was indeed invisible; the genius of the
system of 11 naturalliberty" was that it required no 11 hand,"
no intervention, direction, or regulatiori to bring about the
general good. But the metaphor served the important purpose of keeping the reader mindful of the purpose of that
system. It was by means of the invisible hand that the individual was led "to promote an end which was no part of his
intention"; "by pursuing his own interest he frequently
promotes that of society more effectually than when he
really intends to promote it." zs Without that metaphor the
weight of the argument might have rested with the individual's interests. The invisible hand shifted the emphasis
to the public interest. If the metaphor was unfortunate, it
was not for the reason that it was teleological; on the contrary, its utility and justification lay in the fact that it
clearly expressed the teleological cast of the argument.
The general interest that emerged from Smith's system
was '1general" in the Rousseauan or Hegelian sense of a
general interest more elevated than the sum of individual
interests-Hegelian perhaps more than Rousseauan, the
"invisible hand" resembling Hegel's "cunning of reason"
which contrived to make the interests and passions of individuals serve a larger purpose of which the individuals
themselves were unaware.* It was also ~~general" in the pe-
destrian, utilitarian sense of the totality of interests of all
the members of society. This second sense pointed to the
importance of the "people" and the "poor" in Smith's theory. The "wealth of nations" of the title referred not to the
nation in the mercantilist sense-the nation-state whose
wealth was a measure of the power it could exercise vis-avis other states-but to the people comprising the nation.
And "people" not in the political sense of those having a
voice and active part in the political process, but in the
social and economic sense, those working and living in so-
ciety, of whom the largest part were the "lower ranks" or
"poor."
The concern with the people emerged early in the book
in the discussion of the division of labor, when it appeared
that the great advantage of that mode of production was
the "universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest
ranks of the people ... , a general plenty [which] diffuses
itself through all the different ranks of the society." 29 Addressing the ucommon complaint" that since luxuries had
become available to the poor they were no longer content
with the humble food, clothing, and lodging that had once
been their lot, Smith put the question: "Is this improve*There is no suggestion that the "cunning of reason," as it appeared in
Hegel's Philosophy of History, was inspired by Smith's "invisible hand."
But Hegel had read Smith (as well as other political economists, including
Say and Ricardo), and there are distinct echoes of Smith's "market place"
in the Philosophy of Right, especially in the concept of "civil society," the
realm intermediate between the individual and the state in which individuals pursue their private interests.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ment in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people
to be regarded as an advantage or as an inconveniency to
the society?" His answer was unequivocal.
Servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds, make
up the far greater part of every great political society. But
what improves the circumstances of the greater part can
never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far
greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but
equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the
whole body of the people, should have such a share of the
produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well
fed, clothed and lodged30
The condition of the poor was decisive, Smith reasoned,
partly by sheer force of numbers; being the largest part of
society, their condition necessarily determined the condition of society as a whole. In part it was a matter of "equity"; as producers of the goods enjoyed by the rest of society, they were entitled to a fair share of those goods. They
also had a special claim to Smith's attention because they
were one of the two orders of society-laborers and landlords-whose interests were "connected with the general
interest of society," in contrast to the third, merchants and
manufacturers, whose interests were often at variance
with it.3I Yet the laborers were at the greatest disadvantage: as consumers they were ill-served by a mercantilist
system that promoted high prices and discouraged imports; and as producers by a system that permitted their
employers, by fair means or foul, to keep wages low and
prices high. The poor, in short, were the chief victims of
the existing system-and would be the chief beneficiaries
of the "natural" system proposed by Smith.
Smith's critique of mercantilism is generally read as an
attack on government regulation and a plea for laissez
faire. But it was much more than that, as contemporaries
were aware. Among other things it WRS a criticism of the
prevailing theory of wages. While Smith was not the first
to question the expediency or desirability of low wages, he
was the first to offer a systematic, comprehensive rationale
for high wages. The consensus at the time was that low
wages were both natural and economically necessary: natural because the poor would not work except out of dire
need, and necessary if the nation were to enjoy a favorable
balance of trade. This was the view of Hume, who explained that in years of scarcity when wages were low, "the
poor labour more, and really live better, than in years of
great plenty, when they indulge themselves in idleness
and riot."3Z Arthur Young put it more succinctly: "Every
one but an idiot knows, that the lower classes must be kept
poor, or they will never be industrious."33 Both admitted
that excessively low wages would provide no incentive to
work. "Two shillings and sixpence a day." Young remarked, "will undoubtedly tempt some to work, who
would not touch a tool for one shilling." 34 But this was an
argument for subsistence wages, not for high wages.
7
�It remained for Smith to defend high wages, the "liberal
reward of labour.''
The liberal reward of labour, as it encourages the propagation so it increases the industry of the common people. The
wages of labour are the encouragement of industry, which,
like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the
encouragement it receives. A plentiful subsistence increases
the bodily strength of the labourer, and the comfortable hope
of bettering his condition, and of ending his days perhaps in
ease and plenty, animates him to exert that strength to the
utmost. Where wages are high, accordingly, we shall always
find the workmen more active, diligent, and expeditious, than
where they are low: in England, for example, than in Scotland; in the neighbourhood of great towns, than in remote
country places.35
Smith granted that some workers, if they earned enough
in four days to keep them for a week, would be tdle the
other days; but these were a minority. Most workers, he
was convinced, were given to the opposite failing: if they
were well paid by the piece they would so overwork them·
selves as to impair their health. It may have been with
Hume in mind (and out of courtesy to his friend that he
did not quote him to this effect) that Smith disputed the
conventional view. "That men in general should work bet·
ter when they are ill fed than when they are well fed, when
they are disheartened than when they are in good spirits,
when they are frequently sick than when they are gener·
ally in good health, seems not very probable." 36
The doctrine of high wages was a corollary of Smith's
conception of a uprogressive" economy. Since high wages
were the result of increasing wealth and at the same time
the cause of increasing population, only in an expanding
economy, where the demand for labor kept abreast of the
supply, could real wages remain high. "It is in the progres·
sive state, while the society is advancing to the further ac·
quisition, rather than when it has acquired its full complement of riches, that the condition of the labouring poor, of
the great body of the people, seems to be the happiest and
the most comfortable." In a "stationary" state, on the
other hand, the condition of the poor was "dull" and
"hard," and in a a declining" state it was "miserable" and
"melancholy."l7 The division of labor was crucial for the
same reason, because it made for greater productivity and
thus for an expanding, progressive economy where in~
creased wealth could extend to the "lowest ranks of the
people." 38
The idea of a progressive economy places Smith in the
ranks of the "optimists." It may also be his chief claim to
originality. Unlike previous economists for whom one
good could be purchased only at the expense of anotherthe national interest at the expense of individual interests,
agriculture at the expense of industry, the power of the
nation at the expense of the liberty of its citizens, the pro·
8
ductivity of labor at the expense of the happiness of the
laborer-Smith envisioned an economy in which most
goods and interests were compatible and complementary.
Free trade would enhance both freedom and wealth; htgh
wages would ensure productivity and well-being; the self·
interest of the individual would promote, however unw1t·
tingly, the public interest. It was a prescription for a liber·
ating, expanding, prospering, progressive economy m
which all the legitimate values and interests of society sup·
ported and reenforced each other: liberty and prosperity,
the individual and society, industry and agnculture, capi·
tal and labor, wealth and well-being.
This optimistic view of the economy presupposed an
optimistic view of human nature. It is the French philo·
sophes who are usually credited with such a view. But theu
optimism, based upon the potentiality ~nd potency of rea·
son, was not a conspicuously democratic doctnne, at least
not at a time when the mass of the people were unedu·
cated and illiterate. Because reason was so precious, and
because the ordinary people were presumed to be not yet
capable of exercising the degree of reason required for a
truly rational order, most of the philosophes looked to en·
lightened rulers, "benevolent despots," to do for society
what the people could not do for themselves..
.
To Smith (and the Scottish Enlightenment m general) It
was not reason that defined human nature so much as m~
terests, passions, sentiments, sympathies. These were
qualities shared by all people, not in some remote future
but in the present. No enlightened despot was reqmred to
activate those interests, no Benthamite legislator to bring
about a harmony of interests. All that was necessary was to
free people-all people, in all ranks and callings-:--so that
they could act on their interests. From these md1~1dually
motivated freely inspired achons, the general mterest
would ern'erge without any intervention, regulation, or
coercion.
In a sense Smith's was a more modest-"lower," one
might say-view of human nature, and by that token a
more democratic one. If people differed, as they patently
did it was not because of any innate differences but be·
ca~se the qualities common to all had been developed in
them in different degrees. On the nature-nurture tssue, as
we now know it, Smith was unequivocally on the nurture
side.
The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the. very different
genius which appears to disting~ish !llen of different professions when grown up to matunty, IS not upon many occasions' so much the cause, as the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters,
between a philosopher and a common street porter, for exa~
ple, seems to ~rise not so much from natu:e, as fro~ hab~t,
custom, and education . ... By nature a philosopher IS not m
genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as
a mastiff is from a greyhound. 39
WINTER/ SPRING 1983
�The idea that differences were less the "cause" than the
"effect" of the division of labor radically differentiates
Smith from other philosophers-Plato, most notablywho had used the concept of the division of labor. While
some of Smith's illustrations and "stages of historyn were
reminiscent of Plato, the heart of his thesis could not have
been more dissimilar. Indeed, given Smith's respect for
classical philosophy, and for Plato especially, one may take
his spirited denial of any difference in "nature" between
the philosopher and the street porter as an implicit rebuke
to Plato. To Plato natural differences were precisely the
"cause" rather than the "effect" of the division of labor:
the division of labor reflected the innate differences
among people, and permitted people of essentially different natures to cooperate for the common good. The only
innate quality mentioned by Smith, and the only one necessary to his system, was the jjpropensity to truck, barter,
and exchange." 40 This propensity was shared by porter
and philosopher alike; it was the common denominator
that made it possible for everyone to participate in the division of labor and for everyone to profit from that division. It was also the common denominator that united the
highest and lowest ranks in a single human species, a species in which the varieties were not half so different as
mastiff and greyhound.
Just as the differences among individuals were functional rather than organic, so the differences among the
orders of society were functional rather than hierarchic.
Those three orders were defined by the nature of their income-rent, wages, and profits-not by their position in a
hierarchy-upper, middle, and lower. In fact wage-earners, or laborers, constituted the "second order." 41 Else~
where Smith did use the terms current at the time, "lower
ranks" or "lower classes," to describe the laborers. What
was important about them, however, was not that they
were of the lower classes but that they received their income in the form of wages rather than rent or profit. In
this respect the laborer was a partner in the economic enterprise, the most important partner, Smith sometimes
gave the impression, since it was his labor that was the
source of value. And labor, like rent and profit, was a "patrimony," a form of property entitled to the same consideration as any other kind of property.
The patrimony which every man has in his own labour, as it
is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the
most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies
in the strength and dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him
from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner
he thinks proper without injury to his neighbour is a plain
violation of this most sacred property.42
There was, however, one point at which this optimistic
vision failed Smith, failed him so seriously, in the opinion
of some recent commentators, as to make him a prophet of
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
doom, a critic of capitalism on the order of Marx-indeed
a precursor of Marx in exposing that fatal flaw of capitalism, the "alienation" of the working class.43
If Smith did anticipate something like Marx's theory of
alienation, as Marx himself intimated, it must also be said
that he avoided the ambiguity that appeared in Marx's
own discussion of that subject as well as in recent Marxist
thought.44 For Smith clearly located the source of alienation (if it may be called that) not in capitalism as such but
in industrialism, and more specifically in the division oflabor that was the peculiar character and the special
strength of modern industry. The poignancy of Smith's argument comes from the paradox that the division oflabor,
which provided the momentum for the progressive economy that was the only hope for the laboring classes, was
also the probable cause of the mental, spiritual, even physical deterioration of those classes.
In the progress of the division oflabour, the employment of
the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is of the
great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very
simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by
their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is
spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the ef-
fects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the
same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the
habit of such exertions, and generally becomes as stupid and
ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The
torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any general, noble, or tender sentiments, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even
of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his
country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally
corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with
abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a
soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders
him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance, in any other employment than that to which he has
been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in
this manner, to be acquired at the expence of his intellectual,
social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor,
that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it. 45
This passage is sufficiently powerful in itself, and sufficiently problematic in the context of Smith's work, to
stand on its own without being assimilated to the Marxist
idea of alienation and without taking on all the difficulties
associated with that idea. There were, one might argue,
two different Marxist ideas: that of the "early Marx,"
where alienation arose in the earliest stages of society as a
9
�result of the separation from physical nature and the division of labor in the family; and that of the "mature Marx,"
where it was attributed to the worker's divorce from the
ownership of the means of production and from the products of his own labour. Neither of these ideas corresponds
to Smith's. For Smith the question of ownership was as
irrelevant as the question of nature or the family. His only
concern was the debilitating effect of the division of labor
in the industrial process. In this respect the factory worker
in a socialist regime~ or in any other form of cooperative or
public enterprise, would suffer just as grievously as the factory worker under capitalism.
That Smith held industrialism rather than capitalism at
fault is apparent from the only other passage in the Wealth
ofNations bearing upon this subject. Here Smith compared
the industrial worker with the agricultural laborer, to the
disadvantage of the former. Husbandry, he argued, required a greater degree of knowledge and experience, judgment and discretion than most industrial trades. The ordi.
nary ploughman might be deficient in the arts of "social
intercourse," his voice and language uncouth by the standards of the townsman, but his "understanding," sharpened by the variety of tasks which he had to perform, was
superior to the mechanic occupied with one or two simple
operations. "How much," Smith concluded,
14
the lower
ranks of people in the country are really superior to those of
the town, is well known to every man whom either business
or curiosity has led to converse much with both."46
If the problem was not alienation in the Marxist sense, it
was in its own terms serious enough, serious not only for
Smith himself, who wrote of it with great passion, but for
the reader who may find it a grave flaw in the argument of
the Wealth of Nations. How can one reconcile this dismal
portrait of the industrial worker reduced to a state of tor-
These discordant images are not reconcilable. What can
be said, however, is that the dominant image, that which
informs by far the largest part of the book and which bears
the largest weight of the argument, is the "optimistic"
one: the image of an active, intelligent, industrious worker,
receiving good wages, constantly bettering himself, and
sharing in the ~~universal opulence" created by the division
of labor and the expansion of industry. It was this scenario
that impressed itself on Smith's readers in his own time
and for generations afterwards. Although Marx, in Capital,
quoted the passage describing the worker stupefied by the
division oflabor, it was not until the "early Marx" and the
idea of alienation came into fashion after World War II
that this passage became the subject of serious attention
and that the vision of
~~another"
Smith, a "pessimistic"
Smith began to emerge.*
It is also important to recall the context in which Smith
praised the farm laborer at the expense of the industrial
worker. The first passage appeared in the midst of his denunciation of the scheming merchants and manufacturers
who "seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against
the public." It was then that Smith put in a good word for
the agricultural classes-laborers as well as farmers-who
were not in the habit of conspiring together and who deserved to be defended against those "very contemptible
authors" who spoke of them so contemptuously.5 2 The
second passage appeared towards the end of the work in a
discussion of the functions of government. Of all these
functions-defense, justice, public works, the support of
the sovereign-the subject to which Smith devoted far the
most space was education. After a lengthy account of the
por, stupidity, and ignorance, lacking in judgment, initiative, courage, or any "intellectual, social, and martial vir-
tues" -all this because of the division oflabor-with the
earlier image of the "hearty," "cheerful" worker who, as a
result of the same division of labor, received a "plentiful
subsistence," enjoyed "bodily strength," was "active, dili-
gent, and expeditious," and looked forward to the "comfortable hope of bettering his condition" and ending his
days in ease and plenty"?47 How can one reconcile the
favorable view of the agricultural laborer, who acquired
"judgment and discretion" because he had to deal with so
many different tasks, with an earlier image of the same laborer who, precisely because he went from one activity to
another, developed the habit of "sauntering," became "in11
dolent," "careless," "slouthful and lazy," incapable of any
vigorous application even on the most pressing occasions"? In that earlier passage Smith contrasted the dilatory farm laborer to the factory boy whose task was the
opening and shutting of a valve, and who was inspired, by
boredom itself, to invent a labor-saving device which was
"one of the greatest improvements" made on the steamengine.48
10
*The two Smiths appear most dramatically in the work of Robert
Heilbroner. His influential history of economic thought, The Worldly Philosophers (1953), presented the conventional optimistic Smith. His recent
work introduces a "deeply pessimistic" Smith, this based not only on the
so-called "alienation" passage, which Heilbroner now emphasizes to the
point where it seems to dominate the Wealth of Nations, but on a reinterpretation of Smith's economic theory. So far from positing a "progressive," expanding economy, Smith is seen as predicting decline and decay:
"material decline awaiting at the terminus of the economic journey,
moral decay suffered by society in the course of its journeying."49 This
argument depends on ascribing to Smith something like a Malthusian
theory, in which higher wages lead to an increase of population, an eventual decline of wages, and thus a stagnant and "stationary" economy. But
Smith had anticipated this argument and had refuted it, at least for the
foreseeable future. So long, he reasoned, as the division of labor continued (the division of labor serving as a metaphor for the process of mechanization and invention), the economy would be able to absorb the higher
wages and remain in a progressive, expanding state.50
When John Stuart Mill, almost three-quarters of a century later, argued
for the desirability as well as the inevitability of a "stationary state," it was
under the influence of Malthus and Ricardo rather than Smith, and on
moral and esthetic as well as economic grounds. Finding competitiveness
and material acquisitiveness disagreeable, he preferred a society in
which, "while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer."51
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�history of educational institutions, he posed the question
of the state's role in education. Should, the "public" -the
Hstate, 11 in the marginal notes-pay attention to the
"edu~
cation of the people," and if so, how should this be done
for the "different orders of the people"? It was at this
point that Smith inserted the dramatic warning about the
dire effects of the division of labor. And it was to forestall
those effects, to prevent the "corruption and degeneracy"
of the laboring people, that he then went on to develop an
elaborate scheme of public education.53
The proposal was simple and bold. The "common peo·
pie," including those "bred to the lowest occupation,"
were to be required to master the essential ingredients of
education-reading, writing, and arithmetic. To this end
the state was to establish a school in every district, charg·
ing a fee so modest that even the common laborer could
afford it, the major cost being borne by the government.
Although the schools themselves would not be compul·
sory, some form of schooling would be. To enforce this
provision, Smith suggested that an examination in the
"three R' s" be required before anyone could enter a guild
or set up in a trade. 54
In one sense the proposal was not remarkable. Smith
was simply drawing upon the experience of Scotland
where the parish schools had taught, as he said, "almost
the whole common people" to read and a great proportion
of them to write and reckon.55 In another sense, however,
it was extraordinary, not only because he proposed to ex·
tend to England a state system of education that had never
existed there and that was bound to incur (as it did even a
century later) a great deal of hostility, but because it went
against the grain of his own doctrine. Having spent the bet·
ter part of two volumes arguing against government regula·
tion, he now advanced a scheme requiring a greater mea~
sure of government involvement than anything that had
ever existed before. In the same chapter in which
he made this proposal he criticized the principle of en·
dowments for schools and colleges on the ground that
they gave the institutions an assured income and relieved
them from the necessity of proving their merit; for the
same reason he opposed salaries for university teachers,
preferring fees paid by individual students to individual in·
structors. Yet here, for the "common people," he urged
the establishment of a state-administered, state-supported,
state-enforced system of education with only token fees to
be paid by the parents-enough to give them a stake in the
education of their children but not enough to cover the
cost of education. Perhaps it was to justify this large depar·
ture from his general principle that he painted so dramatic
a picture of the industrial worker whose degeneracy could
only be arrested by a compulsory system of education.
Having made out so strong a case for public education,
Smith went on to extol the virtues of education as such.
"A man without the proper use of the intellectual faculties
of a man, is, if possible, more contemptible than even a
coward, and seems to be mutilated and deformed in a still
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
more essential part of the character of human nature."
Even if the state were to derive no practical benefit from
the education of the lower orders, that education would
still warrant its active concern. In fact the state would ben·
efit from it indirectly: a better instructed people were less
inclined to the disorders that came from "delusions of en·
thusiasm and superstition"; they were more likely to be
"decent and orderly"; feeling "respectable" themselves,
they would be respected by others and be respectful of
others; they would not be easily taken in by "faction and
sedition"; and in a free country, where it was important
that the government have the "favourable judgment" of
the people, it was also important that the people should
not judge the government "rashly or capriciously."56
One commentator has described this view of education
as an "unformulated theory of 'social contro\."'57 If this is
so, any idea of education which is more than purely vocational, which attributes to it any effect on character, sensibility, intelligence, and behavior, falls under the same re·
proach. Moreover, any alternative would be similarly suspect. What kind of education could Smith have pro·
posed which would not have been an instrument of social
control? Had he taken the obvious laissez faire position of
denying to the state any role in education (as his contemporary Frederick Eden, for example, did) would this not
have exposed him to the charge of being unconcerned
with the plight of the lower classes, unwilling to exert himself (and the state) in an effort to improve their condition,
perhaps deliberately keeping them in a state of ignorance
so that they would remain docile and subservient? Or if he
had recommended the kind of education Hannah More favored, reading, but not writing or arithmetic, on the assumption that reading alone was necessary to inculcate
the precepts of religion and the "habits of industry and virtue," was this, too, not an obvious exercise of social con·
troJ?58 And all the voluntary schools of the time-charity
schools, Sunday schools, night schools, industry schools,
schools connected with workhouses and poorhouseswhich provided the rudiments of literacy for large numbers of people who would otherwise have been totally illit·
erate, were these reprehensible for the same reason, or
were they in any way preferable to Smith's plan?
It might be said that it is not Smith's proposal for a comprehensive, state-supported system of education that is
suspect, but the specific moral purpose he attached to it,
this being all the more ominous in view of the role of the
state. Or perhaps the objection is not so much to the exercise of "social control" as to the violation of the "indigenous" culture of the poor, the imposition upon them of
alien "middle-class values." Again, this is to ignore the contemporary context. Smith was not arguing against latter·
day romantics who idealize illiteracy as part of a natural,
superior, folk culture. He was arguing, at least implicitly,
against those of his contemporaries who denied to the
poor the capacity and opportunity to achieve those "middle-class values," who thought that no amount of educa-
11
�tion could civilize, socialize, and moralize them, or who
worried that an educated populace would be restless, demanding, discontent. When Smith urged that the poor be
educated so that they would become better citizens, better
workers, and better human beings, he was not demeaning
the poor but crediting them with the virtues ("values," in
modern parlance) he himself held in such high esteem.
In a brilliant commentary on Smith, Joseph Cropsey has
argued that the dual purpose of his political economy was
to make freedom possible and to make of freedom a form
of virtue. 59 This was also, one might say, the purpose of his
system of education. Just as the laborer, by dint of his labor, was to be a free and full participant in the economy, so
by dint of his education, he was to be a free and full participant in society. For Smith freedom was itself a virtue and
the precondition of all other virtues. It was this cardinal
virtue that he wanted to make available to the "common
people," even to those "bred to the lowest occupation."
If Smith's political economy was not the amoral, asocial
doctrine it has sometimes been made out to be, neither
was it as dogmatically, rigorously laissez faire as had been
thought. 60 His plan of education was only one of several
instances in which he departed from the strict construction of laissez faire, and not unwittingly but deliberately.
He did so when he proposed a law to limit the freedom of
bankers to issue notes, and when he advocated retaining
the law against usury. He also did so when he implicitly
sanctioned the poor laws.
Smith's position on the poor laws has been generally ignored or misunderstood. Because he was so forthright in
criticizing the Act of Settlement of 1662, it is sometimes
assumed that he was also opposed to the poor laws.61 It is
significant, however, that while he did attack the Settlement Act (and the Statute of Apprentices as well), he did
not attack the poor laws. Moreover, his criticism of the
Settlement Act had nothing to do with the giving of relief
but only with limiting the mobility of labor and violating
the liberty of the poor.
To remove a man who has committed no misdemeanour
from the parish where he chooses to reside, is an evident violation of natural liberty and justice . ... There is scarce a poor
man in England of forty years of age, I will venture to say, who
has not in some part of his life felt himself most cruelly oppressed by this i1l-contrived law of settlements.62
This passage was much quoted (and disputed) at the time,
and Smith was credited with helping bring about the reform of the laws of settlement in 1795. What Smith conspicuously did not do was to challenge the poor law itself,
the obligation to provide relief for those who could not
provide for themselves. Nor was he one of those who, in
the years following the publication of the Wealth of Nations, expressed anxiety about the mounting costs of relief.
He died before the movement to restrict relief reached its
12
peak, but not before Joseph Townsend and others had
raised the alarm and urged the drastic reform, if not the
abolition, of the poor laws.
On the subject of taxation Smith exhibited the same
pragmatic, humane temper and the same concern for the
poor. His first principle was that taxes be levied "in proportion" to the ability to pay; and the corollary was that they
be levied only on "luxuries" rather than "necessaries." He
went on to define ~~necessaries" as "not only the commodi-
ties which are indispensably necessary for the support of
life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to
be without" -linen shirts and leather shoes, for example.
In the same spirit he recommended that highway tolls on
"carriages of luxury" (coaches, postchaises) should be
higher than on "carriages of necessary use" (carts, wagons), so that "the indolence and vanity of the rich is made
to contribute in a very easy manner to the relief of the
poor."63 Today, when it is taken for granted that necessity
and luxury are relative terms, Smith's ideas on the subject
may seem unremarkable. In his own time, when many of
his contemporaries were bitterly complaining about the
"luxuries of the poor," and when the low-wage theorists
were using the evidence of such luxuries-and precisely
linen shirts and leather shoes-as an argument against
higher wages, Smith's views were notably progressive.
So, too, were his views on mercantilisin. Among his
other objections to mercantilist regulations was the fact
that they were generally in the interests of the merchants
and manufacturers and against the interests of the workers. Indeed on the few occasions when they were otherwise, he favored retaining them, even at the expense of
the principle of free trade.
Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are
always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is
sometimes otherwise when it is in favour of the masters.64
Thus he disapproved of the regulation of wages-which
established not a minimum but a maximum rate of
wages-and supported the law requiring employers to pay
their workers in money rather than in goods. "This law
(payment in money] is in favour of the workmen; but the
8th of George [the fixing of wages] is in favour of the masters." For the same reasons he protested against the injustice of permitting masters to combine while forbidding
workers to do so. 65
More important than the effect of this or that policy on
the poor was the image of the poor implicit in these policies. These were the "creditable people, even of the lowest
order" who deserved more than the bare necessities of life,
the '(sober and industrious poor" who were the proper
beneficiaries of a proportionate system of taxation, the
"lowest ranks of the people" who would become more, not
less, industrious as a result of high wages and who would
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�benefit, morally and materially, from a progressive economy. That Smith, like most of his countrymen, thought it
just to devise policies that would favor the "sober and industrious poor" rather than the "dissolute and disorderly"
is not surprising. What is more interesting is his confident
assumption that the overwhelming number of the poor
were sober and industrious. It was this assumption that
permitted him to "connect" the interests of the "labouring poor" with the "general interest" of society. And not
only their interests but their natures. It was because the
poor were presumed to have the same virtues and passions
as everyone else, because there were no innate differences
separating them from the other classes, that they were capable of working within the "system of natural liberty"
and profiting from it as much as everyone else. These
"creditable" poor were capable and desirous of bettering
themselves, capable and desirous of exercising the virtues
inherent in human nature, capable and desirous of the liberty that was their right as responsible individuals.66
This is not the doctrine cynically described by Anatole
France: "The law is equal for all; rich and poor alike are
free to sleep under a bridge." Smith did not pretend that
the "formal" equality of the law, even the "natural" equality of the laws of political economy, could be applied to all
indiscriminately. This is why he devised a state system of
education specifically intended for the poor, why he proposed the kinds of taxes he did, why he did not object to
poor relief, why he supported regulations favoring workers, why he based his system on a policy of high wages and
an expanding economy. He did not shrink from the facts
of inequality or deny the need for correctives and palliatives. But neither did he retreat from his basic assumption:
that the poor, as much as the rich, were free, responsible,
moral agents. Later, this ideal of moral responsibility was
to be turned against the poor, used to justify the denial of
poor relief and the opposition to such protective ("paternalistic," as was said pejoratively) measures as factory acts.
To Smith the idea of moral responsibility had quite the
opposite function: to establish the claim of the poor to
higher wages, a higher standard of living, a higher rank in
life-to whatever goods might accrue to them as a result of
a free, expanding economy.
Between the old "moral economy" and Smith's political
economy there was a gulf-a chasm, some would say. The
former depended, at least in principle, on a system of regulations derived from equity, tradition, and law, a system
prescribing fair prices, just wages, customary rights, corporative rules, paternalistic obligations, hierarchical relationships-all of which were intended to produce a structured,
harmonious, stable, secure, organic order. By contrast, the
"system of natural liberty" prided itself on being open,
mobile, changeable, individualistic, with all the risks but
also all the opportunities associated with freedom. The
contrast is to a certain extent artificial, the old moral economy having been much attenuated in the century before
Smith, and the new political economy having its own
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
moral imperatives and constraints. For Smith political
economy was not an end in itself but a means to an end,
that end being the wealth and well-being, moral and material, of the "people," of whom the "laboring poor" were
the largest part. And the poor themselves had a moral status in that economy-not the special moral status they enjoyed in a fixed, hierarchic order, but that which adhered
to them as individuals in a free society sharing a common
human, which is to say, moral, nature.
1. John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of
Great Britain (1876), in Works, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, London 1907, XXVIII, 516,764.
2. On the early history of the expression "laissez faire," see Dugald
Stewart, Biogrdbhical Memoir of Adam Smith, New York 1966 (1st ed.,
1793), 93, n.1; August Oncken, Die Maxime Laissez-faire et laissez-passer,
Bern 1886; Edward R. Kittrell," 'Laissez Faire' in English Classical Economics," Journal of the History of Ideas, 1966, 610-20; Guy Routh, The
Origin of Economic Ideas, New York 1977,44-45.
.
3. Vernard Foley, "The Division of Labor in Plato and Smith," History of
Political Economy, 1974,242. In his edition of the Wealth of Nations London 1904, Edwin Cannan cited Mandeville as the source of the expression (3). But the passage quoted does not contain that phrase, and the
illustration was watch-making rather than pin-making. In this general
sense dozens of other writers might be credited with it.
4. Adam Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Duncan
Forbes, Edinbmgh 1966 (1st ed., 1767), 181.
5. Stewart, 68. In Smith's first year at Glasgow, 1751-52, he was Professor of Logic. His lectures on moral philosophy started in 1752 when he
was transferred to that chair.
6. Walter Bagehot, "Adam Smith as a Person" (1876), Collected Works,
Camb., Mass. 1968, III, 93.
7, Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, ed. Elizabeth Boody
Schumpeter, New York 1974 (Is! ed., 1954),184-86.
8. Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England,
London 1884 (delivered as lectures in 1881). G. N. Clark traces the association of "industrial" and "revolution" to the early 1800s in France and
the phrase itself to the French economist Jer6me-Adolphe Blanqui (not
to be confused with the revolutionist Louis-August Blanqu~ in 1838,
Friedrich Engels in 1845 (Condition of the Working Class in England),
and John Stuart Mill in 1848 (Principles of Political Economy). But it was
Toynbee's work that popularized both the term and the idea. (Clark, The
Idea of the Industrial Revolution, Glasgow 1953).
9. The best summary of this debate is C. P. Kindleberger, "The Historical Background: Adam Smith and the Industrial Revolution," in The Market and the State: Essays in Honor of Adam Smith, ed. Thomas Wilson
and AndrewS. Skinner, Oxf. 1976, 1-25. See the comments on this paper
by Asa Briggs (25-33) and R. M. Hartwell (33-41).
10. Stewart, 52.
II. John Rae, Life of Adam Smith, London 1895, 286.
12. Jacob H. Hollander, "The Founder of a School," in Adam Smith,
1776-1926: Lectures to Commemorate the Sesquicentennial of the Publication of"The Wealth ofNations", New York 1966 (1st ed., 1928), 25; Rae,
Life, 288-90.
13. John Millar in 1786, quoted by Asa Briggs in The Market and the
State, 28.
14. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan, New York 1937, 11-14, 423, 651. The "invisible hand" metaphor also appears in a different context in the Theory of
Moral Sentiments, 7th ed., London 1792 (lst ed., 1759), I, 464.
15. One of the most effective statements of this view is Karl Polanyi, The
Great Transformation, Boston 1957 (lst ed., 1944). A more sophisticated
version has been advanced by E. P. Thompson, who describes the Wealth
of Nations as an "anti-model" rather than a new model, the negation of
the older paternalist model. The new political economy, he argues, was
13
�"disinfested of intrusive moral imperatives" not because Smith and his
colleagues were immoral or unconcerned with the public good, but objectively, regardless of their moral intentions. ("The Moral Economy of
the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present, 1971,
89-90.)
16. Moral Sentiments, I, 146 ff.
17. August Oncken, "Das Adam Smith-Problem," Zeitschrift- fUr So-
zialwissenschaft, 1898. For recent statements and reevaluations of this
problem, see Ralph Anspach, "The Implications of the Theory of Moral
Sentiments for Adam Smith's Economic Thought," History of Political
Economy, 1972; Joseph Cropsey, "Adam Smith and Political Philosophy," in Essays on Adam Smith, ed. Andrew S. Skinner and Thomas
Wilson, Oxf. 1975; D. D. Raphael, "The Impartial Spectator," ibid.;
Thomas Wilson, "Sympathy and Self·Interest," in The Market and the
State; Joseph Cropsey, "The Invisible Hand: Moral and Political Considerations," in Adam Smith and Modem Political Economy, ed. Gerald P.
O'Driscoll, Jr., Ames, Iowa 1979; Richard Teichgraeber III, "Rethinking
Das Adam Smith Problem," Journal of British Studies, 1981.
18. Moral Sentiments. l, 47; ll, 300, 305.
19. Jeremy Bentham, The Handbook of Political Fallacies, ed. Harold A.
Larrabee, New York 1962 (1sted.,l824), p. 230; Works, ed. John Bowring,
London 1838-43, XI, 72.
20. Moral Sentiments, I, 339.
21. Sentiments, II, 115.
22. The "design," as Smith described it in the seventh edition of Moral
Sentiments, included his moral philosophy, political economy, and theory of jurisprudence. (I, vi-vii.)
23. Schumpeter. !41, 182, 185.
24. Wealth of Nations. 388-89. 424, 460, 463, 577.
25. Wealth, 98, 128, 250, 609.
26. Wealth, 14.
27. Wealth, 423.
28. Wealth, 423.
29. Wealth, !!.
30. Wealth, 78-79.
3!. Wealth, 248.
32. A. W. Coats, "Changing Attitudes to Labour in the Mid-Eighteenth
Century," Economic History Review, 1958, 39 (quoting Hume's Political
Discourses of 1752).
33. Arthur Young, The Farmer's Tour through the East of England, Lon·
don l77l,IV, 36!.
34. Young, A Six Month's Tour through the North of England, London
!770, I, 196.
35. Wealth, 8!.
36. Wealth, 82-83.
37. Wealth, 8!.
38. Wealth, ll.
39. Wealth, 15-16.
40. Wealth, !3.
4!. Wealth, 248-49.
42. Wealth, !2!-22.
43. For differing views of this subject, see Nathan Rosenberg, "Adam
Smith on the Division of Labor: Two Views or One?" Economica, 1965;
E. G. West, "The Political Economy of Alienation: Karl Marx and Adam
Smith," OxfordEcon~mic Papers, 1969; Robert L. Heilbroner, "The Paradox of Progress: Decline a'nd Decay in the Wealth of Nations," Journal of
the History ofldeas,1973 (i:eprinted in Essays on Adam Smith, ed. Andrew
S. Skinner and Thomas Wilson, Oxf. 1975); Robert Lamb, "Adam
Smith's Concept of Alienation," Oxford Economic Papers, 1973; E. G.
14
West, "Adam Smith and Alienation: A Rejoinder," ibid., 1975.
44. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Frederick
Engels, rev. Ernest Untermann, New York 1936, 397-98.
45. Wealth, 734.
46. Wealth, 126-27
47. Wealth, 8!.
48. Wealth, 8-9.
49. Heilbroner, "The Paradox of Progress," Journal of the History of
Ideas, 1973, 243.
50. Donald Winch, Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographic
Revision, Camb.1978, 143-44.
51. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, ed.J. M. Robson, Toronto 1965,
II, 754.
52. Wealth,
53. Wealth,
54. Wealth.
55. Wealth.
56. Wealth,
126-28.
734.
736-38.
737.
740.
57. Mark Blaug, "The Economics of Education in English Classical Po·
litical Economy: A Re-Examination," in Essays on Adam Smith, 572.
Blaug does not, however, attach to "social control" the usual invidious
implications.
58. M. G. Jones, The Charity School Movement: A Study of Eighteenth
Century Puritanism in Action, Camb. 1938, 159.
59. Joseph Cropsey, Polity and Economy: An Interpretation of the Princi·
pies of Adam Smith, The Hague 1957; Cropsey, "Adam Smith," in His·
tory of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, Chicago
1963. See also essays cited in footnote 17.
60. The modification of the laissez-faire stereotype goes back at least to
Jacob Viner, "Adam Smith and Laissez-Faire," Journal of Political Economy, 1927. Among the more notable contributions to this revisionist interpretation are: Lionel Robbins, The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy, London 1952; L. R. Sorenson, "Some
Classical Economists, Laissez Faire, and the Factory Acts," Journal
of Economic History, 1952; S. G. Checkland, "The Prescriptions of the
Classical Economists," Economica, 1953; A. W. Coats, "Economic
Thought and Poor Law Policy in the Eighteenth Century," Economic
History Review; Coats, "The Classical Economists and the Labourer," in
Land, Labour and Population, ed. E. L. Jones and G. E. Mingay, London
1967; Coats (ed.), The Classical Economists and Economic Policy, London
1971; Thomas Sowell, Classical Economists Reconsidered, Princeton
1974; Nathan Rosenberg, "Adam Smith and Laissez-Faire Revisited," in
Adam Smith and Modern Political Economy.
61. E.g., Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect, Homewood, Ill.
1968 (1st ed., 1962), p. 51. Blaug's claim that Smith condemned the "Poor
Laws in general'' may rest on Smith's criticisms of trade corporations and
assemblies, in the course of which he also criticized those regulations
which made such assemblies necessary-the regulation, for example,
"which enables those of the same trade to tax themselves in order to pro·
vide for their poor, their sick, their widows and orphans, [which] by giv·
ing them a common interest to manage, renders such assemblies nee·
essary." (Wealth of Nations, 129). But the poor rates were levied by the
parish rather than by trades, and therefore did not come under Smith's
stricture.
62. Wealth, !4!.
63. Wealth, 777. 821. 683.
64. Wealth, !42.
65. Wealth. !42. 66-67.
66. Wealth. 823, 248, 740.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�A.mbiguities in Kant's Treatment of Space
Arthur Collins
One of the sources of persistent obscurity in the philosophy of Kant is the fact that he introduces a double standard for dealing with questions about what there is. In the
Critique of Pure Reason, this appears first in the culminating assertion of the Transcendental Aesthetic: the assertion ofthe "empirical reality and transcendental ideality of
space and time." To say that space and time are empiri~
cally real means that the things that figure in our experience are spatia-temporal things. These are the things
found in the common-sense world of perception and the
things that make up the subject matter of all scientific investigation. All of these empirical realities exist in space
and time. But, to say that space and time are transcendentally ideal means that they do not characterize things as
they are in themselves, as opposed to things as they appear
in our experience. Things apart from our experience and
independent of our mental activities are not spatia-temporal things. Vis-a-vis things as they are in themselves, space
and time are not anything real at all. They are merely ideas.
In the realm of things as they are nothing corresponds to
our ideas of space and time and these realities do not exist
in space and time. "It is solely from the human standpoint
that we can speak of space, of extended things, etc." (A 26,
B 42). Time, " ... in itself, apart from the subject, is nothing" (A 35, B 51).
One may suspect atl:he outset that the device that Kant
introduces here for treating questions about what there is
may be too powerful for any legitimate use. It looks as
though Kant avails himself of a means for having it both
A frequent contributor on the history of philosophy, Arthur Collins
teaches philosophy at the City University of New York. His last discussion of Kant, "Kant's Empiricism," appeared in the July 1979 issue of the
St. John's Review.
Quotations from the Critique of Pure Reason are from the translation of
Norman Kemp Smith; those from Kant's "Inaugural Dissertation" are
from the translation of G. B. Kerferd.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ways at crucial junctures. Faced with the destructive
claims of sceptics and idealists, Kant is a staunch realist.
The objects of perception are real things. They constitute
a causally connected, spatia-temporal system of material
objects which Kant calls "nature" and our knowledge of
these objects is objective knowledge. When he is pursuing
this realism, Kant likes to label entities envisioned by others that fall outside the sphere of possible experience mere
''Hirngespinsf' and uGedankendingen." But when Kant's
thoughts of human morality and freedom seem to be
threatened by this all-too-causal empirical reality, he is prepared to downgrade it, to emphasize that these empirical
0bjects" are only appearances, to reprimand "stubborn
insistence" on their reality (A 537, B 565), and to rest his
conception of man and the human situation on a further reality that underlies and is more fundamental than
appearance.
As a parallel for "the empirical world" of things we can
perceive and study scientifically, Kant uses the expression
"the intelligible world" for the realm of things in themselves. But in the Critique and all later works Kant consistently asserts that we cannot know anything whatever
about the intelligible world-an odd sort of intelligibility!
Before the Critique, in his Inaugural Dissertation, for example, Kant accepted a traditional concept of an intelligible world as opposed to a world of perception and he believed, in the spirit of Plato and the rationalists, that we
could have knowledge of nonsensible reality. In his mature
writing Kant repudiated the claim to know the nonsensible while retaining the designation "intelligible," although
it is only fitting in the context of the earlier view. The single surviving theme from his earlier position is Kant's occasional speculative suggestion that a creature whose intuition (mode of receptivity) is nonsensible might actually
know things in themselves and that God may know things
in themselves without anything like sense experience.
11
15
�Two kinds of reality: empirical and transcendental, risk
generating two systems of truths, one for each reality. Our
complete and permanent ignorance of things in them·
selves, in Kant's thinking, conveniently avoids the possibil·
ity of conflict between these two systems of truths. The
unknowability of transcendental reality "makes room for
faith" in Kant's own words. But in this connection, too,
the duality of the empirical and the transcendental, or
knowable and unknowable reality, seems too convenient
to be legitimate. An unfriendly critic can read Kant's doc·
trine as an admission that the faith that defends "God,
Freedom, and Immortality," operates only by relegating
them to a region where nothing can tend against them
since nothing can be known at all. At the same time, the
seeming robustness of empirical realism also relies on the
utter unknowability of things in themselves in the sense
that, if we could know anything at all about things in them·
selves, we would immediately recognize their ontological
primacy and the derivative and figmentary status of appearances. The veil of appearances seems to be more than
that in Kant's system, one might argue, only because it is
all that we can know.
Should we reject the dual standard of reality, the merely
empirical reality of objects of experience, and the unknowability of things as they are apart from how they appear to
us? Or is there some fundamental truth in Kant's realism
which is not hopelessly undercut by his transcendental
idealism? These questions go to the heart of Kant's system. In trying to answer them, we will find that the concept of space plays a particularly prominent role.
1 Outer Sense and Idealism
Kant's efforts to distinguish his views from the ideas of
earlier thinkers such as Descartes or Hume bring his conception of outer sense to the fore. Kant often relies entirely on the fact that he endorses both inner and outer
receptivity, while the "problematic and dogmatic idealists," as he classifies them, accept inner receptivity but not
outer. In the beginning of the Aesthetic, he defines outer
intuition or outer sense as a capacity "to represent to our~
selves objects as outside us and all without exception in
space" (A 22, B 37). In contrast, in inner intuition, the
mind "intuits itself or its inner state" (A 23, B 37). Here
Kant quite plainly thinks that "outside us," where we locate what is available to outer sense, means outside the
mind, where located things will not be mental things. Inner sense, just as plainly, has only mental things like
thoughts and ideas for its objects.
Kant thinks that the Cartesian ordering of these matters, inherited by the empiricists, involves a reduction of
receptivity to inner sense alone.
They have no expectaton of being able to prove apodeictically the absolute reality of space; for they are confronted by
16
idealism, which teaches that the reality of outer objects does
not allow of strict proof. On the other hand, the reality of the
object of our inner sense (the reality of myself and my state)
is, [they argue,] immediately evident through consciousness.
[A 38, B 55]
Kant goes on to say that the Cartesian-empiricist fails to
note that the object of outer sense in space is just as accessible to us as the object of inner sense.
In his interpretation of the tradition preceding him, Kant
is surely right. For Descartes, spatial reality, the realm of
extended substance, contrasts at the most fundamental
level possible with the realm of mental things. Extension
does not think and the mind is not extended. To this distinction Descartes very definitely adds the view that spatial reality is never given. It is not, as Kant would put it, intuited. In
Descartes' system, space is identical with matter. The existence of a spatial realm is the existence of extended substance. This existence is viewed by Descartes as something
that must be argued for. Descartes never contemplates arguing for the existence of our own conscious states,
thoughts, and ideas. The point of the cogito in this context is
precisely to show the impossibility of thinking of my own
mental states as something for which I could stand in need
of an argument. Stated in terms of "intuition", for Descartes the mental and inner is intuited, while the nonmental, outer, and spatial is not intuited, but is a matter of a
relatively tenuous hypothesis. For Hume, too, "impressions
and ideas," both of which are mental things, are the only
things "really present with the mind" (Treatise, I, ii, 6), while
the existence of extended bodily things is only recognized
with the help of naturally implanted though rationally unsupported beliefs. In the case of Berkeley, the given does
not include anything outside the mind for, indeed, there are
no extra-mental realities at all.
Thus, the Cartesian-empiricist's conception of consciousness is pretty much what Kant calls just inner sense.
Kant gives us a whole mental faculty, namely, outer sense,
beyond any cognitive equipment assigned us by the idealist tradition. The outer in Kant's system is given in intuition just as the inner is given in intuition. And the outer is
not the mental.
_
It is -not surprising that Kant thinks that his acceptance
of outer sense sufficiently distinguishes his view from any
form of idealism. His theory of outer intuition also explains why he is so unconcerned about egocentric and
sceptical problems which inevitably make up the first order of business from the Cartesian viewpoint. These problems will not arise if we find nonmental objects in space
among what is immediately given. In the Cartesian-empiricist tradition, we can say that the problem of outer reality
is the problem of the existence of spatial things to correspond to our ideas of spatial things, ideas which are not
themselves spatial things. "The problem of the external
world" means the world of spatially locatable things all of
which are, unlike any idea, external to the mind. In Kant's
scheme spatial things are given. They are given to outer
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�sense so that the problem of the exte,nal world cannot be
put in the usual way at all. Kant's empirical realism is the
assertion that objects in space are given.
Sometimes Kant calls the opposed vi'ew "empirical idealism." Just as transcendental idealism means that spatial
things are only ideas and nothing real in the sphere of
things as they are in themselves, empirical idealism means
that contents of our conscious experience of spatial things
consist merely in ideas of spatial things and offer nothing
at all in the way of actually existing spatial objects. The
idealist view that objects of experience are nothing real in
space is "problematic" in Hume, in that Hume thinks that
there may be outer objects as well as ideas, and dogmatic
in Berkeley, who thinks that there cannot possibly be outer
objects as well as ideas. In Kant's thinking, we are not limited to a foundation of ideas of spatial things any more
than we are limited to a foundation of ideas of mental
things. Both are present to us as immediately as anything
can be. Naturally, Kant found it hard to accept early criticisms that bracketed his theory with Berkeley's. Berkeley
denies more explicitly than anyone else the immediacy of
spatial things outside the mind, and then he goes on to
deny the existence of spatial things outside the mind.
Upon the least examination, however, Kant's empirical
realism turns out to be a fragile thing. Although outer
sense represents things "as outside us and all without exception in space," Kant says, again and again, throughout
the Critique, that space exists only "in us," that, like time,
space would be nothing apart from the human cognitive
constitution. Spatial appearances exist only "in the faculty
of representations," (A 104) and "all objects with which we
can occupy ourselves, are one and all in me ... " (A 129).
The mind absorbs spatial objects in this prominent Kantian claim. The innerness and mind-dependence of all objects seems to set at nothing the thought that Kant has
distinguished his position from that of the Cartesianempiricist. When we have come a good way into the Critique, to the Paralogisms wherein Kant explains the illusions to which rationalist philosophy of mind is susceptible, he says
The expression "outside us" is unavoidably ambiguous in
meaning, sometimes signifying what as a thing in itself exists
apart from us, and sometimes what belongs solely to outer ex-
perience. [A 373]
The view so clearly put here contradicts the claim that the
theory of outer sense separates Kant's philosophy from all
the forms of idealism that Descartes' account of mind and
perception generates. Kant tells us here that outer appearances do not exist uapart from us." What can this mean if
not that they do not exist outside our minds and thoughts?
The relevant problem that the Cartesian tradition seemed
to face might be put in the question, "Are there spatial
things which exist apart from us, that is, apart from
our thoughts and representations of spatial things?" Of
course, Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume all know that,
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
within our thought, we find ideas of spatial things and that
these ideas differ from ideas of things which are not spatial. In mounting a proof of the existence of extended reality Descartes is responding to the fact that ideas of spatial
things do not exist apart from us, while spatial things, if
any there be, do exist apart from us.
The whole Kantian theory asserting the necessary existence (if experience is to be possible) of causally connected
and enduring empirical objects, the theory secured with
such energy and subtlety in the Analytic half of the Critique, seems to be thrown away here when Kant says that
none of these realities are anything at all outside our own
thinking. This collapse of the pretensions of outer sense
reminds us that Kant sometimes confines his opposition to
idealism to a very different line of thought. This alternative opposition merely stresses that Kant accepts, while
idealists deny or doubt, the existence of things as they are
in themselves in addition to appearances or objects of experience. Arguing in this vein, Kant places no weight at all
on outer sense, as though he realizes that, in his system,
outer sense is simply not outer enough to reach any nonmental realities that may exist apart from us.
In the section of the Critique entitled, "The Ground of
the Distinction of All Objects in General into Phenomena
and Noumena," that is, into appearances and things as
they are in themselves, Kant goes so far as to reduce the
concept of a reality beyond that of appearances to the status of a "merely negative concept" (A 254, B 309). By this
he means that the idea of noumena is simply the idea of
realities that are not known in experience. Since objects of
experience are all the objects of which we can have any
knowledge, noumena, if there are any, are just objects of
which we have no knowledge. Kant goes on to call the very
concept of such further, wholly unknown, realities a
"problematic concept" and a "limiting concept" (A 255,
B 3ll) and he seems to imply that we cannot get quite as
far as the unqualified assertion that there are any such
noumena. The concept of a further kind of being beyond
appearances only clearly marks the end of the realm of objects of whose existence we are sure, namely, the minddependent objects constituting the empirical world. Kant
is saying that we think of mind-dependent realities as appearances of real entities other than themselves but that,
perhaps, there is no other reality, in which case appearances are not really appearances but, instead, they are the
only kinds of things that there are apart from the minds
which intuit these things. Is this not exactly Berkeley's
view? The idea that, for the things immediately present to
the mind, esse is percipi is the idea that we have no right to
think of these things as appearances. Berkeley's ontology
is limited to the ideas present to minds and the minds to
which those ideas are present. If we are forced to interpret
Kant as surrendering the true outerness of appearances in
favor of a counterfeit outerness of space which exists only
in our minds, then his whole metaphysics must appear an
enormous disappointment and all of the famous and diffi-
17
�cult arguments of the first half of the Critique must seem a
waste of effort.
2 Transcendental Aesthetic
In the hope of salvaging as much as possible from this
threatening disappointment let us examine in more detail
the main doctrines of the Transcendental Aesthetic which
I identify as follows: (a) the metaphysical expositions of
space and time, (b) the transcendental expositions, (c) the
view that space and time are forms of outer and inner
sense respectively, and (d) their asserted transcendental
ideality.
The opening section of the Aesthetic is concerned with
the definition of "intuition" (Anschauung) and related
concepts that underlie Kant's controlling distinction between receptivity and spontaneity, that is, between the
functions of intuition and those of understanding and reason. There follow immediately separate and parallel discussions of space and time. In each case a four~point meta~
physical exposition of the concept is supposed to be
followed by a transcendental exposition, but the passages
are marred by Kant's curious failure to adhere to the distinction between these two points of view, even though
the distinction seems to have been invented by him precisely for the purpose of facilitating this very discussion.
The four metaphysical points are that space, or time, is
(1) not an empirical concept, (2) an a priori and necessary
concept, (3) a singular rather than a discursive concept,
and (4) a concept of something infinite.
The expository confusion in both discussions consists in
Kant's inserting the transcendental considerations between the second and third metaphysical points and then
only partially correcting the disorder in passages that follow and in changes in the second edition. The actual reason for this, I believe, is that Kant wants to make the transcendental points in the context of the premises relevant
to them. These premises are the first two metaphysical
points and only those two. In a later passage Kant himself
explains the arrangement saying that he wanted to save
space. But the confused ordering does not save any space
unless Kant means that, with any other organization, he
would have had to restate the needed metaphysical views
in order to connect them with the transcendental exposition which would be separated from them.
In the instances of both space and time, the four metaphysical points are assertions for which no arguments are
given. Perhaps by a metaphysical exposition Kant means
an account that ought to be accessible to any highly intelligent and philosophically mature common sense. He seems
to expect that the statement of the claims will suffice for
their acceptance. This is not entirely unreasonable in that
there is much to be said for the four points.
The first point, considering only space for the moment,
is that space is not an empirical concept. Kant says that the
18
concept of space is presupposed for rather than derived
from experience. To see what Kant has in mind it is useful
to refer to another similar point that Kant often makes
later in the Critique. Unlike ordinary empirical objects,
space is not itself perceived. So space is not a concept like
the concept ocean or box. These are empirical concepts
which we possess because we encounter such things as
oceans and boxes in our perceptual experience. Of course,
space might be an empirical concept, although not an object of perception, if it figured in hypotheses belonging to
an explanatory theory, in the way in which the concept of
a gravitational field figures in theories that explain the perceived motion of objects. Kant's second metaphysical
point rules out this kind of theoretical status for the concept of space. Space is necessary for any outer experience
at all, while theoretical objects are doubly contingent and
never necessary. Theoretical objects are contingent, first,
because the facts which they are introduced to explain are
contingent facts. But theoretical objects have a second
kind of contingency beyond the contingency of the facts
they explain. For theoretical objects may always be repudiated in favor of other theoretical commitments that explain the same facts even better. The status of space is
nothing like this because, according to Kant, there could
not be any facts of outer intuition without space.
Kant expresses the necessity of space saying that we can
think space empty but we cannot think it away. The inhibition on thinking space away is related to the fact that space
is not something we detect by perceiving it or experiencing it. Things that we do detect by perceiving them, things
like oceans and boxes, we can think of as empty (oceans
empty of fish, and boxes empty of apples, respectively) and
we can also think such things away, that is, think a universe without oceans or boxes among its constituents.
Now thinking space empty is simply thinking away all of
the constituents of the outer universe. 'Since space is not
one of these, we have nothing to bring under the heading
of thinking away space itself. There is nothing else that
might disappear from the outer beyond the things that appear in it, and space is not one of these things. Kant reads
the fact that we perceive things in space and that space is
not threatened by disappearance as the necessity of space.
The two other metaphysical points are of less importance to our present interests. That space is not a discur~
sive concept, as the concepts ocean and box are, means
that it is the idea of an individual. There is just one space
in which all outer things are located. The plural "spaces"
indicates only parts of space and not instances of space,
while oceans and boxes are instances, not parts. This is a
very important assertion since it is the foundation of the
unity and uniqueness of the spatia-temporal universe and,
thus, of the connectability in principle of all objects of possible experience. The final claim, the infinity of space, we
can pass over without comment here.
The metaphysical expositions are reflections on the
concepts of space and time which do not depend on any
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�special commitments, nor on any ch')racteristically Kantian critical or transcendental argume.nts. The transcendental expositions, which are loosely derived from the
metaphysical, plunge us at once into specifically Kantian
doctrine as well as into considerable obscurity. From the
nonempirical yet necessary status of space and time, the
transcendental expositions purport to explain how it is
that we possess knowledge in geometry (in the case of
space) and knowledge of a much more vaguely indicated
body of more or less mathematical doctrine (in the case of
time.) The explanation is more implied than stated, and it
makes minimal sense only in the context of views about
necessary truth, mathematics, and experience which are
not themselves discussed in the Aesthetic, although they
have been sketched in the Introduction to the Critique.
The root idea is that no necessary truth can be justified
on a foundation of empirical evidence. Kant takes this to
have been established definitively by Hume. If we learned
about space empirically, as we learn about boxes and
oceans, no knowledge of space could amount to necessary
truth. But knowledge of space is geometry and geometry is
a body of necessary truth. The discussion here in the Aesthetic makes no effort to explain how truths about space
are actually reached but rests content with the general
thought that, since our idea of space is not derived empirically, propositions about the structure of space can also be
expected to be nonempirical. Kant always takes it for
granted that we do possess knowledge in mathematics and
that the mathematical propositions we know are synthetic
(rather than analytic), and necessary (which requires that
they be a priori.) The tenor of Kant's thought is illuminated by a comment he makes on Hume's view that belief
in strictly universal and necessary propositions is not rationally justifiable: "[Hume] ... would never have been
guilty of this statement so destructive of pure philosophy,
for he would have recognized that according to his arguments pure mathematics would also not be possible; and
from such an assertion his good sense would have saved
him" (B 20). Here Kant shows his conviction that we must
find some explanation for necessity in mathematical
knowledge since we do possess such knowledge, and he
also reveals his rather sketchy knowledge of Hume's opinions. For, concerning geometry, Hume did extend his
scepticism to mathematics in the Treatise of Human Nature, and he said that theorems of geometry are only approximations: "As the ultimate standard of these figures is
derived from nothing but the senses and imagination, 'tis
absurd to speak of any perfection beyond what these faculties can judge of; since the true perfection of anything
consists in its conformity to its standard" (I, ii, 4).
The transcendental expositions of space and time constitute an answer early in the Critique to one form of the
great motivating question, ((How is synthetic a priori
knowledge possible?" The answer that explains how synthetic a priori mathematical knowledge is possible is, however, only a sketch or a promise of an answer the full verTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
sion of which depends not only on the thought that space
and time are necessary and a priori concepts but also on
the claim that there are what Kant calls "a priori manifolds" of space and time and "a priori syntheses" of these
manifolds in the course of which the objects of mathematical truths are "constructed," in Kant's terminology.
It is only because space and time are recognizable as
forms of outer and inner sense that Kant is able to assert
their transcendental ideality. For this ideality means that
things as they are in themselves are not spatia-temporal
things. On the surface of it, such a claim contradicts the
general impossibility of knowledge of things as they are in
themselves. In the absence of the identification of space
and time as forms, Kant could at best assert that we do not
know whether or not things as they are in themselves are
characterizable in spatial or temporal terms. The relevance of the formal status of space can be illustrated in
analogies. Imagine an illiterate who learns to read only
telegrams. At one stage he has come to understand that
the words printed on the telegram make up a verbal message received somehow from a distant person. But at this
stage he interprets every word on the form as part of the
message, including, for example, the words "Western
Union." He will have to learn that these words are imposed by the form and are not part of the content. It would
be absurd for this reader to wonder, after learning the status of "Western Union," whether there might be another
"Western Union" which is part of the content of every
message as it is in itself Of course, we might think that
anything might be part of the hidden content of a message. But no part of the content can have just the role and
meaning that the words "Western Union" have on the
telegram blank because that meaning and role contrast
with content by definition.
Such an analogy is imperfect in that "Western Union" is
part of the telegram form on which the matter is organized, but it is not a necessary part, while, according to
Kant, space and time are necessary forms for the organiza-
tion of the matter that we receive in intuition. The essential contrast of form and content is preserved in the analogy. Once we have identified space and time as forms, it is
absurd to suppose that these concepts might also characterize the unknown source of intuitive inputs. Therefore,
this identification of space and time relieves the appearance of contradiction in the assertion that unknowable
things in themselves are not in space and time.
All of this depends on understanding in what sense we
might think of space and time as forms. The word "form",
which is the same in Kant's German discussion, appeals to
the contrast between matter and form that goes back to
Greek thought. Kant says that space is "nothing other
than simply the form of all appearances of outer sense."
The traditional contrast is filled out when Kant identifies
sensation as the matter of such appearances. According to
the traditional distinction, an individual existing thing has
to have both form and matter. Matter cannot exist without
19
�form, that is, without being anything in particular, and
form cannot exist, Platonism apar'\, without being the
form of some matter. Kant's conception of an appearance
conforms, at least superficially, to this pattern. As far as
outer sense is concerned, the matter of an appearance con~
sists of sensible qualities such as color and texture, which
fill formal elements such as surfaces and volumes and so
constitute perceivable objects of some magnitude.
We saw that the pretension of Kant's empirical realism
seems to collapse with the absorbtion of space by the
mind. This absorption, in turn, is clearly traceable to the
claims of the Aesthetic. Space is identified as the form of
outer sense and, furthermore, as a form imposed by us.
This identification "internalizes" space and it is necessary
for the transcendental exposition. This understanding of
space is required for Kant's explanation of our possession
of synthetic a priori knowledge in geometry. Therefore,
space, the imposed form of outer things, cannot be used to
secure the distinction between Kant's views and the ideal·
ists'. We shall now consider the possibility that the matter
of outer sense might play this role.
-
3 The Construction of Spatial Objects
In expressing his opposition to idealism, Kant's appeal
to the accessibility of objects of outer sense is so clear and
emphatic that it is hard to think of it as simply a mistake.
No doubt the force of the Cartesian contrast between the
spatial, extended, and material world and the conscious
unextended mind inclines him to express his thought
about the nonmental outer in terms of spatiality. There is
certainly something wrong with this mode of expression.
Kant, however, did not simply fail to notice that the mind·
imposed status of space is incompatible with the employment of space as the mark of the nonmental existence of
things apart from us. Is it possible that he rests his rejection
of idealism, not on the form of objects of outer sense, but
on their matter; not on space, but on sensation?
The matter of outer appearance is its sensuous aspect.
This is what Kant calls sensation (Empfindung). Sensation
makes up the stuff of which spatial organization is the required form. This statement has to be replaced by a much
more theoretical understanding of sensations and their relationship to perceivable objects. Our receptive faculty
gives sensations a spatial location. But we cannot think of
this receptivity as literally operating on received sensible
qualities. We cannot suppose, for example, that it is a feature of our receptivity to assign a color sensation to a place
because Kant states very clearly that, prior to any synthesizing activity, individual sensations do not have any
ex~
tension at all. Sensible qualities such as color are the sorts
of things of which we can be conscious as the perceivable
features of an object, as the color of a surface, for example.
As such, sensible features themselves are the product of
synthesis, in this case, of a kind of aggregating activity op·
20
erating on unextended sensations which have been located in the same region. Only the resulting aggregate deserves to be described in color language. The unextended
content of a single sensation is located but is not perceivable. This is the claim of the Axioms of Intuition according
to which all objects of experience are extended magnitudes and, therefore, aggregates, the least constituents of
which are not perceivable.
We are treating a major side of Kant's thinking which
has come to be an embarrassment to modern admirers of
Kant. The machinery of the mind, the transcendental psychology, in which Kant tries to depict the actual procedures whereby raw materials are transformed into a world
of experience is a "wholly fictional subject matter," as
P. F. Strawson described it. If anything is acceptable in
this Kantian enterprise it will certainly have to be drastically redescribed in some way that gets away from the idiom of quasimechanical speculation. At the same time,
however little is retained of this account of the mind making nature, no understanding of what is best in Kant's
thought is possible if these speculations are simply ignored. Neglect encourages, in particular, a mistaken interpretation of the terms of Kant's theories which tends to
place them in a spuriously direct relationship to common
sense concepts.
According to Kant, unknown things as they are in themselves affect us and unextended sensations are engendered
as a consequence. In the process our receptive constitu~
tion deploys these sensations in space. The various combinatory powers that Kant ascribes to the human mind under the title of powers of synthesis survey these located
sensations and assemble objects from them. These are perceivable objects and they, rather than their theoretical
constituent sensations, are the first items accessible to
consciousness. There are no objects of consciousness
more primitive than perceivable objects. Many of the important claims of the Analytic come from the idea that any
conscious experience at all, and any self-consciousness, is
conditioned by the completion of this mental construction
of objects of perception. The ultimate constituents for the
construction of objects with perceivable features are sensations, but they do not have perceivable features. The
term "sensation" in eighteenth century philosophical parlance is ordinarily used for qualities apprehended, such as
heat and color. Kant's constituents are called sensations
only in virtue of the extended perceivable things which
have sensible qualities and which are supposed to be made
out of sensations.
This style of thought, prominent throughout the Critique, becomes easier to understand when we see it in the
context of the thought of Leibniz, who exerted a decisive
influence on Kant in just these theories of mental construction. The whole format for the construction of a scientific world of phenomena out of elements of which we
are not conscious is taken over from Leibniz's account of
apperception. Conscious experience results, for Leibniz,
WIN1ER/SPRING 1983
�from the aggregation of innumerable unconscious petites
perceptions. The motion of the sea is perceived as a roar
only because the mind must aggregate the infinite events
which make up the motion of the water, each one of which
is itself silent, and the mind perceives only the aggregate
(confusedly, without distinguishing the constituent events)
as sound. For Leibniz the spatia-temporal character of
things is phenomenal, that is, it reflects not the reality of
the things experienced but the conditions the mind imposes in the process of experiencing anything at all. So underlying realities are unextended but, to be perceived,
they are represented in aggregates that produce the perspectival spatia-temporal subject matter of human experience and knowledge. So for Leibniz, phenomenal reality is
not a valueless illusion. Phenomena be_ne fundata offer a
kind of surrogate for metaphysical reality and truth. As in
Kant, phenomena are the locus of all scientific thought.
The elements wfiich ai-erelated in our best thought do correspond globally to reality although there is no one-to-one
correspondence of appearance and reality. The ambiguous evaluation of phenomenal reality in Kant's system and
the theory of transcendental ideality have their roots in
Leibniz' s thinking.
We have sketched Kant's idea of the construction of empirical objects out of sensations. We are now in a position
to address Kant's idea of the constructions the mind
makes in the pure or a priori manifolds of space and time.
Kant says that "transcendental logic" differs from ordinary
or general logic, in that it has its own subject matter, an a
priori subject matter, to which the basic combinatory
forms of general logic are applied. The a priori manifolds
of space and time make up this self-contained field of application for transcendental logic (A 55, B 79).
The concept of these a priori manifolds can be understood in terms of what we have said about sensation. Kant
says that our receptivity includes a location-assigning procedure which places sensations in space where they are
ready for synthesis into perceivable spatial objects. Pure
space, or the a priori manifold of outer sense, is just the
idea of the system of locations by themselves, without any
sensations assigned to them. Perhaps there is a big difference between a location-assigning system, and a system of
locations to which things can·be assigned. In virtue of the
former Kant speaks of space as the form of outer intuition,
while only in virtue of the latter can he speak of space itself as an intuition, and an a priori intuition at that. Kant
plainly believes that he is entitled to the transition from
the former to the latter, but there is little or no mention of
this issue in the Critique.
Here we should see the Kantian position as an attempt
at a compromise between the conceptions of space defended by Leibniz and by Newton. Newton insisted on an
absolute container space which would exist whether or not
there were any spatial things to be found anywhere in
space. In the Correspondence with Clarke, Leibniz repudiated this on roughly verificationist grounds and he asTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
serted that space is a system of relations between coexistent entities. There would be no space were there to be no
things spatially related. Kant was attracted by the Leibnizean account but he remained convinced that something
like absolute space is conceptually indispensable because
of a curious argument about incongruent counterparts.
Congruent objects are those that have the same shape and
the same dimensions. Two such figures can occupy the
same space. When superimposed they fit each other exactly. Two gloves of a pair are close to congruence but they
cannot occupy the same space because of the left-hand
orientation of the one and the right-hand orientation of
the other. Since the internal spatial relations of the parts
of each glove are the same, it appears that, were Leibniz
right about space, there would be no difference at all between a universe consisting only of a left-hand glove and a
universe consisting of a right-hand glove of the same dimensions. All relations between coexisting things would
be the same in each universe. Kant is intuitively convinced
that Leibniz's theory of space makes it impossible to represent a difference that would be real here. The problem is
solved by the existence of absolute space, since the two
gloves would have different relations to absolute space and
would necessarily fill different regions of it.
In Kant's system, the whole discussion of the status of
space is brought within the domain of appearances.
Things located in space are, first, sensations, and second,
material objects. Is there space in the absence of spatial
things? There is not in the sense that space is transcendentally ideal and does not exist apart from the outer sense
which is a component of our cognitive constitution. But
space does exist apart from spatial things in the sense in
which outer sense offers a system of places which is independent of the fact that sensations are arranged in that
system. This means that the impossibility of thinking
space away carries an implication for the thing-like character of space itself which goes beyond the metaphysical exposition, which is compatible with Leibniz's theory. Newton thought that we need an absolute container space in
order to distinguish absolute and relative motion. Analogously, Kant thinks that we require such a space in order
to solve the problem of incongruent counterparts. Therefore, although he makes space phenomenal as Leibniz did,
Kant's a priori space with neither sensations nor objects in
it functions as absolute space, within Kant's thinking, just
as absolute space outside the mind functions in Newton's.
This commitment to absolute space allows Kant to
think of the location-assigning aspect of outer sense as an a
priori system of locations. "[S]pace and time are represented a priori not merely as forms of sensible intuition,
but as themselves intuitions which contain a manifold ... "
(B 160). We can think of pure space as something like an
armature on which sensations are organized. The chief
doctrines of the transcendental logic and, prominently,
the Principles, result from the consideration of the powers
of combination that men possess applied to these empty
21
�but a priori manifolds. The Axioms, Anticipations, Analo·
gies, and Postulates are said to be a'priori laws of nature.
They are supposed to hold for the empirical realm because
empirical objects are the result of applying the very same
constructive powers to the same manifolds of space and
time, but when these manifolds are filled with sensation.
The structural laws which result from the application of
combinatory creativity to empty space are true of the
empty proto-objects constructed of empty locations.
Therefore, they are also automatically true when these locations are assigned sensations with the combining procedures unchanged.
In the simplest case, that is, the Axioms of Intuition, we
are to understand that the laws of extended magnitude are
generated along with the extended objects of which they
are true. This is achieved when the pure manifold of nonempirical space is synthesized so that empty points are assembled into empty regions, surfaces, and volumes. Since
the empirical manifold results simply from filling the same
locations with sensation, the same geometrical laws will
hold for empirical and pure space. Geometrically describable objects arise from the aggregation oflocations. This is
the detailed story that lies behind the transcendental exposition of space in the Aesthetic. Whether the constructed
objects are empirically full or empty makes no difference
to their geometrical properties.
4 Sensation and the Objectivity of
Outer Sense
We saw that space, as ithe region of outer things, collapsed back into the mind because space is only a mindimposed form and spatiality does not characterize things
as they are in themselves or even sensations, apart from
the location-assigning propensities of our own minds.
Since the outerness of space is all in the mind, Kant's system seems to be no improvement on the perennial idealistic weaknesses of the Cartesian-empiricist outlook. But we
have raised the question whether Kant intended spatiality
to be the aspect of outer appearances that carried the crucial burden of realism. We have examined Kant's conception of sensation, space, and objects with a view to determining whether or not sensation, the matter of outer
objects, might be the needed support for Kant's anti-idealist assertions. Kant never says that sensation is imposed by
us, or that the mind makes sensations. If he meant sensation to carry the burden of realism, it would be understandable that Kant should frequently assert, as he does,
both that outer sense refutes idealism and that space exists
only in us, and that he should assert both in the same context of discussion. There is much in favor of this interpretation although, as we shall see, it cannot be the whole of
his thought about the connection of outer sense and mindindependent reality.
In a revealing passage just prior to the Transcendental
Deduction of the Categories Kant says
1
22
There are only two possible ways in which synthetic representations and their objects can establish connection, obtain necessary relation to one another, and, as it were, meet one another. Either the object alone must make the representation
possible, or the representation alone must make the object
possible. In the former case, the relation is only empirical, and
the representation is never possible a priori. This is true of
appearances, as regards that element in them which belongs
to sensation. In the latter case 1 representation itself does not
produce its object in so far as existence is concerned 1 for we
are not speaking here of its causality by means of the will.
Nonetheless the representation is a priori determinant of the
object, if it be the case that only through the representation is
1
it possible to know anything as an object. [A 92]
This passage has implications for the meaning of Kant's
entire transcendental philosophy. According to the Cartesian-empiricist way of thinking, our knowledge of external
things, if we have any, is based on the fact that those external things cause our representations. Kant would say that,
within that framework of metaphysical thought, these
philosophers have supposed that spatially extended objects are mind-independent entities that "make possible"
our representations. The revolutionary character of his
thought is that Kant will say that sometimes the dependence runs the other way so that our representation makes
possible the object. At its most idealistic, this amounts to a
reductive phenomenalism in the manner of Berkeley. The
idea of empirical objects of perception is simply the idea of
groups and patterns among transient subjective experiences. But in the passage just quoted Kant expresses a far
less idealistic view and expressly denies the reduction of
objects to representations.
Within the passage there are two themes that we will
consider separately. First Kant says that the empirical part
of representation that is sensation is "made possible'' by
the object. In other words, with respect to sensation,
Kant's view resembles the Cartesian-empiricist line of
thought. Something outside the mind is responsible for
the sensation. The object in question is certainly the thing
in itself. This is the mind-independent reality that affects
us and engenders sensations. The sensation is a representation and as such, it is called a "modification of our receptive faculty" and it is, in consequence, also something
in us and in the mind. But these original representations
are not the product of our own creative faculties. They are
received. They would not exist at all were it not for things
as they are in themselves. We will treat this relation between sensations and reality immediately in assessing the
appeal to sensation as the chief support of realism.
The second theme of the quoted passage will become
important at the end of our discussion. This is Kant's statement that even in those contexts where it is right to say
that the representation makes possible its object, we
should not think that this means that representatioBs •produce objects in point of existence (dem Dasein nach), but
only that the representation makes it possible for us to
know realities as objects. In other words, Kant repudiates
1
1
1
1
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�any scheme which would try to reduce objects of representations to representations themselves, a~ radical phenomenalism, for example, reduces material objects to sense
data. We are never to say that an object of knowledge is
nothing more than our representations and the patterns
detectable among them. Kant's phenomenalism does not
account for the existence of objects known but only for
their objecthood in our knowledge. In other words, we are
constitutionally disposed to represent realities independent of our minds as objects of perception. All of the characteristics of objects of perception have an irreducible
mind-dependence. But it is still independent reality that
has become an object for us. The scheme of representation does not create the object that it represents. In the
last analysis, it is things as they are in themselves that are
represented in experience of spatial objects. In experience, independent reality is represented as a system of stable objects of perception in causal interconnection with
one another. There are a great many passages in which
Kant expresses a phenomenalism far more radical than
this. For the present let us return to the more limited claim
about the character of sensation.
How should we understand the question, "Does the object make the representation possible, or does the representation make the object possible?" Let us call this the
priority question. In itself it seems to presuppose a distinction between representations and objects, while this presupposition is one of the things at issue in the confrontation of realism and idealism. Kant's term "Vorstellung" is
broader than anything the English word "representation"
naturally suggests. It is meant to cover not only perceptual
contents but also all intuitions, pure and empirical. Elementary sensations which are not conscious contents are
nonetheless representations. Furthermore, all concepts,
pure and empirical, are representations. Even concepts
which are defective precisely in failing to represent anything, such as the Ideas of Reason, are representations. It
is important to appreciate the abstractness of Kant's usage
here because it reveals his willingness to speak of representations whether or not they represent anything and
whether or not they are conscious items that represent
something to anyone. In the context of the priority question, Kant is thinking of representations as contents of
perceptual experience like the ideas of Locke, Berkeley,
and Hume, but he is also including elementary unextended sensations which are not conscious and have no
role at all in the empiricist tradition. These, as we said,
come into Kant's picture from Leibniz's concept of petites
perceptions.
Kant means us to think that it is idealists like Berkeley
who hold that representations make possible objects.
Berkeley says that an object like a cherry is a bundle of
ideas of sense, including some red ideas, some round ideas,
and some sweet ideas. There are cherries only in that we
have such ideas in such bundles. When Kant addresses the
priority question himself, his thinking focuses on elemenTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
tary sensations and their origin because even red ideas are
a product of synthetic activity. Elementary sensations are
the ones which objects plainly make possible. What objects? Here Kant must mean the things in themselves that
engender sensations by affecting us. So it is, indeed,
Kant's doctrine of sensation and not his theory of spatiality that opposes idealism.
The obscurity that darkens this opinion comes from the
fact that Kant thinks that these very same sensations do
make possible objects, namely, empirical objects. The procedures of combinatory synthesis which we have sketched
operate by assembling perceivable objects out of elementary sensations. So sensations both make possible objects
and are made possible by objects and, in different contexts, Kant gives both answers to the priority question.
We confront here one of the confusions in Kant's
thought that comes from his dual standard for questions
about reality. There are empirical objects and transcendental things in themselves. Sensations are made possible
by things in themselves, and sensations make possible empirical objects. At times, Kant encourages us to think of
things in space as the locus of nonmental being, and he
defines inner sense as access to mental things. This is Descartes' opinion but, if it is also Kant's, then his theory
seems to coincide with idealism. The allegedly nonmental
spatial world is a construct from representations (sensations.) When he asserts his realism, Kant forgets or repudiates the suggestion that spatial things are nonmental and
he counts objects in space as representations along with
sensations. They are all mind-dependent realities and
Kant asks of this whole class of things, Do they make possible mind-independent objects? He decides for realism in
answering this question. Of course, sensations make objects of perception in space possible, but then they are just
appearances. As appearances, they represent realities
which are not just appearances. In our spatial representations, realities which are not representations or appearances become objects for us. "Through the representation
it is possible to know anything as an object."
The underlying difficulty of the dual realities is compounded by ambiguities in the concept of representation.
Consider again Berkeley's understanding of the nature of
a cherry. We should not really describe Berkeley's bundle
theory of perceived objects as the view that representations make possible (or make) objects. The term "representation" is out of place in this description. An element in a
bundle does not represent the bundle anymore than a brick
represents a wall of which it is an element. The idealist
theory really amounts to a renunciation of urepresenta~
tion" as a concept suitable for ideas of sense. The point of
idealism is that there is nothing nonmental for mental
items to represent. An analogous but restricted point holds
for Kant's phenomenalism. The construction of perceivable objects out of spatially deployed sensations by our faculties does not generate an account of objects of perception within which we can say that sensations represent
23
�perceived objects in space. But KaJ!t does like to say that
"we represent objects as outside us ')nd all without exception in space." Using such phrases he allows himself to
think of representations as items having spatial objects
which they represent. But Kant constructs spatial objects
out of elements found in the manifold of outer sense. So it
is quite misleading for him to suggest that those elements
represent spatial objects. In the history of reductive phenomenalism, this illicit use of "representation" frequently
lends plausibility to otherwise unpalatable accounts. As
long as the concept of representation is illicitly retained,
the harshness of the reduction is softened. For the concept implies that there is still a difference between representations and objects of just the sort that the reduction
intends to deny.
We have sa!d~ihat representations make possible empirical objects and are made possible by transcendental ob·
jects. If we delete the implication, which Kant frequently
allows himself, that inner elements represent constructed
objects in space, on the ground that this is an illicit use of
"represenf', a univocal and relatively clear anti-idealist
line of thought emerges and it is, I believe, a major part of
what Kant did want to say on this topic.
What the Cartesian-empiricist tradition calls objects in
space are simply complex representations according to Kant.
The processes envisioned in the Analytic try to describe how
we form such representations. If we ask how it is that spatial
things have the status of representations of anything, we
must say, in Kant's thought, that they inherit this status from
their constituent sensations. So the representational charac·
ter of perceptual experience is traceable to sensation. Sensa·
tion is the proper foundation for realism.
This way of reading Kant's treatment of the priority
question may seem to fall short of his expressed views in
two ways. First, Kant habitually speaks of perceived ob·
jects in space as obiects and seldom as representations, and
much of the Analytic itself is dominated by a usage of "ob·
ject" in which it is obviously spatial things that are objects
and not things in themselves. Second, the priority question, we said, presupposes a distinction between represen-
tations and objects. If we interpret the objects of which
the priority question inquires as transcendental objects,
Kant's ignorabimus will imply that we have no means at all
for making good this distinction. If spatial objects are just
representations we have no further objects to play the role
of things represented.
Concerning the first of these reservations, Kant is cer-
tainly entitled to speak of objects of perception, and em·
pirical objects and objects in space. We could not plausibly
propose that he should only speak of empirical, perceptual, and spatial representations. But all these things are objects only because we think about them, and make judgments about them, and investigate them scientifically.
Conscious contents involve objects and not merely representations because these contents figure as the subject
matter of thought.
24
Objects are given to us by means of sensibility; they are
thought through the understanding. . . . But all thought
must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility [sensible representations], because in no other way can
an object be given to us. [A 19, B 33)
In other words, mind-independent reality becomes an ob·
ject for us by engendering sensations and thence empirical
representations. Then these representations also become
objects of thought and thought about them is thought
about reality precisely because it is traceable to these
sensations.
Reflection on the second reservation bears out this un·
derstanding. Since Kant holds that we can know nothing
about things in themselves (and sometimes goes so far as
to put in doubt the thought that there are any), we are
tempted to think, and Kant is also tempted to think, that
he means that empirical realities are the only ones that can
figure at all in our philosophical account of things. There
is no question, for Kant, of getting beyond the empirical
object. This "going beyond appearance" is the issue for
the old Cartesian-empiricist outlook. Mathematical characterizations, for example, manage to penetrate to things
as they are apart from our experience. Mathematical
thinking, it seems, enables us to get at, and not merely to
represent, reality. But this is no part of Kant's scheme. For
Kant, getting at reality is representing it. We cannot make a
comparison of represented and unrepresented reality. In
consequence, we should not interpret the priority question as presupposing that we can make such a comparison.
Unrepresented reality cannot be compared with anything
because being represented is the condition for figuring in
any comparison we can make.
In his relationship to the idealist problems generated by
the Cartesian philosophy of mind, Kant is actually the
champion of the concept of representation. The idealist
renounces representation by denying reality to anything
but the mental content itself. There is nothing to be represented. The nonidealist within the Cartesian tradition also
rejects the idea of representation in his aspiration to get
beyond appearances so as to compare unrepresented reality with our ideas of it. The great Cartesian question of the
"resemblance" of ideas and their objects expresses this aspiration. This dream survives in Kant's conviction that
God knows reality without representing it, without being
affected by it, and without experiencing it. In the case of
men, Kant grasps, at least most of the time, the thought
that representation is the vehicle of knowledge of the represented, not a barrier which once interposed makes possible only knowledge of the representation itself.
Kant wants to allow space to be absorbed by the mind
and, at the same time, to single out outer sense as the
un~
compromised connection with things that exist apart from
us. Inner sense involves an element of sensation too, but
there is no mind-independent entity represented here, because inner sense is the mind's receptivity to itself. If we
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�construe inner sense as the mind, as thing in itself, affecting itself and giving rise to appearances of itself and its
state, we remain in the realm of the mental. Outer sense
starts outside the mental, not because ifs representations
are spatial, but because sensations of outer sense have
their origin in nonmental independent reality.
That sensation is the essential link to the extra-mental
explains Kant's statement in the Schematism: "Reality, in
the pure concept of understanding is that which corresponds to sensation in general ... " (A 143, B 182). And in
the Paralogisms, Kant can say, in the context of the asser-
atory benefit of the post-renaissance view. The aspect of
our representations that accept mathematical representa·
tion become transcendentally ideal for Kant. Spatial characteristics: figure, magnitude, and motion, are no longer
attributes of mind-independent reality for Kant. They exist only from our point of view. The sensuous component,
ception exhibits the reality of something in space, and in
in contrast, downgraded by the tradition, is the indispensable link to things that affect us in Kant's account.
Each component of this reversal of the evaluation of the
sensible and the mathematical has to be qualified. Kant
offers a new security for extension-dependent qualities
which remain the locus of mathematical description for
him. But the new security is an a priori foundation depen-
the absence of perception no power of imagination can in-
dent on our cognitive constitution. Numerical and
vent and produce that something. It is sensation, therefore, that indicates a reality in space or time, according as
it is related to the one or to the other mode of sensible
intuition" (A 373-4). And a few lines later, "Space is the
metrical representation ceases to be thought of as intellectual penetration that gets beyond appearance. Since
things in themselves are not spatio-temporal, mathematical propositions do not fit them. On the side of the sensible, Kant continues to think of sensation as an effect in us
and does not assert any resemblance between inner and
outer in terms of sensible features. But sensations are the
foundation of objectivity in the sense that they are the
matter of all objects for us, and they would not exist but
for the influence of things outside us. No such claim is
made for the mathematical aspect of representations. So
Kant is able to say that space represents only "possible coexistence" while perception does represent reality be-
tion that sensation is the sole input for perception, 11 Per-
representation of a mere possibility of coexistence, per-
ception is the representation of a reality" (A 374).
5 Primary and Secondary Qualities
Kant's distinction between the formal and material ingredients of empirical intuition is his inventive reworking
of the traditional distinction between primary and secondary qualities. One of the reasons for which it is hard to appreciate Kant's reliance on sensation rather than space for
the basic connection of thinking to the nonmental is that
Kant reverses the traditional evaluation of primary and
secondary. Primary qualities, for the tradition initiated by
Galileo and perfected in the articulation of Locke's Essay,
are those which accept mathematical and prominently geometrical or spatial characterization. It is in respect of primary qualities that our ideas resemble things and correctly
represent a mind-independent reality. Our ideas of secondary qualities involve sensible characteristics like color
and heat. These are literally features of our ideas, that is,
of mental things, but they have no footing at all in nonmental outer reality.
The distinction between primary and secondary qualities is at the core of post-renaissance philosophy because it
explains the success of mathematical science and the failure of the earlier scholastic-Aristotelian program which relied upon a relatively naive interpretation of perceptual experience. The demotion of the sensuous to the status of
wholly subjective appearance fitted the growing understanding of the physics and physiology of perception. The
objectivity assigned to the mathematically representable
side of experience fitted the notion that mathematics is
the "language of the book of nature," with the help of
which we penetrate the veil of misleading sensuous representation to a true conception of outer reality. When Kant
trades this distinction between qualities for a distinction
between form and matter, he discards much of the explanTilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
geo~
cause perception contains empirical intuition or sensation
(A 374). We can say, then, that the synthesized, nonempirical, proto-objects, the geometrical objects of the Axioms of
Intuition, are not representations of anything. But empirical appearances are representations that must have their
object. They derive this status from sensation.
One can recognize patterns of thought from both Descartes and Leibniz subjected to imaginative permutations
by Kant in this context. According to Descartes' conception of "confused" as opposed to
~~distinct"
ideas, we are
disposed to mistake the sensuous mental effect for the extended outer cause. Thus we project sensuous content,
which is immediately intuited but not extended, onto
space, which is extended but not intuited. Descartes
thinks this projection is an understandable human error.
He explains-our disposition to this error saying that we use
the sensuous qualities as clues to the harmfulness and utility of things in the spatial environment. This disposition
contributes to self-preservation and its effect is enhanced
by the fact that we think of the clues as features of, and
not merely effects of, the objects. In this, Descartes supposes, as Kant does, that essentially unextended things
(Descartes' sensuous ideas and Kant's sensations) are projected into space by us, and then thought by us to characterize regions and surfaces. The great difference lies not in
the concept of the projection of the unextended into
space but only in the legitimacy of the projection. Descartes and any other subjectivist on secondary qualities
must say that color characterizes nothing that is actually
25
�extended, since the locus of color is, the mind where there
is nothing extended. For Kant, the same projection is not
an error but an aspect of cognitive functioning which is·
sues in a constructed perceivable object.
Like Kant, Leibniz, too, has it that an essentially non·
spatial reality is represented spatially by the human mind.
Reality is itself not spatial in two senses for Leibniz. First,
space is only a system of relations and never anything like
a container for things, and, second, this system of relations
belongs only to representations or phenomena and not to
things independently of the fact that they are mentally
represented. Leibniz was never attracted at all by the Cartesian method of doubt and the solipsistic starting point
that it fosters. He refuses to enter upon the epistemological enterprise on which Descartes wagers everything. Instead Leibniz offers an overall metaphysical account
which is to be accepted if it does justice to all of our experience and thought. He does not try to show how this account might be reached by any reflective man in the face
of the most extreme scepticism.
Within Leibniz' s account, the ultimate explanation for
the fittingness of our thought to reality is pre-established
harmony. Everyone finds this unsatisfying and Kant expresses his dissatisfaction, saying that Leibniz "intellectualized the senses." Perception is just confused thought for
Leibniz, and all thought is a self-contained activity of the
mind. There is no original input traceable to our being affected by things, because in the last analysis we are not
affected by anything, according to Leibniz, but only programmed in advance to have the mental contents that we
do have.
No doubt Kant inherits from Leibniz a starting point
alien from the Cartesian-empiricist egocentrism and solipsism. It is no part of Kant's plan to doubt whether representations are really representations and then to overcome
this doubt. Kant's acceptance of the Cartesian view that
we are affected by the things that we represent is a repudiation of Leibniz's reliance on harmony as the ultimate
foundation of knowledge. Like Leibniz, Kant understands
the spatial images of conscious perception as the aggregation by the mind of items which are not themselves extended. But like Descartes, Kant thinks that these items
are effects of outer realities. Against Descartes, with
whom he shares the notion of perceptual images as effects
of outer realities, Kant thinks that our idea of color requires that extended things be colored things. Mere ideas
will never make color intelligible without receptivity. Only
because spatial things can actually have sensible features
is it the case that "Perception exhibits the reality of something in space, and, in the absence of perception, no
power of imagination can invent or produce that something." This is related to the view that Hume expressed
saying that all ideas are copies of impressions. Though it is
found in spatial things, color is subjective, in Kant's view,
as it is for the standard theory of secondary qualities.
In this setting of the views of predecessors Kant's rear-
26
dering emerges naturally. There is some objective influence on our faculty or receptivity that is responsible for
the existence and representational character of outer intuitions. In order to think of outer reality consciously we
make spatial pictures by assembling essentially unextended sensations which have been assigned places in the
mind-imposed system of locations. These pictures, in virtue of their empirical content (sensation), represent reality
outside the mind as objects in space. Spatial pictures as
assembled objects really have surfaces and their surfaces
are really colored. Color is an emergent feature which
arises in the synthesis of a multitude of sensations which
have been assigned to locations near one another. Thus,
color stands for, and represents, the outer thing without
resembling it, while the spatial features neither stand for
nor resemble any reality. In some ways this concept of
space is like the psychological concept of a visual field. Geometrical features of things come from the features of
mind-imposed space and play no part in the relation of objects of perception to things outside the mind. This fits
nicely Kant's claim that geometry is necessary and a priori,
and yet geometrical truths are true of empirical objects.
Space is the region of all possible objects ("possible coexistence") and when space is filled with sensation, synthesis
generates apprehendable structures (empirical objects) out
of deployed sensations. That these representations represent the nonmental is due entirely to the contained sensations. The mathematical knowledge we have of such objects is, as Kant says, only a question of getting out what
we have put in ourselves. It is secondary qualities that are
responsible for the fact that experience reaches beyond
merely mental realities, while primary qualities betoken
nothing mind-independent.
6 The Spatial and the Temporal
Were sensation all there is to connection with things
outside the mind, space would be just as mental as time is.
Spatial things would be mental representations of nonmental realities, and temporal things would be mental representations of mental realities. This pleasant symmetry is
not tenable. It is contradicted by the fact that Kant clearly
requires that spatial representations be subjected to time in
order to become participants in the activities of the mind.
Some of the essential doctrines of the Critique depend,
first, on the thought that spatiality per se makes representations unfit for mental status, and, second, it is precisely
the spatiality of spatial representations that renders them
fit vehicles for securing the concept of anything enduring
at all, even of minds as enduring conscious subjects.
Kant segregates the spatial and the temporal with startling rigor. All readers follow him easily when he confines
inner mental objects to a temporal order and allows spatial
distinctions no footing in the mind. This satisfies a widely
shared intuitive conviction that thoughts are not located
WINTER/SPRJNG 1983
�(B)
(A)
(C)
(D)
/
anywhere and that ideas do not displace any spatial occupant Kant's confinement of the mental to time is part of
the common ground of his inner sense and Cartesian consciousness. But Kant's exclusion of time from the objects
of outer sense, which are subjected to space and space
alone, is not attuned to any widely shared philosophical
presumption. As a result, readers of Kant sometimes suppose that he does not mean to exclude temporality from
the outer. It is often said that Kant means to say that all
inner things are subject to time and all outer things to
space and time. And this seems a needed reading lest Kant
be thought to leave no conceptual room for change in the
outer world at aiL Such an understanding, however, conflicts with very simple and clear statements in the Critique
such as this one: "Time cannot be outwardly intuited anymore than space can be intuited as something in us" (A 23,
B 37). Can one hope that even such direct assertions are
open to interpretation or overridden by other considerations? We certainly must say that Kant's ultimate view is
that material objects both fill space and endure in time. In
his thinking, then, the spatial and the temporal are wedded. The point, however, is that they need to be wedded.
No object of outer intuition, considered in itself, is something that exists in time.
As a first approximation for the understanding of this
perplexing view, we can point out that time is not essential
in the realm of the extended, whether or not time, as a
matter of fact, applies to things in that realm. The fact is
that as conscious subjects we confront an outer world in
which there is change. Since this is so, we have to deploy
temporal concepts in describing that world. But this is an
empirical fact It is conceivable that we might have found
an outer reality in which there is no change whatever. Under such circumstances, change would be confined to the
domain of our conscious survey of this wholly static reality. It would not be necessary to ascribe time to both the
inner and the outer. Our first thought, then, is that time is
not absolutely necessary for the very idea of the outer, as
space is absolutely necessary.
The thought of a changeless spatial world leads to a further speculation, and one that is a lot closer to Kant's actual view of space and time. It seems theoretically possible
to deny that there is any change in the actual world and to
assert that the spatial world we do experience is a static
world. All the apparent temporal distinctions in the outer
world will have to be recast as temporal distinctions that
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
apply only in the mental world of experiences. For example, we may think of the sequence of images A-D, in the
figure 1 as the content of consecutive visual experiences of
a subject The natural interpretation of such a sequence
assigns change, and therefore time, to both the outer and
the inner. The subject's inner experience changes as the
outer car passes the tree. But we are not forced to interpret A-D as consecutive viewings of the same outer re~
gion, namely, one in which changes are taking place. We
could think of it instead as consecutive viewings of four
different regions of a wholly static space. If we think of the
images A-D as consecutive frames of a motion picture
film, then the viewing of the film realizes the possibility of
the second interpretation, that is, consecutive experiences
of four different static arrays. This analogy ignores the real
motion involved in the manipulation of the film. When we
view a film we create the illusion of change in the object
by arranging to witness related but unchanging objects in
a special temporal order. In principle, we could think of
our ordinary experience of the world as conforming to this
pattern. Therefore, the ascription of time to the outer is an
expendable convenience.
We made informal use here of the distinction between
the thing seen and the visual experience of that thing.
Kant, too, recognizes such a distinction. He frequently
says that apprehension of the manifold of intuition is always successive, whether or not the manifold itself is successive (inner) or simultaneous (outer). The perception of
a line, however short, (an example Kant likes) involves a
synthesis which is necessarily successive. The allusion to
synthesis in this opinion reminds us that outer sense does
not reveal a world in which the question, "Are there really
changes here, or not?" naturally arises. Due to outer sense
we have a range of intuitions. These are a multiplicity of
individual representations of outer things. For the description of these representations spatial terms are needed and
temporal terms are not Nothing happens in one representation. The ordinary world is not something simply given
to outer sense. The world is constructed by our synthetic
powers (the understanding) operating on material provided by receptivity. In Kant's terms the restriction of temporality to the inner means that all the temporal distinctions used in thinking of the ordinary world are traceable
to synthesis and none to outer receptivity.
Kant often speaks of the products of the synthetic
powers of the mind as objects of outer sense. For example,
27
�a line is an object of outer intuition. This seems unproblematic because a line is a static thing. Its synthesis, how·
ever, is successive and involves time. Strictly speaking,
nothing complex is merely intuited. Even the least com·
plexity is ascribed to synthesis. Combinatory activity-as·
sembling, integrating, collating, comparing, retaining, re·
trieving, reproducing, and, in general, synthesizing-is all
mental activity. Kant often says that we are not conscious
of these operations and some are even "concealed in the
depths of the soul," but this merely emphasizes that he
does think of them as mental processes. No one thinks oth·
erwise. It is inevitable, in Kant's system, that these activi·
ties be temporal activities and any materials involved in
these activities must be in time in order to be accessible for
synthesis.
It is for this reason that Kant confines the Schematism
to consideration of the temporality of intuition. The job of
the schematism is to bridge the gulf between the Catego·
ries as pure concepts of understanding and the empirical
sensibility that offers human beings matter for experience.
The Categories are developed from the forms of judgment
identified in formal logic. Although the transcendental deduction of the Categories is supposed to guarantee that
any reality we are able to experience will conform to these
pure concepts, the deduction does not reduce the merely
formal and logical significance of the Categories. Any ra·
tiona! creature will have experience in conformity with
just these twelve Categories, in Kant's view, but this might
have a wholly different meaning for creatures whose re·
ceptivity is not spatial and temporal as our receptivity is.
So the Schematism interprets the Categories for beings
with sensible and spatio-temporal intuitions. But Kant
seems to ignore the spatial altogether so that, in the Sche·
matism, as he describes it, the Categories are subjected to
a temporal condition. Some readers have supposed that he
might have offered a spatial as well as a temporal Sche·
matism for the Categories. This is not correct. The Gate·
gories are the pure forms that are available for the combination of materials provided by receptivity. Combination
is not intelligible without time. As Kant says, synthesis is
always successive, whether or not the manifold is succes·
sive or simultaneous. Thus Kant calls time the form of all
appearances whether inner or outer. In this view, Kant dis·
tinguishes appearances, which presuppose synthesis, from
intuitions, which do not. Outer intuitions have to be
re~represented as mental experiences in order to enter into
any combinatory activity. For example, the apprehension
of a cube offers an object of outer sense that has spatial
features such as being cube-shaped and no temporal fea·
tures. It is the visual experience of the cube and not the
cube itself that enters into mental activities. When spatial
things are re-represented they trade in their spatial charac·
ter for a new mental character. The visual experience of a
cube is not a cube-shaped experience. It is a datable event
related in time to all other events in the mind.
If outer sense is not directly available for synthesis, this
28
is just another way of saying that we cannot have any im·
mediate or non-inferential knowledge of outer things. The
raw materials of knowledge all have to be representations
in inner sense. But if this is so then in what sense are there
any data of outer sense at all? It seems that Kant's outer
sense has become something like the outer world for the
Cartesian-empiricist. It is a hypothetical source of some of
the data we really do have, namely, the things present to
the mind and available for synthesis. How else can we in·
terpret the fact that in Kant's scheme items that actually
possess spatial features cannot enter into mental processes
or consciousness. They have to be subjected to time. Kant
has internalized the problem of the external world. In or·
der to figure in mental activities, representations must be
temporal representations. When it comes to the supposed
data of outer sense, so often touted as immediate, it turns
out that subjection to time amounts to re-representation.
As Kemp-Smith put it, appearances in space are not really
representations at all, "They are objects of representation,
not representation itself" (Commentary, 295).
No spatial thing can exist as a subjective state. At most a
representation of a spatial thing, a representation which
does not itself have spatial features, can truly exist in the
mind. But the great problem with this is that the spatial is
now cut off from both the inner and mental and from the
metaphysically outer. From the perspective of the inner,
spatial representations are objects that have to be re-repre·
sented in time in order to belong to thought and to the
empirical world the mind constructs. From the perspective of things as they are in themselves, spatial representations are mere appearances. Spatial reality threatens to be·
come empirically ideal as well as being transcendentally ideal.
This instability in the status of the spatial sheds light on
some difficulties in interpreting Kant. Faced with the demand for a distinction between the subjective and the ob·
jective, Kant repeatedly formulates distinctions that seem
to fall entirely on the subjective side. For example, his con·
trast between judgments of perception and judgments of
experience, drawn in the Prolegomena, operates in a realm
that is all appearance. In the Analogies, he purports to dis·
tinguish the temporal order of our experience and the
temporal order in the object. But the only object under
consideration is outer appearance and not
mind~indepen~
dent reality. Such passages result from the fact that Kant
treats outer intuition as a source of input for inner intui~
tion. Then, relative to inner representations, the outer be-
comes a system of represented objects. Thus he is able to
treat outer appearances as if they offered independent objects about which a world of facts could be ascertained.
When he is thinking this way, Kant's conception of the
mind retreats to inner sense, to the traditional Cartesian
consciousness which has to develop knowledge of spatial
things through immediate contact with inner representa·
tions (ideas) of spatial objects. This thought contradicts
the claim on which much depends, in the Paralogisms, for
example, that inner and outer sense are symmetrical, and
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�both are immediate, and objects are given to both. In a
footnote which strengthens the newly composed "Refuta·
tion of Idealism," the Preface to the second edition of the
Critique explicitly asserts that the "permanent" which
must be found in perception "Cannot be an intuition in
me" (B xxxix) for intuitions in me have only the status of
ephemeral representations. Here Kant seems to promote
the object of outer sense, the object of perception, to
mind·independent reality, and simultaneously to reduce
our knowledge of it from the direct intuition claimed ear·
lier to something mediated and inferential.
We will miss what is important for Kant's thought here
if we treat these passages as mere slips into the Cartesian
point of view. The thought that what is permanent "can·
not be an intuition in me" points to an entirely different
significance for the inaccessibility of representations of
outer sense to both consciousness and synthesis. Why is it
that the permanent cannot be identified with any intui·
tion? Plainly, the answer is that anything truly mental, any
subjective state, is essentially transient. The fact that time
is the form of the mental guarantees that everything
purely mental has, as Hume expressed it, "a perishing exis-
tence." Nothing mental could possibly be permanent be·
cause impermanence is the form of mental things. Mere
temporal existence is impermanence.
We have now discovered the deeper Kantian motivation
for the sharp segregation of the temporal and the spa·
tial. Kant's thought of the outer has to satisfy two de·
mands that seem to conflict with one another. On the one
hand, he would like the outer to be intuited and thus im·
mediately accessible like any other intuition. And this is
required for the transcendental ideality of space. On the
other hand, he wants the outer as merely spatial, to be ex·
empted from the ever·vanishing essence of inner things
and mental things, even though the price of this exemp·
tion is separation from mental activities and consciousness. The inaccessibility of the spatial and its tendency to
become something independent of the mind is a conse·
quence of a powerful demand of Kant's theory and is no
mere slip. The defect of the Cartesian·empiricist perspec·
tive is that it envisions a starting point for philosophical
reflection consisting of a conscious mind confronted by
data all of which are perishing mental contents. Some·
thing outside the destructive scope of temporality must be
provided in order to account for the idea of the subject
himself. No concept of consciousness is intelligible which
starts from a framework limited to mental things.
The demand for something not subject to the ravages of
time, and therefore not mental, is the point of Kant's cen·
tral argument concerning apperception and personal iden·
tity. Any conception of mental activity presupposes that
the materials involved be accessible to one subject of con·
sciousness. The possibility of learning, discriminating, recognizing, remembering, and forming concepts requires
that the data be subject to one subject. But inner sense
does not reveal any such "abiding self."
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Berkeley earlier noted that we have no idea of the sub·
ject of experience, and he provided the "notion" of a spirit
to make up for the missing idea. Hume, too, recognized
that we have no experience of the self. Refusing to intra·
duce an ad hoc surrogate like Berkeley's spirit, Hume tried
to reduce the subject of experience to the content of expe·
rience in his bundle theory of the subject. This amounted
to an extension to mental substances of Berkeley's bundle
theory of spatial substances. This is the gist of the history
of the problem of the unity of apperception up to Kant.
Kant takes the bundle theory of personal identity to be the
reductio ad absurdum of the Cartesian·empiricist program
which tries to derive everything from the purely mental,
purely inner, and purely temporal.
Kant insists on a substantial foundation for the unity of
the subject of experience outside the various experiences
of that subject. The great Kantian contribution here is the
recognition that the subject could not possibly be given in
experience. Hume said that when he looked within in or·
der to find himself he found instead only another percep·
tion (perishing mental content). Kant understands that
this is inevitable. Suppose we found a common element in
all our conscious experience and we inclined to think of
this ubiquitous element as our own abiding self. This
would have to be an error. Kant sees that no such element
in experience could be the foundation of the connected·
ness of experiences that makes them all contents for one
subject. On the contrary, experiences stand in just the
same need of connectedness to one another and presence
to a common subject whether or not they have a common
element of any kind. The very idea that I could note a
common element in my experiences presupposes that I, as
a single subject, have all those different experiences, so
that I might note a common element among them. The
common element, if there were one, could not be the rea·
son for the fact that all the experiences containing the com·
man element are mine. We have to look outside the realm of
conscious contents to find a foundation for the unity of
consciousness.
The nontemporal spatial object of outer sense offers a
foundation for permanence because it is not an essentially
perishing object. Of course, the spatial object is not the
sought.for subject of experience. But the nontemporal
outer object provides the minimal conceptual framework
for the idea of the endurance of the subject. Enduring
things in space introduce the "determinate time" within
which the endurance of the subject can be thought.
For in what we entitle "soul" everything is in continual flux
and there is nothing abiding except (if we must so express
ourselves) the "I", which is simple solely because its representation has no content .... [A 381]
So long, therefore, as we do not go beyond mere thinking we
are without the necessary condition for applying the concept
of substance, that is, of a self-subsistent subject, to the self as
a thinking being. [B 413]
29
�Now consciousness [of my existence] in time is necessarily
bound up with consciousness of the '[condition of the] possibility of this time determination; and it is therefore necessarily bound up with the existence of things outside me, as the
condition of the time determination. [B 276]
Endurance does not contradict the essential character of
things that are outside thought. This is the positive benefit
of the Kantian treatment of space as inaccessible to immediate consciousness. The subject cannot be intuited, nor
can it be constructed out of the flux of intuited contents.
It has a stability borrowed from the endurance of outer
things.
A natural objection to Kant's circuitous reasoning about
the subject of experience might run as follows: Consciousness, he says, reveals no enduring substantial subject. It
also reveals no enduring substantial object. The given,
construed as the totality of materials that the mind does
have to work with, entirely consists of perishing contents.
When Kant claims that the outer enduring object is required for the possibility of an inner enduring subject, it
seems that he merely assumes the possibility of the one in
order to provide a conceptual foundation for the other.
Why does he not just assume the existence of the substantial subject and confess that his procedure is really no
more realistic than that of Berkeley?
The essential difference between the inner and the
outer is supposed to furnish the Kantian response to this
objection. For no assumption that Kant could make within
an ontology limited to inner objects could possibly be efficacious just because it is the essence of the inner to be
perishing and insubstantial. Nothing mental endures because time is the form of the mental. So there can be no
question of assuming the endurance of something mental.
Furthermore, this opinion is not an arbitrary dogma. That
the contents of consciousness are essentially transient is
indisputable phenomenology.
The temporal is the realm of all contents of consciousness, so it looks as if we have to posit something nontemporal in order to introduce the least stability in our
thought of ourselves and the world. But Kant would like to
say that we do not have to posit anything because perception acquaints us with the spatial and with things that
have permanent existence in space. The first Analogy of
Experience asserts that our experience is necessarily of en-
during substances. To the extent that the discussion is not
entirely phenomenalistic and reductive, Kant seems to
identify the enduring component of what is perceived
with matter and to assimilate the assertion of the Analogy
to the conservation of matter. This is explicitly Kant's view
in the parallel discussion of the Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde. But there is another side of the idea of permanence that is less theoretical and sweeping and, perhaps,
more attractive.
Permanence requires, at a minimum, that the temporal
parameters of the object perceived be extended beyond
those of the perception of the object. Thus, the idea of
30
permanence is the idea of the existence of objects unperceived. It is this conception of permanence that furthers
Kant's realism. Commitment to permanence in perception is the idea that our perceptions are of relatively stable
objects which endure through gaps in our episodic experiences. Permanence expresses categorical opposition to the
thesis that esse is percipi.
We have seen that the very advantage of nontemporality carries with it the disadvantage of separation from consciousness and the need for re-representation. If we forget
about this problem for the moment, as Kant seems to, the
prospects for his theory are good. Time comes into the picture of spatial reality only via experience. As a re-representation, an experience of a spatial thing has a date, that is a
place in the sequence of all mental contents of a subject.
Nothing merely conceptual obstructs the possibility that
an identical outer thing could be experienced at two different times. This is just what cannot happen with inner objects. I can experience again today the object that I experienced yesterday, but I cannot have the experience I had
yesterday again today. At best, I can have a qualitatively
identical experience, never the numerically identical experience. For objects of inner sense, the date, that is, place in
temporal sequence, is part of the principle of individuation. Therefore, if experiences have different dates, they
are, ipso facto, different experiences. The enduring existence of things in space does not contradict the very essence of spatial existence, while to speak of the enduring
existence of things that exist only in time does contradict
the essence of such temporal things.
Once concepts of spatial enduring objects are given
footing, we are able to speak, as Kant says, of''determinate
time." The outer object exists when we perceive it. It endures between our perceptions of it. A clock is a reperceivable object with the help of which the time between
perceptual experiences is measured. The whole spatial
world is a generalized clock. It makes time determinate in
the sense that it makes it possible to say at just what time
our inner experiences occur. The endurance of the self
that must accompany all experiences is registered in the
objective temporal order of outer things. The dates of objects, clock time, place the whole inner sequence of experiences of objects in an objective context. This is Kant's
completion of his argument on apperception. Outer
things are essential for the temporal continuity of the subject of experience.
This argument appears in various relatively obscure formulations in the Transcendental Deduction, in the Paralogisms, and in the Refutation of Idealism. I have rehearsed
it here in order to emphasize the strategic importance for
Kant of the inaccessibility of the spatial from immediate
consciousness. Immediately accessible contents are essen-
tially transient. In Kant's most theoretical thinking, transience, like permanence, is pressed to the limit. Permanence means conservation of matter forever, and transience means that mental things are all new at each instant.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�The least endurance that goes beyond the instantaneous
depends upon the powers of synthesis' ,and entails a mode
of existence that is not possible within the mind itself. Perhaps these extremes of permanence and transience are
not necessary for Kant's objectives. They seem to come
from a Leibnizean style of thinking about parts and wholes
and infinites that is familiar in the "Inaugural Dissertation" and in the Antinomies. In any case, the general line
of thought is crucial to Kant's philosophy as a whole. To
say this is not to say that he offers a consistent account of
the inner and the outer, the spatial and the mental, so that
his main contentions can be contemplated within the
equilibrium of a coherent and plausible system of concepts. There are inconsistencies which cannot be removed
while remaining faithful to Kant's overall thought because
they lie too deep and Kant's awareness of them is too
slight. Nonetheless, the basis of a generally Kantian reconstruction of most of what he says does seem to be possible.
7 A Sketch for the Consistent Kantian
We saw at the beginning of this essay that spatiality
seems to be equivalent to the locus of extra-mental existence in Kant's initial definition of outer sense in the Aesthetic. This interpretation gave way to an inner and mental status for space in light of the asserted transcendental
ideality of space and the idealist tendency of the claim that
space is only in us. The complete collapse of Kantian realism then seemed to be avoidable only if we could understand outer sensation rather than spatiality as the irreducible connection with mind-independent things. Whether
or not sensation supplies an adequate foundation for
Kant's realism, however, it is clear that the main argu~
ments of the Critique of Pure Reason require that spatiality carry with it an immunity from the transience of all
things of which time is the form. This brings to the fore
once again the identification of space with the region of
nonmental existence.
Failure to resolve strains here leaves Kant seeming to
assert that space is neither the metaphysically outer, since
it is only appearance, nor mental, since it is not subject to
the form of time. A satisfactory reconstruction must start
from the fact that this pressure for an intermediate status
that will bridge the gulf between the mind and the world
arises quite naturally. Some such bridge is, indeed, just
what is needed to overcome the solipsistic viewpoint and
attendant scepticism and idealism. At the same time we
obviously cannot leave space in an entirely unprovided-for
limbo between appearance and reality.
The concept of representation must do most of the gapclosing work. Although he is the champion of representation against the challenge of idealist reductions, Kant frequently yields to the idealist thought that representations
amount to a sort of impregnable epistemological shield
that perfectly protects an ever-virginal reality from the as·
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
saults of enquirers. Every passionate investigation is re-
pelled coldly and all aspiring lovers of truth only get to
know their own fantasies. There is something wrong here.
Representations are involved in all efforts to know anything. But this does not mean that representations block
knowledge from the outset by substituting a surrogate object. The idealist line about representation can be combated, in part, by shifting to use of the verb instead of the
noun. We represent reality as a stable system of relatively
stable material objects. It is reality that we thus represent.
We do not represent our own representations as such a sys·
tern. And, in any case, our representations certainly do not
compose such a system. Our representation of the world
is, itself, a thing of the mind and it has concepts and propositions and images for constituents, not relatively stable
material objects in space. If we resolve to defend Kant's
philosophy and we are asked, "Is reality spatia-temporal?"
we should not answer, as Kant himself often answers,
"Empirical reality is spatia-temporal, but mind-independent reality is not." That reply goes with the idea that our
representations are spatia-temporal and all we know about
are our representations. The right answer should be, "We
represent reality as a spatia-temporal system." This answer
does not change the subject and insist on speaking only
about representations. It is a guarded answer, but not a
negative answer about mind-independent reality. For the
question, "Is reality spatia-temporal?" the answer, "So we
represent it," is a form of affirmative answer. Its force is
very close to that of, "We certainly think so."
If we accept this reading of the relationship between
representation and reality, what are we to make of Kant's
claims that space is only an imposed form, and that space
is transcendentally ideal? The idea that space is a form
comes from Leibniz's analysis rejecting thinghood for
space. Formal status makes space a principle for the organization of simultaneous existants and denies that space
would be anything were there no such existants to be organized. This much does not impair the objectivity of
space. If space is a system of relationships among simultaneously existing outer things then spatial representation is
representation of the outer. Spatial things will be outer
things though space itself is not one of them. This seemed
to be Kant's view in the Metaphysical Exposition of space.
It is only because Kant also thinks of space as a form imposed by us that the spatial tends to become subjective and
ideal.
Why does Kant think that space is imposed by us and is
not a system of relations in which things would stand even
if we did not represent them at all? There are two reasons
for this. First, this conception enables him to explain some
synthetic a priori knowledge, as we saw in discussion of the
Transcendental Exposition. I will simply pass over this
presumed benefit of the ideality of space and will not consider here whether anything of that benefit could be retained if space were not regarded as an imposed system of
relations. However this is decided, we cannot suppose that
31
�Kant flatly asserts that space is imposed simply because
that will enable him to explain our knowledge of geometry
and its application to the world. He must have reasons for
thinking that this status is independently plausible. I want
to call attention to a set of convictions that operate in the
background of Kant's thinking, and sometimes in the fore·
ground. For example,
Those who take space and time for some real and absolutely
necessary fastening as it were of all possible substances and
states do not think that anything else is required in order to
conceive how to a number of existing things there applies a
certain original relation as the primitive condition of possible
influxes and the principle of the essential form of the universe. [Even if we grant it as much reality and necessity as we
can, space] . .. only represents the intuitively given possibility
of universal coordination. [The question remains] ... what is
the principle upon which this relation of all substances rests,
a relation which when seen intuitively is called space. (Inaug.
Diss., 16]
Here Kant is saying that we cannot simply accept space as
the order in which simultaneous existents stand. That ex·
istents stand in any order, that they are related to one an·
other in any way, requires an explanation beyond their
mere existence. "Simply because of their subsistence they
are not necessarily related to anything else ... " (Ibid., 17).
Things must already form a whole or a universe in order to
stand in any relations, even spatial relations. The imposed
character of space comes out of these thoughts without
reference to the explanatory fruitfulness of the idea of
mind imposed space vis-a-vis geometrical knowledge.
To give as much definition as possible to these elusive
thoughts, let us consider reality without worrying at all
about representation or knowledge for the moment. We
can conveniently take God's point of view, remembering
that it is one with which Leibniz and Kant sometimes
seem to have a certain familiarity. Suppose God creates a
planet. It will have all the contents and characteristics that
he has put into it. There will already be spatial relation·
ships between the parts of the planet, but the planet itself
will not be anywhere in space, for there is nothing with
which it is coordinated. Now let God create another
planet. He need not first create more space so that there
will be room for another planet. The fact that it does not
need creating is a reflection of the nonthing-like status of
space, and of its necessary availability. Let us imagine that
God makes the second planet larger and warmer than the
first. As soon as there is more than one thing, in addition
to the properties that each thing has, there will also be a
multiplicity of relations between things. All the relations
seem to have a secondary significance from the point of
view of ontology and creation. They do not place any de·
mands on the creative powers of God at all. A planet will
not have the features it does have unless God actively puts
those features into it in his creation of it. But the relations
do not require anything beyond the creation of the indi-
32
viduals with their features. In creating the second planet,
God does exactly what he would have done had he created
it first. And then it is, automatically, so to speak, some·
where with respect to the first planet, larger than the first,
and warmer than the first. The thought that relations obtain without being created is part of the Leibnizean claim
that relations are not real.
In order to connect this with our reconstruction of
Kant's thinking, we have to add the thought that relations,
and the ones constituting space in particular, have their
existence only in representation. To illustrate this we can
pursue our story of creation. In what sense is one planet
larger than the other, or located somewhere with respect
to the other? Each planet is itself. It has all its properties. It
exists exactly as it would if the other planet did not exist at
all, ignoring some physics. From the point of view of the
planet in itself, if we could speak of such a thing, "larger
than" or "located ... with respect to" do not enter into its
existence at all. Of course, God will know that one planet
has a certain size and the other a certain size. God will
know that one of these is greater than the other. This is
because the planets are assembled into a universe in God's
thought. That they manage to stand as constituents of
anything is mediated by thought.
·
The idea that relations are imposed is the idea that they
only obtain in the context of a surveying intellect or con·
sciousness which provides a connection between things
that would otherwise simply not stand in any relations at
all, even though the several things were to exist. This pat·
tern of thought is clearly visible in Kant's transcendental
psychology. In the absence of a mind whose survey relates
them planets would stand in unrelated isolation much like
the isolation and wholesale disconnectedness that Kant as·
cribes to elements of the unsynthesized manifolds of intui·
tion. Kant's demand for synthesis is not a matter of sup·
posing that the mind will not appreciate the relationships
between spatial things (that they form a triangle, for exam·
pie) without synthesis. On the contrary, they do not form a
triangle or anything else until they are synthesized, al·
though receptivity alone assigns them location. Unsynthe·
sized elements of intuition are simply not related to one
another at all, apart from the fact that synthesis can relate
them. The perceivable features that they have as geomet·
rica! configurations have being as a consequence of syn·
sis. In this context, in the transcendental psychology, Kant
is thinking of both elementary intuitions that need to be
related and of complex intuitions that represent related
things as mental items and not outer realities. But this
thought clearly instantiates the pattern that relativizes re·
lations to a surveying mind.
Quite apart from the issue of the mental status of spatial
things that Kant asserts in his theory of the mental con·
struction of spatial objects out of located but unextended
sensations, his claim that the several constituents of a spa·
tial thing only stand in spatial relations as a consequence
of synthesis is not valid within the terms of Kant's own
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�discussion. The fact that things are in space at all is as·
cribed to receptivity which gives a locati.on to the original
intuitions of outer sense. Kant says that all magnitude
comes from synthesis. But the mere concept of location
cannot be divorced from that of spatial relations in the way
in which Kant requires. We may think with Kant that no
ultimate original sensation is colored or otherwise sensu·
ous, and that the perceivability of the sensuous element in
perception comes from a mental aggregation of many unperceived constituents. We cannot, however, altogether
abandon the idea that the locations to which sensations
are assigned in receptivity are near and remote from one
another prior to synthesis. To withdraw this idea is to
drain the meaning from "location" altogether. Plainly a
certain manifold can be synthesized and perceived as a yellow surface only because many sensations with locations
near one another have similar representational character,
even though we are not conscious of that character on a
sensation-by-sensation basis. The whole doctrine that
traces geometry to receptivity would be lost if we could
not say that the results of a synthesis were significantly determined in advance by the relations between the locations to which the several synthesized sensations are assigned. There is, then, a plain sense in which synthesis
does not create objects with geometrical features out of
mere collections of unrelated sensations. At most, synthesis discovers the geometrical features of pre-existing systems of sensations. Borrowing Kant's own phrase, we
should say that the spatial object is not produced by the
synthesis in so far as its existence is concerned ("dem Dasein nach," A 92) but that the function of synthesis is only
to make it possible for us to know spatial things as objects.
Once we give up the idea that space is imposed by us we
can restate the main themes of Kant while allowing that
spatial things are independent of the mind. The mind contains only representations of spatial things. This is not a
disaster now that we have got clear of the thought that
knowledge by means of representations must be just
knowledge of those representations. Our representations
embrace our thought of the universe as a system of spatia-
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
temporal, causally interconnected, material objects whose
existence does not depend on our thought. Kant surely
wants to make available the anti-idealist result of this externalization of the spatial. In the Paralogisms, for example, Kant says that each subject has his own private time
and that private times are only commensurable with one
another through the public time of spatial existence. Were
space mental, it would be as private as time and would offer no exit from egocentrism. The crucial arguments of the
Critique that we have outlined will be rescued by this understanding, since those arguments require that space be
nonmental while our spatial representations have their
place in the sequence of subjective states.
Whether this reconstruction involves the retraction of
the familiar Kantian claim that things in themselves are
unknown is still not clear, but perhaps it now seems far less
important. Our perceptual knowledge is all conditioned by
complex relationships that obtain between ourselves and
the things we perceive. As empiricists we believe that all
our knowledge is based on perceptual knowledge. If we
mean by knowledge of things in themselves, knowledge
that does not depend on any relations in which we stand to
what we know, then we have no knowledge of things in
themselves. Is there something from which we are, therefore, barred?
What are atomic theory, molecular biology, and radio astronomy telling us, if not about how things are in themselves, as opposed to how things appear? If this sort of
thing is not knowledge of things in themselves, then the
demand for such knowledge seems like the demand to
know what things would look like if there were no creatures with eyes. There may survive enough of a feeling
that there could be some kind of divine, wholly nonrelational grasp of reality to support the idea that there is
something that we cannot know in principle, because our
knowledge depends on relations. But I prefer Kant's
thought that the concept of a noumenon is only a negative
and limiting concept and not the concept of an unknowable reality at all.
33
�BLACK AND WHITE
The right hand of Rachmaninoff, in plaster,
Poses on the piano, exemplifying
Perpetual grasp of the imaginary
Orange. Above, the photograph of Chopin
Wearing his overcoat indoors, the face
Framed in protective jet, the nose connecting,
Like a phrase, the puzzled eyes and lips.
Hands are relaxed in power, but cuff conceals
That all of art's controlled by how you hold
The wrist. Witness another picture, where
With wrists exposed, white beauty and two Jews,
Subalterns on the strings, imparadise
Queen Carmen Sylva of Roumania.
They cut Tchaikovsky's coda, for the dirge
Was deemed indecorous at court. Her reign
Is now, the chaste survivor of the trio,
Retained to touch me weekly with her touch.
Aristocratic still at the piano,
Her fingers knotted, but her thumbs are spades
Or sugar spoons pressing upon my back
To plant the tones that only ghosts require
Of music eaten brown by Brazilian beetles.
I memorize the pulse. Repeated octaves
Refuse admission to the Fourth Ballade,
While in the kitchen, waiting as reward,
Kulitch that must be deftly sawn, not sliced,
And tea from the electric samovar.
ELLIOTT ZUCKERMAN
Elliott Zuckerman is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
34
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�The Media-Shield of the Utopians
RaelJean Isaac and Erich Isaac
Why are the media so susceptible to the views of groups,
whose assumption, often unstated, is that a perfect society
can be created? These are groups out of sympathy with
one or more of the traditional values of American society,
who, however, couch their appeals in terms of values that
Americans share and purposes they desire, to their credit,
to achieve: social justice, peace, a pollution-free and safe
environment, equality between races and sexes, the reduction of risk, greater control of the individual over the decisions that affect his life.
We call these groups utopians. Let it be said immediately, they are not a cabal of conspirators parcelling out
areas of action to different groups in a coordinated onslaught on American institutions. They come from diverse
backgrounds and traditions. Who are these utopians?
They are the leadership and professional staff of the
mainline Protestant denominations and their related organizations, including the National Council of Churches,
the umbrella body representing thirty-two Protestant and
Eastern Orthodox churches. They include the leaders of
almost all the peace groups, including the pacifist ones,
like the War Resisters League and the American Friends
Service Committee and those that, while not opposing all
forms of violence in principle, seek to reduce the risks of
war, like SANE, Clergy and Laity Concerned, Physicians
for Social Responsibility, etc. They are the intellectuals in
Rael Tean Isaac has written Israel Divided, Ideological Politics in the Jewish
State (Johns Hopkins University Press 1976) and Party Politics in Israel
(Longman 1981). She recently published an article, "Do You Know
Where Your Church Offerings Go?" in the Reader's Digest (January
1983). Erich Isaac teaches geography at the City College of the City University of New York.
The above article is adapted from a book, The Coercive Utopians, that
Regnery Gateway will publish in the fall.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
a number of institutes and think tanks that have flourished
in the soil of so-called "revisionist history" which places
the blame for world tensions after World War II primarily
on the United States. They are found in a series of community action organizations like ACORN and National
Peoples Action. They are in government bureaucracies,
and have been especially attracted to agencies like the Department of Education, ACTION (in the Carter years) and
the now defunct Community Services Administration,
most of whose personnel have been transferred to other
agencies. They are prominent in the legally independent
but wholly government-funded Legal Services Corporation and in the similarly constituted Corporation for Public Broadcasting. They are found in the environmental
movement, especially in newer national organizations like
Friends of the Earth and Environmental Action, and in
the host of local environmental groups which, spurred by
the issue of nuclear energy, have burgeoned around the
country. They are found in the consumer organizations established by Ralph Nader. They are found in the colleges,
and are particularly prominent in the law and social science faculties of elite universities.
These movements-if not the specific organizationsare familiar to the reader, for they are the daily fare of
press and television. Yet much of what they say in their
own publications would be surprising, even shocking to
the general reader. But the media have acted as a filter,
screening out most of the information that could damage
the utopians in the public view.
There are a number of factors that explain why the media, instead of providing the public with some perspective
on the utopians, have made themselves a sounding board
for them, absorbing and transmitting their perspective on
crucial issues as objective "truth." The most important is
that journalists have a broadly similar perspective on the
major issues the utopians address. Journalist Robert Novak
35
�(of the Evans and Novak column) has called the media the
setting where journalists, regardless of background, are
welded into one homogeneous ideological mold.l Thomas
Shepard, the publisher of Look Magazine until it folded in
1971, noted that with only a handful of exceptions the
men and women who produced Look "detested big business" and "worshipped the ecological and consumerism
reformers. " 2
While these observations are impressionistic, they are
confirmed by surveys of the media elite. Two political scientists, S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman, in 1979
and 1980 interviewed 240 journalists and broadcasters of
the most influential media outlets. The survey found the
media elite were markedly to the left of the American electorate as a whole. For example, over a sixteen-year period
less than twenty percent of the media elite had supported
any Republican Presidential candidate. Their views on issues were in striking agreement with utopian articles of
faith. For example, fifty-six percent of the media elite
agreed that the U.S. exploits the Third World and is the
cause of its poverty.l
The media also have an ambition to hold sway over society in common with the utopians. In response to questions
from Lichter and Rothman, both the media elite and a
comparative sample of the business elite had a very similar
perception of the actual power of different groups in society, seeing the media, business, and unions as those with
the greatest influence. But asked how they would prefer to
see power distributed, the media elite put themselves at
the top, followed by consumer groups, intellectuals, and
blacks. 4
In part the media elite sympathize with the utopians because they define their role in much the same way. Walter
Cronkite is said to have asserted that journalists identify
with humanity rather than with institutions or with authority.s Similarly Julius Duscha, a reporter who became
director of the Washington Journalism Center, said "Reporters are frustrated reformers ... they look upon themselves almost with reverence, like they are protecting the
world against the forces of eviJ."6
For all their cynicism concerning tile motives of busi~
nessmen and politicians, the media elite readily succumb
to hero worship. Ralph Nader was the journalist's image of
his highest self: his own man, in the pay of no institution,
he acted without reference to financial self-interest. Nader
was the true outsider, an almost monastic figure, with his
spare single room lodgings, his bachelorhood and abstemious way oflife. No single figure has captured the imagination of journalists in quite the same way, but the utopians
as a whole benefit from being viewed by journalists as people like themselves, representatives of all the people.
In the case of some of the media elite more than sympathy is involved. Some are utopians, sharing fully their perspective on events. Larry Stern, in a key position as national news editor of the country's second most influential
paper, the Washington Post, shared their attitudes. This
36
emerged, surprisingly, at his funeral, following his sudden
death in 1980 at the age of fifty of a heart attack. He was
eulogized by left-wing journalist I. F. Stone, who praised
Stern as a friend of Palestine and Nicaragua (i.e. the PLO
and the Sandinistas) and for hating "those huge mindless
institutions that devour our substance and corrupt our
fundamental ideals, like the Pentagon and the CIA."7
(More remarkably, Stern was also eulogized by Teofilo
Acosta, head of the Cuban interests section in Washington, identified by intelligence expert Robert Moss as station chief of the DGI, the Cuban intelligence service.
Stern was apparently a friend of Castro's Cuba as well.)
Journalist Les Whitten, who worked with Jack Anderson
on the popular column, seems to have derived his political
philosophy directly from Ralph Nader. He warned a high
school graduating class in Maryland of the "great piratelike corporations that swallow up the blood of the people"
and informed the class that if you lined up the presidents
of thirty big banks and thirty bank robbers you would have
fifty-eight criminals and the only difference was that one
kind did it with a gun quickly while the bank presidents
did it "at eighteen percent a year without a gun." 8
Many in the media-including some of the elite-actually learned their craft in utopian training-grounds. A huge
((underground," later called ualternative" press, bur·
geoned in the late 1960s, its theme that America (often
spelled with a "k" wrapped in a swastika) was a fascist
country. A number of jounalists from these papers subsequently moved into the straight press. The best-selling
novel The Spike described the odyssey of a reporter for
Barricades (an obvious takeoff on the "alternative" journal
Ramparts), whose sensational scoop exposing the CIA
earns him a place on the New York World (clearly the New
York Times). The Spike's hero Robert Hackney was pre·
sumably modelled on New York Times star reporter Seymour Hersh, who wrote for Ramparts before coming to the
New York Times and made his name exposing the CIA. To
be sure, only the first part of Hersh's career paralleled that
of the fictional Hackney, for while Hackney woke up to
the role he was playing on behalf of Soviet disinformation
efforts, there is no evidence that Hersh's utopian perspective has changed.
Even journalists who do not start out as utopians may be
drawn to them because their concerns make good copy.
Utopians are endless sources of the kind of stories that sell
papers. Our tuna is poisoned; the nuclear plant near our
city is in danger of meltdown; nuclear bombs will destroy
all life from ground zero, which is in our backyard. In addition to the inherent drama of scare stories, these stories
have, as the utopians present them, an appealing clarity.
There are good guys and bad guys, victimizers and victims.
This is much more dramatic stuff than cost benefit analyses, probability studies, and theories of deterrence necessary to refute these stories. Moreover, the utopians have
solutions: shut down nuclear power plants, eliminate all
pesticides, rely on the sun, endorse a nuclear freeze.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�If stories told according to utopian formula make good
copy for the press, they are even bett~r suited for documentaries, television's method of exploring issues indepth. Why this is so can be seen from .a candid look into
the documentary producer's world offered in 1978 by Martin Carr, a veteran in producing documentaries for all
three networks. Carr noted that the producer's first step
was to "arrive at a point of view." His goal was to make the
viewer feel as he felt: "If you walk away feeling differently,
I failed somehow." Carr noted the obligation to provide
"balance," but explained that this had to be done carefully, so as not to disturb the documentary's emotional impact. He described a documentary he had made on migrant workers in which, for balance, he had interviewed
the biggest grower in F1orida. But he was a charming man
who could have tipped the emotional balance of the documentary in favor of his position. So he found another
grower whose point of view was the same, but whose personality would alienate the viewer and put him on instead.
As a result Carr reports: "One could only feel a particular
way at the end of the film ... the way I felt about it." 9 The
utopian point of view on most stories shapes visually striking, emotionally compelling documentaries: the good
farmworker against the bad grower; the victims of disease
versus the large corporation; the peasant guerilla against
government-backed exploiters, etc.
On major topics such as the environment, defense, intelligence, and foreign policy, the media serve as a vast
sounding board for the utopians, while at the same time
suppressing sounds the utopians prefer not to hear. Suppression is especially important, for while there is dispute
on how effective the media are in making the public think
the way journalists do (after all, the public does not vote
like the media elite), there is little dispute that the media
determine what it is that the public thinks about. An article in The Journalism Quarterly points out: "If newsmen
share a pattern of preference as to what is newsworthy,
and that pattern does not represent reality, they will
present a distorted image of the world which may contribute to inappropriate decisions and policies."lO
Nowhere are distortions in coverage more evident than
in coverage of environmental issues, particularly nuclear
energy, the issue on which the utopians have expended
their greatest efforts. The impact of the utopian campaign
against nuclear energy on the media is apparent from two
systematic studies, one by the Battelle Center and one by
the Media Center. The Battelle Center study covered four
national periodicals, including the New York Times, from
1972 to 1976 and found that while in 1972 there were more
positive than negative statements on nuclear energy, by
1976 negative outnumbered positive statements by two to
one.ll (This, it must be remembered, was three years prior
to Three Mile Island.) The Media Institute study focussed
on ten years of television evening news coverage, from Au-
gust 4, 1968 to March 27, 1979 (Just prior to Three Mile
Island). Its most telling finding concerned the "experts"
,TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
used by the networks on nuclear energy. Of the top ten
sources used over the years, seven were opposed to nuclear power. The source most frequently used was the
antinuclear Union of Concerned Scientists, the second
Ralph Nader. 12 After Three Mile Island earlier tendencies
became even more marked. Psychiatrist Robert DuPont
examined 13 hours of videotapes of news coverage on nuclear energy and found that fear was the leitmotif of the
stories. Reporters continually examined what DuPont
called jjwhat if, worst case" scenarios. He found almost no
mention of the risks posed by other energy sources or of
the need to balance risks.ll
·
By 1982 the pattern of media coverage had produced serious misconceptions in the American public concerning
the balance of opinion among scientists on nuclear energy.
A Roper poll found that almost one in four Americans believed that a majority of scientists "who are energy experts" opposed the further development of nuclear energy. One in three members of the public believed that
solar energy could make a large contribution to meeting
energy needs within the next twenty years.l 4 An actual
survey of energy experts, however, showed that only five
percent wanted to halt further development of nuclear energy (among those with specific expertise in the nuclear
area none wanted to halt further development). No more
than two percent of energy experts saw any form of solar
energy making a substantial contribution to energy needs
in the next twenty years.l5
The distortions in perception can be explained by the
views of science jounalists, who are far more sceptical of
nuclear energy than scientists. A survey by Lichter and
Rothman of science journalists at major national media
outlets found there was a fascinating, though scarcely surprising, connection between attitudes toward nuclear energy and political ideology. The more liberal the journalist,
the more likely he was to oppose nuclear energy. Indeed
Rothman and Lichter found they could define the issue
more precisely. "We asked them a large number of social
and political questions. The best predictor of opposition to
nuclear energy is the belief that American society is unjust."l6 Moreover, Lichter and Rothman found that television reporters and producers were even more hostile to nuclear energy than print journalists.
The extensive use, especially by television, of the Union
of Concerned Scientists was presumably a major factor in
explaining the discrepancy between what scientists think
and what the public thinks they think. The public, because of its name, perceived this as an organization of sci-
entists. But as Samuel McCracken points out in The War
Against the Atom, its membership is obtained through direct mail solicitation of the public and the only qualification for belonging is a contribution of $15. Its executive
directors in recent years have not been scientists_17 How
many members of the Union of Concerned Scientists are
in fact scientists? The organization keeps silent, but a random sample of 7,741 scientists turned up only one who
37
�was affiliated with the Union of Concerned Scientists. On
that basis Lichter and Rothman estimate that fewer than
200 scientists among the 130,000 listed in American Men
and Women of Science are affiliated with the Union of
Concerned Scientists. IS Little wonder that the organization refused Lichter and Rothman information needed to
poll its membership!
McCracken observes that anyone would see the fraud if
a general membership organization composed almost entirely of laymen and concerned principally with supporting bans on prayer in the schools were to call itself the
Union of Concerned Clergymen_l9 Yet the media persist in
using this organization of utopians, which misuses data as
it misuses the title of "scientist," as its chief authority on
nuclear energy. The media rarely call upon Scientists and
Engineers for Secure Energy, although this is an organization whose members are genuine experts on nuclear en·
ergy and includes seven nobel laureates in physics. Presumably this is because it does not spread the utopian's
message, endorsed by so many in the media, that nuclear
power is immensely dangerous and the authorities are deceiving the public.
Another interesting insight into the weight of sentiment
against nuclear power in the media comes from a Public
Broadcasting Company spokesman who was castigated for
the uniform imbalance of the PBC's programs. He explained that it would be difficult even to find a producer
prepared to do a pro-nuclear film. zo
On questions of defense, the media elite have also supported utopian assumptions. Walter Cronkite summed up
the media perspective in the 1970s in 1974: "There arealways groups in Washington expressing views of alarm over
the state of our defenses. We don't carry those stories. The
story is that there are those who want to cut defense
spending." 21 The American Security Council, which during the 1970s issued reports and ran a series of conferences
and seminars featuring defense experts who warned of the
disrepair of the American military and the massive Soviet
military buildup then going on, became convinced that
there was some unwritten rule in the media not to cover
their activities. But for the media, as a group advocating
increased defense expenditures the American Security
Council was simply not unews.n
Survey results indicate how pervasively media coverage
reflected utopian attitudes. Ernest Lefever, before starting
his own Ethics and Public Policy Center, led a study team
for the Institute for American Strategy which examined
CBS News coverage of national defense for 1972 and
1973. The study showed that during that two-year period
the viewer saw only one minute on the "CBS Evening
News" dealing with the comparative military strength of
the U.S. and U.S.S.R. 22 The study found that 1,400 presentations on the subject of national defense tended to
support the view that threats to our security were less serious than the government thought while only seventy-nine
contradicted that position.
38
With Reagan's victory, the views of those who argued
for more defense spending could no longer be ignored, for
those views represented administration policy. In response, CBS entered the debate with a massive documentary designed to counter the administration position in
June 1981. Described by its anchorman, Dan Rather, as
"the most important documentary project of the decade,"
the five-hour series, "The Defense of the United States,"
was hailed by the Washington Post as the "first documentary epic in TV history." Its theme was that "the United
States is not threatened by any external enemy, but rather
by the tragic propensity of the two superpowers each to
see in the other a mirror reflection of its own fears and
hostilities." Joshua Muravchik and John E. Haynes noted
that in the five hours devoted to examining plans for a
U.S. military build-up, "there was not mention-none-of
the Soviet build-up which precipitated it."2l
Although the public had no way of knowing it, the program's arguments, experts, even its vocabulary were de·
rived from the utopian organizations. To testify that current defense spending was already excessive the program
used "experts" Jack Geiger and Kosta Tsipis. Tsipis is a
member of the board of directors of SANE and Geiger is a
leader of both Physicians for Social Responsibility and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War
(in which Soviet physicians join with American physicians
to emphasize the need for the U.S. to disarm). Geiger was
identified only as professor of medicine at the City University of New York and Tsipis as professor of physics at
MIT. 24 The viewer was not informed that they were peace
movement activists.
To show that Soviet influence was already on the decline (and increased defense expenditures, presumably, superfluous), CBS drew on the Center for Defense Information that had issued a report in 1980 purporting to show
that Soviet influence in the world had reached an all-time
low. After Defense Secretary Weinberger spoke of the
need for a strong defense, Walter Cronkite undercut his
statement: "Since 1960, the Soviet influence around the
world actually has declined. Their so-called gains like Afghanistan and Angola take on a different perspective, particularly when measured against losses, like Egypt and
China." CBS then offered a closeup of two lists of twelve
nations, one showing Soviet gains and the other Soviet
losses since 1960. The lists were erroneous but repeated
the errors in the lists published by the Center for Defense
Information.25 The voice of the Center for Defense Information had been transformed into the voice of CBS.
The very vocabulary of the program was derived from
the utopians. The process of arms procurement was referred to as "The Iron Triangle," after the title of a book
recently released by the utopian Council on Economic Priorities. Its author, Gordon Adams, was president of the
Corporate Data Exchange, a new-left research organization started by the Institute for Policy Studies. The book
had been financed, among others, by the IPS mainstay,
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�the Samuel Rubin Foundation. The importance of a term
like "The Iron Triangle" is that it not only conveys a
meaning but an emotional impact. "The Iron Triangle" is
bad. It links the government, the armed forces, and industries that produce military equipment in a closed bond of
steel and. mutual interest against the rest of us.
The utopian campaign•against the intelligence agencies
depended heavily on the media for its success. 11he ·campaign began in the .Jate 1960s, when a series of'books and
articles began to appear, many of them financed 'by the
FuNd for Investigative journalism. The Fund was established by Philip M. Stern, whose 'Stern Fund is a major
furrder of utOpian:projects.' But it scored its first major success when:the NewWork Times• ran a series of articles by
Seymour' Hersh in December 1974 exposing CIA involve.ment in illegal tlornestic surveillance of the anti-war movement. Thisrprecipitated a series of investigations by the
'5\J<fcially appointed Rockefeller Commission and the Sen~te,•·which resulted in "reforms" that went far beyond correction of abuses. The CIA's ability to function in crucial
areas was imperiled. At one point eight committees of
Congress, the armed services, foreign relations, appr<Jpiiations and intelligence committees of both houses, had 'to
be informed of every major CIA operation, which, given
the all-but-certainty ofleaks by staff, meant there could be
no such operations.
The U.S. intelligence agencies were a legitimate subject
of media interest. The problem, however, was that in true
utopian fashion the media were interested only in stories
that revealed intelligence activities as illegal or immoral.
Reports that the intelligence services were failing to perform their task of protecting U.S. citizens were not news.
The major media ignored a conference called "Our Domestic Intelligence Crisis," held by the Coalition for Peace
through Strength in March 1979. There were revelations
at this conference that the public might have thought dramatic. For instance, the Secret Service only received one
fourth of the intelligence it received before the media-assisted llreforms" of intelligence agencies discouraged in·
formants who feared Freed om of Information requests
would expose their identities. It thus had to recommend
that the President not visit certain cities in the United
States. The conference also disclosed that the Federal Employment Security program had been undone: members
of the Communist Party or even of the Weather Underground were no longer barred from federal employment,
even in sensitive positions.Z6 The media showed no interest in informing the public about the necessary services
intelligence agencies provide or about the consequences
of dismantling security protections.
With all the popularity of documentaries about the malfeasances of the CIA and FBI, the networks produced
nothing comparable on the KGB. This was not because
the topic could not be handled. A Canadian team did an
absorbing documentary called "The KGB Connections"
based largely on the testimony of KGB defectors. A great
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
critical success in Canada and Europe, it was turned down
by all three networks, including ABC which had invested
in its production. Challenged for its failure to show the
documentary, ABC countered that it would shortly be
showing its own documentary on the KGB but at this writ;ing, a year later, ABC has not done so. The failure to exam'ine KGB activities by both TV and print media meant, as
James Tyson points out in Target America, that the CIA
seemed to shadow-box against a non-existent enemy. The
utopian contention that covert intelligence activities were
the product of deviant psychologic~] needs of those who
manned corrupt American institutions was reinforced.
Foreign policy, particularly as it touches •0TI human
rights, is yet another area in which the media .alm0st uniformly presents the utopian perspective. Thereason'is not
simply that journalists share that perspective, although
doubtless many do. Covering human rights violations in
totalitarian "socialist" aollntries :is <lifticult, if not impossible, for journalists. S1i1dh·cotnitriies, •when they do not bar
jounmalists :alt0gether, <Control their movements. This
-meams •that information has to come from people outside
'the·coutitry. Information was available on the Cambodian
genocide very early from people who had escaped over the
border. By 1977 Reader's Digest editors John Barron and
Anthony Paul had produced a book Murder of a Gentle
Land which, based on the eye-witness accounts of hundreds of escapees, estimated that between April 17, 1975
and the end of 1976, at least 1.2 million people had died as
a result of the policies of the Cambodian government.
Yet press coverage of events unprecedented in horror
since the Nazi destruction of six million Jews was minimal.
In 1976, the year in which Barron and Paul conducted
their interviews, television network evening news programs mentioned events in Cambodia only three times.
NBC never mentioned them at all. The country's two
most influential papers, the Times and the Washington
Post, together mentioned the subject a total of 13 times.27
In 1977, when what was happening was even clearer, the
three networks had a combined total of two stories. That
contrasted with !59 human rights-related stories on the
networks on South Africa. 28 While the New York Times
did better in 1977, referring to the Cambodian genocide
34 times, this still contrasted sharply with 291 stories of
human rights violations in South Africa. The Washington
Post ran ten items on Cambodia. It had thirty items just on
the death of Steve Biko, the black leader who died under
suspicious circumstances in a South African jail. 29 In 1978
the American Security Council made things convenient
for the press corps by arranging a press conference in
Washington D.C., addressed by Pin Yathay, a civil engineer who had escaped after 26 months in Communist
Cambodia. Yathay reported losing 18 members of his family and provided an eye-witness account of desperation
and cruelty:
And there were many macabre incidents ... the starving peo-
ple who ate the flesh of dead bodies during this acute famine.
39
�I will now tell you a story that I lived myself ... a teacher who
ate the flesh of her own sister. She was later caught, she was
beaten from morning to night until she died, under the rain,
in front of the whole village as an example, and her child was
crying beside her, and the mother died at the evening. 30
A dramatic story. But not one of the networks sent a representative. The Washington Post sent a reporter, but the paper never carried a story.
Hedrick Smith, a one-time Moscow correspondent of
the New York Times and then chief correspondent of the
Washington Bureau, has cast light on why the coverage
was so poor. He noted that the Times-the "bible" of the
other media, in the words of a news executive, was not in~
dined to do stories on foreign countries written outside
them.ll Soviet dissidents in the Soviet Union were the sub·
ject of many stories. Once the same people had found ref·
uge in the United States, they found the press uninterested in their accounts of human rights violations. When
leading figures in the Soviet human rights movement like
Vladimir Bukovsky and Alexander Ginzburg participated
in two days of International Sakharov Hearings in 1979
that brought sixty witnesses to Washington to testify, their
efforts were virtually ignored by the press. The Washington Post ran a story in the "Style" section called "Remembering Russia." That was scarcely the point of the hearings. Similarly, when testimony on conditions in Vietnam
was given before a House subcommittee in June 1977, including eyewitness reports of a Vietnamese imprisoned in
a series of "reeducation camps," the major newspapers
carried nothing.l2
The end result is gross distortion in coverage of human
rights problems. In 1977 the New York Times carried fortyeight items on human rights violations in South Korea and
none on North Korea.ll More than that, as Reed Irvine,
head of the media watchdog group, Accuracy in Media, has
pointed out, a kind of collaboration emerges between the
U.S. media and the countries that most systematically violate human rights.l4.
There may have been an additional reason for the reluctance of the media to report more fully on Cambodia and
Southeast Asia. In the last years of the Vietnam War the
press was an adversary of the war and they were at first
unwilling to believe, later to acknowledge, that the American departure did not lead to an improved life for the people
of that area. For example, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, urging a cutoff of American aid on March 17,
1975, wrote: "Whatfuture possibility could be more terrible
than the reality of what is happening to Cambodia now?"
The possibilities were beyond anything of which Anthony
Lewis dreamed. New York Times columnist Tom Wicker in
the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War was glad to
give the press credit for forcing the U.S. out of the region.
Once, however, there were boat people and millions of
murdered victims in Cambodia, the press did not want to be
reminded of its role. The violent reaction of CBS newsman
40
Morley Safer to an article by Robert Elegant in Encounter in
August 1981 is revealing. Once himself a journalist in Vietnam, Elegant laid bare the shabbiness of the reporting, not
exempting himself from the criticism. Safer devoted a radio
segment to denouncing Elegant, whose article almost none
of his listeners could have seen, as worthy of the mantle of
Joseph Goebbels.l5 The entire subject obviously irritated
media nerves.
Coverage of human rights thus adhered to the utopian
perspective according to which the world's worst human
rights violator was the Union of South Africa, followed by
third world countries friendly to the United States, espe·
dally those in Latin America. As countries came under at·
tack from internal subversion backed directly or indirectly
by the Soviet Union, media focus, in true utopian fashion,
was on the injustices that lead people to revolt rather than
the predictable consequences of these "wars of liberation"
in inaugurating much more repressive regimes. Karen de
Young, now foreign editor of the Washington Post, who
from Nicaragua provided warm coverage of the Sandinistas
in Somoza's last period, admitted: "Most journalists now,
most Western journalists at least, are very eager to seek out
guerrilla groups, leftist groups, because you assume they
must be the good guys. 36 Walter Cronkite, speaking in Portland, said the U.S. should help countries such as El Salvador
"achieve their goals even if it means interim steps of social~
ism and communism."l7 (As Reed Irvine pointed out, communism has yet to serve as an "interim step.")
With rare exceptions-NBC in the fall of 1982 produced
a film "What Ever Happened to El Salvador" that accompanied a Salvadoran army unit on patrol rather than the guerrillas-network documentaries have been hostile to the
government of El Salvador. In September 1982, a CBS documentary focussed on the inevitability of revolution in
Guatemala as a response to tyranny backed by the United
States on behalf of our exploitative business interests. Television journalists, however, bend over backwards in their
efforts to understand the difficulties of the Nicaraguan government. A segment on ABC's "20/20" aired in June 1980
had David Marash make the patently false declaration:
uNicaragua's revolutionary justice system has been given
near unanimous international praise."
The utopian influence on public television is even
greater than on the networks. On public television they
often write and produce the documentaries. For example,
Philip Agee was part owner of an anti-CIA three-hour docu·
mentary "On Company Business" broadcast in May 1980.
The fund-raising prospectus sent out by the producers prior
to the actual filming promised that the documentary would
"show the broken lives, hatred, cruelty, cynicism, and despair which result from U.S.-CIA policy" and that it would
record "the story of 30 years of CIA subversion, murder,
bribery, and torture as told by an insider and documented
with newsreel film of actual events."l8
The "insider" who served as the documentary's central
figure and moral hero was Agee, identified for the viewer
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�only as someone who had worked for the CIA between 1959
and 1969. There was no mention of Agee's role in exposing
the identities of U.S. agents worldwide or of his expulsion
from the Netherlands, France, and England. Intelligence
expert Robert Moss has revealed Agee was found to have
met with the Cuban intelligence station chief in London at
least 30 times before he was expelled from England. If the
viewer had known of Agee's record, he might have discounted everything Agee said. The documentary's solution
was to keep silence. Despite this, Public Broadcasting's director of current affairs programming Barry Chase de·
scribed the program in a memo to all public broadcasting
stations as "a highly responsible overview of the CIA's his·
tory." 39 (Chase clearly did not feel inhibited by the law es·
tablishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that
stipulates programs funded by it must be objective and bal·
anced if they deal with controversial issues.)
The Institute for Policy Studies' Saul Landau has written
films for public television of a similar calibre. "Paul Jacobs
and the Nuclear Gang" (with part of its seed money from
the Samuel Rubin Foundation and Obie Benz, one of the
wealthy young creators of the Robin Hood was Right spe·
cies of foundations 40 ) was a polemic against nuclear energy
and nuclear weapons, relying primarily on emotionally
charged interviews with cancer victims who believed their
disease had been caused by radiation and with the members
of their families. Landau also wrote "From the Ashes ...
Nicaragua," directed by Helena Solberg Ladd, who had
been a lecturer at IPS. William Bennett, Head of the National Endowment for the Humanities which had chan·
neled funds for the film's production under its previous
head, on seeing the film remarked that he was "shocked,
appalled, disgusted" by such an example of "unabashed
socialist-realism propaganda." 41 Author Midge Deeter, ex·
ecutive director of the Committee for a Free World, found
this description too mild: "We almost no longer have a
working vocabulary to cover phenomena like Ms. Ladd's
film."42
Many of the documentaries that appear on public television endorse utopian themes far more overtly than would
be possible on the networks. Public Broadcasting presented
a film on North Korea that could have received the imprimatur of its dictator Kim 11 Sung; a hymn to Cuba called
"Cuba: Sports and Revolution;" two films on China, "The
Children of China" good enough propaganda to win the
praise of the Chinese Central Broadcasting Administration for helping American People "understand the New
China," and "China Memoir" produced by Shirley MacLaine, which even Ralph Rogers, then chairman of the
Public Broadcasting Corporation, admitted was "pure
propaganda."4l Boston Public Television's WGBH funded
a film called "Blacks' Britannica" on British racism, which
won the prize at the Leipzig Film Festival in East Germany.
This was too much even for the producer at WGBH who
complained of the film's "endorsement of a Marxist point
of view."44 When he sought to edit out some of the most
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
blatant segments, the maker of the film brought suit and
the U.S. Communist Party front, the National Alliance
Against Racist and Political Repression, petitioned to join
the suit.45 In the end four minutes of the film were removed, but its Marxist message remained unmistakable.
Another utopian theme-hostility against corporations-is also reflected in the media. A Louis Harris poll in
the fall of 1982 found that an "overwhelming seventy-six
percent" of high level executives believed business and financial coverage on TV news was prejudiced against business.46 The hostility is most pervasive in a surprising areaentertainment programming. A Media Institute study
"Crooks, Conmen and Clowns" found that the image of
businessmen on TV series was overwhelmingly negative,
with two out of three businessmen on two hundred prime
time episodes shown as foolish, greedy, or criminal. While
on occasion a small businessman was shown in a favorable
light, those running big businesses were for the most part
depicted as actual criminals.47
While it might be argued that the businessman simply
offers a convenient "heavy" in plot development, Ben
Stein, in The View from Sunset Boulevard, shows that
there is an excellent fit between the opinions of TV writers and producers and the shows they create. Stein interviewed forty writers and producers of the major adventure
shows and situation-comedies and found that even those
worth millions of dollars considered themselves workers
opposed to an "exploiting class." A typical flippant-serious
comment was made by Bob Schiller, who wrote for Lucille
Ball for 13 years and produced "Maud." He said of businessmen, "I don't judge. I think there are good lepers and
bad lepers."48 Producer Stanley Kramer told Stein: Everything that has to do with our lives is contaminated. The
air, the streams, the food-everything is ruined." 49 That
big business was responsible was self-evident to most TV
writers.
To the media the utopians are inherently more believable than those who oppose them. Cynical about human
motives, journalists seem unable to conceive that "public
interest" spokesmen act from anything but selfless devotion to the public good. Abbie Hoffman could enlighten
them: "There is absolutely no greater high than challenging the power structure as a nobody, giving it your all, and
winning."50 Peter Metzger has pointed out another motivation that also has to do with heightening the individual's
sense of power and self-worth. With only a few exceptions
the experts cited by the utopians never made genuine scientific contributions and thus were denied the reward
of recognition by their peers.5 1 They have achieved the
fame and status their scientific work could not gain for
them through serving the utopians' need for men with
credentials.
Mesmerized by the utopians' simple-minded reading of
human nature, journalists are quick to denigrate critics of
utopian orthodoxies. For example, CBS produced a documentary attacking cereal-makers for the high sugar con-
41
�tent of many of their products. (Dan Rather asked a General Foods vice-president if he could sleep at night, given
the damage he was doing to the children of America.) In
pursuit of the requisite "balance" the program interviewed a leading professor of nutrition at Harvard, who denied the cereals did the harm alleged in the rest of the program. The camera simply zoomed in on a plaque on a
Harvard building which indicated that it had been built
through a donation by General Foods.5 2 However effective the visual in undercutting the professor's statement, a
faulty understanding of the reward system in science was
revealed. For scientists, the most important factor in determining career opportunities is the judgment of their
peers, not the approval of company executives who make
charitable contributions to universities.
Journalists are ready to believe the most improbable
charges against institutions they distrust. In January 1982
the New York Times featured a lengthy story by Raymond
Bonner concerning events~ alleged to have taken place a
year earlier: American military advisers in El Salvador had
observed a torture training session for the El Salvadoran
military in which a seventeen-year-old boy and a thirteenyear-old girl had their bones broken prior to being killed.
Bonner's sole source for the story was a deserter from the
Salvadoran army. The narrative that in its original form
claimed that the American advisers were teaching the torture session, had appeared in a leftist Mexican paper but
was such obvious Communist atrocity propaganda that it
took eight months after the original publication before a
taker was found among American journalists, Mr. Bonner,
who offered a ((sanitized" version in the Times. 53
Such credulity leaves the media open to being taken in
by the grossest "disinformation" forgeries. F1ora Lewis, at
the top of her profession as a columnist for the New York
Times, accepted uncritically a supposed State Department
"dissent document," distributed to newsmen by the
Council on Hemispheric Affairs, one of the utopian think
tanks devoted to Latin America, and co-founded by Orlando Letelier, probably "an agent of influence" for the
Cuban government. While the State Department does indeed have a "dissent channel" permitting members in disagreement with policy to have their objections heard at
the highest level of the department, the document F1ora
Lewis accepted as authentic bore the name of a non-existent State Department task force. Lewis devoted her
column of March 6, 1981, to the document that attacked
U.S. government policy in El Salvador. Asserting it had
been "drawn up by people from the National Security
Council, the State and Defense Departments, and the
CIA," she praised the report's "solid facts and cool analysis" and closed by telling the Reagan administration that it
would "do well to listen to the paper's authors before the
chance for talks is lost."
At this point the State Department came out with a detailed report on the forgery that the Times carried as a
news story and F1ora Lewis, her face plentifully covered
42
with egg, wrote an apology in her March 9 column. Similarly, journalist Claudia Wright published an article in November 1982 charging that UN Ambassador Jeane J.
KirkpatEiclt had received a "birthday gift" from the Union
of South Afriea. The basis was a letter from the information counselor at the South African embassy, a crude forgery replete with errors in spelling. 54 (Since Miss Wright is
herself a utopian journalist, the question as to whether she
was herself taken in must remain open.)
Media elite instantly distrust government assertions
that contradict utopian views with which they identify. A
storm broke over the Washington Post and the Wall Street
Journal when it became know that the journalists of both
had relied upon Philip Agee as a source for articles they
wrote attacking a February 1981 U.S. White Paper "Communist Interference in El Salvador." The White Paper
summarized findings from captured documents of the El
Salvador guerrillas, showing the extent of clandestine military support given by the Soviet Union and Cuba to the
guerrillas beginning in 1979. As a result of the furor, even
how the articles came to be written became public knowledge. The Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Kwitny told his
editor of his immediate "skepticism over news accounts of
the white paper."55 The Washington Post's Robert Kaiser
said that he had immediately been eager to explore possible deficiencies in the White Paper and so was pleased
when the Post's national editor, Peter Osnos, asked him to
look into the matter. And Peter Osnos revealed that he
had assigned Kaiser after a call from free-lance writer Jeffrey Stein who said: "Look, I can't understand how you all
have let that White Paper hang out there without a look. 56
(Stein was a former fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, suggesting that the utopian grape vine operates
quickly to encourage attacks on anything the utopians
consider damaging to them.) For the utopians it was crucial to discredit the White Paper, since if the American
public recognized the Soviet-Cuban role in El Salvador,
the carefully fostered image of the guerrillas as indigenous
liberal reformers might be undermined.
Philip Agee, according to Arnaud de Borchgrave helped
by his "Cuban friends," provided a forty-six page attack on
the White Paper which was distributed in April by the
Covert Action Information Bulletin. This publication was
started after an internal factional split at CounterSpy, the
magazine that named U.S. agents abroad, with Agee becoming associated with the new magazine. Both the Post's
Kaiser and the Journal's Kwitny obtained copies. Kaiser
subsequently claimed that in an early draft of his article he
had mentioned Agee as a source, but that his editor at the
Post suggested dropping the reference as "unnecessary."57
Confronted with his failure to credit Agee's paper as a
source in this Wall Street Journal story Kwitny was taken
aback: "I was totally unaware that it had any distribution,
except to a few of his friends here." 58 He insisted that
while he had read Agee's paper: "There was nothing I was
drawing from him or anyone else ... I can't really rememWINTER/SPRING 1983
�ber what was in the Agee piece." In a line by line comparison, Human Events reporter Cliff Kincaid showed, however, that not only did Kwitny's criticisms closely parallel
those of Agee, but that Kwitny even repeated a specific
Agee error: he referred to "labor unions" (Agee said "trade
unions") when the document being analyzed was talking
about the Communist Party. 59
Perhaps the most interesting revelations showed the
wide use by journalists of the Agee apparatus and the igno·
rance of those in executive positions on major papers of
the web of utopian organizations. Frederick Taylor, executive editor of the Wall Street Journal, came to the defense of his reporter in a long article on the editorial page
entitled "TheEl Salvador 'White Paper."' The Wall Street
Journal had been accused "at the least of being the dupe of
Soviet disinformation, and at the worst of taking the work
of a discredited left-winger and passing it off as its own."
"It isn't so." As proof, Taylor repeated Kwitny's own
words:
The article originated in my own skepticism over news ac~
counts ofthe white paper in February. It sprouted because of
two events in April. First, having been asked to sort the files
of my recently deceased Journal colleague, Jerry Landauer, I
called someone who had been a longstanding source of Jerry's
on intelligence matters . ... This source, John Kelly, edits a
magazine, Counterspy, which also printed a critique of the
white paper. Kelly supplied me with some leads and documents. 50
To defend the Journal from charges of being a dupe of disinformation and of passing off the charges of a discredited
left-winger as its own by transferring responsibility from
Agee to CounterSpy and to inform the Wall Street Journal's
readers thatthey had all along been kept informed on intelligence matters by CounterSpy, was, to say the least, a remarkable editorial defense.
Apparently there was a similar gap between editors and
reporters at the Washington Post. When a Washington Post
editorial condemned CounterSpy's clone, the Covert
Action Information Bulletin, as "contemptible" and suggested its editors were less than honorable journalists, they
lashed back:
Your diatribe only highlights the gap betwen the editorial offices and the reporters, for your people are among the large
number of working journalists from virtually all the major
printed and electronic media in the country who call upon us
daily for help, research, and of all things, names of intelligence
operatives in connection with articles they are writing.6I
The difficulty journalists have in believing anything the
government says that interferes with their prejudices, no
matter how overwhelming the evidence, has become obvious to government officials. Admiral Bobby Inman, on retiring as deputy director of the CIA, spoke of his frustration
at trying to convince the public of the peril of the Soviet
military build-up when the press would not even believe
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
U.S. intelligence reports that included spy satellite pictures. Inman described an intelligence briefing for the press
on the Soviet and Cuban-backed military build-up in Nicaragua in which reporters were shown photos of Soviet-type
military garrison arrangements, deployed Soviet T-55
tanks, etc. Newspaper accounts the following day used the
word "alleged" to describe the intelligence findings, suggesting that the reporters did not believe them. 62 .
The media do more than believe the utopians. They protect them. News that could prove embarrassing to the utopians is often simply not reported. Reed Irvine has christened this "the Pinsky Principle" after North Carolina
journalist Walter Pinsky, who described his approach in the
Columbia Journalism Review in 1976. "If my research and
journalistic instincts tell me one thing, my political instincts
another ... I won't fudge it, I won't bend it, but I won't
write it "63 Pinsky gave as an example what he called the
great untold story ofthe trial of)oan Little in his home state.
Joan Little was an imprisoned black woman who had killed
her guard and defended herself on the grounds that he had
tried to assault her sexually. Her story was widely reported
nationally. Pinsky explained that he meant that reporters
never reported the role of the Communist Party, working
through its front, the National Alliance Against Racist and
Political Repression, in controlling the entire political
movement surrounding the case. Pinsky says that journalists kept silent "out of concern that the information might
be used in red-baiting anyone associated with the case who
did not belong to the (Communist) party."64
ABC newsman Geraldo Rivera in an interview with Playboy confessed to practicing the Pinsky Principle in his reporting from Panama. When the Panamanian National
Guard was guilty of violence at the time of the Senate vote
on the Canal Treaties, "We downplayed the whole incident That was the day I decided that I had to be very careful about what was said, because I could defeat the very
thing (passage of the Treaty) that I wanted to achieve."65
An interesting example of the Pinsky Principle was the
failure of CBS in its two-part docudrama, "Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones," to say a word concerning
Jones as a Communist Jones had broken with the U.S.
Communist Party, according to his own account, because it
had turned against Stalin and "I loved Stalin." Nonetheless,
his feelings toward the party had clearly mellowed, for his
will provided that in the absence of immediate surviving
family, his estate should go to the U.S. Communist Party.
Jones had also ordered that $7 million belonging to the People's Temple be transferred to the Soviet Union. When the
script's author Ernest Tidyman was asked about the omission he said he did not believe Jones was a Communist.
Asked what Jones's political views were, Tidyman replied:
"None, particularly. He was very liberal, very progressive,
very community conscious." 66 Presumably, for Tidyman,
giving the facts abcrutJones's Communism would interfere
with the image he wanted to convey of) ones as an idealistic
community-builder gone awry.
43
�More recently the Pinsky Principle has been at work in
the refusal of the media to examine the utopian roots of the
peace movement and its links to the international Soviet
front, the World Peace Council. With rare exceptions, nota·
blythe Wall Street Journal and the Reader's Digest, the mass
media have portrayed the freeze as a spontaneous out·
growth of grass roots Middle America. Even when the orga·
nizations that created and promoted the freeze are credited
as in a Newsweek article of April26, 1982, the identifications
are superficial, giving no hint of the agenda of these organi·
zations. For example, although Clergy and Laity Con·
cerned is described as "a powerful force in the disarmament
movement," it is identified only as a group "begun in 1965
to mobilize the religious community against the Vietnam
War." There is an element oflaziness in this: it is easier to
ask a group about itself over the phone than to acquire its
literature which would explain that CALC sees its task to be
joining together those who "hate the corporate power
which the United States presently represents .... "
But more importantly there is unwillingness to transmit
facts that might put the utopians in an unfavorable light.
Eileen Shanahan, assistant managing editor of the Pitts·
burgh Post-Gazette, observed: "I saw it at the Washington
Star and I'm seeing it here. The present 28-35 news room
set is antiwar to a significant degree and also antinuke."67
When President Regan or members of Congress made any
reference to the credentials of the groups behind the
freeze, the prestige media lashed out. A New York Times
editorial on October 6, 1982, labelled all reference to such
matters an "indecent debate." A Washington Post editorial
on the same date said that to bring up such topics was a
Smear."
Probably the most widespread application of the Pinsky
Principle is the failure to identify utopian sources. Identifi·
cation is a crucial service the media offer the viewer or
reader, for without it he has no way of evaluating the infor·
mation offered to him. For example, the New York Times
reported that a National Lawyers Guild delegation to the
Middle East "came away convinced that the Israeli govern·
ment implements a policy of torture for the annexation of
the occupied areas." Since the National Lawyers Guild, the
major organization of radical lawyers, was identified only as
"a group of American lawyers," the reader was not helped
to be properly sceptical of this information.68 Similarly, the
New York Times, which between 1979 and 1981 carried
essays by Fellows of the Institute for Policy Studies on its
Op-Ed page with more than twice the frequency of any
other think tank, including much bigger and better known
ones, identified the Institute in each case only as "an independent research organization in Washington, D.C." The
suggestion was that the reader was being exposed to "independent" thought, not the radical left perspective invariably provided by Institute Fellows.
A particularly dramatic example of misrepresentation
through failure of identification is the media's treatment of
Wilfred Burchett. Burchett is an Australian journalist. As
41
44
far back as 1967 The Reporter, a liberal magazine of the
period, published an article by fellow Australian Denis
Warner which summed up Burchett's history up to that
point:
Stripped of his Australian passport by Canberra in 1955 and
denied Australian citizenship for his three children by a sec·
ond marriage-one born in Hanoi, one in Peking, and one in
Moscow-Burchett is regarded by those responsible for Australian security as a communist and a traitor who ought to
stand trial for his role in the Korean war . ... 69
Burchett was accused by American POWs returning
from Korea of involvement in obtaining phony confessions
from them about America's alleged use of germ warfare.
Burchett showed up again during the Vietnam war. Senator Jeremiah Denton described being interviewed by Burchett while he was a prisoner in North Vietnam. In his book
When Hell Was in Session he says that Burchett lost his cool
"when I implied that he was a cheap traitor who knew in his
heart that he was prostituting his talents for money in a
cause that he knew was false." 70
In these years Burchett's articles occasionally appeared
in U.S. papers, but he was properly identified. For example,
the Chicago Tribune carried an essay on June 5, 1966, with
the following description of Burchett: "An Australian Communist writer, Wilfred Burchett has travelled frequently to
North Vietnam. He wrote this article after returning to his
Cambodian home from his latest trip. It gives a communist
view ofthe war and its effects and it should be read as such."
But starting in the late 1970s Burchett's essays began to
be printed without any identification that could alert the
reader. The New York Times published his essays on the
Op-Ed page, identifying him only as "a left-wing journalist
living in Paris." After Reed Irvine complained to Times
publisher Arthur Sulzberger that this was an inadequate
identification-and Sulzberger agreed-the Times Op-Ed
page, in the following year, identified him as "a journalist
living in Paris." Harper's published a review by Burchett of a
book attacking the CIA, identifying him only as "a left-wing
journalist" and "a personal friend of Ho Chi Minh." The
same Chicago Tribune that had fully identified Burchett in
1966 introduced him to its readers quite differently on August 6, 1982: "A man whose business is informing the world
is an Australian expatriate journalist, Wilfred Burchett,
now living in Paris."
Burchett's autobiography was published in 1981 by the
New York Times Book Company with an introduction by
long-time Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury, who
concluded that Burchett was radical "because he believes
in the underdog whatever the continent, whatever the
color, whatever the creed." 71 Laudatory reviews in the prestige press evaded or glossed over the subject of Burchett's
service to Communist regimes. The New York Times reviewer wrote: "His (Burchett's) uncommon honesty-he is
honest most of the time, if not quite all of the time-give his
WINTER/ SPRING 1983
�memoirs a degree of intellectual tensioi). •>72 (The reviewer
is not clear as to why he thinks being honest "most of the
time" is uncommon honesty. Is "common honesty" to be
dishonest most of the time?) According to the Washington
Post's reviewer, Burchett's story is that of a man "who early
in his life identified what he saw as the forces of decency
and justice and determined to march with them ... if ...
he has on occasion been forced into self-censorship and
compromises, they have been compromises of a nature
known, whatever they may say, to journalists of all political
colors." 73 The most remarkable review of all was by former
New York Times obituary editor Alden Whitman in the Boston Globe. Whitman described Burchett as one of those
rare journalists "who are distinguished for their primary
allegiance to their readers and to the cause of human betterment . ... He seems to wear no one's collar but his own." As
for Burchett's Communism: "Because Burchett so often
reported uncomfortable truths and because so much of his
work was done in China, North Vietnam, and Kampuchea,
word was put out that he was a communist."74
What is involved here is more than "failure to identify."
Implicit is a rewriting of political history. This is a major
utopian target which the media abet. Communists are
transformed into "liberals." For example, Joseph Barnes,
foreign editor of the former New York Herald Tribune, who
was exposed as a Communist by a series of his former colleagues who broke with the party, started to be referred to
in the press as a "liberal" in the late 1970s. The Rosenberg
case has been transmogrified. In 1978, on the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the execution of the Rosen bergs for treason,
Public Television served up a four-year-old documentary
with a new introduction and epilogue, "The RosenbergSobell Case Revisited." Atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were portrayed as individuals singled out for their political beliefs by a malignant government. When Accuracy
in Media wrote to the President of the Public Broadcasting
System to complain about the film's gross distortion of history, the reply came from the program's producer. Ignoring
the long list of factual criticisms AIM had submitted, he
announced loftily that the suggestion the program embodied Communist propaganda reflected discredit on
AJM75.
In 1982 Telefrance USA, which says that its programs
reach 10 million U.S. homes, broadcast a four-part Frenchmade documentary on the Rosenberg case with the emotional title, "The Rosenbergs Must Not Die." They were
portrayed as innocents railroaded by a corrupt government.
Dorothy Rabinowitz in a Wall Street Journal essay noted
that "no more malevolent band of fascists, scoundrels, cynics and thugs" had ever appeared on a screen than the "assortment of characters supposedly representing an American Supreme Court, an American judge and prosecutor
and members of the FBJ."76 The New York Times reviewer
at least dismissed the program. Cablevision Magazine, however, allowed that there was the "recurring paradox of how
a foreigner-an outsider-may have a fuller perspective on
TifE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
a situation, political or otherwise, than someone more directly involved."77
Misidentification and the rewriting of political history
produce reporting that inhibits, rather than helps, public
understanding of political developments. For example,
press coverage of Kathy Boudin, the Weather Underground leader captured during the Brink's robbery in
Nyack, depicted her-to quote from a typical account in
the Boston Globe-as a "child of privilege," "a brainy, popular tomboy who graduated with honors from the 'right'
schools, the type of girl that people once described as allAmerican." But Kathy Boudin was a red-diaper baby, the
child of radical lawyer, Leonard Boudin. The circle of her
father's friends was largely made up of Communists and
those sympathetic to Communism. (The Globe story itself
bore this out by listing some of the individuals she would
have encountered at her parents' dining table, but did not
identify them either). Kathy Boudin's political development would have become considerably less mysterious if
the media had not concealed relevant information.
Journalistic practices like the Pinsky Principle have
grown common as journalists have changed their view of
their proper role. "Advocacy," "participatory," and "activist" journalism have created new models. To some extent
the ((new journalism," as it is sometimes called, has developed because its literary techniques produce more dramatic copy at a time of intense competition from television, with its strong visual imagery. A "composite"
prostitute (and why confuse the reader by identifying her
as such) can offer a more interesting biography than any
single individual. Similarly, a report that suggests the
writer is directly privy to the thoughts and beliefs of his
subject has more impact than an article with tiresome inserts like "A neighbor said that" or "The defendant's lawyer claims that. ... "
The new journalism is also a reflection of the changing
aspirations of journalists. Journalists are now in a position
to set the policies of papers. They were not in an earlier
era, when conservative owners set their stamp upon their
property. With many more years of education than they
used to have, with higher status in society, journalists are
dissatisfied with a role that limits them simply to chronicling what happens. As lawyer Max Kampelman noted in a
1978 essay in Policy Review:
It is understandable that a significant segment of the media
has become impatient with its limited information dissemination role. It is not easy and frequently not exciting for an intelligent person simply to report events. The tendency, therefore, has been for imaginative and socially dedicated journalists to go beyond normal reporting in order to seek fuller expression of their talents or social values. 78
Joseph Kraft notes: "Not only have we traded objectivity for bias, but we have also abandoned a place on the
sidelines for a piece of the action."79 Jim Bormann, a pio-
45
�neer in broadcast news, described. listening to journalist
Alex Kendrick telling a CBS news affiliate session that a
good reporter should not be afraid, while covering a riot, to
throw a few bricks himself. Kendrick urged the contemporary newsman to get involved and then report what he felt
"inside."8 Kraft and Borman are critical of what hapP<;ned. Most influential journalists, however, are pleased
w1th the new role they have assumed. David Broder of the
Washington Post has praised television's Bill Moyers as a
politician "of the most serious sort'' who "is consciously
engaged in the struggle to reshape the future of public policy."81 John Oakes of the New York Times reports the comment of an approving Swiss journalist who told him the
mass media in the United States were "the only real opposition in the country."82
"Facts" are seen in a fresh light by the new journalism.
As writer Naomi Munson pointed out in Commentary,
while reporters had seen their job as sniffing out facts
" more and more these days they have come to regard'
themselves, instead, in a grander light, as bloodhounds of
the 'truth."' 83 The problem with this is that facts then become at best a tool for revealing the truth. At worst facts
become an impediment to the "truth" which must be
sloughed off, ignored, buried, so as not to interfere with
the public's ability to perceive what in a "higher sense" is
true. Gay Talese, a writer who was godfather to the new
journalism, said its techniques allowed the presentation of
"a larger truth than is possible through rigid adherence" to
normal newspaper standards.84
One result of the new journalism was to create a scandal
like the one that erupted over Janet Cooke and the nonexistent eight-year-old heroin addict "Jimmy." After the
Washington Post was forced to return the Pulitzer Prize
which the story had won, it tried to pass off what had happened as the victimization of a newspaper by one of its
reporters. According to the Post's published account, no
editor anywhere was safe from the machinations of a determined liar.
It was not so simple. Newspapers, the Post among them,
had developed a pattern of shutting their eyes to the fictional aspects of the new journalism. When the Daily
News accepted the resignation of its prize-winning journalist Michael Daley a month after the Cooke scandal-he
was accused of manufacturing material for an article on
British Army brutality in Northern Ireland-Daley remarked that he had used pseudonyms and reconstructions
on many of his 300 columns and "no one has ever said anything."85 In the case of Janet Cooke, Vivian AplinBrownlee, Cooke's editor on the District Weekly, to which
she had been assigned in her first year at the Post, claimed
that she did not believe the story from the beginning and
said so to the city editor."
°
I knew her so well and the depth of her. In her eagerness to
make a name she would write farther than the truth would
allow. When challenged on facts in other stories, Janet would
46
reverse herself, but without any dismay or consternation with
herself86
What this meant was that Janet Cooke was repeatedly
caught in misstatements of fact while she worked for the
Post, but the editors, instead of firing her, had promoted
her.
Despite what the Post's ombudsman Bill Green later admitted were "rumblings" in the newsroom, the Post made
no attempt to check the story or even to ask to see Jane
Cooke's tapes or notes. A few days after the story was published, Post reporter Courtland Milloy drove Janet Cooke
through the neighborhood where she claimed Jimmy lived
and he could see she did not know the area. He reported
his doubts to the city editor, but the editor, as he later confessed, thought Milloy was motivated by jealousy.87 The
mayor and police officials asked the Post to disclose the
identity of the child so he could be helped. Presumably the
life of an eight-year-old boy hung in the balance, but the
Post merely launched into high-flown rhetoric on confidentiality, leaving the police to launch an intensive, expensive, and naturally vain search.
The Post's ombudsman, Green, whose task it is to monitor the paper's performance, wrote a column replete with
utopian cliches, without himself bothering to make any investigation into the story:
Jimmy probably doesn't know many of the promises that have
been made to him. There was the Great Society and the war on
poverty. There are police who promise to uphold the law.
There are schools that promise that everybody will be given a
fair start, a chance to make it. There are the agencies that
promise if you get into trouble, you can get help. Beyond this,
there is the country's glittering promise that things will be bet.
ter if you work. 88
Green promised ringingly that Jimmy could be assured that
at least the Post's promise to him of anonymity would be
kept.
Since the police search was finally abandoned, Janet
Cooke would have been safe had she not lied about her
academic credentials. The Post released biographical data
on their prizewinning reporter. Cooke's claim to a Vassar
B.A. she did not have led to the unravelling of the whole
fabric of invention.
The media's reaction to charges of bias is one of genuine
outrage. Irving Kristol has pointed out that "the television
networks and national newspapers are sincerely convinced
that a liberal bias is proof of journalistic integrity."89 CBS
News President Richard Salant retorted indignantly to suggestions of bias: :"Our reporters do not cover stories from
their point of view. They are representing them from nobody's point of view."90 An interviewer asked Washington
Post editor Benjamin Bradlee:
Are you suggesting that it is untrue ... that you have a cadre of
highly motivated, intelligent, skillful, young liberal reporters
WINTER/SPRING
1983
�who tend to slant their stories toward D~mocrats, liberals, as
they write for the news pages?"
He replied: I am very definitely denying that."9l
At the very time Bradlee was saying this, in the spring of
1972, a ucounter~convention" of American journalists,
sponsored by the journalism review More, was being attended by over 2,000 journalists, including such media
"stars" as Dan Rather, Tom Wicker, David Halberstam,
and Murray Kempton. In an article describing the purpose
of the meeting, More explained: "A growing number of
people who put out the nation's newspapers and magazines and splice together the nightly news are no longer
going to accept the old ways of doing things." The "new"
journalists, said More, were ((sensitive" people who turned
"their attention to the kind of journalism that might help
improve the quality of life rather than objectively recording its decline.''92
How do journalists manage to believe they maintain the
professional journalistic creed of objectivity at the same
time that they transmit, as we have seen, the utopian
world view? Many journalists seem to mistake a sense of
superiority for objectivity. In the fifth and final segment of
CBS's series on defense, President Reagan and Chairman
Brezhnev were shown making speeches denouncing each
other. Cronkite then appeared, like the patient parent of
quarreling children, to lament that from both the Kremlin
and the White House came "angry words." Presenting the
United States and the Soviet Union as mirror-image societies seems to constitute self-evident proof of objectivity
to Cronkite and the media elite. Journalists from the prestige media in England revealed a similar concept of objectivity as "a plague on both your houses" during the
Falkland war. They used the term "the British" rather
than "we," outraging much of the public.
Convinced of their own objectivity, the media are arrogant and dismissive when criticized. Reed Irvine notes
that when he and a group of friends who belonged to the
McDowell luncheon group decided in 1969 to start Accu·
racy in Media, they were convinced that if they did research on cases of media inaccuracy, those responsible
would have no choice but to admit they were wrong, issue
corrections, and be more careful in the future. Irvine
laughs ruefully as he recalls: "We soon found out it really
did not work that way."93
The arrogance is sometimes breathtaking, as the media
unhesitatingly ignore in their own case the demands they
make of others. For example, CBS has been the most aggressive of the networks in claiming for television cameras
the right to cover imy event open to the print media. Yet
when CBS held its annual meeting in Aprill980, the press
was admitted, but television cameras were barred. William
Paley, long-time chairman of CBS, declared they would be
disruptive to the audience. Reed Irvine asked whether he
would recommend that Congress adopt the same policy.
The following colloquy ensued:
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Paley: I would not.
Irvine: Just CBS.
Paley: We have adopted the policy, for the time being
anyway, which has been clearly enunciated today.
That's all I can say about it.94
One journalist remarked that it was like distillers holding a
meeting and barring booze.
After CBS aired a documentary in January 1982 that
charged General William Westmoreland with leading a
conspiracy to deceive President Johnson as to the strength
of enemy forces in Vietnam, revelations in a TV Guide article "Anatomy of a Smear" of what the authors called "inaccuracies, distortions, and violations of journalistic stan-
dards" by CBS led the network to commission its own
study. But CBS then kept the report secret, presumably
because it was damaging to the network. It is not hard to
imagine the reaction of CBS if a branch of government had
kept a report secret in comparable circumstances. (Eventually CBS was forced by the courts to release the report.)
The reaction to criticism is sometimes vituperative. Responding to an issue of AIM Report that clearly touched a
nerve, the Post's editor Benjamin Bradlee wrote to Irvine:
"You have revealed yourself as a miserable, carping, retromingent vigilante, and I for one am sick of wasting my
time in communicating with you." 95 After looking up "retromingent/' which means "urinating backward," Irvine
framed the letter and hung it in the office.
All the sins of advocacy journalism, the fictions supporting a "higher truth," the selective coverage, the attacks on
what are perceived as "the bad buys" and whitewashing of
the "good guys" came together in a media crusade against
Israel during its war against the PLO in Lebanon in 1982.
In a major study for Policy Review, Joshua Muravchik has
provided the fullest account of media distortion on a single
topic since Peter Braestrup's two-volume analysis of the
media's coverage of the Tet offensive in Vietnam. Muravchik found variations in culpability: the Washington Post
was much worse than the New York Times; NBC was
worse than ABC which was worse than CBS; Time and
Newsweek, on the other hand, turned in equally abysmal
performances. But all the media were involved in tendentious and inaccurate reporting with one target-to make
Israel look bad.96
Muravchik piles high the examples of media misstatement of fact. For example, wildly exaggerated casualty reports, falsely attributed to the internationally respected
Red Cross (in fact they came from the nonrelated Red
Crescent, an arm of the PLO run by Arafat's brother), continued to be cited repeatedly after the Red Cross had formally repudiated them. These were soon accompanied by
equally inflated portraits of destruction from supposed
eye-witness journalists in Beirut. While all the media were
guilty of this, the prize may well have belonged to ABC
which, in June, before the Israelis had launched any serious bombing of the city, described Beirut as a result of Israeli shelling, as resembling a some ancient ruin."
47
�Symptomatic of the pervasive dishonesty was a photo
distributed by United Press International with a caption
which said it showed a seven-month-old baby who had lost
both arms in an Israeli raid. Secretary of State George
Shultz, in a statement meant to be critical of Israel, said
"the symbol of this war is a baby with its arms shot off." It
was a symbol not of the war, but of the media's coverage of
it. Subsequent investigation showed that the baby had not
been badly hurt -both its arms were intact. And while civilians, including children, were obviously hit by Israeli
bombs, it so happened that in this case the time, place, and
direction of bombing made it clear that the baby had been
hit by PLO shelling, which the media rarely mentioned,
but which was also a feature of the war.
Verbal attacks on Israel were the staple fare of journalists. CBS' Bill Moyers accused her of waging "total war;"
NBC's John Chancellor talked of an "imperial Israel" and
oflsrael as "a warrior state;" ABC's Threlkeld said she was
"the neighborhood bully." Time and Newsweek referred to
Israel's leaders as "stubborn," "outrageous," and utrouble~
some." Even Israel's release of captured PLO documents,
revealing the extent of Soviet involvement in training of
the international terrorist network, surely of interest to the
West, was dismissed as part of Israel's ((propaganda war.n
Muravchik notes that ABC's Steve Mallory developed a
regular routine of arriving at an area after it was hit by Israeli bombs or shells and announcing, usually wrongly,
that there was no military target there.
The stories the media failed to tell were equally important. Except for the Times, the media had almost nothing
to say of the welcome the Israelis received in Southern
Lebanon by Christians and Moslems delighted to be rid of
thePLO.
But perhaps the media bias was best revealed by the television networks' attacks on Israel for censorship. (The
PLO's censorship, exercised by guns directed against unwelcome TV cameras, was never mentioned.) When ABC
broke Israel's censorship by broadcasting an interview
with Arafat that had been disallowed by the censor, Israel
punished the network by temporarily refusing it access to
Israeli television facilities. ABC accused Israel on the air of
"an intolerable act of political censorship." Israel explained that while it exercised only military censorship on
reports from Israel's side of the battle line, its extension of
its facilities for reports from the enemy's side was a favor
to journalists that it would not allow to be used for the
PLO's political advantage. ABC had agreed to the rules
and then broken them. As Israel saw it, it was as if Britain
had been held responsible for "intolerable censorship" for
failing to channel propaganda speeches by Goebbels from
Germany during World War II if German transmission facilities were not working. But as Muravchik notes, while
Israel's position was one with which the public might or
might not have sympathized, they never heard Israel's side
of the story because the networks would not report it.
They were thus as guilty of "censorship" of information
48
possibly detrimental to them as Israel was. The other networks repeatedly showed black screens on which were
superimposed statements like "22 Seconds Deleted by
Israeli Censors" or "Pictures Censored." NBC set a rec~
ord of sorts when in a single news story on June 5 the
network managed to refer four separate times to Israeli
censorship.
Yet IsraeYs censorship-in wartime-was far less restrictive than that of most other countries at any time and compared very favorably with the censorship of other Middle
Eastern countries. Moreover, while dispatches from other
Middle Eastern countries were censored, the networks
only flashed on the screen references to Israeli censorship.
Eventually NBC began to flash on the screen "Cleared by
Syrian censors," and CBS several weeks later followed
suit. But by the end of August ABC, although it often
broadcast from Syria, still made no reference to Syrian
censorship while routinely using "Cleared by Israeli censors." (Ironically if Israel had kept out all foreign journalists, she would presumably have fared much better at their
hands. This is what the British did during their war with
Argentina over the Falklands that was going on simultaneously, and the media kept silent about "censorship.")
Why should Israel specifically have become a target of
the accumulated vices of advocacy journalism? Robert
Elegant, in the 1981 Encounter essay on media performance in Vietnam that Morley Safer found so offensive,
went to the heart of the problem. Elegant in effect prophesied the media's behavior in arguing that the adversary
stance of the press during Vietnam was prototypical of
what the reaction of the Western press was likely to be to
any war: the press, he wrote, serves as multiplier of the
prejudices of the western intelligentsia whose tender conscience moves it to condemn actions by its own side while
condoning those of its enemies.97 Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz noted an additional factor: Israel refuted
all the lessons of Vietnam, showing that military force
could be necessary, even beneficial, and that a Soviet client could be defeated by an American ally. Podhoretz saw
the attacks on Israel as a cover for the loss of American
nerve, acquiescence in terrorism, and appeasement of to-
talitarianism.98 In Muravchik's view the most important
single factor in the anti-Israel bias was that the war violated the precept that "violence never solves anything."
This was the media's adaptation of the utopian perspective which could more accurately be summed up as "Violence from the left is the only violence that solves anything." Muravchik notes that it is ironic that the belief that
violence solves nothing should have become ascendant in
the media under the impact of the war in Vietnam, for at
the end of that war "violence solved everything-to the
satisfaction of the communists."
Given the extraordinary depths to which the media sank
in the reporting on Lebanon, the analysis of the Columbia
Journalism Review on media reporting of the war is interesting. It concluded that American journalism
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�reported what it saw for the most par~ fairly and accurately
and sometimes brilliantly, provided balanced comment, and
provoked and absorbed controversy. For performance under
fire, readers and viewers could have ask~d for little more. 99
Except for the remark that the coverage "provoked and
absorbed controversy," which was certainly true, this
could scarcely have been further from the mark. But it
does underscore the extent to which the major journalism
reviews, of which Columbia's is probably the most influen·
tial, have themselves become exponents of advocacy journalism. If the press is going to change its ways, it will not
be because of monitoring by the major journalism reviews.
Media needs and attitudes and utopian goals dovetail
nicely. From the point of view of the utopians, stories that
the media may like because of their inherent drama break
down faith in authority. When ABC launched "20/20" to
compete with CBS's highly successful "60 Minutes," the
program was known around the studio as the "cancer scare
of the week." While ABC may have pursued ratings, for
the utopians the programs reveal the wickedness or incapacity of government and corporations, which deny thereality of the dangers or fail to meet them. The media rarely
report human rights violations in totalitarian societies because they cannot gain access to them. For the utopians
these are stories that should be ignored, for they might interfere with their effort to mobilize public opinion against
non-Communist countries threatened by those whose aim
is to establish regimes of the sort that already exist in Cuba
and North Vietnam.
While in theory the fondness for scare stories could
make reports on the Soviet military build-up and Soviet
intelligence agencies appealing, here pervasive liberal orthodoxy among journalists comes into play. It leads them
to downgrade the notion that there is such a thing as a
genuine Soviet threat. It also leads them to automatic sympathy with proposals that come from disarmament groups,
which they become extremely reluctant to report on fully
for fear the effect would be to "unmask" them. This prevents the public from developing scepticism about the
programs of these groups. The media's portrait enforces
the utopian view of the world and makes the calls of the
utopians for "de·industrialization," "decentralization of
industry," solar roof collectors instead of central power stations, seem safer to try than they otherwise would. The
utopian agenda becomes more plausible and attractive as
our familiar world is seen to be threatened only by the callousness and rapacity of our own institutions.
1. Quoted in TV and National Defense: An Analysis of CBS News 19721973, Ernest W. Lefever ed., Institute for American Strategy Press, Boston, Va.l974, 14.
2. Melvin G. Grayson and Thomas R Shepard, The Disaster Lobby, Chicago: Follett Publishing Co., 1973, 266.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
3. S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman "Media and Business Elites,"
Public Opinion, Oct./Nov. 1981, 42-44.
4. Lichter and Rothman, Public Opinion, Oct./Nov. 1981, 59-60.
5. Robert J. Lowenberg, "Journalism and 'Free Speech' as' Political
Power," Scholastic, Dec. 1982, 12.
6. Quoted by Joseph Kraft, "The Imperial Media," Commentary, May
1981.
7. AIM Report, (I) September l, 1979.
8. AIM Report, (I) june 1977.
9. AIM Report, (I) Oct. 1979.
10. Sophia Peterson, "Foreign News Gatekeepers and Criteria of Newsworthiness," Journalism Quarterly, Spring 1979, 116.
11. Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, "The Nuclear Energy Debate: Scientists, the Media and the Public," Public Opinion, Aug./Sept.
1982, 51.
12. Rothman and Lichter, Public Opinion, Aug./Sept. 1982, 52.
13. Robert DuPont, Nuclear Phobia, The Media Institute.
14. Rothman and Lichter, Public Opinion, Aug./Sept. 1982,47.
15. Rothman and Lichter, Public Opinion, Aug./Sept.1982, 49.
16. Rothman and Lichter, Public Opinion, Aug./Sept. 1982, 51
17. Samuel McCracken, The War Against the Atom, New York: Basic
Books, 1982, 108.
18. Rothman and Lichter, Public Opinion, Aug./Sept. 1982, 52.
19. Samuel McCracken, War, New York 1982, 108.
20. AIM Report, (II) March 1979.
21. Interview with Walter Cronkite, Utica (N.Y.) Press, November 13,
1974. quoted in TV and National Defense, Boston, Va., 1974 Frontispiece.
22. TV and National Defense, Boston, Va. 1974, 37.
23. Joshua Muravchik and John E. Haynes, "CBS vs. Defense," Commentary September 1981,46.
24. Muravchik and Haynes, Commentary, September 1981, 45.
25. Muravchik and Haynes, Commentary, September 1981, 48-49.
26. AIM Report, (I) Aprill979.
27. AIM Report, (II) May 1978.
28. AIM Report, (I) February 1979.
29. AIM Report, (I) February 1979.
30. AIM Report, (II) March 1978.
31. AIM Report, (II) Oct. 1979.
32. AIM Report, (I) july 1977.
33. AIM Report, (I) Feb. 1979.
34. AIM Report, (II) Oct. 1979.
35. Contentions, newsletter of the Committee for the Free World, December 1981.
36. AIM Report, (II) May 1980.
37. AIM Report, (I) june 1982.
38. AIM Report, (II) june 1980.
39. AIM Report, (II) june 1980.
40. AIM Report, (I) March 1979.
41. Human Events, Apri124,1982: New York Times April9, 1982.
42. Contentions, Committee for the Free World, April-May 1982.
43. AIM Report, (I) Sept. 1977.
44. Guild Notes, publication of the National Lawyers Guild, April, 1980.
45. Guild Notes, April, 1980.
46. Business Week, October 18, 1982.
47. Crooks, Conmen and Clowns, Media Institute, Washington D.C.
1981, ix-x.
48. Ben Stein, The View from Sunset Boulevard, New York: Basic Books
1979, 20.
49. Sunset, New York 1979, 33.
50. AIM Report, (II) Sept. 1980.
51. Interview with Peter Metzger, January 29, 1982.
52. AIM Report, May, 1978.
53. AIM Report, (II) july 1982.
54. New York Times, November 12, 1982.
55. Wall Street Journal, August 21, 1981.
56. Human Events, july 11, 1981.
57. Human Ev.ents, July 11, 1981.
49
�58. Human Events, July II, 1981.
59. Human Events, July II, 1981.
60. Wall Street Journal, August 21, 1981.
61. Human Events, Sept. 26, 1981.
62. Daily News, May 12, 1982.
63. AIM Report, (I) Aprill978.
64. AIM Report, (I) April1978.
65. AIM Report, (I) July 1979.
66. AIM Report, (I) May 1980.
67. Bob Schulman, The Bulletin, American Society of Newspaper Editors, October 1982.
68. New York Times, August 2, 1977.
69. Quoted in Review of the News, September 8, 1982, 37.
70. Jeremiah A. Denton Jr., When Hell Was in Session, So. Carolina:
Robert E. Hopper & Assoc., 1982, Chapter 11.
71. Wilfred Burchett, At the Barricades, New York: Times Books, 1981,
viii.
72. Quoted in AIM Report, (II) September 1981.
73. AIM Report, (II) September 1981.
74. AIM Report, (II) September 1981.
75. AIM Report, (I) September 1978.
76. Wall Street Journal, November 16, 1982.
77. Cablevision Magazine, October 25, 1982.
78. Max Kampehnan, "The Power of the Press," Policy Review, Fall,
1978, 18.
79. Joseph Kraft, "The Imperial Media," Commentary, May,l981.
80. Jim Bormann, "Honesty, Fairness and Real Objectivity-Keys to
Journalistic Credibility," Keynote address to Radio and Film News Directors Association, September 29, 1971.
81. AIM Report, (II) June 1982; Human Events September 4, 1982.
82. AIM Report, (II) May 1982.
83. Naomi Munson, "The Case of Janet Cooke," Commentary, August
1981,49.
84. New York Times, May 25, 1981.
85. New York Times, May 25, 1981.
86. AIM Report, (I) May 1981.
87. AIM Report, (I) May 1981.
88. AIM Report, (I) May 198 I.
89. Wall Street Journal, October 14, 1982.
90. TV and National Defense, Boston, Va., 11.
91. Grayson and Shepard, Lobby, Chicago 1973, 255.
92. Lobby, Chicago, 255-56
93. Interview with Reed Irvine, October 24, 1982.
94. AIM Report, (I) May 1980.
95. AIM Report, (II) June 1978.
96, Joshua Muravchik, "Misreporting Lebanon," Policy Review, Winter
1983.
97. Robert Elegant, "How to Lose a War," Encounter August 1981, p. 88.
98. Norman Podhoretz, 'TAccuse," Commentary, September 1982, pp.
30-31.
99. Roger Morris, "Beirut-and the Press-Under Siege," Columbia
Journalism Review Nov./Dec. 1982, 33.
ARRIVAL
The orchid waited eons for the ape.
With seasonal reserve, the old magnolia
Seduced the dragonfly. Unpressed,
The olive and the grape
Lingered in indigo or green,
Too pointedly perceived when not
By simian lens. The field, busy with discharge,
Was barren of delight.
Let ape appear: then fruit and fern, weary
Of insect assiduity, will wink
For recognition, oil and wine
Seek flask and cruet. As we,
No longer naked, know, not to be seen
Too close shows sensibility.
ELLIOTT ZUCKERMAN
50
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Benjamin Constant on Ancient
and Modern Liberty
Stephen Holmes
Progressives ritually deplore not only the low level of
popular participation in politics, but also its characteristic
lack of intensity. Conservatives reply that the feverish involvement of ordinarily apathetic citizens can destabilize
and even topple a democratic regime. Benjamin Constant
attempted to combine these two one-sided ideas, ideas that
are conventionally kept at an aseptic distance from one another. In modern societies, he asserted, political tyranny
may be closely associated with attempts to reglorify the
public realm. But tyranny can also be encouraged and sustained by excessive privatization. Too much and too little
civic spirit are equally dangerous. This double claim forms
the theoretical core of Constant's l819lecture on "Ancient
and Modern Liberty." 1
Precursors
The "quarrel between the ancients and the moderns"
which flourished in France toward the end of the seventeenth century was not merely a dispute about poetry. It
reflected a cultural cleavage between religious conservatives who viewed history as a process of degeneration and
advanced thinkers who exalted the refinements of modern
politesse over the crudities of the barbaric polis. 2 Defenders of "the moderns" hoped that a liberation of literature
from unsurpassable classical models would accompany the
gradual emancipation of science from the authority of ArisStephen Holmes teaches political philosophy at Harvard University.
The above essay comes from a book, Boundaries of the Political: the Sceptical Liberalism of Benjamin Constant, that Yale University Press will
publish in 1984.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
totelianism. Constant's vindication of liberal democracy
against the would-be imitators of classical democracy was
certainly influenced by these literary and scientific contests. Constant1 however, drew more heavily on a narrower
tradition of political theory.l
The proximate and primary source for Constant's dichotomy between two kinds of liberty was Montesquieu.
Among its other achievements, De !'esprit des lois drew universal attention to the astonishing differences between
modern England and ancient Sparta. 4 Although he never
used the phrase "modern liberty," Montesquieu had a
clear enough conception of it. In modern societies such as
England, he argued, the essence ofliberty was security. 5 In
Europe, security was notably threatened when nobles were
excessively independent and engaged in anarchic self-help
(as in Poland) and also when monarchs (as in Richelieu's
France) gathered too much power into their own hands. 6 In
either case men feared one another and the calculability of
life was drastically reduced. "In order for men to have this
[modern] liberty, the government must be such that a citizen cannot fear another citizen. 11 7
Constitutionalism, including the separation of powers,
was meant to arrest the seesaw of anarchy and despotism,
to introduce a salutary predictability into civic life. Protection from both baronial reprisals and lettres de cachet was
the essence of English liberty. Men knew that if they did
not break the law neither the police nor marauding private
armies would harass them. Security made it possible to
plan one's life and to enter into long-term cooperative ventures with one's neighbors. A state based on this modern
conception ofliberty enables its citizens to engage in a promiscuous variety of actions and lives. All citizens may contribute to a common pattern, but only as "dissonances in
music agree in the concord of the whole." 8
51
�The compatibility of the moderl)c constitutional state
with unregimented human diversity is one key to Montesquieu's contrast between modern England and ancient
Sparta. He called Sparta free (that is, free from foreign
domination), but he quickly added that "the only advantage of its liberty was glory."9 It was a small "society of
athletes and combatants," 10 where money was proscribed,11 where men were made cruel by harsh disciplinel2 and always ready to immolate their private lives for
the sake of their patrie. Sparta represented the apogee of
politics based on virtue.ll Motivated exclusively by virtue,
Spartans subordinated themselves unflinchingly to a single
overriding purpose: to live and die for the glory of their
state.l 4 They participated in public life, but only in the
sense that they played their parts; they certainly did not
influence" the course of deliberation in personal, idiosyncratic ways. In this 'warrior's guild," 15 in fact, collective
deliberation was less important than gymnastics.
Montesquieu could compare Sparta to a monastery that,
paradoxically enough, secured the undivided loyalty of its
inmates by starving them of all human possibilities except
those associated with the official functions of the group. 16
A modern state could never expect such extraordinary devotion from its citizens precisely because it is too munificent: it lavishes so many extrapolitical possibilities on the
individual that he feels "he can be happy without his patrie." 17 Intense politics based on virtue is thus out of place
in the modern state. Personal honor or avarice may motivate modern citizens; but self-abnegating patriotism cannot. That the English revolutionary attempt to resurrect a
polity based on virtue in the seventeenth century would
collapse in ridiculous hypocrisy was perfectly predictable. IS
Montesquieu's striking counterposition of England and
Sparta had a decisive impact on numerous writers besides
Rousseau.l9 Jean-louis de Lolme was typical. Writing in
the 1780s, he reformulated Montesquieu's contrast as a
distinction between private independence and political
influence:
44
4
To concur by one's suffrage in enacting laws is to enjoy a
share, whatever it may be, of power; to live in a state where the
laws are equal for all and sure to be executed (whatever may be
the means by which these advantages are attained), is to be
free. 20
Passages registering an analogous distinction between
sharing in legislative power and protection from the arbitrary acts of political officials can be found in the eighteenth-century works of Joseph Priestly, Adam Ferguson,
Jean-Charles Sismondi, and others.21 All these writers had a
clear awareness of what Constant would later describe as
the difference between ancient and modern liberty. Nevertheless, the claims to originality advanced at the beginning
of "De Ia liberte des anciens comparee d celle des modernes"
were not entirely unjustified. 22 The abstract dichotomy between ancient and modern liberty was not unprecedented,
but Constant used it in ways that were new.
52
Two Concepts of Liberty
Ancient liberty, Constant wrote, was "active and continuous participation in the exercise of collective power." 23
Modern liberty, by contrast, is "the peaceful enjoyment of
individual or private independence." 24 A hedonistic slide
from "exercise" to "enjoy" signaled the humanly debilitating consequences of modernization. Indeed, Constant's
distinction between ancient and modern liberty cannot be
studied apart from the notion, also inherited from Montesquieu, that European history is a curious blend of progress
and decay. He made remarkable assumptions about the human consequences of modernization:
The liberty of ancient times was whatever assured citizens the
largest share in exercising social power. The liberty of modern
times is whatever guarantees the independence of citizens
from their government. As a result of their character,_the ancients had an overriding need for action; and the need for
action is easily reconciled with a vast increase in social authority. The moderns need peace and enjoyment. Peace can be
found only in a limited number of laws that prevent citizens
from being harassed. Enjoyments are secured by a wide margin of individual liberty_ Any legislation requiring the sacrifice
of these enjoyments is incompatible with the present condition of mankind. 25
Because of the common but erroneous belief that negation
implies deprivation, "negative freedom" 26 is a misleading
translation of Ia liberte chez les modernes. Modern liberty,
as Constant conceived it, is as much a capacity for positive
action as ancient liberty had been.27 The difference only
lies in the character of the action and the field in which it
unfolds. Moreover, Constant distinguished between two
types of freedom in order to investigate the various relations between them, the ways in which they are not only
combinable but even mutually enhancing.
Not merely conceptual, Constant's distinction was initially historical. Each type of liberty, he urged, was originally bound to the institutions and life of a specific society.
Ancient liberty, in its unalloyed form, was only possible in a
sparsely populated, territorially compact, religiously homogeneous and slave-holding warrior's republic. 28 Modern
liberty is the innovation of large-scale, caste-free, internationally open, religiously pluralistic, and intensively commercial societies.29
Although intrigued by the contrast between public participation and private security, Constant did not allow it to
obscure the radically progressive content of modern liberty. In antiquity, "freedom" was a privileged status from
which men could be excluded by the chance of birth. Essential to modern liberalism, by contrast, is the demand
that freedom be distributed to all individuals regardless of
family origin. The relative importance which Constant ascribed to public and private spheres within modern liberty
was a direct function of the modern demand of citizenship
for all.
WINTER/SPRJNG 1983
�Constant's emphasis on a linkage between political
ideals and social contexts was not merely a subsidiary feature of his theory. In explicit contrast to the natural law and
contractarian traditions, he did not attempt to justify his
commitment to the liberal state by adducing ahistorical
traits of human nature. Once again following Montesquieu
and other eighteenth-century (particularly Scottish) examples, he deliberately supplanted the contract myth with a
theory of social change. 30 The liberal state is desirable not
because it mirrors human nature or respects eternal human
rights, but because it is the political arrangement most
adequate to solving the problems of European society
in its current state of economic, scientific, and moral
development.
Constant's conception of social change was also vital to
another striking thesis of the 1819 lecture, an idea elaborated at greater length in De !'esprit de conquete et de !'usurpation dans leurs rapports avec Ia civilisation europeenne of
1814: the modern appeal to classical republican ideals is an
anachronism that can serve only as a rhetorical justification
and partial concealment of political fanaticism and terror. 31
A similar thesis had been propounded by C.F. de Volney
in 1794. Volney too lamented that "we have fallen into a
superstitious adoration of the Greeks and Romans." 32
Cults of antiquity which sprang up during the Revolution
and glorified selfless, Brutus-like tyrannicide suggested this
insight to many observers.ll The myth of ancient republics, Constant agreed, lent a deceptive aura oflegitimacy to
the abusive acts of the Committee of Public Safety: "it is in
the name of liberty that we have been given prisons, scaffolds and countless harassments." 34 The enormous power
of government over society was justified by an ideology
that, invoking ancient community, denied the modern distinction between state and society. During the Revolution,
in other words, the ideal of ancient liberty was a pretext for
oppression.l5 Constant conceded that many of the wouldbe "imitators of ancient republics" were propelled by generous motives.J6 They meant to abolish arbitrary government, seigneurial privileges, and the abuses of the Church.
Their tragic mistake was to have chosen the classical city as
an image unifying their diverse complaints against the ancien regime.
The French Revolution was not the first occasion on
which anticlerical and anti-aristocratic activists appealed to
classical republican ideals:
Since the renaissance of letters, most of those who attempted
to rescue man from the degradation into which he had been
plunged by the double curse of superstition and conquest [Roman Catholicism and aristocracy], believed it necessary to borrow institutions and customs favorable to liberty from the
ancients. 37
Though the image of classical republican freedom may
have been a useful rebuke to the old regime, it was not an
adequate guide to the future. The myth of the ancient city
could serve as a weapon in the assault on Catholicism and
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the inequality of ranks, but it could furnish no clue about
how to replace them.JS Necessarily, attempts to resurrect
anachronistic forms of liberty were political hoaxes on a
grand scale.
The Problem
In modern times, Constant wrote, citizens can no longer
experience political participation as an intrinsically rewarding form of action.l9 But he also said that his contemporaries must learn to couple political participation, which he
described as a path to self-perfection, with individual privacy and independence.40 Which statement are we to believe? Was Constant simply being incoherent? Our perplexity is justified. But it can be dispelled if we examine
how the distinction between ancient and modern liberty
was used during two separate phases of Constant's career.
The 1819lecture contains long sections authored twenty
years earlier in response to exceptional political events. By
1819, the political scene had radically changed. Constant's
former left-wing enemies had vanished, only to be replaced
by equally intractable right-wing foes. In response to this
altered landscape, Constant reelaborated his distinction in
a new direction. No longer threatened by pseudo-democratic fraud, he turned sharply against the civic passivity
that served the interests of the ultras.41 But he left the
passages written years earlier untouched. No wonder
present-day readers feel off balance! Despite these findings, we cannot dismiss the 1819lecture as a jumble of conflicting insights. Constant was right to cling tenaciously to
both sides of his polemic: the atrophy of political life can be
just as perilous as a total repoliticization of society. Constant was struggling to understand the complexities of politics after the Revolution.
The Original Formulation
of the Distinction
A good deal has been written about the two concepts of
freedom and the corresponding democratic traditions.42
What has perhaps been neglected is the history of the distinction itself, especially the context in which it was originally elaborated and the problems to which it was initially
meant as a practical response.
The original version of the "Ancient and Modern Liberty" lecture can be found in Chapter Three of Mme de
Stael's Circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer Ia revolution, a manuscript which was heavily influenced and
perhaps co-authored by Constant around 1798. Constant
and Mme de Stael wanted to convince the Directory that,
instead of merely playing off the Right against the Left, it
should appeal directly to a constituency of its own.
In times of political uproar, civic privatism can prevent
53
�individuals from assuming uncompromising postures associated with !'esprit de parti. The Directory never totally
succeeded in its attempt to arrest the. civil war. Thus, from
1793 until 1799, active participation in French politics
meant being drawn pell-mell into the fratricidal battle:
Even the slightest objection inspires hatred in the exalted par-
ties. This hatred compels every man to ally himself with a
number of his fellows and, just as men travel only in caravans
in places infested with brigands, so in countries where hatreds are unleashed, they align themselves with a party in order to have defenders.43
Constant's vindication of political absenteeism was intended as a reply to Rousseau's glorification of political
participation. He lauded citizen withdrawal and indifference in situations of civil war when participation was
largely a vehicle for partisan hatred and revenge. Civil war
had demonstrated the value of apolitical behavior in a
country "where two opposed parties combat each other
with furor." 44
Constant and Mme de Stael urged the Directory to
draw electoral support from just those individuals who had
remained aloof from the fighting in the years before. The
"inert" and '''{immobile" masses of the nation had views
that were admirably moderate because deeply apathetic_45
They were indifferent to royalty, but not enthusiastic
enough about the Republic to want it to disrupt the nation's tranquillity.46 They were unconcerned about the
fate of the ci-devant privileged caste, but they did not detest the old nobles intensely enough to wish to see them
persecuted_47 They knew that the persecution of even a
few embroils everyone, not merely the persecutors and the
persecuted.48
This majority "wants nothing but its own well-being."49
The desire for peace and prosperity may have signaled a
descent from the heights of antique virtue. But it had politically beneficial side-effects. Moreover, a commitment
to peace was exactly what one would have expected from
most Frenchmen.
Party spirit alm0st -1ilever exists except among individuals
thrown outside lthe.Cirde of domestic life. And two-thirds of
the population df France and of.all,the countries of Europe
are composed of men·.Who.-are·occupied solely with their pecuniary fortune. 50
In order to win the loyalty of these survival-minded
masses, the Directoire should respect their indifference to
politics. It must "never count, in such a nation, on the sort
of patriotism that propelled the ancient republics." 51 Instead of trying to win electoral support by stirring up enthusiasm, by asking citizens for heroic sacrifices of their
particular interests to the general good, the Directory
must acquiesce in individual contrariness. "Liberty today
is everything that guarantees the independence of citizens
from the power of the government." 52 To syphon away
54
votes from royalists and Jacobins, the Directory must offer
private security to its citizens.
De Stael's and Constant's aim in 1798 was to convince
the Directory that the stability of the Republic required an
abandonment of all the enthusiasm-promoting techniques
employed earlier by the clubs, the militant sectionnaires,
and the Convention:
Among the ancients ... in order to capture public opinion, it
was necessary to rouse the soul, to excite patriotism by conquest, by triumphs, by factions, even by troubles that nourished every passion. National spirit must no doubt be cultivated as much as possible within France. But we must not
lose sight of the fact that public opinion is based on a love of
peace, on the desire to acquire wealth and the need to conserve it and that we will always be more interested in administrative ideas than in political questions, because these touch
our private lives more directly_ 53
The majority of the French can have a moderating influence because they are largely indifferent to citizenship
and distracted from public affairs. Justly wary of the intoxicating effect of patriotism, the Directors should heed the
following maxim: "The sphere of each individual must always be respected." 54 To politicize modern individuals in
a total manner is next to impossible, and would be a mistake in any case. In 1798, distinguishing between ancient
and modern liberty meant praising apoliticism and urging
the government to hon<>r the primacy of private life.
The Lecture of 1819
Twenty years later, in 1819, Constant delivered his lecture at the Paris Atheneum. With the shift in the political
situation, the argumentative thrust of his distinction between ancient and modern liberty also changed. In the
France of 1819, there was no cult of.Sparta which Constant might have felt compelled to discredit. 55 There was
simply no threat of a resurgent Jacobinism by this time.
Constant's distinction between ancient and modern liberty has often been distorted by being mislocated exclusively in the context of 1793-1794. The Terror-which
Constant had not witnessed first-hand, for he only returned to France in 1795-provided an important motive
for his rethinking of eighteenth-century liberalism. But
the Directory, the Empire and the ultra-dominated Restoration all influenced his thought in decisive ways. The Directory taught him the insufficiency of "limited" gov.ennment, while Napoleon and the Bourbons helped revi¥eh's
underlyil)g rr~pul:ilicariism, temporarily suspended in the
convulsions of civil strife between 1793 and 1799. By 1819,
Constant had long broken with Guizot and other moderates, and he sat on the far left of the Chamber. Needless to
say, his ultraroyalist enemies never celebrated Rousseau
as a prophet of unlimited popular sovereignty; and as
WINTER/SPRING
1983
�Catholics, they liad·only the faintests)>mpatl!ty, £mr. pagan
antiquity.
•
Constant began his lecture with a "demonstration," following Montesquieu and Rousseau, that the representative system was
discovery of the moderns." 56 He used
the contrast with the direct self-government of the classical city to highlight the uniqueness of representative government. But he did not reduce the modern rupture with
the past to this contrast.
At the opening of the lecture, in a section that did not
appear before 1819, he opposed representation to oligarchic usurpation, not to democratic participation. The representative system was a discovery of the moderns: it was a
technique invented by the Third Estate for putting limits
on that "oligarchy whiclr is the same throughout the centuries."57 At the time, Constant's assertion that representative government is the "only system" that allows modern
men to attain freedom and social peace was immediately
understood as an argument against the ultra program to
reverse the relatively liberal Electoral Law of 1817.
Reminiscent of the regime of the ancient Gauls, the system the ultras wished to impose on modern France also
resembled the constitution of ancient Sparta. A small elite,
the Ephors of Sparta, possessed religious as well as political functions. They had powers to check and limit
the kings. But they also enjoyed executive authority.
They could easily become threats instead of restraints.
They were, in fact, not democratic representatives at all,
"not ... men invested with a mission comparable to that
which election today confers on the defenders of our freedoms." 58 The feudal aristocracy of priests and warriors
idealized by the ultras resembled the Ephors in many respects. Under the ancien regime, "the nobility possessed
privileges that were both insolent and oppressive. And the
people were without rights or guarantees." 59
Shrewdly structured, this argument was calculated simultaneously to entice and to befuddle the antidemocratic sentiments of the French Right. Every royalist had
to applaud the concession that modern France could
never be governed by direct popular self.rule. But the reason why the government established by the Charte 60 was
unlike that of the turbulent classical republics was also the
reason why it was distinct from the Catholic, monarchical,
and aristocratic system of the old regime.
Constant shrewdly replaced Montesquieu's contrast between modern monarchies and ancient republics by a new
contrast, discomfiting to the ultras, between representative and nonrepresentative regimes. Such a contrast had
the embarrassing effect of aligning the Catholic Bonald
with the most radical proponents of pagan democracy.
Taunting the Right, Constant juxtaposed absolute democracy with absolute monarchy.
The parallel drawn between the organization of the ancient city and the social program of the ultras was not
merely negative. More was involved than a shared denial
of the modern principle of representation. In both cases,
"a
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Constant discerned a bias against voluntariness, against
entrusting social choices to unsupervised individuals.
With one eye fixed on the Catholic ultraroyalists, Constant mentioned the power of ancient Roman authorities
to meddle in matters of divorce and marriage. Reflecting
on the ultra education program,, he also remarked that
modern theocrats agreed with ancient republicans: a government should "take possessi<m of the generations being
born" and shape them to. its• own pleasure.6l When he said
(also about Rome) that "les lois reglent les moeurs," 62
his real target was the ultra-not merely Jacobin-idea
that the state should assume the duty of policing private
morality.
In mounting his attack on the French Right, Constant
also focused on religious toleration. There were obvious
differences between ancient civic religions and the modern alliance between throne and altar. Both could, however, be contrasted with a liberal decision to make religion
a private matter: "the ability to choose one's own cult, an
ability that we regard as one of our most precious rights,
would have seemed a crime and a sacrilege to the ancients."63 Distant from antiquity and inhospitable to the
vision of the Social Contract, modern Frenchmen cannot
reconcile themselves to the regimental designs of the theocratic Right. It is not altogether surprising that "the gallant
defenders of doctrinal unity cite the laws of the ancients
against foreign gods and support the rights. of the Catholic
Church with the example of the Atheuians."M These and
other parallels between the ancieNts and' the lilltras were
innovations of 1819. They did not appear in Constant's
earlier discussions of the distinction between ancient and
modern liberty. They betray the immediate;;political objectives of his lecture.
In their interpretations of the Revoluti<m,.Jacobins and
royalists agreed that the Terror had been'necessary to the
demolition of the old regime. Ever since his early pam·
phlet, Effets de Ia terreur (1798),65 Constant had rejected
this shared premise of the Left and Right. He had sought
to disconnect liberty from an incriminating association
with bureaucratic murder. An obvious way to disjoin freedom from the Terror was to split "freedom" in two. One
form (call it ancient liberty) could be found guilty, while
the other (call it modern) would come out innocent. Con·
stant had this strategy in mind in the Circonstances actuelles of 1798 where, together with Mme de Stael, he initially worked out the distinction between ancient and
modern liberty. Throughout the Restoration, moreover,
Constant's need to outmaneuver the ultras led him to
stress the politically harmless aspects of modern freedom. ·
He often wrote of "Ia liberte legale," "Ia liberte constitutionnelle," and "Ia liberte reguliere."66 He tended to discuss freedom in minimalist terms: by liberty he meant the
strict execution of the Charte. 67
But, although Constant no longer felt threatened by the
Jacobins in 1819, he was becoming increasingly exasperated wittin the: ultras. His desire to appease their fears was
55
�evaporating quickly. This turn of events helps explain his
new insistence that freedom from pditics, even if it never
functioned as a pretext for revoluticmary tyranny, was by
no means harmless.
By 1819, in fact, the distinction between ancient and
modern liberty had become Constant's way of exposing
the dangers inherent in his own commitment to civic pri·
vatism. His initial intention may have been to describe
modern liberty as innocent: it had had no role in inspiring
the Terror. But, at the end of his 1819lecture, his theoretical instincts and a changing political scene drew him toward criticizing modern liberty precisely because of its en·
couragement of apathy. Thus, the concluding thesis of the
1819 lecture was this: "Because we are more distracted
from political liberty than [the ancients] were able to be,
and in our ordinary condition less passionate about it, it
can happen that we sometimes neglect too much, and al·
ways mistakenly, the guarantees that it ensures us."68
Constant's Cautious Renewal
of the Appeal to Antiquity
The final section of "Ancient and Modern Liberty"
comes as a surprise. After having devoted twenty dense
pages to his claim that modern peoples are exclusively at·
tuned to private independence and freedom from politics,
after having said that "nous ne pouvons plus jouir de Ia liberte des anciens," 69 and that "the liberty suitable to the
moderns is different from that which was suitable to the
ancients," 70 after all this, Constant abruptly changed his
emphasis: "So, Gentlemen, far from renouncing either of
the two types of freedom about which I have been speaking to you, we must, as I have demonstrated, learn to com·
bine the one with the other." 71
In the body of the lecture, composed in previous years
and geared to different situations, Constant made clear
that "the perpetual exercise of political rights" and "the
daily discussion of the affairs of state" offer "only trouble
and fatigue" to modern nations.72 But in the conclusion,
written in or around 1819, he wrote:
Political liberty, granted to all citizens without exception, al·
lows them to examine and study their most sacred interests,
enlarges their spirits, ennobles their thoughts and establishes
between them a sort of intellectual equality that makes up the
glory and power of a people. 73
The citizenship being praised in the concluding section of
the lecture is only a part-time affair. Nevertheless, we can·
not escape the impression that we are witnessing a dra·
matic alteration in Constanfs tone as well as a reversal in
his theoretical stance. Here, his endorsement of civic in·
volvement is unmistakable. That Constant, at the end of
his lecture, did not denigrate or repudiate political partici·
pation is obviously pertinent to the question of how anti-
56
democratic was his liberalism. But it is not easy to integrate these final pages with the earlier part of his
argument.
On closer inspection, it turns out that two distinct para·
doxes preside over the jolting conclusion of "Ancient and
Modern Liberty." First, there is an inconsistency between
Constant's pessimistic and his optimistic assessments of
popular influence on the government in a modern state.
Modern citizens are said to have no influence on their gov·
ernments. But their active participation is also described
as decisive. Second, there is a flat contradiction between
Constant's claims that: (i) in modern societies, political lib·
erty is a means, while civil liberty is the end, that is, participation is valuable only as a guarantee to ensure private security from government harassment (this distinguishes
modern from ancient participation); and (ii) active civic in·
volvement is valuable in itself; it is an opportunity for soar·
ing above petty individual concerns and furthering self.
perfection.
Viewed separately, both paradoxes seem quite baffling.
Taken together, however, each not only illuminates the
other but also helps explain the structure of the lecture's
conclusion.
Consider the contrast between the pessimistic and the
optimistic assessments of popular influence on modern
governments. Constant's pessimism here echoes Rous·
seau's remark74 that the English are free only once every
several years and solely during the few minutes it takes to
vote; otherwise they are slaves:
Among the moderns ... even in the states which are most
free, the individual, although independent in private life, is
not sovereign except in appearance. His sovereignty is restrained, almost always suspended; and if he exercises this
sovereignty at fixed but infrequent intervals, during which
time he is still surrounded by precautions and obstacles, it is
only to abdicate it75
Constant accepted Rousseau's claim that democratic selfgovernment is impossible in a large country. But he
refused to imitate Rousseau's wholesale rejection of repre·
sentative government on the British model.
Constant decided to adapt himself, without undue ag·
ony, to the new political and extrapolitical possibilities
available in a society incapable of direct democracy. From
a realistic point of view, the marginal contribution of the
average modern individual to any political outcome is
close to zero: "the individual's influence ... is lost in a
multitude of influences." 76 Hence, we should expect most
men to turn their backs on citizenship and devote them·
selves to more rewarding, creative and enjoyable forms of
conflict or cooperation. From Constant's perspective in
1819, however, there was a serious flaw in a way of think·
ing that encouraged men to channel all their energies into
private life. French history had by that time unambigu·
ously demonstrated that civic absenteeism can serve the
cause of tyrants and oppressors. What had been thrown
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�into question was the standard liberal argument that commercial life provides an effective counterweight to excessive political authority. "The progress of industry ... creates for each individual a sphere within which are
concentrated all his interests; and, if the individual looks
outside this sphere, it is only by accident." 77 But when
modern citizens become too absorbed in their private financial business and fail to keep watch over the political
scene, the ambitious few will amass uncontrollable quantities of power.78 Once this has happened, private wealth
will itself be insecure.
Constant believed that economic independence was a
precondition for political influence. Political liberty presupposed civil liberty. He also affirmed the inverse claim:
without effective political influence, economic independence and decentralization cannot be guaranteed. This
second proposition cannot be called a political argument
against capitalism, but it is an insight into the troublesome
political consequences of business-mindedness and the
spirit of commerce.
The historical experiences behind this liberal distrust of
apoliticism were manifold. Just as important to Constant
as the ultra program to limit the franchise was the atrophy
of political life under the Empire. Napoleon had encouraged a withering away of active citizenship in order to consolidate his power.79 He had initially gained popular support for his coup d'etat because many citizens were weary
of the pseudo-republican antics of the Directory. 80 Thus,
the post-revolutionary urge to escape from politics and to
delimit the political sphere had nourished an invasive dictatorship. Constant experienced the pang of enforced depoliticization in his own person when he was ejected from
the Tribunat in 1802. It is inconceivable that, having suffered this humiliation, he would have afterwards viewed
privatization as simply and exclusively a public good.
Constant's argument here might be interpreted as a
democratic rethinking of a dilemma faced earlier by
French aristocrats. In the eighteenth century, the "resurgent nobility" realized they had made a poor bargain when
they sacrificed their political power to Richelieu and Louis
XIV for the sake of cozy privileges and immunities. Without power, their new rights were insecure. 81 Private independence can only be guaranteed by political responsibility. Constant echoed this point, with one major difference.
He wished political rights distributed "to all citizens without exception." 82
To provide his argument with a form more arresting to
modern readers, Constant resorted to a financial comparison. 83 A rich man may, in order to gain time for other
activities hire a manager to handle his fiscal affairs. In
any such' arrangement there comes a point when asaving
time" will be carried too far. A manager left completely
unsupervised may defraud the owner. In the long run, delegating one's power is not necessarily an efficient way to
save time. Like businessmen, citizens must keep themselves carefully informed in order to judge whether their
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
delegated business is being handled honestly and intelligently:
The peoples who recur to the representative system in order
to enjoy the liberty that is suitable to them must exercise a
constant and active surveillance over their representatives.
They must reserve to periods which are not separated by long
intervals the right to dismiss these representatives if they
have betrayed their vows and to revoke any powers they have
abused. 84
Not so enjoyable as the first-hand despoiling, exiling, imprisoning, and executing available to the ancient citizen,
this dismissing and revoking preserved some of the responsibilities of ancient citizens within modern constitutional
government.
From an individual's viewpoint, the importance of his
own civic participation seems negligible and almost imaginary. In the aggregate, however, a participating and well
informed citizen body can certainly prevent the return of
a Napoleon or, more likely in 1819, the gradual confiscation of all political power by the ultras.
There may be no contradiction in Constant's argument.
But there is a problem. The liberal dilemma was how to
motivate individuals to participate, how to galvanize them
into civic activism, given the scant rewards each individual
might expect from time expended on political affairs: "the
danger of modern liberty is that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence and in the pursuit of
our particular interests, we will renounce too easily our
right to share in political power." 85 Civic privatism is a
danger because individuals will be more impressed by the
shorter-term gains than by the longer-term dangers of
apoliticism. Rational calculation leads citizens to see that
they can personally have no "real influence" on political
events,86 and thus may inadvertently encourage them to
expose their polity to dictatorship.
Constant understood that his instrumental argument
for civic involvement (that private rights can only be guaranteed by popular power, that independence will only be
ensured by participation) was not sufficient to rouse men
from the civic sedation administered first by Napoleon
and more recently by the ultra party. Partly because of his
recognition of the insufficiency of the instrumental argument for civic involvement, Constant overturned the previously worked-out logic of his lecture (a logic reflecting his
radically different concerns of 1798) and introduced an
Aristotelian and almost romantic justification of participation. Even apart from its terrible consequences, Constant
concluded, privatism cannot satisfy individuals, even if it
might make them happy. Men could reach bonheur simply
by abandoning their strenuous ideals and sinking into passivity. But happiness was not enough:
No, Gentlemen, I call to witness this better part of our nature,
the noble restlessness that pursues and torments us, this ardor to extend our understanding and develop our faculties.
57
�Our destiny does not call us to!ha)lplness<,:\Jt:>n€,chlill' to'silfperfecbon; and political liberty• isi t!Te< trtosttpoWefhll anti<the
most energetic means of self-J:l'effecHon :'granted us ;.by
heaven. 87
;
Except for "torment" and ainquietude," this passage carefully echoes classical arguments according to which man is
a fundamentally political animal. In radical contrast to the
body of the lecture, it implies that the more time modern
citizens spend on public affairs, the more free they will
feel.
In 1798, when the distinction between ancient and
modern liberty was first elaborated, Constant was still
haunted by the experience of the Revolution and ,espeCially by the idea that political participatimrumeamhnvolvement in plots for Tevenge. He thus viewed patriotic fer·
mentation with a nervous eye. In 1819, by contrast, the
ultra threat caused Constant and his liberal allies to re·
verse their earlier position and speak warmly of "pure, pro·
found, and sincere patriotism," a sentiment capable of en·
nobling the spirits of "tous les citoyens, sans exception." 88
Not merely a means to civil liberty, political liberty was
also seen as an mtegral part of civil liberty. Constant con·
eluded by suggesting that "the greatest possible number of
citizens" must be given influence over public affairs and
admitted to important political functions. Inclusion in
such tasks will give citizens "both the desire and the capac·
ity to perform them." 89 This is the sort of thinking which
~ve!'tually led to the acceptance of universal suffrage as an
mdispensable baSlS for representative government.
The strikingly democratic conclusion to "Ancient and
Modern Liberty" remains puzzling until we understand
how the underlying logic of the argument of 1798 was
adapted to meet the demands of Restoration politics. The
lecture is a palimpsest. It is so complex because it was composed twice, the second version superimposed on the first
after an interval of twenty years. By 1819, Constant's origi·
nal fear of convulsive patriotism had had to make room for
his hope that enhanced civic participation might advance
hberal causes or at least keep the ultras in check.
Civic Privatism and its Problems
The foregoing analysis of the two layers of "Ancient and
Modern Liberty" fails to do justice to the theoretical con·
tent of the lecture. After all, it was Constant's conscious
decision to weave his new and old concerns into a single
pattern of thought. "Ancient and Modern Liberty" gains
its importance from his crucial insight that both the loss of
civic spirit and the revival of civic spirit contain a potential
for tyranny. The right to be distracted from politics is pre·
ClOUS, b!-'t it iS not harmless. 0verprivatization and overpohbCiZahon are symmetncal dangers. The pluralistic and
voluntary pattern oflife to which modern citizens have become accustomed makes us intolerant of societies in
58
which• there are no sharply-etched limits to the political.
Butc·every time we draw such boundaries;-we' seal off im<poltanliiiteasofsotiallife from respiill!iible pi'.blic surveillance and coilttol.-:NaP<?-[eon- craftily used civic privatism
to escape accountability:9° 'The' liberal boundaries of the
political are simultaneously indispensable and fraught
with risk.
This idea is not a palinode or sign of Constant's irresolute _vacillation. It is an insight into the complexity of polihcs m France after the Revolubon. Ultimately, Constant's
success at keeping such ostensibly conflicting ideas simultaneously alive is what makes his thought about •this period so fascinating.
Unusable and even dangerous as a •constructive principle, ancient liberty is helpful as a reminder oflthe central
peril of modern liberty. His sense of this periiJmlly well• be
why Constant was so careful to label participation in-sovereignty a form ofliberty in the first place. Morlll'!squieu'l'iatl
warned against confounding the sovereign 'tptl\iver'\ 6fc•a
people with its '1iberty," and de Lolme adopted thiN·:nne
distinction between freedom and power.9l
Cons_tant's decision to deviate from those who defined
liberty by contrasting it with the exercise of sovereignty
was not casual. He insisted from the start that the influence of citizens on legislation was a form of freedom. He
did not allow active political rights to stand on the sidelines
as a mere alternative to freedom. This refusal to set popular power aside may also illuminate the ending of the 1819
lecture, the apparent contradiction between the notion
that political liberty is exclusively a guarantee and the idea
that it is also a vehicle for self-perfection. By calling popular power a form of freedom, Constant prepared the way
for his conclusion: freedom from politics is not coextensive with liberty. True liberty is an "optimal mix" of public
and private, participation and nonparticipation, citizenship and mdependence, activism and distraction, cooperation and eccentricity. 92
Those who accept Isaiah Berlin's portrait of a privacyaddicted Constant cannot explain why he devoted the last
fifteen years of his life to public service. To be sure the
politics to which he gave himself unstintingly was ~ot a
town-meeting sort of communalism. It was a radical reformist activism. If it was politics with the aim of limlting
politics, it was politics nonetheless. The price of modern
liberty is eternal vigilance. Anti-utopian but reformminded participation was crucial for Constant. In the
Commentaire sur l'ouvrage de Filangieri of 1822, he was
unrelenting about the importance of political citizenship.
In explaining why England was a powerful nation despite
its absurd commercial law, he wrote:
The political institutions, the parliamentary discussions, the
liberty of the press which [England] has enjoyed without interruption for one hundred and twenty-six years have counteracted the vices of its laws and its governments. Its inhabitants maintain their energy of character because they have not
been disinherited of their participation in the administration
WINTER/SPRING
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�of public affairs. This participation, while it is almost imaginary, gives the citizens a feeling of their importance that fosters their activity.93
Spain, by contrast, reveals the dismal fate of a country
where individuals lose interest in themselves because they
are deprived of any chance to influence their own fate:
Spain's "decadence dates from the destruction of its political liberty and the suppression of the cortes."94
Participation in politics, as advocated by the later Constant, was not limited to the periodic surveillance and
controle of the legislators by the electors. It cannot be reduced to a means by which private citizens could defend
their security, goods and jouissances. 95 Constant argued
that concern for the public good was also creative of energetic characters and even national identity. For him, poli- ·
tics was an engrossing passion. He merely wanted to make
sure that it was voluntary, not obligatory. A voluntary politics of reform (based on ideals of civilized humanity) is certainly one of the central possibilities made available by
modern liberty.
We should not, however, allow Constant to give a more
glamorous portrait of the ancient component in modern
liberty than he gave of ancient liberty itself. Constant admitted that he was sometimes bored with public service,
and he never gave flattering accounts of his reasons for
persisting in office. In a revealing letter written in 1800,
when he was first appointed to the Tribunal, he distinguished sharply between happiness and self-perfection,
just as he was to do at the conclusion of "Ancient and
Modern Liberty." He had pursued a political career, he
said:
not as a pleasure-is there any such thing in life?-but as a
task, as an opportunity to fulfill a duty, which is the only thing
able to lift the burden of doubt, of memory, of unrest-the
eternal lot of our transitory nature. Those for whom pleasure
has charms, for whom novelty still exists, and who have preserved the happy faculty of enjoyment, do not need a vocation; but those who have lost their physical and moral youth
must have a distinct mission to do good in order not to sink
into discouragement and apathy. 96
Constant was only thirty-three when he wrote this letter.
Decrepitude was his society's, not his personal, plight. Victimized by an excess of civilization, modern men are incapable of bonheur. The best they can hope for is to quell
their nagging inquietude. Living in a disillusioned age,
Constant decided to call such escapism by the name of
"self-perfection." Idealizing politics was politically useful
in his battle against the ultras.
Modern Imitators of Ancient Republics
Taine, heir to the counterrevolutionary tradition, argued that the Terror was a logical consequence of Enlightenment thought.97 This conservative thesis has been so
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
widely influential that its implausible character is often
lost from sight: if eighteenth-century liberalism leads necessarily to revolutionary dictatorship and murder, then
only the illiberalism of the old regime can sustain social
freedom.
Constant had a different view. The Terror, he thought,
did not result from an excess of freedom. On the contrary,
"the evils of the Revolution stemmed precisely from the
Revolution's having suspended allliberty."98 The liberty
suspended during the Terror had little or no resemblance
to the old aristocratic freedoms which had been sharply
curtailed during the consolidation of French absolutism.
The liberty violated by the Terror was a constitutionally
regulated liberty. It included civil rights, religious tolerance, legal equality, and the political influence of the
Third Estate. Unlike Taine, in other words, Constant saw
no difficulty in criticizing the Terror with categories inherited from the Enlightenment. The 1793-1794 phase of the
Revolution was marked by intolerant fanaticism, secular
priest-craft, and a conflation of the social and the political.
The Jacobins claimed to be establishing a new republic
based on virtue; but they actually recreated a despotism
based, as Montesquieu said all despotisms were, on fear.
Constant never accused the Terrorists of an overexuberant commitment to reason and equality. Rather than
pointing an accusing finger at the Enlightenment, he focused on the revolutionary appeal to classical republican
ideals,99 an appeal that served as a pretext for oppression,
misleading the public and to some extent deluding the oppressors. In so doing he relied explicitly on an Enlightenment mistrust of political recidivism. I00
Robespierre and Saint-Just, who in the crisis of 1793 had
resurrected the Roman institution of emergency dictatorship, were the most notorious modern imitators of ancient
republics. They were not squeamish about using violence
against their real or imagined enemies:
These men thought they could exercise political power as it
had been exercised in the free states of antiquity. They believed that even today everything must yield to the collective
authority and that private morality must fall silent before the
public interest. 101
Robespierre's addiction to Plutarch and Rousseau should
not be overestimated. But his admiration for the ancients
certainly contributed to his self-image as a great moral legislator and founder of a new order.IOZ The classical tradition of civic virtue provided a language in which he could
misdescribe the Revolution and stress the paramount
need for self-sacrifice on the part of all citizens. One of
his favorite exhortations was: "evelons nos ames it Ia hauteur des vertus republicaines et des examples antiques." 103
"Sparta," he rapturously remarked, "shines like a lightning
flash in the immense darkness." 104 "! speak of public virtue," he added in yet another speech, "which worked such
wonders in Greece and Rome and must produce even
more astonishing good in republican France."IOS
59
�Characteristic of the ancient city, according to Constant, was the absence of inalienable rights.l 06 Rights were
not absolute but contingent upon service to the community. They could be legally revoked by the assembled populace.107 In search of justifications for the flagrant violations of judicial procedure involved in revolutionary
justice, the Jacobins were understandably attracted to this
ancient model for the morally impeccable revocation of
rights. Fot similar reasons, "the Spartans of the Convention"108 followed Rousseau in praising the absence of partial associations within the ancient city. Loyalty to family
or Church should never interfere with allegiante to the patrie. Robespierre could encourage the denunciation of
family members for uncivic attitudes and chide wives
whose husbands had been guillotined for harboring unpatriotic feelings. 109 Frenchmen should be exclusively political animals, at least so long as revolutionary government
was in effect. The Law of Suspects defined "treason" so
vaguely as to include boredom and indifference as crimes
against the state.llO Likewise, attendance at local assemblies and the assumption of public office was obligatory,
not voluntary. If you married a foreigner, said "monsieur"
instead of "citoyen/' or went to Church, some zealot
might accuse you of having harmed the public good.lll
This fervid assimilation of the social to the political and
the private to the public was justified by appeals to the
ancient city in which no line had been drawn between
state and society.
Citizenship, for Robespierre, had to be total: "love of
the patrie ... presupposes a preference for the public interest over all private interests." 112 But Robespierre did
not merely denounce conflicting interests. He refused to
admit the legitimacy of conflicting opinions about the
common good. He remarked that there are only two parties in the Convention, the pure and the corrupt.l13 A
crude dichotomy between base self-interest and noble virtue dominated the Robespierrist vision of political life. Patriots, he notoriously suggested, should be concerned with
virtue, not with material well-being.l 14 The same simplistic
dualism supported his near-hysterical attacks on the single
vast conspiracy of the egoistical and demon-driven aligned
against the Revolution.II5 It also underlay his project for
the reeducation of Frenchmen deformed by centuries of
superstition and oppression.l 16 Like a good Plutarchan legislator, ll7 Robespierre was less concerned about granting a
share of legislative authority to the people than with restoring their moral health: "the Legislator's first duty is to
form and preserve public morality."IIB His central aim was
to instill purity of soul into citizens by means of the Revolution: "We want an order in which all low and cruel passion shall be repressed and in which laws shall awaken all
the benevolent and generous passions."ll 9 Men can be inwardly refashioned by governmental edict. Vice can be
legislated out of existence.
For Constant, Robespierre had an absurdly exaggerated
idea of the capacity oflaw to make men morally pure. Con-
60
stant admired the American revolutionaries who were satisfied with a system in which ambition counteracted ambition. Robespierre, by contrast, aspired to create an order
"in which the only ambition is to deserve fame and serve
the country." 120 Instead of rechanneling private vice for
public benefit, he wished to eradicate vice and enthrone
virtue in its stead.
According to Constant, it was this unbelievable attempt
to "improve" men against their will and to resurrect a vir~
tue-based polity on the ancient model that produced the
most gruesome atrocities of the Terror: "The partisans of
ancient liberty became furious when modern individuals
did not wish to be free according to their method. They
redoubled the torments, the people redoubled its resistance, and crimes followed upon errors." 121 The gravest error of the Jacobins was not to have adapted themselves to
the general spirit 122 of the age:
When punishments that reason reserves for great crimes are
applied to actions that some members of society consider a
duty, and that the most honest of the contrary party regard as
indifferent or excusable, the legislator is obliged, in order to
sustain his first iniquity, to multiply indefinitely secondary
wrongs. In order to have a single tyrannical law executed, he
must compile an entire code of proscriptions and blood.123
Robespierre was simply out of touch with the realities of
modern France.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the most common complaint against the old regime was that it was a
holdover from a bygone age. At mid-century, the word
"revolution" had already begun to change its meaning
from going back to going forward. 124 As the Revolution got
underway, the attack on the old regime was conducted less
in the name of an ancient constitution and more in the
name of a desirable future. In this context, it was a skillful
coup de theatre to stamp the most progressive party with
the epithet "anachronism." Indeed, Constant's diagnosis
of the Revolution was part of his strategy of tarring the two
extremes of French politics with the same brush, and thus
of staking out a broad middle position for himself and his
allies. It also allowed him to attack the Terror without
abandoning the liberalism of the philosophes.
The Psychology of Revolution
Constant's most penetrating insight into the leaders of
the French Revolution was that their Rousseauism went
deeper than it first seemed. Rousseau admired Sparta but
was pessimistic about the chances for reviving ancient frugality and virtue in a corrupt modern world. Robespierre is
sometimes depicted as an optimist who tried to do what
Rousseau had declared impossible. But in fact Rousseauist
pessimism permeated the speeches of Robespierre from
1792 until his execution in 1794. 125 His last speech conWlNTER/SPRJNG
1983
�eluded with a typical suggestion that the Republic of Virtue is too good for this world: "The time has not yet come
when men of good will can serve their country unmolested."126 This half-admission that his own goals were impossible to achieve is the most Rousseauist element in
Robespierre's writings. Such a half-consciously perceived
discrepancy between extravagant goals and modest historical possibilities is what Constant had in mind in this sardonic commentary:
Nothing is stranger to observe than the speeches of the
French demagogues. Saint~Just 1 the cleverest among them,
composed all his speeches in short, compact sentences,
meant to jolt awake worn~out minds. Thus, while he appeared
to believe the nation capable of making the most agonizing
sacrifices, he recognized by his very style that it was incapable
even of paying attention.l27
In diagnosing the Revolution, Constant regularly returned
to this dedoublement revolutionnaire. Saint-Just's audience
was not asleep; it was frazzled and distracted. It suffered
from l'arriere pensee and other signs of excessive civilization which Constant later explored in his novel, Adolphe
(1816). Recall this warning of Adolphe: "woe to the man
who in the arms of the mistress he has just possessed, conserves a fatal prescience and foresees that he can abandon
her."l28 Adolphe's torment stemmed partly from his inability to throw himself into any action with complete
abandon. His painful lack of illusions was startlingly mirrored in a psychological portrait Constant painted of the
revolutionary crowd. Although modern individuals can become enthused about certain abstract ideas, they are unfitted for feeling enthusiasm toward particular men.
Adolphe and the French people share "une deplorable
prevoyance'':
The French Revolution was most remarkable in this respect.
Whatever has been said about the inconstancy of the people
in ancient republics, nothing equals the mobility we have wit-
nessed. If, during the outbreak of even the best-prepared upheaval, you watch carefully the obscure ranks of the blind and
subjugated populace, you will see that the people (even as it
follows its leaders) casts its glance ahead to the moment when
these leaders will fall. And you will discern within its artificial
exaltation, a strange combination of analysis and mockery.
The people will seem to mistrust their own convictions. They
will try to delude themselves by their own acclamations and
to reinvigorate themselves by jaunty raillery. They foresee! so
to speak, the moment when the glamor of it all will pass. 29
Constant attributed the savagery and violence of the Revolution to just this lack of conviction, to just this mobility:
"Insurrections among the ancients were much more sin-
cere than among ourselves."ll0 Bloodshed was a tactic
used by eviscerated men to compensate for a deficit of
powerful passions:
An artificial and contrived insurrection requires, apart from
the violence of the insurrection itself, the extra violence
TilE ST. JOHNS REVJEW
needed to set it in motion . ... During the Revolution, I saw
men organizing sham insurrections who proposed massacres
in order-as they put it-to give events a popular and national air.l 31
Void of conviction, but unable to tolerate a rudderless
state of mind, modern men become "pretendus republicains,"ll2 pseudo-zealots more odious and frenzied than
authentic zealots. Their hypocrisy was repellent:
Great sacrifices, acts of devotion, victories won by patriotism
over natural affections in Greece and Rome served among us
as pretexts for the most unbridled outbursts of individual passions. Noble examples were parodied in a miserable fashion.
Because, in earlier times, inexorable but just fathers had condemned their criminal children, modern imitators put their
own quite innocent enemies to death.133
Constant's general understanding of modern European
societies influenced and was influenced by his analysis of
the Revolution. Although he considered the Revolution
an episode in the moral advance toward legal equality, he
never neglected its chilling cruelty. And while he focused
intently on modern misuses of communitarian rhetoric, he
never denied the genuinely progressive outcome of the
Revolution. He thought that the disaster of the Jacobin experiment at legislating public morality revealed the utter
futility of trying to reverse. the course of social change.
The morals and manners of a skeptical, secular, and commercial society leave much to be desired. Legislative command cannot, however, recreate otiose forms of civic vir-
tue and communal belonging.
Because Constant wished to counter Rousseau's pernicious influence on the revolutionary generation and to deromanticize the classical city, he often emphasized the
brutal features of ancient liberty. Despite this tendency,
he was careful to say that the Greeks and the Romans provided the most stunning examples in human history of political freedom. Ancient republicanism, while harsh, was
not despotic. It is only in modern society that ancient freedom becomes a ploy for justifying oppression.l 34 Because
there were no significant boundaries of the political in the
ancient city, total citizenship was not experienced as a violation of the individual or as a restriction on his chances in
life. During the Revolution, by contrast, the ludicrous demand for certificats de civisme revealed how threatened authorities felt by the lukewarm commitment of citizens to
civic life.m Political absenteeism was perceived as treason, as an illicit evasion of the molding-power of a self.
appointed Legislative elite. The pluralism of modern society, including the "line" between state and society, first
made the ideal of ancient liberty into a possible pretext for
political tyranny.
1. "De la liberte des anciens comparee a celle des modemes," delivered
at the Paris Atheneum in 1819 and reprinted in Cours de politique consti·
tutionelle ou collection des ouvrages publies sur le gouvernement represen-
61
�tatif, edited by Eduoard Laboulaye, Paris 1872, val. 2, 539-560. Besides
this lecture, the basic texts in which Constant discusses the distinction
between ancient and modem liberty are Chilpters 6 through 8 of De
!'usurpation of 1814, reprinted in Cours de politique, val. 2, 204-217, and,
most important of all, Book 16 of the recently published manuscript, originally composed between 1802 and 1804, Les "Principes de politique" de
Benjamin Constant, edited by Etienne Hofmann, Geneva 1980, 419-45 5.
This early sketch of Constant's argument is itself a rewritten and expanded version of Chapter 3 of Mme de Stael's Des circonsfunces actuelles qui peuvent terminer la revolution, Geneva 1979, 106-112, a work
written around 1798, but left unpublished until the twentieth century.
We know that Constant actively collaborated on this manuscript. He was
certainly involved with the initial conception of the chapter in question
and can probably be considered its co-author. The actual degree of Constant's collaboration on Circonstances actuelles, however, will always remain a matter of dispute. Since Constant took whole sentences from the
book and simply transplanted them unrevised into his own published
works, we can assume he felt a proprietary attitude toward the manuscript of 1798. The relevant chapter also has a kind of Constantian ring
discordant with de Stael's ordinary tone. But there is room for legitimate
disagreement on this question. The answer to it is also of limited impor·
tance.
2. J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress, New Yark 1932, 78-97; Antoine Adam,
Grandeur and Illusion. French Literature and Society 1600-1715, New
York 1972, 142-164.
3. See Thomas Hobbes's dismissal of ancient liberty, Leviathan, Part
Two, ch. 21, Oxford 1965, 165; and David Hume, "Of the Populousness
of Ancient Nations," Essays. Moral, Political and Literary, Oxford 1963,
381-451. Cf. also Alexander Hamilton: "The industrious habits of the
people of the present day, absorbed in the pursuits of gain and devoted to
the improvements of agriculture and commerce, are incompatible with
the condition of a nation of soldiers, which was the true condition of the
people of those [ancient] republics." The Federalist Papers, New York
1961,69.
4. Compare the virtue-based ancient republic (discussed in Books IIVIII of De l'esprit des lois) with the English mixed regime (discussed
chiefly in Books XI and XII).
5. Montesquieu, De l'esprit des lois, in Oeuvres completes, Paris 1951,
val. 2, 431 (Xll, 2).
6. Montesquieu, Esprit, 396 (XI, 5) and 354 (Vlll, 6).
7. Montesquieu, Esprit, 397 (XI, 6).
8. Montesquieu, Causes de la Grandeur des Romains, in Oeuvres completes, 119.
9. Montesquieu, Esprit, 363 (Vlll, 16).
10. Montesquieu, Esprit, 272 (1V, 8).
11. Montesquieu, Esprit, 269 (IV, 6).
12. Montesquieu, Esprit, 273 (1V, 8).
13. Montesquieu, Esprit, 252 (III, 3): "Les politiques grecs, qui vivoient
dans le gouvernement populaire, ne reconnoissient d'autre force qui pUt
les soutenir que celle de la vertu."
14. Montesquieu, Esprit, 303 (V, 19).
15. Max Weber, The City, New York 1958,220.
16. Montesquieu, Esprit, 274 (V, 2).
17. Montesquieu, Esprit, 362 (VIll, 16).
18. Montesquieu, Esprit, 252 (III, 3).
19. Montesquieu's definition of freedom as personal security (with no
reference to self-government or the satisfactions afforded participants in
a common endeavor) was echoed in Jaucourt's article on political liberty
in the Encyclopedie: "La liberte politique du citoyen est cette tranquillite
d'esprit que procede de I' opinion que chacun a de sa sfirete, & pour
qu'on ait cette sfirete, il faut que le gouvernement soit tel, qu'un citoyen
ne puisse pas craindre un citoyen." Encyclopedie, ou Dictionnaire
raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers, val. 9, Neufchastel1765, 472.
20. Jean-Louis de Lolme, The Constitution of England, London 1807,
246.
21. Joseph Priestly, An Essay on the First Principles of Government and of
the Nature of Political, Civil and Religious Liberty, London 1768, 12-13,
62
54; Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, London
1767, 92; Jean-Charles-Leonard Sismondi, Histoire des republiques italiennes du moyen-age, Paris 1809, val. 4, 369-370. These texts are all cited
in Guy Dodge, Benjamin Constant's Philosophy of Liberalism, Chapel
Hill1980, 43-44.
22. Cours de Politique, vol. 2, 539.
23. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 547.
24. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 547.
25. Les "Principes de politique" de Benjamin Constant, 432.
26. Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty," in Four Essays on Liberty,
Oxford 1969, 118-172.
27. Some radically ascetic "noes" may not entail any "yeses," but this is
not the case with modem liberty.
28. "Principes de politique," 421-424.
29. Cours de Politique, val. 2, 556-557.
30. For this point I am indebted to Larry Siedentop, "Two Liberal Traditions" (in The Idea of Freedom, edited by Alan Ryan, Oxford 1979, 153174), though his contrast between French and British liberalism is uncon·
vincing because it requires the expulsion of Adam Smith from the British
tradition.
31. Cours de politique, val. 2, 213-217.
32. Constantin Franyois de Volney, Lecons d'histoire, in Oeuvres com·
pletes, Paris 1846, 592.
33. Robert L. Herbert, David, Brutus, Voltaire and the French Revolution, New York 1972.
34. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 217.
35. Constant's analysis of the masks worn by "modem imitators of ancient republics" was echoed thirty-five years later in Karl Marx's discussion of the role played by Roman costumes and Roman phrases in the
great French Revolution. (Karl Marx, ''Der achtzehnte Brumaire de
Louis Bonaparte," Marx-Engels Werke, Berlin 1978, val. 8, 116.) Curiously
enough, in the very same passage where Marx tacitly repeated Constant,
he explicitly said that Constant was another bourgeois propagandist unaware that "ghosts from the days of Rome'' had watched over the demoli·
tion of feudalism in France. Marx's principal point, in any case, was that
history had instructed the French Revolutionaries to create bourgeois society, and that they had to drug themselves to the banality of their task.
They mouthed public-spirited slogans and struck patriotic poses borrowed from ancient citizens. Marx went on to predict that the proletarian
revolution would be quite different. It would be truly heroic, neither re·
quiring nor admitting any form of self-deception. Unlike Marx, Constant
did not believe the emergence of revolutionary cults of antiquity could
be traced to the cunning of reason. He thought that the Jacobin fixation
on classical virtue was a contingent fact: it was caused by the classical
education of middle class French elites and especially by the paucity of
alternative languages available for attacking royalism and religious orthodoxy.
36. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 548-549.
37. "Principes de politique," 420.
38. Cf. Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens. A Study of Rousseau's Social
Theory, Cambridge 1969.
39. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 555.
40. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 559-560.
41. The ultraroyalists or extreme reactionary party already began to
make fierce recriminations against Louis XVIII for his concessions to
constitutional government in 1814. They were Constant's principal adversaries for the last fifteen years of his life.
42. Cf. George Sabine, "Two Democratic Traditions," Philosophical Re·
view, 61, October 1952,451-474.
43. Mme de Stael, Circonstances actuelles, 106.
44. Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 106.
45. Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 106.
46. Mme de Stael, Circonstances, l 07.
47. Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 107.
48. Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 107.
49. Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 108.
50. Mme de Stael, Circonstances. 109.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 110.
Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 111.
Mme de Stael. Circonstances, 111.
Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 111.
John Plamenatz, The Revolutionary Movement in France 1815-71,
London 1952, 21-22.
56. Cours de politique, val.
57. Cours de politique, val.
58. Cours de politique, val.
59. Cours de politique, val.
2, 540.
2, 540.
2, 540.
2, 540.
60. The new constitution of 1814, regally "granted" to the nation by
Louis XVIII, retained the Civil Code, and recognized legal equality, religious toleration, and the right of purchasers of "national lands" to keep
their property. To understand the liberal-ultra battles of the Restoration,
it is important to note that the Charter was a blatantly ambiguous document which, for instance, did not make clear how power was to be apportioned between the king and the Chambers. Guillaume de Bertier de
Sauvigny, The Bourbon Restoration, Philadelphia 1966,65-72.
61. Cours de politique, val. 2, 554.
62. Cours de politique, val. 2, 542.
63. Cours de politique, val. 2, 542.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
Cours de politique, vol. 2, 553.
Reprinted in Cours de politique, val. 2, 53-69.
Cours de politique, vol. I, 17, 180.
Cours de politique, val. l, 173.
Cours de politique, val. 2, 556.
Cours de politique, vol. 2, 547.
Cours de politique, vol. 2, 556; see also 557.
Cours de politique, val. 2, 560.
Cours de politique, vol. 2, 545-546.
Cours de politique, vol. 2, 559.
Rousseau, Oeuvres completes, edited by Bernard Gagne bin et Marcel
Raymond, Paris 1964, vol. 3, 430.
75. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 542.
76. Cours de politique, val. 2, 553.
77. Benjamin Constant, Commentaire sur l'ouvrage cfe Fi[angieri, Paris
1824, vol. 2, 182-183.
78. Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests. Political Argu, ments for Capitalism before its Triumph, Princeton 1977, 123-124.
79. Louis Bergeron, France under Napoleon, Princeton 1981,87.
80. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 552.
81. Franklin Ford, Robe and Sword. The Regrouping of the French Aristocracy after Louis XN, New York 1965, 19.
82. Cours de politique, val. 2, 559.
83. Cours de politique, val. 2, 558.
84. Cours de politique, val. 2, 558.
85. Cours de politique, val. 2, 558.
86. Cours de politique, val. 2, 547.
87. Cours de politique, val. 2, 559.
88. Cours de politique, val. 2, 559.
89. Cours de politique, val. 2, 560.
90. In the manuscripts of 1802-1804, written under the shadow of Napoleon, we find: "lorsqu'il n'y a dans un pays libre ni liberte de la presse, ni
droits politiques,le peuple se detache entierement des affaires publiques.
Toute communication est rompue entre les gouvernants et le gouvernes.
L'autorite, pendant quelque temps, et les partisans de l'autorite peuvent
regarder cela comme un avantage. Le gouvernement ne rencontre point
des obstacles. Rien ne le contrarie. II agit librement mais c'est que lui seul
est vivant et que la nation est morte." Les "Principes de politique" de Ben·
jamin Constant, 137. The liberal constitutionalism Constant advocated
was obviously not intended to detach citizens entirely from public affairs.
91. Jean-Louis de Lolme, The Constitution of England, London 1807,
245. Referring specifically to the French revolutionaries and their followers, Edmund Burke employed a similar distinction: he wrote that "the
right of the people is almost always confounded with their power." Reflections on the Revolution in France, London 1969, 153.
92. Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, Cambridge, Mass. 1970,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
30-43. Constant, however, was thinking of "interdependence" rather
than a mere "mixture."
93. Commentaire, Paris 1822, vol. 1, 73.
94. Commentaire, vol. 1, 72.
95. According to Isaiah Berlin, Constant defended democratic selfgovernment "only for the reason ... that without it negative liberty may
be too easily crushed." Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford 1969, xlvii.
96. Letter to Mme de Nassau, 20 January 1800, cited and translated by
Elizabeth Schermerhorn, Benjamin Constant, New York 1970, 183.
97. Hippolyte Taine, The Ancient Regime, New York 1876.
98. Melanges de litterature et de politique, Brussels 1829, vol. 1, 68.
99. As Gay and others have stressed, the appeal to antiquity was only one
aspect of the Enlightenment tradition; and it was counterbalanced by a
belief that, in many domains, the moderns had outstripped the ancients.
100. In his essay "Of Refinement in the Arts," Hume wrote: "To declaim against present times, and magnify the virtue of remote ancestors,
is a propensity almost inherent in the human mind." Essays, Oxford
1963, 285.
101. "Principes de politique," 438.
102. "During a conversation in which [Robespierre] attacked the representative system, it is reported that, asked what he would put in its place,
he replied, 'Celui de Lycurge.' " Alfred Cobban, "The_ Political Ideas of
Robespierre during the Convention," Aspects of the French Revolution,
New York 1968, 186; consider also R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Demo·
cratic Revolution, Princeton 1964, val. 2, 124.
103. Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, edited by Laponneraye, New
York 1970, vol. 3, 518.
104. Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 608; but also see vol. 3, 194, where Ro·
bespierre notes of Sparta that "this nation of austere republicans has
nothing in common with a nation of 25 million men." Robespierre was
flexible enough that, in order to attack the sectionnaires and the Commune, he often reversed himself and denounced urban self-government
on the ancient model.
105. Robespierre, Oeuvres, 3, 544.
106. This thesis has found a subtle defender in Michel Villey, Leqons
d'histoire de Ia philosophie du droit, Paris 1962, 221-250.
107. According to Moses Finley, "Classical Greeks and Republican Romans possessed a considerable measure of freedom, in speech, in political debate, in their business activities, even in religion. However, they
lacked, and would have been appalled by, inalienable rights. There were
no theoretical limits to the power of the state, no activity, no sphere of
human behavior in which the state could not legitimately intervene provided the decision was properly taken for any reason that was held to be
valid by a legitimate authority." The Ancient Economy, London 1973,
154-155.
108. Melanges de litterature et de politique, vol. 1, 68.
109. Norman Hampson, The Social History of the French Revolution, To·
ronto 1965, 223.
110. "Suspicion was directed not only towards probable authors of acts
already committed, on grounds of definite circumstances susceptible of
discussion and of proof, but also towards the possible perpetrators of
eventual crimes, who were believed capable of them because of their
opinions or even their real or simulated indifference." George Lefebvre,
The French Revolution, London 1968, vol. 2, 118.
111. Fran~ois Furet and Denis Richet, The French Revolution, New
York 1970, 188-189.
112. Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 514.
113. Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 698 and 612.
114. Norman Hampson, The Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre, London 1974, 139 and 173.
115. Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 551.
116. On the execution of Louis XVI as an attempt to furnish a republican re-education for the miseducated French nation, see Michael
Walzer, Regicide and Revolution, Cambridge 1974, 1-89.
117. According to Plutarch, Lycurgus "bred up his citizens in such a way
that they neither would nor could live by themselves; they were to make
themselves one with the public good, and, clustering like bees around
63
�their commander, be by their zeal and public spirit carried all but out of
themselves, and devoted wholly to their country." The Lives of the Noble
Grecians and Romans, New York n.d., 69. ·
118. Robespierre, Oeuvres, voL 1, 156.
119. Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 541.
120. Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 541.
121. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 213.
122. For Montesquieu's idea of the "general spirit" of a country or age,
see De l'esprit des lois, Book XIX, chapters four and five.
123. Des Suites de Ia contre-revolution de 1660 en Angleterre, 56-57.
124. Consider the two uses of the word "revolution" at the beginning of
Turgot's "A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind," On Progress, Sociology and Economics, edited by R. L. Meek,
Cambridge 1973,41-42. See also Felix Gilbert, "Revolution," Dictionary
of the History of Ideas, New York 1973, vol. 4, 152-163.
125.
126.
127.
128.
129.
130.
131.
132.
Hampson, The Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre, 13 3-134.
Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 736.
Les "Principes de politique" de Benjamin Constant, 432.
Adolphe in Oeuvres, edited by Alfred Roulin, Paris, 1964, 32.
"Principes de politique," 434.
"Principes de politique," 620.
"Principes de politique," 620.
"Principes de politique," 86.
133. "Principes de politique," 438.
134. This caveat distinguishes Constant's position from the views ad·
vanced by Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 2 vols., Princeton
1966.
135. M. J. Sydenham, The French Revolution, New York 1966, p. 178;
Hampson, The Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre, 198.
SIXTEEN EIGHTEEN
'Why do these gentlemen wish to throw me out
Of the window?' asked an obscure Bohemian secretary
Before he was unexpectedly exfenestrated and miraculously saved
By a pile of castleyard rubbish or an angel of God.
Thus he was flung into History, and with his fall
Introduced three decades of winter, delusion and warThe occasional Adam, perplexed and resurrected, to remind us
That the innocent often are incidentally in castles.
ELLIOTT ZUCKERMAN
64
WIN1ER/SPRING 1983
�Mark Aldanov
The Holdup at Tiflis on June 26, 1907:
the ''Exes ''
from The Suicides
translated by Joel Carmichael
The following section comes from Mark Aldanov's last novel,
The Suicides, that appeared in Russian in Western Europe in 1958
after his death in 1957-but has never been published in English.
Bom in 1886 in Kiev, Mark Alexandrovich Landau (Aldanov was
his pen name) won prizes in secondary school for his accomplish~
ments in Greek and Latin. By 1910 he had earned degrees in law
and natural sciences from the University of Kiev and published a
monograph in organic chemistry. Untill917 he lived in St. Petersburg. In some sense the Bolshevik seizure of power in October
made him into an artist and a Russian: he began to write journalism and then novels after he left Russia forever in March 1919. He
wrote first of all in the Russian language press abroad for the more
than two million Russians in exile by 1922. But his novels and
essays also won a wide audience in Europe except the Soviet Union
and the United States. Throughout much of his life he continued
his scientific work. In exile he lived mostly in France but also in
Berlin for a few years and during the Second World War in New
York. He was, he used to say, the only Russian writer abroad who
managed to live from his pen-with difficulty. The following novels of Aldanov have appeared in English: The Ninth Thermidor
(1923); The Devil's Bridge (1925); Saint Helena, Little Island;
The Escape (1932); For Thee the Best (1940); Before the Deluge
(1950); To Live as We Wish (1952); Nightmare and Dawn (1957),
For Aldanov see C. Nicholas Lee, The Novels of Mark Alexandrovich Aldanov, The Hague, Mouton 1968; "Mark Aldanov: Russia, Jewry, and the World," Midstream, March 1981, 41-46.
The Suicides begins with the Social Democratic Congress in
Joel Carmichael translated the memoirs ofN. N. Sukhanov (The Russian
Revolution 1917, Oxford 1952), the only full-length eyewitness account
of the February and October events in Russia in 1917. His essay, "The
Lost Continent, the Conundrum of Christian Origins," appeared in the
Autumn-Winter 1982-83 issue of the St. John's Review.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Brussels in 1903 and ends in 1923. In the manner of Tolstoy (on
whom Aldanov had published a critical work in 1915), itportrays
historical personages as well as private individuals. There are accurate, carefully researched portraits of Mussolini, Wilhelm II, Franz
Joseph, Witte, Lenin, Stalin. The most brilliant is perhaps of Witte.
The portrait of Lenin is superior to its only rival, Solzhenitsyn's in
Lenin in Zurich-in part because Aldanov unlike Solzhenitsyn
knew many men who had known Lenin. Here is one of many characterizations of Lenin:
His favourites of not long before, Zinoviev and Kamenev, were
holding things up. They did not want an uprising. Lenin began
to hate them ferociously. Not, to be sure, for long. In complete
contrast to Stalin he was never rancorous, and was always ready
to come to a friendly accord with any of the people whom he
referred to and considered "scoundrels" and "sons-of-bitches,"
as long as they submitted to him completely. Robespierre could
not talk for two minutes without saying something about ''vertu."
Lenin would never even have pronounced the word, not only
because the world had undergone a c lumge in literary sty I.e. He
simply did not understand just that "virtue" was, and what its
point was if it existed. Surely, it was impossible to make a revolution without scoundrels?
A meditation, born of decades of recollection, study and reflection, on the Europe that was to destroy itself in the First World
War, The Suicides contains many stunning historical judgements-iudgements of simplicity and depth rarely found in academic historians. Aldanov understood the interrelation of events
throughout Europe because he had an uncanny sense-that betrayed itself in the resiliency of his narrative-of the relation of
public events to private lives, especially to private bafflement, incapacity and self-ignorance.
65
�Here is one of many remarks on the outbreak of the First World
War:
According to all profound sociological :theories the assassination
of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand was only the occasion of the
World War. The real causes were quite different: "Anglo-German economic rivalry," "struggle for markets," "internal contradictions of the capitalist order," etc. But the reading of the
simple-minded correspondence of the contemporary statesmen
thrusts another conclusion forward: The assassination in Sarajevo was not an occasion, it was just this that launched the catastrophe. They never wrote or spoke about "the struggle for
markets" or about "the internal contradictions of the capitalist
order" and they had never heard about them. It may well be they
were not even acquainted with the words.
The following section tells the story of perhaps the most famous
Bolshevik holdup. It also represents a turning point in the life of
one of the main characters in the novel, Jambul, who after the robbery leaves the terrorists forever to return to the land and the religion of his fathers in Turkey.
Dzhugashvili is the name Stalin bore at his birth, Koba his nickname. Krupskaya was Lenin's wife. L. R
The Tillis terrorists usually assembled in the same restaurant, the Tilipuchuri. This had nothing to do with conspiracy; they knew that the local police were very inefficient, and would not be too zealous in arresting them. At
that time a policeman's trade, especially in the Caucasus,
was just as daD.gerous as a terrorist's.
The Caucasian Deputy Police Commissioner, Count
Vorontsov-Dashkov, was a man of liberal views. He was
fond of the Caucasians, as all Russians have been, with a
slight touch of benevolent disdain for the Caucasian
accent. In his youth he himself had fought against the
mountaineers for three years, and recalled that there was
never the slightest hostility to them in the army at the time
and that in Russian literature, from Pushkin and Lermontov to Tolstoy, there was scarcely a single unsympathetic
Caucasian. The war had long since been over, but in a confused and almost unconscious way the Commissioner re-
garded the terrorists of the Twentieth Century as a somewhat inferior repetition of Shamil's mountaineers.*
He did not, of course, consort with the terrorists, but he
attempted to maintain human relations somehow with the
leaders of moderate Socialism. They sometimes made private pacts which, however, instantly became public. For
instance, when the Armenians and the Tatars fell out, he
handed the Social-Democratic Party five hundred rifles in
order to arm the working-class guards who were maintaining order, on the word of honor of the Menshevik,
Ramishvili, that the rifles would be returned to the author-
*For Shamil's mountaineers see Leo Tolstoy's short story, A Prisoner in
the Caucasus (1872). L.R.
66
ities as soon as the emergency was over. Before the expected arrival of the Tsar in the Caucasus, he secured the
revolutionaries' word of honor that no attempts at assassination would be made. He did not think such an agreement completely assured the Tsar's safety, but in the
Caucasus, in his opinion, it was a better guarantee than
any police measures. Vorontzov-Dashkov was opposed to
execution; he thought that no matter what you did you
couldn't frighten a Chechen or Ingush with the gallows. In
addition he had almost become a fatalist after the assassination of Alexander II-you can't escape fate.
He had been a favorite of three Tsars. Hence the Government disliked him intensely. The Count's ancient
name, however, his enormous wealth, his independence as
a man who needed no one, even his seignorial appearance
and his manner of talking to everyone in the same way,
and most of all his personal intimacy with the Tsar made
the Government wary. It interfered as little as possible
with his administrative methods in the Caucasus. The
Commissioner's views may have been reflected a little
even in the activities of the police. But even out of simple
caution police agents tried to avoid looking into places like
the Tilipuchuri restaurant unless it was absolutely unavoidable. Everyone in the Caucasus carried cold steel, a
great many were revolutionists, and there were more than
a few primitive bombs being made. "Absolutely every
child is capable of taking a sardine-tin and some drugstore
articles and making a shell that's fit to blow up his nursemaid-," wrote a contemporary.
It is likely that even at that time the Police Department
knew that the "expropriations" were being conducted
from afar by Lenin himself. It may also have known that
for this purpose the Central Committee of the Party had
formed a small, still more central committee, which was so
secret that for a long time the most eminent Social-Democrats never even knew of its existence.
There were only two men on this committee besides
Lenin: Krasin, alias Nikitich, alias Winter, alias-for some
reason-the Horse, and Bogdanov, who had half a dozen
pseudonyms: Maximov, Verner, Rakhmetov, Sysoika,
Reinert, Ryadovey. The members of the Police Department were not particularly interested in the spiritual qualities of the revolutionaries: "They're all swine!" (Some
might have added "including ourselves"). But it was just
these two Bolsheviks whom it was difficult to suspect of
terrorism: one was busy either with philosophy, science, or
heaven knows what; the other was a prominent engineer
who had amassed some money in business and was by no
means a "horse" but an extremely able and skilful activist.
But the people they had assigned as deputies in immediate
charge of terroristic activities in the Caucasus were known
to the police-Koba or Dzhugashvili, and Kamo.
There were fables and anecdotes about Kamo in the
Caucasus. But not even the revolutionists knew much
about Dzhugashvili. They spoke about him even less. Incomprehensibly this man, who was passionately in love
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�with self-advertisement, which he later devoted himself to
with a success unheard of in history, in his youth told almost nothing about himself even to his close comrades:
doubtless he suspected them all of being provocateurs. For
still far more incomprehensible reasons he almost never
spoke about his doings in the Caucasus even later on,
when he could have without the slightest danger.
It was already dusk when )ambul hurried to the restaurant. He glanced into the open window. No guards were
there. Where can they be today? he wondered. He knew
that no one should stay home alone that night-unless
Koba, perhaps-he has no nerves at all, thought )ambul.
He walked on further. After convincing himself that
there were no suspicious-looking people about, he turned
back. Time to eat, he thought, I haven't had a thing since
morning.
Early that morning, after taking the best horse out of the
stable, he had ridden far out of the city and had practiced
with his revolver in a secluded spot in the woods. Even
years earlier he had been able to hit a hull's eye at fifteen
paces. He had stuck a sheet of paper about three times as
large as a playing card on to a tree and missed it twice in a
row. This annoyed him very much, though not much accuracy was needed for the business on the following day.
Lack of sleep, of course! he thought angrily. But what
about it, I don't think it's the first time I've gone into a
dangerous business. Before I used to sleep perfectly well.
He took himself in hand and began shooting better. Before
his last shot he made a bet with himself; if I miss it means
we'll have a fiasco. He had made bets with himself at home
too, with both cards and coins: he got different results, but
even without the cards one thing was clear: whatever happened it was already impossible to withdraw. It would have
meant dishonoring oneself.
Sometimes it seemed to him that he should actually
make bets about something else too: was the whole thing
necessary? He had had doubts for a long time, and they had
recently been growing stronger and stronger. Occasionally
he even asked himself whether they weren't to be explained by his fear of death. His friends said he was absolutely fearless-he simply didn't understand what fear
was. Such remarks got back to him and pleased him. Nevertheless, he thought them exaggerated: people who had
never been afraid didn't exist. Sokolov and Kamo are
braver than anyone I've ever seen, but they must have
been afraid, too.
At last he hit the sheet of paper, actually right in the
center, and he stopped practicing. He had taken along only
one reserve box of bullets, and it was bad luck to take thirteen shots before an action. Seven hits out of twelve, he
thought, not bad, but before I would have done better.
Before, whenever he came to the Caucasus, even from
Paris, he always became lively and merry. Now it was difTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ferent. His usual gaiety had almost left him. He was serious-minded, somewhat solemn. Yes, it's quite possible I'll
be killed. Well, so I'll be killed, there'll just be one )ambul
less, that's all ... I thought the time had gone by when I
would draw up a balance-sheet of my life before a dangerous action; it seems it hasn't quite, he said to himself. He
thought about his aging father: how would this make him
feel?
He thought about Lyuda too, sometimes. He had pleasant memories of her. He didn't know just what she was
doing. At their parting in Petersburg she hadn't asked him
to write (she had simply forgotten). This hurt him. Nevertheless, he sent her a letter from Tiflis. To avoid causing
her any trouble he sent it without a signature, in an assumed handwriting, and without any indication of a return address. There could be no reply. But she probably
wouldn't have answered anyhow, out of pride, he thought.
He didn't write again. It must have been for the first time
since he was fourteen years old that a woman was on his
mind. In general he thought about women very seldom.
The restaurant was empty and stifling, with a smell of
fried onions and freshly ground coffee, each a smell he
liked. Kamo sat at the end of the room. He had evidently
just arrived. There was nothing to eat or drink on the little
table in front of him. He's got himself all dressed up, the
jackass! thought )ambul. The cutthroat was wearing a
dark-red Circassian tunic, a white silk Caucasian coat, and
Moroccan soft-soled boots; the scabbards of the sabre and
the dagger were thickly adorned with turquoise, silver, and
ivory. A white Caucasian fur-cap was laying on the chair.
Thank God he hasn't put on a felt cloak and hood, in June!
)ambul thought. Can he have the bombs on him, too? No,
for the time being Koba's taken the bombs away from
them. Koba may be anything you like, he's not a fool!
After glancing around once more quickly, almost imperceptibly, he greeted Kamo, and sat down opposite him at
the little table.
"Look here, don't sit that way with your back to the wall.
How will you fight if the cops jump in?" asked Kamo. His
Russian sounded almost like a caricature of the Caucasian
accent used for jokes. There was no other language they
had in common. Both spoke Tatar badly.
"Why should we sit side by side at such a small table? If
the cops come in please inform me."
"When should I inform you? A cop runs quickly. Lose
half a second, you're through. Impossible to lose half a second," said Kama, who never understood jokes.
"All right then, I'll know soon enough. There's a backentrance behind you. A cop likes to run through backentrances, too. Hadn't you guessed?"
HNo/' admitted Kama, astonished.
Jambullooked at him, as always, with tender curiosity. It
was only with him that he spoke jocularly now. He knew of
his exploits, which usually succeeded, and he couldn't understand why or how they had succeeded. He doesn't even
understand what a conspiracy is! Jambul thought. He obvi-
67
�ously only has instincts instead of a mind, like a wolf or
1
tiger.
Jambul knew a great many terrorists. He considered So·
kolov the most remarkable of them', and was a little sorry
the executed man hadn't been a Caucasian. The affair in
Tiflis was going to be the work of Caucasians only. All of
them reckless and foolhardy. All of them much cleverer
than Kamo, thought Jambul. Nevertheless he's going to
have the chief role, maybe that's right after all.
"Have you had any vodka?"
uNo."
"Will you have some with me? It may be the last one
we'll have."
"Are both of them watching out for the cashier?"
"Both of them are watching out for the cashier."
"Who's going to be carrying the money?"
"Two will carry money. The cashier and the accountant."
"Are they young? Family men?"
"I don't know."
~~what
are their names?"
"The cashier is Kurdyumov. The accountant is Golov·
nya."
11
ls there lots of money?"
"Annette Sulakhvelidze says-a million. Patsiya
Galdava says three hundred thousand."
"Old wives' tales! Are they going in a carriage?"
"Maybe," said Kamo indifferently. "I'll drink one glass,
no more, before tomorrow morning. I'll drink milk. I won't
drink wine."
"Why not? Did Koba give you orders? Lenin himself
drinks a little. They say he likes Italian wines."
"He doesn't. I brought wine once to Kuokal. A whole
wineskin from the Caucasus I brought. At that time I was
an aide·de.camp. I rode in first class. He thanked me.
Lenin doesn't like wine. But Bogdanov likes wine. He was
so happy! And Lenin gave me bombs, Krasin made them. I
also made them. He knows chemistry. I helped. Good
"They are going in a phaeton."
"What's the guard?"
"Another phaeton."
"But it's not the phaeton itself that's going to do the
guarding. Who's going to be in it?"
"Five men with guns. Caldava says-always five men
with guns."
Don't tell me there isn't going to be a Cossack convoy?"
"There will be a Cossack convoy. It will be behind. It
bombs."
"Many Cossacks. I don't know how many."
"Oh, we'll do away with quite a few people if we're not
finished off first. They have wives, children ... Does that
mean the women couldn't find out anything else?"
uStolypins?"
"Stolypins," Kamo nodded. This was the name for a
new type of bomb, which had been tried out first on Ap·
tekar Island.
"So . . . D'you want something to eat? D'you like
shashlyk?"
"I like shashlyk. I like almond pastry. Are you paying
with your own mon'ey? Not Party money-if it's Party
money I'll have cheese."
"My own, my own. I've never had any Party money and
never will. Tomorrow, too, if it comes off, I won't take any·
thing for myself."
"Will I? You are a fool!"
"But maybe others will, eh?"
"Listen, you want me to kill?"
"No. Of course our own people won't. I know, they're
almost all good fellows, but the others have stolen. What
will you eat with the vodka? I'll pay, I get some from my
father, today there's no sense worrying about money.
What zakuski d'you like?"
"I like everything. Just a little bit. Some cheese ... "
Jambul called over the owner and after some reflection
ordered a lavish dinner (perhaps the last we'll ever have,
he thought); smoked sturgeon, caviar, cheese, shashlyk,
almond pastry, a carafe of vodka, a bottle of the best
Kakhetin wine.
"Now tell me, just don't shout," he said in a low voice,
after the owner had gone away. "Have you seen Patsiya?"
Tve seen Patsiya/' answered Kama, who whenever it
was possible preferred to give answers in the wording of
the question. "I've seen Annette, too."
1
68
11
will be in front, too."
"Many Cossacks?,
"The women couldn't, and you and I couldn't."
"Are there any changes in the plans?"
"Why changes? It's a good plan."
"What does your Koba think?"
"Koba gives the orders, and what he thinks, who
knows?"
11
That's so. He's always lying."
uDon't dare say Koba lies!"
"But in his whole life he never said a word of truth: he's
simply incapable of it."
"Listen. D'you want me to kill you!" said Kamo, and his
face began to flush scarlet. "Lenin-here!" And he raised
his hand high above his head. "Then comes Nikitich." He
lowered his hand. "Then Koba." His hand went down an·
other little bit. "And then you, me, everyone." He placed
his hand on the table.
"Thank you. But your Koba, after all, used to be a Men·
shevik, though he hides it carefully."
"No more Bolshevik, Menshevik. In Stockholm Lenin
got united."
uHe 1ll soon be disunited. 11
"He will not be disunited. But Koba was never a Men·
shevik. Always Bolshevik."
"He was a Menshevik, he was. In the Caucasus we all
were," protested Jambul, who liked to tease him.
"You lie! I kill!".
"No, please, don't kill me. Kill someone else instead. By
the way, do you always carry your Mauser on you?"
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�"Always. Never without."
"Well, another fool," said Jambul, though he was never
separated from his revolver either. "What else did you talk
about with Lenin?"
"Provocateurs we talked about. Lenin thinks provoca·
teurs. Krasin also thinks so. I suggested a plan. I go to all
the comrades. I take three men, good ones, I take along a
stake. A big one. I ask: 'Are you a provocateur?' If he's a
provocateur, we stick him on stake right away. If he gets
scared, it means he's also a provocateur. A good Bolshevik
never gets scared. Lenin didn't want it. Krasin didn't either. He cursed. Cursed a lot. He said, 'You are a savage
and an idiot.' Lenin laughed. It means it's true. I know I
have no culture . . . Do I talk Russian well?"
l'Magnificently.''
"I don't know grammar. I don't know anything. I can't
write. In Georgian and Armenian I can. Badly. I can't do
arithmetic at all," said Kamo with a sigh. "No culture. A
savage. My grandfather was a scholar. A priest."
"Really? A priest?"
"A good man, a scholar. I myself was a believer, oh, what
a believer I was! I prayed a lot. Then I stopped, the comrades taught me. Koba taught me. He taught me every·
thing. Grateful. But I learned badly. My father was a
drunkard. He's alive, but he kicked me out a long time
ago. Because of him I have no culture ... Well, let's talk
business."
"Well, tell me everything."
They went over what was to be done the next day.
There really were no changes in the plan.
" ... We start off at Sumbatov's house."
"But who is finally going to throw the first bomb from the
roof? That's the only thing that still hasn't been decided."
"None of your business, who throws it. Koba knows who
throws it. Not you."
"He'll tell me today, no later. It's just as much 'my business' as his," said Jambul angrily. HI'm risking more than
he is."
"Not more than he. You're not necessary, either. Koba
is necessary."
"I have a different opinion ... But tell me, is it true they
once hanged you?"
"They hanged me. The swine hanged everyone they
caught right off. I stuck my chin into the rope. They didn't
notice. They were drunk. It was disgusting. The swine
went away. I untied myself. Ran away. They didn't hang
me. My chin was sore a month."
"Have you got a pure-blooded horse ready for tomor·
row?"
"Don't say pure-blooded. Say thoroughbred. A Russian
officer told me that. A dragoon. Stationed here. You say
pure-blooded, they see immediately you're not a Russian
officer," explained Kamo with satisfaction.
"So they'll see it immediately, will they? And of course
you're a typical Moscow hussar ... Well anyhow, try not to
get in the way of the bomb on your thoroughbred. It would
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
be a pity about the horse. Does it mean you're going to be
in uniform tomorrow, too?"
"In uniform."
"More fool you. I'm afraid you're going to mess things
up. It would be better if you gave me your part."
1 won't give it to you. You're the fool now."
"And where did you get that medal you've stuck on?
Did you buy it in the Armenian Bazaar?"
"I bought it in the Armenian Bazaar."
"You should have bought a St. Andrew First Class," ad.
vised Jambul, but caught himself up, thinking, he'll do it
too!
"Not St. Andrew First Class. Koba said: 'Stanislas Third
Class with crossed swords and a ribbon!' If anyone was in
two battles in the Japanese war then it's a Stanislas Third
Class with crossed swords and a ribbon. You don't know.
Koba knows."
"Koba knows everything. And what is he going to do to.
morrow himself? Is he also going to shoot from the
Square?"
"He's not going to shoot from the Square. If he's killed,
who'll be left?"
"Of course, of course. Is he excited?"
"He's not excited."
"Is it true he's as evil as the devil?"
"Evil," agreed Kamo, after thinking. "But not like the
devil. His wife died."
"I know. Is it true that she was a believer and couldn't
endure Socialists? Did he love her?"
41
"He loved her so much, so much."
"And I never believed he could love anyone. Iremashvili
told me he was at the cemetery. He himself and Soso-he
calls Koba 'Soso' for old times' sake. They were friends.
Anyhow Dzhugashvili told him, putting his hand over his
heart: 'Only she could soften my heart of stone. Now, I
hate everyone! It's so empty, so unspeakably empty!' I
questioned him over and over. He swore it was exactly that
way! So Koba can't shoot from the Square? Are you worried about him."
"I'm not worried about you. I'm not worried about my·
self. I'm worried about Koba."
"Right," said Jambul. It's really impossible even to get
angry with him, he thought, looking squarely at Kamo. Ka·
rna's eyes were in some incomprehensible way kind, soft,
sad. "Well, fine, but when you grab the sack in the Square
whom will you give it to?"
"I'll give it to Koba. I'll give it to Lenin. I'll give it to
Krasin."
"They're all right. It's true that Dzhugashvili doesn't
care about money. But where can it be held for the time
being? It's not so easy after all to get it across the border."
"None of your business."
"Koba had a good idea. He told me about it. He wants to
hide it in the Tiflis Observatory. He worked there once, I
think, didn't he? He knows every nook and cranny there.
He wants to put it in the Director's sofa. Clever! Clever!"
69
�~~Ask Koba."
"It's clever," repeated Jambul. He' liked the idea primarily because of its originality: the Obs\'rvatory! He thought
with a smile that Koba wouldn't entrust the money to one
man alone. Either he'd take it himself or send a few people, so that it'll be more difficult to steal it. "I would still
like to see him before the action. Will you come with me?"
"I won't come. And I won't give you the address."
"I know the address without you anyhow," said Jambul.
He said good-bye to Kama and went out of the restaurant, once again looking around in all directions. He did
not feel like going home. It was really too late to see Koba,
and actually there was no point to it. He wouldn't have to
spend the night at home, he thought. For that matter,
fate's fate. Anyhow, I won't surrender alive. . . What's
Lenin going to spend the money on? The little periodicals?lf so what a fine thing to go into an action like this for!
Tomorrow I may very well be dead-would it be worth it?
Suddenly he recalled the explosion on Aptekar Island.
He had read the newspaper accounts with even more eagerness than Lyuda, or anyone else; from the very first moment he understood whose handiwork it had been, and
knew all the participants. Now, and not for the first time,
he imagined these unknown, speechless young people, almost just as devoted to Cain as the Klimova girl, going in a
landau to Aptekarsky Street from the Morskaya, how methodically they noted the turns-two more? no, threehow they studied the names of the streets, the house numbers, how they counted the minutes of life left to them.
How for the last time, in front of the villa, they looked at
the earth, the sky, the people, the cab-driver, who had also
been condemned to death by them.
No, I couldn't have done that! thought Jambul with a
shudder. There's a great difference between a death that's
possible and one that's certain, without the slightest, the
most infinitesimal hope of rescue! He thought about the
arrest and execution of Cain. How could he have failed to
commit suicide at the last moment? He couldn't do it in
time, that Hercules! And what if I don't either? ... Nevertheless there's some hope, and there's some sense in this,
too. We'll lay our hands on a million, there'll be an uprising
and the Caucasus will free itself. That's the one thing that
distinguishes our operation from an ordinary armed hold-up,
but that one thing is enough ... Yet, if I'm killed life will
go on exactly as it always has, it's just that I won't know
anything about it. And people won't remember, I'll never
go down in history. Will anyone ever recall anything about
Sokolov? Who, with all his recklessness and heartlessness,
was a super-hero, a match for all the Lenins and
Plekhanovs?
At this late hour Erivan Square was deserted. He looked
at the house from the roof of which some man he didn't
know was supposed to throw the first bomb the next day.
Three princesses, well-known in Tiflis society, lived on the
top floor; good-natured anecdotes used to circulate about
them. Could he be up there already? That would be more
70
reasonable than lifting himself up there in the morning
light. He guessed that the man would mount from the
courtyard by the staircase or the pipes.
He walked up to the gates and tried them. They were
unlocked. Jambullooked around and peered into the feebly lit courtyard. Two men were standing with their backs
to him looking at the roof. One was in a Russian shirt and
sandals. He looked to Jambullike Koba. Really, how can I
possibly work together with such a man! he thought. It was
as though the sight of Koba brought to a head in a flash all
those doubts that had been brewing in him for days and
months.
Tiflis was under martial law. Cossacks rode constantly
about the streets of the city. The policemen stationed at
the Police Commissioner's palace were armed with rifles.
Patrols were stationed at every intersection. Dozens of
people were participating in the preparation and execution of the expropriation. As usually happens in such circumstances, confused rumors about the forthcoming action had reached the authorities. Later the Tiflis prosecutor was to accuse the police chief of lightmindedness. The
police chief, to justify himself, would make some unflattering references to the ideas of the prosecutor.
The "theoreticians" of the expropriations preferred to
call them "engagements in the civil war." They were fond
of military vocabulary. Some of them may have recalled,
from War and Peace, or from the countless newspaper quotations such as "Die erste Kolonne marschiert," the "dispositions" taken by Weihrother before Austerlitz. But it is
possible that in spite of Tolstoy they thought that battles
actually did take place as a result of just such "dispositions." In any case they had carefully worked out a detailed plan of action at Erivan Square: Chiabrishvili, Ekbakidze, Shishmanov, Kalaniadze, Chichiashvili and Ebralidze were going to attack the phaetons carrying the
money that was surrounded by the convoy, Dalakishvili
and Kakriashvili the police detachment near the Town
Council, Lominadze and Lemidze the patrol at the Velyaminovskaya, and so on.
But expropriations are really not like battles. They do
not last for a whole day, or even for several hours, but
barely three or four minutes, and in any case there is certainly no science about them in existence. The Correla~
tion of forces" could not be known to the expropriators,
since at any given moment a patrol of five or ten or even
twenty Cossacks might turn up on the Square. Erivan
Square itself was actually the least appropriate place in
Tiflis for an expropriation. It was crowded, central, and
close to the Police Commissioner's palace. Cossack pa·
trois, heavily reinforced, kept riding across it during those
days almost uninterruptedly. Army and police posts were
permanently stationed near the district headquarters, the
44
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�banks, and at the corners of every one. of the streets giving
into the Square.
The leaders of the enterprise, whose regard for the lives
of others, or for that matter their own, :was not excessive,
had decided to take measures this time to cut down the
number of victims: from early morning on Kama, in an
army uniform, and with a wild look, had been walking
around the Square and in a low voice, interlarding his pe·
culiar Russian with "adroit mysterious remarks," had advised passers-by to get out as fast as possible. This device
was rather senseless: one passer-by was constantly being
replaced by another. In the nature of things, this strange
officer ought to have instantly aroused the strongest suspicions of even the stupidest policeman. He aroused no suspicions at all. He left safely before the start of the action
and took his place in a drozhky harnessed to the thoroughbred. He himself drove standing up (also hardly ever done
by officers).
Some post office official had informed the terrorists
that on june 13th, at 10 o'clock, the cashier of the Tiflis
branch of the State Bank, Kurdyumov, and the accountant, Golovnya, would be receiving a large sum of money
at the Postal Telegraph Office and would then take it to
the bank, in Baronsky Street, past Pushkin Square, across
Erivan Square and on along Sololaksky Street. The official
could hardly have been bribed or frightened by the terrorists, who didn't do things that way. They never promised
anyone money, and unlike many other expropriators did
not even take any money for themselves. They gave everything to the Party. Probably the official also sympathized
with the Party, or else hated the Government like much of
the population of Russia.
Kurdyumov and Golovnya went to the post office on
foot. This was a routine affair for them: money from the
capital arrived in Tiflis often. It would have been impossible to reproach the heads of the bank with lightmindedness: the cashier and accountant had been assigned a
guard, Zhilyaev, and a fairly large detachment of soldiers
and Cossacks.
Probably for reasons of economy, the phaetons were
hired only at the post office. Kurdyumov and Golovnya received the money without counting it. That would have
been dangerous, and for that matter needless: it was sealed
in two huge packages, of 170 thousand and 80 thousand.
In addition the cashier was given another 465 rubles that
weren't sealed. Kurdyumov counted these and put them
in a side-pocket of his jacket. He hid the packages in a sack,
drew a leather band tightly around the neck and carefully
carried it out to the phaetons, accompanied by the accountant, the guard, and some soldiers. The Cossacks
were waiting in the street. Kurdyumov and Golovnya got
into the first phaeton, putting the sack on the rug at their
feet. Zhilyaev and two soldiers were in the second phaeton.
1HE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
There were another five soldiers in the third. The Cossacks
divided up; some of them galloped on ahead of the phaetons,
some of them behind; there was one Cossack alongside the
first phaeton, near one of the little doors.
Probably one of the expropriators had been keeping the
cashier under observation at the post office, too. In any
case observers were waiting for them in various places
along the road. At Pushkin Place Patsiya Galdava signaled
Stepka lntsirkveli the approach of the Cossacks; he passed
it on to Annette Sulakhvelidze, who was promenading about
in front of the staff building; she made a sign to Bachua
Kuprashvili, who was running along the square with an unfolded newspaper (which was the last general signal). In a
moment he joined the expropriators who were running towards the phaetons.
The first bomb was thrown from the roof of the house at
the corner of the Square and Sololaksky Street. It was followed by others thrown from various angles, and then instantly by a desperate burst of revolver shot. Chaos supervened. There was no question of "disposition." Because of
the smoke almost nothing was visible. People scattered to
all sides as best they could.
Kama's drozhky whirled into the Square from Ganovsky
Street. The reins in his left hand he stood on the footboard
shooting his revolver off in all directions and yelling out
fearful curses. According to the "dispositions" he was supposed to seize the sack with the money in the first phaeton. But it wasn't easy even to find the phaeton that
strangely enough had remained undamaged. The cashier
and accountant had been thrown into the street by the
force of the explosion, and a Cossack killed.
Kama had almost never lost control of himself in his life
and was actually incapable of losing his head whenever he
was carrying out some definite order. He had never felt the
slightest doubts either before the explosion or after it:
Lenin ordered, Nikitich assisted, Koba organized-so
what was there to brood about? Thinking wasn't his business. Now in the Square he acted almost exclusively by
instinct. He may have been the only one who was completely calm, in spite of the din of the bombs, the shooting,
and the savage outcries. He was yelling and cursing desperately not because of anger or excitement, but simply because yelling and cursing were part of the technique of
such actions, as in the old days the cavalry sprang to the
attack with howls and roars.
Bachua Kuprashvili jumped out of a cloud of smoke at
the right and ran off down Sololaksky Street. For a second
a phaeton appeared to be outlined in the cloud, but just
then another bomb crashed and smoke swallowed up the
phaeton again. Bachua's fallen! thought Kama. He's killed!
But the sack, where's the sack! And in that same second
he saw Chiabrashvili, holding the sack in his hand, running towards Velyaminovsky Street, where there was less
smoke, with extraordinary, unnatural, super~human
speed. This was definitely an out-and-out disregard of orders. Kama swiftly wheeled his drozhky around and hur-
71
�tied after him. The thought flashed through his mind that
Bachua might have only been wounded, but it was impossible to return in the drozhky-let the others get him!
It took him a moment to snatch the sack from Chiabrashvili and to rush off again to the conspirators' apartment. A number of the other expropriators were already
there. He took them in with a glance, flung the sack on the
floor and shouted violently:
'Where's Bachua?"
uKilled! ... " "He'll be here soon! ... " "Wounded! ... "
44
0on't know! ... "answered voices panting. The disposi~
tions" hadn't reviewed the question: which was more im·
11
portant-the sack or a comrade? But it was clear enough
that the sack was far more important. But Kama's face
flushed scarlet; he heaped frenzied curses on his comrades. Suddenly the door opened and Bachua, a bloodstained hand to his head, appeared on the threshold.
Kamo, against all rules of conspiracy, yelled something in a
wild voice and flung himself suddenly into a dance. Bachua, barely able to control his panting, explained that he
had lost consciousness on the street only for half a minute,
then jumped up and run on there. No one listened much.
They all talked at once of what they had just done and
lived through. At the top of their lungs they shouted that
they had to speak in low voices: people on the street might
overhear them. Kamo yelled out something, and went on
dancing. Someone picked up the sack, put it on the table
and started loosening the collar. In a flash Kamo bounded
over to the table like a cat. He trusted comrades, and knew
there was not a single thief among them, but Koba had
ordered the packages to be brought sealed: Dzhugashvili
trusted the comrades less.
However, the figures were written on the covers:
"170,000" and "80,000." Not letting the packages out of
his hands, Kamo read them off. He tried to add them in his
head, others helping him: "250,000." The enthusiasm was
general, though a few of them had expected it to be a million. Kamo started dancing about again, holding a package
in each hand over his head. ~'It's done!" "The revolu·
tion! ... " "Now we'll be free! ... " they said. One of the
expropriators said everything had gone offlike clockwork.
That was how they all spoke in Tiflis that day, some with
delight, others with rage. A day later every newspaper in
Russia wrote the same.
Jambul couldn't remember all the details of the action in
Erivan Square, the most terrifying of his life. These lapses
in memory happened to him occasionally when he had
drunk two or three bottles of wine after dinner. In practical matters they had never happened to him before.
The plan had been for him to shoot a policeman standing at the door of the Commercial Bank; he had chosen
this himself; he didn't want to shoot the cashier or the accountant, though he didn't tell his comrades. And just as
soon as he saw Kuprashvili running along with the opened
newspaper he took his revolver out of his pocket and went
over without haste to the bank. The policeman, a beard-
72
Jess young blond, obviously a Russian from the north, was
standing half-turned toward him, gazing curiously at the
approaching convoy. Jambul remembered shooting immediately after the first bomb exploded, even before smoke
hid the carriage-and he didn't understand what had happened. He was incapable, simply incapable, of not hitting a
man six or seven paces from him. He recalled aiming at his
head: a Mauser bullet was supposed to kill outright. The
policeman, completely unharmed, shouted desperately,
turned around and snatched at his own revolver. It was
just at this second that the chaos in the square began. And
without being able to remember how, Jambul found himself some thirty paces from the bank doors, behind the
newspaper kiosk.
He recalled shooting twice more into the pall around the
phaeton, also probably without killing anyone. He remembered later that he didn't want to be killed either. He remembered that for a few seconds he stared brainlessly at
the newspapers hanging on the wall: the Voice of the Caucasus, the Tiflis Gazette . .. Suddenly he saw a Cossack on
a big bay galloping at him whirling his lash. In a flash Jam·
bul's self-possession came back to him. He bounded a few
paces forward and fired. The horse reared up, hit by a bullet in its throat. He stopped. Just then a second bomb burst
and deafened him. Someone ran past him, clutching his
side and yelling something, with a contorted face. The
Cossack wasn't getting up. The phaeton is supposed to go
back along the Sololaksky, Jambul remembered, and ran
off that way. No, the phaeton's smashed now, of course.
What should I do now? For a moment he stood there motionless, still half stunned. Then he rushed off, over to the
kiosk. The Cossack was gone. The big bay horse, expiring,
was writhing convulsively on its side in a pool of blood. His
whole life he would remember its brown eyes with their
distended whites. Then there was a gap in his memory. He
tried and failed to recall how much longer he stayed in the
Square and just what he was doing there.
He came to himself in a broad side-street. People were
running in the street screaming in fear and shoving each
other. He didn't think it proper to run, and walked along
on the pavement at an ordinary, scarcely hurried pace. He
thought he would have to turn off to the right further on,
and that the conspiratorial apartment was very close. I
didn't want to kill it. Why did it have to rear up? I killed it
for the sake of Lenin's little periodicals ... Dozens of people must have been killed ... But not by me ... How could
I have missed that policeman? Suddenly everyone leapt
off the street on to the sidewalks and into the entry-ways: a
squadron of dragoons was hurtling towards them on their
way to the Square. Oh, what horses! thought Jambul ...
Why did it have to rear up? ...
No more shots could be heard, but from the direction of
the square a confused roaring could be heard. The street
was almost empty. Jambul turned off to the right and came
to the conspiratorial apartment. Though the windows
were closed he could hear shouts, clamor, laughter. What's
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�the matter with them, he thought, have they gone out of
their senses? At some other time he might have liked the
Caucasian boldness and contempt for danger, but now he
listened for a moment and passed on. ·
A little further on he came across a wretched-looking bistro. In the doorway the proprietor, pale and excited, was
evidently about to shut down. He glanced suspiciously at
Jambul, and almost refused to let him in, but he did. He
said something quickly and evasively. Fifty? thought Jambul: impossible! There couldn't have been fifty casualties!
Unwilling to talk, Jambul asked for more vodka, and
tossed off a few glasses one after another at the counter. In
a languid way he thought this might arouse suspicion: in
the morning no one gulps down vodka that way ...
"Is there any cognac?" he asked, and on being told there
was only Russian Shustovsky, but that it was good, he ordered some, not in a mug but in a tea-glass. He tossed it off
at one gulp. The owner looked at him in alarm. Jambul
paid and, shaking even more than before, went out. Yes,
yes ... Not very pretty ... Not a cavalry charge in goldembroidered uniforms. . . All for Lenin's little periodicals ... Not pure blood, but mixed with dirt. .. Much
more than in war. .. Perhaps all oflife is a mistake ... Perhaps, yes, it may very well be ... he muttered to himself in
the street.
For the first few days after the expropriation Jambul
didn't see any of the terrorists. He read the newspapers
and drank a great deal, though he had already calmed
down. He had noticed no traces he had left behind and
thought with even more conviction than before that the
Russian police were very bad and in addition were frightened to death, especially in the Caucasus.
Money and another letter arrived from his father in Turkey, at his temporary agreed-on address. The old man
asked his son more insistently than usual to come home;
he also complained about his health more than usual, said
that he wanted to see him once more without fail, and
mentioned the necessity of putting his inheritance in order. Jambul had received such invitations before, too, and
had always declined them. He likes to complain, like all old
people, he thought. Perhaps he's heard something, and is
worried. They seldom corresponded. The old man could
hardly have known with certainty just what his son was
doing. Jambul had said vaguely that he was taking part in
the struggle for Caucasian independence. His father was
able to understand this and even ought to sympathize.
He dined in the restaurants in the center of the city, and
each time made a point of going to Erivan Square. He
could not get the blood-bespattered bay horse, and its eyes
with their distended whites, out of his head. After going
home he read on into the late night. He had gone out to
the Golovin Prospekt and bought some books at random: a
thick Petersburg review, Shakespeare in Russian, To!THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
stoy' s Resurrection. He felt he absolutely had to leave for a
visit to his father. It was possible to leave legally, his passport was perfectly trustworthy. He loved his father but had
always told himself that he was incapable of watching anyone "grow old." But nevertheless he never used to write
about himself so alarmingly. Surely he's not going to die!
I'll be left alone in the world like a splinter ...
That evening he went to bed early and set out on the
wide bed the three books he had bought. At first he did not
read. He thought of his father. He thought of the action in
Erivan Square. He thought of Lenin. He's going to be
overjoyed, manna from heaven ... he said to himself, and
frowned still more severely: the words 'from heaven'
seemed far from apt. He couldn't fall asleep, in spite of the
huge amount of wine he had drunk. He never took sleeping pills, for some reason he was afraid of them. He
opened Shakespeare's plays at random, at the boring play
Cymbeline. He picked up the review. He noticed with irritation that the news-vendor had slipped him an old shopworn issue.
In the news-column he learned that 73 3 people had
been killed that year in Russia, 215 hanged, 341 shot by
order of a court martial, and in only a month and a half 221
had been executed by the new emergency court martial.
Perhaps there'll soon be not 215, but 216 hanged, he
thought, and again said to himself: one Jambul more or
less, isn't it all the same? He often spoke to himself that
way, but knew he was speaking insincerely: this particular
''one" had a certain importance for him. In the news story
some more figures were given of those called "representa·
lives of the authorities" who had been killed-the number
was just as large. Three days ago I didn't make a single addition to this statistic, thank God!
He also read in the review something long and boring
about a "Party of Democratic Reforms," about a Professor
Maxim Kovalevsky, and about a lawyer called Spasovich
who had recently died. "Public morals are becoming more
and more savage," Vladimir Danilovich had recently written from Warsaw: "Bomb explosionS1 shootings, looting,
and assassination take place every blessed day even in the
street." Words like this would once have evoked in Jambul
nothing but a sneer: he disliked liberals. They've had a
good time of it all their lives, he would have thought,
they've never once risked their precious existence. Now
he thought nothing of the kind. He put the paper aside
and opened Resurrection.
He read it until far into the night. He liked Tolstoy as an
artist, but had an even more scornful attitude towards his
ideas than he had towards those of the liberals: Just the
feeble-mindedness of old age, he thought. He found the
scene of the church service in the prison extremely annoying. No, really, it's just blasphemy after all. He didn't have
the right to make fun of other people's faith and he himself doesn't have any: a believer could never have written
that way about church ceremonies. But what oppressive,
terrifying language! he thought as he fell asleep.
73
�And at once the various figures which had been passing
through his mind during the past fe~ days and hours were
all jumbled together, spinning about and springing up into
the most senseless life. Lenin had written a little article on
blood-stained assignations. His father, with a sick, emaciated face, was lying in bed waiting for a doctor who never
came. A blood-bespattered bay horse galloped into his uncle's orchard, drenched in sunlight, and explained hoarsely
that it could no longer serve since it had been killed by a
bullet in the throat from )ambul. Dimitri Nekhlyudov explained to it that there must have been some juridical error: )ambul never killed horses and never would. In the
Tiflis Gazette Spasovich proposed to defend Kate Maslov
for a thousand rubles: "There are only ten Kates in all," he
said, "while a great deal more was taken from Kurdyumov." Lenin tore himself away from his little articles and
said mockingly that he wouldn't give a single ruble, not a
penny for any uprising, everything was needed for the little periodicals, and a fig to all the comrades ...
He was awakened by a knock at the door. It took him a
moment to come to himself. A young chambermaid came
into his room, smiled at him, and respectfully reported
that he was being asked for on the 'phone by His Most
Serene Highness Prince Dadiani. )ambul, tearing himself
away from the warm pillow, looked at her for a moment
agog. Then he remembered that this was the name Kama
wasliving under in Tiflis.
"Please te!Ihim I'll be right down," he said. The chambermaid smiled at him sweetly and went out. He put on a
splendid silken dressing gown he had bought in Paris at
the Place Vendome, and thought of Lyuda, who had been
particularly fond of it. Is it all right to go downstairs in a
dressing gown? He thought, it doesn't matter, it's early,
there'll be no one there. Actually, it was not even eight.
The fool might have rung later, he thought.
HGood morning, your Highness," he said. HWhat's hap~
pened? A very early call."
Kama replied that someone wanted to see him at ten
o'clock. Koba, of course, )ambul guessed.
"At his place," said Kama and hung up without waiting
for an answer, just as though there couldn't be the slightest doubt of )ambul's agreeing. )ambul shrugged his shoulders. I'll come late just for spite!
But it wasn't right to be late in their work, and he arrived
on the stroke of ten, leaving the carriage driver far from
the house Dzhugashvili was living in. The boss, quite
calm, met him with his usual sneer. How I hate the sight of
him! thought )ambul.
He had known this man for a long time. He could not
endure him. Whenever they met he would have an obscure feeling as though he were in the company of a real
evildoer. He never mentioned this about Koba to anyone
and even reproached himself for a baseless and consequently unfair judgment: he knew a good deal about
Dzhugashvili, but still not the sort of thing that would
have justified considering him a malefactor, or "the worst
74
of good-for-nothings." It sometimes seemed to him that
others who knew Koba well had the same feeling about
him and said nothing about it either: something in his very
looks made people wary. Well, in any case I'm not afraid of
him! thought )ambul. His irritation and spite were heightened immediately.
In the room there were Kama, in the same uniform with
the same dark-red embroidered decoration, and a woman
in a cheap, dirty white dress. )anbul remembered that her
name was Mara Bocharidze and that in the band she
worked at the role of a Tiflis house-wife. He greeted her
politely. Koba looked at him with a sneer and carelessly
extended his hand.
"Hello, bicho," he said. This word, which meant "old
boy" or something like it, and was a special little sneer of
Koba's, irritated )ambul still more: It meant, "You're all
just a lot of runts, and I'm a great big fellow." And all the
while, with all his wiliness and boldness, he was a very grey,
coarse fellow, rather shabby looking, with both an innate
and played-up coarseness. He thinks that has an effect on
everyone, thought )ambul: it doesn't on me, but he won't
be coarse with me, he knows it wouldn't be safe.
"Very glad to see you too, bicho," )ambul replied. Koba
turned away from him at once and started talking to
Kama, who was looking at him enraptured. Mara also
looked into his eyes, more in fear than in rapture. Koba
spoke Russian considerably better than Kama, considerably worse than )ambul.
<(That's a matter of course and you do it," he ordered.
)ambul's suggestion was confirmed: Dzhugashvili was assigning them both to take the money over to the Observatory: it was sewn into a large new mattress that was lying
on the floor in Koba's room.
"Yau go with Mara in one carriage, and he'll follow you
in another. Why did you have to be so stupid as to dress up
like an officer! Carrying a mattress! Change your clothes
immediately!"
Timidly deferential, Kama explained, partly in Russian,
partly in Georgian, that he hadn't known about the forthcoming transfer of the mattress. He also expressed the
opinion that it would be better to transfer it in the evening, after dusk.
''I'm not asking you for an opinion! Do as I say!" cried
Koba. Kama nodded instantly. Mara also nodded her head
in fright. Jambul interrupted: "Any street hawker could
move the mattress," he said mildly, as though addressing
no one in particular. "An outsider wouldn't be in any danger. In case of arrest he could explain that he had been
hired, and could prove his alibi. But if they catch Kama
they'll hang him. It's true that a street hawker might give
away the address of the apartment he'd gotten the mattress from," he added, as though naively. A gleam of spite
flashed through Koba's eyes. He stored up )ambul's words
in his memory, but he restrained himself and sketching
out on his face an extremely improbable looking goodnatured smile, said: "I shall ask you to follow them in anWINTER/SPRING 1983
�other carriage. Have you got a revolver on you?"
"I have, bicho. Very well, I'll follow them. Very closely,
of course, else they might be able to drag out the money
and scuttle off," said Jambul imperturbably.
Kamo' s face suddenly turned bestial. "Listen!" he
snarled.
Koba interrupted him instantly and started laughing,
just as good-naturedly. "He is, of course, joking. Now look,
these orders of mine are easy to understand. You and she
will take the mattress to the director. Then you'll go down
into the big hall. At eleven o'clock some astronomer is going to show the yokels all sorts of nonsense. Listen to it; go
together with the crowd, and also go out when the crowd
does. You won't be noticed. If on the way to the Observatory the police attack, start shooting, to the last cartridge,
naturally. And run to the apartment on Mikhailovsky
Street. With the mattress, naturally!" he said impressively.
"And on the way back, Maro, you little ninny, you come back
on foot alone. You have no revolver, you'll get off without
going to gaol. And you two can do as you please, shoot or
don't as you please. You, Kamo, no matter what happens,
you can't escape hanging. For old sins. But as for you," he
said, turning to Jambul, "there's no evidence of anything
against you. For carrying a revolver it'll be a lot if they send
you off to hard labor. Never mind, daddy will wait for you in
Turkey," said Koba, and a little sneer appeared on his face
once again. Jambul flared up. He knows about father too! he
thought: he keeps a check on the comrades!
"And how d'you know whom there's evidence against
and whom there's not?"
"A little magpie had it on its tail, as Lenin said in Tammerfors," said Dzhugashvili. He was very proud of having
spoken to Lenin, and of having, as it seemed to him, made
a strong impression on him. "For the Erivan affair there
can't be evidence of anything against anybody, so there
won't be any against you, either."
'I'll go to the Observatory, but I won't take the money to
Finland."
"And I'm not ordering you to," said Koba. He had long
since decided that Kamo would take it there alone; he
trusted him.
liNor can you order me to do anything!"
Without answering Koba turned to Kamo again. He repeated his orders tersely and clearly; he knew Kamo didn't
understand the first time.
Yes, he knows his business, it's true. But in all my life
I've never seen anyone so repugnant to me, thought Jambul, listening attentively. After finishing his explanation
Koba stood up. The audience is over! thought Jambul.
Kamo and Maro stood up at once, too.
The astronomer, a graybeard in a silken jacket, was
showing the Observatory to a small group of visitors and
wearily making the usual explanations:
THE ST. JOHNS REVJEW
"The man whose portrait you see hanging on this wall
was the great astronomer Nicholas Copernicus. He was
born in 1473 and died in 1543. For a long time he was
thought to be a German, but that was incorrect. Copernicus was a Pole. He discovered that it was not the sun that
rotated around the earth, but the earth that rotated
around the sun. He worked with the aid of a parallactic
instrument consisting of three little pieces of wood with
three degrees. Later on these little stumps of wood passed
into the possession of another famous astronomer, Tycho
Brahe, who treasured them as a sacrosanct relic of the history of science, and wrote verses about them. In these he
said that the earth produced a man like that once in a
thousand years: he stopped the sun and started the earth
moving. For a long time Copernicus couldn't make up his
mind to publish his discovery: he was afraid of being persecuted by the Catholic Church and even more afraid of being laughed at by everyone. It was not until shortly before
his death that he published his immortal work. He dedicated it to Pope Paulus Ill, but it was included by the Congregation in the notorious Index as heresy. Though this
great man was a believer, it may well be that only a miracle
saved him from the stake," said the astronomer, who evidently disliked the Catholic Church. "His work of genius
is entitled De revolutionibus orbium caelestium. There is
a monument to Copernicus in Warsaw, the work of
Thorwaldsen ... "
The word "revolutionibus" caught Jambul's attention.
So there's some kind of a revolution there, too, he
thought, though not the same one. He glanced at the
gaunt, harassed face with the tufts of hair falling on both
sides of the head. Yes, that's not like Koba's face ... Who
knows what sort of a man he was and what he thought
about life? ... So he was a believer? But could he have believed in everything? Did he believe in an afterlife? But
surely he was more intelligent than I, with Kamo and
Koba, even with Lenin thrown in!. If I had any real faith in
me I wouldn't choose such a life for myself. But then what
would I do? The little stumps of wood with degrees are not
for me. I have no gifts at all. But when, why, and what for,
did I ever choose such an inhuman existence? Caucasian
independence? But it's only various Kobas that are probably going to run it after all, and what's the use of hiding from myself that they're a hundred times worse than
the Voronov-Dashkovs. And people like Tsintsadze or
Ramishvili are basically the same liberals as the Spasoviches and Kovalevskys, they can hardly be told apart.
They'll hardly be the ones to come to power, if there's a
revolution, any more than the Kovalevskys will come to
power in Russia. And that's just the reason they won't, because they're civilized, and not wild beasts! he thought, astonished himself at the swiftness with which his attitude
towards the revolution had changed. Nevertheless, he
thought, it's not just because of that bay horse!
The astronomer announced that the tour was over. The
visitors started out. At the exit Jambullooked around again
75
�and went into Erivan Square still at the same artificially
unhurried pace with which he now walked around the
city. His body was alert and tensed in case of an unexpected onslaught. Since the expropriation he had not been
separated from his revolver, though this had no point;
there really was no evidence against him, and if arrested he
would in all likelihood not be hanged.
A few people were standing in the street at the same
spot where the first bomb had fallen. One of them was explaining something, pointing at the jumbled stones. Jam·
bullistened in. Yes, that's probably a blood-stain. Here is
where that Cossack fell who was leaping around the phaeton. But I didn't kill him. Except for the horse, I didn't kill
anyone. He walked on to the newspaper kiosk, stopped
where he had stood then, and again saw the Tiflis Gazette.
He took a few more steps, looked at the place-and suddenly felt sick.
In the Annona restaurant, where there were always a
great many people and there was no chance of arrest, he
sat down for a breathing-spell. He could hardly eat, but he
drank some wine, and listened to the string orchestra. At
the little tables around him people were discussing their
affairs. "We'll have to think all that through and through,"
one of them said.
Yes, and I'll have to think things through and through.
Perhaps I've thought about life, about the most important
things, very little. Now it's too late. Though why is it too
late? There's no one to talk about it with. Koba's a beast.
Kamo's a hero. Everyone claims he's kindhearted, and
here he was getting ready to impale people on a stake!
How strange he used to be religious! Now of course he
makes fun of faith: Koba taught him that. .. Yes, I'm get·
ting old and didn't notice ... I'll have to go see father as
quickly as possible. Thoughts flashed incoherently
through his mind.
On the way home he went in to see the men whose address he used for letters. There was only a telegram from
76
Turkey. He hastily tore it open, ripping the end off the
envelope. It was from an old friend telling that his father
has passed away that night in his sleep, painlessly.
It was evident that the director of the Observatory sym·
pathized with the expropriators. It was, however, possible,
though unlikely, that he didn't know what there was in the
new mattress on his divan. In a short while Dzhugashvili
had drawn everything out of the mattress, and Kamo had
carried it to Lenin in Kuakalla. This time he no longer traveled first-class but second, and was not a Wing Adjutant,
but a mere junior officer.
Krupskaya and Bogdanova sewed the money in the
quilted waistcoat of their comrade, Lyadov. "It sat on me
very skilfully," wrote Lyadov, "and the money was carried
across the border illegally without any trouble."
At the State Bank, however, the numbers of the stolen
five-hundred-ruble notes had been recorded, and they
were wired instantly to every police department in Europe. The five-hundred-ruble notes were exchanged in
batches in various West European banks. In trying to convert them Litvinov, Semashko, Ravich, and a few other
Bolsheviks were arrested. In this way the smaller Central
Committee, that is, Lenin, Krasin, and Bogianov, lost a
small part of the money.
Aside from this there was some unpleasantness with the
Mensheviks, who launched an "agitation," that it was im·
proper having anything in common with "rogues." They
abused Lenin and Kamo in the most horrifying language.
But Lenin was not too vexed by the unpleasantness. At his
dictation Krupskaya added the following to a personal let·
ter of his about this affair: "The Mensheviks have already
started the vilest brawl. They're doing such vile things it's
hard to believe ... What sons-of-bitches! ... "
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�SUMMER
The thrushes' voices, liquid every evening.
Whole hours pass
Soundless but for the rustling
Of maple trees whose leaves,
Flake upon flake of dusky turquoise,
Encrust some liquid inner richness. Summer.
Summer! Unnumbered days pace through a desert
Empty of landmarks, colored scratchy gold.
But the whole mirage
Dappled with havens for birds to perch in
Will have vanished by October
No matter how passionately put together.
Country created root and branch,
Whose every pod and blossom,
Hayfield, hilltop, cloud
Have come to tingle with mythology ...
A tall white horse bridled in green
Passes and repasses on a carousel
That whisks repeatedly out of reach.
Under the pine trees trails make soft
Chiasmuses. This has all
Been marked long since on his chart by the master
Of subterranean bonds. Inside the house
A room at the top of the stairs
Smells of old puppets, contains a twangy piano
Kin to the sea-clogged one that you remember.
Outdoors as well are portents to be noted.
The way the light falls;
One particular maple, lightning-lopped,
Motionless and imposing
As a statue in the meadow;
A dead elm's gesture
Past boggy grass to where the woods begin;
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
77
�Caw of a crow, hawk hovering
Over the line that separates sun from shadow.
What will you do with your life?
Long interlude. The elm and maple wait.
Slats of light
Lean down on you pacing
Through gawky trees that strain for their share of sky,
Teabrown swampjuice slurping underfoot.
The years till now:
This rusty leafchoked bucket once held sap.
Into the trackless competitive hardwood
Dip till the dimness sends you back uphill,
Daylight returning at the top of the rise.
House in a hollow,
Smoke dissolving into early evening,
Somebody playing that piano,
Face or phantom at the attic window:
Benevolent and tiny, it all
Happened repeatedly but long ago.
To an accumulated depth of water
Plummets the pebble thrown, and ripples spread.
The whole of summer will have been one long day.
MAGNOLIAS IN PRINCETON
in memory of Sidonie M. Clauss
Puppies run around the pool
outside the Woodrow Wilson School.
On a bench I try to read,
magnolias dropping overhead,
lavish lacy opening
in the clinging sheath of spring.
Petals milky·pinky pale
slather whiteness like a veil
over the grey branches' bone,
over smudges of light green.
On a sunny afternoon
gorgeous garlands bloom and preen.
78
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Yet a single wintry breath
dooms this Rubens world to death.
Half an hour of cold's enough
to wrinkle creamy rose to rough
russet, parch the baby cheek
and shrink it to a shrivelled scrape
rustling along the stones,
silken skin to rattling bones.
Cold can cut the flowering short.
So can changes in the light.
Take that radiant bridal air
fresh magnolia blossoms wear:
one dark cloud blots out the sun,
all the joyful glow is gone.
Quenched and drawn, they shrink to white,
livid, glaring, harshly bright.
Where then can I look for stable
radiance: perhaps the marble
neoclassically flashing
columns of the Wilson School,
or the snowy puppies dashing
round the azure of the pool,
or the court's blond travertine,
or the trees' faint new green?
None of these. It's going to rain.
Plum-dark clouds come like a stain.
Damp wind ruffles pages, hair,
piled dry petals, and the air.
To avoid the looming cloud,
I prepare to join the crowd
moving up the temple stair.
Petals twitch and stir and fall
as slowly up the scholars file;
the magnolia bank springs leaks
through which distant thunder speaks.
Wait. A tiny ruffling tap.
Here's a petal in my lap,
newly fallen from a branch
as I got up from the bench,
longer than my finger, fresh,
plump, and fragrant, bruised like flesh.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
79
�Slowly I shut my book on this bookmark,
this touch of perfect color blown
undramatically down,
its pink and white already edged with dark.
THE SERVICE FOR SIDONIE
May 3 1980
The rain it raineth every day.
Not this one.
Our fumbling gestures sketching out your loss
preserved as if in amber by May sun.
The dreadful hole no sooner dug than spring
gently conspired to fill it. The two babies'
babbling purled, a rhythmic little brook,
under and through the ceremony's broken
flow (the hushed voices, bubbles burst in weeping).
Inflamed, turned inward, all our eyes were dazzled
at the chapel door by a great blaze of noon
and when we left the porch and stood in the sun
birds embroidered the quiet
with brilliant stitches of incessant song.
Ironic, tender-natural renewal,
brimming with green abundance, speaks of cycle.
But for us mourning you no rhythm softens
today's shared truth. This thing the grace of season
so gently twines its tendrils round remains
a terrible cessation-opening blossom,
richly unfolding, ruthlessly cut off.
RACHEL HADAS
Rachel Hadas published her first book of poems, Starting from Troy, in
1975 (Godine). Her second, Slow Transparency, will appear in September
1983 (Wesleyan University Press). She teaches English at Rutgers University in Newark.
80
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Letters on Legitimacy
Guglielmo Ferrero-Gaetano Mosca
A Note on Guglielmo Ferrero-and his Friendship with
Gaetano Mosca
From 1896 to the end of their lives, a few months apart, at the
end of 1941 and in the middle of 1942, Gaetano Mosca (18581941) and Guglielmo Ferrero (1871-1942) carried on frequent correspondence. Two hundred and twenty-five Letters survive, probably less than a third of the total. In 1896 Ferrero was twenty-five
years old and at work on his first book to win wide recognition,
L' Europa giovane (1897)-the fruit of three years of study and
travel throughout Europe. Thirty-eight years old, Mosca had iust
won the chair of constitutional law at Turin and published the first
edition of Elementi di Scienza Politica-a work that achieved
something of the status of a classic. (A later edition was translated
into English with the title The Ruling Class, New York 1939).
Mosca appreciated the importance of Ferrero's work almost from
the beginning with an essay II fenomeno Ferrero (1897), published
long before Ferrero won international status.
Their correspondence is an extension of their work. Often on almost a day-to-day basis, it discusses the major events of twentieth
century history, the reasons for decadence in Europe, and especially
in Italy, before the First World War, the First World War and the
crisis that came of it, the coming of Fascism in 1922, and Ferrero's
and Mosca's struggle against it within Italy until1925 when open
opposition became impossible, and finally, the dark years that
made the Second World War inescapable. Throughout these letters
the ideas that are to play an important part in their thinking take
shape and modify.
Both Mosca and Ferrero took direct part in political life, Mosca as
a deputy in Parliament from 1908 to 1919 and Senator after 1919,
Ferrero as a frequent political commentator. This involvement in
actual political life lent their work a straightforward and practical
cast that, in their instances, made for a deeper grasp, rather than an
These four letters come from a collection of the surviving FerreroMosca correspondence edited by C. Mongardini, Gaetano Mosca- Guglielmo Ferrero. Carteggio (1896-1934), Milan 1980.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
evasion, of the underlying problems. Both men knew, and in many
instances were intimate with, the leading men of their times. They
had the best information at their disposal, and had read enough of
the right kind of old books to know its limitations. In some sense
the clarity of their view of the public affairs of Italy and Europe,
and of their grasp of the crisis of the twentieth century, testifies to
the depth of their friendship. For them the understanding of public
events, especially the events of crisis, were not an evasion of private
life, but an understanding of the place of their lives in their country
and time, and finally in the whole history of the West. Each of
them was happy enough to be able to grasp the symptoms of the
catastrophe, long before it occurred, that threatened to sweep away
all they loved.
Besides Elementi di Scienza Politica, the only other major work
of Mosca's translated into English is Storia delle dottrine pelitiche
(Bari 1937), A Short History of Political Philosophy (New York
1972). Most of Ferrero's work is translated into English and the
other major languages of Europe.
In his early and middle thirties in 1902-1906, Ferrero published
an account of the self-destruction of the Roman republic and the
settlement of Augustus in five volumes, The Greatness and Decline of Rome. Written in simple narrative style the work is overwhelming in its capacity to evoke and to understand, in its appetite
for life and intelligence. It won Ferrero a world-wide audience, an
audience that made it possible for Ferrero's voice to be heard
throughout the West, even after Fascist censorship prevented publication of his words within Italy after 1925. The work caused an
uproar in the academic world of Italy.
Throughout his life Ferrero wrote weekly columns and monthly
articles that appeared in the major newspapers and magazines of
the world. Some of these articles were collected into books and published every few years: Militarism (London 1902); Europe's Fateful Hour (New York 1911, 1918); Between the Old World and the
New (New York 1914); Ancient Rome and Modern America (New
York 1914); Four Years of Fascism (London 1924); Words to the
Deaf (London 1926); The Unity of the World (London 1931).
In the twenties Ferrero dedicated himself to a cycle of novelsunder the general title La Terza Roma: Le due verita (Milan
81
�1926); La rivolta del figlio (Milan 1927); Gli ultimi barbari, sud ore
e sangue (Milan 1930); Liberazione (Lugano 1936)-that told the
story of Italy since its unification, a subject whose evasion up to
then, in Ferrero's judgement, contributed importantly to the collapse of the Italian government after the First World War. Of all
Ferrero's works, his novels were least read.
Under constant police surveillance after 1926, Ferrero left Italy,
it turned out forever, in 1930-with the help of Mosca who inter·
vened with the Minister of Foreign Affairs to get him a passport.
The University of Geneva and the Institut Universitaire des
Hautes Etudes Intemationales had offered him a chair in modem
history-his first university position. At about sixty he entered into
one of the most courageous and creative periods of historical study
in his life. At the university for more than ten years he gave a
weekly lecture on the history of the French Revolution and Napo·
leon and the consequences of misunderstanding these events in the
nineteenth century-a lecture that was an event in the town as well
as at the university. At the institute Ferrero dedicated himself to
the study of the differences between war in the eighteenth century
and the unlimited total war of Napoleon-a study that led him to
the rediscovery ofVattel, the author of the eighteenth century clas·
sic of international law, Le droit des gens, ou principe de la loi
naturelle, appliquee a la conduite et aux affaires des nations et
des souverains (Leyden 1758).
One of the most important of Ferrero's little books, Peace and
War (London 1933) came out of this study of war. He argued that
part of the catastrophe of 1914-1917 came because statesmen and
generals were ignorant of the character of the war they were fighting and above all had misunderstood the meaning of Napoleon.
His lectures at the university led to four volumes on the French
Revolution and the crisis it brought Europe and the world: The
Two French Revolutions 1789-1796 (posthumously published,
New York 1968); The Gamble, Bonaparte in Italy, 1796-1797
(London 1939); The Reconstruction of Europe, Talleyrand and
the Congress of Vienna, (New York 1941); The Principles of
Power (New York 1942).
In all his historical work Ferrero studied the past in order to discover the present-the opposite of studying the past because one
thinks one understands the present, which often leads to a politicization of the past in the service of present prejudices. Ferrero had
no favourite ages. His grasp of human character and the common
sense that comes of it was too strong for such infatuation. He did
not idealize any times-which meant he did not flinch before tragedy and outrage but still kept a remarkable love of life. He suffered
much, but his work never betrays resignation and depression.
For Mosca, see James H. Meisel, The Myth of the Ruling Class
(Ann Arbor 1958). The Istituto de Studi Storico-Politici of the Uni·
versity of Rome is bringing out his complete works. For a preliminary bibliography of Ferrero's writings, see Guglielmo Ferrero, histoire et politique au vingtif:me siecle, Geneva 1966. For an
account of the surveillance of Ferrero under Fascism, based on police archives, see Helmut Goetz "Guglielmo Ferrero, Ein Exampel
totalitaerer Verfolgung," Quellen und Forschungen aus Italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, 61, Tuebingen 1981, 248-304,
which should be compared to Leo Ferrero, Diario di un privilegiato
sotto il fascismo, Turin 1946. L.R.
82
1920
Mosca to Ferrero
Turin, January 28, 1920 Corso Umberto 45
Dear Ferrero,
I received with the usual delay your card of the 18th,
which avoided the postal strike only to fall into the railway·
men's strike. I had previously received the Memorie e con·
fessioni di un sovrano deposto, * which I have already read
and am turning over in my mind.
In the first part it seems to me that, among the many
original ideas, two stand out. The first concerns the great
French Revolution which, while purporting to bring liberty, equality, etc., gave the people instead military con·
scription (timidly already begun by absolute governments
here and there) and a world of taxes and constraints. The
second concerns the Holy Alliance, which you say was
more equitable than the victors in the recent war, and
would have been more able to develop Wilson's idea of a
League of Nations and which, as you rightly observe, even
if it did not give us perpetual peace, at least assured peace
for the span of a generation.
In regard to this second idea, I think that you are indis·
putably right. The principle of legitimacy that guided the
Allies of 1815 produced less injustices and exercised less
coercion on the will of peoples than the victors of the
present day, attempting to organize Europe on the princi·
pie of nationality and the so-called self-determination of
nations. The sovereigns of 1815 were more generous and
moderate toward the defeated. They had more sense of
measure than the leaders of the democracies of today.
They were more consistent in applying the principle they
said inspired them. Now, instead, the principle of self·
determination has been applied in such a way that the
peace treaties prevent the German provinces of Austria
from joining Germany. An enormous-and shamefulinconsistency.
As for the first idea, I still hesitate to say that you are
entirely right. Yes, the revolution did much harm, but it
also did much good. Perhaps almost all the good could
have been achieved without almost all the harm or, at
least, without a great part of it. But you, who are a real
historian, know how difficult it is to reconstruct history on
the basis of an hypothesis, how difficult it is to know what
would have happened if, at a given moment, events had
*Memorie e confessioni di un sovrano deposto (Memoirs and Confessions
of a Deposed Sovereign), Milan 1920. Ferrero called this book "a summary of the history of the nineteenth century" inspired by the memoirs
ofTalleyrand and his principle of legitimacy. Cf. B. Raditsa, Colloqui con
Guglielmo Ferrero, Lugano 1939,73-74.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�developed in a different way from how they did develop. I
remember that Louis XVIII, to whose /TIOderation and political views you rightly pay tribute, used to say that we
couldn't speak ill of the Revolution because it had done so
much good and we couldn't speak well of it because it had
done so much harm. I very nearly agree with him. And let
us go on to the second part where there seem to be two
basic ideas: (!) that Germany should have won the war
and instead she lost it, or, at least, that she lost where she
deserved to win; and (2) that Germany was, in a way,
forced to make war by the atmosphere that took hold of
Europe in the ten or twenty years before the war.
Never mind about whether Germany deserved to win. I
admit that, if the sacrifices Germany made and the terrible
sufferings she inflicted on herself and on her adversaries
entitled her to win, then she deserved it. But . . . after
America entered the war, she was the weaker. She could
hope only in some striking bit of good luck, which did not
occur, or in the cowardice of her enemies, who were not
free to be cowards. The governments of the Entente could
not present themselves as defeated before peoples of
whom they had asked such great sacrifices. Besides, the
abyss of revolution was behind them if they stepped backwards. Perhaps one of them will fall into it anyhow-but
victory was the only hope of salvation. And Germany, as
the weaker, behaved like a gambler who has little money.
She took the greatest risks. Once they failed, she was done
for.
As for the causes of the war and the responsibilities for
its unleashing, I agree with you that certainly not all the
fault is Germany's and the Kaiser's. For ten years and
more the European bourgeoisies had been more or less afflicted with imperialism, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps
in order to take people's minds off socialism. This created
the atmosphere in which the appalling war could break
out. Part of the responsibiiity lies also with the diplomatic
encirclement which England practiced against Germany.
Germany, however, was responsible for provoking the incident which provoked the explosion. As a result that good
part of the world that doesn't see beyond its nose believed
and believes that the entire fault was hers.
And now that Satan, as you say, has finished the job,
what is this poor tortured and suffering world to do?
If you are right, salvation could come from a restoration
of the principle of authority, from rulers with enough
moral prestige not to have to rely exclusively on brute
force. But is this possible in a democratic regime, where
the best way to rise is to humiliate oneself before the
crowd, to flatter it indecently?
Neither of us knows whether or not the world will overcome the present crisis and if present institutions can endure. If they don't, we shall, for sure, fall under demagogic
tyranny, or under bureaucratic and military tyranny or,
worse still, under both together. And Italy, closest to the
looming danger, is not yet aware of it!
I'll come to see you in the spring and we'll talk. I hope to
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
publish a review of your book. Its main points will be those
I have just made.
My family is well. My respects to Mrs. Ferrero. Greetings to Leo.
I am most affectionately,
G. Mosca.
P.S. Please send me the exact address of your brother, the
doctor, who is in Ancona. I should perhaps write to him.
Ferrero to Mosca
(F1orence), January 31, 1920
Dear Gaetano,
Thanks for your letter. My brother's address is: Dr.
Giuseppe Ferrero, Via Montirozzo 59, Ancona.
To understand the book you have to proceed a bit by
deduction, since the writer's real ideas are hidden behind
the ideas-thesis and antithesis-attributed to the supposed author, to keep him in character. What you say
about the Holy Alliance is exactly what I think; it stands
out more in the second than in the first part since in the
first part the sovereign accuses the Holy Alliance of having
been too pacifist, traditionalist, classical, and Catholic, in
spirit if not in religion.
· It is not the same thing with the French Revolution. I
didn't try to decide whether the Revolution was a good
thing or a bad, whether it did more good than harm,
whether it could have done the good that it did without
doing so much harm. These are insoluble problems, because there is no way of measuring exactly the good and
the harm that it did and to make a comparison between
them. My idea-which I meant to have come out of the
thesis and antithesis-is this. In the French Revolution
there is a contradiction among the formulas, the programs,
the doctrines, and the results. This contradiction, disguised during the whole nineteenth century and up to the
World War with a host of devices and compromises, has
now broken quite out of control. The doctrines promised
men liberty, equality, and brotherhood, but events have
yielded a discipline far more demanding, heavy, and oppressive than that exercised by former governments. They
brought up governments harsher and more violent because they are at the same time stronger and less authoritative, governments that now are all turning into tyrannies
based on money and brute force. And all this happened
because the French Revolution undermined all the principles of authority, with their religious basis, of the old regimes and put in their place a new principle, the will or
sovereignty of the people, which doesn't work because it is
based only on a function and can give rise only to electoral
machines. On this point I have come to embrace totally
83
�your ideas, over which I was for a long time hesitant. For
many years I thought that the sovereignty of the people
was a serious principle of authority and could serve as the
basis of a juster, less oppressive, milder, and more human
political and social order than the one that went before.
Deeper study of the nineteenth century, a hard look at reality and longer reflection have persuaded me that you
were right.
Hence I don't doubt that the present order of things
is fated to crumble more or less everywhere and to be
replaced by a militaristic and demagogic tyranny, as arbitrary, capricious, oppressive and cruel as the worst despo·
tisms of the past. What is said on pages 289* and 311 represents my thinking.** I am so persuaded of these things
that already I am preparing myself for this unsparing, bestial despotism by, among other things, cutting down my
needs, luxuries, and expenses, because I am sure it will
leave me only my eyes to weep. Never mind, as long as it
leaves me a pen to write! As for the rebirth of the principle
of authority, to which there is reference on page 311, I believe it is inevitable but in the distant future. We shan't
live to see it. Probably this new principle of authority will
take shape around the persons, institutions, and doctrines
which will defend men against this horrid tyranny.
In short, I think that the movement that began in the
eighteenth century for the liberation of man has come to a
dreadful tyranny and a reign of force: a formidable contradiction from which there must come a political, moral, and
intellectual crisis of vast proportions of the sort that occurred at the end of the Middle Ages, when the Church
became the negation in practice of every principle of the
Gospel. We are in a situation which, in certain regards, recalls the one that gave rise to the explosion of the Reformation and the wars of religion.
As for the pages in which the deposed sovereign says
that Germany should have won the war, it seems to me
that you attribute to them a conclusive value whereas, to
me, they are of only passing importance. The second part
of the book was conceived as a medley of fragments written in accordance with tormenting changes of thought
and feeling under the impact of a blow of misfortune.
Hence there are contradictions, successive stages, jumps.
*The passage referred to runs:
"Men have deposed God and overturned all the idols they had tried to
build on his profaned altars: Science, Liberty, Democracy, Progress, Civilization. All authorities have collapsed. Therefore, force alone rules the
world. Force alone and naked, or barely covered with a red rag or a tatter
of a national flag. It rules the world as it can, with excesses and stops and
starts, without discernment, and tears it apart, for force is so weak when
alone and naked. 0 men, do not harbour illusions: in Europe the only
authority that remains is gold and iron."
**"Slowly and cautiously throughout all of Western civilization, the Revolution has done its work, the work it botched brutally in an hour in
France. Undoing the sacred legitimacy of all authorities, it has left men
no other government than force. From one end of Europe to the other,
force and need are the only authorities-both fake-men still obey."
84
The sovereign says, in his first notes, that Germany should
have won the war but, further on, he realizes that Germany was destroyed by its own strength, that it was defeated because it was too strong and had wanted to be too
strong. My real opinion on this point is expressed on pages
216-217: "Germany had to lose, because it was the
stronger ... n
~~we
wanted to be too strong ... "
This second part of the fifth chapter on confessionspages 212-223-is extremely important, because it contains the development of one of the book's most important
ideas. The first part of the chapter has a purely artistic reason for being, expressing thoughts which, in the second
part, are confuted. At bottom it serves to recall, in fitting
summary manner, the history of the war and Germany's
formidable effort. It is a warning to the states and statesmen of the Entente, who delude themselves that they defeated Germany with the power of the spirit when they
did it with the power of matter. In short, the three ideas
that I wanted to stress with the thesis and antithesis and
that are like Ariadne's thread through the labyrinth are the
following:
a) The French Revolution began a struggle between
the old principles of authority and its own principles. For
the reasons I have explained above, this struggle ended in
the ruin of all principles, old and new. As a result, Europe
after hoping for freedom for a century, has fallen under
brute force-anarchy or tyranny.
b) The world war is not the usual war won by the best
army or the army used the best. It is the bizarre, incoherent, chaotic catastrophe of a political and military system.
In this catastrophe all states exceeded the measure of
force granted human organizations. Institutions absurd in
their principles and dangerous in their exaggeration,
above all conscription armies as they developed after 1870,
were the means of this excess.
c) The responsibilities of Germany, enormous as they
are, are only partial, because from 1789 on all of Europe is
responsible. The World War is the final outcome of the
entire history of the nineteenth century-with the exception of the period from 1815 to 1848. The whole history of
Europe flowed toward this outlet. The whole history of
Europe has been an uninterrupted preparation of this catastrophe-except for the attempt of the old dynasties between 1815 and 1848 to move against the stream. That period from 1815 to 1848 strikes me as the only period when
Europe was governed with real political wisdom. Despite
its faults it would deserve rehabilitation.
If you want to write a review, these elucidations may be
useful to you. My wife holds it against me that I have written a book that is something of a riddle. I must help my
friends unravel it.
Warmest greetings,
yours Guglielmo
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�1923
Ferrero to Mosca
F1orence, May 6, 1923, 7, Viale Machiavelli
Dear Gaetano,
I have read the Elementi.* I am happy, above all, at the
freshness of your thirty-year old book. Except for a few unimportant points it could have been written today. The
outlook on the world, the spirit of the research have not
aged at all, so that reading it, one has no impression of go·
ing back a whole generation. This means that your book
has deep, vital roots. When a book stands up against the
passage of thirty years it has passed the hardest test, and
may endure for three hundred, because it is endowed with
eternal elements.
The new part completes, or rather, develops the old, by
introducing into the synthetic vision the new events and
phenomena of the last thirty years, and your further expe·
riences. You have made two books written with thirty
years between them into one book, without changing or
rewriting the first. This is a rare, perhaps unique, occurrence, and worthy of note.
What I like best in the book is what I might call its ancient spirit, that psychological realism whose origin lies in a
deep, because long thought-out, knowledge of the human
soul, a knowledge that is the necessary basis of politics,
since politics is only psychology in action. I say that your
book is soaked in the spirit of the ancients, because they
had in high degree the same deep-seated realism. You referred in the preface to Aristotle's Politics, and rightly, because your book has an honorable place in the same family. How different from the nebulous ideological fantasies
in which so many political writers are lost today!
This is the most serious, thoughtful, mature, profound
book on politics to appear in Europe in recent years. It
comes at a time at which it is most needed to lead bewildered minds back to the eternal reality of human affairs, in
which alone lies the secret of the good fortune and pros.
perity of nations. Let's hope that it is read and meditated
upon to the extent it deserves. For my part I'll do my best.
I must voice two objections or reservations of a general
character. It seems to me that you don't give sufficient importance to what you call the political formula and I call
the principle of legitimacy of governments. You seem still
to consider it a sort of pia fraus or conventional lie, useful
for justifying governmental power above all in the eyes of
the ignorant masses. I am increasingly persuaded that it is
*Elementi di Scienza Politica, Turin 1896; second edition (here referred
to), Turin 1923. English translation, The Ruling Class, New York and
London 1939.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the essential part of government and that force is only a
subordinate element, which has no true effectiveness unless it is based on the first. A government is not the real
thing unless it has persuaded all those who obey it that it
has a right to command. This is the test of all governments,
not the collecting of policemen and soldiers for the purpose of beating up recalcitrants, a police operation in
which even a Lenin, a Mussolini, and similar revolutionary
bunglers can succeed. And periods in which the right of
the government to command is uncertain and insecure are
always troubled, even if the government has great force at
its disposal.
The other reservation is this. I don't think you have
gauged the true importance of the upheaval that took
place in European civilization in the nineteenth century.
You seem to consider it a normal development of civilization, along familiar lines. But I don't see it that way.
There was a break, an overturning, a violent interruption
of the line, an attempt to overthrow some of the principles
on which all civilizations rested until the eighteenth century. To me this is a point of capital importance. Almost all
the objections which I should make to points of detail
stem from this different way of looking at the nineteenth
century.
I find, here and there, a few unimportant errors. StoJy.
pin** was not killed with bombs but with a revolver shot at
him by a student when he was sitting in a theater. Augustus did not frequently renew the Senate because the nationalistic reaction which, after Actium, brought him to
the presidency and kept him there all his life, did not allow
him or his successors to introduce many new senators.
The first to conduct an operation of this kind was Vespasian, who did not take the new families from Italy, as you
say, but from the western provinces-Cisalpine Gau~
Gaul, above all Spain, and from North Africa. Under Vespasian the Senate, which was what we might call centralItalian, became Euro-Africanl To my knowledge, under
Vespasian and in the second century, there were not many
oriental members. The East was always unwilling to accept Roman political ideas-aristocratic and republican up
to the end of the third century-that instead spread widely
among the Romanized and civilized barbarians of the
West. The East remained faithful to absolute monarchy.
This explains why the West and not the East replenished
the Roman Senate, up to the collapse of the system in the
third century.
I'm getting ready to write about your book. Greetings to
your family.
Yours
Guglielmo Ferrero
**Peter Arcadievich Stolypin {1862-1911), Russian statesman. Prime
minister in 1906, he fought revolutionary ferment with reforms, among
them agrarian reform that dissolved the mir and allowed the peasants to
own property.
85
�1934
Ferrero to Mosca
Geneva, February 17, 1934
Dear Gaetano,
I've read the book of your lessons.* It's rich, substantial,
clear, full of ideas and briskly written, apt for pleasant and
quick reading. I hope it finds many readers. Italy would
need to read books like yours.
The exposition of the doctrines of yours I know seems
precise and exact. And so I extend the same judgment to
those that are new to me. If I have any reservations, it's
about the overly intellectualizing tendency of the book. It
seems to me that you lend too much importance to ideas
as inspiring events. Ideas, in my opinion, are often the
horse-flies of history.
Rousseau, for in-stance. 1 believe that Rousseau's influence on the French Revolution has been enormously exaggerated. In the course on the Revolution that I gave here
three years ago, I maintained that Rousseau didn't make
the Revolution but that the Revolution created Rousseau.** Rousseau's books had made a certain dent but
only on a small number of people who, later, for the most
part, were against the Revolution. But when the Convention found itself isolated and without other support than
assemblage of forces amid a France in ruins, it needed, at
least, a theory to justify its power. It latched onto The Social Contract, glorifying it and making it into a sort of Bible
of democracy.
As for what you say about socialism, I think it isn't at all
exact to say that political equality makes for economic
equality. This is an argument conservatives have abused
for the last hundred years but which seems to me unfounded. The old regime was founded on political and economic inequality; the rich had all the power. I don't believe it's possible to return to this state of affairs, which
collapsed because it was excessive. Equality, economic
and political together, is impossible unless we crystallize
labor into absurd forms. I believe, therefore, that, after
many convulsions and oscillations, the world will adapt to
a state of political equality and economic inequality, such
as a number of countries have already reached. Political
equality will compensate for economic inequality, to the
advantage of the poor. Socialism has, in fact, been more
successful in countries where the government had an oligarchic and aristocratic character and there was still considerable political inequality-Russia, Germany, Austria,
Italy-than in countries where economic inequalities are
great but political equality is ensured by democratic institutions-such as the United States and England before
1914.
The theory of the political formula seems to me also to
need reenforcement. I should substitute this somewhat
neutral phrase with another, more vigorous: principle of legitimacy. Among African blacks or barbarians facts and
rights may coincide: whoever possesses the material instruments of power is thought to have the right to command. Little by little, as a country becomes more civilized,
the fact of possessing the instruments of power no longer
suffices. These instruments must have been acquired with
the observance of certain rules and principles which confer the right, recognized by all, to govern. Outside these
principles there is no longer a legitimate government;
there is usurpation. Whereas you seem to consider the political formula as a sort of plaything or game, which serves,
at best, to moderate the rulers, it seems to me that the
principle of legitimacy is a matter of the utmost seriousness, solemnity, and necessity. It is the very essence of civilization. A civilized people that falls from a legitimate government to a government of usurpation becomes infantile
again. Today, alas, two-thirds of the world's governments
are illegitimate usurpations. During the last twenty years
the world has precipitated into barbarism, just because a
large number of old legitimate governments have fallen
and made way for usurpations. For how long?! That's the
great question.
But we would need to talk all this over face to face. Cordial greetings and good wishesG. F.
Translated by Frances Frenaye
*Mosca's Lezioni di storia delle dottrine e delle instituzioni politiche,
Rome 1932.
**The last version of this course, given at the University of Geneva in
1940-1942 was published almost ten years after Ferrero's death in 1942:
Les deux revolutions francaises, 1789-1796, Neuchatel 1951. English
translation, G. Ferrero, The Two French Revolutions 1789-1796, New
York 1968.
86
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Guglielmo Ferrero and Legitimacy
Carlo Mongardini
Guglielmo Ferrero understood that in our century the
fundamental question for politicians and statesmen was
no longer the exercise of power by an organized minority,
but how to build legitimacy from below. Gaetano Mosca
and Vilfredo Pareto also knew this was the problem.
Mosca opened the academic year of 1902-03 at the University of Turin with a lecture, "The Aristocratic and
Democratic Principle in the Past and Future." 1 In 1920
Pareto wrote a series of articles in the Rivista di Milano on
the transformation of democracy. 2 But neither Mosca nor
Pareto were up to dealing with this in part new subject
because each conceived the structure of power to hinge
on elites and the substitution of one elite for another (Mosca's "circulation of elites"). Ferrero, instead, made legiti~
macy the central question in interpreting contemporary
history and saw it as the key to understanding the crisis of
the modern world.
Ferrero did not think of himself as a professional historian.3 He turned to history in the spirit of Taine,4 one of
his models, uin order to recover, in the comparison of past
and present, the today almost completely lost awareness of
certain rules of life that cannot be transgressed without
running into the reason of things." 5 His avowed desire to
"divide the study of history not into epochs ... but by
types of phenomena";6 his conception of the study of history not as an "effort to recall the past," but as "an exercise
in recognizing the differences and similarities between
past and present," show his concentration on understand·
ing the changes taking place in the society of his day. This
meant-as in the instance of Taine-a new kind of history, not political history, but the history of civil society or
rather of the changes in civil society. The orientation on
Carlo Mongardini is professor of political science at the polytechnic in
Milan. He recently edited the surviving correspondence of Gaetano
Mosca and Guglielmo Ferrero, Gaetano Mosca-Guglielmo Ferrero. Car-
teggio (1896-1934), Milan 1980.
The above article was read at a congress on Ferrero, "Guglielmo Ferrero,
tra societa e politica," at the University of Genova on October 4-5, 1982.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
society allows the application of the categories employed
in studying and interpreting the present to the past (in the
case of Ferrero to ancient Rome) .. In another sense, Ferrero simply pursues the comparison of present and past,
Hthe differences and similarities."
Ferrero was, above all, a student of society, or, as he put
it, a student of "some problems of individual and collective
life."7 We should not be surprised that such study turned
out largely political. By nature and almost by historical necessity, the study of society in Italy is political. 8 Like Mosca's theory of the political class, Ferrero's concern with legitimacy had clearly contemporary relevance. In 1923
Ferrero wrote Mosca of the significance of the principle of
legitimacy:
A government is not the real thing unless it has persuaded all
those who obey it that it has the right to command. This is the
test of all governments. Not the recruitment of a few policemen and soldiers to beat up recalcitrants-a police operation
in which even a Lenin, a Mussolini and other such Revolutionary bunglers can succeed. And times in which the right of
the government to command is uncertain and insecure are
always troubled, even if the government has great forces at its
disposal 9
To understand Ferrero's total concentration on the
principles of legitimacy, we have to recall his experience
under Fascism-clearly revealed in his correspondence,
especially in his letters to Mosca. Mosca's theory of the political class had been an argument against the corruption
of parliamentary democracy; Ferrero's concept of legitimacy was an intellectual weapon against Fascism's violence. In search of a principle oflegitimacy to give stability
to the rule and structures' of representative government,
old Europe flounders between varieties of dictatorship or
"caesarism" and the. threa~ of revolutions that, for their
part, offer no solutions,.capable of substantially modifying
the course of history.
The subject of legitimacy marks our century, especially
after the First World War. Foretold.in the works of SaintSimon, the theory of political class and elites is essentially
87
�an inheritance from the nineteenth century. New subjects
for political thought introduce the 'new century: the new
feudalism, representation, legitimacy, consent. To give
these subjects-whose pertinency is now unmistakabletheir full weight was one of Ferrero's great intuitions.
LEGITIMACY AND ITS IMPLICATIONS
The inspiration of these themes by the struggle with
events tends to confirm that Ferrero did not, as has been
written, come upon the idea of legitimacy in Geneva in
1930 while preparing a course on the French Revolution
and Napoleon, lO but more than ten years earlier, as he says
himself. In Principles of Power, he tells how in 1918 a few
pages ofTalleyrand gave him the key to the understanding
of the history of Europe since the French Revolution:
It took ... a universal catastrophe and a few pages from an
old forgotten book before I became aware of the existence of
the mysterious Genii that were helping and persecuting me
without my knowledge .... The World War was just coming
to an end, and the thrones of Europe were falling one on top
of the other with a deafening clatter. To while away the
hours, I started reading some ancient and forgotten tomes
which were somewhat in the spirit of the times. One day,
while reading Talleyrand's Memoirs, I came across seven
pages in the second volume that revealed to me the principles
oflegitimacy. The revelation was momentous. From then on
I began to see clearly in the history of mankind and in my own
destiny. 11
Legitimacy completed a theory of power that Ferrero
first began to elaborate in the early years of the century.
To undo fear, that primordial condition of human nature,
and to create artificial conditions of stability and security,
man fashions power in the same way he organizes social
life and makes civilization. But power performs its task of
dispelling insecurity only to the extent that it draws upon
an objective idea that legitimates it and lends legality to its
actions. "Power can attain its proper perfection, legitimacy, only through a sort of unwritten contract." This
contract grounds power in the reciprocal promise of the
ruled to obey and the rulers to observe certain rules and
pursue certain ends. In every society legitimacy sanctions
the exercise of power. "As soon as the two parties no
longer respect this contract, the principle of legitimacy
loses its strength. Fear returns." 12 Primordial fear returns-but within society. The ruled fear the force avail·
able to the rulers, the rulers' rebellion, and the frailty of
consent on which they can rely. Power can guarantee "the
rules of the game" of living together only to the extent
that it serves the principles that give a society its direction.
Once the ties of the principles of legitimacy loosen, mistrust invades rulers and ruled: insecurity and fear slowly
88
overcome the human soul. An instrument made to combat
fear, power can incite it, both active and passive, when uit
violates the principle of legitimacy that has up to then jus·
tified it."ll The primordial condition of man, Hobbes's
state of nature, is overcome by the institution and religion
of legitimacy, power. 14 But this religion cannot do without
a rational creed, without rulers with authority and without
the consent of the governed. The principle of legitimacy
ties everything together. It is the actual living constitution
of its group. Power, however, cannot rest on an unequivo-
cal relation between rulers and governed. Like any other
institution, it has to come to terms with the basic contradiction "between human liberty and the social necessity
for reactions that can be foreseen." 15 At the basis of power
there is ambivalence, the same ambivalence that Freud
found in the same years at the foundations of civiliza.
tion, !6 and that the Berlin sociologist, Georg Simmel,
thinks accompanies all subordinationP
The principles of legitimacy attenuate this ambiva·
lence. Because they objectify the idea that endows the organization of society from below and above with meaning,
they serve to preserve subordination from abuse. Govern·
ment and the governed both submit to the idea that underlies the institution. From this idea all members of the
group draw the assurance of the obiectivity of the exercise
of power, which is intimately connected to the idea of legitimacy. Ferrero spoke of "the invisible genii of the city."
Again we are surprised by an analogy with Georg Simmel,
who speaks of the "characteristic and deeply rooted capac·
ity of both individuals and groups to draw new strength
from things whose energy stems from them." The ancient
Greeks, says Simmel, created gods "by sublimating their
own qualities" and then expected the gods to give them a
morality and the strength to practice it.lB
Ferrero's principles of legitimacy are modern gods that
men fashion then to draw from them the rules of political
conduct. These gods must remain inviolate in their sanctuaries, because, "every true authority is divine, and no
material force can violate it." 19 uMen will never acknowl-
edge other men's right to command them unless by a feeling of mystical origin which the intellect cannot explain .... A secular state is an impossible contradiction,
and the authority of the state, like that of a father or
mother, is either by nature hieratic, even when stripped of
rites, or apocryphaJ."20 Men's readiness to hold the principles of legitimacy sacred accounts for the religious dimension in politics. The religious dimension comes not only
because politics was born in temples. It inheres in the nature of political things. 21
Because of this religious dimension, the principles of legitimacy make up the actual living constitution in its organization of a group of men from above and below. They
justify power, the power to command and to rule. "Of all
the inequalities among men none has such telling conse·
quences and, therefore, such a need for justification as the
inequality that comes of power. With rare exceptions one
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�man is as good as another. Why should, one have the right
to command and the rest the duty to obey? The answer
lies in the principles of legitimacy!' 22 They make possible
"tacit agreement between rulers and ruled about the specific laws and rules that determine the conferment and
limits of power." This implicit understanding frees government "from the fear of revolt ever present in the enforced obedience of its subjects." And the subjects no
longer "fear and distrust power." 23 Legitimacy becomes a
complex mechanism which includes a choice of purposes
that must win the assent of all; means of achieving them,
clearly identifiable in institutions; a set of capable men, a
political class, with an effective, and not only formal, mandate to represent the people.
This complex picture of political realities shows the
great intuitive understanding and relevance of Ferrero's
contribution to political thought. Power amounts no
longer to the power of the elitists, to a simple matter of
fact that an organized minority conquers and wields. The
problem of power is intimately tied to legitimacy. Power
must be understood as a circular process. Through consent,24 identification, and representation, 25}egitimacy rises
from below, while power comes down from above in the
actions of the political class that exercises it.26 A more
complex conception has overcome the one-sided vision of
the elitists. The principles of legitimacy work as the invisible "genii of the city."
Through the principles of legitimacy the prevailing
needs of society find realization in an idea that underlies
the formation and guides the actions of a group. This idea
makes up, to speak in juridical terms, the actual constitution of every organization 27 It balances the force available
to the government, which achieves its objectivity through
this idea, and the consent that rises from below. With the
disappearance of this idea consent breaks up and the force
power exercises grows more pronounced and subjective in
its exercise. Mistrust and fear increase. jjNo government
can endure if it is not upheld by a certain force. But woe to
the government that wants to do and command too much!
Some force is necessary, too much is harmful. A government needs authority, prestige, respect. A government
can never have too much authority. The state is authority,
not force." 28 "The principles oflegitimacy have the task of
freeing rulers and ruled from their mutual fears. They increasingly substitute consent for coercion in their relation.
They are, therefore, the pillars of civilization. For men's
effort to free themselves from the fears that torment them
is civilization." 29
The elitists had, however, taught Ferrero that political
conflict cannot be reduced to a conflict of principles:
No principle of legitimacy can thrust itself upon a nation
solely by its own power; in the beginning every principle is
imposed by an organized minority that attempts to overcome
the repugnance and incomprehension of those who are
bound to obey 30
THE ST, JOHNS REVIEW
The time described in these lines is the time of the rise
of a new principle, the phase of prelegitimacy. For principles oflegitimacy "are born, grow, age and die. Sometimes
they differ and collide. Their life cycles and their struggles
make up the invisible web of history."l 1 Prelegitimacy involves the minority that assumes the role of introducing
the new principles. Legitimacy, in contrast, implies all the
forces at work in the political sphere, above all majority
and opposition. The opposition cannot be suppressed
without damage. "Whatever the nature of the suffrage by
which sovereign people express themselves ... , it is obvious that its will cannot be identified with either the will of
the majority or with the will of the minority, that each is a
different section of the unique sovereign will and that the
latter is to be found in the juxtaposition of the two willsmajority and minority. It is therefore impossible to suppress the will of either one without mutilating the sovereign will and drying up the source of legitimacy." 32 In a
system of solid political liberties the opposition must be
free to perform its task. "For the minority to be able to
offer a serious and fruitful opposition it requires a firmly
established system ... so that the will of the people may
not be falsified by coercion, intimidation, or corruption.
But a false majority, which would only be a disguised minority, would always be too frightened of the opposition to
allow it to make loyal use of the political freedom it needs,
or to respect the freedom of suffrage sincerely." 33 Such
conditions of "false majority" foreshadow a crisis oflegitimacy, the outbreak of force and fear on the political stage.
Anarchy spreads. And power threatened threatens in return even to the point of a recourse to a "policy of assassination," a policy that begins in the modern world with the
rise of Napoleon.l4 The break-up of legitimacy means
a return to the original condition of insecurity and precariousness. The mechanisms of defense and aggression that
men had thought laid aside forever come to life again, now
magnified by power. A power that feels threatened and attacks nascent rebellion, and, thereby, excites new and
fiercer violence.
That political struggle cannot be understood entirely in
terms of principles of legitimacy does not mean that Ferrero considers principles oflegitimacy instruments of justification in the hands of the minority that holds power.
This refusal to reduce principles of legitimacy to mere instruments of justification, distinguishes Ferrero's princi~
pies of legitimacy from the political formula of Gaetano
Mosca, at least in its early elaborations.* The principle of
legitimacy also includes the political formula but is not
equivalent to it. The two expressions, legitimacy and polit*In the last chapter of Storia delle dottrine politiche, Bari 1933, Mosca
describes the political formula (the entire chapter is translated in J. H.
Meisel, The Myth of the Ruling Class, Ann Arbor, Mich. 1958, 382-391):
One of the first results of the new method was the notion of what,
since 1883, has been known as the political formula, meaning that in all
societies, be their level ever so mediocre, the ruling class will justify its
89
�ical formula are, in fact, only in appearance similar.l5 Like
power, the political formula comes' from above. The prin·
ciple of legitimacy, however, involyes all participants in
the political process, for it provides the basis for the tacit
contract that institutes rule. The difference between legitimacy and the political formula may be subtle. In my judgment, 'however, it shows the difference in perspective
from which Mosca and Ferrero viewed the role of legitimacy in the dynamics of politics. Upon the reading of the
just published second edition of Elementi di scienza Politica in 1923, Ferrero wrote Mosca in a letter already
quoted in part:
It seems to me that you still don't give sufficient impor-
tance to what you call the political formula and I call the principle of legitimacy of governments. You seem still to consider
it a sort of pia fraus or conventional lie, useful for justifying
governmental power, above all in the eyes of the ignorant
masses. I am increasingly persuaded that it is the essential
part of government and that force is only a subordinate element, which has no true efficacy unless it is based on the first.
A government is not the real thing unless it has persuaded all
those who obey it that it has a right to command.36
As I remarked at the beginning, legitimacy had contemporary relevance for Ferrero. Ferrero wanted to understand the political crisis of his own times. He concluded
that absence or insufficiency of a principle of legitimacy
had allowed the history of modern Europe continually to
oscillate between varieties of dictatorships or Caesarism
that surreptitiously seek to restore the old principles of legitimacy and revolutions that vainly try to impose with
force new principles of legitimacy that have no place in a
quantitative civilization. The democratic principle based
on universal suffrage is too frail to sustain rule. It comes
down to number simply, to an electoral machine. It has
lost all metaphysical and moral significance.J7 It has corrupted representation. For the most part, it came from
above: "Universal suffrage was everywhere thrust upon
the masses by a minority recruited from the upper class
and supported by a few popular groups. It came from
above exactly like monarchic power. And it descended
from above because the government, after admitting that
the will of the people was alone or in part the source of
legitimate authority, was unable to stop in midstride for
power by appealing to some sentiment or credence generally accepted in
that period and by that society, such as the presumed Popular or Divine
Will, the notion of a distinct nationality or Chosen People, traditional
loyalty toward a dynasty, or confidence in a man of exceptional qualities.
Of course, every political formula must reflect the specific intellectual
and moral maturity of the people and the epoch in which it is adopted. It
must closely correspond to the particular conception of the world prevailing at that time in that particular society, in order to cement the moral
unity of all the individuals who compose it.
Any indication that a political formula has become "dated," that the
faith in its principles has become shaky, that the ardent sentiments
which once inspired it have begun to cool down is a sign that serious
transformations of the ruling class are imminent.
90
very long at arbitrary distinctions that restricted sovereign
rights to a part of the nation. The people means everyone.
A simple irresistible solution." 38 Universal suffrage also
failed to endow the collectivity with the mystery of value.
The consequences were profound: "the collapse of all
authority":
The ruin of all principles of authority in which Western civilisation believed is the greatest destruction caused by the
war. . . . All authority has collapsed. Sheer force rules the
world, force alone, stark naked, or covered up with red rags or
the torn shred of a national flag. Force governs as best it can,
with excesses and sudden starts, without discernment. It tears
the world apart. For force is so weak when it is naked and
alone. 39
With the collapse of all authority after the First World
War, Europe on the one hand entrusted itself to the myth
of "regenerative violence" that has not and never will prevail and which has only spawned various madness:
The Revolution has not won and could not win because it did
not give birth to a new principle of authority. Universal suffrage is not a principle of authority, but an electoral machine
for collecting votes and putting together assemblies, large and
small. When has the world ever been governed by a machine?
A government is eyes, arms, brains, thought, and will. A machine is a piece of blind inanimate matter, moved by external
force. 40
On the other hand, everyone in Europe called loudly for a
"strong government". But governments of that time were
a strange mixture of strength and weakness, "immense
force bolstered by tottering authority."41 All this resulted
in a series of dictatorships that could not justify their
power and sought to revive as much as possible the old
monarchial power42 Dictatorships and revolutions appealed to each other and justified each other in a vicious
cycle that kept out the crucial problem: the not merely formal, but the actual legitimacy of power. After 1930, Ferrero wrote, "The confusion becomes general. We must go
to the bottom of the problem; distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate governments by means of definitions that go to the root of the problem; study intermediate forms and drive out the mental chaos of our wandering
by the effort to understand it."43
What did Ferrero think would become of the principle
of legitimacy? Its future depended on overcoming this period of transition in which men believed they could build a
civilization solely on quantity. "The world," Ferrero said
to Bogdan Raditsa in 1939,
will not recover order, peace, and freedom to live and think
until the day it rediscovers the eternal ~rinciples of any civilisation: quality, limits, and legitimacy. 4
Mankind, or at any rate its elite, now faces a decisive turning
point: it has become too well informed, too sure of itself, too
skeptical to believe in a principle of legitimacy as a religious
WINTER/SPRJNG 1983
�absolute without wanting to know why. It wants to reason
everything out, even principles of legitimacy. Therefore it
must not remain content to reason only to the point where
every principle of legitimacy appears a'!:>surd or unjust. It
must go beyond that to the very bottom of the problem. It
must discover the nature and the task of principles of legitimacy, so that from them it may deduce rules for a rational
ethics of authority that will transform the former mystical
veneration of government into a widespread knowledge and
sentiment of respective duties: those of the government toward its subjects and those of the subjects toward the government. There is no other solution. The problem of government today looms before the West like an enormous and
precipitous mountain, full of crevasses, glaciers, and ava-
lanches, that bars the path to all mankind.45
An Augustus who could restore the state "beginning at the
beginning with the legitimacy of the government" is called
for-not a Caesar. "We shall sink deeper and deeper into
disorder until we constitute a government whose credentials are in order, whose legitimacy, or right to govern, is
unarguable before the conscience of the nation". 46
INTUITION AND LIMITATIONS IN
FERRERO'S THINKING
Ferrero's identification of several crucial elements in
the crisis in the relation of individual to society brings his
work close to us. In the context of individual and society,
the problem of legitimacy is not only a political but also a
social problem. Social life is founded on dimensions at the
same time objective and subjective. The principles of legitimacy, in Ferrero's meaning, make sense just because
they at the same time embody the objective dimension of
collective life and the subjective assent to it through identification with the institutions that carry out the principles
of legitimacy.
Principles of!egitimacy can only rise from a balance between the objective and subjective dimensions of life. But
Ferrero deals with the sames problems that Simmel
treated in his analysis of the money economy, that Max
Weber saw in terms of formal rationality, that Freud described as civilization's discontent. 48 But Ferrero concentrates his attention chiefly on the political consequences
of the crisis in legitimacy-and on the succession and alternation of varieties of anarchy and totalitarianism that
justify and reinforce each other.
The end result of doctrines that promised men liberty,
equality, and fraternity, Ferrero wrote to Mosca in 1920,
has been the coming of governments "harder and more
violent, because stronger but less authoritative ... that today are all turning into tyrannies based on money and
force .... As for the rebirth of the principle of authority, I
believe that it is inevitable but that it will come about
slowly, in a distant future. We shall not live to see it. Probably the new principle of authority will take shape around
persons, institutions, and doctrines that will defend men
against this dreadful tyranny."49
Ferrero did not mean to write political theory. From the
point of view of theory, there are, in fact, many things to
criticize: his too formalistic and sometimes too abstract exposition of legitimacy that is more bound to principles
and, therefore, to the images of legitimacy, than to the
mechanisms of consent and of identification that bring legitimacy; the consequent impression of neglect of daily realities, of the relations and interaction of social life that
produce power and legitimation; and finally his recourse
to language that too often resorts to emotion rather than
proof.
Ferrero has, however, at least two great merits. He went
beyond the power theory of the elitists. And with the theory of legitimacy he made a notable advance on the theory
of ideology and upon Mosca's political formula. Many of
Ferrero's books and many of his views show the marks of
time. I believe, however, that these two themes could provide the beginning of a new chapter in political analysis. In
Italy, Ferrero wrote, at least, the introductory paragraph of
that chapter.
Translated by Frances Frenaye
modern culture, in Ferrero's view, founded on quantity,
on the increase of numbers, on progress defined in terms
of production, on a money economy, has provoked a crisis
in the subjective dimension of social life. Faced with the
increase of complexity and at the same time with the
fragmentation of social life, with role conflicts and manifold expectations that sweep him up, the individual, as
Simmel observed, defends himself with indifference and
gives up identifications that might disturb the unity of his
mental life. 47 The impossibility of striking a balance between the objective and subjective dimensions of life is
the crisis in legitimacy. It was in its capacity to balance between subjective and objective life that Ferrero found the
"religious" implication of the principles of legitimacy.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
l. Later reprinted in Gaetano Mosca, Partiti e sinddcati nella crisi del regime parlamentare, Bari 1949.
2. Vilfredo Pareto, Trasformazione della democrazia, Milano 1921.
3. Bogdan Raditsa, Colloqui con Guglielmo Ferrero, Lugano 1939, 63.
4. Ferrero came to Taine through Cesare Lombroso, who also considered him one of his teachers. His way of conceiving and approaching history is certainly very similar to Taine's. Both men had the idea of studying the past in order to understand the reasons for a contemporary crisis,
whether in France after 1870 or in Italy at the turn of the century. It may
well be that Ferrero's sensitivity to the problem of the legitimacy of
power came also from Taine. For the relationship of Taine, Lombroso,
and Ferrero, see M. Simonetti, "Georges Sorel e Guglielmo Ferrero fra
"cesarismo" borghese e socialismo" (with 27 unpublished letters from
Sorel to Ferrero 1896~1921), Il Pensiero Politico, 5, l. On Taine, C.
Mongardini, Storia e sociologia nell'operra di H. Taine, Milan 1965.
91
�5. Guglielmo Ferrero, Lavecchia Europa e_ Ia nuova. Saggi e discorsi, Mi·
lan 1918, 36.
•
6. Guglielmo Ferrero, Storia e filosofia della storia, Nuova Antologia, November 1, 1910. Reprinted in B. Raditsa, Colloqui, Lugano 1939, 100.
7. B. Raditsa, Colloqui, Lugano 1939, 63-64~
8. Cf. C. Mongardini, Profili della sociologia italianc1, Rome 1982.
9. C. Mongardini ed., Gaetano Mosca-Guglielmo Ferrero. Carteggio
(1896-1934), Milan 1980, 331. A translation of the entire letter of May 5,
1923, appears in "Letters on Legitimacy" in this issue of the St. John's
Review.
10. Cf. N. Bobbio, "II potere e il diritto," Nuovo Antologia, Aprill982.
The exact date is important. Because if we date the idea from the course
given in Geneva in 1930, we must recall that Max Weber's Wirtschaft und
Gesellschaft, posthumously published in 1921, contains a famous characterization of the forms oflegitimate power. Actually, Ferrero had amply
developed his idea of legitimacy in Memorie e confessioni di un sovrano
<kposto, Milan 1920.
11. G. Ferrero, Principles of Power, New York 1942, 18-19. This book
first appeared in an edition (published by Brentano's) in French, the Ian·
guage of its writing, in New York in 1942.
12. G. Ferrero, Power, New York 1942, 42.
13. G. Ferrero, Power, New York 1942, 42.
14. There are, however, important "differences between Ferrero and
Hobbes, Cf. D. Settembrini, "Riscopriamo Guglielmo Ferrero," Tempo
Presente, June 1982.
15. G. Ferrero, The Reconstruction of Europe, New York 1941, 32.
16. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, first published in
German at the end of 1929.
17. Georg Simmel, "Ober und Unterordnung" in Soziologie, Untersu·
chungen iiber die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, Berlin 1908. Translation
in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited and translated by Kurt H.
Wolff, New York 1950, 181-306, 193:
Man has an intimate dual relation to the principle of subordination.
On the one hand, he wants to be dominated. The majority of men not
only cannot exist without leadership; they also feel that they cannot;
they seek the higher power which relieves them of responsibility; they
seek a restrictive, regulatory rigor which protects them not only
against the outside world but also against themselves. But no less do
they need opposition to the leading power, which only through this
opposition, through move and countermove, as it were, attains the
right place in the life pattern of those who obey it.
18. Cf. G. Simmel, "Comment les formes sociales se maintiennent,"
L'annee sociologique, 1897. Also, in a later, longer draft, "Die Selbsterhaltung der sozialen Gruppe" in Soziologie, Untersuchungen tiber die
Formen der Vergesellschaftung, 3 Leipzig 1923, 375-459. English translation of the earlier draft, "The Persistence of Social Groups," American
Journal of Sociology 5, March 1898, 662-698; 6, May 1898, 829-836; 4,
july 1898, 35-50.
19. G. Ferrero, Memorie e confessioni di un sovrano deposto, Milan 1920.
On the nature of principles of legitimacy, cf. also, L. Pellicani, "Rivoluzione e totalitarismo," Controcorrente, October-December 1974.
20. G. Ferrero, Memorie, Milan 1920, 280. Because of their sacred char·
acter all principles of legitimacy, even originally partly rational, "can be·
come absurd in their application." The rational element in principles of
legitimacy "is accidental, external and unsubstantial" (G. Ferrero, Power,
New York 1942, 25). Moreoever, the rationality of a principle of legiti·
macy remains internal to the principle itself (117).
21. Cf. Georges Burdeau, La politique au pays des merveilles, Paris 1979,
6 ff.
92
22. G. Ferrero, Power, New York 1942,22-23.
23. G. Ferrero, Power, New York 1942,281.
24. Ferrero showed unusual foresight in distinguishing between types of
consent, especially between active and passive content. For instance,
Power, New York 1942,40-41,278,293. On types of consent, C. Mongar·
dini, Le condizioni del consenso, Rome 1980.
25. Political representation is, in Ferrero, the "supporting structure of
the democratic system" but it does not imply a close relationship between representatives and represented. The relationship passes through
the principles of legitimacy just as every action of the government
passes through them. Cf. Pier Paolo Portinaro, "Democrazia e dittatura
in Guglielmo Ferrero," Comunitd, 33, 181, October 1979.
26. Power, New York 1942, 171.
·
27. Ferrero's recall in Power (132) of Hans Kelsen, "one of the greatest
exponents of constitutional and international law of our time," is not ac·
cidental. A little further on (143-144), he seems to subtly argue with him:
Efficacy has a role in the eternal drama of legitimacy, but a different
role from that assigned to it by contemporary thought. Though attached to it, legitimacy never depends directly on the efficacy of gov·
emment, which may increase or diminish over a long period of time
without affecting legitimacy.
28. G. Ferrero, Memorie, Milan 1920, 292-293.
29. G. Ferrero, Power, New York 1942, 48.
30. Power, 169.
31. Power, 49.
32. Power, 173-174.
33. Power, 175.
34. Power, 201-203.
35. N. Bobbio ("II potere e il diritto," Nuova Antologia, April 1982)
seems, instead, to lend them the same meaning.
36. See the discussions between Mosca and Ferrero on "political for·
mula" and "principles oflegitimacy" in Gaetano Mosca-Guglielmo Fer·
rero. Carteggio (1896-1934), Milan 1980, 330-332 and 453-55. Transla·
tions of both these letters (May 6, 1923 and February 17, 1934) appear in
"Letters on Legitimacy" in this issue of the St. John's Review.
37. G. Ferrero, Power, 53.
38. Power, 182-183.
39. G. Ferrero, Memorie, Milan 1920, 289 and 295.
40. G. Ferrero, Memorie, Milan 1920, 285-286.
41. G. Ferrero, Words to the Deaf, New York 1925, 71.
42. G. Ferrero, "Reflexions sur une agonie," L'illustration, April 21,
1928.
43. G. Ferrero, Power, 130.
44. B. Raditsa, Colloqui, Lugano 1939, 83.
45. Power, 283-284.
46. G. Ferrero, La democrazia in Italia. Studi e precisioni, Milan 1925,
107.
47. G. Simmel, "Die Grossstadte und das Geistesleben" in Die Grasstadt, Dresden 1903, 185-206. English translation, "The Metropolis and
Mental Life," in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, New York 1950, 409424.
48. Ferrero uses the concept of identification in much the same way as
Freud, and gives it much the same importance in the interpretation of
modem society. Cf. G. Ferrero, Power, 35-36,48. For Freud, Civilization
and its Discontents (1929).
49. Mosca-Ferrero. Carteggio, Milan 1980, 295-297. A translation of this
letter of January 31, 1920 appears in "Letters on Legitimacy" in this issue
of the St. John's Review.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�My Memoir of Our Revolution
from City of Ends
Daniel Ardrey
That morning his picture appeared on the wall-and on
all the walls all over the city. I saw from my window a small
crowd looking up at it-! went down to look myself. We
studied it in silence. He was a handsome man-no doubt
about it-and fair with his blond hair combed back en
brosse. Though the picture was a grainy black and white
snapshot you could see his eyes were blue-either that or
pale brown. Written beneath it were simple wordsBROTHERS AND SISTERS
UNITE
FOR
VICTORY
AND
THE
REvOLUTION!
They sent a shiver through us like a small shock-it was
the first time he was to speak to us and we weren't used to it
yet. Nor were we used to reading: our lips moved as we
read and our heads jerked on from word to word. As we
stood there looking up we all knew that this was our expec·
tation and our fulfillment. I looked around and saw tears in
some of the women's eyes-Marissa was there and snif·
fling into a much worn hankerchief. My reaction was one
of enormous relief as though a huge burden had been
lifted from my shoulders. My back straightened involun-
Daniel Ardrey lives in Boston.
The above selection comes from an unpublished novel, City of Ends.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
tarily and I raised my chin. Marissa came over to me-her
eyes were reddened.
Isn't it too wonderful?
she asked.
Yes, it is
I answered-it was trueIt's what we all hoped for.
I patted her on the shoulder-! wanted to console her
though there was nothing to be sad about. His picture
alone had given us new meaning.
The rest of the day I saw small groups of people clustered in front of it speculating.
What's he like? Will we ever see him? Where' s he
from? Look at those eyes. And the chin. And the
hair. What'll he do?
And so on. The kinds of questions people asked to flesh
out their initial excitement. Because above all we wanted
to think of him as a man. There was something about his
face-perhaps the jutting of his chin, perhaps his piercing
eyes-that inspired confidence and respect. And, of
course, we saw him as the personification of our Revolution. From now on it was going to cease to be amorphous
and confusing. We were like those wakened from a deep
and troubled sleep-to see in his face that which we'd
dreamt and forgotten, or never known. I went about my
business as usual-though nothing was as usual then. It
was before and after, light and dark-a total change and so
clearly defined. If our Revolution was to have a human
face, his, it was also going to take on a personality, also his.
That would make it so much easier to understand, I
thought-no longer were we going to be perplexed and
baffled and because of it always afraid. No, this was itand the act of reading his words gave me a feeling of intimate relation to him. Although he was addressing us as
brothers and sisters we couldn't be that-we would have
to be children and led. Not that we'd mind-it was only
93
�logical. The Revolution had made us all children anyway.
Though some of us were older than others, the Revolution
had led us into a world that was fresh and clean and beautiful-like a child's. There was also the unknown-so much
of it I couldn't say-that's where he came in. Like a father
he'd tell us what was and what wasn't. That is to say, define our beliefs and behavior. We all had a sense of this-in
some way or another-and if we were discussing the color
of his eyes or hair we were also thinking of these other
things.
I went about my business humming, arranging things on
my shelves. The shutter to my shop was half up and while
my back was turned Roderigo came in. I heard his voice
behind me and knew who it was.
Well, what do you think?
What?
Is he for real? Or is it a plot? Somebody out to get
us.
I was so startled I dropped what I had in my hand. I had to
bend down to pick it up before I turned to him. I saw he
was serious.
How can you think that?
I said.
It wouldn't make sense.
Maybe not. Or maybe not now, maybe later.
Roderigo shrugged with his face, his shoulders didn't
move, and sat down on an orange crate. He took a toothpick from his coat pocket and began to pick at his teeth.
We'd be fools to fall for it if it weren't for real,
wouldn't we?
he went on.
I suppose so,
I said. I sat down on something and scratched the side of
my forehead-it was to give me time to think. He was
studying me with great care.
You know,
he beganWe all think we're so clever. I mean that we know
how to get by. And we do. Look at us.
He moved his hand palm upward in a half circle.
But what else do we know?
Pause. He answered his own question.
Not much, maybe nothing. We don't have the
faintest idea what we're getting into, do we?
Maybe not,
I said thinking how best to phrase itBut everyone was thinking the same thing at the
same time. It was like we all knew what was going
to happen and didn't know what it was.
My turn to pause.
That means something, you can't deny it.
I don't.
He took the toothpick and balanced it on his forefinger.
He studied it for a momentIt's his face that frightens me. Maybe any face
would, but this one more than most.
94
I don't feel it,
I said-
Nobody else did, you'll get used to it. Maybe you'll
even trust him.
Maybe.
He wiped the toothpick on his sleeve and put it back in his
pocket. It was going to be one of those conversations without an end. He got up, looked over my shelves and
shrugged-this time with his shoulders and not his face.
Then he went out without a word. Roderigo was one of
those people who made you feel like you'd made another
mistake-and that you'd go on making them. Usually he
did it with a laugh-this time he didn't. I didn't care. It was
his problem, not mine. I never like to convince someone of
anything-my convictions were for myself. I didn't even
think much about them. I thought that I was born with
them. And that we all were. I believed that the Revolution
was a victory for all of us-whether or not we believed
in it.
It was the kind of day I kept trying to remember something I wasn't trying to forget. All day it was there. Like a
little particle of sand irritating the tissue around it. By the
time I lay down and fell asleep I'd been exhilarated so long
I was exhausted. It was then I realized-almost dreaming
it -that it was in fact the Anniversary of our Revolution.
How amazing he should've appeared then!
His name was Kamal. It was one of many things we were
soon to find out about him. After the first wall poster there
were many others-each one with his picture at the top
like an emblem. Or like his signature-in this case its position reversed-as if he'd signed his statement at the beginning to ensure its authenticity. That way we were to know
what followed was genuine and to be believed in. Each
morning I looked down at the wall from my window-the
shutters now left open day and night-and saw there was
another poster up. I threw on my clothes and raced downstairs. Others on the street did likewise-some of us stood
still buttoning our shirts or still combing our hair. We soon
got better at reading-our lips moved less-though there
was still a murmuring as we read. It was communal: we did
it together and enjoyed it. We didn't even notice that for
the first time we were together and that it was through and
because of him.
He told us a great deal about himself-his life history as
it were-but always in passing. His main subject was-as it
had to be-the Revolution. But we knew about that-or
thought we did-so it was him we were curious about. He
seemed to realize this. At the end of a short textWINTER/SPRING 1983
�THE REVOLUTION MUST GO ON, DO NOT
BETRAY IT, YOU ARE THE BYES AND
EARS, BEUEVE IN THE REVOLUTION AND
IT WILL BEUEVE IN YOU
and so on-were a few lines about himself. It was these we
read and reread until each of us knew his life history by
heart. His poor parents and their harassment by the tax
collectors of the Old Regime. How his brother had died as
a child from starvation. How his mother had wept and carried the body for days even though it was lifeless. How his
father had worked twelve and fourteen and sixteen hours a
day for a pittance. How he-Kamal-had had to work as
hard as a child-and how he'd begun to read. His reading
fascinated us-we did little of it ourselves and thought
that a man of action would do likewise. No, in his youth he
was almost scholarly. He'd gone to a seminary, then to a
university on scholarship, and then on to do post graduate
work abroad-all this while he worked nights as a sole support of his family. His father had become a cripple-victimized by a work accident that twisted his back and for
which there was no compensation. His mother had great
difficulty breathing-from the noxious fumes she'd had to
inhale at her factory. It was almost a blessing when she'd
died-for her last years were spent gasping for breath like
a fish out of water. We read in awe of someone who could
transform himself from such a background to a life of
scholarship-and then out of nowhere to become the embodiment of the Revolution.
The wall posters became a vital part of our lives. You
saw parents taking children down to read them-then children saying them to themselves as they walked home. The
wall posters were not easy to read-they were pasted one
on top of the next and the wall itself was often pitted and
cracked to begin with. So reading one wall poster was a
reminder-admittedly subconscious-of all the others you
had read that were under it. In this way, the Revolution
that often seemed to have little or no history began to take
on a collective past for us. There was another problem
with them-their printing. We had little experience of it
and whoever was doing it was learning his craft as he went.
There were differently shaped letters in the same word,
smeared ink that ran in the rain, and lines of printing that
went up to edge of the poster and off it -so between that
and the line below was a gap of meaning our reading had
to leap over. We learned to interpret these signs as we
learned to read-they made the text all the more intriguing. At the bottom of each poster was an imprimatur in
tiny letters-Errico studio, it said. We wondered where
that was-we never knew. What an honor to be the first
among us to read his thoughts-like walking up to him and
shaking his hand.
At this point there were those who had doubts. About
him. About the course of the Revolution itself. As days
went by and summer began I heard more and more people
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
whispering. I thought of Roderigo. I hadn't seen him since
he'd confided in me. I was sure I had doubts myself-to
have seen Kamal in person would've dispelled them for
me. And for most of us. But he didn't appear. We weren't
dealing with an ordinary man. He knew of our doubts as I
was sure he knew of everything in our minds. I always got
the feeling he could read them-the same way we read his
through the wall posters. Before long we read there would
be a sign-one that would show each of us that he was real
and the real extent of his powers.
THERE IS GOOD AND THERE IS EVIL IN
THE WORLD. THE REVOLUTION IS GOOD.
ALL ELSE IS EVIL.
It was simple-we understood.
THERE IS ONE TRUTH AND THAT IS THE
TRUTH OF THE REVOLUTION. IT IS UKE
LIGHT. WITH IT YOU CAN SEE AND WITHOUT IT YOU ARE LOST IN THE DARK.
BROTHERS AND SISTERS, BELIEVE!
We wondered what that sign was going to be. There was all
sorts of speculation. People spoke of a trembling of the
ground or other kinds of apparently natural phenomena.
Perhaps we got a little too metaphysical in our enthusiasm.
When his sign came it was as striking as it was appropriate
and all the more convincing for us.
It was late one evening and I was in my room sitting by
myself in the dark. I heard a scratching at the door. It was
Oggi-who else? He was among the sceptical but I sensed
in him someone waiting to believe. I let him in and he
dropped his weapons in the corner with a clunk. I made
some coffee and we sat sipping it. The windows were open
and there was a pleasant breeze blowing the curtains back
and forth. They brushed against my arm from time to
time-for a moment I thought I'd been touched by some
hands. It sent a sensation through me I wasn't sure of. It
was as we sat there-the two of us not talking-that we
began to see it happening. The city was lighting up. Bit by
bit. The area by the marina went on. Then that near the
National Museum. Then near the foot hills. Oggi and I put
down our mugs as one and stood up to lean out. We still
didn't speak but our shoulders rested against each other.
Then my own room lit up and it became as bright as day.
Brighter. It was blinding. We turned from the window to
try and look. I shielded my eyes. There were flashes that
seemed to go off in my head. I blinked a few times and
began to see. There was a single light bulb hanging from
the ceiling by a cord-l'd long ago forgotten about it. And
there it was on again. I laughed. Spasmodic. Nervousness
mostly. And the expression in Oggi's face was miraculous.
A cross between anger and being hurt. Then amazement.
95
�He went up to the bulb and touched it with his finger. He
jerked it back and brought it to his ,mouth. It was already
too hot. He was shaking his head back and forth. Of course
he knew what it was-we all did-but electricity was so
strange for us. To have been without it for so long and
then to have it again-that was ridiculous. There was a
switch on the wall that'd been there all the time-! went
over to it and moved it down. The bulb went out. I moved
it up and the bulb went on again. Oggi laughed and put
out his finger to touch it-then stopped. He smiled at me
and shook his head. Then he went to the switch and
flicked it back and forth several times. The light went on
and off again. Each time we laughed and louder. And
harder. Soon we were laughing so hard Oggi got the hiccups. I slapped him on the back and he stood hiccuping
and shaking his head.
Unbelievable!
he gaspedUnbelievable!
I couldn't have agreed more though the strange thing was
that we did believe. And we knew we owed it all to Kamal.
That summer was so mild. The breezes came off the sea
and kept the city cool and temperate. It was so pleasurable.
We felt a new and assured sense of security.
It was a time for hard work and no play-Kamal told us so
and we believed.
THE REVOLUTION WANTS YOUR SPIRIT
AND YOUR HANDS
we read-and all of us wanted to join in. Oggi came bythis time his hands were empty and he carried no
weapons.
I buried them,
he answered my inquiring lookI'm not going to be needing them.
And he was gone-in search of a trowel or some digging
implement. Such was our confidence! In ourselves. In Kamal. I walked wherever I pleased and in the middle of the
street. All over I saw groups of children and young
adults-they were picking up bricks, one by one, and setting them in piles. For so long the city had been a place
caught in mid-movement-it was the Revolution that had
stopped it like that. I passed a bank where the construction
looked like it was still going on. The hoists were in place,
mortar had hardened on the trowels, the ladders still led
up from floor to floor. It was these things we thought we
could get going again. Everywhere there were people
96
clearing and scraping and washing off. When I walked past
they looked up and waved-then went back to their work.
There was a sense of camaraderie-to be out and working
together felt so good. Because it was for us-and for him.
I had my problems-that is, my business. There were so
many things I'd saved up that were all of a sudden of no
use-most obviously, candles. I was loathe to throw them
away so I simply stuck them in the back of my shop. You
could never tell, I told myself-how often I'd predicted
one thing only to have another happen. My motto was to
keep it -whatever it was-even if at the time it made no
sense. I had to find new things-and fast-so I was out
looking around the city for one thing in particular. Light
bulbs. I'd had to wade through piles of junk to get my
hands on one of seventy-five or a hundred watts. For me it
was a new technology-to survive I had to adapt to it.
Wherever I found one I unscrewed it from the socket and
wrapped it in tissue paper. Light bulbs were so fragile unlike most of what I carried-candles were a lot easier to
take care of but then no one was going to want them. I
spent my days walking all over the city looking for light
bulbs-and I found them. Where I expected-where
they'd been left-in apartments and offices long since
abandoned. To me they were small and precious and delicate. And it wouldn't be long before everyone else thought
so too. We were so excited by the electricity that we left
our lights burning day and night. You'd see people switching them on and off for the sheer fun of it-like Oggi and
me. When it was dark and I was walking around I could
look in and see the bulbs burning. People were gathered
under them and looking up. No one drew their shades or
closed their shutters-at night we had no sense of our own
exposure. It was still so new to us. But I knew that sooner
or later the bulbs we had were going to go out-and others
would be in demand. I was trying to get my hands on every
last bulb I could find-to be ready for that time.
I had always to be one step ahead-if not I'd never make
it. The Revolution was carrying me and everyone else
along with it-that is, we never knew what was going to
come next. Everything-whether living or not-was part
of it-light bulbs as much as the rest. So meaning was
everywhere. If I had one ability above all it was my apprehension of this. It was easy to see that people were part of
the Revolution-even a child knew that-but many of us
never knew that things were also a part of it. Perhaps what
gave me so much confidence in Kamal was my sense that
he understood this too.
THE REVOLUTION IS IN YOUR HANDS. WASH
THEM! THEY MUST BE CLEAN!
EACH THING YOU TOUCH IS THE REVOLUTION.
IT IS THERE BEFORE YOU. IT IS THERE
AFTER YOU. REMEMBER YOU ARE NEVER
ALONE!
WINTER/SPRJNG 1983
�The most evident thing about his writings was his fondness for exclamation marks. I'd forgotten at first what they
were for-someone reading a wall poster next to me had
told me. Then I'd understood. How mcire than anything
else they conveyed his sense of urgency and emotion. It
was strange for us to think of him as emotional-the Revolution as we'd understood it had no room for that. It was
Kamal who showed us how mistaken we were. He made it
come to life for us.
THE REVOLUTION IS YOU. IT LIVES IN
YOUR HEART. IT BREATHES AS YOU
BREATHE. BELIEVE IN IT AND YOU WILL
UVE FOREVER!
Perhaps that's why we were no longer afraid of it-to be in
fear of yourself wasn't the same thing as to be in fear of the
unknown. Kamal made the Revolution familiar to us all.
He made us see it was something to feel for and even to
love.
Love wasn't too strong a word. We had no word that
meant the same thing all the time-or even for very long.
Love came closest to that. It wasn't a word I'd have used
for someone else-not for Oggi, much as I cared for him.
Nor for my mother, though you were supposed to love
your mother. She had made that relationship one that
couldn't be expressed by a word. The Revolution was different-it was in direct contact with each of us. It was Kamal who showed us what that meant.
LOVE THE REVOLUTION AND IT WILL LOVE
YOU BACK!
To us it was true and like so many things he showed us we
saw it as if for the first time. I always thought he could read
our minds but was more than that, he knew what we were
going to think before we thought it. In that sense all time
was present to him at all times-while we kept living our
day to day lives. When we read
THE REVOLUTION MAKES YOU JOYOUS
TODAY. YOU WILL BE SADDENED TOMORROW.
it was so. The next day our mood changed. We were subdued-some of us cried. I was ashamed of myself. Marissa
came by. I gave her what she wanted and asked for nothing
in return. She was part of us and understood. Her eyes
were wet and she reached up and touched me on the
cheek. Then shook her head.
I don't know
she said! don't know. I feel sort of sick like something's
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
gone out of me. I've lost something and I don't
know what.
I felt that way. I didn't say it. I helped her out of my shop
and down the street. I felt saddened by the rocking of her
limp against me. That mood didn't last.
THE REVOLUTION IS PEACE. PEACE BEYOND WORDS. As THE REVOLUTION IS
BEYOND WORDS. PEACE BE WITH YOU!
We felt better. There was Kamal again-penetrating into
each of our hearts and minds. Holding us. Gentle. Reassuring. For Oggi-for me-for everyone-he was more than a
father. He was fatherhood, too. Imagine-then-what it
was like to hear his voice for the first time!
It was late summer-hot, not unbearable. I sat in my
room wondering what to do next. I'd sold all my light
bulbs. They'd gone in a flash when their true value became apparent. Once the old light bulbs had all gone out.
There were no more to be had. I'd gone through more
piles of junk looking for them-no luck, they weren't
there. Much to my amazement I'd begun to start selling
candles again. That's what I meant about my business being unpredictable. Now the problem was what I was going
to live on next. That's what I was thinking about when I
heard it. A rumbling. Like distant thunder. I brushed the
curtains aside-there were no clouds. I listened some
more. It was continuous. I went down into the street. Everyone else was there-including Roderigo and Old Jubal.
I hadn't seen either in a long time. Roderigo winked at me.
Old Jubal adjusted his canes and waved with one handthe same gesture as if he'd opened a door. The rumbling
was there and getting louder. All of us were looking up at
it. There was a small black box-some form of loud
speaker, I supposed-affixed high up on a building. The
rumbling was coming from it-not continuous as I'd first
thought. Spaced. In a monotone.
OmOmOm
Pause
OmOmOm
Pause again.
Om Om Om
I felt like I was looking into something-there was movement and getting closer. My head began to ache some.
Then a crackle. High pitched. So piercing our first reflex
was to clap our hands over our ears-the crackle came
through them-through flesh as through stone. So when
97
�the voice began there was relief and a collective sigh. For a
few moments our ears kept ringing. I wasn't sure what I
heard. The words seemed to have echoes to them. It was a
man's voice-curiously shrill and feminine and sounding
none too cheerful. It took us a while to figure out whose it
was-though there was no one else's it could've been. I
was standing behind Old Jubal and saw him stroking the
grey stubble on his chin. Then his hand came out to mehis canes moved and he came closer.
It's him
he whispered. I didn't hear him. I was straining to hear the
voice from the black box.
It's him! Kamal!
This time I heard. There was a rustling among usRoderigo was nodding his head beside me. I realized it
too-how strange! We hadn't thought of him having a
voice-much less a voice like this one. It was so unpleas·
ant-like a querulous school teacher we'd long ago forgotten. Then there it was again. We were face to face with
it-and with him. Kamal. A real person, voice and all,
when we'd gotten used to him as a manifesto on a wall.
He knew this. He was still reading our minds:
Some of you may not like my voice, I don't like it
either. In fact, I don't think of it as my voice. It's
too harsh. It's not how I think of myself. It hap·
pened to me under torture. It was the torturers of
the Old Regime, they did it to me. You don't
know what it is, torture. I hope you never find out.
It destroys your body and your mind, one through
the other. The people who do this to other people
are no longer people.
Pause. There was some static. Kamal went on.
I lived through it somehow. You can if you believe
each day is your last, if you're willing to give it up,
all of it. I was. I didn't know what this meant. You
can't know while it happens to you, no one can.
Afterwards my voice was never the same.
Another pause. None of us moved. We stood with our eyes
fixed on the black box.
It took me a long time to get used to it. I'd stand in
front of a mirror and practice saying words. None
of them sounded right to me. I hated them. I
hated those who'd done this to me. Then one day
I realized something. I don't know how we find
out such things, they come to us from elsewhere,
as though there is another presence in us at that
time. What had happened was that my voice was
no longer mine alone. It was mine and that of the
Revolution. The Revolution was going to speak
through me. It was the pain and screaming that
took my own voice from me. It was the Revolution
that gave it back to me with a meaning. That is
why I wanted you to hear me. Some of you will be
disappointed. Then you will hear me again and
again. You won't notice it any more. It'll be the
most natural thing in the world. Like your own
98
voices that you hear every day. Because it is not
me you are listening but yourselves. There is one
voice for all of us. I listen. I look. I can even look
· into you. I know what it is you need, I know you as
I know myself. We are all children of the Revolution. That is why we are brothers and sisters. It is
the Revolution that gives life, life and meaning. It
is as close to truth as we can get. Without it we are
lost. So I say to you, believe in the Revolution, believe in its truth. If anyone tells you otherwise,
they lie.
There was the crackle again. Then
OmOmOm
and silence. It hung in the air around us. We were stunned
and didn't move. I wanted to cry like a little boy. I felt Old
Jubal reach out and touch me. I looked down at him. His
whole face was shades of grey, his skin, his stubble, his
hair. It was his eyes that were so striking-they too were
grey and flecked with something that sometimes shone.
Like now.
Well, my friend, we've heard him
he whispered
Let's go home.
I didn't know where his was or if he had one-I assumed
he meant mine. He got his canes moving and we moved
off-! was behind him. I didn't want to go-I felt I was
tearing myself away. There was something about the place
where I'd stood as I listened. There was something about
his voice. It was hard to get used to and hard to forget. It
was from then that we truly began to believe in Kamal. I
supposed it was because his voice was so unexpected. It
was the unexpected in the Revolution that always convinced us because it had no precedent.
What do you think of him?
I meant Kamal. This time I saw his head shift and even in
the dark I saw a kind of sparkle in his grey eyes.
We need him
Old Jubal saidWe need him as much as he needs us. Without us
he's nothing. And he knows it.
That was his answer-all of it. I waited for more-there
wasn't any. Old Jubal was that way-cryptic-enigmaticsometimes illusive. Questions weren't much help-he
talked about what he wanted to talk about. Often his
dreamsThey are as life
he saidOnly more so.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�I didn't know much about dreams-I 4sually couldn't tell
if I had any. Old Jubal said he remembered each one.
I had five last night
he went on.
Let me tell you some, my friend. In one I was a
little boy again with my feet. I was playing football. Dribbling. I must've been a center forward. I
was dribbling back and forth from one goal to the
other. No one could catch me. The players on
both teams tried to catch me. They couldn't.
They couldn't get near the ball. I kept it. It danced
from my feet as through on a string. Then they
got me cornered. All of them. Like dogs. I began
bouncing it on my head. They were jumping up
and down around me trying to get it. They wanted
to reach out and grab it with their hands. They
couldn't, they couldn't touch it.
He paused.
My friend, I am always afraid. You should be too.
I shrugged. I wasn't-for the time being.
Not now
I said.
You should be, you must be.
He answered.
The Revolution needs people. It feeds on them. I
go all over. I see things other people don't see.
There are so many parts of the city, large parts,
with no one there. I ask myself where they are.
Can you tell me where they are, my friend?
I didn't know-! didn't say.
I'll tell you. They've been eaten!
What? Eaten? Ridiculous! How? Why?
He was thinking. I was too. What did he mean? I couldn't
say it was nonsense-Old Jubal wasn't like that-! had to
figure out what he meant. It was dark now. The candle
flickered and went out. There was a faint glow from the
city's lights-whitish. The stars again looked brighter now
that the lights were less.
It's simple. You won't like it, my friend. The Revo·
lution is hungry all the time, starving. It doesn't
like dogs and cats. If it did there aren't enough of
them anyway. And they're scrawny. So what's it
going to live off? The answer's obvious.
Pause.
Us! Look how nice and plump we are. Even when
we don't eat much. Not you so much. Not me. The
others. I'm old and I stink. After my good meal of
beans and hot sauce I might taste good. I doubt it.
But think of all the boys and girls out there. And
they're so young and tender. All that meat! Do you
think the Revolution can resist?
You don't really believe this?
I exclaimedIt isn't possible.
It is, my friend, it is. What I mean is this. The Revolution is living off us, it has nothing else to live on.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
And when we are gone it will go too.
I heard the clatter as he bent and picked up his canes. It was
so dark I couldn't see his face-there was some light on the
table beween us.
I'm old
he said
And I don't taste good. It doesn't matter much to
me. It's all the others I'm afraid for. And that
means you. Think about it.
Pause.
Now it's time to sleep and dream.
We did. That night I dreamt for the first time I could
remember.
We got up and set off down the street. It was then that
we heard the
Om Om Om
and the crackle that followed it. There wasn't anyone else
under the black box above us so we stopped by ourselves.
Brothers and sisters
it began-it was Kamal, of course-by now we knew his
voice by heart.
I must be honest with you. I have bad news. The
Revolution is in danger. What I can't say at this
time. Believe me it is. I will reveal it in due course.
It is a danger to all of us. It comes from within and
without. We must be vigilant.
He paused and there was a coughing. The first time I'd
heard him cough-strange to hear. Oggi looked over at
me-l shrugged. Kamal went on-the first few words halt·
ing as if to catch his breath.
The Revolution is a living thing. We must never
forget that. Like any thing that lives it can be
threatened. A threat to it is a threat to all of us. And
a threat doesn't always look like what it is. We must
learn to look for it. Look for anything that doesn't
fit in. Anything strange, anything unknown. You
know the Revolution. It is yours. Look for things
you don't know.
He paused again. I thought I heard music in the background like a band on parade. He coughed some and muffled it with his hand over his mouth. Much as we thought of
him as the embodiment of the Revolution, I didn't think
we thought of him as a man like other men. Even his shrill
voice made him distinct. His coughing had the opposite
effect. It sounded all too human. We waited and he went
on.
To conclude. There is a clear and present danger.
There are always others who would take my place.
99
�You will not know them. They will not know you as
I do. They haven't my face 'or my voice. Beware of
them. I will be among you ..
There was the crackle and the Om sound and Oggi and I
stood looking up at the black box expecting more. I felt he
was talking to each of us-as if he were present in the box
and looking down at us. Kamal was so enigmatic-we could
never be sure what he meant. There was danger, yes, but
what kind? how to look for it? and how for him to be among
us? The idea of his walking around shaking hands seemed
preposterous. That clearly wasn't what he meant. But we
were learning-always-to wait and watch. The Revolu·
lion had so much to teach us. I felt a little like a child who
had still to learn not to touch what was hot because it
burned.
the morning at the same time I opened my shutter-then
someone would come along and raise it. Like Marissa or
Roderigo. They'd sayThese are really worth twice as much
once they bought it After they left I doubled the price. By
midday I might've gone up two or three times-particu·
larly if it was something people really wanted-like ice on a
hot day in summer. Or in late spring as it then was. Ice was
a marvelous commodity because it melted and was so per·
ishable. I kept it buried in sawdust in the basement and
brought little chunks of it up-gradually at first, then to·
ward the end of the summer all at once. My timing had to
be so precise. If I waited one day too long by then it was
worthless. That's what had happened to Kamal's coins.
They shrank in value day by day. What was more amazing
they shrank in size too. They got lighter. His image on them
got blurred. And the metal itself changed color. It got redder, then turned bluish and finally went green. I asked for
more and more of them in exchange for less. A pack of
cigarettes, for example-especially good American ones
like Viceroys or L and Ms. These went from a handful of
coins to a bagful in the space of a few days. As always
Marissa caught on fast-she started buying cigarettes
when I'd thought she didn't smoke. It wasn't the cigarettes
she was after-it was the coins she wanted to avoid.
How to read the Revolution: that was the trick. It wasn't
simply a question of reading the wall posters-by now
these appeared with monotonous regularity and were read
and as soon forgotten. Nor did we pay that much attention
to his voice-it still came on at all times of the day or night
and we listened while doing something else. Having heard
his story the first time the retelling of it held no great inter·
est for us. His voice we got used to also-the shrillness of it
we came to think of as artifact of the broadcast itself. When
he told us to be on the alert we paid attention-for a timethen our attention lagged. Perhaps we already recognized
that the Revolution would go its own way-not that he,
Kamal, would lead it. He never appeared to us in personwe began again to doubt his existence-in spite of the elec·
tricity and the coins. We might have thought differently
had we to approach him on bended knee or grovelling on
our stomachs. Then we would've thought of him as a
God-but we didn't. I didn't know how it happened: how
we came to think of him as simply another image-as de·
based in time as the coinage on which his face appeared.
That was of more interest to us. The reading of it for a
while was a great skill like divination. Particularly to me in
my business-the coins even without any denomination
were as tricky as the Revolution itself. I'd learned to accept
them-take them as money-when I no longer cared much
about money. I took them in lieu of things. I'd fix a price in
100
The Revolution played such games with us. We were
children to it-the city and all of it our playground. We got
used to this or thought we did-it was all a game, we
thought. Perhaps that's why the real children were so good
at it. They caught on fast. They didn't have a sense of time
to hold them back. And that's why we thought so little of
the past, if at all. It was an impediment to us, a dangerous
one. To get rid of it-to forget-was to be ready for what
came next. I wasn't. I was waiting for her to come back.
This time I hadn't forgotten.
Old Jubal paused and ran his right forefinger along his lips.
I knew the sign-it meant a story.
When I was a student,
he began,
I wasn't very good, as a student. I'm always forget·
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�ting things-simple things. Like how to multiply
and how to spell and each subject we get to I think,
"This is the hardest subject. I'll be so glad to get
through it." But, no, my friend, it wasn't. There
were harder subjects. And harder teachers to go
with them. I had to learn algebra and trigonometry
from an Egyptian. And chemistry and physics
from a Greek.
Pause.
I never get over it. When I think it's going to get
easier it doesn't. So I leave.
I quit school. I never go back. Maybe I join the
army-maybe I drive a taxi. It doesn't matter. I
don't remember. I forget it with all the things I
studied. All I learned is this-to give thanks for
the present. So simple, eh?
He raised an eyebrow.
You know what I mean?
I nodded. Old Jubal sometimes took a long time to get to
the point. He jabbed his finger at me.
No, you don't. If you did you wouldn't be here.
I looked down at my feet. I didn't want to say anything to
offend him. I let him go on for a while-I wasn't paying
much attention. I thought of Lelia for a bit-then of what
I had to get done that day. Suddenly his canes were moving and he propelled himself over and against where I sat.
My friend, suppose I tell you that in days all of this
will be gone. Poof. Like that.
He made a gesture with his left hand as he said it -the
fingers shot out from his closed fist and then closed again.
Gone. Like you're in a desert and dying of thirstyour lips are swollen and black. You stink like I
stink.
I raised my hand to say no-to say I didn't mind. He
brushed it aside and went on.
Eh? what does it matter? You see palm trees,
some silver water below them. So you run. You
can't breathe but you run. You get there. And
what do you find? Eh? Surprise. No surprise.
More sand. Nothing but sand.
He paused.
It's like that, you know. To me this Revolution is a
living thing. It needs to eat and drink. Nobody
sees this now. They will. It's going to get thirsty.
It's going to suck up everything in sight. And all
the things you can't see. You and me with it.
Nothing is ever going to be the same-except
worse.
He was sweating-he wiped the sweat from his forehead
with the back of his hand. I don't know what I'd expected
him to say. I believed him-why not? It was always that I
didn't know what it meant. I got up to get him another
cigarette-the air was thick with smoke-! smelt it all over
myself. He didn't want it-he waved me to sit down. His
eyes fixed me.
You still don't know what I mean.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
It wasn't a question.
I don't know myself. What it means for all of us. If
I did I wouldn't be here.
We sat. I thought of Lelia. She didn't belong in our company-the city wasn't a place for her. It was better for
those like Old Jubal and me-those who didn't expect
much-those who didn't care much when they didn't get
it. That was the Revolution again-doing things to timegetting rid of the past and the future. To leave us with a
present that had so few references to it. I should've left
then-! should've listened-! should've known. I didn't. I
had a sense of fear.· That should've been enough. I
should've taken her and gotten out. It wasn't going to be
like that though.
Somehow we'll manage. I always seem to get by,
I said and I left it at that. He scowled at me and opened his
mouth. I saw the gold filling flash.
What about her?
he asked and got up and got his canes moving. He brushed
past me and was gone. It was then it struck me-l didn't
know whom he'd meant. I hadn't told him about Lelial'd never mentioned my mother. With Old Jubal that
didn't matter-he knew there was someone else.
It was Oggi who told me-although I could've found out
from anyone. He came early-I heard his scratching at the
door and let him in. It was drizzling and his face and matted hair glistened with it. He was bursting to tell me-but
wouldn't until I'd asked him over and over. Then it came
out-there were rumors throughout the city that Kamal
was gone.
See!
he smirked! told you so! Didn't I tell you? I knew it.
And then-spitting out his contemptWhat else could you expect from someone like
that?
I didn't answer-there wasn't one. We knew something
had happened-it took us time to find out what. There
was a great surge of happiness, almost elation. And there
was also a sense ofloss. No one knew what to do next. Now
everything seemed possible. Oggi and I headed out into
the street to see what was going on. All sorts of rumors
were on everyone's lips. There was a rustle among people
like dried leaves-on each face, expectancy. As the day
went on we got more and more excited-by the sense of
ourselves and the Revolution. The drizzle stopped. The
clouds broke up and moved west. The sun shone brightly
on streets that were slick and wet. Oggi and I walked aim-
101
�lessly. I wished Lelia were with us-that would've made
the day perfect. I intended to go and get her. I didn't. Per·
haps because I didn't like to think of her as part of the Revolution. To me she was something secret and private-and
all the more precious for being so.
Oggi got more impetuous. He dragged me along behind
him when I wanted to stop and chat. There were rumors
flying all over-that Kamal had fled by boat or by land or
that he'd been picked up by plane. That he'd taken hundreds of suitcases with him containing the sum total of our
wealth. That he was limping and coughing as he went and
hadn't long to live. Strangely we didn't care why. We
pushed and jostled each other in the streets-we slapped
each other on the back and clasped hands. There was a
great feeling of togetherness and moment like swallows
out at sunset and circling. We all felt part of the great undertaking that was our Revolution. No longer was it personified by a man. It was greater than any of us, no matter
how great he might seem. With Oggi that afternoon I felt a
great sense of clarity and companionship. The high purpose of the Revolution was raising us above ourselves. It
was such a great feeling-it was all over so soon. Amazingly, we never knew we were a city under siege until it
was over. We went back to our rooms and slept that night
and dreamt of the Revolution in myriad forms-and while
we did so it ended.
Like that.
Or so it seemed.
The following morning we found out what had taken
place without our knowledge. Oggi and I were hanging out
the window. The air was crisp and the sun bright. He was
humming to h1mself.l was scratching my head-! always
had this itch there when I woke. Then both of us stopped
what we were doing.
What's that?
he said. I looked out and saw it too. For there it was-a
small dark figure at the far end of the street-looking like
anyone else walking down it. Except it wasn't. We knew at
once it wasn't. It got closer-it turned out to be a boyabout Oggi's age or a little older. He was walking nonchalantly down the middle of the street-as if he knew it well
or didn't care. He wasn't one of us-that was for sure. He
was dressed in black and wore a soft hat. His chest was
crisscrossed with bandoliers and there were weapons over
his shoulders and in each hand. It was most of all his face
that was different. More angular than one of ours and
much darker. As he got closer we saw it was leathery as if
endlessly burned by the sun. We saw him look up and see
us-sort of. There was no reaction beyond the flicker of
his eyes.
He went on and many others like him followed. We saw
them filling the end of the street. They made it black with
their bodies. They moved down it until there was nothing
but blackness in it. They weren't all the same. Some were
older. Many were younger and no more than children.
Some had armbands that showed authority. They were all
102
heavily armed-like walking arsenals, I thought. And their
faces all looked hard and leathery, no matter how young
they looked. By now the windows all along the street were
filled with us looking down. You could sense the questions
on everyone's lips. Who were they? Where did they come
from? What was happening? I looked over at Oggi-his
lips were moving as if he meant to speak and didn't know
what to say. The presense of obviously superior beings
filled us with fear and trembling.
A little later we heard the first sounds of the cars and
trucks-the grating of gears and the revving of engines.
The air began to fill with the smell of gasoline. Smoke and
fumes hung in a grey brown cloud over the city in that
direction and drifted to cover the rest of it. And the cars
and trucks were coming out from under the cloud and
roaring down the street. And all the streets all over the
city. The cars and trucks were of all sizes and shapes and
descriptions. Each was jammed full of heavily armed men
also dressed in black. They were in jallopies and in the
backs of roadsters, on dump trucks and pickup trucks, in
jeeps and station wagons. It was awesome. The air was
thick with smoke and fumes. We were soon coughing and
wheezing and gasping for breath. We weren't used to the
smell of gasoline nor to the exhaust-it made us dizzy.
The noise of the engines was deafening-we covered our
ears with our hands. It was no use-the sound went
through walls as easily as through flesh. We were overwhelmed by it. I felt too tired to move, even to hold up my
hands. They fell to my sides. There was a great fatigue
over all of us. Our euphoria of the day before was dead and
gone. None of us had the faintest idea what was going on.
We waited to be told.
The cars and trucks came to a stop all over the city with
their engines still running. The fumes rose from them and
made our eyes water. It was as if we were crying and many
of us were. Men with megaphones soon appeared in the
streets. Their voices boomed off the buildings and echoed
in our rooms. There was nowhere they couldn't be heard.
Citizens,
they saidDon't be afraid. We have come to help you, to liberate you from your oppressors, to give you back
your freedom. You have only to follow instructions and no harm will come to you. Stay inside
and don't come out.
So we did-for days.
To pass the time Oggi and I played games. All kinds of
games-tic-tac-toe, blind man's bluff, jacks, charades, pin
the tail on the donkey-anything to try and take our minds
off what was happening. Or had happened. Soon we began to get used to it-as did all of us-and we saw that, no,
this wasn't the end of the Revolution. It wasn't over. What
had happened to it we didn't know. There was no way to
tell. Each of us was alone with our fears and doubts. The
Revolution remained. It was the one thing we had that was
permanent. More so than buildings or streets, certainly
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�more so than ourselves. The Revolution was like nature to
us-if everything else were taken away '\t remained. So we
sat in our rooms~ each of us alone, no matter how accompanied. For us the Revolution was our greatest
consolation.
It never ceased to dumbfound me that when change
took place it was either so slow it never occurred to us or it
was so fast it was over before we had any awareness of it.
Instead we had to get used to it-as if it was a state of
things that'd always been-when the youngest of us
could've remembered a time when it wasn't. To have done
so would've meant great peril-this above all was an ac·
cepted fact. That's why remembrance for us was so much
a process of selectively forgetting. To start over each day
with new relationships-between people and between
things-and to accept them as givens. It was a criterion of
life for us-the one that mattered if all others didn't. And
so often they were in doubt-how could they not be? It
was hard, if not impossible, to know what was constant in
ourselves when we had so little to measure it against. For
me that was what made Lelia so remarkable-though she
herself didn't think so. In that sense I supposed I was like
every romantic who had ever been. I thought of her as a
North Star or a Southern Cross-to navigate by across
endless dark wastes. Not surprisingly, then, as soon as we
could go out, I did-to her.
She was sitting mending while her old aunt snoozed.
She let me in, gave me a kiss on the cheek and went back
to her mending. That was her livelihood. People brought
her shirts that were torn, dresses that'd been ripped, socks
with gaping holes in them-for we had always to make do
with what we had. I sat across from her and watched-she
was wearing a denim skirt and a white cotton blouse with
her hair in a pony tail. To me she looked like a little girleven though she was almost as old as I. That didn't matter-however she looked I worshipped her. And I worried.
How she was? Was she afraid? Hungry? Lonely? She was
all of these-and quite happy too. I never got over that
either: how anyone could be happy and mean it. But she
was and she did. Her happiness was infectious. I got it by
being near her. I'd smile-to myself at first-then outwardly. I'd get up and go look in the mirror-she used it for
fittings-and see the smile on my face, to make sure it was
there. It was. I saw it. Then I'd go sit next to her and hold
her hand. We'd sit there quietly-her hands still-she
wasn't doing anything-and I thought of us as sharing her
happiness-which was becoming mine too. Extraordinary!
That I was so happy-when all around-the whole city in
fact-was in such a state of turmoil and doubt. It was simTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ply that she seemed more real than anything else. I'd
watch her fingers making the intricate patterns of stitch or
weave and I could've sat there all day as though I were
watching bees building a honeycomb-driven to it by the
geometry in their minds. If I wanted to hold her hand
she'd let me for a while-she knew what it meant to me
and she liked it. Then she'd slide her fingers out of mine
and say
I have to go back to work.
It was all she had-I couldn't say no. It was still more than
anyone else had that I knew of.
Reassured she was all right, I soon left. Something was
bothering me-that is, everything. I wanted to walk and
have my own sense of what was happening. Because the
Revolution had taught me to use my eyes and all of my
senses-and to try and believe them. So as I walked I saw
the city getting used to its occupation. The cars and trucks
that so awed us were everywhere-as were the men in
black who were so heavily armed. They were ominous. But
they did nothing. They stood chatting in groups or sat in
their trucks oiling their weapons. They nodded as I passed
yet made no movement to stop and search me.
I saw Marissa limping along a street-she saw me at the
same time and her face lit up. She had some shopping bags
with her and asked when I was going to open. I told her the
truth. That I had nothing to sell. I promised to let her
know when I did. Many of us were out in the streets trying
to figure out what was going to happen next. There were
as many rumors as people and most of them were about
them. Our guardians, our protectors-whatever they
called themselves. We weren't sure. None of us talked to
them and they made no effort to talk to us. That was how
we referred to them-not knowing otherwise how to call
them. At that point they seemed quite peaceful-in spite
of their appearance. The smell of the gasoline was the
most striking sign of the occupation. It pervaded the city
with its sweetish odor, actually quite pleasant at times. But
there were also the fumes of the cars and trucks when they
were running. These made us short of breath and our eyes
watery. We saw everything through their grey brown haze.
The colors of the city were made dull and flat, from what
they were. In that sense the occupation didn't feel threatening to us-it was more like a change in the weather. And
the weather was strange. It drizzled off and on for days. A
warm drizzle, it was still late summer. There was a greenish mildew on things and their surfaces stayed moist and
slippery. All this time we thought we were getting used to
it. Kamal and what he represented was long gone and forgotten. Then there was the most surprising reminderlike a voice from the dead-in the form of a wall posterobviously his last.
BROTHERS AND SISTERS,
it read-
103
�I BESEECH YOU TO LISTEN TO ME ONE LAST
TIME. I WILL NEVER BE WUH YOU AGAIN
AND I MUST ASK YOUR PARDON FOR MY ERRORS.
FOR ME THE REVOLUTION WILL ALWAYS BE THE
GREATEST THING IN MY LIFE-AS YOU ARE
BECAUSE WE ARE ALL PART OF IT. I AM
GOING NOW-MY EYES WILL CLOSE AND I
WILL CROSS MY ARMS ACROSS MY CHEST. YOU
WILL BE WITH ME ALWAYS. I WILL NOT DIE
ALONE. I WILL THINK OF EACH OF YOU.
I WILL ASK PARDON OF EACH OF YOU. I
KNOW YOU BETTER THAN YOU CAN KNOW. FOR
ME THE FUTURE IS A BLESSING BECAUSE THE
REVOLUTION ALWAYS HAS A FUTURE. I
THINK OF EACH OF YOU FACING IT AND I SAY
BE BRAVE! COURAGE!
IT IS WHAT KEEPS US TOGETHER. WE WILL
ALWAYS HAVE IT AS LONG AS WE LOVE THE
REVOLUTION ABOVE ALL. FAREWELL, AND BLESS
YOU, MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS!
He was gone. We knew that..Not how. Not why. Kamal
never meant so much to us before. We realized that he had
seen what we hadn't. Now we were truly alone. We would
try to forget him because we had to. We knew that much.
But in forgetting him there would be a void where he had
been.
Fortunately Oggi was fascinated by spare parts and all
things automotive. He wasn't doing anything else so I had
him go out and scavenge the city looking for them. He'd
come back with the distributor caps and the oil filtersand all sorts of others I'd never heard of. He was getting
older and more responsible-I told him to keep them and
see what he could do with them. He was mesmerized by
the New Regime-or rather by its most obvious signs-the
cars and trucks roaring up and down the esplanades and
the avenues. To him they were a source of incredible
power-almost magical-yet I also knew how he hated the
New Regime. Most of us did-perhaps all of us-and for
no particularly good reason-beyond that it had so little to
104
do with our lives. And that it was different. Whatever the
reason our hatred of it was always unstated. No one gave a
sign of it-not as such-it was there in the flicker of an
eyebrow or the running of a finger across the bridge of the
nose. You had to know it was there to see it-once you saw
it there was hatred everywhere. It was directed most of all
toward a single enigmatic figure-or rather his name.
7Carlos7. The two things for us were the same.
For us he was a protean figure-a chimera of sortsthat we knew and didn't-all the more horrible for our ig·
norance of him. His image-of which there was nonewas the heart and soul of the Occupation. He came with
them-apparently he was their leader. So it was natural to
compare him with Kamal and the comparison was striking.
Because we never saw him-actually we never saw either
of them-but we never even saw a picture of7Carlos7 nor
heard his voice. He was there all the more so in his name.
To many of us it was the most horrible thing-some
wouldn't say it-if they did they spat it out. They weren't
supposed to, though. There was a way to pronounce itmeasured and without intonation. And we had to make
our peace with it. His name was an ominipresent sign of
the Occupation. Of course the Occupation wasn't what
they called it-to them it was still the Revolution. We got
used to their terms-we had to-and those who didn't
trembled as they spoke. As always your own language was
the fastest way to betray yourself. To whom? Not to usalthough us was less and less definable. They made their
presence merge with ours. Some of us became them. As
time went by what we might've once said to anyone we
would soon say only to ourselves or to loved ones. By then
they could be anyone. They made friends easily-a pack of
cigarettes or a stick of gum would do the trick. Before long
you were saying things you shouldn't. Or maybe you in·
tended to. This whispering went on all the time all over
the city-like a gentle breeze in early summer. In fact, it
was that time of year. The city had never been so beautiful. The trees had rich green growth on them. Flowers
were blooming in all the gardens. Or where gardens had
once been, in piles of rubble in the streets or out of the
cracks of walls. The city took on a festive air. There were
gay colors everywhere-bright blues and pinks, the reds of
roses and poppies, the oranges and yellows oflillies. When
Lelia and I went walking-we did so each evening arm in
arm-she loved to gather them and make a bouquet. She
set one in my room and one in hers-so even when she
wasn't with me I smelt the rich perfume of her flowers that
she was smelling, too. I'd gotten somewhat used to hershe more so to me-though at times I still moved too
abruptly and startled her. One of the joys of being with her
was the chance I got to forget myself.
I seemed a part of her-as did everything else. To me
even the Revolution paled beside her-she was gentle,
yes, she was also more vivid. I loved to watch her do
things-as much as I was coming to love her at rest. To
watch her make a pot of tea. It was such fun. Who
W!NfER/SPRING 1983
�would've believed it? Of course the pot was a can and the
strainer was a linen bag and the tea was a fine black substance like dark sand that the strainer never kept out.
There I was picking the tea from between my teeth with
the tip of a toothpick-the tip of my penknife. Still, I loved
to watch her making it-for me a ritual of great beauty and
meaning. Perhaps that's why I loved her. She illumined
everything she touched.
I couldn't fail to be aware of the incongruities of our relationship-there were so many. I to her. She to me. Both
of us to each other. Both of us to the Revolution. And to
the city. And to the Occupation. And to 7Carlos7. Whoever and whatever he was. We didn't discuss it. It was so
obvious because we lived there. Each of us wanted to find
something beyond what we had-and we had. We cherished it-yet we were afraid. That in spite of ali-or the
little-we could do something would happen to destroy it.
Which was why we never mentioned to each other any of
these things. Because any of them could. There was between us a conspiracy of silence and blindness-not to acknowledge what was there at every hand. At every word.
Whether they were there or not. The Revolution was in
language and thought-as was the occupation. As was
7Carlos7.
He wasn't something you could shut out. He was there
as we spoke between ourselves. He was there to me as I
thought. I thought of him as a mastermind that got into
each of our heads and spread like a bacillus. Yet to all intents and purposes there were no signs of it. Or him. Except in the oblique ways we learned to recognize. I always
thought two tenses belonged particularly to him-the pas-
Because no matter how many times you'd said it, as long as
you hated him-and by inference them-there was the
distinct possibility you would gag on it. As though swallowing gasoline. To mumble, to stutter, to pause in your enunciation-incredible-these were all life threatening acts.
Acts of insurrection they were called. No wonder we practiced his name so much. And the more we practiced the
more we got used to it. Our hatred submerged into ourselves. And we might just as well have hated ourselves.
Maybe we did. Hatred was such a mutable thing for us. We
didn't feel it. Then we were called upon to say his name.
And we did. No emotion-then a flicker of it-his name
spoken evoked it in us. It was then we were truly in danger.
Perhaps we got away with it that time. Perhaps we didn't.
It was so hard to tell. All we knew was that some of us disappeared-as though bodily sucked out of our lives. To
our friends and our relations there was no trace. We were
gone as if we'd evaporated. We knew speech had something to do with it. We knew the Occupation and 7Carlos7
obviously did. But the disappearances were as enigmatic
as his name. They happened. To some of us-to many.
There was no explanation. It was no wonder, then, that we
felt as if we were living on the edge of something at all
times. One false step and we'd be over the edge and gone.
To Lelia and me in love each day was an end in itself.
sive and the imperative. As in
That should be done,
and
Do it!
Incredible that so much power should be concealed in
such little phrases. And not just power-hatred-on our
part. As we recognized the source of that power. It was
insidious-we were made aware of it at all times-even
the most private. Because there was no privacy-as a concept it was dead and gone. There was a sense of concealment, of something to be hidden, not of something that
belonged to us. 7Carlos7 was the manifestation of this
awareness. I never knew for sure if he was a man or not. I
assumed so-it wouldn't have been the first time I was
wrong. He was definitely a presence.-One that spoke to
us in the passive and the imperative. A voice, without a
face, without a voice, nonetheless, a voice. Lelia didn't like
to say his name even to me. It made her uneasy, at times,
nauseous. I couldn't blame her-but we had to learn how
to say it as naturally as saying our own. I made her practice-! practiced myself. To say a name that was the object
of hatred without intonation was the hardest thing for
us-for anyone. That's why it was so revealing-that's
why they made us do it. We had to. It came up all the time.
Every time you said it there was the threat of revelation.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
I couldn't see the point of anything. The Occupation
had been going on for so long we thought it'd always been
there. It settled on us like the clouds of dark exhaust and
haze. We coughed all the time and spat blood and mucous.
The sun moved across the sky like a greyish orange ball.
Seen through the grey haze. The sunsets were fantastic
colors of purple and red. It was hot and muggy that summer. Moving my body and all the spare parts took all my
strength and some I didn't have. And there were times
when Oggi wouldn't do anything-he'd curl up on a pile
of spare parts, pick one up and oil and grease it for hours.
He was blacker than I was, pitch black. His eyes stood out
white in contrast. And he'd lie there for hours rubbing the
part back and forth whistling. The whistling got on my
nerves. When I asked him to stop he shrugged. And
stopped. A little later he started again. It wasn't the two of
us-it was everything. The heat. The air-or what was
now air. The furtiveness that had come over us. 7Carlos7.
And fear.
There was so much of it-all different kinds. There
were more fears than we ever had words for, all of them
would have made our language nothing but synonyms for
fear. Myriad ones. Because it was everywhere and in every-
105
�thing. Most of all it was the fear of disappearance-that
we'd wake one morning and be gone. So many had. Fear
abstract and fear particulate. In contrast the spare parts
business had become a tired joke to me. I'd gotten into it! didn't want to think about it anymore. I wanted-if want
was the word-to sit in my room and be alone with my
fear. To be with someone else was to see fear in them.
With Oggi the fear took the form of whistling and rubbing.
With someone else it was a cough or running a hand back
and forth over the walls or floor. It was a fear of themthey like everything else were now signs of the Occupa·
tion. Fear of cars and trucks. Fear of them as people. Fear
of the little man who came to my shop. Fear of myself.
Fear of giving myself away. Fear of speech. A name-his
name. So many specific fears-fear of each object we
came in contact with-each fear a little different from the
others. To anyone not living as we were such fears
would've seemed unbelievable. Fantastic. Like a chi!·
dren's story of ogres and giants and princesses carried
away from them by princes on the wind. To us it was the
most natural thing in the world. Fear had always been part
of the Revolution-now it was more so-taking a new
form with new objects. Whatever was part of the New Re·
gime was part of fear. Those of us who weren't-that
meant all of us-had it in our blood. Like water we drank it
in and it came out like urine. It passed through us-we
were where it was for a time-then on-through us over
and over-the process repeating itself-endless.
There it was again-the face-or part of it. I saw it for
an instant-then my food came through and the panel
closed. That was it-my contact with the outside worldthat and my bit of blue sky-or whatever color it was. I'd
thought I could get used to anything-the Revolution
made us that way-adaptable or not at all. As always there
was something else-something we didn't expect because
we'd never thought of it. In one sense I'd disappeared. To
everyone I'd known I was gone-ceasing to exist. Yet to
myself-the one person that really mattered-! was very
much there-all the more so because so much else was
gone. The face was the only thing human around-it
peered through the panel in the door-if I didn't move it
studied me. The eyes staring-the ears and chin cut off by
106
the door-that made the face disembodied. In spite of that
it was companionship of sorts. I called to it-it never an·
swered. Or its answer was my food-on the floor~ I didn't
get there in time to catch it. Splot. I had to scoop it up with
the side of my hand and lick it off. It tasted of the floor and
the fungus that grew there. A grey green fungus that flour·
ished because the floor was moist and cold. That was my
vegetation-my flora. And my fauna was a small bug about
the size of my thumbnail that crawled over the walls. I got
used to it-it was the first thing I looked for each daythough I no longer thought of them as days. There was
light-there was dark-there was a sense of alternation
back and forth between them. That was what my calendar
had been reduced to. Each day I got up and washed my
face at the pipe in the corner-! then squatted over the
hole..:.. I balanced myself with my hands against the wall.
That was perhaps the pleasantest experience of the daymy bowel movement. I looked forward to it. Afterwards I
felt relief. Almost composed. My body felt in a state of
equilibrium-I'd gotten rid of what I'd eaten and my
waste. I felt a need to be only myself-and no more. I felt
no suffering as such-~he only thing that bothered me was
the bed springs. They squeaked and rattled when I moved
on them. I never got used to the sound. It woke me at
night-over and over-which is why I had no nightmares.
I woke before they could form. Which is why I was always
so tired. Exhausted. There was no way to get relief from
the things in my mind. They kept piling up-all the things
I didn't think of. And kept forgetting. They were there and
had weight-getting heavier and heavier the more I
couldn't sleep. I tried to sleep on the floor. The cold and
moisture and slime of the fungus were worse than the bed
springs-they made my skin creep. So I went back to
sleeping on the bed-bad as it was it wasn't the worst.
Nothing seemed so bad to me that in time wasn't ordi·
nary. I looked for the bug and saw where he was-! waited
for the face to appear and thought of it as my face. The
eyes staring at me through the panel were the only reflec·
tion of myself I had. I wondered about all the things that
didn't happen. They would've been explanations of what I
was in for. There weren't any and I never knew. Not at
that point. There was no questioning and no duress. At
times I thought I heard cries in the distance. No one ever
came for me. Maybe they weren't cries but doors closing. I
had nothing to go by. Beyond the face, or the part of the
face, which in itself told me nothing. Except that it was
part of something human-that I too was part of. But the
humanity of it was less than I was used to. And I wasn't
used to much. I had nothing to do and nothing to think of.
I lay on the bed and tried not to move. That became a skill
in itself. To alter my weight so the bedsprings wouldn't
squeak. Because it was all I had I became more and more
aware of my body. Preoccupied with it, in fact. I studied
my hands and the way they moved. I spent hours bringing
my thumb across to touch my little finger-or closing my
fingers into my palm to make a fist. Each motion that
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�seemed simple enough in itself got increasingly complex
when looked at in detail. I tried to move my fingers so
slowly I couldn't see them move. As if I were a creature
that was going to live forever and had all the time in the
world to do whatever it wanted.
Before I did anything I thought about it to decide if it
was worthwhile. That is, if it had a purpose. Most things
didn't. So I eliminated them-in the same way I got rid of
waste with my bowel movement every day. I wanted to get
by on less and less. To be like the bug on the wall that took
all day to get from one point to another. He too had all the
time in the world to go back. There was a lot to learn from
him. Somehow I'd decided he was a he. And I studied his
movements with the same intensity that the face studied
me. Eyes staring, lids unblinking. The bug made me care·
ful of where I stepped and how I moved. The last thing I
wanted to do was to crush the bug inadvertently. I was
concerned for him. When he didn't move for an unusual
length of time I got up, ever so slowly so the bedsprings
rustled but didn't squeak, and went over to take a look.
Perhaps I saw his antennae quiver or one of his wings was
raised-his wings weren't much-stumps more like. What·
ever it was adequate-my companionship remained as~
sured. I went back to bed as slowly as I'd moved from it.
One thing above all never ceased to amaze me each time I
lay down-its length. Because it was mine. My feet
touched one end and my head the other-the bed itself
didn't seem accidental. That is, it seemed part of a greater
plan, one that in time might be revealed to me. Not that I
was unhappy with where I was. I felt more secure than I
might've felt elsewhere. But that peace of mind was an ar·
tifact, as was my bodily composure. I had only to think of
her, any part of her, an ear, a little finger, a lower lip-and
my body began to shake as from a fever. The bedsprings
squeaked. The walls appeared to vibrate in time. My heart
pounded and my skin prickled. It was the obverse oflovefear. The thought of her-any thought of her-triggered
it-and cast my whole being into doubt. I shuddered. The
bedsprings rattled. I didn't know what was happening to
me. I held onto the bedframe for dear life. And this didn't
happen once-it was over and over. I couldn't stop myself.
She was so dear to me that all else was at risk. I tried to
steady my mind-to look for the bug-to count the days.
It helped a bit. Afterwards I lay gasping for breath. Each
move I made was tentative.
One of those days was the Anniversary of the Revolu·
tion-I didn't know which.
I didn't mean to get angry-it happened like that-like a
light had gone off in my head-or I saw a flash and that
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
was the stimulus for it. Whatever the cause the transition
was so fast I wasn't aware of it. There I was not angrythere I was very much so. Pounding the door. Kicking it.
Not feeling the pain in my feet. No sensation, in fact. The
anger had taken me over as if it were another life form. I
was screaming-or shouting-whatever it was it was loud.
I heard my own voice so much magnified it wasn't mine.
My hands and feet seemed to be on their own too. It didn't
last very long. I hadn't the strength for it. It was there in a
short burst of tremendous energy. It was as soon spent.
Gone. I went back to nonanger, my muscles flaccid, my
skin sensitive again. It amazed me that I'd even been able
to get angry. There was nothing to get angry at. The face
wasn't there. The bug was high up and out of sight, the
blue sky was still blue sky. My anger-or any other emo.
tion I might've had-was incongruous. It had no purpose.
It didn't belong there. Without it I lapsed back onto the
bed. In time the face appeared in the door, my food came
through and the bug showed up on the wall not far over
my head.
I felt ashamed of myself. In relation to everything else
my anger was such a pettiness. I went and scooped up my
food. I ate. I was so used to the fungus I didn't taste it. If
the food smelled to me it was simply the smell of it. Not
bad. Not good. A characteristic of existence without crite.
rion. I began to identify with the bug. I thought of myself
looking down at myself on the bed. Larger and whiter than
necessary. And curious too. Why all the moving about?
And the noise? And the huffing and puffing? Imagine!
There was no sense of real economy about it. Truly the
whole thing was an enormous waste. It was so much better
to be so much smaller again I had the sense of going into
myself and looking out. In my head, I'd become as small as
the bug-the rest of my body was an enormous encum·
brance. I stopped eating. The food piled up in front of the
door in a little mound. It began to stink-not its own smell
anymore. Worse. Much worse. A smell with color-a
greenish orange. I became aware of the face looking in at
me more and more. I looked back as if from beyond. I no
longer thought it could see me. I saw a finger appear and
scratch the side of the nose on the face. And the expres·
sion-or that part of it I was exposed too-didn't stare as
much. I saw the face turn sideways. There was an ear and
hair. I heard a voice from very far off, like an echo. Or the
echo of an echo. Like a scraping. There was an intonation
to it so I took it to be a voice. It amazed me how much
better I began to feel. Lighter. Buoyant. The carcass I'd
been carrying around all these years was finally getting
manageable. I lay on the bed and had no need to think of
the springs and not moving. They squeaked, if at all, very
faintly. It was at this point I thought of my disappearance
as taking place. Not their disappearance of me. That had
already happened. This was mine of myself-as if bit by
bit I were withdrawing from my own existence. It was a
feeling most pleasant-not unlike that at the end of my
bowel movement. After much pushing and squeezing I
107
�was left with a sense of self and a relief from waste. I felt an
obvious lightness-not giddy-I remained clear-eyed and
stable. Things seemed far away and distant and had no
·
hold on me.
It was in this state I saw the door open and a man come
in. He had a stool under his arm and he set it on the floor
and sat on it. He looked very small-no larger than my
hand-the stool was small too. The size a child might have
for its dolls. He said nothing. He watched me and I
watched back. Then with alarm I realized he was getting
larger-or my sense of him was. I tried to hold myself back,
to keep away; I couldn't. I kept coming closer, as he did,
getting larger. I felt myself getting heavier and weighed
down, dense. It was his being there that'd done it to me. I
knew that much. And as he got larger his appearance took
on more detail. He was dressed as an officer of some sort.
There were epaulettes on his shoulders and gold braid
hung down from them. His uniform was a dark green and
creased so sharply there were angles to it. At some point I
was aware again I was my normal size. I saw his forefinger
tapping on his knee. What he thought of me I couldn't
know. His face-it wasn't the face in the door-was without emotion, though not without interest. I propped my·
self up in bed. The springs squeaked. I saw how close he
was, the dark color of his uniform filled my field of vision.
His hand reached into his pocket, took out a cigarette and
reached across and put it between my lips. The smell of
the tobacco, rank and acrid, and the dryness of its taste
against the tip of my tongue was a shock to me. The sec·
ond shock was when he lit it. The flame from his lighter
flared in my face and I jerked my head back. Then there
was the smoke from the cigarette itself. I puffed. It filled
my head and made me dizzy. I gagged on it. I coughed. I
felt the cigarette slipping from my lips. It did, onto my
chest, I watched it burn a small hole in me. I meant to
reach forward and grab it, but I couldn't move my arms or
my hands. My body twitched. There was the pain of the
burning, intense, pointing into me. Then his hand came
over and took it off and put it back in my mouth and held it
there. I puffed again. The smoke made me giddy. It filled
the room. It clouded over his face. It made my eyes water.
They closed. There was the burning pain in my chest,
though the cigarette was between my lips. I had to finish. I
knew that. I puffed and puffed. My head felt full of the
smoke. It also began to feel composed. Relaxed. My hands
didn't move but my fingers opened out from my palms. I
looked up at him, he must've seen it in my eyes. I was
grateful. He smiled, a narrow smile, no creasing of his
cheeks. Nonetheless a smile. I tried to smile back. I
thought I did. He took the end of the cigarette from be·
tween my lips and threw it in the corner.
That's better? No?
he said.
Mundt's the name. Pleased to meet you.
Pause.
How are you feeling today?
108
I meant to answer. I tried to. I opened my lips in an 0 to
speak. I thought of what I was going to say. Something in·
nocuous like fine or OK. Instead I said nothing. I mouthed
my answer. I knew I was saying nothing. I didn't know
why. He must've understood-this Mundt. He nodded
and his hand came forward and patted mine. It was then I
saw how huge his was. How hairy at the knuckles. How
large the knuckles were in relation to the rest of the finger.
There was something strange about them too. There was
an extra joint and the tips of the nails buried themselves in
the flesh at the tip of the fingei. I was more impressed with
his hands than with his uniform. I watched them as he
spoke.
Even if we don't expect you to be happy here, it's
not that bad is it?
Pause.
Food every day. Drink. Time to think things over,
no?
His forefinger pressed against his thumb-they flattened
out and the forefinger of the other hand came over to
stroke them.
Not at all what you expected, eh? A bit of a surprise?
I looked up-there was a twinkle in his eye. He settled
back on the stool.
You know we don't want anything from you. I
mean we're not going to torture you or anything
like that. I bet you've heard stories about interro·
gations. Electrodes to the genitals. All night beat·
ings on the soles of the feet. Maybe someone told
you about being hung upside down from a bar?
He sighed. His lips were large like his fingers. I nodded and
kept nodding. He seemed to expect it.
I thought so. It doesn't happen here. I don't know
where people get such ideas. They make them up
and then they believe them. There's nothing to be
afraid of. It's only natural to be like that, people
are. So what? It means nothing.
I looked down and saw the tips of his fingers come to·
gether to form a point. He looked down at it -then ·at me.
You can't help what you are, we know that. Nor
can anybody else. I mean if you're a petty bourgois that's what you are, no?
I nodded.
So we don't care about your little tricks. They
don't make any difference to us.
His voice was guttural and flat -as if he were resigned and
had said it many times before. A strange fellow this
Mundt-nice enough. I nodded as much as I could with·
out overdoing it. I wanted him to see I agreed with every·
thing he said.
If you hoard or steal or fabricate we don't care.
People don't believe it but we don't. If you call
yourself an entrepreneur that's your business.
He paused. His hand came up to the side of his face and
he ran his forefinger along his nose. My eyes moved up
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�with it and I found myself looking into his. I didn't mean
to. It happened without my awareness of it. They were
dark grey-the color of slate. I looked down as fast as I
could. I didn't want him to get upset. He licked his lips and
continued.
You know this place isn't so bad. There are lots of
people like you here. Well meaning. They don't
think they've done anything. I mean you don't
think you've done anything, do you?
I didn't nod. I shook my head. I'd almost nodded. I caught
myself in time. My mouth opened to speak, to say something, to explain. I didn't. I couldn't.
Everyone's the same.
He sighed.
That's why interrogations are useless. So we get
you to confess, then what? The next day you don't
remember any of it. If we want you to remember
we have to keep telling you. Day after day. It's
useless for everyone. Besides, there's nothing you
know that we need to. The whole thing is a waste.
He looked down at his feet. His fingers were twisting together so I couldn't tell his hands apart. I'd stopped nodding-! didn't know what to agree to. He shrugged and
looked up. I looked down. I'd been watching him with my
head down with the upper part of my eyes.
You didn't expect me to come, did you?
I shook my head. I nodded. I wasn't sure which I meant.
No one does. You know people think we don't
know.
He looked sad as he said it.
That your life here, or out there for that matterhe waved his hand toward the bit of blue skyGoes on and nobody sees what you're doing. It's
not so. We know. Because you don't know don't
think we don't. Maybe we miss something once in
a while, a little thing here or there, not much. But
we know enough to know.
Pause. He looked toward the window, some light from it lit
his face and made it lighter.
You know there are a lot of things in life people
don't figure out. They get older and they die and
they never know. I think we're all that way somehow, no?
He said it softly, as if to himself. I nodded, not so much to
him: I felt that way too.
Well, I'll tell you one thinghe turned and looked down at me. The light was gone
from his face.
You're better off here than anywhere else.
His thumbs came out of his belt and he pointed a forefinger at my head.
Right here. Now.
Pause.
You know what I mean?
I thought I did. Yes. I nodded. He turned away slightly; he
started to say something and stopped, as if to rephrase it.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Let me put it this way,
he went on.
You live here. You grow up. You get old. All the
time you get by. Maybe better. Maybe worse. You
think you've got it all figured out. In your business
maybe your're putting something aside for your
old age?
He turned back as he said it. Abruptly he sat down on the
bed. The springs didn't squeak then. They went baing,
boing, baing. The room reverberated with the sound of his
sitting. I felt his immensity loom over me. There was no
defense. I was helpless like a newborn baby. All the while I
felt frail and ancient. He spat out his next words as if he
were mad and I tried to shrink back into the bed.
Don't bother. There isn't anything to figure out
anymore. You'll never see it again whatever it was.
His forefinger came down stiff in the middle of my forehead.
You've had it. You know it. I know it. Life isn't
what it used to be. Don't forget that.
Pause.
You can't go back to your little village and grow
corn. If you had such a village. There aren't any
more.
His forefinger lifted off and hung over my head-suspended.
There's a lesson in all of this, no? So what if you
learn itshrugit won't do any good.
He put his hands on his thighs-about to get up. He licked
his lips. They were moist and glistening.
Maybe we should have many lives? To come back
and next time try what didn't work out this time.
Amusing. People in villages think like that. Except
they're all dead and they don't come back.
He got up. I followed him with my eyes to his full height.
I say good-by now. You enjoyed my visit? Interesting, eh?
I nodded for the last time.
It makes for a change, I know. We all need a little
change now and then. Make the best of it, I tell
you. It1l turn out all right.
He was looking straight at me, his forehead furrowed.
There were beads of sweat on it.
If you have nothing and you want nothing, what's
to lose? Eh, nothing.
That was it. He didn't say anything else. He looked down
at me for a bit, pensive, abstracted. Then he turned and
left. The door shut behind him with a thank. The face appeared in it, looked at me and left. I was alone again-except now I had the vivid impression of this Mundt's presence. He loomed in the air around me even after he'd
gone. I didn't think why he'd come or what he'd meant. I
knew what I'd understood-what I knew. I agreed with it
all. I really thought I had nothing left to lose.
109
�WITH 0RJAN AT THE GREAT JAPAN EXHIBITION
Someone in Stockholm counted out the skins
And told you how many golden buckToothed beavers had been killed to make
The coat. And yet it's not the coat that draws
Astonished glances from these Portuguese
With their ungainly noses.
They recognize in cheek and forehead, frozen
To silence by the snow, then quick
As evergreens released to freshness,In lips configuring a phrase
Of sleek imbalance, molded by chosen
Vowels lifted to sadness in a lilt
And overheard as music-in these
They feel what I, when thunderstruck, had felt:
That the same fancy etched your look
As prompted the master of the brush
To practise for a lifetime his bamboo
And then exhaust it in a single stroke.
Only the tiger is unsurprised,
Alone in the cold salon.
His liquid stripes are yours, his curvings yours,
And with a bounding your seraphic shadow
Impresses strangeness onto silk,
Enshrines a celebration in a screen.
ELLIOTT ZUCKERMAN
110
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�The Division of the West-and Perception
Leo Raditsa
Introduction
We live in a divided world. This is a common phrase that
statesmen repeat, and their audiences ignore and forget.
And that nobody much understands: it is too obvious.
This division is not only a "political" fact-Churchill's
"Iron Curtain" -but the most fundamental fact of our
lives. It reaches every aspect of our living our art, our
thinking, and our perception. It involves most of the nations of the world and all areas of life. Its main characteristic is a capacity to spread and to touch everything. Because
it is at once so close and so remote, it is at the same time
obvious and incomprehensible. We call this division "total
1
war" -and that name haunts our imagination.
This division has in fact replaced the devil, who-many
thought-had been done away with. But with the withering of religion, or at least of the readiness to cope with neither its presence nor its absence, the devil has not been
known as such. Somewhere the free nations sense they
face evil, but are embarrassed to know it. Knowing it unflinchingly stinks somehow of a relapse into superstition.
There is no devil. But we believe men can be angels. The
greatest murder in this century has come in the name of the
greatest aspirations; aspirations that many dare not deny,
lest they lose the good opinions of their neighbors; aspira-
Leo Raditsa has recently published Some Sense about Wilhelm Reich
(New York 1978), "Augustus' Legislation Concerning Marriage, Procre-
ation, Love Affairs and Adultery" (in Aufstieg und Niedergang der
Roemischen Welt, Berlin 1980, 13,2), "Iranians in Asia Minor" (in The
Cambridge History of Iran, Cambridge 1983, 3,1), ''The Source of World
Terrorism," (Midstream, December 1981) and "Why Were We in Vietnam?" (Midstream, June-July 1982).
The above essay comes from an unpublished book, Rationality and
the Perception of Depth, and the Division of the West in the Twentieth
Century.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
tions that paralyze those incapable of living them and
which, therefore, can be exploited to excite guilt. The totalitarian regimes parrot our ideals of "self-determination of nations, or of "peace" back to us.
Such divisions are not common. But they have occurred
before. During the Peloponnesian War, during the Reformation, and in the Wars after the French Revolution,
which began the crises we continue to live. 1 The characteristic of such wars is that they spread, that they increase
on what they feed, that they are always world wars. They
touch everybody and everything. And they cannot be
stopped except by men who understand them, because
they are about things men do not understand. Hitler said
men will only die for things they cannot comprehend 2
The division of the West first occurred in 1914. It has
continuously intensified and spread not only on battlefields, but in the minds and hearts of men. In the aftermath of the Second World War, especially in 1947-48, it
grew deep and unmistakable. Until the sixties and the Indochina War few could deny it-although many, in order
to find the strength for the next step, chose at times to
ignore it. Like the violence after the First World War, the
renewal and intensification of the division after 1945 surprised many and disappointed all who had endured the
carnage in the promise that it would bring about a new
world, with a living peace and tangible concord. But these
disappointments are the very stuff of the war that has
brought about the division of the West, for it continually
excites expectations in order to disappoint them.
The First World War was a conventional war that surprised a world that took itself to be deeply at peace, and
baffled it, for it had no idea what the war was about. In the
inebriation of the expectation of a new world that overtook
the world in 1917, the war destroyed many major govern-
111
�ments and constitutions, above all in Russia and Germany,
Austria, and a few years later in Ihlly. This destruction of
governments and the exultation at their destruction, which
found expression in the myth of "revolution", in the myth
that a spontaneous upheaval of the people swept away the
governments, became the most telling characteristic of this
continuous war that has brought about the division of the
West, and that continues to deepen it.
This division spreads through polarization. Polarization
divides the world into two attitudes (ideologies) that over·
come a world made of states of various size. In its final effects polarization takes place in people's minds. It func·
tions on the assumption that before you can destroy
people and the governments that protect them, you must
destroy their capacity to reason, to perceive the difference
between freedom and slavery, between the constructive
and the destructive. The ultimate model of this polarization for international relations is civil war or sedition. This
is now called, with the ignorance of the educated, "revolution" and "class war." The characteristic of civil war 1 ac·
cording to both Thucydides and Hobbes, is precisely that
it spreads, that it is unstoppable, and that it reaches men's
minds themselves, their perception. That it alters their
perception. The struggle centers on perception, the very
perception that has been the battleground of Western phi·
losophy since at least the seventeenth century. But now
ceaseless war for more than two generations has turned
the questioning of philosophers into a matter of life and
death for everyone. For those who cannot see will neither
live nor survive.
On its deepest level this division and polarization of the
world functions to prevent contact, that is, perception in
depth-the world seems flat to our eyes-and its equiva·
lent in the mind and heart, the experience of rationality
and the self-evident. It tends to divide and to polarize qualities such as freedom and authority, and distort them into
shadows or dim reflections of themselves. In the instance
of freedom, into license; in the instance of authority, into
authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Once so distorted,
these qualities tend to define each other in their hatred
and in their destruction of each other, rather than in an
aggressive dialogue. Such a dialogue would be the true
Aristotelian mean, the mean in depth, not the mean of
compromise. Because it cripples rationality and the
strength, confidence, and courage that come with it, polar-
destruction of forms in the name of freedom, there is a
yearning for their restoration that has something of the
straightforwardness of the eighteenth century about it;
but more assurance, resilience, and sobriety-and more in·
nocence and wisdom, the innocence and wisdom that
comes after suffering. 3 Constitution and form generally
provide the test of content, of the readiness to act on what
one says. They allow us to tell the difference between acts
and propaganda, between feeling and impulse. In contrast
to this is the attitude, typically communist, that the end
justifies the means, that content-good intentions and
promises of a radiant future-authorizes the destruction
of forms, of law, and constitutions.
Finally, this polarization tends to make us perceive ourselves as indistinguishable from our enemies, in the illusion that not telling our differences might make for our
survival It makes us feel as destructive and self-destructive
as those who want to destroy us. The Soviet attempt to
dominate the world feeds on this self-hatred. This polarization spreads largely because of unacknowledged fear of
the actual military dangers that threaten us. Who looks at a
map?
I have been writing as if the division between the free
countries and totalitarianism were fundamental But the
real division occurred before there was any totalitarianism.
Totalitarianism is a consequence of the division and the
incapacity to cope with it, not its cause. The division in its
starkest, unadulterated form took shape during, and especially after, the First World War. That war that nobody really understood started out between different peoples, not
between freedom and slavery. In 1914, at the start of the
war, one could still speak of freedom without equating it
with democracy. The world was bigger than democracy,
and politics was much less important, and life more easily
distinguished from it.
The division of the West, and the disturbances in perception I have mentioned, betray themselves most strikingly in art. Nobody can see the world whole; except-and
this is crucial~the words that are written in Russia but
published in the West. Western painting has tended more
and more toward a form with content, without a recognizable world, while painting in the totalitarian world pretended to see a world it could not perceive.
ization fashions an immobilizing situation. Force, rather
than strength, appears to be decisive. And is often in fact.
The division of the West also shows itself in a separation
of form and content, especially in politics. In the free West
we are impatient with the safeguards and the indirectness,
the due process of representative and parliamentary democracy. We do not understand representation. We want
to seize on problems directly, and, therefore, take political
demonstrations, which intimidate thought, words and
action, for granted. In the East of Europe and in China,
where people have known the murder that comes of the
112
1 The Division since 1945-and Stagnation
since 1917
The division of the West shows itself most obviously in
the division of Germany, a subject so obvious that nobody
pays much attention to it, and also in the division of Korea,
and China-with Taiwan-and, of course, until 1975, of
Vietnam. The division of Germany also means the diviWINTER/SPRING 1983
�sion of Europe. Without the division ,of Germany there
would be no division of Europe, or of the rest of the world.
The division of Germany never intended by the free
West exists because there is no peace 'treaty. The nonexistence of a peace treaty is not some unimportant formality for just the same reason that marriage is not merely
a piece of paper. The lack of a peace treaty means we did
not know how to settle the Second World War despite victory and the apparent cessation of the fighting in Europe.
It meant the war had not ended, or that it had ended in a
mere truce.4 A formal treaty would have required the removal of all Soviet troops not only from Germany but
from all of what has come to be called Eastern Europe
since the War. The absence of a peace treaty meant the
war continued, no matter how fervently we wished to
deny it.
Our incapacity to restore full sovereignty to Germany
and to force the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Europe
may mean that we did not have the confidence to risk full
sovereignty in Europe again, even if we had know how to
restore it. That we preferred to bring totalitarianism and
the Soviets into the middle of Europe rather than to face a
full-fledged restoration, or attempt at restoration-and restoration in all cases meant creation of legitimate governments, a process that receives its first real test with the passage of a generation. Somewhere in the first volume of his
memoirs, Kissinger says as much. He admits that the
spread of totalitarianism, and the consequent division of
much of the world between free countries and totalitarian,
has given the world a kind of stability it did not have before. I think this dreadfully wrong. I think that the war has
gone on more intensely, first of all with the Soviet seizure
of half of Europe without having to fight us or the rest of
Europe for it. Only it has gone on without direct fighting,
in Europe, between the free countries and the Soviets.
But whether it is wrong or not, dreadful or not, is not the
real question. There is no way of settling a war one does
not understand. And unless you can settle it you are probably condemned to eventual undoing in war-in battle or
not-for the incapacity to bring victories into settlements
turns them into mere incidents in a war that cannot be
stopped.
Nineteen forty-five complicated the situation for free
countries whose constitutions, especially if they are inherited, presuppose a capacity to distinguish between war and
peace. It forced nations to carry on wars, and pretend they
were at peace-a situation that tied the tongues ofleaders in
free countries, and forced them into something like totalitarian hypocrisy, for they could act but could not explain
why they acted, which meant that eventually they could not
act at all and lost the confidence of their electors.
Because the division of Germany and Europe and the
consequent antagonism between the Soviet Union and
the United States means that the war is not over, the
United States and the free countries must go along with
the Soviet Union in its passionate profession of hatred of
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
nazism and fascism, a hatred that seems to increase with
the passage of time. Until recently this going along meant
"no enemies on the left"; for the left was portrayed as the
only sure antidote to fascism and nazism. Stalin at Yalta
had infuriated Churchill by calling any government that
was anti-fascist, democratic.5 In his footsteps, the Soviet
Union continues to equate a democracy" with antifascism
and antinazism, and to call any country it desires to undo
"fascist." Since 1967, at least, it has used the word to
smear Israel, whose capacity to defend itself stirs Soviet
hatred and keeps it from seizing the Middle East. 6 In
much of the West, perhaps most obviously in Italy, until a
few years ago, when it became apparent to many that the
most organized and deadly terrorism came from left, it was
enough to call anything "fascist" to discredit it without
further discussion.
The power of this little word "fascism" must come from
somewhere. It cannot come from the fearful memory of
the past, especially in a time that shows itself most in its
forgetfulness. Its power comes from the past's persistence
in the present, from the continuation of the war in the
present, and the refusal to see it. But at the same time this
little word masks the way the war continues in the present,
for it pretends the danger from nazi Germany persists. In
fact the same danger does persist but it does not come
from the same regime.
The Soviet Union and China continue nazi Germany's
War. This exploitation of the memory of a fear, which is in
some way comfortable because safe, to distract from actual terror and murder going on daily before our eyes, is
only possible because of the incapacity to end the war
which shows itself in the division of Germany. The division of Germany, and the division of the West that comes
from it, continue the war and at the same time make it
impossible to face our past and resolve Germany's future.
This evasion of the past means that we must keep its memory alive artificially, especially the memory of past hatreds,
the main drive of Soviet propaganda. It makes it impossible to acknowledge that the defeated were not entirely
wrong, the victors not entirely right. A peace treaty, a real
peace treaty, would have meant acknowledging that nobody was entirely right. To know that neither side was entirely right, is to know our tragedy for what it is, to recognize that something was destroyed in those wars that was
valuable and that it is not going to be easy to recreate, restore or refashion. To know the tragedy of our times for
what they are, would mean facing present danger instead
of seeking relief from it in the horror of a past whose horror people did not recognize at the time.
The insistence that the Allies, who included the Soviet
Union, were entirely right, and the Axis entirely wrong
made it impossible to tell the Soviet Union to withdraw its
troops from Eastern Europe immediately after the war, for
those who are entirely right can do no wrong. The concentration on the myth of the past is a way of avoiding the
present, especially the continuance of the past in the
113
�present. Acknowledging we were not entirely right or
wrong would make the world whole again. It would make a
tougher, more straightforward, more painful-and much
less dangerous place. Until we understand that peace is
much harder than war, the war that calls itself peace will
continue-which means it will spread. The politicization
of all areas of life, which is the first sign of its advance, will
also spread.
This insistence of being wholly right has made our cen·
tury incapable of distinguishing real greatness, whose de·
fects are obvious, from the parody of it by little weak men
who might have been great. No time since the time of the
Trojan war has been so niggardly in the recognition of
greatness, and, therefore, such a patsy to thugs and mur·
derers. Like Hitler and Stalin, whom it adores when they
are alive, hates after their death. This hatred after adora·
tion amounts to disowning your own life after living it.
And it goes on. You only have to read the unbridled-and
never convincing-hymns of praise to Chou En·Lai and
Mao Tse·Tung and North Vietnamese party men in Kis·
singer's memoirs to see it. This fascination with these little
men who seem all powerful but whose apparent omnipo·
tence is only made of weakness is a fascination with mur·
der.
At the end of the Second World War, before the distor·
tions that pass for memory-like the myth that only the
Communists resisted Hitler-that prolong the Second
World War took hold, men like James Forrestal and Walter
Lippmann knew the importance of the future of Ger·
many, not only for Germany, but for all of Europe and,
therefore, for the whole world.? And they did not hesitate
to speak of it openly, in a way that appears unabashed
now. The sacrifice of Poland, and the public denial of it in
the final communique at Yalta, made it impossible for the
British and the United States to do much more than
weakly insist on German unity at Potsdam. The loss of Po·
land, which had been the subject of torturous negotiations
throughout 1944 that Churchill had stated repeatedly
would decide the peace, made it impossible to settle Ger·
many. It set the terms of the struggle we have lived with
ever since without, for the most part, understanding it in
any terms that allow a mastery of it. Instead, with the doc·
trine of containment we accepted the Soviet terms of the
struggle without realizing that the readiness to go along
without a settlement meant continuing the war.
This evasiveness about Germany, and the obsession
with the Second World War that has come with it, has had
its consequences. It was Germany, in an effort to deal with
its future on its own, not the United States, that initiated
the policy of "detente" in 1967-as Kissinger admits in his
memoirs. The United States acquiesced to German "Ost·
politik" because it did not dare oppose it. This policy has
drawn Europe away from the United States without
strengthening it. In the years after the war men foresaw
these consequences of going along with the actual division
of Germany, and insisted on its unity more clearly than
114
they do now that the consequences are here for all to see:
"Certainly we cannot default Europe to Russia" -to do so
would be to invite attack "within the next two decades" by a
totalitarian land colossus armed with all the sea and air power
which the whole of Europe could, under authoritarian management, produce.
. .. "As you know, I hold that world stability will not be re·
stored until the vacuum created by the destruction of German power and the weakening of the power of Western Europe has been filled-in other words, until a balance of power
has been restored in Europe." Such a balance of power would
include military strength, but "I believe that economic stabil-
ity, political stability and military stability must develop in
about that order.''s
In an important book in 1968, The Discipline of Power,
George Ball tried to recall the importance of Germany.
But his words even then sounded quaint and old fash·
ioned:
For the future of Gerrriany after two wars is a riddle we must
solve with care. It lies at the heart of the relations between
East and West. It is in many ways the most intractable and
quite likely the most important problem we face. 9
The absence of a peace treaty meant in the most spe·
cific terms that the fighting on the European fronts had
come to a halt but that the war had not ended, because
there were no coherent terms for ending it. There is no
way of ending a war you do not understand. The U.N.,
which had served as a distraction from the discussions for
the future of Poland at Yalta, substituted the aspiration for
peace in the future for actual negotiations for a peace
treaty that made some sense of the world in the present. It
served also to blind people to the startling fact that the
United States and Britain had thought little in concrete
terms about settling the war, that they did not know what
to do with victory in a war that had been forced upon
them-and that they had brought upon themselves.
25 Aprill947 ... At the conclusion I said it was manifest that
American diplomatic planning of the peace was far below the
quality of the planning that went into the conduct of the war.
We regarded the war, broadly speaking, as a ball game which
we had to finish as quickly as possible, but in doing so there
was comparatively little thought as to the relationships between nations which would exist after Germany and Japan
were destroyed. The United Nations was oversold; sound in
concept and certainly the only hope for improvement in the
world order, it was built up over-extravagantly as the solution
to international frictions that had existed for centuries. Now
there is a danger of its being cast aside by the American public in a mood of frustration and disappointment. 10
A few months later, on July 26, Robert Lovett, the Un·
der Secretary of State, deepened Forrestal's analysis:
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�... He spoke of the lack of planning fqr peace in the State
Department and the casual and off~the-cuff decisions of the
late President, and referred to Churchill's remark that at
Yalta he had been dealing with the "shell of a man" and not
the man himself. Lovett added that the great political error in
the postwar period was the failure to insist upon the writing
of peace treaties while our troops and military power were
still evident in Europe. Nothing, he said, could have stopped
the American forces which were at that time deployed in Germany. II
Probably nothing betrays more the confusion and the
desperation of statesmen after the war than the occurrence of meetings like Yalta and Potsdam, the first of
many summit meetings that have never brought agree·
ment. They were born of a desperate notion that a few
"great" men could make peace on the strength of their
"personal" friendship. And that is part of the reason why
"friendship" has become a word we blush to use. They
substituted talk for negotiation. At Yalta Churchill spoke
often as if he were in Parliament-but there was no one to
listen. Roosevelt was exhausted unto death-and Stalin
had no use for words except as traps for those who spoke
them. And by pretending to hear them in private, he kept
Churchill from speaking them in public where they might
have really counted. In some sense Yalta and Potsdamand not the U.N.-were the first to substitute the aspira·
tion for peace in the future for the actual negotiation of
peace in the present. And the substitution of aspiration for
the action of actual agreement was just what Stalin
wanted, for he knew the cultivation of aspiration you had
no intention of fulfilling weakened and, eventually, undid
men.
The policy of unconditional surrender made the conclusion of a peace treaty difficult, for it destroyed German
sovereignty and no peace treaty could be concluded with·
out Germany's consent. Conclusion of a peace treaty re-
quired the restoration of, or at very least the agreement to
restore, German sovereignty. And the restoration of sover-
eignty or its creation-for it amounts to the same thingas the whole history since the First World War shows, is
extremely difficult, and in any case requires much more
than a generation. Rousseau thought it impossible. Cer·
tainly, it is impossible unless the victors realize its difficulty. Neither to restore it entirely or to destroy it
entirely-the situation of Germany since 1945-means
threatening the sovereignty of the victors and all their al·
lies whose assurance of sovereignty depends on them, especially when there are regimes like the Soviet that feed
on the destruction of sovereignty, for whom war called
"revolution" and "peace" means the destruction of sover-
eignty. And without the recognition of sovereignty, there
can be no experience of reality, of the difference between
life and death, war and peace. Without it all nations invite
questioning not only with words, but with acts that aim to
destroy any people or nation not strong enough to resist.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The most obvious consequence of the absence of a
peace treaty, the division of Germany, is an extreme exam-
ple of the communist technique which threatens many nations called independent but actually struggling for sovereignty and legitimacy. This technique splits countries
against themselves under the cover of a supposedly spontaneous civil war that is actually aggression from the outside. In the extreme instance of Germany, the defense of
West Germany might mean the destruction of all of Germany in the actual outbreak of war. To defend itself Ger.
many must risk its destruction. This contradiction that defense would bring destruction is at the center of the peace
movement, which started in the Federal Republic in response to the decision of Italy, Germany, and Britain to
accept the Pershing II and cruise missiles at the end of
1979.
The division of the West that dwarfs the relations between nations also reproduces itself within the free nations through polarization in thinking to the point that in·
dividuals of the "Left" and the "Right" experience
different meanings for same words. Thucydides gave this
incapacity to experience the same meaning for the same
words classic expression in his description of the civil war
in Corcyra-a description that is at the heart of Hobbes's
thinking, and, therefore, of our political understanding of
domestic political life.
The received value of names imposed for signification of
things, was changed into arbitrary. For inconsiderate boldness, was counted true-hearted manliness: provident deliberation, a handsome fear: modesty, the cloak of cowardice: to be
wise in every thing, to be lazy in every thing. A furious suddenness was reputed a point of valour. To re-advise for the
better security, was held for a fair pretext of tergiversation.
He that was fierce, was always trusty; and he that contraried
such a one, was suspected. He that did insidiate, if it took, was
a wise man; but he that could smell out a trap laid, a more
dangerous man than he. But he that had been so provident as
not to need to do the one or the other, was said to be a dissolver of society, and one that stood in fear of his adversary.
In brief, he that could outstrip another in the doing of an evil
act, or that could persuade another thereto that never meant
it, was commended.
Hobbes, however, was little concerned with war from
abroad, and especially with war from abroad that calls itself
sedition. He saw the threat to civil life as coming mainly
from within, and not from the exploitation of domestic discord as a cover for aggressive war. War from abroad that
wins an unwilling consent by calling itself sedition is something the twentieth century's incapacity to perceive events
has brought upon a world too unsure of itself to distinguish
the new from the merely self-destructive.
In contrast to the Peloponnesian War and Corcyra, however, the polarization today in free countries comes not
primarily from actual violence within the country but occurs in men's minds in response to war masking as civil
115
�violence elsewhere in the world, often in places no one
ever thought of much, before the ohset of fighting.
The division and polarization shOjVS itself not only be·
tween individuals but within them-' individuals who feel
torn between, in appearance, mutually exclusive interpre~
tations of all events. One man's hero is another's murderer.
Because we fear the responsibility of choosing, such a
division and polarization brings paralysis. And paralysis is
often a prelude to violence-or to helplessness in the face
of violence. Aristotle meant something like paralysis when
he used the word stasis for events which until recently
many called "revolution" in the illusion that their violence
brings movement and change instead of springing from
the incapacity for change.
This polarization in thinking would not work its way
into men's reasoning without the fear of the Soviet Union
and Communist China, mostly unacknowledged, behind
it. Lately, too, the Soviet Union has openly excited fear
with its threats of nuclear war, and, before that, with its
sponsorship of supposedly indigenous terrorists throughout the world-a sponsorship that governments even now,
with the exception of Italy and Israel, do not take seriously
because their awareness of it influences neither their
words nor their actions. 12 This open resort to terror is in
fact an attempt to bring the fear that reigns in totalitarian
count!ies to the whole world.
Propaganda always feeds on suppressed anger and fear.
Once people face the facts that inspire this unacknowledged fear, for instance the extermination in Afghanistan
and the use of gas in Afghanistan, Laos, and Cambodia,
the propaganda loses its grip-and men return to their
senses. Individuals and newspapers like the Wall Street
Journal, L'express, II Giornale Nuovo have driven governments to at least acknowledge Soviet sponsorship of terrorism, manipulation of the peace movements, use of gas in
Afghanistan, Laos, and Cambodia. In the face of sceptical
hostile journalists' questions about terrorism, the then
Secretary of State, Alexander M. Haig, referred to the
work of one private journalist, Claire Sterling. But especially in foreign affairs, governments are supposed to bring
men to their senses-not men their governments. We are
already in a situation that calls upon individuals to say
things their governments dare not acknowledge-the situation of individuals in totalitarian countries.
The last presidential election somewhat undid this tendency to polarization in thinking in the United Statesand also in free Europe-because it showed the capacity
of millions of individuals to come to their own conclusions,
to think with their own heads, despite the pounding and
manipulation of almost all major media. It made facts self- ·
evident that men had hardly dared mention in public a few
years before. There was, however, an immediate attempt
to reintroduce ideological stereotypes, like a drug that
some men, and especially some men who have come to
speak for the Democratic Party, could not get along with-
116
out. In somewhat veiled terms, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. recently pleaded openly for this kind of polarization, even as
he scornfully admitted that Reagan's election has reasserted common sense perception and the meaning of
words enough to weaken the ideological rigidity that had
intensified polarization during the long years of South
Vietnam's and the United States' fight to save Indochina.
In the attempt to reintroduce this polarization, exploitation of the yearning for peace and the terror before nuclear death plays an important role, a role similar to the
"anti-war" movements more than ten years ago:
In foreign policy the administration has presided over the re-
militarization of the Cold War. [Soviet propaganda characterizes any Western attempt to defend itself as a reintroduction
of the Cold War.] It has conveyed the distinct impression that
it regards nuclear weapons as usable and nuclear war as winnable. Far from regarding the nuclear arms race as a threat to
the future of humanity, the administration appears to regard
it as the great means for doing the Soviets in.13
The government appears tongue-tied before this attempt to rewaken ideological thinking. It avoids straightforward facts and telling details and resorts to platitudes
that are barely distinguishable from ideology, and betrays
something approaching inverted agreement with those
who wish to undo it. This evasiveness bespeaks fear and
stirs the suspicion it would dispell. For instance, President
Reagan in his address on March 8, 1983, and on other occasions, exaggerated the effective exercise of American
strength in the years immediately after the Second World
War-the years that, unwittingly, made for the continuation of the war they meant to end, and thereby, increased
the chances for the collapse of the West that has to some
extent occurred.
The absence of a coherent peace, and the consequent
unacknowledged continuation of the war, meant we knew
what we were against but not what we were for. It meant
containment-the resignation to the perpetuation of the
division in the hope that it would end. The truth of the
matter is probably that nobody at the end of the War really
expected peace. For otherwise they would have thought
seriously about it. Because they did not expect it, they
asked only to be allowed to aspire to it.
The paralysis that first betrayed itself in this resignation
shows itself not only within countries but in the general
stagnation in international relations which some take for
"stability" -which, in turn, fosters stagnation in attitudes
that prevent the perception of facts, and their significance, at the moment of their occurrence.
Soviet propaganda speaks as if the truce in Europe and
the far East in 1945 had just occurred. And in some sense,
that is true-in the psychological sense. In the free countries the same old arguments are repeated from generation
to generation, but always as if they were new, the same
illusions reappear and must be dispelled. This repetition of
the same arguments responds unawares to the rigidity of
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Communist propaganda-and sometimes is actually occasioned and manipulated by Communist disinformation.l4
At the time of the Soviet attack on Afghanistan in December 1979, George Kennan explained Soviet aggression in
much the same terms that Forrestal in 1944 said hampered
American perception of Soviet aggression:
After a Socialist woman's attempt on Lenin's life on August 28, 1918, Radek, the Bolshevists' star writer, quoted
Lenin's ''winged words'' in Izvestia:
Even if ninety percent of the people perish, what matter if
the other ten percent live to see the revolution become universal?18
I find that whenever any American suggests that we act in
accordance with the needs of our own security he is apt to be
called a god-damned fascist or imperialist, while if Uncle Joe
suggests that he needs the Baltic Provinces, half of Poland, all
of Bessarabia and access to the Mediterranean, all hands
agree that he is a fine, frank, candid and generally delightful
fellow who is very easy to deal with because he is so explicit in
what he wants.l5
In a world that thinks of itself as constantly on the move,
little changes-in perception and understanding. Again,
Forrestal in 1947 could be describing the situation today:
A few pages later in a somewhat different context Melgounov comments:
Not for nothing do the three capital letters which stand for
the title of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, of the
Che-Ka, stand also for the three Russian words which denote
"Death to every man." 19
In Afghanistan a few years ago, to the ignorance of almost all Western newspapers, an Afghan Communist in
charge of a prison echoed the Soviet words of 1918:
It looks to me as if the world were going to try to turn conservative but the difficulty is that between Hitler, your friends to
the east, and the intellectual muddlers who have had the
throttle for the last ten years, the practical people are going to
have a hell of a time getting the world out of receivership, and
when the miracles are not produced the crackpots may demand another chance in which to really finish the job. At that
time it will be of greatest importance that the Democratic
Party speaks for the liberals, but not for the revolutionaries. 16
But stagnation does not mean "stability"-it means drift
towards totalitarianism, drift for the most part unperceived.
And the stagnation does not go back to 1945 only. It
reaches back to 1917. Soviet actions to the world have not
changed since 1917 and early 1918. They are only an extension of the terror that began in 1917 and 1918 in Russia
to as much of the world as will not resist the methodical
resort to terror, sometimes not even disguised with hon-
eyed overtures of peace in the name of a spontaneous uprising for freedom. lri 1923 Guglielmo Ferrero said that
Russia had in four years suffered the distintegration that
had taken the ancient world four centuriesY In 1925 the
Russian historian, educated and trained in the world of
Nicholas II, Sergey Petrovich Melgounov, published The
Red Terror in Russia, in the major languages of Europe,
that described the atrocities of the Bolsheviks without uttering the word Marxist. But all that has been forgotten.
And because it has been forgotten we recall anything that
happens with difficulty.
The man who will read Melgounov will see the stagnation that surrounds him. He will see that the generations
have come and gone and that little has changed in Bolshevik practice since 1917, the practice that instructed Hitler
and showed him the world would ignore, and forget what
it did not ignore. The practice of getting others to do the
murdering for them, and still others to justify and exult in
it. The practice of blaming others for the murder they did
themselves: uThe Terror was forced upon us."
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Their commander-in-chief was one Sayyed Abdollah. With
my own ears I heard him say: "A million Afghans only must
remain alive: we only need a million Communists: the others,
we don't need them, we will liquidate them.'' 20
Nothing has changed. The children shot today in Afghanistan are the descendants of the children shot in Russia in 1917-1918.21 The murder that went after almost
every person of noticeable energy and independence in
the countryside in South Vietnam by 1965-information
available in a book published in the United States in the
same year-went on in Russia beginning in 1917.22 There
was nothing spontaneous even then: it was cold and methodical. And why is it that murder, as long as it is spontaneous, seems alright to forget? The terror that wracked
Germany in the last years, and-almost unnoticed by the
rest of the world-wracks Italy now, that threatens the life
of every judge who dares condemn a terrorist, of every
courageous journalist, of the wives and children of prison
guards and wardens who do not cooperate-all that started
in 1917 in Russia with the seizure of wives and children as
hostages for shooting. And yet we, and our newspapers,
treat murder in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Cambodia, or Italy,
when it is noticed at all, as if it had not happened before.
Neither are peace overtures at the moment of murder
anything new. For instance, the present Soviet peace overtures to Europe-together with threats of nuclear annihilation-meant to stop the American defense of Europe
with Pershing II and cruise missiles at the moment that
men and women drown in excrement and are buried alive
in Afghanistan.2l In 1917 and 1918 in Russia the shootings
never stopped on the nights before amnesties, the most
dreaded nights. And the greatest murder in Russia in 1917
and 1918 came with the aboliton of the death penalty.
When I think how few of these occurrences that ought
to be the currency of our thinking about the war called
peace figure in our memories, and contrast it with the hor-
117
�ror that grows with the years at thepmrder of five million
Jews and unumbered millions of others, I conclude that
only the destruction of fascism and nazism in war allows us
to experience its horrors after (and almost because) we can
do nothing about them. But we ignore the present murder, and the murder that preceded it, because we can do
something about it-if only not ignore it.
The resentment and hatred in much of the world at Israel's courage-that makes others perceive their cowardice-bespeaks a certain disingenousness in this horror at
past murders we can no longer do anything about. A disingenousness that serves to distract from present murder
and present cowardice and that shows itself nakedly in the
current Soviet and Arab propaganda that compares Israel
to the Nazis. Israel is one of the few nations in the world
that stands up to murderers, and takes words seriously,
that has learned the lessons of World War 11-the war that
does not cease.
But although the Communists have not changed since
1917, they have renewed themselves. They have returned
to their source as Machiavelli (Discourses 1, 3) said all republics and sects must. (But a regime that finds itself in
undermining the governments of the world, let alone its
endurance and renewal, was more than Machiavelli could
imagine.) First with the seizure of half of Europe and
China after the Second World War, and then with the
theft of Cuba-while the world wondered whether Castro
was really a "Communist"-and most lately with the undoing of many helpless and unwilling countries after the
fall of Saigon in April 1975: Cambodia, Laos, South
Yemen (in 1968), Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua. And Grenada in 1979. I almost forgot little Grenada
which lies on the oil routes through the Caribbean and
whose youths now go to Cuba six months every year for
indoctrination. The Communists helped precipitate the
destruction of the government of Lebanon in 1975 and of
the government of Persia in 1978. They are now fighting
to seize El Salvador and Afghanistan. And with each successive conquest there is less information and more lies.
And the world watches as if in a dream. It has been a rough
"short course" in the geography not learned in our renowned universities.
Each new conquest means a return to 1917-1918, and
reconfirms its lessons. To talk of the weakening of ideology in these circumstances is nonsense. Each conquest
strengthens it. Violence undoes the illusions and the beliefs of victims-but spreads the fear that makes for illusion and the lip-service to ideology in the rest of the world.
We are not getting farther away from 1917 as the years
pass on: it is approaching us. That is what I mean by stagnation-and what the Communists mean with their talk of
the inevitability of history.
Nineteen seventeen is nearer, because we cannot re~
member it, because we have less conception of what happened than men did in the early twenties. I do not mean
only the atrocities, but the simple facts. We still mindlessly
118
call October a Hrevolution", as if it were some popular up~
rising, instead of a few organized armed men's seizure of
a state. There is little understanding that the war, and the
collapse of the army in the face of peace propaganda, were
the decisive events-propaganda for peace, intenser and
more dangerous, but otherwise not unlike the outcry in the
United States and Europe during the Vietnam War.24
All the endless talk for more than two generations about
Hclass warfare," "the masses," "alienation," usocialism,"
the division of many intellectuals outside Russia into "Stalinists" and "Trotskyists", all this talk, this supposedly
"passionate" talk, that takes itself for philosophy, but is actually only verbiage, serves to obliterate the perception
and remembrance of these few fearful facts. And this incapacity to know the facts of the twentieth century reflects
itself also in a general incapacity to tell the story of our
times, to write simple narrative history in which living
statesmen count, and there is a reality to cope with. 25
And this incapacity to remember and see the facts leads
us to speak and even act as if we had adversaries worthy of
respect, as if they were partly right. We let communist regimes get away with murder. We do not even remind them
of it, and do not distinguish between these regimes and
their peoples. And the more they get away with murder,
the more they return to 1917, the more they can ignore
the nagging emptiness within. The force of this emptiness, and its fragility, shows itself in their denial of rejection, especially of the rejection of their agents and party
men:
My career in the KGB was developing successfully, and it
promised to be even better in the future. But my KGB and
party superiors did not know that for many years I was devel-
oping dissatisfaction with and finally total resentment of the
Soviet socialist system. When I was a university student I had
the chance to learn about the night~marish cruelty and atrocities of the Stalin regime which slaughtered up to 20 million
Soviet citizens. After graduating from the university and being transferred from one Central Committee, Communist
Party, Soviet Union affiliated organization to another, I wit·
nessed firsthand the fact that the Soviet socialist system was
not working for the good of its citizens. I came to the understanding that it is a totally corrupt dictatorship-type regime
with rotten moral standards. Most of the slogans put forward
by the Kremlin leaders I came to understand are aimed at de-
ceiving peoples of the U.S.S.R. and of the world. And I clearly
understand that Marxism-Leninism is actually a perverted
type of religion imposed on millions of people.
Over the past 3 years the Soviet authorities are progressively
using all ruthless and, even by Soviet law, illegal means to
force and blackmail my family to cooperate with them. The
main reason for the indescribable torture of my family by the
Soviet authorities is that the KGB is obviously under pressure to
present the Soviet Politburo with "proof' that the reasons for
my defection to the United States were not political. They cannot admit that a major in Soviet intelligence could possibly be a
hidden dissident.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Speaking about the Soviet Union, they have a problem, because my file in the KGB does not lead them to find anything
bad about me because there is nothing-it is impossible for
them. It is against the Soviet Communist rzature to admit that
a KGB major defected for political reasons. It just cannot happen by their ideas-they know that it can, but they cannot tell
that to the Politburo or the Russian people. (My emphasis)26
Tolstoy describes this emptiness in Napoleon, and the
dependence of its persistence on the approval of much of
the world. At Borodino for once the suffering of battle
breaks through to him. But he cannot yield to his feelings,
because of the praise of half the world. He orders the continuation of fire that he does not desire against Russians
who will not give way, because he thinks the world expects
it of him:
This day the horrible appearance of the battlefield overcame
that strength of mind which he thought constituted his merit
and his greatness . ... With painful dejection he awaited the
end of this action, in which he regarded himself as a participant and which he was unable to arrest. A personal, human
feeling for a brief moment got the better of the artificial phantasm of life he had served so long. He felt in his own person the
sufferings and death he had witnessed on the battlefield. The
heaviness of his head and chest reminded him of the possibil-
ity of suffering and death for himself. ...
Even before he gave that order the thing he did not desire,
and for which he gave the order only because he thought it was
expected of him, was being done. And he fell back in that artificial realm of imaginary greatness, and again-as a horse walking a treadmill thinks it is doing something for itself-he submissively fulfilled the cruel, sad, gloomy, and inhuman role
predestined for him.
And not for the day and hour alone were the mind and conscience darkened of this man on whom the responsibility for
what was happening lay more than on all the others who took
part in it. Never to the end of his life could he understand
goodness and truth, too remote from everything human, for
him ever to be able to grasp their meaning. He could not disavow his actions, belauded as they were by half the world, and
so he had to repudiate truth, goodness, and all humanity.
(Emphasis mine)27
But the victory over Napoleon brought Europe a hundred years of stability because Talleyrand understood that
only the removal of Napoleon could dispel! the "artificial
phantasm" that was destroying the life of Europe in the
name of improving it, and persuaded Alexander I of it28 In
contrast, the First World War precipitated totalitarianism
in much of Europe, and the Second World War, dedicated
to its destruction, ended with its greatest advance. In contrast to the French revolution, which brought war to all of
Europe in the name of freedom, the First World War
brought totalitarianism in its aftermath.
There is in recent history a specific date for the renewal
of this emptiness' attack on the truth that began in 1917,
and for the West's collaboration with it, a date that showed
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
that the capacity to tell the truth-without which no free
country could survive-was at the center of the struggle.
On April 16, 1943, the government of Poland in London
announced the discovery of bodies of "many thousands"
of Polish officers they suspected the Soviets had murdered
near Smolensk in the forest of Katyn. 29 Instead of supporting the Polish government which was eventually to have
ten divisions fighting in the West, the British and American governments tried to silence it. Stalin broke diplomatic relations with the government of Poland and started
the long diplomatic struggle for Poland that went on
throughout 1944 and which Churchill knew would decide
the fate of Germany and Europe, and, therefore, of the
peace.
A Hungarian Stalinist until he joined the uprising in
1956 that brought him his death, Miklos Gimlas described
this process of throttling the capacity to say, and understand, the obvious that has threatened many of the governments and newspapers of the world since 1917, and
that made a decisive advance in the long years of the war
for Indochina. Because they succumbed to, and even in
some instances encouraged, the frenzy in the United
States and Europe that took itself for passion that undid
that war, their words now ring hollow-the so-called "credibility gap":
Slowly we had come to believe ... that there are two kinds of
truth ... that truth of the Party and the people can be different and can be more important than the objective truth and
that truth and political expediency are in fact identical . ...
And so we arrived at the outlook ... which poisoned our
whole public life, penetrated the remotest corners of our
thinking, obscured our vision, paralysed our critical faculties
and finally rendered many of us incapable of simply sensing
or apprehending truth. This is how it was, it is no use denying
it.30
In just those years of the Indochina war the first authentic voices since 1917 from within Russia broke upon the
world, and showed its startled eyes that the capacity to tell
the truth, which had made Russian art one of the centers
of Europe in the nineteenth century, had survived the socalled Russian revolution, that Russia still lived, that
things were at the same time worse than we had known,
and better than we had imagined in that abandoned country. At the same time that the West succumbed to an onslaught of lies, voices in the east dismissed them with a
sureness that made us blush at the obvious we desired to
deny-and did deny. Loudly, because we knew it to be undeniable. But the Indochina war ended with the first major Soviet advances throughout the world since the seizure
of eastern Europe in 1945.
These voices embarrass much of the West because they
remind it of its evasiveness and willing blindness. Almost a
generation ago, Michael Polanyi described this incapacity
to face simple facts, and draw their consequences, in
words that tell even more today:
119
�Many academic experts will refuse'· to recognize today that
mere thirst for truth and justice has 1 caused the revolts now
transforming the Soviet Countries. They are not Marxists,
but their views are akin to Marxism in Claiming that the scien·
tific explanation of history must be based on more tangible
forces than the fact that people change their minds3l
This incapacity to cope with the truth, and tell it, makes
it difficult for free governments to explain their policies
and even sometimes to enjoy the confidence of their
actions. There is no way to act effectively in free countries
without straightforward explanation of actions. For action
needs the test of public explanation to win natural assurance. During the war in Vietnam, the United States did
much of what was necessary, but did not dare justify it or
say it openly, did not dare know what it was doing. The
government was simply not able to find the words to ex·
plain its actions. This incapacity to explain its actions
amounted almost to acting publicly in secret. This evasiveness not only bred suspicion, but undid confidence both in
the government and finally in the people, who for many
years lent the government a confidence it turned out not
to have. It also kept the government from realizing that it
did not have a strategy for winning. That even today the
word Winning" sounds uncomfortable is a measure of our
past evasiveness. The government lost the war with words,
not on the battlefield, because it did not understand its
actions enough to explain them. A Soviet commentator, in
contrast, understood its actions very well, precisely because he did not have to suffer the test of public explanation:
11
I really tore the stupid Americans to shreds this morning ... I
held them up to shame for escalating the War in Vietnam.
What idiots they are in Washington! Rotten humanists in
white gloves! They want to hold Communism back, the fools.
But it doesn't have to be stopped; it needs to be squashed.
But they don't understand, not a damned thing! The only fellow they ever had who understood what a cowardly bunch of
jackals all these Stalins and Khrushchevs and Maos and Hos are
was John Foster Dulles, may his soul rest in peace. He knew
you can talk with Communists pleasantly and politely, just
as long as you hold a gun to their heads. Then they are quiet
and peaceful, as smooth as can be. But any other approach is
useless ...
I read all these people like Alsop, Lippmann, and Pearson,
and not one of these pundits is smart enough to say straight
out: Tell the Russians to go to hell and get on with the job in
Vietnam. The Russians won't dare to raise a finger against
you. They're scared to death. And the Chinese won't touch
you either. But they'll make a terrible lot of noise. All you
have to do is snap back at them properly and quietly, as
Dulles did, and they'll shut up. They'll be begging for peace
themselves. How stupid life is. We can't write what we think
but they can't do what we think either. They are afraid of their
own left-wingers. I've been there, I know. (My emphasis)32
This incapacity to explain action publicly, and, therefore, more often than not, to understand it privately with
120
any confidence, leads to an incapacity to understand the
significance of action. To understand the importance of
acts, especially in a situation where the threat of total war
is constant and, therefore, unreal, and "little" wars continue regardless-and where the fighting is far away and
engages only the Soviets or their proxies directly-you
have to go to the books about the camps. They are the only
books of manners, of diplomacy, we have-our Odyssey.
The first rule of the camps is, pay attention to actions, not
words-one's own actions and the actions of others:
Only dimly at first, but with ever greater clarity, did I also
come to see that soon how a man acts can alter what he is.
Those who stood up well in the camps became better men,
those who acted badly soon became bad men; and this, or at
least so it seemed, independent of their past life history and
their former personality make-up or at least those aspects of
personality that seemed significant in psychoanalytic thinking. 33
Diplomats should now go to the books on the camps to
learn what they are up against in dealing with totalitarian
regimes. For our world no longer has any strangers, or,
at least, no longer knows how to recognize and greet a
stranger. And in the camps there are no strangers-and
everybody knows it unmistakably.
In their concentration camps totalitarian regimes betray
the desperation that possesses them, and that informs
their actions among the nations: in their readiness to allow
criminals to victimize the innocent captives, in their resort
to terror, including threats to relatives and friends still outside, to make men do anything to survive, above all in their
effort to prove there is no such thing as courage, that life is
merely existence, to destroy men without directly killing
them, to make them scared of the breath they breathe.
And all this not swiftly but in a long drawn-out cunning
cat-and-mouse game that raises expectations and crushes
them, that exploits the yearning to survive (at the price of
betraying all one is), and the illusion that one might just be
different from the dead and dying, to turn a man into an
apparently willing victim, because his will-and his lifehave shrunk almost beyond his experience. Melgounov
was already clear in 1925 about this slowness:
Besides, the policy of the Soviet Government is a policy capa·
ble always of postponing its wreakings of revenge, so that persons may "disappear", may be sent into exile, or thrown in
gaol, long after they have been granted official guarantees of
immunity. 34
Melgounov mentions no countries-in addition to individ-
uals-because he did not imagine that the violence consuming Russia might spread to the world. All this slowness, especially the exploitation of the wish to survive at
almost any cost, has betrayed itself in the fear of war that
has obsessed the West since 1917. More than twenty years
passed before the Communists finally struck South Vietnam openly.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Terror and destruction appear to wprk. Few can cope
with them without wreaking equal destruction-Indochina was an important exception-in return, destruction
that usually works to the advantage of tfuose who want to
destroy.
The camps teach that there is no "negotiation" without
hard-headed courage, and the strength that comes of it,
that does not lead to irremediable surrender in which the
victim, individual or country, is made to consent to his
own destruction, which wants to change man, to reach his
core, but which destroys many, and discovers unexpected
strength in some.
Who knows whether it is not in man's lack of an internal core
that the mysterious success of the New Faith and its charm
for the intellectual lie? By subjecting man to pressure, the
New Faith creates this core, or in any case the feeling that it
exists. Fear of freedom is nothing more than fear of the void.
"There is nothing in man," said a friend of mine, a dialecti~
cian. "He will never extract anything out of himself, because
there is nothing there. You can't leave the people and write in
a wilderness. Remember that man is a function of social
forces. Whoever wants to be alone will perish." This is proba-
bly true, but I doubt if it can be called anything more than the
law for our times. Feeling that there was nothing in him,
Dante could not have written his Divine Comedy or Montaigne his Essays, nor could Chardin have painted a single
still-life. Today man believes there is nothing in him, so he
accepts anything, even if he knows it to be bad, in order to
find himself at one with others, in order not to be alone. As
long as he believes this, there is little one can reproach in his
behaviour. 35
The emptiness Milosz means is Baudelaire's ennui. It
means not being able to taste life, not feeling alive, not being alive. "Whoever wants to be alone will perish." But
whoever does not stand alone will not live. People who
cannot feel life, whose words have no meaning, feel that
there is a wall between them and life, that there is no core.
The incapacity to experience life, to feel alive, makes people feel as miserable as poverty-and, ashamed. They
wince in envy at individuals who can feel these things. In
free countries envy tortures all the more, because it is clear
that nothing keeps one from life except oneself: there is
nobody to blame.
Totalitarian ideology promises to dispel such emptiness,
but totalitarian states simply crush anything that is not
empty. They murder and persecute individuals not possessed by it. It is the insistence on this emptiness, on proving that there is nothing else, nothing that can stand up to
it, that drives totalitarian regimes to expand. For free
countries excite murderous envy, because they remind totalitarian regimes that everyone might not be empty, that
there might be men who can say "no," who might love life
enough not to do anything to survive. But baffled by their
freedom that mercilessly drives them to experience their
incapacity to live, the free countries, for the most part,
cannot conceive that anybody could envy them:
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
... very many people: living in totalitarian countries, having
survived terror and been brainwashed by propaganda, are not
only genuinely content with their position, but virtually consider themselves to be the happiest people on earth. This,
however, engenders an inferiority complex vis-3.-vis the democracies, so that the inhabitants of totalitarian countries often turn into implacable enemies of freedom, ready and willing to destroy everything that reminds them of the free will
they have lost. This also applies in many respects to the intellectuals of those countries, who often display a pathological
fear of freedom.
A man who has been accustomed to breathing fresh air all his
life does not notice it, and never realizes what a blessing it is.
He thinks of it only occasionally when entering a stuffy room,
but knows that he need only open the window for the air to
become fresh again. A man who has grown up in a democratic
society and who takes the basic freedoms as much for granted
as the air he breathes is in much the same position. People
who have grown up under democracy do not value it highly
enough. Yet there are weighty reasons for their dissatisfaction with this society .... 36
This reluctance to take their own measure that makes it
difficult for the free countries to realize that the totalitarian regimes are murderously envious of their freedom-in
some sense experience it more deeply than the free countries because they have deprived themselves of it-makes
it difficult for them to experience communist hypocrisy
and duplicity. At the end of the war some experienced the
West's incapacity to perceive Communist duplicity more
vividly than now:
The sheer duplicity of the Soviets during these negotiations is
beyond the experience of the experts in the State Department, with the result that any future promise made by the
Soviets is to be evaluated with great caution. It appears that
they do not mind lying or even our knowing that they lie, as
long as it is for the benefit of the state_37
Perception of totalitarian duplicity would lead to awareness that the Communist regimes speak in a different dimension, that the same words mean different things to
them, in the precise sense that the same words meant different things at Corcyra. This double vision in which the
relation to world and self, and of language to truth, is at
stake, is precisely the disturbance in perception that I
mentioned in the introduction which betrays itself in the
division of the West and feeds upon it-and makes it difficult for us to distinguish between our friends and enemies:
30 Aprill947 Jimmy Byrnes came in this morning and in talking about the Russians he said they are "stubborn, obstinate
and they don't scare." I reminded him of our conversation
about two years ago when he chided me for being too extreme in my views about the Russians when I told him that
[when] he harbored the illusion that he could talk in the same
fashion with the Russians that he could with the Republican
opposition in the Senate he was very much mistaken. At that
time I told him that when he spoke so to speak, using language
121
�in a third dimension, the Russians spoke in a fourth, and there
1
was no stairway. 38
The dissociation of words from facts, which makes it impossible to grasp the meaning of events until afterwards,
when nothing can be done about them, results from not
perceiving totalitarian duplicity, and the incommensurability of vision that comes with it. Such dissociation and
double vision makes people helpless before aggression.
Brezhnev in 1973 meant just this dissociation when he
called for "cooperation" between the two sides despite
their incapacity to talk to each other-as if they were interchangeable, and the truth did not separate them:
For years we have been piling up arms without interruption.
Until now we can destroy each other many times over, not
simply once. Why not persuade our people to work together,
even if we hold ideological positions, we will perhaps never be
able to reconciliate?39
One of the New York Times correspondents in Indochina, Sydney Schanberg, experienced this double vision
in his own flesh when he could not recognize the revolution of his dreams in the murder before his eyes, patients
left to die on the operating table and the rest, in Cambodia
in the spring of 1975 after the fall of Saigon:
... In almost every situation we encountered during the
more than two weeks we were under Communist control,
there was a sense of split vision~ whether to look at events
through Western eyes or through what we thought might be
Cambodian revolutionary eyes.
Brutality or Necessity?
Was this just cold brutality, a cruel and sadistic imposition of
the law of the jungle, in which only the fittest will survive? Or
is it possible that, seen through the eyes of the peasant soldiers and revolutionaries, the forced evacuation of the cities is
a harsh necessity? Perhaps they are convinced that there is no
way to build a new society for the benefit of the ordinary
man, hitherto exploited, without literally starting from the beginning; in such an unbending view people who represent the
old ways and those considered weak or unfit would be ex-
pendable and would be weeded out. Or was the policy both
cruel and ideological? (My emphasis)40
Because totalitarian leaders see the freedom of the West
with more clarity than much of the West, they desire to
undermine and destroy it with the free West's involuntary
cooperation and consent-to exploit the West's fear of its
own self-destructiveness, that showed itself in the First
World War and in the decade before the Second World
War, to turn it against itself. To win this unwilling cooperation they exploit the West's unacknowledge guilt at going
along with the cat-and-mouse game of murderers ever
since 1917.
The United States now goes along with this cat-andmouse game in El Salvador. Intelligent and honest journalists, who do not know much history, observe rightly that
122
the United States contributes to the polarization it might
have prevented with the swiftness of confidence-which
they do not, however, call for:
It was certainly possible to describe some members of the
armed opposition, as Deane Hinton had, as "out-and-out
Marxists/' but it was equally possible to describe other members of the opposition, as the embassy had at the inception of
the Revolutionary Democratic Front (FOR) in April of 1980,
as "a broad-based coalition of moderate and center left
groups." The right in El Salvador never made this distinction:
to the right, anyone in the opposition was a communist, along
with most of the American press, the Catholic church, and, as
time went by, all Salvadoran citizens not of the right. In other
words there remained a certain ambiguity about political
terms as they were understood in the United States and in El
Salvador, where "left" may mean, in the beginning, only a resistance to seeing one's family killed or disappeared. That it
comes eventually to mean something else may be, to the extent that the United States has supported the increasing polarization in El Salvador, the procustean bed we made ourselves.41
Violence, in appearance random, in which, in contrast
to outright war, you never really know who you are fighting, makes for the "ambiguity of political terms" that Joan
Didion talks of. Because the United States will neither pull
out entirely or move decisively, the violence goes on and
on, and the propaganda war spreads throughout the world
in the doubts of men. To prolong means to lose, because it
means to prolong uncertainty and to increase the "mixed
signals" from the United States the El Salvadorans complain of, rightly. The continuation of violence means that
men, especially men outside the country ofviolence, will
want most of all an end to it. It means victory for the few,
weaker and more violent, who will destroy freedom in El
Salvador. The focus on El Salvador that comes of going
along with this cat-and-mouse game also keeps the United
States from lifting its eyes to the real threat and instigator,
Cuba, and to the danger to Mexico-from seeing the
whole situation in the Caribbean, and in the world.
The cat-and-mouse game feeds off dread of the "Right,"
of fascism and nazism. But it may actually in the slow unceasing course of defeat provoke the brutality it dreadsas a young writer observed in profound criticism of the
President of Yale's recent outburst against the "Moral Majority":
Neither your Address, nor any other manifestations of liberal
Democrat culture take notice of the real dangers to the
United States, such as the latest measures of Soviet militarization, like the abolition of military draft deferment for college
students or the creation of military bases in Afghanistan for
advancing further into the Middle East. But these real dangers exist, they will really grow, they will produce real fear,
and on this fear real fascists or Nazis will capitalize. 42
And this may be just what Soviet policy wants-in spite of
itself.
WJNTER/SPRING 1983
�2 The Roots of the Division in the Past
I have described how the division betrays itself in politics since 1945, in the division of the world, in the division
of Germany and of countries like Korea, and in the polarization of thinking, and the excitation of irreconcilable factions within free countries, and within individuals within
those countries, and of the workings of this division, of
how it turns countries against themselves and individuals
against themselves, of how it increases the forces within
an individual that paralyze him in the name of freeing him
from them.
But this division that shows itself most startlingly in politics since 1945, goes much deeper than politics. It tends to
politicize all life. Even in Italian elementary schools and
high schools factionalism that calls itself "Left" and
"Right" holds sway-a telling indication of the adults' incapacity to speak to each other. 43
The politicization shows itself most tellingly in the politicization of freedom, in its equation with democracy, in
the incapacity to conceive of democratic constitutions
springing from freedom, rather than freedom springing
from democratic constitutions. The astonishing, fairly current, assertion that the greatest achievements in art, philosophy, and the writing of history have occurred in democracies shows this parochialism in its nakedness.
In the paradox of contradiction, the war now abroad
means to destroy constitutions in the name of directly realizing this freedom that politicization devours. For it hates
democratic constitutions for their modesty, for their readiness to build on this freedom, and yet measure their distance from it. For these constitutions with their checks
and balances, their respect for opposition, their due process, their dedication to law and justice above all expediency, express both our yearning for freedom and our inca-
pacity for realizing it, directly. In its genius the American
constitution bases its confidence in men on a distrust of
their natures, and, therefore, distinguishes what men do
from what they think, say, and desire. It, therefore, makes
men experience their disatisfaction with themselves-the
difference between their good opinion of themselves and
their actual self.
Art and philosophy and the writing of history, when
they are not propaganda masquerading as art, have always
been greater than politics and free constitutions, have always shown their foundation in nature and in living man,
in the freedom that is greater than constitutions and underlies them. In this sense art and philosophy and history
are silent. They do not incite to action, but allow one to
experience the springs of action, life itself, in another dimension of make believe and recall.
The shrinking of freedom within political bounds that
corresponds to its containment within the frontiers of a
few countries, shows itself in unmistakable terms in the
emptiness of much of what passes for art, philosophy, and
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
history-and in its unacknowledged politicization, and in
the public's fascination with it and incapacity to distinguish it from actual art. Substitute the word "communism" for "sex" in many novels written today, and they
will betray the yearning to incite to action, with the most
powerful stimulants, characteristic of propaganda, the
ideological drive to obliterate the obvious, the self-evident,
the lovely plainness of the day-as Lev Navrozov has observed.
In contrast our great art-and we have some-is above
all unassuming, unassuming enough to undo pretension
and masks, and make you blush. The plainness of our
humdrum existences which leaves little space for anything
but life, whether lived or not, escapes and baffles like a
new Circe everything but this unassumingness which
bears no pretence and makes no show, and seems, and in
some sense is, effortless-which does not mean it comes
without struggle. Above all it knows that the most important things come unasked. I am thinking, for example, of
Montale, Morandi, the Grass of Onkel, Onkel, Godard,
and Truffaut. In Sinyavsky's A Voice from the Chorus it
moves even in the camps, for the book is made up of the
author's letters from the camps-in a world that, at least in
the West, writes few letters for other than official purposes. In some sense no real story can now be told on the
unmistakable level of art without this unassumingness
that recalls the simplicity of nature, and is the only
strength we have that is undeniable. Nadezhda Mandelstarn in Hope against Hope showed Stalin's unmistakable
smell for this unassumingness, and his refusal to give up
the scent until he destroyed it.
Besides showing itself in art, philosophy, and the writing
of history, the mirrors of the soul, this freedom greater
than democracy lives in individuals, in the lives they lead,
in the language they speak, which bears all history in it,
which is always greater than the meanings it shows, which
always shows life rediscovering its meanings, and, therefore, always surprises-all living that in happy times goes
on untouched by politics. Because this freedom lives in individuals, and in some sense begins with them, the war
now going on aims at destroying all individuals capable of
experiencing freedom and, therefore, nature to some extent. Igor Shafarevich meant this destruction when he
wrote " ... socialist ideals must (bring) . . . the withering
away of all mankind, and its death.":
... the economic and social demands of socialism are the
means for the attainment of its basic aim, the destruction of
individuality.
... Such a revolution would amount to the destruction of
Man, at least in the sense that has hitherto been contained in
this concept. And not just an abstract destruction of the concept, but a real one toa.44
To the extent that the world-wide war to destroy freedom has made freedom smaller than democracy, which
123
�can only spring from it and realize it within limitations,
and allow individuals to realize it, but which cannot create
it, for it already lives, and we know its presence even in its
partial absence, totalitarianism has already succeeded.
Because individuals realize the attack is against them,
and that their governments are in some sense complicit
with it, just as they themselves are complicit with it, they
tend to be distrustful rather than critical of their democratic governments and of themselves-a distrust that like
the shrinking of freedom shows the success of totalitarianism has no geographical frontiers, because it has no sovereignty, because it subdues all life within its own frontiers
and, therefore, must feed on life without.
But this struggle against totalitarianism that has subordinated freedom to politics, and threatens the individual, is
in a sense simply a byproduct of the First World War and
of the incapacity to understand and end it. Unlike the wars
of Napoleon whose armies attempted to bring the French
Revolution to all of Europe, the First World War did not
begin as a total revolutionary war. It began as a conventional war which surprised everybody.lt turned into a total
war because nobody understood it. And its very uncontrollability, which came of this incapacity to understand it,
and which betrayed itself in enormous casualties, turned it
into a revolutionary war in 1917, for the betterment of humanity, to justify those casualties. In 1917 to keep its soldiers in the trenches, the Italian government promised
them a new world. 45 1917 also brought the Fourteen
Points, and the veneration of Wilson's picture almost like
an icon in much of Europe. The First World War was not
born of the revolution. It unleashed it.
The men who defeated Napoleon did not only know
what they were against. They knew what they were for.
They knew concretely enough what they were for, for Talleyrand to explain to Alexander I that there could be no
peace without the removal of Napoleon from power, and
restoration of monarchy in France. In contrast, the men of
1914 so little understood what they were about that they
allowed a war they had not understood to turn into a total
war against all governments-that is, into a war against
themselves.
Because revolution, the war against governments that
sets individuals against each other and against themselves,
came after and as a result of the First World War, became
the content of the First World War after the fighting on
the fronts ceased, because the war produced revolutions,
and not the revolutions the war, the division of the West
precedes the struggle against totalitarianism, and underlies it, and is deeper than it.
In 1918 in a remarkable work, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, Thomas Mann clearly grasped the underlying
meaning of the struggle that had rent Europe, and sensed
that the incapacity to grasp it, that betrayed itself in 1918
in the flight into principles that masked disrespect for the
defeated in their desire to change them, would also make
it impossible to experience the tragedy that gripped Eu-
124
rope, both victors and defeated, and, therefore, to end the
war in peace:
... Berufen sein, sei es zu einem Wissen oder einer Tat, zu
der man nicht geboren ist, das schien mir immer der Sinn der
Tragischen-und wo Tragik ist, darf Liebe sein. 46
The First World War represented a renewal of Rome's
struggle against the world in antiquity and in the sixteenth
century which Germany had resisted:
Der lmperialismus der Zivilisation ist die letzte Form des
roemischen Vereinigungsgedankens, gegen den Deutschland
protestiert . .. 47
For Thomas Mann in 1918 it was clear that the accidental war had been about something real and almost palpable, his own living and all the world he had known-and
that because it had been about something real, neither the
defeated not the victors could be entirely right.
Mann saw the First World War as a struggle between
France and Germany, between France that embodied the
principles of the French Revolution, and Germany and
the German-speaking world, and probably also Russia
(which an accident of diplomacy had put on the side of the
Allies). He understood that total war had distorted France
as much as Germany, for total war tends to obliterate the
differences between victors and defeated.
Germany stood for art as opposed to "literature"-the
novels that led Madame Bovary to destruction-for work
in distinction to employment, for culture as opposed to
civilization, for authority as opposed to liberty, which he
distinguished from freedom, for feeling as opposed to principle, for philosophy, for freedom as opposed to democracy, which tended to spread politics everywhere, and after the French Revolution, had brought war to all of
Europe. By art as opposed to "literature," he meant an art
that was greater than politics, and which taught its readers
the limits of politics. He dared even to write that he had
hoped Germany would win the war.
But the greatness of Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen
comes in the awareness that breathes throughout it that
this world is gone forever, and that its disappearance will
have consequences. It is a book full of the sense of loss,
and, therefore, full of sorrow and depth, a warm depth
whose profoundity does not frighten. Betrachtungen eines
Unpolitischen is as much a farewell to Germany as Buddenbrooks was a farewell to his parents and his family, and
Lubeck and the world of the Hanseatic cites. From now on
he would be on his own without a past in a world that was
on its own.
The time of wandering in which all were homeless had
begun-the time in which men no longer knew how to
greet a stranger, and, therefore tell the difference between
a stranger and friend, in which men no longer wrote letters, in which all knew the devastating loneliness of losing
oneself in a crowd, in which a great deal of cash no longer
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�meant wealth, in which great cities assured anonymity,
and the elites of the world lived as if in villages, in which
the country of the homeless would inherit the defense of
what was left of a Europe that could not defend itself, in
which love would be called sex, and blushes feared, in
which egalitarianism was taken for the simplicity of nature, in which any difference smote the heart with something like the pangs of unrequited love, in which envy
would be taken for enthusiasm, in which few could conceive less was more 1 in which you wrote books because you
feared to speak your mind to your neighbour, in which
plain good sense would be taken for untutored naivete, in
which gradually artists disappeared and all men became
"artists," in which everything had to be learned in school,
in which men thought they were the first in history to
make love, in which men protested against death, in which
shame's place in nature was beyond imagination.
1918 was probably the last year Mann could have written such a book Later he praised democracy, because it
was all that was left, and never with anything like the
depth of his farewell to the world of his youth. For after
1918 you could no longer address individuals without exciting crowds, without inspiring the passions that made
things worse in the name of making them better, without
provoking the politics that seduced individuals to their
death by promising to do for them what they could not do
for themselves.
You had to get along with what was left-that is what
Mann's farewell meant. But getting along with what was
left meant knowing the consequences of destruction. It
meant that in the future Europe would live only in individuals wandering and alone throughout the world in a silence that told of embarrassment at great works and at
greatness itself, and that took any inadvertent sign of lifefrom which all art springs-as something untoward:
... Ich sprach von europaeischer Verhunzung: Und wirklich,
unserer Zeit gelang es, so vieles zu verhunzen: Das Nationale,
den Sozialismus-den Mythos, die Lebensphilsophie, das Irrationale, den Glauben, die Jugend, die Revolution und was
nicht noch alles. Nun denn, sie brachte uns auch die Verhunzung des grossen Mannes. Wir muessen uns mit dem historischen Lose abfinden, das Genie auf dieser Stufe seiner Offenbarungs-moeglichkeit zu erleben_48
About twenty years after Mann's Betrachtungen, Kafka
understood clearly that the separation of feelings from understanding that the principles of the victors had helped
bring about-and against which Thomas Mann had said
Germany had always protested-had brought about the
demonization of feelings that might destroy the very
things they would have preserved when not divorced from
understanding. By feelings Kafka meant, I think, the wild,
and quite passionless, indignation that drove political
propaganda, and threatened to undermine the little authority that remained in government and individuals.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
... One ought not to provoke people. We live in an age which
is so possessed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to
do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a
crime. War and revolution haven't ceased to rage. On the
contrary. The freeing of our feelings stokes their fires.49
Mann knew that something real had been destroyed.
And because something real had been destroyed, and because men did not realize it had been destroyed, the destruction, the war, would continue, even as the protests of
desperation against it increased. This destruction pretended to free the core of man, that showed itself in the
capacity to say "yes" or uno," but actually it sought to de~
stray this core, to paralyze the capacity to say "yes" or
"no," to destroy the living, the capacity to live. It did this
by turning life itself into politics, into propaganda that
drove people into ecstasy with its promises to change human nature.
When Mann realized that there could be no peace after
1917 because neither defeated nor victors could admit
they had been both right and wrong in the traditions of
eighteenth century law, he meant the disappearance of
doubt in international relations, the doubt that finds remarkable description in the late Richard Hofstadter's
sketch of the qualities that make for art and philosophy:
It is, in fact, the ability to comprehend and express not only
different but opposing points of view, to identify imaginatively with or even to embrace within oneself contrary feelings and ideas that gives rise to first~rate work in all areas of
humanistic expression and in many fields of inquiry.50
The democracies recognized this doubt, that is ultimately
the doubt, and the questioning that comes of it, of Socrates, in their recognition of opposition and criticism in their
domestic life. But after 1917 it no longer held any sway in
international life where victors and defeated could no
longer admit they were both right and wrong. Instead they
wanted a rigidity they took for assurance-a rigidity which
robbed them of confidence and made them fear themselves, and which made them weak in peace and harsh in
war, and which finally obliterated the distinction between
peace and war.
But this rigidity in international relations which brings
with it the destruction of traditional international law (ius
gentium)-the Germans were not even invited to the
peace negotiations after the First World War-cannot but
slowly paralyze the doubt within the domestic life of free
countries. It shows its stiffening effect in the spread of ideologies, and the polarization they bring, within free countries. For this doubt to live within countries, it must also
show itself outside of them in the recognition of the uncertainty of relations between nations, which allows the continuation of present friendships, because it recognizes that
the friends of today might be the enemies of tomorrowand the enemies of today, the friends of tomorrow. 51 This
recognition of uncertainty means the recognition of the
125
�differences between nations, which, in turn, brings the
recognition that freedom is bigger than constitutions, and,
therefore, does not require similar constitutions everywhere, that some peoples can live' in freedom without
spelling their freedom out in written documents, that freedom is old, slavery new. In his characteristically sententious remark at Yalta that the wars of the twentieth century unlike other wars allowed the victors to impose their
political systems on the defeated, Stalin meant the opposite of living with this uncertainty. 52 But this uncertainty
inspired the traditional law of nations (ius gentium), which
is older than almost all nations now living, and which knew
it lived precisely because it sought its assurance, not in the
written guarantee of treaties, but in the threat of war for
violation of traditional practice-for instance, the seizure
of ambassadors, something the Persians did at their peril
in the nineteenth century.
The incapacity to settle the war with a real peace, which
brought the defeated as well as the victors to the peace
table, blurred the distinction between victors and defeated, precisely because a real peace would have meant
recognizing their differences, and the differences in their
political traditions. It would have meant not destroying
the institution of the Kaiser, or at least realizing the serious consequences of its destruction. It would have meant
understanding the risks involved in undoing the empires.
It took more than a generation and much disaster to make
the world understand that the destruction of governments
prolongs a war instead of ending it, because legitimate governments do not grow up overnight:
July 29, 1945 ... He (Ernest Bevin, Foreign Minister of Great
Britain) then made a rather surprising statement-for a liberal and a labor leader: "It might have been far bett~r for all of
us not to have destroyed the institution of the Kaise.~after the
last war; we might not have had this one if we hadn't 'done so.
It might have been far better to have guided the Germans to a
constitutional monarchy rather than leaving them without a
symbol and therefore opening the psychological doors to a
man like Hitler . .. " 53
The blurring of the distinction between victors and defeated showed itself in the collapse of governments among
both the defeated and victorious. For Italy, which Mussolini seized by bluff in 1922, and Russia, at least until
Kerensky, had been victors in the war with Germany. And
the collapse of France in 1941, in face of the might that
came of the collapse of the democracy that defeat had imposed on Germany, should also probably be included in
this list. This collapse of governments among both defeated and victors shows the war had overwhelmed both.
In a sense the story of the two decades between the wars
is the story of how victors and defeated undid each other
in unwilling cooperation. Defeat is a serious business. It
should teach the victors modesty of aims. The extent that
the war had overcome both defeated and victors showed
itself also in the victors' blindness to the significance of the
126
failure of democracy in Italy, and then in Germany. Nations who had persuaded themselves they had fought the
war for democracy ought to have been profoundly alarmed
at the collapse of these governments-not to speak of the
collapse of the Tsar, and a few months later, of the justborn democracy in Russia in 1917. Blindness to the significance of the failure of democracy in Italy, and later in Germany, led to complicity with the regimes that replaced
them. And this sense of complicity paralyzed the democracies in the face of their aggressions. In some sense nazism
and fascism and communism were the creatures of the victors who had not known the responsibilities of victory:
If the realists had wanted to train up a generation of
Englishmen and Englishwomen expressly as the potential
dupes of every adventurer in morals or politics, commerce or
religion, who would appeal to their emotions and promise
them private gains which he neither could procure them nor
even meant to procure them, no better way of doing it could
have been discovered.
... The British government, behind all its disguises, had dedared itself a partisan of Fascist dictatorship.
... I am writing a description of the way in which those
events (the English government's unstated policy of undermining the government of the Republic of Spain and the governments of Abyssinia and Czechoslovakia) impinged upon
myself and broke up my pose of detached professional
thinker. I know now that the minute philosophers of my
youth, for all their profession of a purely scientific detachment from practical affairs, were the propagandists of a coming Fascism. I know that Fascism means the end of dear
thinking and the triumph of irrationalism. I know that all my
life I have been engaged unawares in a political struggle,
fighting against these things in the dark. Henceforth I shall
fight in the daylight. 54
Those are famous words of Collingwood's in 1939. But
governments had started teaching this confusion to their
citizens long before. In a letter on February 15, 1918,
Robert Lansing, Secretary of State, argued strongly
against giving money to the Bolsheviks in an assessment
that even to today sounds raw and outspoken because of
its accuracy:
.. . Mr. Walling had a keen appreciation of the forces which
are menacing the present social order in nearly every European country and which may have to be reckoned with even
in this country. It is really a remarkable analysis of the dangerous elements which are coming to the surface and which are
in many ways more to be dreaded than autocracy; the latter is
despotism but an intelligent despotism, while the former is a
despotism of ignorance. One at least has the virtue of order,
while the other is productive of disorder and anarchy. It is a
condition which cannot but arouse the deepest concern. 55
Despite this advice, a few days later on March 11, 1918,
Woodrow Wilson, unwilling or unable to distinguish the
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�violence in Russia from his own promises of democracy to
the world-promises made in 1917 to give the fighting
meaning-wrote encouraging words to the Soviet Congress:
... The whole heart of the people of the United States is with
the people of Russia in the attempt to free themselves forever
from autocratic government and become the masters of their
own life. 56
Wilson's measureless aspirations wished to dispell the
memory of the hatreds shown the world in allied wartime
propaganda. But they matched this hatred in fierceness.
Their measurelessness also made them difficult to distinguish from the measureless aspirations of those out to destroy all government that continued the hatred of the war
in the ostensible repudiation of it. Both the builders and
destroyers of governments meant to repudiate the past, including the immediate past of the Great War. There were
to be new times-times the world had never seen before.
They repudiated the past because the past embarassed
them. But this embarassment measured only their shame
for the present. They shrunk from the past, because they
would not know they were ashamed of the present. Underneath this measurelessness that came of shame for a
present that was beyond coping, and that was so difficult
to distinguish from "revolutionary" fervour, and was in
some sense its complement, there was always fear of war,
and the suspicion of governments that comes of the fear of
war-enough combined to weaken any government.
It was almost as if the world no longer knew how to
mourn the dead only to forget them. It did not realize that
continuing the war in the measurelessness of aspirations
meant not mourning, not feeling sorrow. And that not sorrowing meant forever the leaden guilt at so much massacre whose incomprehensibility had undermined the confidence of statesmen everywhere, made them incapable of
concluding an effective peace, and undone the word courage-a guilt that no amount of freneticizing about the future would dispel. There has been perhaps no time with
greater cause for sorrow that sorrowed less. The past
stopped in 1917.
But the appeal to measureless aspiration to give meaning to the slaughter did not only bring the past to a stop. It
nourished the suspicion that violence brought progress,
made the world better, that it might be the only way to
change things. For the measureless aspiration for peace
and a new world meant man had changed, and the only
change that men knew had come of violence, now called
"revolution" instead of war, because the word "revolu-
tion" excited hope, war dread. And it tells something
a bout these measureless aspirations that almost every
country that totalitarianism seized first went through democracy.
The belief that violence brought progress made the suspicion that men had done intolerable damage to themselves intolerable. It banished prudence, common-sense,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
sobriety, and most of all pessimism, all words hardly anyone dared show in public, whose meaning men no longer
knew-or dared conceive-except darkly, and in the silence of their own minds, a silence that the deafening roar
of aspiration in all public places made men fearful of trusting. Everything, but above all disaster, became the occasion for exuberance that men mistook for hope-just as
they took their sentimentality, especially the sentimental
whining for peace, for goodwill. But unlike hope and sorrow and goodwill, this exuberance and sentimentality despite its illusion of energy made men helpless in the face of
those who used the same exuberence and sentimentality
to undo them. Because of its measurelessness it made it
hard to grasp obstacles that would have shown their aspirations their limitations and, therefore, increased the responsibilities of the victors by facing them with the choice
between what they might do-and what they could not.
But the very measurelessness of the aspirations that increased because they did not face these obstacles made for
the assumption hardly anyone dared question in public,
that men had actually changed, rather than simply destroyed ages of inheritance.
In this unwillingness even to ask whether destruction
might not have made things worse, our time contrasts with
Rome in her civil wars. Open almost any page of Cicero, of
Sallust and even some of Caesar, and you will see there a
confidence we cannot conceive that their words will live
forever because they tell of men who had destroyed themselves and their freedom, and had little illusion that it
would not be forever, and that nothing would come of it,
except sorrow for the loss they could not help. And so it, in
fact, turned out, only much more slowly than now, because they recognized the loss-preferred sight to the exuberance of willing blindness, and did not deny the dullness
that had overcome them.
The readiness to justify events after their occurrence in
order to find a meaning for a war that nobody understood-except the totalitarians, who confused their confidence that destruction ignored had irremediable consequences with understanding-which showed itself in the
resort to aspirations for a new world in 1917, put free governments behind events. Between the wars, the complicity
that came of not grasping the significance of the collapses
of democracy in various countries increased their slowness
in grasping events and responding. It made them helpless
in the face of the continuation of the war until it was too
late. And in the Second World War, the depth of their unacknowledged sense of responsibility for the disaster made
them merciless in their self-justification, and incapable of
respecting their enemies, and blind to the consequences
of an alliance, born of necessity, with a totalitarian regime
worse than nazism and fascism, that had to some extent
inspired them. Towards the end, Hitler remarked that he
was the amateur, Stalin, the pro.
The situation of the free countries behind events has
persisted until the present-with the exception of the
127
�swift confidence of the beginning of the Korean War. But
even the Korean war ended not in a settlement, but in a
battle truce between commanders that reinstituted the division of the country that precipitated the war. The
United States remained in the situation of response-not
mastery.
To remain behind events weakens confidence in governments, for it shows them not enough on top of events
to understand them. And understanding, in our situation
of neither war nor peace, where many states are illegitimate and others lack the confidence of legitimacy, is crucial. In a normal situation of balance of power, such as prevailed in the nineteenth century or in the eighteenth, not
haunted by the fear of war, and where subversion is not
prevalent, response may be enough-not in ours.
The situation after the First World War allowed little
room for error. It called for more honesty, more straightforward practicality, for more courage than war itself. But
the war had consumed courage. Even the world that had
yielded so much death embarassed people. It was too serious to bear mention. The destruction of the First World
War meant human nature was on its own everywhere.
People felt the demands of truth, and knew they had to be
met, unflinchingly. All the art between the two wars tells
that, and shows that bravery-and, for the most part, it
moves as if there were no longer any history, or govern·
ments worthy of notice-as if the world lived only in private life and private sensation. But it was not easy to face
human nature. The whole period between the wars is
driven by the conflict between the necessity of facing human nature, and the unreadiness to face it. F1ight into aspiration relieved the conflict-but it did not restore confidence. It devoured it.
More than governments, people realized they were on
their own, in something like the state of nature, not of
choice as the excitation of aspiration pretended, but of necessity-of the necessity of past events, of destruction and
of the incapacity of settlement -a necessity that totalitarians called "the inevitibility of history," because they
counted on individuals' incapacity to cope with it.
The yearning for total freedom that took flight into aspiration, and that in the unrecognized desolation appeared
like necessity itself, did not amount to a capacity for it.
Precisely because the war had subordinated freedom to
politics-and made freedom the stuff of international relations-and in order to subordinate it to politics, dismembered it, politics tended to devour everything before it in
the search for a freedom greater than itself that would
show it its limits. These limits live in individuals' capacity
enough to distinguish between "yes" and "no."57 Hitler
came to office legally, and Mussolini also. The combination of a yearning, and incapacity, for measureless free~
dom that was taken to allow everything exposed men to
the most ruthless among them, to men like criminals, in
their incapacity to yield to natural law, to use Hobbes's
words that mean the words nature speaks to those who listen to it, in their thwarted genius. The incapacity to distinguish actual genius and nature from its distortions and parodies led to fascination and admiration for criminality-a
fascination that has again betrayed itself in the last twenty
years, and which paralyzes.
And the tragedy is that in its attack on nature, and its
attempt to destroy it, totalitarianism also uncovered nature, but only in war for it knows only war, which it cannot
distinguish from revenge or defense, and unmistakably reminded of its presence. In the midst of the "insane gran·
deur" of the Second World War, Milovan Djilas realized
that the fighting, after bringing his hardness out, also softened him, for a moment that disappeared until words recalled it to him a generation later:
Then, unobtrusively yet insistently, various thoughts came to
my mind concerning the Germans, the Partisans, and ideology. Why were doctors from Berlin and professors from Heidelberg killing off Balkan peasants and students in these ra-
vines? Hatred for Communism was not sufficient. Some
other terrible and implacable force was driving them to insane death and shame. And driving us, too, to resist them and
pay them back . ... This passion, this endurance which lost
sight of suffering and death, this struggle for one's manhood
and nationality in the face of one's own death ... this had
nothing to do with ideology or with Marx and Lenin. When
the sun rose, I suppressed these abysmal thoughts, for I
sensed how destructive they were for the ideas and organization to which I had given myself. But I never forgot those
thoughts ... 58
Nazism and fascism and communism were a vengeance,
and an exploitation, of 1914-1917, a vengeance and exploitation not only of the defeated upon themselves, but also a
vengeance and exploitation of the victors upon them·
selves-for why else did they tolerate the spread of these
destructive movements?-for principles they could not
live up to, that made them unrecognizable to themselves,
that made them feel like liars when they spoke and defenseless in the face of their enemies, now at home as well
as abroad, and more insidious than soldiers on a battlefield. For it turned out that they were not able to act in
accordance with what they had said in 1917, most obviously when Hitler seized the Rhineland in March, 1936:
to say uno," that is, in nature. And totalitarianism, in the
name of freeing this nature, attacked this capacity to say
"no" directly in each individual-with the argument that
it embodied the truth, and the truth could not be resisted.
It attacked nature itself, as if there had never been any
governments. And it discovered, to almost everybody's
amazement, that many individuals did not have resilience
128
-Maison aurait pu arreter Hitler sans risque de guerre quand il
a occupe la Rhenanie en 36?
-Sans aucun risque. On le sait. Aucun. Hitler avait donne
l'ordre a Ia Bundeswehr d'entrer en Rhenanie, avec une reserve imposee par le haut commandement. Si les troupes
franc;aises avanc;aient, les troupes allemandes se retiraient.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�On le sait aujourd'hui. On sait que, en mars 1936, on aurait
pu changer le cours de l'histoire. Cela fait partie de rna philosophie de l'histoire. C'est une date, une date fondamentale,
oil il suffisait de Iuddite et d'un peu de courage pour changer
le cours de l'histoire. Mais, malheureusement, Hitler avait raison. II n'y avait aucune chance de trouver en France un
gouvernement pour prendre cette decision. 59
Nazism and fascism reached deep yearnings, yearnings
for authority and its reassurance, not only in Italy and Germany but throughout the West-so that the world not unfortunate enough to continue them draws its breath interror at their memory, and shades its eyes from them even as
it feels driven to look, and is dull, with few important exceptions, to their continuation in the present, and the
widespread sympathy for them, in their denial in communism. Nazism and fascism arose in deeply traditional countries whose traditions war had partly destroyed and repudiated almost entirely-but which individuals could not
relinquish even if they would. (For politics is swifter than
character, and in the twentieth century risks uncontrollability because it does not acknowledge its conflicts with
character. No time's politics has denied obvious things
more, feelings, and common sense that comes of feeling.
For the political exploitation of aspiration is the greatest
underminer of feeling.) Nazism and fascism exploited the
yearning for the old values, destroyed in the First World
War, mercilessly: self-respect, duty, respect for accomplishment, the yearning for civil order, the compatibility of
freedom with obedience, the yearning for deserved deference, for meaningful life, for glory-and above all for courage. But they knew their murderousness, and did not hesitate to display it. Mussolini took responsibility for the
murder of a member of parliament, Matteotti, which had
aroused the greatest public outcry Italy had ever known, in
parliament in 1924. Communism, in contrast, with its
promise of a new world with new values without the harshness, cruelty of the old values denies its murderousness,
and, therefore, its hypocrisy is more seductive. For Djilas,
the murderousness of Communism is only a question:
"Killing is a function of war and revolution or could it be
the other way around?"
The blindness that came of the public exploitation of
aspiration to deny private experience tended to make the
world unrecognizable to those who lived in it. This blindness to world and self, this incapacity to see the world,
which led to the insistence on facts without understanding
or on understanding without facts-and, thereby, increased the susceptibility to propaganda-is the disturbance of perception that led after the Second World War
to actual political division of the West and the war that
progresses by dividing the rest of the world and individuals
against themselves.
The wars set what we would like to be against what we
actually were, in a way that made it difficult to experience
what we were, and to distinguish it from what we yearn to
be. Most simply, by setting liberty, the liberty of principle,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
against authority that springs from some contact with nature, the wars rendered difficult the growth of liberty and
authority in each other's presence. Without both liberty
and authority the experience of freedom in the actual living of individuals, from which the liberty in constitutions
springs, cannot live. Instead the separation of both liberty
and authority, and the setting of each against the other,
tends to provoke the distortion of their extremes, permissiveness, license, and weakness on one side, and cruel and
stifling authoritarianism on the other (whether from the
"left" or "right" matters little).
Liberty and authority are not the only qualities set
against each other in this conflict. The World War that has
not ceased deepens the division between form (principles)
and content, between will and desire. With the result that
these qualities are often experienced as antithetical, and
distorted in that experience. For instance, will into the
cruel rigidity of totalitarian dogma that cannot respond to
questioning, and desire into mere wish and arbitrary fancy
that cannot stand up to anything, and for instance, imagines it can get peace by demanding it, merely.
This division and polarization of qualities that can only
flourish in the give-and-take of each other's presence-a
give-and-take that is the ground in nature of the dialogue
between government and opposition in free democracies-hampers perception of political reality. After 1917,
and even more, after 1945 when the rigidity of the situation grew more obvious, and the force of that rigidity began to make itself felt throughout the world, this trouble in
perception has hampered fitting, effective negotiation and
action. Most simply, it attempts to undermine the capacity
of individuals (and also of governments) to distinguish between actual freedom and slavery that masks as greater
freedom. The struggle against totalitarianism goes on first
of all in the heart's mind. For without clarity of mind
among those for the moment spared violence, there can be
no resolute action against actual violence that takes place,
for the most part, not on battlefields, but at the will of often few well-trained and supplied men who strike at random, and who know that prolonged violence works to their
advantage both within the country they desire to seize,
and in the world elsewhere.
The inability to grasp what goes on before one's eyes, to
feel and to understand, instead of feeling in order not to
understand, or understanding in order not to feel, the incapacity to see, and to acknowledge that one does not see, is
the disturbance of perception that lies at the center of the
division of the West, and is increased by it. This dissociation is the driving force behind the division of the West. It
shows itself most dramatically in painting that like all art
often betrays the deepest capacities for living of an epoch.
129
�Perception
'
A little after 1945, first in America and then throughout
the Free World, painting that could see neither the world
nor man but that, until its collapse into emptiness in the
sixties, somehow expressed the anguish of the inability to
see, without acknowledging it, won public acceptance.
This painting shows perhaps more dramatically than anything else the incapacity to perceive and understand that
finds its general expression in the division of the West, and
in the drift and stagnation-and violence that involves
everybody-that has come of it after 1945. Significantly,
this painting also betrays the flattening and affectlessness
that comes of polarization: it has no depth, no world to see
and touch. For depth comes only within the give-and-take
of freedom and authority-and not when they are set
against each other and driven into the distortion of their
extremes. At most this painting betrays anxiety-the anxiety that comes of the inability to see, and increases it.
The process that culminated in painting that saw neither world nor man had started long before 1945, in fact
almost immediately after the impressionists, and well before the First World War brought the division that showed,
at the same time that it increased, the difficulties of perception and understanding, of apprehending world and
self that the West has struggled with since the destruction
of antiquity-and which have put the disappearance of antiquity at the center of its awareness and its language, and
its thought and art.
In the decades just before the First World War, a deepening division first appeared that grew into open opposition between form and content that distorts each and dims
the sight of the world and self. In Picasso's work a sharp
break occurs several years before the First World War between the paintings of the Blue and the Rose periods,
which still strive for feeling and vision-or, at least, openly
face the inability to feel in their risk of sentimentalityand the pre-cubist paintings like Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon (1907) whose intellectual brilliance blinds one
momentarily to their deadness of feeling. In contrast in
the German-speaking area there occurs especially in the
work of Munch and Kokoschka an over-concentration of
feeling, at times frightening, because without the assurance of vision, without a sense that the picture actually
shows the living world-that there is a world to distinguish
from a rising dream.
To put it crudely, painters in the world that was to become the allied sphere tended to formalism without feeling and in the German-speaking sphere to feeling which
because unsure in form became difficult to distinguish
from nightmare, and, at its weakest, daydream. Much of
this work in either sphere does not reflect the world and
the experience of beauty but, with differences in intensity,
the inability to see it. It often leads one further from the
world-and into a self that recognizes itself in its isolation
130
from the world, a self that cannot get out of itself, and,
therefore, suffers the temptation to narcissism. In either
sphere, painters appear to struggle against something, a
transparent mirror that throws their self back at them,
against a transparent wall that impedes vision, even as it
allows them to catch sight of the world they strive to see
and touch, just beyond reach. Already also, depth begins
to fade into flatness.
This transparent wall that gets in the way of their eyes'
reaching and, therefore, turns the world into something
recognizable, but at the same time incomprehensible,
sometimes into the very opposite of what the mind and
common-sense know to be out there, is the source of the
division of the West that hardened, and, thereby, provoked the violence that could destroy it in 1917, to spread
it after 1945. The iron curtain, too, is a transparent mirror
that baffles the eyes with the image of the self it throws
back-and, thereby, makes narcissism and spurious intimacy meant to exorcise danger without acknowledging it,
and the sense of entrapment that comes of them, the way
to self-enslavement and destruction.
Since depth and a strong sense of the whole composition appeared in painting in Italy from 1200 to 1600 for the
first time since antiquity, this transparent wall made itself
felt despite, and because of, the lucidity of vision and
depth that came with it. In painting in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries in Spain and the Low-lands, it almost disappeared entirely except for a certain stiffness, for
an incapacity to allow movement, for a tendency to freeze
movement like a snapshot. (This holding still distinguishes
painting since the Renaissance from the ancient art that
inspired it, for ancient art moved freely, especially obviously, in Greek vase painting and Etruscan frescoes.) Even
when it appears to disappear altogether, this stiffness, the
transparent wall, betrays itself in the awareness that the
painting is a painting, in the awareness of the eyes of the
painter, and of the hindrances that keep them from losing
themselves in their seeing.
This painting from 1200 to 1600 in Italy, and afterwards
throughout Europe, realized the reciprocal relation between sight and understanding, and, ultimately, between
seeing and rationality, but always at a certain distance
from nature, which lent it the stiffness I have described. It
depicted nature as well as men and history but it always
subordinated nature, even in the North in the seventeenth
century, to man and memory-to the recall of the past.
Some of the paintings of Durer and of Rembrandt are perhaps exceptions. In artists like Leonardo or Rembrandt
drawing was knowing. They could not see without understanding what actually lay before their eyes. In our words,
Leonardo and Machelangelo were researchers. With this
one overwhelming difference, they did not fear wholes,
that is, important conclusions. (Machiavelli, at the beginning of his Discourses, remarks that artists had been the
first to dare to learn from antiquity. And daring to look at
antiquity meant looking at your own world, without flinchWINTER/SPRING 1983
�ing, as Machiavelli's own work showed.) And everything
about this art bespeaks confidence, and awareness and
confidence in the face of tragedy. The whole sense of !tal·
ian painting in this time is of overwhelming lucidity, of a
world pressing in upon the eyes, of joy and fearlessness in
sight. They are wild in their beholding. The same seeing of
this many citied world-as many citied as Ancient
Greece-showed itself in the individuals who dared look
again openly at the sky-and to understand the great
works of antiquity, to look history in the face. After
Caravaggio, who reaches an unbelievable unity of depth,
shape, and movement, seeing and knowing again suffer
separation in Italy. In subsequent years there is much ges·
turing, there are dramatic, highly brainy compositionsbut there is little sight, sense of the whole, except as design, or depth. This gradual withering of contact becomes
apparent soon after the burning of Giordano Bruno in
1600. Such things are not done with impunity. But in the
North sight and understanding found a new softness in
their relation, and a lucidity more distinguishable from
clarity of mind than in Italian painting-and, therefore,
less easily capable of giving an account of itself in words,
but for all that not less explicit and meaningful.
The tradition of painting in the West since 1200 which
could see both men and events, could both remember and
know, at the expense, however, of a certain remoteness
from nature, found breathtaking renewal in the work of
Delacroix and Manet, just before the impressionists drew
upon it to abandon it, and to yield to nature directly.
In the half century or so before the Great War, Turner,
the impressionists and post-impressionists saw into the
quick of nature, and in that sight knew themselves a part
of it-without sentimentality or self-consciousness, and, in
contrast, for instance, to the woodenness of Claude Lor·
raine, with an easy sweetness still sets the world moving.
Even in Cezanne, whom we all too often see with Cubist
eyes, there is little separation between form and content,
between what is seen and how it is seen. Everywhere, perhaps most startlingly in Seurat and his associates, there is
an unassuming confidence that what is seen will gather
shape of its own. Many of these painters do not distinguish
shape from intensity (energy). They often do not sharply
define edges or outlines which arise, instead, of them·
selves, unexpectedly, in their work. For a whole world has
its parts. They distinguish but do not separate earth and
sky. Both throb with movement in their works, which har·
bour no empty spaces. They distinguish trees, plants, and
earth from the space and air around them. They do not
separate them from it. Their space is not empty, but vibrant and full and soft like the trees, plants, and flowers
reaching or showering or bursting into it. In Turner light
softly pulsates, in Vincent the sky glows and pulsates,
sometimes almost harshly:
The sacrifice of the sharp outline of objects shows that the
vision of the painter is focused not upon the objects but upon
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the space itself. ... Above all, in the use of the divided touch,
the painter conveys to the painting and through the painting
to the observer the vibrating, pulsating quality of the atmosphere ...
One of the results of this technique is to give to their paintings (the paintings of Monet, Renoir, Pisarro) a depth offield,
a sense of profoundness, a three-dimensional quality that
other paintings suggest but do not fully achieve. The impressionists accomplish this by making us aware of the space, not
simply as the coordinate of objects and events, but as an objective reality itself.60
In the brief moment of the impressionists the transpar·
ent wall, the stiffness, did in fact entirely disappear, and
movement reappeared unequivocally for the first time
since antiquity, but at the cost of seeing human beings:
men and women more or less disappeared from the can·
vas. To live on, the open embrace of nature of the impres·
sionists had somehow to come to see man, to remember
and to know, as well as to see nature as if there were no
man. Otherwise it would turn to mere evasion in the fa].
lowing generations:
Before the impressionist impulse disappeared in the morass
of twentieth century political thinking, it found expression in
the work of two men (Gauguin and Van Gogh) whose lives
dramatized the final struggle.6l
In the general streaming, sometimes harsh, especially of
Vincent's last pictures, only the men and women suffer an
emaciated, almost leaden holding-still, quiet and resigned,
but nevertheless forced enough to make you sense the
bound writhing in their bodies-the characteristic expres·
sian of Christian Europe. They bear the haggard and
pinned-down-in-the-chest look of helplessness, the cutting
and cynical knowing sensitivity that knows everything but
can do little, so full of pity and hate, yet also at the quick of
love, which, despite the blurring of postwar prosperity and
its convention of goodwill, still makes its presence felt.
Vincent wanted to discover the streaming outside man
within him also. He betrayed man's unwitting unwilling·
ness to yield to it:
Beyond the head ... I paint infinity. I make a simple background out of the richest, most intense blue I can contrive,
and by the simple conjunction the blonde head is lit up by the
rich blue background and acquires a mysterious effect like
that of a star on the deep azure.62
The tragedy Gauguin and Van Gogh lived came because they attempted to see nature in man as well outside
of him. For the seeing of the impressionists to live on they
knew they had somehow to transform and to renew the
tradition of Manet and Delacroix that the impressionists
had abandoned to yield to nature.
Renewing the tradition that had culminated in Manet
and Delacroix meant rediscovering the rational. It meant
experiencing the reciprocal relation between sight and un·
131
�derstanding, and finally between genitality and rationality.
It meant seeing man. Seeing man meant recognizing the
irrationality that separated nature outside of him from nature inside him, and kept him from both. It meant keeping
up the impressionists' contact with depth despite the superficial hardness of man, and the fragility that rendered
many men fearful of depth. It meant rediscovering the rational without abandoning nature, rediscovering it in nature. Otherwise renewal would be mere wooden repetition. In the failure of the successors of the impressionists
to see the world whole, the division of the West first
showed itself in acute form.
In this shorter perspective, the incapacity of painting to
see the world and human beings in this century, which led
it to turn the transparent wall itself into the subject of
painting, at the cost of the whole and depth, and finally, of
the obliteration of world and even self, simply represents a
breakdown in the capacity to maintain and expand the
contact with life of the impressionists, to deal with its contradictions, with the contrast between the impressionists
daring in touching nature and their corresponding incapacity to remember men and events, to experience both
the public world and the private, and their relation, to
combine seeing and knowing. The contact with nature
could not go on without resolving this contradiction, without undoing man's self-exile from nature.
Until the impressionists, painting coped with this transparent wall by actually seeing it, and, therefore, acknowledging it and keeping it distinct from the painting, at the
same time that it made you aware inescapably that the
painting was a painting. The impressionists dissolved the
transparent wall and its stiffness.
Unable to maintain the contact with nature of the Impressionists, and no longer able to work in the service of
religion, which in previous centuries, with its mediation
between the desire, and the incapacity, to experience nature, had kept art from yielding to despair, contemporary
art cannot but serve, often unawares, propagandistic purposes. It weakens those who attend to it. It steals courage
away from them. Instead of reflecting nature, it makes
mock theological, demagogic-and, therefore, unwittingly
political statements. It betrays a world grown flat and,
therefore, largely the creature of wish, of wish that takes
itself for desire, but dreads will.
The breakdown in seeing after the impressionists, and
the unacknowledged fixation in it that lends a frantic impatience to much art, in the midst of stagnation, closely
parallels the incapacity to grasp the meaning of events
and, thereby, to master them, in politics of this century.
Here, too, as in painting, man destroys world and self because he cannot maintain real contact with life in himself
and outside of himself, because he cannot stand living,
its rough disappointments, its joys, its depths and its
heights-and yearns for it more desperately, the more he
deprives himself of it, and, therefore, succumbs to increasing alternations of violence, in the name of discovering
132
and changing the nature of man, and negotiations to put
an end to that violence that turn out simply to tighten and
spread its hold on men.
Another example of the division and opposition between form and content that shows itself in painting in
this century appears in the contrast between the programmatic "internationalism" that blurs the distinction between peoples, and, thereby, puts the past beyond the
reach of memory, of the Allies and the frightening discoveries in the German-speaking countries, beginning at the
end of the nineteenth century, that man was often not capable of distinguishing between rationality and irrationality, that the rational in appearance often masked the irrational that in crucial moments betrayed itself in undoing
it, that freedom was more than many could stand. I mean
psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis took seriously the truth
that individuals had to come apart, had to know their helplessness, before they could experience their strength, and
discover their wholeness, that "nothing can be sole or
whole that has not been rent". Not explicitly a response to
the war's destroying that would not cease, it knew how to
start at the beginning with individuals-with the existence
that yearned for life which had survived the destruction
that still threatened it. Like Socrates and his ignorance, it
nurtured the confidence that the rational, once freed of
the irrational that drained its energy, might spring up of its
own strength.
Psychoanalysis did not aim directly at the truth, but at
the distortions that obstructed the truth. But it made it
possible again to experience the unwitting presence of the
truth, for it uncovered the quick of life moving at its own
sweet will-and the fearfulness that kept individuals from
it, a fearfulness that individuals took for fear of destruction, but which numbed them to the rational fear of the
destruction that actually threatened them. Because of its
simplicity, stubborn enough always to threaten it with reductionisms, and because of its refusal to indulge in assurances-for it knew it could not know what would become
of it-it provoked much hatred and resentment. Hatred
and resentment that otherwise sought disguise in political
exhilaration that was nothing but forgetfulness.
But psychoanalysis had its limitations-above all in its
incapacity to know its limitations. Others might have
shown it its limitations, but unfortunately the strength of
its truth drove those that denied it, to deny it entirely, and
those that accepted it, to accept it entirely. With such
friends it hardly needed enemies. Both friends and enemies in unwitting cooperation perpetrated the divisions
psychoanalysis meant to overcome, especially a resignation to, and even an exultation, in the irrational psychoanalysis meant to expose in order to overcome. To some
extent the attempt to undo the irrational, in order to free
the rational, spread the irrational, and lent it something
approaching social acceptance. Social acceptance meant
taking the irrational for inevitable-instead of struggling
against it to undo it. It meant turning the popular misunWINI'ER/SPRING 1983
�derstanding of psychoanalysis against psychoanalysis in
the pretense of accepting it.
The weaknesses and limitations of psychoanalysis came
of its strengths. Superb in its grasp of'the present, it is
weak in its comprehension of the past and its life, except
as it continues like a foreign body unassimilated in the
present. It is weak, too, in conceiving of the future except
in the shape of the irrational distortions of the present.
Breathtaking in its comprehension of individuals, and in
its resilient affirmation of feeling and nature, psychoanalysis cannot conceive of society as more than a crowd of solitary individuals. It explains institutions too exclusively in
terms of the necessity of curbing irrational secondary
drives. It does not conceive of rational disagreement and
conflict. It cannot explain why people speak except to
lie-as Otto Rank put it. It takes the rational in history for
nothing more than a cover for the irrational. Despite its
destruction history knows creation also. Creation that
could not live without institutions and rulers and men, ca·
pable of some direct contact with rationality and, there·
fore, nature. For only direct contact with rationality can
withstand irrationality. Direct contact with rationality
means understanding that the irrational arises from a distortion of the rational, that the rational can be discovered
in the irrational. Psychoanalysis instead assumes that the
rational arises in history only in response to irrational
actions and desires which it secretly wishes, but does not
dare to imitate-and that therefore, because of this inverted agreement, almost always succumbs to them directly, or to a severity in repressing them that reaches the
corresponding extreme of irrationality, as if there were no
mean.
This pessimism that at its worst turns to resignation
comes of not recognizing the limitations of psychoanalysis. It can undo the irrational. But it leaves the affirmation
of the rational to itself. This readiness to leave the rational
on its own comes in part of the rational realization that
rationality, unlike irrationality, is unpredictable, that ra·
tionality cannot be foreseen until it arises of itself, that the
truths of one generation are the lies of the next. But it also
arises from an irrational antagonism to philosophy that it
takes not for the thought that comes after the dissolution
of the irrational, but for mere rationalization of the irratio·
nal. Because it does not acknowledge it has no use for
thought, it is unwittingly materialistic, even though it has
made possible the rediscovery of the soul-a grotesque
phrase that tells something of our plight. Because psycho·
analysis does not acknowledge it cannot take responsibility
for its discoveries, it tends to forget that the world is bigger
and older than its discoveries.
This contrast between the desire to apprehend a reality
beyond politics and the sensitivity to nature and feeling in
the defeated German-speaking empires and the principled
world of the Allies with its chiliastic declarations and its
yearning for the observance of treaties and covenants it
did not have strength of heart to enforce is another exam1HE ST. JOHNS REVJEW
pie-similar to the division in painting-of the distinction
between form and content turned under the stress of unlimited war into opposition in which each distorts the
other, so that content and feeling turn to phantasy and
dream, form to propaganda. Ultimately this opposition
leads to a world in which the democracies insist on limits
without conviction, and the totalitarian regimes pretend
to conviction without limits, a world in which individuals
and nations say one thing, do another, and neither know
what they do, nor believe what they say, and will not distinguish between words and actions. In the twenties and
thirties the democracies trusted the honeyed words of tyrants rather than their own eyes witnessing outrage because they could not draw this distinction between words
and actions. In the same years Wilhelm Reich discovered
that the actions of patients, the way they held their hands
and heads, how they sat and so on told more than, and
sometimes the opposite, of the words they spoke6l
This reluctance in distinguishing between words and
actions shows itself now in the unwillingness to declare Poland and other countries in eastern Europe in default on
their debts even after their refusal to pay interest on them.
This reluctance threatens the international western monetary system, and to some extent domestic currencies, for it
shows that in the name of avoiding a debt crisis actually
already upon them-and us-Western bankers and their
governments will not insist on obligations that make for
the trust that gives money much of its value. This tendency to take words for action shows itself even more in
the codification of traditional practices of international
law (ius gentium) in international treaties that imply an unwillingness to defend these practices except with words.
For these treaties wish away the distinction between the
enforcement oflaws within nations and the state of nature
between them, where only the threat of war guarantees
traditional practice. Would the Soviet Union use gas so
blatantly in Afghanistan and Laos had it not signed international treaties that assured it that nations with a voice
would disapprove but not act to stop them?
The struggle of painting with reality, and its awareness
of its incapacity to yield to sight, until its collapse into
something of blindness in this century, has a close parallel
to philosophy's struggle to understand man's relation to
the outer world since at least the seventeenth century.
The impressions of Hume, and the difficulty of their relation to world, and the appearances of Kant that are entirely within the individual, and yet have some exteriority,
for the space, without which their appearance would be
impossible, is both within the mind and in some sense outside it, are both attempts to cope with the transparent mirror of the painters. In its sense of the presence of this barrier, and of its incapacity entirely to cope with it, to rid
itself of it or to live within it, philosophy since the seventeenth century like painting since the thirteenth distinguishes itself from philosophy in antiquity, which encompassed both nature and man, and nature in man, because
133
�it was ready to suffer tragedy rather than submit to it, unawares. For the ancients the barriers that kept man from
nature in himself and outside of him, that changed emotions like love into lust, anger into hatred, courage into ar·
rogance, rationality into ideology, aspiration into self destruction, energy into frenzy, and so on, were within man,
a stiffness he himself maintained, and, therefore, could
dissolve into softness, rather than between man and the
world. They appeared like barriers between man and the
world only because man did not realize they were within
him. Because ancient thinkers realized that the barriers
were within man, and not outside of him, they pursued
the dissolution of distortions that showed themselves in
thinking, rather than accommodating themselves to them.
These distortions that keep man from world and self are
also always distortions in seeing.
The discovery of rationality in antiquity amounted to a
rediscovery of nature. The discovery of rationality in nature made it self-evident that evil destroyed life within
man as well as outside of him, and that politics, unless it
distinguished rational from irrational, would degenerate
into the destructiveness of irrationality in the name of the
rational, that politics betrayed the self that was really no
self at all, but mere distortion, of men who did not dare
know themselves, and, therefore, hated nature and themselves. In contrast, much of philosophy since the seventeenth century attempted to accommodate to these distortions, to live within them, and, therefore, has been more or
less unable, with the exception of Hobbes with Thucydides as his teacher, to comprehend violence from without
that attempts to destroy the barriers that occasion these
distortions, but actually only increases them. The uneasiness of this accommodation to distortion shows itself in
the extraordinary effort of many of these philosophers
who begin with the doubt of world and self to complement
their thinking about knowing with political philosophy
that, however, begins with the assumption that men cannot perceive the world directly, or know themselves. In
some sense they sensed that politics might attempt to
undo their accommodation to distortion, which was to
lead to an unprecedented mastery of nature but which,
however, at the same time that it demanded an experience
of nature made it all the more difficult. This effort to find a
way for men to rule themselves without knowing themselves, for unlike antiquity that only yielded to the nature
it understood, modern thought had mastered some nature
before understanding it, has worked to an extraordinary
extent, but it is aiso extraordinarily weak in the face of
men who think they know no doubt, because they cannot
distinguish dogma from truth. The attempt to apply the
doubt that in its accommodation to distortion had yielded
the assurance to master nature-without understanding it
entirely-to politics led inadvertently to a situation that
demanded the rediscovery of the doubt of Socrates,
which, in contrast to the doubt of philosophy since the
seventeenth century, had led to the experience of nature,
134
to the quick of life and, thereby, of rationality, but not to
the mastery of nature. I say, inadvertently, because these
philosophers had tried to fashion systems in politics that
with their emphasis on written and designed constitutions, on what people did rather than what they thought,
on procedure rather than content, in some sense asserted
there were no answers, and, thereby only questions without answers. The doubt of Socrates, in contrast, suggested
that you had to get along without the answers, not that
there were none, but that the answers would come of
themselves with the dissolution of distortion, that the answers were living itself.
This thinking could deal even brilliantly with public domestic life. For in domestic life it was possible to live as if
there were no public answers. But international affairs
were another matter. For constitutions did not regulate international affairs. In some sense the wisdom of the new
philosophers discovered its limitations, and its greatest
challenge, at the frontiers. For beyond the frontiers, in the
life between nations, you had to get along without the answers in order to discover the truths specific occasions de-
manded. In the life among nations you could not live as if
there were no answers. Yau had to live without the answers. The struggle that culminated with the impressionists, and collapsed after them, was an attempt to turn the
doubt of the new philosophers, which resigned itself to a
certain isolation from the world and self in order to master
them, into the doubt of Socrates that allowed the world
and self to live, and, thereby, to resolve the contradictions
and separation, but not the distinction, between domestic
public life and life between the nations. For art has no
country except in the eyes of the beholder. International
affairs demanded more than the assurance that comes of
recognizing distortion without dissolving it. There could
be no science of international affairs, only the truth discovered in specific circumstances. Only the readiness to live
without the answers could lead to the discovery of those
truths which did not yield to science.
Conclusion
I have written of difficulties in perception, and in thinking that distinct from perception cannot, however, win re-
silience and lucidity without lucidity in perception which
is the perception of life and of life perceiving itself. For
there cannot be thought, distinct from brooding and ideology, without perception, without apprehending the world
and events upon their occurrence, without the experience
of beauty without which confidence in the truth cannot
live. For truth is the perception of nature, of beauty moving in individuals at its own sweet will. It is nature perceiving itself, and, therefore, naming itself. But that the lucidity of thought follows upon the lucidity of perception does
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�not mean it is the same thing as perception. Quite the contrary. The lucidity of perception makes it possible to distinguish thought from perception, to know thought's independence from perception, to know th~t man is a bit of
nature, but a bit of nature that names himself and the
world. For it is man that thinks, not nature. But man can
think only when the nature within him moves freely
enough to perceive nature outside him, for the thoughts
he thinks are nature's.
This disturbance in perception precedes and underlies
the political crisis. At the same time the political crisis increases and deepens it. The incapacity to turn victory into
peace, into coherent peace, that marks almost all the wars
of this century, which is really an incapacity to foresee the
consequences of victory, to master events, indicates that
there is something in events that men cannot grasp and,
therefore, prevent.
Since the events of 1914, governments have been forever behind events. They have not overtaken events;
events have overtaken them. Understanding comes after,
not. during or before events. With the result that the understanding that comes after events seeks almost always to
make up for past defeats and disasters. In its anxiety to
make up for the past it often misreads the present, and, is
thereby, drawn into repeating the past, just because of the
urgency of its wish to avoid its errors. Events fool this
belated understanding. The very attempt to anticipate
events because of past slowness impedes the perception of
events unfolding in the present, which in turn further saps
the confidence anticipation meant to restore. The war in
Indochina did not so much undo the lessons of Munich as
show that they had not been profoundly enough learnt to
rediscover them in a war of disguised aggression.
The attempt to justify present judgment solely on precedent serves to obscure ambivalence, the ambivalence
that impedes the straightforward-and fearful-assessment of present events. This ambivalence showed itself
during the war for Indochina in the collapse of much of
the establishment in agreement with the protesters without even, for the most part, defending its policies. The protesters were not mistaken in their perception of hollowness in the establishment. In some sense each generation
has to rediscover the truths of the past generations on its
own. The recall of the past is indispensable just because it
teaches that it cannot substitute for present judgment.
But too ready recourse to the past for justification rather
than instruction betrays evasiveness in the present. The
gift that comes of recalling the past is the realization that
you are on your own in the present.
In the two World Wars, whose destructiveness showed
itself in the incapacity to turn victory into peace and,
therefore, in simplifications that told themselves they
came to terms with fundamentals-as if the uncontrollability of destructiveness showed men their true face, and
not the face they drew up against the truth, to deny the
truth-something essential was destroyed. I mean the
THE ST. JOHNS REVlEW
readiness to experience reality, the consequences of action, character, the courage of sight and pleasure except as
a matter of principle or propaganda, the plain light of the
day that fills up the day and which had moved the brushes
of the impressionists. I mean finally the capacity to distinguish one thing and another, and especially rational from
irrational. Men would believe anything and nothing. And
it did not seem to make much difference, whether they
believed something or nothing.
In either instance the force of aspiration impeded the
experience of actual strength. This incapacity to distinguish the irrational from the rational shows itself in disturbances in sight, in the incapacity to see wholes. Because of
this disturbance in perception little is self-evident, for the
self-evidence is in some sense a whole. And this in countries whose constitutions depend upon self-evidence, and
the experience of good will that comes of it. Amidst the
simplifications, the simple became embarassing like blushing,-and complexity became the refuge of bafflement
that would not experience itself. The irrationality in the
simplifications shows itself in its unwillingness to stand
questioning and outright opposition-and in the attempt
to suppress it outright, and in the willingness to foster, and
often to finance, all sorts of spurious opposition, which is
in more or less inverted agreement with what it ostensibly
opposes. This fostering of spurious opposition, besides
clouding obvious facts-for obvious facts are also
wholes-in doubt, fosters a bizarre combination of recklessness of speech-obvious but unnoticed in the "op-ed"
pages of newspapers with large circulation-and flattery.
Few societies in the past have betrayed such a hunger in
their fear of straightforwardness and goodwill for both servility and the intimidation of insult, for the qualities they
claim most to despise. The fear of straightforwardness
shows itself in the involuntary and overwhelming condescension that meets the words of those like Solzehnitsyn
who do speak their minds unflinchingly, a condescension
that imbues the truth with the stink of its own rot.
Like sight, and because of the difficulties of sight, of recognizing the obvious, feeling too is more difficult-seems
about to disappear entirely into emptiness. In this confusion of rational and irrational, artificially provoked by tales
of atrocity and the like, and in the consequent attempt to
suppress them indiscriminately, which leads to a despairing emptiness, Baudelaire's ennui, a person in genuine an~
ger or in love will feel outrageous-like what he imagines a
Nazi to have been. Feeling-and not pornography-feels
pornographic and often stirs in those who witness it, envy
and hatred. We barely recognize ourselves.
The present division of the West serves to blur the
memory of this destruction. No time has been so obsessed
with its unwilling destructiveness, so fearful of it as to be
unable to distinguish it from rational self-defense. But the
memory will not go away. It lives on in the suspicion of the
incapacity to distinguish irrational and rational that gnaws
at our confidence and makes us unceasingly uneasy. This
135
�lack of confidence shows itself in our readiness to ridicule
the past and its confidence, and to' exaggerate its failures.
There is much contactlessness in the West, and brutally
cruel, distorted contact in the East: where the flesh itself
turns wooden but where also life stirs in the destruction,
after the destruction, where almost the only unmistakable
voices we hear find words~ voices that arouse contempt
that is only a defense against fear, shame, and embarassment-the embarassment and fear of Adam and Eve after
eating the apple.
The ambivalence that shows itself in the fear of distinguishing rational and irrational induces paralysis. Paralysis
leads to drift. Drift in turn makes for the spread of the irrational-of subversion, sedition, terrorism, above all for the
spread of the ideological and propagandistic stereotyping
of events, and for the sense of helplessness that comes of
not perceiving the significance of events. All these hinder,
and prevent swift and effective-the two are almost synonymous-action.
The indecision that comes of this paralysis finds it most
openly cruel expression in the precarious balance the two
"superpowers" hold between life and death-a balance
that tests the love of life-and which at the same time that
it points to the difficulty of choice, insists on its necessity
in the starkest terms. Were people, and especially governments, capable of choice in the less overwhelming matters
of their lives, for instance, capable of outspoken support of
the Israeli measures to restore sovereignty, and to undo
the international terrorist bases in Lebanon, it would not
come to such a harrowing choice. But drift and its paralysis
often leads governments, and others whose work calls for a
rational response to irrational challenges, to connive with
this irrationality-because of a perverse unacknowledged
admiration for it. If the coming negotiations with the Soviet Union will bring no sensible advantage to the West
and no relief to the East European nations-as in view of
the current crackdown in Poland and within the Soviet
Union appears unlikely-they will turn into creatures of
this murderous fascination with the irrational.
Successful coherent peace-in contrast to the exploitation of the yearning for peace to undo the readiness of selfdefence-requires choosing freely to face harsh dangerous
realities in the absence of the overwhelming necessity of
battle. In some sense it requires more courage than battle.
It requires unevasive words. For evasive words can be
worse than bullets. " 'Bullets kill. Words prolong the death
by giving false hope. It is worse to prolong.' "64
At stake in unevasive words is the truth which alone can
give the political systems that seek to protect its stirring
the strength to act effectively to avoid the large scale wars
their dread of war may otherwise bring upon them. For
the truth alone is bigger than these constitutions which
cannot live, and, therefore, survive without it. It is the air
they breathe.
The truth means distinguishing between irrational and
rational, the only distinction that can bring the willing con-
136
sent without which freedom cannot live. Distinguishing
between rational and irrational means distinguishing between authority and authoritarianism, between genitality
and secondary desires which often seek refuge in either
totalitarian asceticism or license, between love and pornography, between self-defense and murder. It means taking risks-and distinguishing between passivity and apathy and safety. The incapacity to take these risks, and to
make these distinctions, shows itself in an indiscriminate
dread of all feeling-and in the resort to collective indignation and ideology to still the uneasiness of its absence-the
absence of life itself moving at its own sweet will. Without
the flow of feeling there can be no experience of rationality, no experience of affirmation and denial, without
which the distinctions between self-defense and killing,
love and pornography, genitality and secondary desires. In
each of these distinctions the difference the perception of
which makes the distinction possible is between actual
feeling moving of its own sweet will and the yearning for it
which makes people susceptible to ideology which often
brings the opposite of what it promises, death instead of
life. Only the flow of actual feeling-in distinction to the
yearning for it that shows itself in sentimentality and cruelty-can distinguish between strength and force, between consent and manipulation, between rational defiance and stubborness and spite, the defiance that
preserves rather than the revolt that destroys, and names it
freedom.
In some sense totalitarianism has done nothing but call
our bluff, our incapacity to live up to our ideals, to feel the
freedom that is actually ours, that is all about us but which
few experience in themselves, that is, the contrast between the knowledge that there is nothing outside stopping us and an inner sense of the constriction which keeps
us from moving. I mean the yearning for the simplicity of
nature, for its spontaneity, for its strength, for its openess-and also the dread of it and the disgust with it which
unlike the nineteenth century we cannot experience with
any forthrightness.
The nineteenth century could live somehow with the
sense that man was not entirely himself. It could perceive
still, somehow, its limitations at the same time that it knew
these limitations were somehow self-imposed and artificial. At the same time, however, it realized with clarity that
all that most inspired it wished those limitations away, and
might one day destroy them, although for the most part it
enjoyed still enough of the modesty of nature to understand that destroying these limitations would only spread
and intensify the paralysis they actually served to limit and
define.
Until the First World War destroyed the delicate balance between what it wanted and what it saw it was, the
nineteenth century was happy, because confident enough
to live within these contradictions. And this capacity to
live within them without denying them lent it the boldness of clarity so that its words sparkled and did not dread
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�warmth and courage in peacetime, and could tell outrage
without hesitation. And it could suffer, and, therefore,
events did not make it suffer. And it knew the meaning of
chance and that there was nothing inevitable in events,
that nothing that happened had to happen. It knew that
you could not explain what happened if you assumed it
had to happen. Because it knew that nothing was inevita·
ble, it knew responsibility, it knew it made events-it did
not entertain the conceit that events happened to it-that
is, it knew how to suffer, how to sorrow, how to feel com·
passion instead of murderous pity that betrays itself in a
swift look of the eyes that acknowledges everything to
deny it. It also knew how to tell outrage without hesitation,
that is, it could stand self.criticism and distinguish it from
self-hatred. Because it knew real indignation and, thereby,
real self-love and courage-and something of the taste of
life-it knew how to prevent the exploitation of its guilt
for the purposes of nourishing complicity with actual outrage, complicity that shows itself, gives itself away, by its
indulgence in worked-up indignation against largely imaginary outrages, for instance, the world~wide "uproar" about
American "atrocities" in Vietnam which were exceptions,
and of greater rarity than in most wars, and the eerie passivity that meets the murder in Afghanistan, in Cambodia:
it took the New York Times two years to pick up the story,
and then only after the New York Review of Books reviewed a French book about it. (People in the Soviet Union probably know more details about the murder in Cambodia than Americans.)
In some sense more ambitious for the truth than the
nineteenth century, that is, less capable of putting up with
even the mere appearance of hypocrisy, we end up more
oblique than the nineteenth century. Because we will not
know this hypocrisy, the plain straightforwardness of the
nineteenth century, and its readiness to acknowledge matters it could not cope with, embarrass us. We take our hypocrisy for the truth itself. And so things that were plain as
the day a generation ago, are now obscure; for instance,
that George Orwell wrote 1984 against Stalinism, not
against Hitler and nazism. And we barely notice lying in
politics, the lying that took George Orwell's breath away,
as Joseph Adelson remarked recently. For instance, the
major newspapers take Andropov's calling the President of
the United States a liar more or less for granted.
This greater obliquity, greater because unacknowledged, and, therefore, not experienced as obliquity, but as
a kind of disingenous straightforwardness or naivete,
comes from the inability either to stand the truth-or to
get along without it. With the result that we are uneasymore uneasy, the more we protest against uneasiness.
Much of what we take for boldness amounts merely to unacknowledged timorousness, for instance, the suspicious-
ness of all authority, especially government, of the media-which makes for the excitement of the denial of
common sense in the hope of, thereby, reaching depth, as
if the denial of the obvious amounted to getting at the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
heart of things, when in fact the simplicity of the obvious
overwhelms with its lucidity only with the perception of
depth. Otherwise the obvious appears fragile, brittle, ungiving, dead, dull, unpalatable, and boring.
Totalitarianism, unlike the despotism that existed before Napoleon, and which Montesquieu described, parodies our ideals and exploits our incapacity to live up to
them entirely-an incapacity which shows itself in our
readiness to take freedom for granted, and in our unwillingness to conceive that others envy it, and desire to undo
it.
The division of the West intensifies this division and
ambivalence within individuals, and to some extent
springs from it. A whole world means whole people, it
means people and societies capable of distinguishing between truth and lies, and knowing that the truth lives. It
means distinguishing between love oflife and resentment
and self.hatred, between freedom and license.
Like battle the balance of terror attempts to force this
wholeness on individuals at the same time that it threatens
to intensify the division that undoes this wholeness by inviting people and nations to yield to this terror instead of
facing up to it. Yielding to this terror will not bring peace
but only an intensification of war, and the further spread
of totalitarianism, which is a kind of continuous war of in-
dividuals against each other and against themselves, unceasing and apparently impossible to undo from the inside
without support from outside, support that must take
risks, including the risk of conflict, to be meaningful. And
not to resist means to yield. Even the leaders of many of
the peace movements will now upon questioning admit
that peace means yielding to totalitarian violence in the
name of undoing the much greater daily "violence" in life
under "capitalism".65 They are not after peace at all but
after intensification of violence which kills without knowing it, their kind of violence, which, like totalitarian violence, does not distinguish between peace and war. Totalitarianism dreads this wholeness more than anything, for
only this wholeness can see through it and dispel it. The
spread of totalitarianism roots in our own indecisiveness,
in our own paralysis, in our own incapacity to see what is
going on. And this procrastination prolongs and thereby
increases cruelty, and involves almost everybody in it. For
short wars are much more merciful than unending wars as
Lebanon should have showed Vietnam had taught usbut did not.
1. Cf. Guglielmo Ferrero, The Two French Revolutions, New York 1968.
2. Quoted in Theodore Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality, New
York 1950: Man kann nur fuer eine Idee sterben die man nicht versteht.
3. Cf. Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build A Castle-My Life as a Dissenter,
New York 1979; Adam Michnik, L'eglise et la gauche, Paris 1979. For
China, the writing of Wei Jingsheng, introduced by Simon Ley, "La lutte
pour la liberte en Chine," Commentaire 7, Autumn 1979, 353-360. In his
most recent book, Cette lanc;inante douleur de la liberte (Paris l98l), Bu.
kovsky betrays startling silliness in making sense of his experience of life
in the West since he left Russia.
137
�4. Cf. Brian Crozier, Strategy of Survival, London 1978; Leo Raditsa,
"The Present Danger," Midstream, February 1979, 59-70.
5. Foreign Relations of the United States (Conference Series), Washington, D.C. 1945, I 850-855 and elsewhere.
6. For the background of this propaganda, Bernard Lewis, "The AntiZionist Resolution," Foreign Affairs, October 1976, 54-64.
7. Walter Lippmann, The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy, New
York 1947. Lippmann's remarkable book shows deep mastery oflessons
G. Ferrero had drawn from the Congress of Vienna (G. Ferrero, TheReconstruction of Europe, New York 1941; cf. G. Ferrero, La fin des aventures, guerre et paix, Paris 1931).
8. Letter of James Forrestal to Chan Gurney, Chairman of the Senate
Armed Services Committee, December 8, 1947. The Forrestal Diaries,
edited by Walter Millis, New York 1951,349-350.
9. George Ball, The Discipline of Power, Boston 1968, 151, cf. 149-168.
10. ForrestalDiaries, New York 1951,265-266.
11. Forrestal Diaries, New York 1951,296-297.
12. For Soviet thinking about nuclear war, see Joseph D. Douglass, Jr.
and Amoretta Roeber, Soviet Strategy for Nuclear War, Stanford, Ca.
1979. For Soviet involvement in terrorism, Stefan T. Possony and L.
Francis Bouchey, International Terrorism-The Communist Connection,
Washington, D.C. 1978; Claire Sterling, The Terror Network, The Secret
War of International Terrorism, New York 1981. See also, Leo Raditsa,
"The Source of World Terrorism," Midstream, December 1981, 42-49.
13. The Wall Street Journal, December 7,1982.
14. For Soviet disinformation, see Soviet Active Measures, Hearings before the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, House of Representatives, July 13-14, 1982, Washington, D.C. 1982, especially the testimony of Stanislave Levchenko, 137-169. See also the testimony of
Ladislav Bittman in Soviet Covert Action (The Forgery Offensive), Hearings before the Subcommittee on Oversight of the Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence, Senate, February 19, 1980, Washington,
D.C. 1980. In 1968, the year of the beginning of detente in Europe, and
of increased Soviet involvement in terrorism, the head of the KGB's Disinformation Directorate, described the duplicity of disinformation (testimony of Arnaud de Borchgrave to the Senate Subcommittee on Security
and Terrorism, April24, 1981):
... our friends must always be encouraged to write or say precisely
the opposite of our real objectives. Conflict between East and West is
a permanent premise of Soviet thought-until the final demise of
capitalist power in the West. But this must be constantly dismissed
and ridiculed as rightist cold-war thinking.
Except for scope and boldness, disinformation has changed little since
the end of the war. Cf. the testimony of Bogdan Raditsa. May 11, 1949,
Communist Activities among Aliens and National Groups. Hearings before the Special Subcommittee to Investigate Immigration and Naturalization of the Committee on the Judiciary, Senate, Washington, D.C.,
1949.
15. Letter to Palmer Hoyt, September 2, 1944. Forrestal Diaries, New
Ymk 1951, 14.
16. Letter to Stanton Griffis, United States Ambassador to Poland, October 31, 1947. Forrestal Diaries, New York 1951, 335.
17. Quoted by Caetano Mosca, Elementi di Scienza Politica 2, Turin
1923,450.
18. Sergey Petrovich Melgounov, The Red Terror in Russia, London
1925, 33.
19. Melgounov, Red Terror, London 1925, 41.
20. The words are Dr. Abdallah Osman's who was arrested toward the
end of 1978 for his western education. Quoted in the important article by
Michael Barry, "Afghanistan-Another Cambodia?," Commentary, August 1982, 29-37, 32. See also, Leo Raditsa, "Afghanistan Fights," St.
John's Review, Winter 1982, 90-98.
21. For one instance of the shooting of children, The Washington Post,
February 7, 1980.
22. For South Vietnam, Douglas Pike, Vietcong, The Organization and
Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, Cambddge, Mass. 1966, 249.
138
23. Michael Barry, "Afghanistan-Another Cambodia?," Commentary,
August 1982, 29-37.
24. This ignorance showed itself dramatically in the movie Reds that did
not even distinguish between the February revolution to establish democracy and the October seizure of power, and barely mentioned the
war. In this movie American mindlessness led to distortions that Soviet
schoolbooks, which mention that the Bolshevik minority destroyed all
democratic institutions, do not dream of. And except for an important
essay by Joel Carmichael ("Warren Beatty's Bolsheviks," Midstream,
March 1982, 43-48) and a letter of Lev Navrozov (Commentary, June
1982) nobody noticed. In fact one critic called the movie gently "condemnatory"-as if condemning was more important than telling what happened, and letting the condemnation take care of itself.
25. For this tendency, see the brilliant esSay by Jacques Barzun, Clio and
the Doctors: History, Psycho-History and Quanta-History, Chicago 1974.
26. Testimony of Stanislav Levchenko, July 14, 1982, in Soviet Active
Measures, Washington, D.C., 144, 145, 156.
27. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, translated by Louise and Aylmer
Maude, New York 1942, 10, 38.
28. Cf. G. Ferrero, The Reconstruction of Europe, New York 1941; also
The Gamble, Bonaparte in Iwly, 1796-1797, London 1939.
29. See the statement of Lieutenant General Marian Kukiel, Polish Minister of National Defense, in Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, The Rape of Poland,
New York 1948,29-30. The Soviet regime had about 14,500 Polish officers murdered near Smolensk and other places in Western Russia in
1940. In an article showing the Soviet and Polish regime's aggressive persistence in denying responsibility for the massacres, Nicholas Bethell
("Katyn and the Little Conifers, Encounter, May 1977, 86-90) quotes an
official diplomatic report of May 24, 1943, from the British Ambassador
to the Polish government-in-exile in London, that did not flinch in description of the, in its judgement, necessary evasiveness of Churchill's
government:
In handling the publicity side of the Katyn affair we have been constrained by the urgent need for cordial relations with the Soviet government to appear to appraise the evidence with more hesitation and
lenience than we should do in forming a common sense judgment on
events occurring in normal times or in the ordinary course of our private lives; we have been obliged to appear to distort the normal and
healthy operation of our intellectual and moral judgments; we have
been obliged to give undue prominence to the tactlessness or impulsiveness of Poles, to restrain the Poles from putting their case clearly
before the public, to discourage any attempt by the public and the
press to probe the ugly story to the bottom. In general we have been
obliged to deflect attention from possibilities which in the ordinary
affairs of life would cry to high heaven for elucidation, and to withhold the full measure of solicitude which, in other circumstances,
would be shown to acquaintances situated as a large number of Poles
now are. We have in fact perforce used the good name of England like
the murderers used the little conifers to cover up a massacre.
30. Quoted in Michael Polanyi, "Beyond Nihilism" in Knowing and Being, London 1969, 20.
31. Michael Polanyi, "The Message of the Hungarian Revolution" in
Knowing and Being, London 1969, 28.
32. Leonid Vladimirov, The Russians, New York 1968, 101-102.
33. Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart, Autonomy in a Mass Age,
New York 1971,24.
34. S. P. Melgounov, The Red Terror, London 1925,97.
35. Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, New York 1953,72.
36. Mikhail Agursky, "Contemporary Socioeconomic Systems and their
Future Prospects" in Alexander Solzhenitsyn ed., From Under the Rubble, New Ymk 1976,78,74-75.
37. Forrestal Diaries, New York 1951,482.
38. Forrestal Diaries, New York 1951,262-263.
39. Giuseppe Josca, Carriere della Sera, April27, 1973.
40. New York Times, May 9, 1975.
41. Joan Didion, "El Salvador, the Bad Dream," New York Review of
Books, December 2, 1982.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�42. Andrei Navrozov, "Letter to A. Bartlett Giamatti," The Yale Free
Press, October 14, 1982.
43. Cf. Vittoria Ronchey, Figlioli Miei, Marxisti IJtmaginari, Milan 1975.
44. Igor Shafarevich, "Socialism in Our Past and Future" in From Under
the Rubble, New York 1976, 58-59.
·
45. For a fine account of the first appearance of this propaganda in 1917,
especially in Italy but with general reference to the whole West, see Ro"
berto Vivarelli, 1l dopoguerra in Italia e l'avvento del fascismo (1918-1922),
Naples 1967, especially 1-114.
46. Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, Berlin 1922 (first
published 1918), 130.
47. Mann, Betrachtungen, Berlin 1922,47.
48. Thomas Mann, "Bruder Hitler," (1939), Gesammelte Schriften, Ham·
bmg 1960, 12, 852.
49. Gustav Janouch, "Conversations with Kafka," Encounter, August
1971, 15-27.
50. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, New York
1962, 32.
51. The" .. , and hold them (our British brethren) as we hold the rest of
mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends!" of the Declaration of Independence.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
52. Foreign Relations of the United States (Conference Series), Washington, D.C. 1945, I.
53. Forrestal Diaries, New York 1951, 80.
54. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, Oxford 1939,44-52 and 147167. Quotations from 48-49, 163-64, 167.
55. Quoted in George F. Kennan, Russia Leaves the War, Princeton, N.J.
1956, 272-273.
56. Quoted in Kennan, Russia Leaves the War, Princeton, N.J. 1956, 511.
57. For a classic description and analysis, Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psy·
chology of Fascism, New York 1946 (first edition 1933).
58. Milovan Djilas, Wartime, New York 1977, 285.
59. Raymond Aron, Le spectateur engage, entretiens avec Jean-Louis Missika et Dominique Walton, Paris 1981,62.
60. Alexander Lowen, "The Impressionists and Orgone Energy," Orgone Energy Bulletin, 1, 1944, 169-183, 173.
61. Lowen, "The Impressionists," OEB, l, 1944, 178.
62. Vincent Van Gogh in his description of his "Portrait of the Painter
Bosch". Quoted in Lowen, "The Impressionists," 181.
63. W. Reich, Character Analysis\ New York 1949.
64. James Webb, Fields of Fire, New York (Bantam edition) 1979, 182.
65. Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac, "The Peacemaking Utopians" in
The Coercive Utopians, Chicago 1983, forthcoming.
139
�REvmw EssAY
On Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth*
GREGORY S. )ONES
The editor of The New Yorker magazine, William
Shawn, has described Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the
Earth as a work that "may someday be looked back upon as
a crucial event in the history of human thought." 1 This is
extremely unlikely. Schell's main conclusion, that calls for
radical changes in the world's political structure, is based
on a fallacious quasi-mathematical argument. Apart from
this argument, Schell's understanding amounts to a wish
for a world where people could live in peace. Schell does
not explain how we can construct a more peaceful world.
Schell's main argument hinges on the possibility that an
all-out nuclear war could lead to human extinction:
To say that human extinction is a certainty would, of course,
be a misrepresentation-just as it would be a misrepresentation to say that extinction can be ruled out. To begin with, we
know that a holocaust may not occur at all. If one does occur,
the adversaries may not use all their weapons. If they do use
all their weapons, the global effects, in the ozone and elsewhere, may be moderate. And if the effects are not moderate
but extreme, the ecosphere may prove resilient enough to
withstand them without breaking down catastrophically.
These are all substantial reasons for supposing that mankind
will not be extinguished in a nuclear holocaust, or even that
extinction in a holocaust is unlikely, and they tend to calm
our fear and to reduce our sense of urgency. Yet at the same
time we are compelled to admit that there may be a holocaust, that the adversaries may use all their weapons, that the
global effects, including effects of which we are as yet unaware, may be severe, that the ecosphere may suffer catastrophic breakdown, and that our species may be extinguished. (Emphasis in original.)
Schell then puts argument in mathematical form:
To employ a mathematical analogy, we can say that although
the risk of extinction may be fractional, the stake is, humanly
speaking, infinite, and a fraction of infinity is still infinity. In
Gregory S. Jones is a senior policy analyst at Pan Heuristics, a Los
Angeles research firm. With Albert Wohlstetter he wrote Swords from
Plowshares: The Military Potential of Civilian Nuclear Energy (University
of Chicago Press 1978).
140
other words, once we learn that a holocaust might lead to extinction we have no right to gamble, because if we lose, the
game will be over, and neither we nor anyone else will ever
get another chance. Therefore, although, scientifically speaking, there is all the difference in the world between the mere
possibility that a holocaust will bring about extinction and the
certainty of it, morally they are the same, and we have no
choice but to address the issue of nuclear weapons as though
we knew for a certainty that their use would put an end to our
species. (Emphasis in original.)
A small probability of an infinite harm (in this case, human extinction in large-scale nuclear war) has to be treated
the same as if the probability of this harm were a certainty.
To reduce the probability of nuclear war to zero, Schell
argues for complete nuclear and conventional disarmament worldwide. He also wants to change the world's political structure to "create a political means by which the
world can arrive at the decisions that sovereign states previously arrived at through war." In the near term he supports a nuclear freeze, talks between the nuclear powers to
reduce the probability of accidental nuclear war, and
George Kennan's proposal for halving the nuclear arsenals
of the superpowers.
Schell argues against unnamed (and, to me, unknown)
people who might think that the human extinction is not
all that bad. If only we would recognize the seriousness of
the situation, we would create this new world order.
The real problem, however, is Schell's argument that a
finite probability of an infinite harm can be treated as if
the harm were a certainty-and not that people do not
take human extinction seriously. This argument's total indifference to the actual probability of a catastrophic nuclear war is the trouble. For as long as there is a chance of a
catastrophic nuclear war, the argument does not change.
To halve the current probability of a catastrophic nuclear
war does no good; to double the current probability of catastrophic nuclear war does no harm. Any world with some
chance of catastrophic nuclear war is equivalent.
*Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth, Alfred A. Knopf, New York,
1982.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�The logic of this argument should lead Schell to reject
half-measures like a nuclear freeze, etc.,(even if a nuclear
freeze lessened the chance of nuclear war). For such measures will not eliminate catastrophic nu.clear war. A nuclear freeze will, in fact, increase the chance of nuclear war
since it will prevent improvements in the safety, security,
and survivability of our nuclear systems and impede the
development of precise forms of nonnuclear attack with
the potential to replace nuclear weapons for many missions. Even in a totally disarmed world with a new political
order, as Schell admits, the political order could break
down, a war could break out, and with nuclear weapons
reconstructed, a nuclear catastrophe could occur:
In a disarmed world, we would not have eliminated the peril
of human extinction from the human scene-it is not in our
power to do so-but we would at least have pitted our whole
strength against it. The inconsistency of threatening to perpetrate extinction in order to escape extinction would be removed. The nuclei of atoms would still contain vast energy,
and we would still know how to extinguish ourselves by releasing that energy in chain reactions, but we would not be
lifting a finger to do it. There would be no complicity in mass
murder, no billions of dollars spent on the machinery of annihilation, no preparations to snuff out the future generations,
no hair-raising lunges toward the abyss.
All this is very well. But the logic of the argument yields
no reason to prefer Schell's totally disarmed world to our
current one.
The probability of nuclear war is quite important and it
is vital that we keep this probability as low as we can. To
reduce the overall risk to ourselves and at the same time
improve the quality of our lives it is, however, important to
use our resources proportionately to our actual needs and
risks. For example, at any second (to use some of Schell's
frenzied prose) the earth could be struck by an asteroid
large enough to have catastrophic consequences to the
earth's biosphere leading to human extinction. There is
substantial evidence of such collisions in the past. (Some
hold such a collision led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.)
Telescopes to scan the skies for such asteroids and stocks
of large nuclear armed missiles (the size of our Saturn
moon rockets) ready to intercept and blow up these asteroids would reduce the risks of such collisions. We do not
man such telescopes and missiles because the risk (once
every hundred million years or so) does not warrant the
relatively modest expenditure.
The risk of nuclear war is greater than the risk of large
asteroid collisions. But the price of trying absolutely to
avoid nuclear war is also unacceptably high, because it
would cost us more than just money. Schell chides us for
continuing to cling to our current system of nation states
which we use to support what he calls "our transient aims
and fallible convictions." These include such trivialities as
liberty and justice.Z The logic of Schell's beliefs and of
much that is current in the antinuclear movement would
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
lead one to do almost anything to avoid a nuclear holocaust.
Surrender to the Soviets would be the easiest way, especially if one is willing to give up liberty and justice. How to
be neither red nor dead, however, is our real problem.
Schell's argument has so little content that it can be
used to support anything or nothing. Pierre Gallois and
Raymond Aron used the vacuous argument of a finite
chance of an infinite harm that Schell uses to argue for
world disarmament and a new world order, to advocate
spreading nuclear weapons to a very large number of
coun'tries.l They held such distribution would make for a
very peaceful earth because nuclear weapons would enable every country to deter an attack. This would be true
even for very small countries, since there would always be
a slight chance that their nuclear weapons would survive
an enemy surprise attack and do the enemy's cities enormous damage. Gallois and Aron argued that even a very
small possibility of this enormous harm would deter an
enemy.
Of the two notions that comprise his solution, total disarmament and a new world political order without war,
Schell correctly takes the new world order for the primary
requirement, for once achieved it would make disarmament easy. It is striking that Schell has no idea what this
new world political order would look like nor how to bring
it about. He leaves these tasks to his reader:
In this book, I have not sought to define a political solution to
the nuclear predicament-either to embark on the full-scale reexamination of the foundations of political thought which
must be undertaken if the world's political institutions are to be
made consonant with the global reality in which they operate
or to work out the practical steps by which mankind, acting for
the first time in history as a single entity, can reorganize its political life. I have left to others those awesome, urgent tasks,
which, imposed on us by history, constitute the political work
of our age.
There is nothing new or original in the thought that it
would be nice to have a world where people settle their
political differences peacefully. There are problems, however, not amenable to easy solution-questions like who
should rule the Falkland Islands, where should the Palestinians live, how to bring liberty and justice to people living in totalitarian countries as well as improving the quality of government in our own country. People have
worked and will continue to work hard to solve these and
the many other political problems in the world today.
They do not need Jonathan Schell to tell them how serious
and important this work is. But finding solutions has not
been and will not be easy and there's nothing in Schell's
frantic book that will make this task any easier.
1Quoted in Newsweek, March 14, 1983, 67.
Schell complains that the nuclear powers "put a higher value
on national sovereignty than they do on human survival."
3 Pierre Gallais, The Balance ofTerror(with Foreword by Raymond Aron),
Boston 1961, 129 ix. I am indebted to Albert Wohlstetter for pointing out
this connection.
2 Elsewhere
141
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<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Office of the Dean
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St. John's College
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ISSN 0277-4720
thestjohnsreview
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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141 pages
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The St. John's Review (formerly The College), Winter/Spring 1983
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1983-01
1983-04
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Radista, Leo
Parran, Jr., Thomas
Lord, Susan
Bolotin, David
Wilson, Curtis A.
Sachs, Joe
Aldanov, Mark
Carmichael, Joel
Brann, Eva T. H.
Himmelfarb, Gertrude
Collins, Arthur
Zuckerman, Elliott
Isaac, Rael-Jean and Erich
Holmes, Stephen
Hadas, Rachel
Ferrero, Guiglielmo
Mosca, Gaetano
Mongardini, Carlo
Ardrey, Daniel
Jones, Gregory S.
Kocsis, Joan
Description
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Volume XXXIV, Number 2 of The St. John's Review, formerly The College. Published in Winter/Spring 1983.
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ISSN 0277-4720
The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_34_No_2_1983
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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St. John's Review
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THESTJOHNSREVIEWAUTU:
NWINTER198283THESTJOHl
SREVIEWAUTUMNWINTERl
8283THESTJOHNSREVIEWAl
TUMNWINTER 198283 THEST
OHNSREVIEWAUTUMNWI!'
TER198283THESTJOHNSREV
•
�Editor:
FROM OUR READERS
Leo Raditsa
THE EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES
Managing Editor:
Thomas Parran, Jr.
Editorial Assistant:
David Carnes
Consulting Editors:
David Bolotin
Eva Brann
Curtis A. Wilson
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
Why, I wonder, would you or your editor deliberately choose to
send me an issue of your magazine calling my attention to a review (of Updike) [Lev Navrozov, "Updike and Roth: Are They
Writers?", St. John's Review, Summer 1982] that is so gratuitously,
exaggeratedly, insulting? Is this meant to be provocative behavior?
Cute behavior? Am I supposed to have a passionate intellectual
curiosity about what the St. John's Review thinks of our books?
I don't bother to reply out of anger or resentment; only to express my astonishment at what people with some pretension to
professionalism think is appropriate; I won't bother opening another issue.
ROBERT GOTTLIEB
Unsolicited articles, stories, and poems are welcome,
but should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed
envelope in each instance. Reasoned comments are also
welcome.
THESTJOHNSREVIEW (formerly The College) is published by
the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland
21404. Edwin J. Delattre, President, SamuelS. Kutler, Dean. Pub·
lished thrice yearly, in the autumn~winter, winter-spring, and
summer. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions: $12.00
yearly, $24.00 for two years, or $36.00 for three years, payable in
advance. Address all correspondence to The St. John's Review,
St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland 21404.
Volume XXXIV
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
Number I
©1983, St. John's College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Cover: Arch of Titus. The triumphal parade in Rome of the spoils from
the Temple of Jerusalem. Built in 80-85 A.D., almost half a generation
after the end of the Jewish War (70 A.D.), the Arch of Titus rises on the
Via Sacra in the Roman Forum-part of the triumphal route.
William James, by Alice Boughton, 1907.
Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz, by Andreas Scheits, 1704, Florence, Uffizi.
Composition: Britton Composition Co.
Printing: The John D. Lucas Printing Co.
The writer is president and editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf, publisher of
John Updike.
Lev Navrozov replies:
I have received over 500 responses like Mr. Robert Gottlieb's
letter to my reviews of "great works of literature" and of their reviews in the New York Times and the New York Review of Books.
So I can establish a certain general pattern. A respondee wants
to show that he despises my review so deeply that no response is
appropriate except icy silence, so that his response should not
really be regarded as any response at all. This approach saves the
respondee from any dangerous attempt to discuss my review, to
argue, or to present his view.
The respondee also says or ifDp]ies that his response is provoked not by insecurity, or any Other such ignoble feelings, but
by the loftx emotions of a gentleman and an artist, duty bound to
express his civic or artistic scorn. Whereupon a respondee lets it
be known that any other response is beneath his dignity and
makes what seems to him an epistolary door-banging exit.
Let me now note that a Russian emigre monthly, Literary
Courier, has translated the review in question into the Russian
and published it in the magazine's latest issue. According to its
editor in his letter to me, it "has caused great interest, much
praise, and this we owe to you."
So evidently the issue is not between just Mr. Gottlieb and me.
The issue is rather between his milieu and mine. What Mr. Gottlieb's milieu regards as "great novels," or "outstanding poetry,"
my milieu does not view as literature.
I come from a family of a writer and lived since childhood in
the literary milieu of the poet Pasternak and the novelist Platonov
(I give these two names as known in the West). I also grew up on
Western, and in particular American, literature.
Even if I had read Mr. Updike's novel at the age of 16, I (and
my milieu) would have said that this is not literature.
(continued on page 2)
�HESTJOHNSREVIEWAUTUMNWINTER198283
3
William James, Moralist jacques Barzun
13
Treasure Hunt (narrative) Meyer Liben
22
Don Alfonso (poem) Elliott Zuckerman
23
The Unity of Leibniz's Thought on Contingency, Possibility, and Freedom
Arthur Collins
46
Letter from a Polish Prison Adam Michnik
51
Not Just Another Communist Party: The Polish Communist Party
Branko Lazitch
54
A Nighttime Story (narrative) Linda Collins
57
Marx's Sadism Robert]. Loewenberg
68
Meetings, Recognitions (narrative) Meyer Liben
72
Two Poems
73
The Lost Continent, the Conundrum of Christian Origins joel Carmichael
84
New Year's Eve (narrative) Meyer Liben
85
Ernst and Falk: Conversations for Freemasons Gotthold Lessing
translation and notes by Chaninah Maschler
97
The Rainfall in the Pine Grove, after Gabriele D'Annunzio,
"La pioggia nel pineto," and two poems Sidney Alexander
Laurence Josephs
REVIEW ESSAY
100
Defeat in Vietnam, Norman Podhoretz's Why We Were in Vietnam
review essay by joseph A. Bosco
AT HOME AND ABROAD
103
Letter from the Homefront: On Marrying Kari]enson
105
The Holocaust Mission, July 29 to August 12, 1979 Raul Hilberg
Inside front cover:
FROM OUR READERS:
The Emperor's New Clothes Robert Gottlieb
Editorial Policy Nancy de Grummond, Charles Kluth, Kurt Schuler
�I realize that to say that the naked Emperor wears no clothes may seem "gratuitously, exaggeratedly, insulting" to those
tailors who spun the fictitious clothes and
the courtiers who support their pretense.
But what am I supposed to do? To pretend
that Mr. Updike wears luxurious literary
vestments?
Ironically, the parents or grandparents of
many of those who belong to Mr. Gottlieb's milieu came from Russia too. Yet by
the time we came they had created a selfcontained cultural monopoly which keeps
out all critics, whether riative Americans or
late-comers like myself.
Only in a culturally self-contained mutual admiration society which has insulated
itself against all outside literary criticism,
amateur monstrosities like Rabbit is Rich
may be proudly published and showered
with rave reviews and prizes.
Members of this monopoly can well ignore its critics who can only publish in offmonopoly periodicals which can be easily
passed over in silence. Yet for all their
power they cannot afford any dialogue or
debate with their critics.
EDITORIAL POLICY
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
Please enter my subscription to the St.
John's Review in accordance with your policy about new subscribers. I have had occasion to see the magazine from time to time
over the past two years when it was passed
on to me by a friend and was first of all attracted by articles in my own field of art
history and archaeology written by eminent scholars like Philipp Fehl and Homer
Thompson. It was refreshing to find their
ideas and opinions presented in a much
broader context than is possible in the standard specialist journals. The magazine is to
be praised especially for not suppressing
feeling in its contributors, who are allowed
to bring up issues relating to strong, basic
emotions about fear and love and living
and dying. Lev Navrozov is permitted to
say true things he could not have said in
the Soviet Union, and Michael Levin may
publish his own very personal, highly debatable views on the sexes. In the case of
the latter, even the outrageous title of his
2
article, "'Sexism' is Meaningless," (St.
John's Review Autumn 1981) allowed for
expression and reaction. The resulting section of Letters to the Editor was lively and
splendid. Congratulations to the Editor,
whom I respect immensely for publishing
writings that help to create dialogue and
bring into focus significant thought and
feeling.
males; it is no more worthy as ·an end in itself than is machismo.
CHARLES KLUTH
'52
Baltimore, MD
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
An Open Letter To The
Instruction Committee
NANCY T. de GRUMMOND
Associate Professor
Department of Classics
Florida State University
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
As an alumnus of St. John's, I think you
are to be commended for printing the article "'Sexism' is Meaningless" (St. John's
Review Autumn 1981), especially because
you must have known that to do so was to
invite a great deal of criticism. But I was
distressed to find that some graduates of
St. John's appear to have adopted the jesuitical doctrine that "error has no rights" and
complain not merely of the opinions expressed in the article but even of your having printed it and Your motives in so doing;
it would appear that there is free speech
only for those who hold "correct" opinions.
It is my opinion that the most recent
work in anthropology and the physiology of
the brain, as well the practical experience
of the Army and the Marine Corps, indicate strongly that the traditional understanding of men and women as equal but
complementary remains true. The obvious
difficulty with this formulation has been
that it has too often been used to exclude
women from fields of endeavor to which
they were perfectly well suited, not to mention other abuses; hence the knee-jerk reaction of the feminist to any comparison
which goes beyond the "gross biological
features" (to quote one of your correspondents). But the application of so gross a
standard has led us to such obvious absurdities as quotas for 1OOlb. beat patrolmen.
It will not be easy, as it never is, to be
both fair and reasonable but, if there is to
be a restoration of common sense, we had
better start trying. In the meantime, we
needn't, and shouldn't, equate feminism
with anything beyond the concerns of fe-
I am disturbed by the statement of editorial policy you recently adopted for the St.
John's Review . ..
The statement emphasizes that contributors to the Review should be familiar with
the St. John's program (first paragraph), will
probably be tutors, alumni, or visiting lecturers, and will write mainly about books
and issues within the program (fourth paragraph). I presume that you find such a
statement necessary because you are dissastisfied with the editorial practices the
Review has been following for the last several issues, and I infer from the paragraphs
I cited that you don't think the Review has
been sufficiently concerned with the program. Apparently, you want to narrow drastically the range of topics the Review covers.
That is a bad mistake.
The Review is the only tangible intellectual contact that many alumni and many
outsiders have with the college. Consequently, I think that the Review should
make a strong effort to appeal to them, by
including articles about subjects that are of
immediate interest to them. One must remember that the world of learning is wider
than the St. John's program; one must also
remember that most of the general public
(and, after a few years away from St.
John's, most alumni) have intellectual interests different from those of students and
tutors at St. John's. If the Review wishes to
address that public, it cannot stick its head
in the sand and pretend it does not see that
more people want to read about the informativeness of the New York Times versus
that of Pravda than about spirituality in the
philosophy of Plotinus, for example.
Let me relate to you my own experience
with the Review. The articles in it that I
always read first are those not explicitly
connected with the program. My friends,
whether alumni of St. John's or of other
(continued on page 112)
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�William James, Moralist
Jacques Barzun
James's long discussions in youth with Wendell Holmes
and the great essay-review of Spencer's Psychology in 1878
were his first attempts to vindicate the character of the
moral life. It had to be done because the phrase "in an age
of science" was already taking on the implication that
everything in human life had changed and must be reexamined before its license to exist could be renewed.
For James as a naturalist, the double question was: how
to establish the reality of moral choice as part of nature;
and how to show that this choice was a free individual act,
not a resultant of extraneous "forces." The evidence
James begins with is the root phenomenon of the reflex
arc: a sensory stimulus affects the brain, and its result is
some form of action. All action is reaction upon the outer
world. 'The current of life which runs in at our eyes and
ears is meant to run out at our hands, feet, or lips. The only
use of the thoughts which it occasions while inside is to
determine its direction to whichever of these shall, under
the circumstances actually present, act in the way most
propitious to our welfare.'
What James saw and said a hundred years ago is that reflex action is not like stepping on one end of a see-saw and
getting hit in the face by the other. Between stimulus and
action comes response and which response it is to be is by
no means always automatic. Whatever may be the link between brain and mind, we experience the stimulus. Except
in the simple cases of touching a hot stove or a sharp
blade, response varies widely. The mind interposes at the
midpoint of the arc its peculiar and complex individual
characteristics.
This interlude of response may seem a slender support
A leading man of letters, Jacques Barzun has recently published Critical
Questions, Selected Essays 1940-1980 (University of Chicago Press,
1982). The above essay comes from A Stroll with William James, a book
meant to mark a life-long debt, to be published early in 1983 {Harper and
. Row).
Quotations from James are in single quotes.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
for the moral world, but it is the same support that holds
up and indeed constitutes the whole of our conscious life,
with which moral judgment and choice are intertwined.
The important point is to recognize preference as a given
element and one that is inescapably individual. It is that ·
"taking" (or unique perception and perspective) which is
central to the Jamesian conception of reality.
In one of his most charming essays, "On a Certain
Blindness in Human Beings," James relates a picturesque
incident of his driving with a North Carolina farmer
through a remote valley recently opened to cultivation.
James was appalled at the devastation-beautiful trees
felled, then charred stumps bearing witness to the struggle for level ground; great gashes in the greenery and
patches of corn and other plantings irregularly scattered,
like the pigs and chickens, among the miserable log cabins, across what mus't have been an enchanted vale. 'The
forest had been destroyed; and what had "improved" it
out of existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer without a single element of artificial grace to make up for the loss of Nature's beauty.' James put a tactful question to his driver,
whose reply changed the whole scene: "Why, we ain't
happy here, unless we're getting one of these coves under
cultivation." 'I instantly felt,' James goes on, 'that I had
been losing the whole inward significance of the situation.
Because.to me the clearings spoke of naught but denudation, I thought they could tell no other story. But when
they looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of
was personal victory, of honest sweat, persistent toil, and
final reward. The cabin was a warrant of safety for self and
wife and babes. The clearing was a symbol redolent with
moral memories of duty, struggle, and success.'
Preferences, then, the ends that we pursue, 'do not exist
at all in the world of impressions we receive by way of our
senses, but are set by our emotional and practical subjectivity altogether. Destroy the volitional nature, the definite
subjective purposes, preferences, fondnesses for certain
effects, forms, orders, and not the slightest motive would
3
�remain for the brute order of our experience to be remodelled at all.'
It is our desires, our "fondnesses" as James calls them,
that underlie the state of mind in which we say "this is
good, this is bad; that is better and this worse." Or we imply these judgments by a taking or a rejecting, instinctive
or deliberate. Desires are of course not limited to bodily
need. Man has developed a want for the superfluous,
which is infinite and includes those satisfactions termed
moral satisfactions. The moral order, in other words, turns
out to be the meaning attached to experience by every being who thinks while he feels.
But this conclusion is only the threshold of the higher
moral questions. Thoughtful people wonder about the
status of ethical ideas strictly so called, the meaning of the
terms right and wrong, duty and conscience, and the
standards that they comply with. In ordinary speech,
<~ethics" means not cheating or stealing, "morals" means
sexual propriety; and the "decline of moral standards" so
frequently discussed turns on how much there is of the
one and how little of the other. "Wider moral issues" occupy writers and preachers and even politicians: what is a
just society? Is equality of opportunity enough to ensure
it? Is the .criminal reared in poverty responsible for his
acts? Does the right to life begin in the embryo? And in
comparing groups or individuals, the question is asked,
What "values" has she, he, they got? Tell us your "priorities." "Lifestyles" themselves, voguish and vaguish as the
term is, embody the kind of judgment called moral, and
the same estimating of worth comes into play in every
realm of thought and action: art, science, philosophy, and
religion are equally exposed to moral judgment; they form
part of the moral life of man.
Its difficulty is that because it relies on estimates, because it arises from our different perspectives, certainty
and agreement are not to be had, even with the aid of a
particular religious revelation. And supposing that revelation brought about unity, the multiplicity of creeds at variance on moral questions would still leave the philosopher
having to choose among revelations. He wants a prescrip~
tion to. fit all mankind if he can discover it. What can he
turn to?
In answering the challenge, James gives in passing some
credit to the Utilitarians, who ascribe good and bad to associations with pleasure and pain. Association does train
us morally, but only up to a point. As James's Psychology
makes clear, there are tendencies of the human mind that
are "born in the house" and not developed by utility.
'Take the love of drunkenness; take bashfulness, the terror of high places, the susceptibility to musical sounds;
take the emotion of the comical, the passion for poetry,
for mathematics, or for metaphysics-no one of these
things can be wholly explained by either association or
utility. A vast number of our moral perceptions deal with
directly felt fitnesses between things and fly in the teeth
of all the prepossessions of habit and presumptions of uti!-
4
ity. The moment you get beyond the coarser moral maxims, the Decalogues and Poor Richard's Almanacs, you
fall into schemes and positions which to the eye of common sense seem fantastic and overstrained. The sense for
abstract justice, which some persons have, is as eccentric
a variation as is the passion for music. The feeling of the
inward dignity of certain spiritual attitudes, as peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of the essential vulgarity
of others, as querulousness, anxiety, egoistic fussiness are
quite inexplicable except by an innate preference of the
moral ideal attitude.'
Since these attitudes are individual facts and unevenly
distributed among mankind, it follows that 'there is no
such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically
made up in advance. We all help to determine the content
of ethical philosophy so far as we contribute to the race's
moral life. In other words, there can be no final truth in
ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had
his experience and said his say.' This is what we should
expect in a universe that is inherently pluralistic and
unfinished.
Are there then no such things as moral principles? Is it
meaningless to speak of principled action, of a man, a
woman of principle? For if all these are empty words, how
can moral behavior be taught and misbehavior reproved?
The demand for a common standard is as strong a feeling
as that of wanting justice in our special case. We ask incessantly, What is the law? the entrance requirements? the
speed limit? We need yardsticks to set our minds at rest
and bring others to book-the phrase is literal: the book is
the record of accepted measures for ordinary thought and
action. Bence the similar call for principles in the cloudier
sphere of moral judgment.
But the word principle, with its aura of personal merit
and firmness in a shaky world, is ambiguous. To the absolutist a principle is a teaching fixed for all time and good
on all occasions, a dogma. One should not be afraid of the
word, "dogma/' for it conveys the advantage that princi~
pies have when proclaimed with authority as "indelible
moral truths, not mere opinion." In that guise principle
seems to possess an inherent compelling force-no need
of the police behind it. At the same time, dogma has acquired its unwelcome ~ound because it claims universal
sway, while modern liberal constitutions require the peaceful coexistence of several conflicting dogmas. So the very
general demand for principles and men of principle comes
down to asking that everyone have "some principle or
other.'' And diversity is back to plague us as before.
A further difficulty with principles is that they clash
among themselves, even within the same system of morality. Albert Schweitzer, for instance, preached "Reverence for Life" and got the reputation of a saint. But what
pragmatic contents does the formula cover? If it means no
vivisection, more hun1ane slaughter~houses, forbidding
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�blood-sports-even if it means vegetarianism, Schweitzer's
injunction can at least be debated. But as a universal rule
it is mere concept-worship. Schweitzer must have daily
flouted his own law. If his hospital at Lambarene was even
moderately aseptic, many living crawling creatures had to
be denied reverence. The tape worm and tse-tse fly could
bear witness to his unprincipled behavior, and he was
ruthless to cancer cells, which are also a form of life. "Oh,
but that's not what he meant!" What then did he mean?
An absolute rule is literal or it is nothing. Here the nothing is a pompous echo of a general tendency already wellrooted in our mores.
Schweitzer was too intelligent a man not to see the objection and he made some verbal gestures to gloss it over:
good sense should govern the application of principle.
That saving clause, expressed or not, seems to go with
every ideal when one begins to analyze it It enables the
absolutist to pass for a moral champion and sensible as
well: proclaim the principle inviolable, denounce as unprincipled-as pragmatists-those who question the heroics of absolutes, then reserve the right to do quietly what
the "unprincipled" say has to be done.*
In the last half-century the game has been played with
this same "sanctity oflife" to bring about the widespread
abolition of capital punishment; it now goes on about legalized abortion. "The state should not commit-or abetmurder." The noble rhetoric blankets the varieties of
experience and flouts the proper use of words: a judicial
execution or a legal operation is not murder. And other
considerations than the life of the criminal or the fetus
have relevance. To name but two, the sanctity of life is
hardly honored by incarceration for years in the prisons
we have. Nor is it reasonable to prohibit abortion and permit all persons and powers in society, whether through
high literature or low advertising, to solicit the eye and the
imagination with ubiquitous incitements to sexual activity.
In a word, principles are at best short-hand summaries
of what civilized life requires in general, in ordinary relations, in open-and-shut situations: do not lie, steal, or kill.
But the pure imperative gives no guidance whatever in
difficult cases. Universal lying would be dreadful, but you
do not tell the truth to the madman armed with a knife
who asks which way his intended victim went And even
routinely, you lie to spare the feelings of the hostess who
apologizes for her spoiled dinner or dull company. The
police shoot in hot pursuit and sometimes kill the innocent bystander, just as they would, and do, to quell a riot
The very right of self-defense works for and against the
sanctity of life. And whether or not the unborn have a
"right to life" from the moment of conception, it would
be morally monstrous to force the victim of incest or rape
*The love of abstraction and hatred of usefulness go so far in certain
moralists as to make them affirm that it would be better for morality if
honesty were not the best policy. In other words, the right is what people ought to do with no reason given, except that they ought to because
it is right. Imperatives satisfy, even vicariously, the imperial emotions.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
(especially if accompanied by venereal disease) to bear her
child. The child itself might come to wish it had never
been born and curse the blinkered moralist
Every human situation being a tangle of facts and meanings and possible consequences, moral judgment consists
in deciding how much evil may be averted and the good
sustained or extracted. Sometimes the complication is
tragic, as in the case that E.M. Forster discussed at the
outbreak of the Second World War: "Should I betray my
country or my friend?" The dilemma may have seemed improbable at the time; it no longer looks it after the revelations of high-minded spying and treason. And the moralist
is no nearer a solution than Antigone was two thousand
years ago when she had to choose whether to obey the law
of the gods commanding her to bury her brother or the
law of the state forbidding her to do it because he was a
rebel.
If these various degrees of uncertainty and horror do
characterize the life of man precisely because he is a
moral being, what help can thinking about it abstractly
provide? James has but two generalities to offer, but they
are comprehensive. The first is that 'there is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek
incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to act as to bring
about the very largest total universe of good that we can
see. Abstract rules indeed can help; but they help less in
proportion as our intuitions are more piercing and our vo-
cation the stronger for the moral life. For every dilemma is
in literal strictness a unique situation; and the exact com-
bination of ideals realized and ideals disappointed which
each decision creates is always a universe without precedent and for which no adequate previous rule exists. The
philosopher, then, qua philosopher, is no better able to determine the best universe in the concrete emergency than
other men. He sees, indeed, somewhat better than most
men what the question always is-not a question of this
good or that good simply taken, but of the two universes
with which these goods respectively belong.'
"Not this good, or that good" -it is the whole tangle
that must be resolved, just as it is from the new emergencies that moral habits grow more delicate. If we no longer
make fun of the insane, abuse the crippled, or beat the
abc's into little children, it is because individuals with
"piercing intuitions" have persuaded society that their
sensibility to others' pain implied a moral duty to stop inflicting it But short of such great reforms, what moral
contribution can the morally alive person make? Start, as
James always tells us to do, with the idea of a tangible result 'If one ideal judgment be objectively better than another, that betterness must be made flesh by being lodged
concretely in someone' s actual perception. It cannot float
in the atmosphere, for it is not a sort of meteorological
phenomenon like the aurora borealis.' ·
The second general principle as to the question what
ought to be done, what one's duty is in the circumstances,
what the ground of our obligation is, brings us to the pas-
5
�sibly surprising conclusion 'thatwithout a claim actually
made by some concrete person there can be no obligation,
and that there is some obligation wherever there is a
claim. Our ordinary attitude of regarding ourselves as subject to an overarching system of moral relations true "in
themselves" is therefore either an out-and-out supersti·
tion, or else it must be treated as a merely provisional ab·
straction from that real Thinker in whose actual demand
obligation must be ultimately based.' James, being a natu·
ralist, does not posit such a Thinker; he is only showing
those who do that their traditional religious morality im·
plies a claimant. It follows that in a world which acknowledges no God-or not everywhere the same one-the
claim must come from the beings whose existence we do
acknowledge.
James knows the strangeness of thinking that every claim
imposes a duty. With our habit of always wanting a backing
to reality, we look for some sign of "validity" behind the
claim to turn it into an obligation, something beyond,
which 'rains down upon the claim from some sublime di·
mension of being which the moral law inhabits. But how
can such an inorganic abstract character of imperative~
ness, additional to the imperativeness which is the con·
crete claim itself, exist? Take any demand, however slight,
which any creature, however weak, may make. Ought it
not, for its own sole sake, to be satisfied? If not, prove why
not. The only possible kind of proof would be the exhibition of another creature who should make a demand that
ran the other way.'
So here we are, each of us, at the center of the conflict·
ing claims that assail us. They may come from animals or
infants or strangers: the range of claims we are subjected
to depends on the degree of our awareness; the extent of
our moral effect on the world depends on our ability to
sort and fulfill them.
I confess that when I first read James on "The Moral
Philosopher and the Moral Life," I was struck by a sense
of helplessness about carrying out his injunction. But af·
ter reflection, when I had grasped his extraordinary idea, I
felt the sudden release from interminable shilly-shallying:
X has asked me to do this for him. Perhaps I should. But I
don't really like X, so why should I? But it's absurd to
decide on mere dislike. Why not do what he asks if I can
without too much trouble? Yes, but he probably won't
return the favor. Surely, that's no reason for not doing
it-and so on. The amount of inner wear and tear saved
by the Jamesian redefinition of duty can be very great.
Our modern cant phrases-to sort out one's priorities, to
stick to one's values-hardly help in comparison with
James's simple idea that the burden of proof in our moral
relations is always on the negative: given a claim con·
cretely presented, why should I not satisfy it? The search
for a "why should I" is futile see-sawing or a grudging sur·
render to the "superstitious abstraction."
The result of honoring as many claims as possible is to
raise the amount of satisfaction in the world, increase the
6
sum of good, and thereby umoralize" the universe more
than it is already. For if reducing cruelty to animals makes
for a universe better than it Was before, so does giving our
claimants more of what they assert to be their good. Su·
perficially, the judgment may look like the Utilitarian's
"greatest good of the greatest number"; actually, it differs
in having nothing to do with legislating the good of society at large or with the wishes of a majority. It is a con·
crete relation between persons.
That relation may even be what is meant by the uto·
pian commandment that we should love one another. At
the same time, the requirement of an existing, live claim
prevents intrusive do-goodism under the cloak of love.
But what if the claimants misjudge and call good what is
bad-ask for drugs or the means of harming others? In
such cases there is obviously a counterclaim which nullifies theirs, the claim of their kindred or of the rest of society. Besides, claims of this sort fall within the circle of
mores and laws about which the moral person has long
since settled his doubts. One is not bound to be perplexed
and imagine a dilemma every time a choice has to be
made. A great deal of the present century's feelings of
guilt are the result not so much of moral conscience as of
the self-conscious ego. Its feelings are not insincere, but
they are more about the status of the self in its own eyes
than about the object of its concern. Thus Mrs. J
ellyby in
Dickens, who neglected her children in her zeal for the
natives of Borrioboola-Gha.
To respond to all possible claims, one must begin look·
ing for them in one's own immediate sphere of knowledge. One must recognize the limits of one's power, but
with a resolve to act. Indignation about this bad world is
cheaply come by and morally worthless. As Robert Frost
once recounted, he gave up reading Lincoln Steffens on
the plight of cities, because as a poet he knew he could
not go and help. Self-acceptance strengthens the moral
judgment in an essential way, for in deciding which claims
to fulfill there are times when the claims of the self must
be counted. The traditional self-sacrifice of a grown child
to an aged parent, for example, must be weighed against
its possibly immoral results-domestic tyranny and emo·
tiona! blackmail, on one side, gradually creating embit·
tered hostility toward the whole world, on the other.
As always, it is easier to dispose of such questions from
the distance of the writer's desk or the philosopher's lectern. The great merit of James's view of obligation is that
its concreteness and perception of the unique warn us
against the errors of casuistry. The word has acquired the
sense of deviousness only because in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries the religious casuists tried to foresee
and rule on all conceivable predicaments in advance, in a
"case book." On paper their solutions sounded contempt·
ible. Moral dilemmas, like experience itself, exceed all imag·
inings, as is shown by our innumerable books of casuistry
-our novels. They lead us to admire or despise the same
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�acts, doubtless because these only look the same, or because disparate moral truths are invoked.*
Imbued with the tragic view of life, James was certain
that moral action often demands the sacrifice of self; duty
is hard; it entails pain and sometimes death. For evil is real
and must be fought, repeatedly, endlessly, at great risk.
Not only is there no guaranty that one's moral decision is
right; there is not even any assurance that the fulfilled
claim will not turn from a good to an evil. James's knowledge of history brought enough instances to his mind to
leave no doubt.**
To speak of moral decisions implies that human beings
faced with a moral choice are free to do one thing or another. This privilege is denied by thinkers who believe in
determinism. They may belong to either camp of James's
opponents; they may be idealists or materialists. Both
accept the fact of volition: you can raise your arm if so
minded or refuse to if you choose. But that choice is not
really yours nor is it decided on at the moment; everything
in the past has been interlinked in a chain of causes and
effects, of which your present act is but the latest link to
the next. We see here the block universe of the Absolute
or of blind matter, either of which locks all things in a
tight network for all eternity.
The battle over free will is ancient and neither side can
win, because satisfactory evidence on the subject can
never be found. The definition of "free" is itself a source
of disagreement. Those who say that man acts for a reason
and not from a cause are told that reasons too are foregone. The thorny notion of cause and effect divides even
scientists, though most prefer determinism as more con~
venient to work with. This state of affairs leaves belief in
free will as itself something to choose or reject. James was
brought to see this option by the French philosopher
Renouvier and like him he chose free will, on moral
grounds. He pointed out at the same time that the determinists also choose-the opposite. Let them have their
way, says James, it then follows that 'you and I have been
foredoomed to the error of continuing to believe in liberty. It is fortunate for the winding up of controversy that
in every discussion with determinism this argumentum ad
hominem can be its adversary's last word.'
But this debonair taunt and argument are not enough.
In "The Dilemma of Determinism" James shows what follows his choosing and what he means by its moral
grounds. Take any deplorable event (his example is a bru*For a vivid contrast, take our modern scorn for the medieval trial by
combat or by ordeal to determine guilt. In an age of belief in a divine
providence that governs every event, it was a most moral and logical procedure, and our method of trusting in the doubtful word of mortal witnesses would have seemed reckless and absurd.
**A striking one has emerged since his death: the benevolent, liberal,
highly moral treaty that Great Britain made after the Boer War saddled
South Africa with a regime based on the continuance of race oppression.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
tal murder, then recent) and see the difficulties that arise
if a determinist regrets its occurrence. 'Are we to say,
though it couldn't be, yet it would have been a better universe with something different from this Brockton
murder in it? Calling a thing bad means that the thing
ought not to be, that something else ought to be in its
place. Determinism [thus] virtually defines the universe as
a place in which what ought to be is impossible.' And
'what about the judgments of regret themselves? If they
are wrong, other judgments, of approval presumably,
ought to be in their place. But as they are necessitated,
nothing else can be in their place; and the universe is what
it was before-a place where what ought to be appears impossible. We have got one foot out of the pessimistic bog,
but the other sinks all the deeper. We have rescued our actions from the bonds of evil, but our judgments are now
held fast. When murders and treacheries cease to be sins,
regrets are theoretic absurdities and errors.'
In other words, under determinism there can be no
clear and consistent meaning in the terms moral life,
moral judgment, moral action.
Freedom thus regained does not mean "deuces wild"everybody free every instant to will what he or she pleases.
There are networks of compulsion-instinct, habit, bodily
makeup-and it is as clear to indeterminists as to others
that one can predict fairly well what someone else will do
when one knows the doer's character and the constraints
he works under. Determinists seem to fear that the cosmos will fall apart if free will is permitted to exist. 'It is as
likely (according to McTaggart) that a majority of Londoners will burn themselves tomorrow as that they will partake of food; as likely that I shall be hanged for brushing
my hair as for committing murder, and so forth.' Clearly,
the dispute itself is very free; it suffers no constraints from
common sense. But in James's universe things are not totally loose and disjointed. All kinds of unities and relations
among things and among ideas coerce. The one permanent
avenue of freedom, however narrow, is that 'in an activity
situation, what happens is not pure repetition; novelty is
perpetually entering the world.'*
One might have expected that James's large definition
of duty and his solid reasoning in favor of free will would
satisfy the moralist "in an age of science." But they do not,
because James's maxim requires that an action for good
shall be related to the entire present situation, which he
says is new and cannot be judged by previous rule. But
morality is the right and James's precept looks like the expedient, the changeful. A moralist may admit the changing
character of truth, because he has accomodated himself
to "progress" in science, but this concession probably
*The full technical argument is given in Chapter VI of Essays in Radical
Empiricism, "The Experience of Activity;" and again at greater length
in the last five chapters of Some Problems of Philosophy.
7
�makes him all the more unbending about the "right." He
is sure that the pragmatic imagination playing upon context and consequence can only make for uncertainty in
human relations, set people adrift and helpless amid temptations, in short replace Right absolute by Relativism.
This argument is so familiar that it is often accepted by
those against whom it is directed, as if they lived indeed
by a lower grade of ethics but could do no better. Nor is it
noticed that the attack brings together two different sets
of facts. One is the diversity of existing moralities, each of
them absolute to some tribe or nation; the other, the diversity of individuals within tribe or nation.
When Europe discovered the new world in early modern times it was seen that peoples lived by different rules.
Montaigne pointed out that cannibals were not immoral
at home though they were abominable murderers in Europe. By the next century Pascal notes that even in Europe
moral truth is one thing on this side of the Pyrenees and
another on the other side.
This being the state of affairs from time immemorial, it
seems rather egotistical to proclaim any one set of commandments the sole morality, and somewhat fanciful to
speak of "indelible moral truths implanted in the human
heart." Is it moral or immoral for the Mohammedan to
have four wives? Or the African chief to have forty, each
worth so many head of cattle? A worldly Pope recently declared that to look with lust upon one's wife was tantamount to adultery. If this is morality for Catholic believers,
is it incumbent upon their neighbors on the same street?
In many parts of the world, a gift of value for doing business, giving justice, or performing a helpful official act is
only courtesy; in the West it is bribery, immoral and criminal. Murder in early medieval England was paid for by a
fine-that is the original meaning of the word murder;
later it was paid for by one's life; now, in this country, the
penalty is a life sentence, and the meaning of that is seven
years in jail. (If life is sacred, by the way, the Eskimos' law
is the most moral: the murderer is told to go away and join
another tribe.)
Like it or not, humanity is radically diverse. It is only by
successive abstractions that we come to conceive of a single "human nature." If you take away one by one heredity,
education, the social forces of the time and the place, you
can arrive at the essential human being, the forked radish
with four limbs, needing food and shelter, and who will
surely die. But having defined him-or it, rather-no specimen of the kind can be found; like an average prescription
for eyeglasses, the definition doesn't fit anybody.
It is at this point that the second and different target of
the foe of Relativism comes into view. Actual life is lived
by a collection of somebodies and they are no more alike
among themselves than are the groups to which they belong. Ascetics and Lotharios, extroverts and introverts,
the pensive and the gregarious, the poet and the athlete,
and many other varieties and subvarieties breathe and
move under the same customs and costume. If the moral-
8
ist perforce tolerates different national and tribal ethics,
why the indignation at internal diversity?-unless it is
such as to disturb the peace, which is a political, not a
moral reason. In advanced civilizations the idea occurs to
very moral persons that different types of character are
entitled to different treatment.* Since 1914, for example,
we recognize the conscientious objector. As Shaw pointed
out even earlier, to do unto others as we would have them
do unto us may be unjust: they are not us and their tastes
may differ. It is precisely the social behaviorist's mistake
to suppose that the same lure and the same whip will work
on all alike. It is also the error of the speculative reformer;
Utopias are invariably made for one type.
The anti-relativist of today, with his high ideal of inflexibility, needs to see that without the acceptance of different ethical norms we should never have got away from
those of the cave man. The refinement of feeling and conduct that moralists pride themselves on comes from
change, not fixity. The law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for
a tooth gets outgrown, but at first it necessarily appears as a
violation of principle. The fear that if one rule is altered,
then "anything goes" is the fallacy of all or none. "Things"
could hardly "go" farther than we see them doing at present, yet our age is extremely moralistic, if not moral; it
lacks "morals" in the vulgar sense but it is full of moral
scruples and it labors under innumerable codes aimed at
giving equal treatment and protecting the helpless. We
have come so far as to cherish even "endangered species"
-small, unknown, speechless claimants such as the snail
darter, which now arouse widespread moral passions.**
Indeed, our moralism is one cause of the perpetual anger
at society: why isn't it perfect?
Since )ames's moral philosophy follows the pragmatic
pattern of considering outcome as well as antecedents, it
is clear that his relativism, far from being footloose, is held
fast by as many demands and duties as the moral agent
can think of. His relativism relates, and widely. It would be
better named Relationism. In thus relating one's decision
or conduct to several needs and ideals, one gives the observer as many chances to criticize, whereas the absolutist
relates his act to only one thing: the fine abstraction that
*Contrary to common opinion, it is in governing and administering that
rules should be rigid. If well drawn, they save time and preclude indecision. In the life of institutions good fixed rules are the prime producers
of efficiency and fairness. To be sure, such grooves for sensible action
must be redrawn as often as necessary. The complicated work of civilization today is chaotic because of antiquated procedures. Everybody
"makes policy" and leaves action to chance or precedent. But this failure due to scarcity of administrative genius is aggravated by false notions
of "flexibility," "compassion,'' and other forms of muddling inequity. In
the struggle with the bureaucracies of business and government and
education, what makes the public hate "the system" is that it is not a
system.
**UNESCO has adopted a Declaration of the Universal Rights of Animals, but it has not helped the goats of San Clemente Island, which
were liquidated for endangering several species of plants and the habitats of other, less common creatures. Ah, principle! (New York Times, August 19, 1979).
AU1UMNIW1NTER 1982-83
�his God or his grandfather once uttered emphatically. In
other words, James insists as usual that theory be given
concrete, namable contents. Those are the "objective val·
ues" that moralists preach, though what they rant about is
but a formula, a form of words.*
The Jamesian obligation to connect the moral judgment
not to 'this good or that good simply taken but to the uni·
verse with which they belong' also clears up the common
confusion about morals in politics and foreign affairs. Lin·
coin's struggle with his followers' narrow absolutes may
serve to illustrate. In 1863, when summoned to change
leaders in troubled Missouri, he gave a reply that should
be read as a textbook case in political morality: "We are in
Civil War. In such cases, there is always the main ques·
tion; but in this case that question is a perplexing com·
pound-Union and Slavery. It thus becomes a question
not of two sides merely, but of at least four sides even
among those who are for the Union .... Thus, those who
are for the Union with, but not without slavery-those for
it with or without, but prefer it with-and those for it with
or without, but prefer it without. Among these again, is a
subdivision of those who are for immediate, but not grad·
ual extinction of slavery." To each party, each of the six
choices was the only moral goal, as Lincoln knew: "all
11
these shades of opinion and even more" are entertained
by honest and truthful men .... Yet all being for the
Union, by reason of these differences each will prefer a
different way of sustaining the Union. At once sincerity is
questioned·, and motives are assailed. Actual war coming,
blood grows hot, and blood is spilled. Thought is forced
from old channels into confusion. Deception breeds and
thrives. Confidence dies, and universal suspicion reigns.
Each man feels an impulse to kill his neighbor, lest he be
first killed by him. Revenge and retaliation follow. And all
this, as before said, may be among honest men only." It is
as Dorothy Sayers told us: the first thing a principle does
is to kill somebody.
The statesman thus appears as something greater and
wiser and more tragic than the image of "the man of principle," who follows the rule by rote and lets the heavens
fall. He is actually one who says: "Gentlemen, I beg you to
rise above principle" and who persuades the everwarring
factions of his party and his nation to give up their abso·
lutes and be guided by his superior pragmatism. In the
murderous battle of principles, he keeps in view the aim
and end of moral action. The end is the test, justifying
him when the story is over.
But even before, along the way, the end is the standard
for judging which principle is to be followed and which
must be waived. Hear Lincoln before his presidency, dur·
ing the debates with Douglas: "Much as I hate slavery, I
would consent to the extension of it rather than see the
Union dissolved, just as I would consent to any great evil,
to avoid a greater one. But when I go to Union saving, I
must believe, at least, that the means I employ has some
adaptation to the end. To my mind Nebraska has no such
adaptation."
Here with the word means Lincoln introduces the last
component of moral conduct: besides the variety of claims
and ends to be weighed and combined, there is the mode
of action to be chosen. No man was more dedicated to
freedom than Lincoln, but as Chief Executive he restricted
freedom of speech, suspended habeas corpus, and used
the army to enforce the draft against rioters-with regret,
no doubt, but without compunction.
Does this not mean that the end justifies the means?
Yes. Horrors! No formula arouses greater indignation in
moralists; it is the mark of the Evil One; it is the reason
given for regarding avowed pragmatists as suspect. Any·
body who subscribes to the wicked notion in so many
words has to explain himself, offer some excuse. Well, for
a start, everyone without exception acts on it in ordinary
life. For instance: a man takes a sharp knife and slashes a
child. He is a brute, a monster. But just a minute! The
man is Dr. X, about to remove the inflamed appendix. Immediately the cut in the abdomen becomes desirable,
praiseworthy, highly paid. The end-and nothing elsehas changed the moral standing of the violent act. The
end justifies the means.
Again, we take that same child, we take all children,
and, at an age when they are bundles of energy bent only
on running and playing and shouting we coop them up for
four hours, six hours a day, and compel them without due
process of law to struggle over tasks they do not care for
and see no point in. It is called Education. We piously
plead: the end justifies the means. Similarly, the ends jus·
tify monogamous marriage, imprisonment by law, monastic retreat from the world, and its seeming opposite: society
itself. For as Rousseau and Freud pointed out, to live in
society is a harsh, unnatural discipline justifiable only by
the ends of relative safety for continuous toil.
The modern state particularly is built on the ends-andmeans formula so hastily condemned. From compulsory
vaccination and seizing land for public use to the control
of a thousand normal acts-eating and drinking, teaching
and learning, traveling and importing-our laws and administrative rules interfere hourly with harmless human
purposes.
We tell ourselves that the end-the common welfarejustifies. The same maxim is also blessed by one ancient
church that guides the conduct of millions. It teaches, on
the basis of scriptures even older than itself, that procrea·
tion in wedlock is the sole justification of sexual intercourse.
The end apparently justifies the otherwise reprehensible
means. On occasions less intimate and recurrent anybody
would behave in the same spirit: we would not hesitate to
knock down man, woman, or child to save any of them, on
*Looking at the sum of moral ends achieved permits moralities and cultures-whatever anthropologists may say-to be adjudged better or worse.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the instant, from being run over or burned to death by
clothing on fire.
9
�The bugbear phrase is evidently a misnomer for something else; and cleansing it of odium is not a merely verbal
matter, for its present use is to distort the actual relation
of ends to means and discredit pragmatic moral judgments.
What needs to be embodied in a formula is a distinct
situation, that in which the means corrupt the end-or destroy it, as would happen, for example, if one should drug a
child to stop it from crying. Weak minds are often tempted
to use such means, which in effect covertly substitute one
end for another; the true one is a child at peace and not
crying; the false is a child merely silenced by a dose of
pmson.
Besides, this reductivism works both ways. 'If William's
religious melancholy is due to bad digestion, scientific
theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are.' James called such interpretation
"medical materialism" and saw in it sheer intellectual arrogance. He resented the trick that transformed useful
discoveries (his own included) about the dependence of
mental upon bodily states into a gratuitous identification
of the two. It is a permanent temptation, as the poet and
scholar Joy Gresham, who became Mrs. C. S. Lewis, confessed about her youthful views: "Men," I said, "are only
apes. Love, art, altruism are only sex. The universe is only
matter. Matter is only energy. I forget what I said energy
was only."
To speak of moral intuition and believe in free will on
moral grounds, as we have seen James doing, argues the
valuing of belief itself as a human activity. To accept
equality or any other "moral truth" for its good consequences is an act of faith and therefore a risk. But as early
as the 1870s and '80s, when James was discussing these
questions, faith had become a privative concept which
meant: unscientific, illusory, antiquated nonsense, prob-
ably of religious origin.
Those who took this attitude generally called themselves
Positivists, after the name given by Auguste Comte to his
philosophy of knowledge. In effect it admitted as knowledge only what science had certified-positive(ly) knowledge. Toward everything else these minds were skeptical;
toward religion specifically, or anything called spiritual,
they declared themselves "agnostic"-Huxley's bad coinage for one who says: HI don't know."
The purpose embodied in this then-new word is important; it was to teach the lesson of withholding belief. The
agnostic does not deny divinity like the atheist; he waits
for evidence one way or the other. Such a position sounds
worthy beyond cavil, but its balancing act between Yea
and Nay rarely proves stable. Most positivists were assertive materialists, and James found himself obliged to rr\eet
their hidden metaphysics head on. 'Science, these positivists say, has proved that personality, so far from being an
elementary force in nature, is but a passive resultant of
the really elementary forces, physical, chemical, physiological, and psycho-physical, which are all impersonal and
general in character. Nothing individual accomplishes
anything in the universe save insofar as it obeys and exemplifies some universal law.' Thus-and this was the analogy that Taine made famous in the preface to his History
of English Literature (1864)-"Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar." James shows that the argument rests on the genetic fallacy. Treating moral facts like
so many chemicals is 'as if the same breath which should
succeed in explaining their origin would simultaneously
explain away their significance.' And he adds that he feels
'impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of the
program, in view of what the authors are actually able to
perform.'
10
By the time one does get to energy, amid the elementary particles of physics, which exist for us only as traces
on film and which are identical within their kinds, it is evident that something must be added to them before they
can become even the ape that we say we are. Yet when one
makes this simple reflection one is suspected of "smuggling in" something illicit into the universe. The word
''mysticism" is murmured and one is accused of being
"against Science," or just too stupid to see how, for the
enlightened, science has become "a Way of life."
Science can be no such thing, since it begins by excluding what it cannot measure or classify. No scientist has
ever chosen a wife or bought a house by scientific methods,
nor does he laugh, or applaud a musical work, on scientific
grounds. Two-thirds of his life is totally remote from science. Therefore to speak of belief, free will, or faith of any
kind as "smuggled in" would mean that natural science offered a complete account of experience. What it offerstoo readily-is the claim to do so in the future, coupled
with the command to sit and wait. Huxley, again, gave the
fGrmula: "To rest in comfortable illusion when scientific
truth is conceivably within reach is to desecrate oneself
and the universe."
Some writers of our time, though eager to vindicate the
moral life, have accepted the premise that science legitimately occupies all the land, but hope that it might be induced to lease some untilled portion for non-scientific use.
When James met the claim of total ownership he took a
different and intellectually sounder line. The opportunity
was given him by a statement in which the English mathematician W. K. Clifford, who was also Jame's friend and fellow psychologist, summed up the new orthodoxy: believe
nothing without sUfficient evidence-it is a sin: '"Whoso
would deserve well of his fellows in this matter will guard
the purity of his belief with a very fanaticism of jealous
care .... If a belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence (even though the belief be true, as Clifford on the
same page explains) the pleasure is a stolen one. It is sinful
because it is stolen in defiance of our duty to mankind .... It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." '
On this text James wrote a closely reasoned essay which
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�he called "The Will to Believe." The title has passed into
common usage with (as usual) the erroneous meaning of
"believe what you please." Seeing this, James regretted
the phrase and thought he should have said "the right to
believe." In fact, the demonstration is about the right and
the will to believe, each restricted to precisely stated conditions.
Clifford's preachment 'with somewhat too much ro·
bustious pathos in the voice' is self-refuting on the face of
it. Clifford, like everybody else, believed thousands of
things on no evidence at all-for example, whatever he
knew, or thought he knew about his family and friends;
and he acted on faith whenever he said with no quiver of
doubt: "I'll see you next Monday."
It is such facts of belief and their source in experience
that James begins by examining. 'We find ourselves believing, we hardly know how or why. We all of us believe
in molecules and the conservation of energy, in democ~
racy and necessary progress, in Protestant Christianity
and the duty of fighting for "the doctrine of the immortal
Monroe" -all for no reasons worthy of the name. We see
into these matters with no more inner clearness, and prob~
ably with much less, than any disbeliever in them might
possess. His unconventionality would probably have some
grounds to show for its conclusions; but for us, not insight, but the prestige of the opinions, is what makes the
spark shoot from them that lights up our sleeping magazines of faith. Our faith is faith in someone else's faith,
and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief in truth itself is that· there is a truth and that our
minds and it are made for each other.'
Our thoughts are energized by feelings of all kinds, and
it is the varied origins, character, and intensity of feeling
that pose the problem of which ideas to trust. 'Our next
duty, having recognized this mixed-up state of affairs, is to
ask whether it be simply reprehensible and pathological,
or whether, on the contrary, we must treat it as a normal
element in making up our minds.'
To help settle the question James defines a few terms.
Call hypothesis anything proposed to our belief and see if
it seems to us live or dead. A live hypothesis is one that the
individual finds believable, credible. To an atheist, the reincarnation of souls is not a live hypothesis, but "medical
materialism" might be. He could in the end reject it, but it
was not "unthinkable" like the other. If one thinks one
might take action there is some degree of "liveness" in the
hypothesis: 'there is some believing tendency wherever
there is willingness to act at all.' ("Act" here would include
re~arranging
one's other opinions and altering one's
vocabulary).
The choice between hypotheses James calls an option
and he classifies options as living or dead, forced or avoidable, momentous or trivial. What he goes on to state applies
only to an option that is forced, living, and momentous. It
is only within these narrow limits and only when no empirical evidence is to be had, that James finds the right
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
and the will to believe legitimate. Belief under these conditions is no frolic when teacher's back is turned; it has a
reason to exist, which is: that not deciding is a form of decision. Thus for most people free will is a tenable idea-it
is live, which makes the option living, and it is certainly
not trivial; it is forced, because there is no third possibility.
So in the absence of evidence one has the right to believe
in free will, for not deciding would be to decide against it.
These safeguards against credulity have been so regularly overlooked in discussions of James's essay that they
bear restating in his own words: *'Our passional nature
not only may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its
nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say under such circumstances, "Do not decide but leave the
question open," is itself a passional decision and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.' ,
So much for the right to believe. The will to do so is a related subject, but its limiting conditions are different.
First, willing is not mere wishing or "velleity," as it is ca11ed.
"I wish I were a millionaire" and "Everybody falls in love
with me" are not forms of the will to believe; they are
commonplace fantasies. Not the superficial wish but the
deep-seated will is a strenuous expression of the self.
When Walter Scott, caught as partner in the bankruptcy
of his publishing firm, decided for his honor to pay all its
debts by writing novels, essays, biographies indefatigably,
he noted in his journal: "] must not doubt. To doubt is to
lose." That resolve was his will to believe-in his own
powers, in his eventual success.
But belief is a far from simple thing. One often hears
the strong beliefs of others explained away: "He thinks so
because he wants to so much." But try, yourself, to believe that you are younger, or a better dancer, than you actually are; the probability is that you cannot, no matter
how much you want to. Peter the apostle wanted to walk
on the waters of the stormy lake; his life depended on it,
but he could not will it. The test of willing, as usual, is action. Every great artist starts out unknown, uncalled for,
but possessed of a belief in himself and of the will to make
it true. His periods of discouragement show that it is will
which is at work in periods of production.
These facts define the situation in which the will to
believe is legitimate and, what is more, "creative": 'There
are cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith in a fact
can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic
which would say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is "the lowest kind of immorality." Yet such is the
logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to regu*One exception must be noted: Edwin L. Clarke, in a modest textbook
entitled The Art of Straight Thinking (New York 1929), devotes half a
page to explaining that James carefully limits the domain in which belief
without evidence has its rights. Professor Clarke-may have been annoyed
by the ubiquitous will to misunderstand on the part of other scholars.
11
�late our lives!' James then gives a physical example to make
vivid a type of predicament that orie meets more often in
social or emotional life: 'Suppose that you are climbing a
mountain, and have worked yourself into a position from
which the only escape is a terrible leap. Have faith that
you can successfully make it, and your feet are nerved to
its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, and think of all
the sweet things you have heard scientists say of maybes,
and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and
trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair,
you roll into the abyss.'
Life being full of "maybes," it forces every conscious
being to act a thousand times on the strength of the will to
believe. The will functions without our knowing it as
such, or appreciating the philosophic and psychological
reasons for its reality, as against the unlifelike view of the
Cliffords and the Huxleys. But any initial doubt or faith
has the interesting aspect that everyone can prove himself
right: 'Refuse to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for
you shall irretrievably perish. But believe, and again you
shall be right, for you shall save yourself. You make one or
the other of two possible universes true by your trust or
mistrust-both universes having been only maybes in this
particular, before you contributed your act.'*
One very ordinary situation in which belief contributes
to making itself true is that in which trust, candor, courtesy,
or love produces the same pleasant attitudes in return.
And so with their opposites; the grouchy and suspicious
generally find their worst expectations come true. In bodily
matters, the placebo effect, long used by physicians, is of
the same kind: give a sugar pill to a patient with the will to
cure himself and he may do as well as the truly drugged one.
This peculiarity of the body and the mind, though not
uniform in its action, is so noticeable that it has inspired
more than one cult of self-help: to double your energy and
succeed in all things, repeat three cheerful slogans before
breakfast. That is a caricature of the will to believe, but
caricature implies a real original.
'Our willing nature,' as James calls it, is normally re·
strained; it needs favoring conditions before it can act to
our benefit. The common belief of those around us is one
enabling cause. A vivid imagination is another, but it must
summon emotional force behind its image and keep it at
the forefront of consciousness. The will to believe is the
will to attend; that is why we say of genius that it is ob·
sessed. As Hemingway puts it somewhere: "It was not just
something he believed. It was his belief."
The distinction points to a generally neglected factthe gradations of belief, the various shades of our several
beliefs. Think of them in this light and the shadings ap·
pear indeed infinite. We believe the broadcast report of a
catastrophe; we believe more strongly when the details
*Thanks to the currency of the phrase "self-fulfilling prophecy," the
the
public is now familiar with
workings of the negative will: predict that
your wedding will not take place and make it so by not showing up for it.
12
are told in the next day's paper; we believe to the full
when not merely a witness but a friend saw it happen.
There is even a step beyond, which is faith, or belief un·
conscious of itself. One senses the difference between
believing that something exists and believing in the thing
itself. People are chock-full of beliefs, but life is lived on
faith-a buried assumption on which one acts; for exam·
pie, that the shopkeeper will give you change for your ten·
dollar bill and not say it was a five, as he could safely do if
he were in bad faith. When any deep trust has to be put
into words we discover that belief-its statement-is the
interruption of faith. One used to have unthinking faith
in the safety of the streets; now one at best believes that
the stranger coming along will not assault one. Common
speech records the shifting emphasis when it uses "I be·
lieve so" to mean "I am not sure."
If in order to leap the mountain chasm it was necessary
to overcome "The fear that kills," it is.no less important to
remember the poet's next line: "And hope unwilling to be
fed." For despite the derivation of the word, it is a mistake
to suppose that everybody wants to believe what is agree·
able.** Many prefer the worst; to them news or ideas feel
true because they are gloomy. When Freud said that
science was the conquest of will over the pleasure princi·
pie, he evidently felt that the truths of science robbed him
of pleasure, and he rejoiced. But it is just as reasonable to
say that scientific work is the expression of man's free will
invading the realm of necessity, in which case science is
one form of the pursuit of happiness.
These opposed views are doubtless never to be reconciled, but they illustrate a main contradiction of our century. The age cries out for all the freedoms-the free will of
individual self-determination, the free choice of social and
cultural pluralism, the right to free beliefs and utterance,
the free access to good things that equality affords. But it
also believes in the material, medical, subpsychical determinism of all acts and thoughts, and it turns its back upon
risk, which is the necessary companion of free will as well as
of the right and will to believe. So while half our energy
goes to freeing, the other half is spent on trying to make
safe, to control, to predetermine by means akin to the behaviorist's conditioning or the poll-taker's way of freezing
the future. Our worship of science springs from the same
passion for certainty (plus the hold it gives on other's opinions) rather than from intellectual pleasure and admiration. Similarly, because they are risky and disturbing,
heroism and ambition are thought wrong and ridiculous;
tests, statistics, diets, charts tell everybody "This is what
you ought to be-indeed, whether you know it or not, this
is what you are.'' And with that denial of freedom and risk,
anxious guilt replaces the sense of accomplishment.
**"Belief' seems to have a two-pronged etymology: be-lief means be-glad,
as in "I'd just as lief," lief being related to love; belief is also connected
with leave in the sense of allow. Our belief is thus what we should be
glad to think when it is allowable to do so: exactly James's position.
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�Treasure Hunt
Meyer Liben
It was one of those lovely New England days late in
August which our great authors of the early and middle
nineteenth century have described for us so easily, so extensively. When a region has achieved a given importance
-political, cultural, whatsoever-the climate and terrain
take on an added significance. How much more so if the
beauty is there to begin with!
I am poor at natural description, I find it difficult to portray what is, whatever exists, in distinction, I mean, to
what is happening (I add that as a kind of self-pleading, to
hide a deficiency). I am plainly insensitive to natural beauty
(a great deal is happening there) having a poor sense for
color, space, and relationship.
Lake, mountain, and cloud blended. The predominant
colors were green, blue, and brown, the dusty brown of
road. A few clouds wandered aimlessly in a sky otherwise
absolutely clear. I mention the aimlessness of the clouds
because that contrasts so strongly with the decisive, the
volitional nature of the event now ready to begin, I mean
the Treasure Hunt in the annual Blue and Gold color
competition in the summer camp set in a terrain which
has been so closely and charmingly, so easily and extensively described by our great authors of the early and middle nineteenth century.
A word in passing about this Color War, a phenomenon
requiring explanation for those unfamiliar with the customs of the summer camps of the late 1920s and the early
1930s. The competitive element was strong, mirroring
that of the Great Society. There was no particular effort
made to disguise or soften the competitive instincts.
Everyone in camp, counsellor and camper alike-with exceptions to be mentioned-was on the Blue or the Gold
team engaging in every variety of sport, in dramatics, and
in any other kind of activity which lent itself to competition. Our Blue and Gold lasted for only five days. There
were some camps at the time which were divided on the
very first day, even on the bus or train carrying them all
out of the city, and the struggle for points, for victory,
went on all during the summer! That was obviously exaggerating, rather than mirroring, the world round about,
and then there were camps coming into existence which
discouraged, even forbade this type of competition, trying
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
to create an atmosphere different from that of the society.
The competition in these camps was of a low-pressure
sort; in some cases the element of cooperation was definitely encouraged.
But our camp stood in the middle between those which
were competition-crazy and those which were competitionshy-we had our five days of Blue and Gold rivalry (deeper
thinkers amongst us referred to it as an attenuated hangover of the War Between the States) and we were now on
our fourth day of that rivalry, with the issue in doubt, and
an important 25 points to be awarded to the team (this
was a Senior Division event) winning the Treasure Hunt.
There were three on a team. On the Blue team were
Larry Altman, Dick Gordon, and Dave Crown. On the
Gold team were Marv Woolman, Jackie Lesser, and Ben
Semmel. This game-finding a written clue on the basis
of a written clue, and so to the final treasure, usually a
prize, in this case the 25 points-requires intelligence and
speed. There is hardly a game that doesn't. Now Larry
and Marv were very intelligent (both, as it happened, from
Townsend Harris Hall), while Dick and Jackie were very
fast, ran neck and neck in the sprints, and both murder at
laying down a bunt and beating it to first. That left Dave
and Ben to represent sagacity, the guiding hand, even
what we in our camp called "character,n a quality for
which medals were awarded at the reunion held in midwinter. "Character" meant a certain stability; often times
the awards were made to those who seemed most reserved
and didn't particularly shine in one sport or another. The
stability didn't seem to jibe altogether with the sagacity,
but that was part of the confusion of this particular area
of choice.
The contestants were gathered around the flagpole, situated on the parade grounds which overlooked the lake.
The Grand Isle seemed very close, the brilliant clarity of
that August day acting as a kind of telescope. Down at the
waterfront the sophomores were starting their swimming
meet, and the points to be won here, tho not crucial, were
bound to be important.
Above the cries and splashes of the sophs one of the
judges, head of the Senior Division, laid down the rules. A
word about these judges. The Head Counsellor and the
13
�camp Doctor were kind of ex-officio judges-they might
be used if a shortage or an emerge'ncy developed. The active judges were usually counsellors chosen for their noncombative natures. They came most from the intellectuals,
those (often, of course mistakenly) thought to be the least
interested in victory and therefore, by a curious twist in
logic, the most judicious. If a counsellor went to an Ivy
League school, or planned to do medical research, he was
pretty sure to be chosen for a judge. So do the men of the
world underrate the fierce rivalry of mind and spirit.
"The boundaries," said the head of the Senior Division,
"are the backstop of the baseball field (not into the woods),
the beginning of the girls' camp (not into the girls' camp),
the parents' Social Hall, and the lake (not into the lake).
And remember, no conversation with anyone not on your
team."
This last warning was given because (as this judge had
heard) there had been a scandal a number of years back,
years after the Black Sox scandal, in which spies were used
to report the discoveries of the opposing team. These spies
would follow the enemy, see where the clue was replaced,
and report accordingly. That episode almost disrupted the
Color War, but then it came back stronger than ever.
I'd like to sketch in a little of the background of this
Head Senior Counsellor, while he is laying down the law in
his rather pedantic manner, tho shot through with flashes
of wit which were swiftly reabsorbed into the pedantry,
only to reappear again, for he was bright and nimble, really
assumed a pedantic style to cover an extreme restlessness,
a power of imagination.
His name is jules Kurtin, he has just finished his senior
year (on scholarship) at Yale, and will enter Law School in
the falL He is a kind of solitary, friendly with both the eggheads and the athletes, tho belonging to neither group, and
naturally incurring the suspicion of both. Since he had no
girl friend, there were rumors that he was a homosexual,
but that was wrong, it was just that he had no girl friend.
Rumors of sexual deviations and difficulties were not uncommon-it was an easy way of getting back at someone
who seemed superior or odd. He had no camp experience
before this year, and had no particular interest in going to
the camp. His sister, however, had a boy and a girl of camp
age, and she insisted that her brother be included in the
kind of package deal which was usual then, and probably
still is, in the summer camps. So, since he had nothing
better to do for the summer, he found himself at camp.
Then he was made head of the Senior Division because
the man who had been hired for that job gave it up at the
last minute for a better-paying job in the Poconos. Thereluctance of the other Senior counsellors (who had been to
the camp before and wished to continue for themselves
the benefits of its traditio!"! as a "Counsellor's Paradise")
propelled Jules into this position, in which, after an unshaky start, he managed quite adequately. In view of his
college, his temperament, and consequent reputation in
the camp community, it was only natural that he should
have been chosen as one of the judges. No one could
14
imagine jules taking sides in this war. No one thought that
he would fight over a close decision at home or threaten
to leave the camp unless the broad jumper on the other
team was disqualified for a foot fault. It was the felt absence of this combative edge which disqualified jules from
being chosen for the Blue and Gold.
So jules, in spite of his comparative unfamiliarity with
the ins and outs of the camp (for many of the counsellors
had been there, beginning as campers, for as long as ten
years) had been given the task of working out the route and
writing the clues for the Treasure Hunt. He at first approached this as a rather pedestrian task, but as he began
to work on it, one night at a writing table in the parents'
lodge, his interest was aroused. The game took on the profound meaning which all games, sufficiently examined,
will bring to light, every game being a deposit, so to say, of
man's history and ·forgotten behavior. jules began to see
this game as a kind of allegory of life's pursuits, of all the
goods (and evils) which we are forever seeking. He saw the
Treasure not only as money-he thought of the Holy Grail,
the Golden Fleece, of the brawling and curiously honest
madness of California in 1848.
Then he jotted down, as they came to mind, some of
man's pursuits: Fame, Love, Money, P.ower, God, Happi·
ness, Truth, justice, Security, Failure, Status, Understanding the Origins of the Universe.
These were some of the pursuits from which he decided
to make his choice for the game. And because he realized
that so many people do not know what it is they are pursuing, indeed are seeking something to pursue, he added
Ideals to his list.
And what about the randomness and mystification in
life? He grinned at the thought of his favorite line from
Ring Lardner. Lost, at the wheel of a car, close to home,
our author asks a policeman for instructions. Advised to
take the Boston Post, Ring replies: "I have already subscribed to one out-of-town paper".
So, out of the joy of play and amateur mystification, he
included this last sentence as one of the clues. Does this
sound as tho it would be too esoteric an allusion for the
hunters? Not at alL For, as it happened, there was a counsellor from Boston, who received, every day, precisely the
Boston newspaper in question, which he spread out,
weather permitting, on the parade grounds, during free
time, rest hour, or whatever other time he could snatch
from duties not very arduous to begin with.
But now the clues are finished, and the hunt has started.
Each side is given the first clue. They study it anxiously,
eagerly, wanting to get the head start. It was the famous
quotation from Socrates about the worthlessness of
the unexamined life.
Now in these summer camps, in these close social con-
glomerations, there is a high level of interpersonal knowledge, there is endless joking and jibing about oddities of
behavior, an intricate and ever-changing web of friend and
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�enemy, there is a great deal of sadistic gossip (as well as
friendly gossip, boasts of the merits and achievements of
those on your side), there is a great deal of the hostile interest of the young, part of the pattern of what we today
call "putting one down".
The point of these clues in the Treasure Hunt is that a
given word, or phrase, will, through free·associational
routes, rational analysis, or luck, yield up the material leading the hunters to a given person, or a given place. So
these paragraphs, these lines, sentences, and clauses are
studied with the care and intensity that the New Critics
give to a line of verse.
Obviously the key word in this first clue was the word
"unexamined". Now there was a youth in the camp, whose
name was Jordan Kustler, who refused to be examined by
the camp nurse. On the occasions when these examina-
tions were necessary (the nurse sometimes doubling for the
doctor, or assisting him in these mass prophylaphtic orgies)
Jordan would disappear-into the woods surrounding the
camp, down to the lake and under a war canoe, anywheres
where he thought he'd be safe from the examination
(mostly throat) of our attractive nurse.
This clue, therefore, was not the most difficult of clues.
Larry and Marv (the smart ones, you recall) hit on the answer at about the same time, and the teams, with Dick and
Jackie in the lead (the fast ones, you recall) sped towards
the bunk and the bed ofJordan Kustler, twelve years old, a
Junior. The two speedsters arrived in a dead heat (the distance from pole to bunk being very short) but Jackie found
the slip, which was under Jordan's pillow, and, according
to the rules, his team, assembled, had one minute to read
and analyze the clue before handing it over to the foe, or,
in the absence of the foe, to replace it exactly where found.
To enforce these rules, the judges were spread out at the
different discovery spots, moving ahead with the progress
of the game. This, of course, was to prevent the discoverer
of the slip from hiding it in a place absolutely unrelated to
the sense of the previous clue. It is an example of the imperfectibility of man. So the Gold team examined the new
clue, and then, at the word of the judge, handed it to the
Blue team, and tore off in the direction of home plate.
Look homeward, angel,
Milton's line, Wolfe's title, was the second clue.
When writing down this clue, Jules was thinking of
man's role in the world, that he must seek to prove himself in the great outside, and then return to the ease and
safety of home (the way Shakespeare did), tho, as with
Ulysses, the trials on the way home were not the least hazardous. To the Blues and the Golds the line meant only
one thing: Home Plate on the baseball field. The Blues
reached the plate just as the Golds were streaking off.
On the ball field, the Juniors were in the midst of a game
worth 50 points, and these could prove to be important,
if not absolutely crucial in the final tally.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
"What's the idea?" asked the catcher on the Gold team
as Dick went for the home plate. "How are you supposed to
play a ball game with an army tearing around home plate?"
But he had not objected when the Gold team had looked
for and found the clue buried und<;r the plate.
"Don't hold him back," said the judge, "let him look."
And then Dick triumphantly came up with the slip of paper, and discussed it with Larry and Dave, who had by now
appeared on the scene.
That third clue was not an easy one, it certainly puzzled
the Blues, who stood discussing and analyzing it, at the
edge of the field, not far off from the Gold team, which
was similarly stymied.
This clue read:
Luck is a fool's name for fate,
and it was an expression of the sort that sometimes gains
currency in this kind of social organization, makes the
rounds, is on everyone's tongue and then is swiftly forgotten. Both teams now tried to remember who it was that
had coined the phrase, or introduced the phrase, or made
the phrase popular, thereby associating himself indissolubly
with that phrase. Marv Woolman was sure that the expression had originated with Boris Melkin, a somewhat bizarre Junior Counsellor (that is, a younger fellow, a J.C. not
a counsellor in the Junior Division) who put on Hamletish
manners, roaming the camp grounds, quoting tag-ends of
verse and wisdom. 'Tm pretty sure" said Marv, "that he
started that saying" and off went the Gold team towards
the bunk and bed of Boris Melnick. But Larry Altman had
another thought, it was a kind of free-wheeling inspirational thought, one of those flashes into the outer darkness that lights up precisely the object lost or hidden.
"Let's go" he said, "to the horseshoe that's hanging on the
Social Hall door." So, without question-one can run as
fast puzzled as clear-headed-off sped the Blues, with
Dick in the lead, and reaching that spot, he sure enough
found the fourth clue tied onto that horseshoe. They read
it swiftly and dashed away from the Social Hall, trying, unsuccessfully, not to be seen by the Gold team. Frustrated
in their search in Boris Melkin's bed and bunk (to say
nothing of his trunk and personal belongings) that bunk,
as it happened, being at the end of the line and so having
a view of the Social Hall, the Gold team (it was actually
Ben Semmel, to give credit where credit is due) noted the
surreptitious departure of the Blues-they left like scouts
at dusk-and began a swift examination of the Social Hall.
Finally, they hit on the horseshoe, without any association
coming to mind, but by that time the Blues had a lead of
about five minutes, by no means commanding at this stage
of the game, but fairly significant, and were far away from
the Social Hall, while the Golds stood around and puzzled
over the fourth clue.
That fourth clue was the line from Shelley:
Fa me is love disguised,
15
�and this one, too, proved somewhat of a puzzler for the
contending teams. These clues (the analysis of whose
structure is long overdue, quite perfect for a doctoral the·
sis straddling sociology and literature) often depend on as·
sociations of an eccentric sort or on puns of a sometimes
ghastly sort. In this fourth clue, for example, both teams
spent time on the word 'is', for it seemed at first glance to
offer the most likely possibilities, considered that one of
the counsellors was called Iz, and so both teams went into a
swift breakdown of his life, loves, and habits, but couldn't
somehow come up with enough to go on, enough to make
them move in a given direction, so they looked further into
the mystery hidden in this short line. What follows is surely
too gross a generalization, but it sometimes happens when
those of roughly similar backgrounds are engaged in the
same problem, that they will sometimes see the answer at
about the same time. This of course is running down the
importance of individual difference. Nevertheless, the two
sides suddenly remembered the play (written by the dra·
matics counsellor) in which the actor, wearing a mask of
wordly power, suddenly throws off that mask, reveals a
face desperately alone, and pronounces the name buried
in his heart. It was a memorable moment, both teams remembered it, and the Golds rushed back into the Social
Hall, followed soon after by the Blues, who had not gone
too far off for their deliberations. The six of them milled
around on the stage, seeking the· clue which had to be
there. It was there, worked into the folds of the curtain,
and fell when the curtain was shaken in a moment of random despair. Dick and Ben touched the paper at the same
time (so said the judges, after a disputation) and both
teams looked together at the fifth clue, the one already
mentioned:
I have all ready subscribed to one out of town paper,
and that turned out to be a pretty easy clue. The contenders lit out for the Bostonian's bunk, but there was no clue
there, no object left untouched, no possible hiding place
passed over, and then they all went, as the Irish say, after
himself. He was officiating as one of the judges at the
Sophomore swimming meet. In no time at all he was surrounded by the six youths, and paid them as little mind as
he could, considering the circumstances, the sixth clue
folded and protruding from the coin pocket of his swimming trunks. Dave Crown of the Blues spotted the piece
of paper and grabbed it. That gave his team the minute's
edge to analyze that clue and reflect on it.
The sixth clue was the statement from Laotse, which
had impressed Jules, as an amateur cosmogonist (who is
not an amateur cosmogonist?):
All of a sudden, nothing came into being.
Larry, Dick, and Dave looked incredulously at this sentence, and then incredulously at one another. So did the
16
Gold team (at sentence and one another) when the paper
came into their hands.
"This is a reallulu.
"What is this supposed to mean?''
"That Jules is off his rocker, bats in his belfry."
"What does nothing come from?"
''What does it mean?''
These were some of the comments made and some of
the questions raised by members of both teams. They
were on the shore, a little ways off from the dock, and
were pretty close to one another. It looked almost as tho
the difficulty of the clue had brought them together. But
then they moved apart and began a closer examination of
the text.
There was a freshman in the camp by the name of Lee
Soden.
"SuddenLee, suddenly, Lee Soden" said Marv excitedly,
and off went the Golds on a wild goose-chase. It was a genuine wrong number.
The Blues recalled that one of the counsellors, Bob
Kamin, was very fond of the expression: "Nothing to it".
He used it on every conceivable occasion, preferably when
it sounded quite senseless. Apparently he liked the sound
of it, or preferred to stop conversations. Or it might just
have been a kind of habit, the way some couldn't help
spitting, or winking an eye. So off dashed the Blues on as
wild a goose chase as the enemy.
Both possibilities, of course, were genuine, they deserved exploration. They were only wrong, and after the
teams had proved to themselves, by the most exhaustive
search, that this was the case, they continued to study the
sentence written by the Chinese philosopher, desperately
seeking the word, the sound, that would send them off in
the right direction.
After a while someohe (Ben Semmel, as it happened)
saw the word being (which should have been existence,
but Jules remembered it as being) as beeing, and that led
the Gold team to the place where the bee-hive had recently been discovered and soon destroyed-after a series
of swift, high-level discussions, the final one on the spot.
Here, sure enough, the Golds found the seventh clue, and
so went back into their early lead. And this turned out to
be a fairly substantial lead, for it was a good ten minutes
before the Blues, after excluding one possibility and another, picked up the right word play.
Now it somewhat threw Jules that these sentiments,
which he had chosen with a certain amount of care, with
some thought, should have to be read as semantic puzzles,
interpreted on the basis of these puns, these sophomoric
plays on words. But that was the tradition in which the
game had come to be played, and to change the tradition
in the middle of the game, he thought, is a way of spoiling
the game. So was the content overlooked, the allegory
grounded. But the sentiments had to be read nevertheless, and the kids might feel some sense of the over-all ...
Jules's thoughts were checked, as he approached the
scene of the seventh clue, by the sight of Georgie Lessing,
11
AUTIJMN /WINTER 1982-83
�a senior. Jules grinned at the sight of the boy sitting on the
steps of his bunk. He was the only kio in the camp who
had stayed out of the Blue and Gold competition. He did
it as a matter of principle. "If you want me to compete,"
he said, "I'll go home." And that, of course, would have
opened up the problem of a return on the camp fee, if indeed that fee had been paid in full, to say nothing of his
two cousins in the girls' camp. All manners of pressure
were brought on the boy, but he was adamant. "It's all
madness," he said, "creating a phony rivalry, fighting
where there are no real issues." So he sulked in his cabin,
or, as now, sat on the steps of his bunk, reading "War and
Peace" or one of the "Baseball Joe" series, for that was the
style of his eclecticism.
"Where are they looking now?" asked Georgie. "At the
bottom of the lake?"
"If you only knew," said Jules.
He hesitated and then decided it wouldn't be cricket to
tell Georgie about this next clue, which was a really corny
one. The thought of it always made him a bit hysterical,
being so obviously ridiculous, so outlandish, so idiotic. In
order to make use of this clue, he had had to get the permission of a counsellor called Wilfred Thar.
The clue, of course, was:
There's gold in them thar hills.
Thar had a mouthful of gold fillings. Between two of the
teeth so filled there was a slit, formed, no doubt, by the
slow drift of the lower teeth, and after a fairly lengthy discussion (Thar being a rather finicky chap) Jules convinced
him that this slit formed by the drifting of the teeth would
be the perfect place to hide a clue, which had to be written, of course, in very small script on a very small piece of
paper.
"Now don't swallow it," Jules had said, and they both
laughed, Jules giddily, Wilfred in a rather pained manner.
Well, it didn't need Intelligence, Character, or Speed to
figure out where that clue was. Thar made no effort to
hide-he sat on the steps of his bunk, watching the runners as they streaked by in the early stages of the game,
waiting for the moment he did not exactly relish, tho having made his promise, he was determined to stay with it.
Now and then he felt with his tongue to feel whether the
slip of paper was in its proper place.
Well, the reader can well imagine the jollification, the
addlement which then surrounded the person and place
of Wilfred Thar. The Gold team, with its ten minute edge,
was down at the bunk in a flash and were rather thrown
by Thar' s manner, which seemed a little more hostile than
the occasion warranted. They even felt for a moment that
they were on the wrong track. There was a confused huddle, during which the three team mates reassured one another, and then they started on the search. They did a
thorough dismantling job on the bunk, on the suspect's
bed, and when it became clear that there was no clue inside, they approached the counsellor. He sat in a species
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
of horrified resignation; the fact is that he was very sanitation-minded, suffered on occasion from fears of contagious diseases, and looked forward with some apprehension
at the prospect of six youths poking around in his mouth
in search of a small piece of paper. In the summer his fear
of contagion was related to tropical diseases, such as
typhoid and yellow fever, diseases quite unknown in New
England at the time. He had an opportunity, while waiting, to think of the medical backgrounds of the six boys,
and was disturbed at the remembered knowledge that
Dick Gordon's brother had been in a New York hospital
for a reason which Wilfred had never thought to ask
about. Thar was wearing a T shirt, a pair of bathing trunks,
and sandals.
"Wauld you mind taking off your T shirt and sandals?"
asked Ben Semmel.
The Golds had decided that it would be best if Ben, as a
Character winner, should approach Wilfred along these
lines.
Without a word, the counsellor removed his shirt and
sandals. Both were carefully examined and returned.
"Do you mind," asked Ben, "if we looked in the pockets·
of your trunks?"
"Not at all," said Thar, ~~help yourself."
So they searched and again found nothing.
"This sounds stupid" said Ben. "but we'd like to take a
quick look into your mouth."
Wilfred opened his mouth without much interest and
smiled without much joy when Ben pulled the paper out.
The Golds quickly jotted down the eighth clue and Ben
started to replace the piece of paper.
"Never mind," said Wilfred, "I'll handle that," and he
carefully replaced the clue just as the Blue team hove into
sight.
Now the Blues did not bother with bed and bunk. One
of them had heard from a kid in Thar's bunk about the
unusual amount of gold in his counsellor's mouth, and
with hardly a word of apology they went straight for that
area. The counsellor winced when Dick pulled out the
paper.
The Blues had picked up five minutes on the Golds,
with five clues to go.
The eighth clue, before being approved by the camp
authorities, required a certain amount of discussion, some
dispute. A quotation relating to Noah, and reinforced by
mention of a youth nicknamed Arky, clearly led to the Ark
in which, of course, was enclosed the Torah, used in the
Social Hall on the rainy Sabbaths, for when the sky was
clear, the Services were held outdoors, on the parade
grounds over the lake.
In this high-level discussion about the use of the Ark,
there was, at first, a general demurrer at the notion of using it in any way in this game. The word "sacrilegious"
was used. But Jules explained the way in which he had
planned the Treasure Hunt and his arguments, with their
educational cast, softened the opposition.
"This relates to the search for God," explained Jules.
17
�"How can we possibly exclude this search from the game?
Is it less important than the search' for money and power,
than the search for love and justice?"
Presented this way, the argument was irresistible. But
jules's desire to put the clue inside the Ark was turned
down decisively, nor would the judges accept the idea of
pinning the clue on the curtain covering the Ark. They finally decided to put the clue on a bench in front of the
Ark, and that was fairly easy for both sides, so the Gold
team maintained its five minute lead.
In composing the ninth clue, Jules used the expression
the Pursuit of Failure.
That in fact was the clue. He had heard it used by one
friend about another friend. jules remembered the phrase
tho he himself was very little preoccupied with failure, being young, healthy, ambitious, and hopeful. But he was
aware of the Freudian implications of the statement. Some
seek their own destruction, feel they deserve their own
destruction because the early murderous impulses had
never been properly abreacted (a word he sometimes
thought of, but never used), because the impulses were
stronger than the usual, or the provocations greater, or
the character structure weaker. No doubt there are other
possibilities-it is even conceivable that one has done
something for which he feels he deserves punishment.
And a kind of punishment is apparently the pursuit of failure-the fact that this behavior can be pleasurable only
adds to the punishment when the pursuer comes to un·
derstand that the pleasure is a trick, a device to keep him
on this pursuit of failure, for what is the point of pursuing
failure if there is nothing in it at all?
This clue, too, was based on an outrageous pun. There
was a counsellor (one of the counsellors for the freshmen,
kids about six or seven years old) who, early in the summer, had fallen desperately in love with a girl counsellor
called-yes, yes, this is her name, unbelievable as it
sounds-Phalia. Her name was Phalia. She was most attractive, flashing eyes and all, and it was not surprising
that Fred Angst (the freshman counsellor) should have
fallen in love with her. She was apparently a living example of his type, and who, all things being equal, will not fall
in love with a living example of his type? The fact that she
did not respond in kind was part of the over-all situation in
which Fred found himself. He was a serious chap who liked
to win as much as the next one, and found that he was not
sleeping as well as one would expect in this cold, bracing,
New England night air. He was almost always up an hour
or two before reveille, t.hinking of what he had said, or
should have said, of what she had said, of what he wished
she would say, thinking of how she looked, imagining moments of a deeper intimacy than they had so far enjoyed.
The fact is that Phalia did not respond in kind, she being
entranced in another direction. It was happening all over
18
the place, but Fred was more insistent in his pursuit than
most of the others, he did not drift easily to other faces,
other bodies. His difficulties became known the way difficulties become known when people are looking to see the
triumphs and difficulties of others. Furthermore, in the
words of George Herbert, "Love and a cough cannot be
hid." Fred's situation, known to the counsellors, became
known to the campers (who is not interested in abiding,
unrequited love?) and Fred Angst was known as the one
who carried the brightest of all torches.
But it was a rough clue, the pun was beyond limits, and
both teams puzzled over the four words, saying them over
and over again, saying them backwards, forwards, and
sideways, turning the phrase round and round. Really it
shouldn't have been that hard because the New York way
of pronouncing "failure" is precisely Phalia and finally,
Larry Altman hit on the connection.
"Down to the freshman bunk" he cried, and as they
ran, he quickly explained his thought. Dick Gordon sped
ahead, easily outdistancing his team mates, for the frosh
bunk was at the other side of the camp, and Dick had the
tenth clue by the time Larry and Dave arrived. It was
pasted on Fred Angst's trunk, more or less disguised as a
Railway Express ticket. About five minutes later (for love
and a cough cannot be hid), the Gold team arrived, and
decided to check first the person of Fred. (Spur of the moment luck had taken Dick into the bunk). Fred allowed
the search, tho it was disconcerting, for the freshman
were involved in their own aspect of the color war-they
were in the midst of a potato race, which Fred was umpiring, or overseeing, or whatever it is one does with seven
year old kids involved in a game which they have just
learned, involving a set of rules and swift movement. The
competitive excitement of the Blue and Gold had pene'trated the somewhat isolated life of these youngsters (for
they were off from the main camp, going to bed earlier)
and the ten points picked up by the winner of the Potato
race might easily prove of crucial importance. There was
indeed a case, known to the old rememberers, of a color
competition decided by the five points given for greater
silence at the dinner table.
Finding nothing on Fred's person, the Golds went into
the bunk, and of course they found the clue, but by that
time they were about ten minutes behind, and streaked
off with the tenth clue in mind. That clue was probably
the easiest of all the clues, being the statement from
Isaiah (2.8) that
Everyone worshippeth the work of his own hands,
and that could lead only to one place, which must be the
Arts & Crafts hut.
We leave our contestants for the moment to record a
conversation between one of the judges, stationed near
this hut (to be in front of it might be a give-away) and the
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�camp chef. The kitchen staff was not involved in the Blue
and Gold. The waiters were not invdlved, but being old
campers or would-be counsellors, they generally took sides,
while the kitchen workers, older, and often without camp
experience (coming from the city employment agencies)
found it difficult to understand what was going on. They
were amazed, for example, by the silence at table. The
chef was baffled by the fierceness of this rivalry, did not
understand that he was witnessing a pure, or abstract,
struggle for victory, on the basis of an artificial division,
and that the winner wins precisely nothing but the victory, and the right to assume a superior stance as against
the losers.
"Why," said the judge, to the incredulous chef, "there
was a case, a few years ago, not in this camp, where the
color war started at the bus terminal, the teams traveling
on separate buses-to learn songs and cheers, plan strategy, etc. Well, the bus drivers were carried away by the
spirit of the event, by the excitement of the songs and
cheers, and decided to make a race of reaching the camp,
tho there were no points awarded (so they say, but who
knows?). Well, one of the buses got into an accident, luckily no one was hurt, just a few kids shaken up, and that's
how that camp season started."
"What is it again they win?" asked the chef.
"Only the satisfaction of winning," said the judge, who,
with more knowledge, was less astounded than disturbed
by this abstract lust for victory.
But then the conversation was interrupted by the appearance of Dick Gordon, headed for the Arts and Crafts
hut, on a hint from Isaiah.
Now Jules would have the boys understand the prophet's
meaning, that it was wrong to worship the work of one's
hands, that this leads to idolatry, the worship of made objects, and can lead even to self-idolatry. "See this wondrous object I have made. Therefore am I superior, more
noble, etc." The painter says to himself: "What a wondrous thing I have created," but such a work merely goes
into the world and takes its place amongst the other
created objects.
Nor is it to be implied (Jules would like the boys to think
of this too) that the work of other hands ought to be worshipped, but only the living invisible God, who inspires
creation, this foray into the thinly-domesticated mystery,
this salvage out of chaos.
But mostly
the work of his own hands
and that work will be worshipped by the maker only if it is
not in use. Man worships what he makes and hides, the
way a miser worships gold (late at night, when there are no
distractions) but once he sends that object into the world,
why it is no longer his. He will not worship what is being
used day by day, even being used up (for no such created
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
object lasts forever). There is no secrecy, no idolatry or
shame, it is only what man has made with his own hands
(sometimes amazing, but never to be worshipped) to take
its rightful place in the circulation of created things, rivalling the objects that came into the world, nor must these
objects be worshipped, being merely signs of the inexplicable Creation, the mystery of the making of worlds.
Ideally speaking, Jules would have liked the boys to
think of these matters, as they schemed for their points in
the Blue and Gold. But he knew how fierce competition
will sometimes destroy thought, knew the chasm that lay
between victory and ideality.
"But something will rub off" he thought, as he watched
the other Blues enter the Arts & Crafts hut.
In that hut were objects in various stages of completion.
There were more objects of utility than objects of art, in
line with the predilection of the counsellor in charge and
a certain sense-mostlY unconscious-of the injunction
against the making of graven images. There were wooden
boxes, of various shapes, meant f6r various uses, and in
one of these boxes was the eleventh clue. That made the
discovery pretty routine, for what boys, seeking a hidden
slip of paper in a room full of empty boxes, would not
open those boxes, first off? So the Blues found this clue,
and, ten minutes later, the Golds found the clue, and off
they were, on the next to the last lap.
This eleventh clue was more difficult than others:
I have always known
That at last I would
Take this road, but yesterday
I did not know that it would be today.
Narihira (translated by Kenneth Rexroth)
When the Golds found this clue, the Blues were still
puzzling over it. They did not know in which direction to
move, trying desperately to decipher the lines before the
Golds picked up the clue, for they feared the keen mind
of Marv Woolman, remembering (all of a sudden) that he
had won a high school poetry prize. So the Blues studied
the document, the way one studies the missing word in
the crossword puzzle-time and the unconscious sometimes succeed, activated by the reason, and activating in
turn that reason, and in the interplay the missing word appears, the puzzle is solved. And then the Golds were in
the same boat. Both teams studied the text. What road
was meant? What kind of yesterday, what kind of today?
And yet the answer was not so terribly difficult-one
only had to hit on the fitting event, and then all fell into
place.
What event was this? Now there had been a boy in
Jules's bunk, a boy of twelve, called Sandy, a very engaging and ingenious child, very spirited, very poignant, a
child who could easily win one's heart, the way he won
Jules's heart. Towards the end of July, Jules received a rush
19
�summons from the camp director. It was in the late after·
noon, in the pleasant interlude between the end of the
afternoon swim and dinner time. All moved at their ease (I
say all, but there are always some so dispirited that even
this pleasant interlude had no effect), discussed the high
spots of the day, hungry after much activity and sure that
food would be forthcoming. The head counsellor and the
doctor were seated with the director, who handed Jules a
telegram. This telegram announced the death of Sandy's
father. Jules looked at the message blankly. The dead
stranger slowly disappeared, and the problem remained of
breaking the news to the child. We may worship the dead,
but we must take care of the living.
"We thought," said the director, "that it would be best
if you told the boy, you're pretty close to him."
Jules nodded. He thought of a book by Mrs. Ward (was
that her name? what was her first name again?) in which a
character is faced with the problem of breaking such news.
It is a universal situation, but each event has its unique
approach.
"You'll understand how to break it to him," said the di·
rector, "gradually."
~~Yes/' said Jules.
He was rather proud that he had been chosen for so delicate and difficult a task. Why not the director, the head
counsellor, the head of the Junior Division? He wondered
why the doctor was at this meeting? Why a doctor at the
news of the death of a distant stranger? A kind of rever·
sian, he thought, to the ancient medicine man, the witch
doctor, the man of magic summoned at the moment of awe
and loss. Then, of course, before one dies, he most gener·
ally is sick, and so the doctor is summoned when he dies.
There was so little left for any of them to say at this conference, it all seemed quite unreal, except for the reality
of telling the child. If the child didn't have to be told (but
those were not the instructions) why then the matter would
slowly have disappeared amongst all this social happiness,
the way a wisp of cloud will disappear in a joyful sky of
blue. There would have been no high-level conference.
But the man was dead, and the child had to be told, he
had to be sent home, to be at his dead father's side, and
walking down to the camp (the meeting was in the parents'
lodge) during the interlude, the free play, Jules thought of
what it was he had to do.
He had to be serious with the child, until the child realized that his counsellor was serious, and then the child
would begin to expect an explanation of this seriousness,
for this seriousness had to be maintained beyond the usual range. That was all that had to be done-a certain seriousness had to create a certain expectancy, and that
expectancy had to create a given anxiety, and then the
anxiety had to be met.
So Jules was serious in the bunk, serious to all the kids
in the bunk, but particularly to Sandy. And the child grew
serious, expectant, and anxious, for this was an unex~
pected style of behavior on the counsellor's part. But Jules
20
decided that he would not break the news till the next
morning. Should I trouble his sleep even more? thought
Jules, and he decided that the best time to break bad news
is in the morning, when one is least tired, but would the
anxiety interfere with the child's sleep?
That night, after dinner, the Juniors had camp fire, they
sat around, sang, listened to stories, roasted marshmallows, put out the fire in the immemorial way of boys. The
songs floated in the air, the stories flooded the stillness,
the voids of expectancy, the fire died in the solemn hiss.
\Then, when the kids turned in for the night, Jules sat on
Sandy's bed, spoke to him about the city, about his life at
home, enquired about his mother, about his father, about
his sister, and then again about his father, created an air of
seriousness, of anxiety. And the child was confused,
troubled, fell asleep after an active day in which he had
played his part. Hadn't he doubled in the ninth, and then
come home with the winning run?
The next day, after breakfast, Jules took the child for a
walk, down to the lake. That was an unusual act.
"But what about inspection?" asked Sandy, for after
breakfast the bunks were inspected, for poorly-made beds,
spider-webs on the ceiling, dirt in the corners, and each
week a banner was awarded to the cleanest bunk in the
division.
"We'll be back in time" said Jules, and they walked
slowly along the shore. The lake was absolutely calm, the
sky clear, the visibility perfect. Jules asked about the boy's
school life, about his street life, about his grandfather,
about his father, about his teachers, about his friends,
about his father. The child was uneasy, worried, wondered about this walk, about this conversation, began to
expect what he did not want to hear, and then heard it,
slowly and conclusively. The lad was silent, he threw a
rock into the lake, and both watched the widening ripples.
Jules put his arm around the boy's shoulder. They walked
together along the lake-shore.
"Your mother wants you to go home today," said Jules.
"It didn't have to happen," asked Sandy, "did it?"
He looked up trustingly at his counsellor.
"It happened," said Jules, "that's how it is. Now you
must go back, out of respect to your father, to remember
him, and to help your mother."
He felt a bit foolish mouthing these platitudes, but was
not sorry that he said them. What else is there to say? he
thought. Is silence better?
Sandy seemed, on the surface, to be wondering more
than suffering, wondering why this had happened, won·
dering why it happened to him. There was an indication
of anger, that this had happened to him, an indication of
resentment, that this had happened to him, and not to the
others, rather than to the others. He listened to the camp
cries, to the early-morning hum. Then his jaw hardened,
he stoically accepted the inevitable, the mystery and the
disappearance. He acted the man who silently sorrows,
buriesgrief and suffering, and continues his day's work,
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�his life's work. Then the boy's lips trembled, and he burst
into tears, with the awful sense of absolute loss.
So it was only a matter of time before one player or another, one team or another, would stumble on the meaning of the lines of the Japanese poet, would come to think
of one who amongst all having to leave, left earlier than
expected, on the road he would have had to take.
The Gold team picked up the clue first. Far from Marv
Woolman, it was Jackie Lesser, the speedster, who hit on
it. His nimbleness was apparently displaced upwards, and
a certain sympathy, a feelingful note, triumphed over
cleverness and character.
"It's Sandy," cried Jackie. "He left before the season
ended, he took the road home before he was supposed to
take the road home."
Marv and Ben looked at him with an amazement compounded with surprise, even anger, for how come that
Jackie, picked for speed, should have come up with an answer that made immediate sense? But their feelings quickly
disappeared into the competitive crucible, and the three
minds worked as one in trying to figure out just where they
were supposed to look. Would it be in Sandy's old bunk?
But there was clearly a road involved. What road? The road
home, of course. That road started at the top of the hill, it
was the beginning of the country road which led to the
town road, which led to the main road, which led to the
railroad station. So up they-sped to the beginning of that
country road, where stood a great oak tree and thru the
branches of that oak peeped a sheet of paper. It was the
clue, tied around a twig. They read and copied the clue,
looking around all the time to see whether the Blues had
picked up the trail. There was no one in sight. Then one
of the judges appeared from his hiding place, and tied the
paper back on the same twig. Off went the Gold team, not
down the path they had come up on, where they might be
observed by their rivals, but singly the back way, behind the
bunks, to meet near the Nature hut where they read, again,
the lines of Keats which made up the final clue:
Young men and maidens at each other gazed
With hands held back, and motionless, amazed
To see the brightness in each other's eyes
As they were examining these lines, leading to a place,
the Blue team was desperately reading over and over
again the lines of the Japanese poet until they too, by a
process of elimination and association~ came to remember
Sandy and his sudden departure home, and that led them
to the oak tree and the final clue. That clue, those lines
from Keats, were swiftly fathomed by Larry Altman, and
he and his teammates rushed down to the parade grounds
for this was where the boys and girls came together for the
Sabbath services and on all other ceremonial occasions.
(It was quite amazing that the Gold team had so much
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
trouble with these lines, they were so accurate a description of the meetings between brother and sister camps.
The three teammates, standing in front of the Nature
hut-a random meetingplace, away from the oak-were
in full view of the parade grounds, but looked past those
grounds in a kind of panic which sometimes occurs when
the victory is in sight. How else is it possible to explain
their overlooking these meetings, climax of the week, the
girls dressed in their whites [to welcome the Queen of the
Sabbath], the boys scrubbed and combed, in their sailor
ducks and sport shirts, waiting~ in the dusk-for this or
that familiar face, for the figure actively sought out, or flirtatiously avoided, for the figure warm or indifferent?)
A little down the way from the flagpole, Jules waited
with the other judges. He looked out at the lake, on whose
quiet surface, way out in the distance, the boats of strangers were faintly seen. He felt, for a moment,. a curious
sense of power, as one who created movement in others,
even choosing the direction in which they moved. But he
did not like that feeling, and it faded. He wondered whether
he had left out any important pursuits. Of course he hadthere was the search for identity, later to become a rather
fashionable problem, namely, Who am I? or Who am I
really? But he had excluded that pursuit on purpose-he
believed that one found himself (is everybody lost?) not by
looking for one's self, but by struggle in the outside world,
the world of struggle, the world of ideas (a kind of struggle),
of love (a kind of struggle) and so on.
Then the Blues appeared at the parade grounds (with
Dick Gordon, or course, in the lead) and quickly sized up
the situation. There was only the flagpole, and Dave
Crown was the first to look up (character pays) and there,
three-quarters of the way up the pole, the tell-tale piece of
paper was taped.
"There it is" shouted Dave, and then Dick-who was
nimble as well as fast-started to shinny up the pole. This
brought the Gold team out, wondering what connection
the lines of the poet had with the flag, which was swaying
in the slight breeze. Then Ben Semmel understood the
sense of the lines, saw the parade grounds filled with boys
and girls
.. . amazed
to see the brightness in each other's eyes,
saw the paper on the flag pole, but by that time Dick was
up there, pulled off the tape, and swiftly brought to the
ground the paper which read:
TREASURE HUNT WINNER!
and that was certified by the judges who appeared from
their vantage point and made official the victory of the
Blues.
21
�Don Alfonso
In this harmonious villa
Where oboes serenade
And lovesick tenors croon
Of constancy among the sycamores
I think of two old men who closed their eyes
And recollected what they owed.
The one considered wise
As ice crept up his thighs
Settled a rooster on the demigod
Who cured him of becoming.
The other fellow, fat but not a fool
Also perplexed his school
With chatter of a debt to Justice ShallowSuddenly chilled
When to be king his Prince banished the world.
This morning in the coffee house I heard
The fresh Ferrando trill of Phoenixes.
His friend, a baritone but still a boy
Joined him in sixths to idolize
Some lily of allegiance.
I hate a warm duet.
Too arrogant for owing, I'll enjoy
A bet. Adept at recollecting, I'll
Collect, moved not by eros but
Experience. No instant chill
Nor gradual welcome gelidness
But icy from the ages, I'm compelled
By one goad only: to instruct
Exasperating innocence.
Leaving the losers to their wry quartet
I'll shape my cadence to the sages' tune,
A philanthropic glee
Contrived for three:
Midwife to wind·eggs and the source of wit
And I, who knew Giovanni.
ELLIOTT ZUCKERMAN
Elliott Zuckerman is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
22
AUTUMN/WINI'ER 1982-83
�The Unity of Leibniz's Thought on
Contingency, Possibility, and Freedom
Arthur Collins
1 The Defects of Cartesian Physics
That it fails to accommodate force is Leibniz's fundamental criticism of Descartes' physics. Descartes tried to
reduce physics to geometry. A conceptual scheme restricted to geometrical concepts lacks resources adequate
for the representation of physical forces. In the context
that is best known and most often discussed by Leibniz,
he attacks Descartes' conception of the conservation of
the "quantity of motion," and he substitutes the idea of
the conservation of vis viva, or active power, which is what
we would call the conservation of energy_I
When we try to state the issues here in up-to-date terms,
at least in the terms of modern classical physics, it can appear that Leibniz is insisting on the conservation of the
product of mass and velocity-squared, while Descartes
calls for the conservation of the product of mass and
velocity. Since mv2 (kinetic energy) and mv (momentum)
are both conserved, some commentators say that Descartes and Leibniz are both right and that debate is out of
place.'
This conciliation is not satisfactory. Nothing like the
modern concept of mass is actually employed by Descartes. Were we to try to introduce umassn where he speaks
of "quantity of matter," we would have to make amendments in his thinking along the very lines which Leibniz
requires. Mass eludes any merely geometrical description
and the shortfall is only made up by appeal, in one way or
another, to something like force. Furthermore, Descartes
actually thinks in terms of what we might call "speed",
that is, motion along any path, straight or curved, while
Professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, Arthur Collins has published articles in many philosophical journals. He last contributed "Objectivity and Philosophical Conversation, Richard Rorty's
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" to the St. John's Review (Winter
1982).
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the conservation laws only hold for rectilinear speed. This
distinction becomes significant in Descartes' metaphysics
when he tries to reconcile mind-body interaction with the
thoroughgoing mechanical determinism that he supposes
to rule the material world. Descartes' idea of conservation
and his laws of impact express this determinism. The
problematic mind-body interaction takes place, Descartes
hopes, when purely mental influences manage to "deflect"
the subtlest material particles of the animal spirits in the
pineal gland. Such deflection is supposed to change the
direction but not the quantity of motion of particles affected.' In the parlance of classical physics, this solution
fails because it violates the principle of the conservation
of energy. The deflection of a particle would constitute a
change of velocity (though not necessarily of speed) and,
therefore, a change of energy. This addition or subtraction
of energy would not be charged to any account in the material world. Leibniz makes this point.4
These faults in Descartes' ideas are not just details on
which he remains at an unsatisfactory and preliminary
level, relative to later science. On the contrary, the difficulties spring from views which are among Descartes' most
important and best insights. The claim, "My physics is
nothing but geometry," 5 is widely recognized as the expression of his deepest inspiration in science, but this
view is also, as Leibniz thought, responsible for the most
obvious defects in Descartes' physics. Why are we supposed to agree that physics is just geometry? In part, this
is supposed to follow from the fact that nothing sensuous
is allowed to characterize (touter," spatial, material reality
by Descartes' epistemological analysis. All sensuous characteristics like color, sound, and heat, that is, all the socalled secondary qualities,6 are not really out there. They
exist only in the play of mental states and perceptions in
our minds. Contact with outer things is causally responsible for the generation of ideas with sensuous features, but
material things do not have such features themselves.' On
23
�reflection, it appears that nothing is left with which we
can rightly describe the nonmental 'space-filling world except nonsensuous concepts like figure, magnitude, and
motion.
When sensuous distinctions are no longer thought to distinguish different regions of space, we are reduced to a defoliated universe of moving particles having geometrical
features only. To Descartes this seems a great intellectual
advantage and a trustworthy sign of the correctness of his
epistemology. In fact, it would be better to say that his epistemology is motivated in major part by his scientific objectives. He intends to filter away the sensuous so that a
mathematically suitable subject matter will be left for scientific theory. His epistemology provides just the interpretation of reality needed by Descartes and others who
were convinced that scientific understanding becomes possible only when we manage to delete the unmanageable,
subjective, sensuous aspect of things and to characterize
the subject matter of science exclusively in the vocabulary
of abstract mathematics. In the argument of Descartes'
Meditations and in the Principles of Philosophy, the proof
for the existence of an external world of material things is
simply a proof that the abstract mathematical and geometrical truths, which we are able to appreciate in pure
thought, do have a subject matter outside of our thought
which they fit and describe. This subject matter is res extensa, that is, space, as an existing manifold or entity.
Descartes does not confine his purification of our conception of the material world to the purge of sensuous
characteristics. The prevailing scholastic-Aristotelian tradition was dominated by biological and psychological paradigms for the explanation of change. Within this tradition,
as Descartes read it, the understanding of physical phenomena involved projecting into the physical realm various soul-like agencies and, in particular, the substantial
forms of the scholastics. Descartes' reduction of physics
to geometry means the elimination of this psychologism
and teleological thinking from the scientific explanation
of the motions of bodies. The material universe which survives the elimination of both the sensuous surface and the
inner determinants of motion is Descartes' plenum of indefinitely subdivisible particles, all of whose motions are
determined by collisions that conserve an initial sum of
motion given to the system at the beginning of things by
God.8 Matter itself contains no principle of action nor disposition to move or not to move. All concepts of determinants of motions residing in material things are e1iminated
in Descartes' rejection of the animism of the scholasticAristotelian tradition.'
At a level near common sense we can represent the shortcomings of the Cartesian identification of space and matter
and the resulting purely geometrical physics as follows. A
theory in physical science has to provide concepts with the
help of which we are able to see what happens as the instantiation of clear regularities. Motions observed in ordinary experience are usually too complicated for analysis,
24
but, at least for the scientific explanation of motion, rules
should be formulable that cover very simple artificial or
imaginary ideal cases. Descartes himself thinks of the obligation of scientific theory in this way and he formulates
seven laws of which ideal cases of impacts of particles are
supposed to be the instances. 10 If such laws are satisfactory
they will enable us to predict what will happen when situations fitting the conditions specified (here the specification
of simple collisions) are realized. This elementary reflection
is usually summed up by saying that a scientific theory generates predictions when initial conditions are satisfied.
Now Leibniz's critique of Descartes' physics can be stated
as the thought that no such predictive validity is accessible
to a physics framed with Descartes' attentuated concepts.
Using a priori arguments, Leibniz is able to show that the
specific laws Descartes presents are incoherent and could
not possibly be empirically adequate.n But the larger point
is that no laws based on Descartes' concepts can succeed.
Leibniz sees this permanent inadequacy in the fact that
Descartes has no conceptual means for distinguishing between instantaneous motion and instantaneous rest. 12
Suppose we are going to predict the future position of
bodies in the solar system. In order to do this we need rules
expressing the patterns of mofion which they instantiate
and we need initial conditions in the form of specifications of the positions, velocities, and accelerations of the
various heavenly bodies at some particular time. But geometrical concepts only yield determinations of position at
a particular time, that is, at an instant. Descartes' purification of the concept of matter has left him nothing with
which to express the difference between a moving body
and a stationary body at one moment and he has no reason for thinking that there is any intrinsic difference. The
obstacle to predictive success within Descartes' conceptual scheme can now be put very simply. Initial conditions
that characterize material things at one moment of time
accessible to Cartesian physics will give the positions of
particles only. But the future development of a system of
bodies depends upon velocity and acceleration, and not
merely on position. So the Cartesian scientist will inevitably find different developments arising out of what he
sees as identical conditions. If the conditions are identical,
however, the very idea of scientific regularity requires
identical predictions. So predictive success cannot be
forthcoming. Ad hoc efforts to generate predictions conformable to experience must result in laws which are arbitrary and incoherent, as Leibniz finds that the Cartesian
laws of impact are in fact.
The characterizations that successfully distinguish motion and rest at an instant are just those that are accessible
to the infinite mathematical methods of the calculus
which Leibniz himself developed. Leibniz thinks of Descartes' "matter" as incomplete. It is a mistake to think that
merely space-filling stuff could constitute a substance.B In
this there is the influence of Aristotelian conceptions of
matter and form which Leibniz does not repudiate. NeiAUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�ther matter nor form, by itself, can constitute an existing
thing. But Leibniz' s view is also determined by his under·
standing of the irreducible status of force in physics. In his
thinking, momentary material existence is an abstraction
from the reality of temporally extended things. Substances
are not constituted of densely laminated temporal slices
which are their constituent realities as the cards are the
constituents of the deck. Substances, rather, correspond
to functions with values extended in time. Thus, the monad contains all its temporal states as the values of a function are contained in the law which is the function itself.
The fundamental metaphysical description of the world
must be in terms of such functions. Such a description
can never be reached by aggregating consecutive momentary distributions of merely space-filling stuff. In contrast,
time does not enter into Descartes' characterization of res
extensa at alJ.l 4 So, in Cartesian physics, moving bodies
have to be constructed out of momentary stationary bodies.
Descartes did attempt to present a theory of motion in
his laws of impact. Furthermore, his scientific writings
present an enormous number of explanations of various
phenomena most of which are now merely picturesque
relics. Some of his explanations are reasonable and correct. On the whole, however, it seems to me that Descartes
was never entirely clear about the appropriate expecta·
tions for scientific explanation, once the field had been
cleared by his elimination of both sensuous qualities and
occult inner determinants of change.
No one emphasized the role of mathematics in science
more than Descartes. Yet he seems to have had very little
confidence in the possibility of really detailed mathematical explanations of real events, and he did not foresee anything like the kind of success mathematical physics was to
attain, so soon after his lifetime, in the work of Newton.
Sometimes Descartes writes as though the chief intellectual job of science is completed when substantial forms
and teleological explanations have been dropped so that
the material world can be understood to be a matter of
moving and colliding particles.
The explanations that Descartes actually gives of particular phenomena are usually very much like ad hoc scholastic explanations in their ambitions and their explanatory
horizons, however unlike scholastic explanations they are
in content. Like the scholastics, Descartes offers imaginative stories that are plainly without predictive force or intent. They are broad ways of seeing the phenomenon in
question within the framework of a geometrical particle
universe.
In a remarkable passage, Descartes says that, since he
came to appreciate the real character of physical reality,
that is, that it is a spatial manifold of particles, and since he
came to appreciate the nature of physical events, that is,
that they are collisions of particles, he has found that he
can solve any problem of science that is proposed or that
occurs to him in a very short time. 15 This is not so much an
outrageous boast as it is an illuminating indication of what
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Descartes expects from explanation in physics. The solutions to problems which he can produce so promptly are
obviously merely broad hypotheses providing, with the
help of humble empirical analogies, a way of seeing this or
that event as a particular form of particle motion. So the
phenomenon of planetary motion is explained when we
see that an ocean of particles might carry suns and planets
in vortices, as a whirling eddy of water carries a leaf in a
closed path. Magnetic phenomena are explained by the
imaginative hypothesis, again based on the observable
world of everyday objects, that there are screw-shaped
pores in bodies, which impede but do not prevent the passage of screwshaped particles, just as the threaded nut impedes but does not prevent the passage of the threaded
bolt. Combustion is explained to the same limited degree
as the progressive destabilization of the structure of a
burning object by a storm of fast moving particles. And
the refraction of light is supposed to be intelligible on the
model of tennis balls deflected from their path when they
encounter the light resistance of a thin veil. In sum, explanation does not go beyond the provision of a hypothesis
that makes it reasonable that the phenomenon in question is observed even though the world is just a plenum of
moving particles. Particular explanations rely on a rough
empirical analogy to show how such particle collisions
could constitute the phenomenon in question. It is only
such hypotheses, dependent upon empirical analogy, that
Descartes was able to think of in a short time, and that is
what he means by "solving" the problems that come to his
attention. Given this conception of explanation it is quite
understandable that Cartesian physics should tolerate divergent developments from initial conditions that are identical when described in the terms that Cartesian science
permits.
Near the end of the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes
quite explicitly expresses his conception of the irreducibly
conjectural character of theoretical explanations. He recognizes that accounts in terms of particle motions involve
positing events (the particular particle motions and collisions) which are not accessible to the senses. Then, in
Principle CCIV of Part IV, Descartes tells us
That touching the things which our senses do not perceive, it
is sufficient to explain what the possibilities are about the nature of their existence, though perhaps they are not what we
describe them to be and this is all that Aristotle has tried to do. 16
In the following passages, Descartes says that we would not
find his individual explanations compelling if we considered them independently of one another. The real support
for his system is that so many explanations are generated
from so few ideas (namely, those that go into the scheme
of a plenum of particles), yielding a simple coherent picture of the worldY
If we look at Leibniz's critique in the context of Descartes' repudiation of teleology and his reduction of nature
to a wholly mechanical system of particles in motion, we
25
�find that Leibniz urges the rehabilitation of teleology and
is prepared to reinstate the Aristotelian biological paradigm for all substances complete with the entelechies and
substantial forms that were so deliberately expunged from
the physical world in Descartes' ·thought. This must appear to us as a considerable step backward. A number of
Leibniz's prominent excesses such as his panpsychism, his
denial of the reality of death, his theoretical assimilation
of all causes of change to a more-or-less mental "appetition", and his ubiquitous teleology are all of them regressions in comparison with the conceptual restraint achieved
by Descartes. Leibniz only manages to preserve any plausible and recognizably scientific perspective at all by segregating teleological and mechanical explanations and
holding that everything that happens in the physical world
can be explained mechanically, without invoking the
agency of any entelechy or deploying any teleological pattern of explanation.18 Teleological thinking is conveniently
allocated to a higher metaphysical level. Teleological understanding, in the form, for example, of least action principles, guides our discovery of mechanical laws without
introducing a teleological aspect into those laws themselves. Leibniz says, for example, that the thought that
light always takes the shortest path operates essentially in
the understanding that led to the discovery of Snell's law .I'
I do not want to give the impression that Leibniz's defense of teleology is entirely inappropriate. Leibniz did not
simply slump back into already discredited styles of
thought. On the contrary, his insistence that reason-giving
explanation must be reconciled with a mechanical universe and his idea that the two patterns of explanation operate at different levels embody important truths.
2 Nature Itself
Attempting to delete spurious psychologism and teleology, Descartes eliminates all activity from the material
world and paves the way for an Occasionalist philosophy in
which God is directly responsible for each thing th.at happens. The ultimate passivity of material substance is expressed in Descartes' thought that matter does not even
contain any principle sufficient for its own continued existence into the next instant of time. All temporal continuity of existence depends on God's continual recreation
of things. 20 How could a particle, unable to struggle though
a second of continued existence without help from God,
have any continued and independent effect on things
other than itself? Furthermore, the Cartesian exclusion of
every means for distinguishing one region of space (which
is matter) from another undercuts the very idea of occurrences in the material world. At each moment, every region
of space or matter exactly resembles every other region. It
follows that at every moment the structure of the whole of
space or matter is exactly what it is at every other moment.
The universe is at every moment a plenum of indefinitely
26
divisible particles. Then anything that happens will leave
things exactly as they were: a plenum of indefinitely divisible particles,'~ If, somehow, we could attach meaning to
motion in this universe, we would still be unable to make
sense of Descartes' idea that God has caused an initial motion of particles and ordained the subsequent conservation of that motion. For Descartes' conceptual parsimony
leaves us no way to grasp how it is that motion might continue without the continued action of God.
At first impression, we are apt to think that Descartes
can reasonably propose that God has created an essentially
inert, wholly passive, and motionless universe, which he
then sets in motion at the beginning of time. We will have
in mind analogies like the initial winding of a motionless
clock which creates a motion that endures in the clock
without our continual intervention. Leibniz sees that this
understanding of motion in nature cannot survive close
inspection, if we are thinking in terms of Descartes' physical concepts. Clocks can be wound so that they will run
continuously precisely because of the nongeometrical features of bodily existence on which Leibniz insists. The
compression of the mainspring of the clock represents a
force, an inner determinant of future motion. This intrinsic potential cannot be represented as a particular arrangement of particles. Within Descartes' framework of
ideas, the compression of the spting would bode nothing
for future motion. A mere arrangement of space-filling
particles will not induce any further changes. A further rearrangement will need an external cause. Ultimately, God
will have to move the hands of the clock himself. This is
the prospect for "the new philosophy which maintains
the inertness and deadness of things." 22
Leibniz mounts such criticisms in his 1698 essay, "On
Nature Itself."23 If we are to imagine that God has arranged things to conserve the initial motion that he has
caused in matter, we must suppose that he has imparted
to material a foundation for continued motion that is intrinsic to that reality.
For since this command [calling for conservation of motion
after the initial motion was imparted] . .. no longer exists at
present, it can accomplish nothing unless it has left some subsistent effect behind which has lasted and operated until now,
and whoever thinks otherwise renounces any distinct explanation of things, if I am any judge, for if that which is remote
in time and space can operate here and now without any intermediary, anything can be said to follow from anything else
with equal right.24
and
... if things have been so formed by the command that they
are made capable of fulfilling the will of him who commanded
them, then it must be granted that there is certain efficacy residing in things, a form or force such as we usually designate
by the name of nature, from which the series of phenomena
follows according to the prescription of the first command.25
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�In other words, no matter what role we assign to God, we
must impute active powers to nature if we are to formulate
intelligible explanations.
"On Nature Itself' is Leibniz's contribution to a German debate occasioned by Robert Boyle's contention that
appeals to "Nature" should be deleted from science. 26 For
Boyle, the repudiation of Nature meant the rejection of
scholasticism and scholastic forms. In this, Boyle is following Descartes. For the specious concept (<Nature", Boyle
wants to substitute "mechanism" as the foundation of all
explanations in the material world. The German Cartesian
point of view supported Boyle's claim and reasserted the
essential passivity of material substance. 27
Leibniz does not argue against Boyle's mechanism, nor
does he claim here that mechanical explanations ought to
be supplemented by teleological explanations, though this
is certainly his view. In this context, it is the Cartesian
concept of mechanical explanation that Leibniz finds defective as a consequence of the limitations of Descartes'
concept of material substance." Descartes tries to exclude
ad hoc psychologism and teleology." But the resulting
conceptual platform is so feeble that no explanations at all
can be mounted on it. Then God's ad hoc intervention is
required at every point. If that is so, then it turns out that
the only explanatory pattern that finds any application in
Descartes' material world will be the teleological pattern
of intended purposeful behavior. God causes each and every thing that happens for his good reasons. Then all explanations are psychologistic, the very thing Descartes
sought to eliminate completely. Although Leibniz is rightly
known as the defender of teleology, his insistence here
that activity be ascribed to nature itself is founded on the
claim that, failing an active nature, each and every mechanical event in the universe would have to be understood
as an intended action on the part of God.
Perhaps the most interesting idea of "On Nature Itself'
is Leibniz's thought that we should bring under a single
philosophical perspective both the mechanical events
studied and explained by physicists and the free actions of
men. Leibniz sees that the independence of the human will
and the independence of mechanical forces from God's
actions are parallel requirements if we are to understand
human responsibility and the motions of bodies respectively. The passivity of created substance finds expression
in the Cartesian doctrine "that things do not act but that
God acts in the presence of things and according to the fitness of things." Natural application of this to the mental
realm of thinking and willing would mean reassignment of
the cause of the sequence of our thoughts and desires and
resolutions from us to God. The Occasionalists such as
Malebranche who seem to espouse such a view have not
really established it and do not appreciate its destructive
implications. We must believe in our own spontaneity.
To doubt this would be to deny human freedom and to thrust
the cause of evil back into God, but also to contradict the tes-
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
timony of our internal experience and consciousness by which
we feel that what these opponents have transferred to God
without even the appearance of reason belongs to ourselves.30
Furthermore, the very idea of an independent substance is
wrapped up with action so that, were actions all assigned
to God,
God would be the_ nature and substance of all things-a doctrine of most evil repute, which a writer who was subtle indeed but irreligious, in recent years imposed upon the world,
or at least revived. 31
Equally appropriate to mechanical causality and free
action, these ideas show us what is best in Leibniz's
thought about teleology without the encumbering metaphysics and theology with which his insights are ordinarily
accompanied.
What is at stake in the dispute over active powers as far
as mechanical explanation is concerned? Consider a simple
example. The wind blows dead leaves from the branches
of trees in the autumn. Leibniz's intuition is that our science must offer a mechanical understanding that really
succeeds in attributing the detachment of the leaves to
the force of the wind. Of course, Leibniz thinks that God
has arranged the laws of nature and that these laws are as
contingent as the particular events that obey them. 32 But
to say that is not to say that God really removes each leaf,
that God twirls it in the air for a while, and that God then
deposits it on the ground. On the contrary, things are so
ordered that the wind removes the leaves and no action of
God's is present or required. To assume that God knows
just how each leaf will move is to assert the infinity of his
understanding but not the ubiquity of his will. To think
otherwise is to destroy the idea of "laws of nature" and to
replace them with mere generalizations the truth of which
is only a consequence of the consistency of God's actions.
Therefore, our mechanical conceptions must be rich
enough to capture causal action in relationships that obtain between natural events. Descartes has produced a
physics that is too weak for this job.
Turning to voluntary human behavior, Leibniz finds the
same pattern in a setting of very different philosophical issues. When we raise the question which preoccupied Leibniz throughout his career, that is, the question of God's
responsibility for the failings and evils of human conduct,
we are asking whether or not human beings are truly active
in the world. Of course, Leibniz thinks that men are created by God and that, in his creation, God fully appreciates the powers, limitations, and liabilities of his creatures.
Moreover, being omniscient, he knows exactly what circumstances they will face and how they will act. This
much is parallel to the fact that God makes the things of
the material world and the laws of nature and he knows in
advance just what will happen. But to say that men have
any powers at all implies that, when those powers are exercised, it is men who act and not God. When I vote it is
27
�not God who casts a ballot, any more than it is God that
tears the leaf from the wind-whipped branch. No doubt we
would not hold a man responsible for his actions if he
were a mechanism like a clock or if his "acts 11 were caused
by the wind. So there is more to responsibility and free
agency than independence of God. In "On Nature Itself",
however, Leibniz sees the common ground of mechanism
and volition. In understanding we have to make fundamental explanatory appeal to the human agent. In understanding mechanical events we must make fundamental
appeal to physical determinants of change. The creativity
of God no more constrains physical forces than it does human actions.
This line of thought also clarifies Leibniz's oftenexpressed view that there is a mechanical explanation for
everything that happens in the world while, at the same
time, teleological explanations have their own validity
within the same world of events.33 The physical world is
not a continuous sequence of miracles, as it would be if
active powers were excluded from nature. The physical
world is ordered by the intentions and creativity of God.
But to say that is to say that he has created a mechanically
functioning system wherein what happens is explained by
physical causes for motions and not by the will of God.
The wisdom of this conception is partially concealed
from us by the theological trappings of Leibniz' s customary discussions. It becomes correspondingly clearer when
we translate the conceptual relationships envisioned by
Leibniz back to the level of human purposeful action in a
mechical world. What is required for the simplest selfconsciously purposive action by a human agent? Suppose,
for example, a man drives a nail into a wall in order to
hang a picture. The format that Leibniz proposes urges us
not to confuse the aptness of the teleological explanation,
"He put the nail into the wall in order to hang the
picture," with a mechanical explanation of the motion of
the nail: "The force imparted by collisions with the hammerhead caused the relatively rigid nail to penetrate the
relatively fixed waiL" We should not think that the mechanical explanation competes with or rules out accounts
that cite purposes and reasons. Thus, Leibniz says that
there is a mechanical explanation for all motions. The mechanical explanation is not merely compatible with a
reason-giving explanation. Leibniz is asserting that a mechanical explanation is required if the reason-giving explanation is to be intelligible. We could not act as we do,
when we want pictures hung, were it not for the fact that
nails are mechanically caused to move by collisions with
hammerheads. Leibniz appeals to a notion of levels of explanation saying that there are mechanical explanations
for everything which are not teleological, and that there
are also teleological explanations applicable to the same
reality which are correct explanations.
Leibniz thus stands against all reductive programs that
would try to convert teleological explanations into mechanical explanations. Such a reduction is the common aspira-
28
tion of Hobbes's conception of the material embodiment
of deliberation and wilL of Descartes' theory of deflections of particles in the pineal gland, and of contemporary
mind-brain materialism applied to action and motivation.34
In Leibniz' s view mechanical causes are organized as they
are as a consequence of God's intentions. But it is physical
forces that explain what happens mechanically, and God's
intentions are not physical forces. The same pattern of relationships holds for human purpose-fulfilling actions. Human intentions have a secure explanatory role. But this
never removes the need for a mechanical explanation for
the motions of things. Human intentions are not mechanical causes any more than divine intentions are mechani~
cal causes.
In his theological presentations we can all understand
with Leibniz, although perhaps few of us will agree with
him, the thought that the laws -of nature are instituted by
God in the course of bringing into existence the kind of
world he wants. But in understanding just this much,
Leibniz shows that we must be envisioning two kinds of
explanation which are correlative and not in conflict with
one another. We are supposing that God sets up the world
and its laws with a purpose and to fulfill his plans and intentions. This is a reason-giving explanation belonging to
the general teleological pattern. But this idea would not
be intelligible at all, and explanations would collapse into
the assertion of sequences of miracles, if we did not also
suppose that the arrangements God makes give scope to
another very different kind of explanation, namely, the
mechanical explanations of the motions of things that appeal to physical powers and forces in nature rather than
God. In the absence of an explanatory role for natural
forces, appeals to God's ordinances reduce to the Occasionalist's attribution of each and every event to the direct
intervention of God's will. Following the same pattern,
while deleting the theological context, we can understand
a purpose-oriented explanation of human behavior, but
we would not be able to understand it, for it would mean
nothing if it were supposed to rule out or to compete with
mechanical explanation of what happens. If it were supposed to rule out a mechanical account, a reason-giving
explanation would have to assert that the will moves objects directly. But we neither understand nor have any use
for this efficacy of the will. We do understand that someone has arranged matters to realize his objective just insofar as we also understand that there are mechanical causal
relations which he has foreseen and wittingly exploited in
his action. If we thought that teleology eliminates mechanism, we would convert every purposeful act into a manmade miracle.
The idea of purposive action in a mechanical world has
seemed to many philosophers to require a gap in the mechanical order of things through which the will can find
expression in what happens. Leibniz' s insight here shows
us that the envisioned gap could serve no useful purpose.
A motion that is not mechanically explicable would not be
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�graspable as a purposeful act but, instead, this uncaused
motion would belong to the realm of the miraculous, as
though our every action involved a kind of levitation.
We tend to credit the question, "How can my reasons
have anything to do with what happens if there are mechanical causes for all motions?" This natural-sounding
complaint implies that my reasons could be relevant if
only some events were not determined by any mechanical
cause. Then those things at least might be determined by
"my reasons." But this line of thought is hopeless. If my
reasons could produce some motion in things, this will be
either an unintelligible miracle and, thus, no explanation,
or, "my reasons" will just be an expression for some fur·
ther mechanical cause, as both seventeenth century and
twentieth century reductions will have it. But if appeal to
reasons is actually only appeal to mechanical causes, then
purposes, objectives, that is, true reasons, drop out alto·
gether and explanation operates merely by appeal to sufficient prior determinants of motion.
Without the cloud of dust that philosophical reflection
about causality and freedom inevitably raises, I do not
think we would find an apparent inconsistency or any
other problem in the fact that the force of hammer blows
moves a nail, and that I, at the same time, claim to have a
reason for its being in the wall. Only a philosopher would
ever think that the correctness of the reason-giving ac·
count implies that I must have moved something "with
my will" so that either my will is also a physical cause, or
the mind can mysteriously intervene in the physical order
and violate conservation laws in the process. In Leibniz's
thinking the choice between these unpromising options is
not forced upon us. Teleology is not mechanism and it
does not presuppose a gap in the mechanical order. Quite
the reverse is the case. Leibniz shows that if the relevant
motions are not explicable mechanically, the teleological
explanations will not get any explaining done. This is the
most profound message of the understanding of activity
and explanation presented in "On Nature Itself."
Our thinking about action is often beset by another
speculative temptation. We are willing to allow that the
mechanical force of hammer blows surely accounts for the
motion of the nail head. But then we simply want to look
further back in the physical and physiological chain of
events for the point at which appeal to reasons and purposes finds its real footing. Of course, I did not simply will
the hammer to move any more than Jj.;imply willed the nail
into the wall. I picked up the haii}I'fler and that means, inter alia, that forces applied to the hammer by my hand explain its motion. Could it be that the will only produces its
own nonmechanical effects when applied to parts of my
own body? This would enable me to orchestrate the mechanical relationships of things in the world beyond my
body so as to achieve desired objectives. This attractive
thought comes to a dead end with the appreciation that
the motions of bodily parts are not in any relevant way different from the motions of external objects. Conservation
TI!E ST. JOHNS REVIEW
laws alone mean that there must be mechanical explanations for motions of protoplasm as well as for motions of
rocks. There are known physiological-mechanical (speaking loosely) explanations for the motions of my hand, of
my muscles, and, no doubt, there are as yet undiscovered
explanations for all the subtle electro-chemical goings-on
within the muscles, the nerves, and the brain. Should we
not suppose that my control of my body, to the extent that
I have such control, presupposes and exploits just these
mechanical relationships? To think otherwise will be
merely to project the miracle of willed motions into some
physiological recess where our scientific understanding is
presently incomplete and does not as yet, therefore, make
such willing as unintelligible as the idea of willing a hammer to move. Willing things to change and move is really a
concept with no more application within the body than
without. And voluntarily moving things that we can move
does not imply that no mechanical account of their motion
is correct.35 Leibniz's view that purpose explanations do
not replace or conflict with mechanical explanations appears to be the only defensible understanding.
This conclusion does not mean that Leibniz provides
any philosophical analysis that removes the feeling of incompatibility that surrounds the issue of freedom and causality. The understanding of teleological explanation and
its relation to efficient causality or mechanism remains to
be achieved.36 Leibniz's view of the distinctness and the
interdependence of these explanatory patterns is both
subtler and more promising than many approaches that
are still defended. This Leibnizean view, as I have1ried to
show, is independent of theological commitments and of
Leibniz' s too-bold opinion that there is a teleological explanation for everything that happens.
3 Analyticity
All the events and actions that are explained either mechanically or teleologically are contingent according to
Leibniz. True propositions asserting such occurrences are
contingent truths. By a contingent truth Leibniz means a
truth of which the denial expresses something possible and
is not inconceivable or contradictory. I want to emphasize
Leibniz's assertion of the contingency of all of these
subject matters because there is an intefpretation of his
thought, and it is the dominant interpretation now, according to which he does not really think that any of these
matters are contingent. On this, the dominant understanding of Leibniz, he takes all truths to be analytic
truths, and, as everyone agrees, no analytic truth can be
contingent. It is an obvious and essential feature of analytic
truths that their denials are contradictory. So in saying
that Leibniz thinks that all truths are analytic, supporters
of this interpretation assert that he cannot really distinguish between the class of truths whose denials are contradictions and any other class of truths whatsoever. So
29
�his real opinion is supposed to be th~t there are no contingent truths at all and that everything true is necessarily
true.
In considering this contention we have, first, to note
that there is a sense in which all these contingent truths
are also necessary. They are "hypothetically necessary" in
Leibniz's customary terminology. 37 By this he means that
there is a coercive reason why this event or action occurs
rather than some alternative to it. Thus, given the laws of
nature and the relevant circumstances preceding a mechanically caused event, that event must follow. This is
entailed by the presumed universality of natural laws.
Leibniz recognizes that the conditional statement that expresses hypothetical necessity is itself logically necessary
or, as he expresses it, metaphysically necessary and absolutely necessary. It is a feature of any absolutely or logically
necessary truth that its denial is a contradictory statement.
Therefore, in saying that an event is hypothetically necessary, Leibniz is associating that event with a conditional
statement that is absolutely necessary.
This is not an extreme view of Leibniz's, nor one that
we should think of as expressing a characteristically rationalist perspective. An ideally simple schema can bring out
the points in a way that makes them noncontroversial, or
nearly so. Suppose that the only law relevant to the occurrence of the event E is the simply conditional: "If circumstance C obtains then event E follows." E is shown to be
hypothetically necessary by adverting to this law together
with the fact that the circumstance C did obtain in the actual context of the occurrence of E. This can be summed
up in the logically necessary conditional:
If it is the case that the law: if circumstance C then event E,
holds; and if circumstance C does obtain, then event E follows.
All those philosophers of science who envision a deductive
relationship between scientific laws, initial conditions and
statements asserting the occurrence of explained events
are committed to this Leibnizean viewpoint. Most empiricists adopt this view. That the relationship of the explanans
to the explanandum is deductive is just another way of
saying that propositions with the above form, and those
with much more complicated laws and instantiating conditions, are logically true. Leibniz once asserted, "As for
eternal truths, we must observe that at bottom they are all
conditional, and say, in fact, such a thing posited, such another thing is."38
The necessity of conditional statements connecting laws
and conditions with explained events is all that Leibniz
means by "hypothetical necessity" in the sphere of mechanical explanation. Such hypothetical necessity leaves
open the possibility that some other event might have occurred, rather than the actual event, had the laws and initial conditions been different. For factual circumstances,
and the laws of nature, are themselves contingent according to Leibniz. 39 Thus~ the denial of the occurrence of a
hypothetically necessary event is not contradictory.
30
Parallel points are to be made in understanding Leibniz's
conception of the contingency of free actions. Leibniz
consistently rejects what he calls "the freedom of indifference." By this he means to exclude choices which are entirely arbitrary and motivated by nothing but the disposition
to choose. Freedom, for Leibniz, never eliminates the
need for a reason for what is done which distinguishes it
in some intelligible way from all alternative actions and
makes clear why it was chosen over alternatives. To suppose that a man could actually make a random or arbitrary
choice between alternatives would be to allow an element
of unintelligibility into our idea of reality. A single inexplicable node in the causal network of things would infect
the whole scheme of an explicable world.
The vulnerability of this conception is revealed in exchanges with Samuel Clarke, who points out, among other
things, that Leibniz must rule against the very possibility
that God, or a man, could ever be faced with equally desirable means to some desired end.40 In the manner of the
problem of Buridan's ass, the value-equivalence of the
means would prevent selecting either of them, on Leibniz' s principles, no matter how urgently desired the end.
In spite of such penetrating criticisms, we should bear
in mind that the idea that everything that happens is explicable is not merely a rationalist dogma. It seems to be a
presumption of all investigations of things and one that is
extremely difficult to set aside.
For better or worse, Leibniz's view is that an agent must
always have a definite reason for choosing the action he
does perform from the alternative courses available to him.
The reason is coercive in the sense that, once an agent determines what course he prefers, which Leibniz expresses
as "what course appears best to him," he will inevitably
adopt that course. He likes to compare deliberation with
weighing things in a balance. The very idea that a man
could act in the absence of a determining reason is, for
Leibniz, like the idea that a balance might incline to one
side although there is no greater weight in that side than
in the other.41
The principle: men always choose the course that appears best to them, is the analog of a scientific law, and the
particular assessment preceding an action will be the ana·
log of prior circumstances. Again, conditionals of the following type can be formed:
If a man is choosing for the best, and if A appears better than
any other option that he recognizes, then he will do A.
This pattern fits the actions of God as well as of finite
agents with the difference that God's infinite power enforces his choice and to God's infinite wisdom what appears best is best.42 In both the divine and the human case,
the absolute necessity of conditional statements of this
form never means that other actions could not possibly
have been performed. On the contrary, it is an ineliminable
part of the idea of action that all of the alternative actions
AUTIJMN/WINTER 1982-83
�could be performed by the agent. This is the minimum
meaning of calling them alternative courses of action. The
question of choice only arises on the. irreducible assump·
tion that an agent could do more than one thing. Only
then does the question of preference, the best, the appar·
ent best, and assessment become relevant. Therefore, ac·
tions themselves, although hypothetically necessary, are
never absolutely necessary. Other preferences and princi·
pies of action might have issued in other actions. The denial
that a particular action was done is never a contradiction.
The contingency of mechanically explicable motions
and the contingency of motivated actions is essentialto
Leibniz's thinking about these matters. If it were abso·
lutely impossible for a particular motion not to occur, if its
nonoccurrence were inconceivable and contradictory, and
the assertion of its occurrence, thus, metaphysically nee·
essary, then talk about mechanical causes would be as in·
appropriate in physics as it is in geometry. If a man's
behavior were absolutely necessary, the desirability of an
action would be as irrelevant as the desirability ofa theo·
rem in pure mathematics. Then, as Leibniz says, it would
be as easy to be a prophet as to be a geometer.43 Like geo·
metrical proofs, scientific explanations and explanations
of actions can be expressed in deductive arguments. The
crucial difference is that the premises of mathematical de·
ductions are themselves necessary truths while the prem·
ises from which actions and events can be deduced are
contingent.
Apart from God, the existence of all material things and
all human agents is contingent. Thus all statements that
describe finite existences and say what happens to them
and what they do are contingent truths, if they are true
statements.44 Plainly all statements about mechanically
caused events involving bodies and all statements about
the free actions of human agents will fall into the class of
contingent statements.
The popular idea that Leibniz makes all truths analytic45
is certainly wrong. It flies in the face of his frequent and
careful statements on these issues. It makes nonsense of
his most important views and of his philosophy as a whole.
It imputes logical inconsistencies to a great logician that
are so obvious that no beginning student could miss them.
There is just no question of testing this proposed under·
standing of Leibniz against his writings in order to see
whether it may be an adequate or an unavoidable expres·
sion of his real opinion. The only interesting question is
how it can have happened that this reading has managed
to gain, not merely currency, but ascendancy in the views
of so many who study Leibniz's philosophy.
First, we need a rough review of the concept of analytic
truth that is used in this bad interpretation of Leibniz.
The roughness of our treatment here intentionally avoids
twentieth century controversies over analyticity46 and
avoids all of the niceties concerning logical form that
would require attention in a scrupulous discussion of ana·
lyticity per se. In particular, we shall largely ignore the fact
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
that all propositions are not of subject-predicate form, as
Leibniz himself largely ignores it. None of these matters
have any relevance to the claim that Leibniz thought that
truths are all of them analytic. An exposition of analyticity
that fits in with Leibniz' s expressed views about truth and
that makes sense in the context of examples of truths like
Leibniz's examples will suffice' for our purposes.
Propositions are analytic whose truth depends upon and
only upon the meaning of the terms they contain. Gener·
ally the meanings of terms are complex. In order to make
meanings fully explicit reformulation of sentences is gen·
erally required. Such reformulations substitute something
like definitions for terms that have complex meanings. In
the case of analytic propositions, this analysis via articulation of meanings ultimately makes the truth evident, dis·
playing it, for example, as resting on an identity the denial
of which would be patently contradictory.
In an illustration that has become standard in modern
discussions, the articulated meaning or definition: "things
that are both men and unmarried" replaces the complex
term "bachelors" in analyzing the proposition,
(I) All bachelors are unmarried,
yielding,
(2) All things that are both men and unmarried are un·
married,
which rests on the identity,
(3) What is unmarried is unmarried,
in the sense that to say that (2) is false is to assert that
something is both unmarried and not unmarried, which
denies (3) and is, therefore, contradictory."
Leibniz never uses the word ''analytic 11 in this sense. As
everyone knows, the word ''analytic" was first given the
sense just sketched by Kant. At the same time, Leibniz
certainly does say that there are truths which reduce to or
rest on identities. He also often points out that this foun·
dation of such truths is not always evident and that it re·
quires analysis of the terms of a proposition to display the
underlying identity.48 Perhaps his thinking in such pas·
sages is so close to our concept of analyticity that we can
properly say that he is talking about the analyticity of
propositions in our sense, although he does not use the
word as we do. But just this much, far from showing that
Leibniz takes all truths to be analytic, seems to establish
the opposite. For Leibniz always very clearly distinguishes
between truths that rely on the law of contradiction from
other truths which need a further foundation and whose
denials are possible and not at all contradictory. The con·
sistency of Leibniz's distinction on this point is one of the
reasons for which it is odd that many readers are satisfied
to say that he makes all truths analytic.49 The following is
a particularly clear statement of Leibniz' s. It is one of a
number of statements with similar force:
31
�Omnes Existentiae excepta solius Dei Existentia sunt con tingentes. Causa au tern cur res aliqua corltingens [prae alia] existat,
non petitur ex [sola] eius definitiOne ..... Cum enim infinita
sint possibilia, quae tamen non existunt, ideo cur haec potius
quam ilia existant, ratio peti debet non ex definitione alioqui
non existere implicaret contradictionem, et alia non essent
possibilia ....
All existences excepting only the existence of God are contingent. The reason why something contingent exists [rather
than another thing] is not to be sought in its definition
[alone] . ... Since there are infinite possibilities which, nonetheless, do not exist, the reason why this rather than that does
exist ought not to be sought from definitions, otherwise not
existing would impl~ a contradiction, and other things would
not be possible. . . . 0
It is worth noting that, in Kant's initiating discussions
and in all philosophical usage since Kant, "analytic" is essentially a contrastive concept and the point of calling a
proposition analytic is not fully intelligible without the
correlative concept of "synthetic" propositions. Neither
Kant nor any post-Kantian philosopher who uses the concepts, analytic and synthetic, has said that all truths are
analytic. The contrast is always the basis for a dichotomous
classification of truths. There are philosophical controversies concerning the viability of the analytic-synthetic distinction altogether, though philosophers do, for the most
part, accept the distinction." There are none who accept
the distinction and then find that all true propositions fall
into just one of the two available classes.
It is this extravagant opinion, that no philosopher would
dream of holding himself, that is so commonly assigned to
Leibniz. This reading of Leibniz requires, then, that we
retrospectively apply to his thought an essentially contrastive concept that was introduced long after his death by
Kant and, at the same time, it requires us to suppose that
Leibniz uses this contrastive concept noncontrastively
and that he puts all truths on one side, though no other
philosopher would do that. Once this interpretation is introduced, it turns out to be incompatible with almost
everything that Leibniz said. This circumstance, instead
of leading to the prompt rejection of the interpretation, or
even to suspicions about it, has spawned various ingenious
efforts to deal with the Leibniz' s inconsistencies, namely
those that the interpretation itself creates. The most outrageous plan for resolving these created difficulties is
surely Russell's. Russell supposes that though Leibniz says
that there are contingent truths he does not believe that
there are any, since Leibniz really thinks that all truths are
analytic and therefore, necessary. Russell finds that Leibniz
was a fellow of poor character, lacking "moral elevation" 52
so he basely concealed his true views after discovering
that they did not please Antoine Arnauld in 1686.53 If Russell were right, we should have to think that Leibniz went
on, after 1686, to write huge books and endless letters and
articles, and thousands of fragments that no one saw but
himself, in all of which he insincerely asserted that there
32
are contingent truths only because he thought that this
opinion would more appealing to his royal patrons and religious authorities than his real belief that everything is
necessary.
Other critics have not followed Russell in these accusations, but neither have they rejected the idea that, for
Leibniz, all truths are analytic. Why not? One obvious reason hinges on the word "contains." Leibniz states in many
places that if any proposition is true then the predicate is
contained in the subject of that proposition, or the subject
contains the predicate. Furthermore, it is quite possible
that Kant had in mind just this Leibnizean use of "contains" when he introduced the distinction between analytic and synthetic truths by saying that the predicate is
contained in the subject of analytic truths, while it is not
contained in the subject of synthetic truths which add
something, as Kant puts it, that is not already thought in
the subject concept. So we have two suggestive facts:
First, Leibniz said that in all truths the predicate is contained in the subject, and, second, Kant said that, if the
predicate is contained in the subject, you have an analytic
truth. Combining these we can get: Leibniz finds that all
truths are analytic.
But this requires the additional premise that Leibniz
and Kant mean the same thing when they speak of the
predicate being contained in the subject of a proposition.
How can that possibly be when Leibniz makes it clear,
again and again, that his "containment of the predicate in
the subject" is compatible with the contingent status of a
proposition? In the essay "On Necessary and Contingent
Truths," Leibniz says
Verum est affirmatum, cuius praedicatum inest subjecto,
itaque in omni Propositione vera affirmativa, necessaria vel
contingente, universa1i vel singulari, notio praedicati aliquo
modo continetur in notione subjecti; . ...
Assertions are true of which the predicate is in the subject, so
that in all true affirmative propositions, whether necessary
or contingent, universal or singular, the notion of the predicate is contained in some way in the notion of the subject; . ... 54
Again, this citation is selected from a number of discussions which have the same force. I have added the emphasis, "aliquo modo continetur," that is, ''contained in some
way." What are the different ways in which the predicate
might be contained? Leibniz clearly envisions two possibilities. In the case of necessary truths, containment of
the predicate in the subject is a matter of meaning, that is,
containment is shown "ex definitione" of "per analysin
terminorum." Only in these cases is the reason for the
containment a "necessitating reason." 55 In the case of
contingent propositions Leibniz says that there is no necessitating reason but only an "inclining reason" for the
presence of the predicate in the notion of the subject.56
Again, Leibniz distinguishes between predicates that are
part of the essence of the subject and predicates that
AUTIJMN/WINTER 1982-83
�are in the subject but not part of the essence of the subject. Only propositions that ascribe essential predicates
are necessary.
It seems to me beyond dispute that, were Leibniz informed of Kant's conception of analytic and synthetic
propositions, he would not say that he finds all truths analytic. His stated distinctions prepare for a much more
plausible response. Analytic truths are those for which
there is a necessitating reason for the inclusion of the
predicate in the subject. These are propositions true by
definition. They ascribe essential predicates. The denials
of these are contradictory. There are other propositions
which are synthetic. They are contingent propositions
where the reason for the subject's containment of the
predicate is not a necessitating reason. They are not
shown true by appeal to the meanings of terms. They do
not involve essential predicates of their subjects. And
their denials are not contradictory.
That Kant's analytic statements are all necessary is a
logical point at the most elementary level. Leibniz, who
was, after all, a great logician, could not fail to notice that
where the subject contains the predicate in Kant's sense,
a proposition will be necessary and its denial a contradiction. But in all the passages wherein he asserts his containment thesis, Leibniz also asserts that there are contingent
as well as necessary propositions, and these differ "toto
genere."57 In one passage Leibniz actually seems to antici·
pate and reject the idea that his conception of contingent
truths might, somehow, make them necessary along with
ordinary necessities:
Si omnes propositiones etiam contingentes resolvuntur in
propositiones identicas, an non omnes necessariae sunt?
Respondeo, non sane.
If all propositions, even contingencies, are to be resolved into
identical propositions, can we not conclude that they are all
necessary? I answer, Not soundly.
Leibniz then explains that propositions of fact are all about
existing things. What exists, a consequence of God's creation, is always an alternative to other possible existences.
So there is a reason for what exists, but that something exists is not necessary. And he concludes:
... dicendumque est in contingentibus non quidem demonstrari praedicatum ex notione subjecti; sed tantum eius rationem reddi, quae non necessitet sed inclinet.
It must be said that in contingencies the predicate is by no
means to be demonstrated from the notion of the subject; but
rather a reason for it is given which does not necessitate but
inclines. 58
Furthermore, in many presentations of the contain~
ment thesis about all truths it is plain that Leibniz does
not think he is asserting something controversial or even
original in the least way. He intends this claim, rather, as
an expression of a conception of truth shared by most
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
philosophers." He thinks it is Aristotle's conception of
truth, as well as that of ail the leading scholastics he can
think of. But Leibniz does not propose that Aristotle and
most scholastics held that ail truths are necessary and that
they can all be established from the analysis of meanings.
Leibniz would recognize that as an extreme and unfamiliar
view, while his containment thesis is presumably familiar
and innocuous. In one passage, Leibniz says, "[In a true
proposition, the predicate is contained in the subject] or I
do not know what truth is."60 This is just hyperbolic rhet·
oric for expressing the noncontroversial status of the containment thesis as Leibniz understands it.
It is not hard to state just what the containment thesis
does mean as Leibniz intends it. It asserts only what might
be expressed as follows: If'S is P' is true, then, of course, P
must actually qualify the subject S. That is, P must be a
feature of that subject, for that is just what the sentence
states. In other words, a list of all of the features of the
subject S would contain the predicate P, for if P were not
on that list, it could hardly be true to say'S is P.'
Leibniz's thinking is also influenced by a conception
which is now known as the "timelessness of truth." If an
individual has some feature at some time, then the statement, 'S is P' which expresses that fact, is timelessly true.
The statement does not become true when the individual
comes to have the feature. This is not a mysterious doc·
trine if we think of the temporal qualification as tacitly included in the predicate. Then we get propositions such as
"Reagan is elected in 1980" which is always true, and not
just in 1980. But consider "Reagan is re-elected in 1984."
If this is true, it is now and at all times true, although we
do not now know that it is true. If it is true, then Leibniz
will say that Reagan (now and always) has the feature of
being elected in 1984 although we are not smart enough
to know that in advance. Further, reelection in '84, like
election in '80, is not an essential feature of Reagan, if it is
a feature. That means that, if he is going to be reelected,
that is not a necessary truth, though it is, now, a truth.
Understood in this way, the containment thesis is as uncontroversial as Leibniz expects it to be. The containment
thesis actually provides no support whatever for the idea
that Leibniz takes all truths to be analytic truths.
In addition to his views about containment of predicates in subjects, there are four Leibnizean doctrines that
seem to press readers to the interpretation we are considering. These are (I) that for every truth an a priori proof is
available in principle; (2) That God is able, because his
mental powers are infinite, to reduce contingent propositions to identities and thus appreciate their truth, while,
for mentally weaker men, a posteriori experience is the only
source of knowledge of contingencies; (3) There is a complete concept for every individual so that one who knows
the concept would know everything that was, is, or will be
true of that individual; and (4) An individual is a species infima, that is, a minimal species.
(1) In many passages and in various contexts Leibniz
33
�says that there is an a priori proof for all true propositions,
although we are often unable to produce that a priori
proof. Now, most philosophers of the twentieth century
think that the feasibility of a priori proof is equivalent to,
or is certainly a reliable mark of, necessary status. To prove
some proposition a priori means, for us, to prove it without any appeal to the facts of the world, which are only
discoverable a posteriori, or by experience. Again, we are
now inclined to think that if a proof does not need any appeal to the facts it must rely wholly on analysis of concepts
and meanings. That means, for us, that a proposition provable a priori will be an analytic truth and, therefore,
necessary.
In considering Leibniz's ideas, however, this line of
thought must be wholly set aside. It is simply an error to
project into Leibniz's thought any restriction of a priori
status to propositions that are necessary or defensible by
appeal to meanings alone. God's policy of action: selection of the best, and man's policy: selection of the apparent best, are premises that Leibniz plainly admits in a priori
proofs, but he regards these as contingent premises and
their contingency will be inherited by whatever is proved
with their help. In fact, the contingency of all created existence alone guarantees the contingency of all matters of
fact even though a sufficient intelligence would be able to
predict them, using God's selection of the best as a premise. Leibniz says,
Principium primum circa existentia est propositio haec: Deus
vult eligere perfectissimum. Haec propositio demonstrari non
potest; est omnium propositionum facti prima, seu origo omnis existentiae contingentiae.
The first principle concerning existence is this proposition:
God wants to choose the best. This proposition cannot be
demonstrated; it is first of all propositions of fact; or the
source of all contingent existence.61
The confinement of a priori to analytic truth is plainly
wrong even for thinking about Kant, as his fundamental
concept, synthetic a priori truth, testifies.
(2) Obviously we do not and cannot produce apy of the
a priori proofs for contingent facts that Leibniz says are
possibile in principle. The reason he gives for our failure is
that the world is infinitely complicated and each thing in
it is related to everything else. An a priori proof of anything will have, as a consequence, to be an a priori proof of
everything. It will have to take an infinity of factors into
consideration. Our minds are clearly not up to such proofs.
But an infinite mind, the mind of God, and only such a
mind, could actually frame and grasp such proofs. This
strand of speculation occurs frequently in Leibniz's writings and it has contributed to the idea that Leibniz thinks
that all truths are analytic although we finite minds cannot appreciate the analyticity of what we discover through
experience. Therefore we call these "contingent truths".
Only God can understand these truths as analytic truths,
but such they surely are.62
34
Leibniz frequently alludes to infinite analysis in mathematics. He likes to say that he appreciated the true character of contingencies when he placed them in the context
of infinite mathematic~] analysis. Infinite analysis is the
"radix contingentiae": the root of contingency. Again, he
says that it takes a little flair for mathematics to grasp the
nature of contingent truths which are only resolvable, in
some sense, at infinity, as curves meet their asymptotes at
infinity, and an infinite-sided polygon becomes a circle.
Contingent truths are often said to be like incommensurable ratios whose exact value is the sum of an infinite series of factors. And Leibniz actually seems insecure in this
analogy because we finite minds are capable of summing
such infinite series.63
Many of those who say that Leibniz makes all truth analytic are most encouraged by this appeal to infinite analysis. My guess is that such readers think that Leibniz means
that we treat propositions as contingent because we cannot understand their necessity. These readers rightly note
something that Leibniz surely does mean, namely, that
what is only a posteriori to a finite mind may be a priori to
an infinite one. They go on to the plausible but faulty extension: What is contingent to a finite mind may be necessary to an infinite one, and what is synthetic for us may be
analytic for God. These extensions would only be legitimate if we could say that the infinite understanding that
God is capable of is an understanding of meanings and
definitions. Why should we think that? Of course, Leibniz
does mean that an infinite analysis would be required to
find all the predicates contained in a given substancesubject. But we have seen that the reasons for containment
do not all give rise to necessary truths or analytic propositions. There is nothing in the idea of an infinity of predicates that tends to make them all essential predicates.
Leibniz sometimes says explicitly that infinite analysis
of which only God is capable is needed to reduce contingent truths to identities. Can't we say that all identities
are necessary? Identities come into the picture only via
the notion of containment. If P is contained in S then the
identity underlying'S is P' is expressible as'S (which hasP
in it) is P', the identical part of which is 'What is Pis P.'
Let us agree that this is a necessary truth if anything is.
What follows? If P is a contingent feature of S, then the
identity is also statable as 'What is contingently P is contingently P.' But to point out that this identity, like all
identities, is necessary does not in any way undercut the
contingency of 'S is P'.
At times, Leibniz did worry lest his view that all truths
rest on identities make them all necessary. In a passage already quoted he asks, "If true propositions all reduce to
identities are they not all necessary?" He then tries to dispel the appearance of necessity in a manner much like
that I have just proposed. To say that there is an underlying identity only means that the predicate is contained in
the subject. But the truth in question is necessary only if
the containment is essential"ex notione subjecti" and not
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�if there is a merely inclining reason for the containment, a
reason "quae non necessitet."64 The Same understandable
worry sometimes leads Leibniz to d~ny that contingent
propositions really reduce to identities at all:
... ita in contingentibus datur connexio [relatioque] termi~
norum sive veritas, etsi ea ad principium contradictionis sive
necessitatis per analysin in identicas reduci nequeat.
-. .. accordingly, in the case of contingencies, a connection
[and relation] of terms is given, though it cannot be reduced
to the principle of contradiction or necessity through analysis
into identitiesP
But in this very passage Leibniz reasserts his idea that
God's infinite analysis gives him a view of contingencies
that we cannot share. It is, then, only a priori knowledge
and not necessity or analyticity that infinite analysis yields.
It is likely that the same reflections underly Leibniz's
misgivings about necessity in this passage:
... non intelligentem quomodo praedicatum subjecto inesse
posset, nee tamen fieret necessaria.
... I did not understand in what way the predicate can be
contained in the subject1 and yet not make the proposition
necessary.66
Leibniz did not forget his distinction between necessitat·
ing and inclining reasons here. It is just because the containment thesis will always generate an identity that it so
strongly suggests the necessity of the analyzed proposi·
tion to Leibniz and his readers. But, as we have seen,
Leibniz would rather abandon the claim that an identity
underlies every contingent truth than regard such truths
as necessary.
The best support for the idea that Leibniz makes even
contingent truths analytic may come from passages like
this one:
Verum est vel necessarium vel contingens. Verum necessarium sciri potest per finitam seriem substitutionum seu per
coincidentia commensurabilia1 verum contingens per infinitam1 seu per coincidentia incommensurabilia. Verum necessaria est cujus veritas est explicabilis; contingens cujus veritas
est inexplicabilis. Probatio a priori seu [demonstratio] Apodixis
est explicatio veritas.
Truth is either necessary or contingent. Necessary truth can
be known through a finite series of substitutions or through a
commensurable coincidence [resolution to identity] 1 contingent truth by infinite analysis 1 or through incommensurable
coincidence. Necessary truth is that of which the truth is explicable; contingent1 that of which the truth is inexplicable. A
priori or apodictic demonstration is explication of truth.67
Leibniz never makes it entirely clear in just what way appeal to infinity is supposed to help us to understand contingency. In spite of the large number of passages in which
he makes use of the analogy of incommensurability, he
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
never makes it clear just how this analogy is to be under·
stood either. Furthermore, his appeal to "substitutions"
in passages like the one just cited sounds menacingly necessitarian. Be this as it may, we can be sure that Leibniz
did not think that these analogies go to show that contin·
gent propositions are really analytic. He surely does mean
that we cannot complete son;te kind of analysis which God
can complete, and this because the analysis in question is
infinite. But to make a proposition analytic, Leibniz would
have to say not only that its full analysis requires an infi·
nite mind, but also that that analysis is wholly conceptual
and that the substitutions employed in the analysis are all
of them definitional substitutions. Mere assertion that
analyses are infinite does not imply that they are confined
to conceptual matters. On the contrary, what God discovers through his infinite analysis is what we have to learn
through experience. This prominently includes knowledge
of causes of events and of free decisions, that is, of contingencies. In countless passages, including those we discussed in the first two parts of this essay, Leibniz makes it
clear that God's foreknowledge is foreknowledge of contingent facts, of mechanically caused events, and of freely
chosen actions. The a prioricity of God's foreknowledge is
always distinguished from the necessity of what he knows.
God cannot reduce actions and causes to definitions because they are not matters of definition.
Leibniz usually, perhaps invariably, combines his idea
that God can make infinite analyses with the thought that
God can know contingent truths a priori. The above passage ends saying that contingent truths are inexplicable
by men and that by explicability is meant demonstrability
a priori. This is the mystery about contingent truths that
infinite analysis is to make intelligible. God's powers enable him to prove contingent propositions a priori, but
that does not convert contingent truths into necessary or
analytic propositions.
Here is what Leibniz really has in mind in his discussion
of infinite analysis that makes possible a priori knowledge
of facts. We men have enough understanding of the world
to predict a few things like eclipses and next month's tides.
The more knowledgeable and brilliant we are the more we.
can predict. Some of our predictions depend on our knowledge of our own future actions. We can predict that we
will not run out of gas on a long trip because we know that
we will stop and refuel when we run low. In these ways,
God is like us but infinitely wiser and more powerful. He
has been able to predict everything from the beginning.
"Everything" includes an infinite complexity of mechanically caused events and freely undertaken actions and
these are all contingent.68 God knows all the contingent
effects of mechanical causes and all the free decisions that
agents will ever take. Everything is connected with every·
thing else, so that the infinite truth of the world appears,
from a particular point of view, in the complete truth
about any individual. But this enormous truth contains a
great deal that is irreducibly contingent.
35
�God's knowledge is wholly a priori ,since he knows everything before he creates the world of which he has knowledge. He knows that this is the way things will turn out, if
he creates just such individuals subject to just such natural
laws, and also creates such free men acting on such principles. That all this is knowledge of the actual world is a consequence of God's decision to create this "series of things."
Here again we have a contingency. He creates as he does
in light of a mental comparison with other possibilities
each of which is also infinitely complex. ·God might have
created another world, or none. That would not be contradictory. But his creative action is contingent and a great
many of the things that happen in the world he created
happen contingently. Perhaps we can say that for Leibniz
anything that could be said to "happen" is contingent.
For he describes necessary and essential truths about the
world as conditional."
(3) Leibniz regularly says that every individual has a
"complete concept" and that all the truths, past, present
and future, about an individual could be read off from the
complete concept. This gives rise to the thought that
truths about individuals are conceptual truths, for does he
not say expressly that they can be got out of concepts? Beyond this, Leibniz is a metaphysical individualist. The
universe consists wholly of a multiplicity of entities that
Leibniz calls substances. These are basic individuals whose
existence manifests a true unity and independence. All
truths about the created universe are truths about these
substances. Again, this is an expression of Leibniz's nomi·
nalism. At his most theoretical, Leibniz says that all substances are what he calls monads. His theory of monads is
notoriously difficult to relate to discourse at the less abstract levels of physical science, psychology, and ethics. I
think it is certain that Leibniz himself never connected
his Monadology with other universes of discourse in any
definite way.70 Nonetheless, Leibniz also allows discourse
in which far less theoretical individuals such as persons
and physical bodies are the subjects about which truths
may be asserted. At both the most theoretical and the
more practical levels of discourse .he defends the idea that
every individual has a complete concept and he freely uses
persons and blocks of marble as illustrations of individual
things with complete concepts.71 When Leibniz wrote to
Arnauld saying that the entire history of the individual is
contained in its complete concept, down to the minutest
detail and once and for all, Arnauld found in this doctrine
"a necessity more than fatal." 72 Thus, Arnauld may be the
first of those who found in this opinion of Leibniz a philosophy that excludes all contingency. Readers who now
say that Leibniz makes all truths analytic in connection
with the complete-concept thesis are reasserting Arnauld's
initial reaction.
The analyticity interpretation gets support here because
we so naturally suppose that to speak about what is in a
concept is to speak about meanings. If all truths about in-
36
dividual substances can be generated by knowledge of concepts, then they all come from meanings and are, therefore,
analytic. This understanding is inadequate for reasons
much like those we have already stated in the context of a
priori proof and infinite analysis. Leibniz is using the term
"concept" of a substance so that all features of a substance, and not merely essential, definitional, or necessary
features, will appear in the concept. He uses the word
"concept" to contrast with talk about the substance itself
as an existant thing. The concept is the representation of
the thing. The features of the concept follow the features
of the thing and include contingent elements, if the thing
has contingent features.
Of course, the concept of the individual is accessible to
God before creation, so God is not merely forming a representation of an existant. This a priori accessibility of the
concept is, again, an important part of the doctrine that
encourages the analyticity thesis about Leibniz. Since the
concept pre-exists the thing of which it is the concept,
truths derived just from the concept must be conceptual
truths. But, again, this is wrong. We finite minds can have
concepts of things before they exist, and whether or not
they later exist. We may have a complete concept (relatively speaking, of course) of a certain engine, and then we
may build the engine that just fits that concept, or we may
build another, or none, if other ideas suit us better. This is
the way we should think of Leibniz' s God, allowing the
appropriate superiority of his power and wisdom. When
we think in advance that the bearings we have designed
for our engine will not last for more than one year of constant use, we envision a contingent feature of our engine.
If we build the engine and are entirely right about the
bearings, the fact that they wear out in less than a year
does not become a kind of necessary truth. It is a contingent truth that we were able to foresee, so that it was part
of our concept of this engine before the engine existed.
To call it "a truth about an engine" presupposes that the
engine is built. If we do not go on to build the engine,
then all we have is a conditional truth. "If we build such
an engine, and if the laws of nature are as we assert them
to be, then the bearings of that engine will wear out in less
than a year." This is a necessary truth, but, as Leibniz
himself says, its content is only of the form, "Such a thing
posited, such another thing is."73
We conclude, that for God and for man, the existence
of concepts of things prior to the existence of the things
of which they are concepts does not in any way imply that
truths about the things, legible from the concepts, are
necessary or analytic. In the absence of the existence of
the thing, such truths are not truths about individuals at
all. With the existence, even the subsequent existence,
nothing prevents them from being contingent truths.
(4) Leibniz sometimes says that an individual is a species
infima.74 That is, each substance is a least species, a species having only one member, namely, that individual substance itself. Now truths about the relation of species and
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�subspecies are ordinarily truths based wholly on meanings
within some scheme of classification. Let us assume in
any case, that such is the status of assertions like, "Cats
are mammals." Let us assume that this and other truths
like it are necessary and analytic truths. In the example,
we can see that being a member of the smaller class, cats,
has as an essential requirement being in the larger class,
mammals. If sentences about individuals could be assimi·
lated to this pattern they too would be necessary and analytic. It is as though the more defining qualifications one
introduces in speaking of a species, the fewer will be the
individuals that instantiate that species-concept. Then
Leibniz may seem to be saying that the most articulate
species-concept, the ultimate definition of a subspecies, is
always a concept so full that there is but one individual
that can satisfy that species concept. Such a concept will
specify everything about the single individual that is, under this understanding, the member of a species infima.
This idea is plainly close to the complete-concept theory
that we have just considered. The remarks we made about
that theory apply equally to the notion of a species infima.
Leibniz got the idea of a species infima containing one individual out of scholastic thought. The scholastics arrived
at the concept in connection with the problem of individuation. What is it that really makes one thing, one man,
for example, a different individual from another? According to a powerful and plausible Aristotelian view, the body
is the ultimate and decisive foundation for the individuality of things. But for scholastics some things, such as
angels, differ from men in that angels do not have bodies.
The idea that each angel is a species infima is a scholastic
solution to this problem. It tries to accept the Aristotelian
concept of individuation by ruling that there can be only
one bodiless entity of each conceptually distinct sort.75
Leibniz extends the idea of species infima to all individuals whether or not they have bodies. He has in mind
that no two individuals, such as two men, will have just
the same bodily features, nor just the same physical histories, etc. Therefore, classifications based on subtle
enough differences will yield classes containing only one
individual. But, as we saw, this will include classification
with respect to empirical and contingent features, and not
merely with respect to essential features. In fact, Leibniz' s
special objective here is not complete concepts or a priori
proofs but rather a vehicle for expression of his well-known
view that no two individuals are exactly alike, or that individuals never differ in number only.76
I have devoted a lot of detail to this point, that is, the
idea that all truths are analytic according to Leibniz, because it is an error that is widespread and an error that,
once made, leaves Leibniz' s overall thought in hopeless
confusion and inconsistency. I think it can be said that
this misinterpretation is just based on inappropriate modernizations of Leibniz's use of word.s such as "a priori",
"concept", "containment" and 11 teduction to an identity."
Confining ourselves to Leibniz's senses of such expres-
Tiffi ST. JOHNS REVIEW
sions, none of his doctrines lend any support to the popular misinterpretation.
4 Possibility and Possible Worlds
Leibniz often expresses his commitment to contingent
truth by saying that not everything that is possible actu·
ally exists.77 Spinoza and Hobbes are generally bracketed
in his discussions as thinkers who erroneously eliminate
contingency and equate what is possible and what is real.78
If there were no unactualized possibilities, Leibniz says, it
would be inappropriate to praise God for his creation,79
and men could not be free and responsible for their actions.80 To speak of human freedom presupposes that
more than one possibility must be open to a man. To praise
God presupposes that other worlds might have been created. This is the setting of the famous concept of possible
worlds.
The thought of other possible worlds emphasizes a side
of our reflections on contingency that easily generates
puzzles and paradoxes. The recent great revival of discussions of possible worlds has not neglected to revive these
paradoxes and puzzles.81 The paradoxes turn on the idea
of the existence of possible worlds. Suppose we agree that
Leibniz is right about Spinoza. Then Leibniz asserts and
Spinoza denies that there are possibilities beyond those
that are actualities. But what can this mean? Both men
know that what exists, exists, and what does not, does not.
Leibniz says that there are further possibilities, and Spinoza that it is not the case that there are further possibilities. These perhaps inevitable expressions suggest that
the difference is in some way a difference about what
there is. To say that there are unrealized possibilities
seems to be the same as to say that unrealized possibilities
exist somehow. Of course, they do not exist in the way in
which realized possibilities exist. But if Leibniz were to
admit that these possibilities do not exist at all, that they
do not exist in any sense, then what would be the difference between his view and Spinoza's? Generally, this kind
of thinking has led many, and sometimes Leibniz among
them, to think of a possible world as a kind of existent
thing. Because it gives unrealized possible worlds some
kind of ontological weight, I call this the ontological inter·
pretation of possible worlds.
The temptations and advantages of the ontological interpretation can be illustrated in connection with Leibniz's
discussions of the "problem of evil." Among the creatures
of God are some, some men, for example, whose acts are
vicious, whose characters are corrupt, and whose very
constitution is deficient. How can an all-powerful and allgood God have produced such creatures? One view of
Leibniz's solution to this problem is that, in Leibniz's system, God's creation does not include the fashioning of
such deficient individuals at all because all individuals, as
possibilities, exist eternally and, therefore, pre-exist all creative acts of God. A recent exposition states:
37
�siderable ontological standing. God is not responsible for
these individuals because they exist as possibilities quite
independently of him.
The ontological interpretation of possible worlds is
especially clear in a passage at the end of the Theodicee
where Leibniz adds a sequel to the dialogue of Lorenzo
Valla that he has retold. The high priest Theodore is sent
by Jupiter to be instructed by Pallas Athena so that he will
understand how misery and corruption of some men is
compatible with the greatness and goodness of God. The
goddess meets Theodore on the steps of an immehse palace of inconceivable brilliance. After first making him capable of receiving divine enlightenment, Athena tells him:
system wherein competing organisms fully exploit every
possibility and exist in every ecological niche. Both Russell and Arthur Lovejoy point out that, if Leibniz's theory
of competing possibilities is taken literally, there appears
to be no role at all for God in determining what exists.85
This is precisely because the theory gives possibilities not
only a kind of existence but also a certain activity that is
independent of and precedes actuality.
Leibniz seems to have thought of the "urge to exist" of
possibilities as at best a convenient metaphor. He usually
speaks of unrealized possibilities as existing only as thoughts
in the mind of God. In the Theodicee he says that the idea
of a struggle for actual existence must really be understood
as a conflict of "reasons in the perfect understanding of
God," and at least once he expressly asserted that possible
things, since they do not exist, can have no power to bring
themselves into existence.86 These views of possibility are
deflationary in comparison with the ontological interpretation that makes possibilities into things that are. When
Leibniz follows this ontologically restrained line of thought
and speaks of possibilities that God considers before crea·
tion as "ideas", he means that something that is just an
idea contrasts with things that exist in any sense at all.
The fact that God recognizes that many different actualities might arise, depending upc,m what he freely decides to
create, does not mean that anything already exists, as
though ready for his "examination" in its fully formed
state, merely leaving God to determine whether or not to
license the full-blooded actuality of an already subsisting
entity."
Leibniz's writings and life-long interest in the theory of
combinations shed light on his thinking about possibility.
In the Ars Combinatoria Leibniz relates his abstract development of a theory of combinations to truth by way of the
reflection that a proposition is composed of a subject and
a predicate and is, therefore, an instance of binary combi-
You see here the palace of destinies, of which I am the keeper.
There are representations here, not only of everything that
happens, but also of all that is possible; and Jupiter; having reviewed these representations before the beginning of the existing world, examined the possibilities for worlds, and made
It is, then, the business of inventive [combinatory] logic (as far
as it concerns propositions) to solve this problem: (i) given a
subject to find its predicates. (ii) given a predicate to find its
subjects.88
Each substance has "always" subsistfd, or, strictly speaking,
has had a conceptual mode of being that lies outside of time
altogether~sub ratio possibilitatis. Its total nature was determined, for its adequate and complete notion (including all its
predicates save existence) was fiXed. For this God is in no way
responsible; it is an object of his understanding and no creature of his will.82
According to this line of thought, possibilities are completed essences which God knows about but does not
make. Creation consists in admitting into actuality certain
of these individuals who, actuality apart, are completely
formed. In his policy for conferring actual existence on
these individuals God sees to it that the best possible world
becomes the actual world. This best possible world has
some defective individuals in it but it is, on balance, better
than any possible alternative. God did not construct these
deficient individuals, nor their betters. He merely allowed
them, so to speak, through the portals of actuality. I am
not particularly concerned here with the success of this
well-known formula for the absolution of God. I do want
to stress that, insofar as it does absolve him from the responsibility for having created deficient individuals, it
gives those individuals, as mere possibilities, a certain con-
the choice of the best of all. ... Thereupon, the goddess led
Theodore into one of the apartments: when he was there, it
was no longer an apartment, it was a world.83
In this forceful, entertaining and figurative exploitation of
the concept of possible worlds, unrealized possibilities are
construed on the pattern of other worlds that one might
visit or observe.84
The high-water mark of this realistic interpretation of
possibility in Leibniz is probably his theory of exigentia.
According to this view, all possibilities contain a certain
urge to exist. The actual world is the net effect of the strivings of individuals many of which are incompatible with
one another. The result is a world of maximal existence
which we might think of on analogy with an ecological
38
nation.
From the point of view of combinations, Leibniz is think·
ing of possible truths and not actual truths. That is, combinatory analysis will never enable us to see that the ascription
of one predicate to a subject makes a true proposition and
the ascription of another makes a false proposition. But
if our language were adequate and complete enough, a
merely combinatory procedure would generate all the
statements about every subject that could possibly be
true.
The idea of an adequate and complete language is itself
problematic. Leibniz always supposes that adequacy will
be enhanced by analysis and definitions that reduce complex predicates to their simpler, .and ultimately, to their
primitive constituents. The completeness of a language
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�would require that the miscellany of subject terms of ordinary speech be replaced by terms representing the simple
constituents of reality. This kind of project faces a large
number of philosophical and technical difficulties. It is
certainly a familiar project in twentieth-century philosophy. Ideas very much like those of Leibniz on the subject
of possibility, ideal language, and combinatory analysis lie
behind the modern development of truth-functional analysis, Russell's Hlogical atomism", the metaphysics and
"picture-theory" of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Rudolph
Carnap's many versions of the theory of "state-descriptions", and the extensional semantics of quantification
theory. Like Leibniz's schemes, a few of these recent projects for ideal languages have got beyond the programmatic
stage. The scheme itself, however, enables us to grasp and
evaluate Leibniz's thinking about possible worlds.
A drastically simplified model for the world will be helpful. Suppose that the universe could only have two constituent substances in it, apart from God. Suppose these
substances are two dice and that names for each of them
are the simple subject terms of our language. Suppose,
further, that the only truth to be told about a die is what
number of dots it shows. Then the simple predicates of
the language will all be expressions like "shows a three"
and "shows a six." Let us imagine that the whole history
of the universe is just the outcome of one roll of the dice.
The roll itself is not even a part of reality. Then all the
truth there is about the universe would consist in saying
what number of dots between one and six each of the dice
shows. We can write this as a pair of numbers: for example, let the truth be that (5, 6), which is to be read, "The
first die shows a five and the second a six." In this representation the subject terms are indicated just by position
in the pair. Leibniz' s problem of the Ars Combinatoria
would be this: Find all the predicates of the first die. And
the solution would be the set of all simple predicates
{shows a one, shows a two, ... , shows a six}.
All subjects of a given predicate, for instance, the predicate "shows a two," would be the set of all the subjects or
{the first die, the second die}.
Though creation will be a trifling matter with this attenuated universe, God still has the job of determining which
possible world shall come into existence. That means that
God will determine which of the several outcomes for a roll
of two dice shall be the actual universe. Being wise, God
understands that the possible worlds are exhausted in the
array of combinations:
(I ,I)
(2,1)
(3,1)
(4,1)
(5,1)
(6,1)
(1,2)
(2,2)
(3,2)
(4,2)
(5,2)
(6,2)
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
(1,3)
(2,3)
(3,3)
(4,3)
(5,3)
(6,3)
(1,4)
(2,4)
(3,4)
(4,4)
(5,4)
(6,4)
(1,5)
(2,5)
(3,5)
(4,5)
(5,5)
(6,5)
(1,6)
(2,6)
(3,6)
(4,6)
(5,6)
(6,6).
Now we need something to distinguish the different possible worlds represented in this array in terms of value so
as to make it thinkable in the framework of the analogy that
God might judge one possible world better than another.
Leibniz says that God combines things so as to produce a
maximum of ordered variety. Let us say that the numerical total of dots on both dice measures the quantity of existence and that variety is represented only by evenness
and oddness of the number of dots on each die. Under this
stipulation, the possible world (6,6) maximizes quantity but
not variety, while (4,5) maximizes variety but not quantity.
(5,6) offers a maximum of quantity with variety, so this
may be our model for the best possible world.89
Were the universe as simple as this dice-world, a mentality no more powerful than ours could survey possible
worlds in advance as well as any divinity. We could know,
as God would, that there are eleven possible totals of dots,
ranging from two to twelve. There are fifteen worlds with
sums less than seven and fifteen with sums more than seven.
On the array, these sets of fifteen possible worlds are displayed above and below, respectively, the diagonal going
from the lower left to the upper right. The diagonal itself
contains the six ways of getting a total of seven, which is
more ways than there are for getting any other total. We
could extend this set of analytical truths about the set of
possible outcomes indefinitely. These truths about possible outcomes are all accessible to us prior to rolling the dice.
Leibniz thinks of such intelligible considerations about
possible worlds as themselves necessary truths, as indeed
these are when considered as statements of possible arithmetical combinations. Should we point out to Leibniz that,
when these mathematical reflections are transferred to actual physical objects, they cease to be necessary truths?
Real dice might be so constructed (for instance, they might
be loaded) so that certain combinations will never come up.
We might then say, for example, that it is not possible to
roll a seven with a certain pair of dice. Still this would be a
matter of hypothetical necessity according to Leibniz, depending on physical laws and conditions. The outcome
(3,4) would not be contradictory, even for loaded dice. After
all, God will decide the physical laws too, so He can make
uninhibited use of combinatorially analyzed possibilities
in connection with possible physical objects.
Thinking in terms of this simple model of the world and
alternative possibilities, and in terms of our own real abilities to understand possibilities in advance, reduces our impulse to construe possible worlds as having any kind of existence at all apart from the one possible world which is
the world. Our own thought and survey of possible outcomes of a roll of dice does not depend on thinking that
those possibilities somehow exist with fully articulated status in advance of any rolling. No outcomes of railings preexist the actual rolling in any sense whatever, and speech
about possible outcomes only refers to what may happen
after rolling. When Leibniz says that God considers a
world or worlds in which Adam does not sin as well as worlds
39
�in which he does, he need mean by this nothing more than
a vastly more complicated case logically quite like our reflection that, in some rolls, the first die comes up a one,
and in others it does not. That these outcomes are open to
intelligent survey does not mean that they must already
exist in any sense at all.
In contemporary discussions of modal concepts in logic,
the ontologically weighty interpretation of possible worlds
is currently defended by David Lewis. In his theory, the
ontological standing of all possible worlds is so consider·
able that "real" or "actual" cease to be ways of making
fundamental distinctions between one possible world and
all the others.90 Lewis thinks that "actual" and "real" are
indexical expressions like <~here" and "now."91 Any place
at all is "here" for a person speaking from that place. One
time is not fundamentally distinguished from others by
being now. In a similar way, there is an internal and an external use of "actual" in characterizing worlds. Of course,
speaking within this possible world, we say that all the
others are merely possible while this one is actual. But the
inhabitants of other possible worlds will inevitably make
the same claim for the actuality of their world, and with
the same justice. To say that other possible worlds are not
actual does not diminish them in point of ontological
standing anymore than it diminishes the existence of places
to say that they are not liere. This ingenious, perhaps intuitively unconvincing proposal is egalitarian about the
existence of all possible worlds. Metaphysically speaking,
they are all equally constituents of reality.
Possible worlds are all of them representations like the
items in the array that represents thirty-six possible outcomes of one roll of a pair of dice. The real world is not a
representation. It is the world. So, too, by our hypothesis,
there is but one roll of the dice. The real world cannot be
identified with one of the items on the array, not even with
the item that represents the world as it actually is. Lewis's
theory about possible worlds succumbs, first, to the tempting thought that there are thirty-five items of one kind
and one item of a different kind, thirty-five shadowy worlds
and one full-blooded reality. On this basis, Lewis is able to
propose that full-bloodness or actuality is perspectival. We
have to judge, so Lewis thinks, from within one of these
thirty-six worlds. Naturally, the one we judge from will be
called "actual" and the others "merely possible." But we do
not judge from within one of these worlds, for none of
them is the world. We have, in the dice-world, thirty-six descriptions and one world. Nobody lives in descriptions and
must judge from such vantage points. The thirty-six possibilities all deserve the old scholastic label: "entia rationis."
Leibniz makes use of this thought when he points out
that we have to think even of the actual world as a possible world and as contemplated by God. 92 We will be safe
from ontological largesse as long as we make all possible
worlds alike, and do not think of them as all shadowy except one.
40
The most decisive argument against any ontological interpretation of possible worlds in the context of Leibniz's
thinking is that it undercuts the view of possibility that he
defends. Leibniz himself presents this argument. If possibilities were any kind of subsisting things, intelligible,
because they are somehow, there like Athena's palace of
destinies, to be inspected by God or man, then they would
have to be objects of a kind of experience, rather than products of reason and understanding. Inspection of possible
worlds, were they to exist in any way, would amount to a
further source of a posteriori knowledge. Theodore actually observes other worlds and explicitly gains knowledge
of them and of the comparision with his own world by experience. And that is just what Jupiter has done in contemplating the possibilities prior to creation. But this figure
gives us no reason to think that Leibniz actually inclines
to the ontological interpretation of possibilities in the
Theodicee. Athena, herself, calls the contents of the palace "representations" and though Theodore experiences
other possible events, this is not described as another reality but Comme dans une representation de theatre."93 In
other words, the items from which we learn about possibility are not other worlds with a less robust kind of being,
nor are they other worlds with the same being as ours, when
viewed from within, as David Lewis proposes. They are
not worlds at all but only representations. When thinking
about possibilities we are comparing representations of
worlds with each other.
The fact that we make an actual object like the array of
thirty-six possible dice worlds, or the palace of destinies of
Athena, is an accidental feature of representation. Our
representations could be all of them in imagination only.
But, whether the representations are real objects or only
thoughts, the important point is that we do not have alternative worlds to compare, but only alternative representations, one of which, by hypothesis, represents the world as
it is.
Leibniz makes the point that, if possibilities were to exist as inspectible things, then knowledge of them would
be a_posteriori, in discussing the idea of a "scientia media."
Such a middle science was proposed by Luis Molina,
among others, as a device for resolving the tensions between the concepts of human freedom and predestination. The middle knowledge was supposed to be a kind of
visionary appreciation of things accessible to God and
constituting a third option between the absolute necessity
of definitional and mathematical truth and the mere con·
tingency of matters of fact which we learn in experience.
Leibniz points out that, if the notion of vision actually car·
ries any weight in the concept of "scientia media", the
knowledge deemed accessible to God will be a posteriori
knowledge:
11
Non ergo in quadam Visione consistit DEI scientia, quae imperfecta est et a posteriori; sed in cognitione causae et, a
priori.
AUfUMN/WINfER 1982-83
�Thus the knowledge of God is not made up of a kind of vision1 which is imperfect and a posteriori; but in understanding
of causes, and a priori. 94
This theme becomes immediately relevant to the thought
of existing and inspectible possible worlds when Leibniz
rejects the Molinist claim that God might see the future
infallibly reflected in a great mirror.
Secundum au tares scientiae mediae non possetDEUS rationem
reddere sui pronuntiati, nee mihi explicare. Hoc unum dicere
poterit quaerenti cur ita futurum esse pronuntiet, quod ita
videat actum hunc representari in magna illo specula, intra se
posito, in quo omnia praesentia, futura, absoluta vel condi-
tionata exhibentur. Quae scientia pure empirica est, nee
DEO ipsi satisfaceret, quia rationum cur hoc potius quam illud in specula repraesentetur, non intelligeret.
According to the advocates of the scientia media, God could
not give a reason for his assertions, nor explain them to me.
To someone who asks why he says that things will be thus, he
would be able to say just that it is because he sees this event
represented thus in that great mirror, posited among them, in
which everything present, future, absolute or conditioned is
exhibited. Such knowledge is wholly empirical, and it would
not satisfy God himself because he would not know the reason
for which this rather than that is represented in the mirror.95
A vision in a glass, no matter how accurate and trustworthy,
is only another experience which cannot replace rational
understanding. In the spirit of this conclusion we have to
suppose that God's representations of other possible
worlds have the features that they do because God understands how things would be related in those worlds. The
same holds for the simpler human mind contemplating
the simpler dice-world. The array of thirty-six outcomes
has the constituents that it does because we understand
just what would be possible and we make the representations accordingly. Possible worlds are dependent upon our
understanding, and not the other way around. And if other
possible worlds did exist, somehow, and God could examine them, that would not give him reasoned knowledge
but only a kind of empirical knowledge that is not available to us.
5 Freedom
Leibniz's understanding of freedom is dependent in
many ways on his doctrines concerning contingency and
possibility. Mechanism perennially challenges the claims
of freedom. In the second part of this study, we have seen
Leibniz's proposals for the reconciliation of freedom and
a ubiquitous mechanical causality covering all motions.
The view that all truths are analytic which we have criticized in the third part would also contradict the view that
men are free, and the rejection of that interpretation elim-
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
inates a general threat to Leibniz's doctrines. The theme
of possible worlds, just considered in the fourth part, can
also be interpreted in a way that creates a fundamental
obstacle to freedom.
The thought that a man could have done something other
than what he did do plainly requires that some other action
was possible. Insofar as possible worlds are to offer a way
of expressing our thoughts about possibility, we can say
that, where there is freedom, one action is done in the actual world and other actions in other possible worlds. But
can we say that one and the same man exists in more than
one possible world? Or is an individual confined to just
one world so that other possible worlds could at best contain similar individuals faced with similar choices? If one
and the same man cannot exist in more than one world, the
prospect for freedom is dark. We shall apparently be forced
to construe the idea of the freedom of one individual as
equivalent to the idea of the behavior of more than one
individual.
This is the problem of transworld identity of individuals. It arises in a clear form in Leibniz's exchanges with
Arnauld and it is much discussed in recent literature on
identity and modal concepts.96 Leibniz sometimes seems
to imply that a true individual can exist in one possible
world only. The thesis that there can be no transworld identity is defended at present, again by David Lewis, among
others. It is closely connected with the ontological interpretation of possible worlds just examined. If possible
worlds exist in any sense at all, they seem to be, to that extent, like other places that one might visit, or at least
places of which one might obtain news. Under any such conception, each world will have its own population. At best,
one possible world may have an individual in it who more
or less perfectly resembles, in history and features, an individual in another possible world. Even if such a similarity
were perfect, an individual in one possible world cannot
be the very individual that is in another world any more
than a man born in New York can be the very same individual as an exactly similar man born in New Jersey.
We have repudiated the ontological interpretation of
possible worlds and we have argued that, in his best
thought, Leibniz repudiates it too. If the prohibition on
identity across possible worlds comes entirely from the ontological interpretation we can expect that it will be removed when that interpretation is set aside. If alternative
possible worlds are only representations of different systems and not existing systems of different entities, then it
seems that possible worlds will contain different representations of one and the same individual. Freedom would,
then, not be threatened.
When he received a sketch of the Discourse of Metaphysics from Leibniz in 1686, Arnauld found that the complete
concept of the individual enunciated in Article Thirteen
destroys the foundations of freedom and responsibiity.97
The ensuing exchange on this point brought the problem
41
�of transworld identity to the surface. In that correspondence, Leibniz uses the concept of possible worlds in arguments intended to overcome Arnauld's initially negative
judgment. God knows all the things that Adam and all his
descendants have freely done and all that they ever will
do. He also knows all the things they might have done had
they chosen to act differently, or were they going to
choose differently in the future. This is part of God's knowledge of other possible worlds which he could have created.
In other worlds Adam does different things. How does
Leibniz think it possible to fit freedom for Adam and his
progeny into this picture of God's knowledge and creation? There are two thoughts pertinent to this question
and the second of them hinges on transworld identity.
In the first place, God can know in advance what a man
will freely choose, so free agents do not present an obstacle to God's complete knowledge of the "series of things."
It is this thought that is responsible for the rapid shift in
point of view in the Discourse from the issue of determinism to the issue of foreknowledge." God contemplates all
possible worlds. Some of them have free agents in them
and some do not. Worlds with free creatures in them are
better than worlds without freedom, so God will surely
create one of them. This one is best of all, a judgment that
requires knowledge of the actual series of things and of all
possible series. But God does not produce the events of the
actual world himself. They are produced by the causes that
we rightly mention in explaining those events. Actions are
really done for the reasons the agent has.
Here we find again the point of "On Nature Itself." Explanations have their footing in the world and not merely
in its creator. By analogy, the pistons drive the crankshaft
of an engine and we cannot skip over or drop explanatory
reference to the pistons and explain the motions of the
crankshaft by appealing to the intentions or actions of the
builder of the engine. So in the inanimate world it is forces
that causes motions and not God. When a man acts freely,
he, and not God, determines what he will do. This is the
platform for Leibniz's defense of freedom and reconciliation of freedom with the complete concept of the individual and with God's knowledge. Though everything that I
do belongs to my complete concept, many things belong
contingently, and some because of what I freely choose to
do.
no more impairs my freedom than does another man's
knowledge of how I will vote impair my freedom to vote as
I see fit.
Leibniz's second line of thought about the freedom of
the individual in the correspondence with Arnauld is a
good deal less secure than the first line of thought. In the
passage concerning a possible journey that we have just
quoted, Leibniz touches on the question of the identity of
individuals across possible worlds. In introducing the possible journey as an illustration, Arnauld had sought to distinguish those facts about an individual without which he
could not be the individual that he is from another range
of facts which can vary without affecting identity. Arnauld
thinks that this distinction must be pressed in opposition
to Liebniz's claim that all the facts about an individual are
equally contained in the complete concept of that individ·
ual which God is able to consult before creation. Thus,
Arnauld says, with echos of the Cartesian cogito:
I am certain that, since I think, I, myself, exist. For I cannot
think that I am not, nor that I am not myself. But I can think
that I will make a certain voyage or not, while remaining en-
tirely sure that neither the one nor the other will require that
I am not myself. 100
If we put this in the terminology of possible worlds, Arnauld is asserting that the very same individual can exist
in more than one possible world. In one possible world Arnauld makes a journey and in another world the identical
Arnauld does not make the journey. As we have seen, this
claim rules out the ontological interpretation of possible
worlds.
In responding to this contention Leibniz comes very
close to denying the possibility that the same man may be
a constituent of more than one possible world. In his earlier letters Leibniz had fallen into use of the expression
"possible Adams" and in response to the statement of Arnauld that we have just cited, he says that the notion of
multiple Adams has to be taken figuratively. When we
think about Adam from the point of view of a few salient
characteristics: "that he was the first man, put into the
garden of enjoyment, and that from his side God took a
And there is nothing in me of all that can be conceived sub ratione generalitatis . .. from which it can be deduced that I will
make it necessarily _9 9
woman," 101 we speak as though these few characteristics
determine the individual so thaf he will remain one and
the same substance whether he has or lacks other features. Different completions will be the various possible
Adams, yet, we speak as though they will all be the same
individual, differently completed. This is what Leibniz
says must be understood as a loose and metaphorical way
of speaking. Rigorously speaking, a few salient characteris·
tics do not determine an individual,
God's knowledge of what I will do is not the explanation
for my free action. God knows my motives and he knows
how I will assess my Circumstances and this is the basis of
his knowledge of what I will freely do. God's knowledge
... for there may be an infinity of Adams, that is to say, of
possible persons [sharing these salient characteristicsJ who
would nonetheless differ among themselves . ... the nature of
an individual should be complete a,nd determined. 102
The connection of events, although it is certain, is not necessary, and . .. I am at liberty either to make the journey or not
make the journey, for, although it is involved in my concept
that I will make it, it is also involved that I will make it freely.
42
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�If a man were to differ in any way at all from the actual
Adam, in his features, in his history·, or in his relations to
the rest of the universe, then that man could not be Adam
but, at most, another possible man similar to Adam.
It seems to me that, if he were to rely on this second
line of thought, Leibniz's reconciliation of freedom and
the complete concept of an individual would surely fail. It
is as though Leibniz is here reducing the idea of two alter·
native courses of action available to a free agent to the
quite different idea of two very similar possible individuals, one of whom necessarily pursues one course, while
the other necessarily pursues the other course. If this re-
sult is allowed to stand it must be a severe disappointment
to those who hoped to analyze contingency in terms of
possible worlds. We start by thinking that I could take the
journey, or I could not. It is up to me. Possible world analysis then restates this as the fact that one possible world
has me taking the journey and another has me not taking
it. But now the ontological interpretation exerts its undesirable influence. It cannot be true of one and the same individual that he takes a trip and does not take that trip. So
if these possible worlds are like existing things, even with
a shadowy existence, it will turn out that it cannot be me
that does not take the trip in another possible world but,
instead, a man much like me. This is disappointing because the idea of freedom surely requires that one and the
same individual may either perform or not perform a certain act. Freedom is rejected if we substitute a conception
of two different individuals one of whom performs the act
while the other does not. What another does can never be
part of the essence of my freedom.
Leibniz does not seem to appreciate fully the dangers
implicit in the denial of transworld identity. Yet even in
these passages he does not foreclose an understanding
that will save both the complete concept notion and freedom. Thus, in the same context, Leibniz considers the life
of an individual up to a certain point in time, and the life
of the same individual after that point. The crucial time is
labelled B. B is the time at which the individual does in
fact perform some free action such as setting out on a
journey103 The line ABC then represents the life history
of the individual and the issue of identity and possibility
focusses on the conditions for saying that the individual in
the interval AB is the same as the individual in the interval BC. Since there is a reason for everything, and no free
action is a manifestation of arbitrariness or indifference,
there was a reason prior to B which explains why the journey is taken at B. Since the event at B is a free action, the
existence of a reason means that there is something about
the agent's constitution, thought, perceptions, and assessment of his circumstances prior to B which would make it
possible to predict with complete certainty that he would
make the journey. It is in this sense that everything that
he does is contained in the complete concept of the individual. But as we have stressed in Part Ill, the coercive
reason for a free decision does not necessitate behavior.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The very idea of a course of action entails that other courses
were possible. The individual whose choice could be predicted by a sufficiently well-informed observer is, nonetheless, really choosing. This too must be counted part of
the complete concept of the individual.
The complete concept gives the impression of conflict
with the concept of free deci>ion. But Leibniz means to
include the fact that he makes free decisions in the complete concept of an individual. That he will make the free
decision to take a journey is as much part of the concept
of a man as is the fact that he will take the journey. We
feel a conflict here that is reinforced by Leibniz' s assertion that an individual who does not make the trip cannot
be the same individual. By the same token an individual
who decides not to make the trip cannot be the same individual. Then how can the decision be free? If we set aside
the ontological interpretation of possible worlds, there is a
way of putting together all of these ideas that reconciles
them all. This requires as the focal element the thought
that a man deciding what to do is, in the jargon of possible
worlds, deciding which of two possible worlds to bring
about. Strictly speaking, there are an infinite number of
possible worlds in which I make the journey and an infinite nu.mber of worlds in which I do not. The set of all
possible worlds is the union of these two sets. In a free action, I determine that the actual world will fall into one
or the other of these two exhaustive sets of possibilities.
In this respect Leibniz' s conception of human freedom is
modelled in the creativity of God. God's work consists in
determining which possible world will be real. He chooses
a world which contains free agents. But that means that
he does not fully determine which world will be real, for
that is partly a consequence of all of the free decisions of
all free agents. Every free act makes a difference as to
what possible world is actual. We have seen that God
knows just which world will be real, but that knowledge
depends upon knowing how men will freely choose. This
means no less than the thought that God's knowledge of
the complete actual world depends upon his knowledge of
our world-choosing actions as well as his own.
At the point of choice an individual can really do either
of two things. If he does one, he makes himself and the
world different from what it would have been had he done
the other. In this sense, insofar as he is free, it is up to a
man to determine which possible individual he is. The result of this decision, like all other features of an individual,
contingent as well as necessary features, belongs to the
complete concept of that individual. So we can say that,
though a man has a real choice, he will not be the same individual he would have been had he chosen differently.
This does not at all require that there is, in some kind of
existence or subsistence, another individual who does
choose differently. The existence of such another would
not help us to understand freedom. I determine what individual I will become not in the sense that there is a collection of individuals and I can become identical to just one
43
�of them. Rather, I can represent my future in different
ways and my action will determine which of these repre·
sentations is a representation of the real world. Insofar as
he means that, when a man acts freely, he forecloses pas·
sibilities that would have made him a different man had
they been realized, Leibniz is certainly right.
. This ultimate reconciliation depends upon accepting
the thought that Leibniz understands every free action as
eliminating worlds from the roster of all possibilities. This
interpretation would have men sharing in just the kind of
creativity that Leibniz assigns to God. Men's power and
knowledge remain insignificant in comparison with divine
power and knowledge, but the essence of human action is
otherwise quite a lot like divine action. In many passages
in his writings this seems to be just the conception of human action that Leibniz does adopt. Thus:
[The rational spirit] is an image of divinity. The spirit not only
has a perception of the works of God but is even capable of
producing something which resembles them ... our soul is ar·
chitectonic in its voluntary actions .... In its realm and in the
small world in which it is allowed to act, the soul imitates
what God performs in the great world. 104
The following abbreviations are used in these notes:
G: I-VII: Gerhardt, C. J., Die Philosophische Schriften von G. W. Leibniz, seven volumes, Berlin, 1885.
Grua I-II: Grua, Gaston, G. W. Leibniz: Textes Inedits, two volumes,
Paris, 1948.
OF: Couturat, Louis, G. W. Leibniz: Opuscules et Fragments Inedits,
Paris, 1903.
L: Loemker, Leroy, Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters, Second
edition, Dordrecht, 1969.
M: Mason, H. T., The Leibniz-Arnauld Correspondence, Manchester,
1967.
F: Frankfurt, H. G., Editor, Leibniz: Critical Essays, Garden City,
1972.
I have translated the Latin citations from Couturat and Grua, of which
there are no English translations, and the French from Theodicee, G VI.
Other quotations in English translation only are from the works cited in
the relevant notes.
L See "A Brief Demonstration of a Notable Error of Descartes," L:
297-302; also "Critical Thoughts on the General Part of the Principles
of Descartes," especially Leibniz's comments on Part 11, art. 4 and 36, L:
392, and 393-5. Leibniz restates, summarizes, and refers to this issue in
many of his articles and letters.
2. See Mach, E., The Science of Mechanics, McCormack, T. J., tr., La
Salle, 1960, 360-5, and Papineau, D., "The Vis Viva Controversy,"
Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, val. 8, 1977, 111-42.
3. The Passions of the Soul, Haldane and Ross, editors, Descartes: Philosophical Works, Cambridge, 1931, art. xxxv-vi, val. I, 347-8.
4. See "On Nature Itself," L, 503.
5. Principles of Philosophy, art. 1xiv, in Haldane and Ross, val. I, 269.
6. The distinction between primary qualities (as those susceptible of
mathematical characterization and thus objective) and secondary qualities (taken to include all sensuous qualities and to be subjective only) was
first drawn by Galileo. The terminology, "primary" and "secondary," was
first used by Robert Boyle. The distinction plays a fundamental part in
the philosophies of Descartes and Locke and has been retained by many
thinkers up to the preSent. See, for example, Jackson, F., Perception,
London, 1977,ch. 7.
44
7. See Meditations, "Replies to Objections," Haldane and Ross, val. II,
253-4; and Meditations, VI, val. I, 191.
8. Principles of Philosophy, Part II, art. xxxvi.
9. E. g., Letter to Mersenne, Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres de Descartes,
Paris, val. III, 648-9.
10. Principles of Philosophy, Part II, Art. xliv-lii, Adam and Tannery,
vol. VIII-I, 68-70.
11. "Critical Thoughts," L:398-402; and the note to Leibniz's comment
on Part II, Art. 53, G: IV, 382-4.
12. "On Nature," L: 505.
13. "On Nature," L: 505; and Letter to DeVolder, L: 516; see also,
Naert, E., Memoire et conscience de soi selon Leibniz, Paris, 1961, 15-20.
14. Cassirer, E., Leibniz's System in Seinen Wissenschaftlichen
Grundlagen, Mar burg, 1902, Einleitung, art. 7, 90-102.
15. Discourse on Method, Anscombe and Geach, editors, Descartes'
Philosophical Writings, London, 1954, 47.
16. Principles of Philosophy, Part IV, art. cciv, Haldane and Ross, vol. I,
300.
17. "But they who observe how many things regarding the magnet, fire,
and the fabric of the whole world, are here deduced from a very small
number of principles, although they consider that I had taken up these
principles at random and without good· grounds, they will yet acknowledge that it could hardly happen that so much could be coherent if they
were false," Principles of Philosophy, 301. Here Descartes approximates
the so-called hypothetico-deductive conception of theory formation
and confirmation. The degree to which this kind of thinking appears in
Descartes' ideas about scientific knowledge has been generally overlooked.
18. Discourse on Metaphysics, art. 10, L: 308-9.
19. Discourse, art, 22, L: 317-8.
20. Meditations, reply to objections, Haldane and Ross, 219.
21. "On Nature," L: 505.
22. "On Nature," 501.
23. L: 498-508.
24. "On Nature," 500.
25. "On Nature," 501.
26. Boyle, R., "Free Inquiry etc.," 1692; See Loemker's account, L: 498.
27. "On Nature," L: 502.
28. "On Nature," 504-5.
29. See my "The Scientific Background of Descartes' Dualism," this
journal, Winter 1981.
30. "On Nature," L: 502.
31. "On Nature," 503. The writer is Spinoza.
32. " ... [I]f this world were only possible, the individual concept of a
body in this world, containing certain movements as possibilities, would
also contain our laws of motion (which are free decrees of God) but also
as mere possibilities," from Leibniz's remarks on a letter of Arnauld,
M:43.
33. Discourse on Metaphysics, art 10, L: 308-9.
34. See Hobbes' Leviathan, Part I, ch. l-3, and De corpore, Part IV,
ch. 25. For contemporary materialist conceptions of the mind see
Rosenthal, D., editor, Materialism and the Mind-Body Problem, En·
glewood Cliffs, 1971.
35. See O'Shaugnessy, "Observation and the Will," J. Phil., vol. LX,
1963.
36. See my "Teleological Reasoning," J. Phil., LXXV, 1978.
37. For example, Grua, 270-l. The distinction is also discussed in
several letters of the Correspondence with Arnauld.
38. Nouveaux Essais, G: V, 429.
39. M: 43. See note (32), above.
40. See Clarke's fifth letter, addressed to art. 1-20 of Leibniz's previous
letter, Alexander, H. G., editor, The Liebniz-Clarke Correspondence,
Manchester, 1956, especially 98.
41. Leibniz's second letter to Clarke, art 1, Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, 16.
42. Discourse on Metaphysics, art. 5, L: 305.
43. Montgomery, G., Leibniz: Basic Writings, LaSalle, 1902, 127.
44. See Russel4 B., The Philosophy of Leibniz, London, 1902, ch. II~
25-30.
AU1UMN/WINTER 1982-83
�45. Louis Couturat played an especially important role in promoting
this interpretation. See La Logique de Leibniz, Paris, 1901, ch. VI, sect.
5-18, 184-213. Summing up his detailed inVestigation, Couturat says,
"En resume, toutes verite est formellement ou virtuellement identique
ou comme dira Kant, analytique, et par consequent doit pouvoir se
demontrer a priori au moyen des definitions et du principe d'identite,"
210. Couturat's book influenced Russell to change his interpretation
from his 1902 exposition, according to which Leibniz makes existential
propositions contingent, to the 1903 view that Leibniz did not really
believe in contingency at all since he held that all truths are analytic.
The prestige of Russell and Couturat has been an enduring support for
this interpretation. Among more recent writers, the analyticity of all
truth is ascribed to Leibniz by Fried, D., "Necessity and Contingency in
Leibniz," Phil. R., val. 87, 1978, 576; Wilson, M., "On Leibniz's Explication of Necessary Truth," in F: 402; Lovejoy, A, "Plenitude and Sufficient Reason," The Great Chain of Being, Cambridge, Mass., 1936, as
reprinted in F; 295, 316, and 321; Hacking, I, "Individual Substance," F:
138; Rescher, N., Leibniz: An Introduction to his Philosophy, Totowa,
N. ]., 1979, 23; and Nason, J. W., "Leibniz and the Logical Argument for
Individual Substances," Mind, vol. LI, 1942, 201-2. Prominent dissidents are Broad, C. D., Leibniz, Cambridge, 1975, who recognizes the
compatibility of the containment thesis and the complete concept with
contingency; and I Ishiguro, H., Leibniz's Philosophy of Logic and Language, Ithaca, N.Y., 1972, 15 and 120.
46. Quine, W. V., "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in From a Logical
Point of View, Cambridge, Mass., 1953, 20---46.
47. The limitation of this example to the subject-predicate propositional structure has no theoretical implications. Equally compelling illustrations could be constructed to fit any propositional form.
48. Grua, 387.
49. OF: 16-7 and 405; Grua, 273.
50. Grua, 288.
51. See Strawson, P., and Grice, H., "In Defense of a Dogma," Phil. R.
52. "Recent Work in the Philosophy of Leibniz," Mind, 1902, as reprinted in F: 365.
53. "Recent Work."
54. OF: 16.
55. Grua, 303; OF: 405.
56. Discourse on Metaphysics, art. 13, L: 310.
57. OF: 18.
58. OF: 405.
59. "First Truths," L: 267.
60. Letter to Arnauld, M: 63.
61. "Reflections sur Bellarmin," Grua, 301.
62. See especially, Rescher, N., The Philosophy of Leibniz, Englewood,
1967, ch. II and III; and the same author's Leibniz: An Introduction,
Totowa, N.j., 1979, ch. III and IV.
63. Parkinson, G. H. R., Leibniz: Logical Papers, Oxford, 1966, 77-8;
OF: 388 and 18.
64. OF: 405.
65. Grua, 304; see also, OF: 388, ffl34.
66. OF: 18.
67. OF: 408.
68. Letter to Arnauld, M: 58.
69. Nouveaux Essais, G: V, 428.
70. See, for example, the Correspondence with Des Bosses, L: 596-616.
Here Leibniz shows great flexibility, or ambiguity, on the connection
between monads and the status of animals as unified beings. The muchdiscussed vinculum substantiale marks his insecurity concerning the adequacy of the theory that all true substances are monads.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
71. M: 42.
72. M: 9.
73. Nouveaux Essais, G: V, 428.
74. Discourse on Metaphysics, art. 9, L: 308.
75. Discourse, art. 9, L: 308.
76. This claim appears throughout Leibniz's writings. It makes up one
of his arguments against atomism; it is a foundation for his relational
theory of space and time; and it is a prominent dictum of the Discourse
on Metaphysics and of the Monadology.
77. Grua, 263.
78. Leibniz thinks that Spinoza and Hobbes held this erroneous view and
that Descartes risks falling into it. See L; 273 and Theodicee, G: VI, 139.
79. Theodicee, G: VI, 145.
80. Grua, 270; and Theodicee, G: VI, 122.
81. This revival has been stimulated in major part by the work of Saul
Kripke who made use of the concept of possible worlds in constructing a
semantics for modal logic. For the revival of the paradoxes see the discussion of David Lewis's theory of possible worlds below.
82. Rescher, N., Leibniz: An Introduction, Totowa, N. ]., 1979, 72.
83. Go VI, 363.
84. Compare, "I argued against those misuses of the. concept that regard possible worlds as something like distant planets, like our own surroundings but somehow existing in a different dimension, or that lead to
spurious problems of 'transworld identification' "; Kripke, S., Naming
and Necessity, Cambridge, Mass., 1980, 15.
85. For Lovejoy's view see F: 327; for Russell's, F: 378.
86. Grua, 286; and Theodicee, G VI: 236.
87. This deflationary, non-ontological conception of possible worlds
also seems to rule out the solution of the problem of evil that is imputed
to Leibniz by Rescher and others. Nothing evil exists prior to the creation of the world. God's understanding that something evil might exist
cannot be made to yield the idea that something evil does exist whether
He does any creating or not.
88. Parkinson, G. H. R., Leibniz: Logical Papers, Oxford, 1966, 1-12;
and Couturat, L., La Logique de Leibniz, Paris, 1901, ch. II, "La Combinatoire."
89. It is a defect of the simple dice-world as a model for Leibniz's thinking
that the best world can be achieved in either of two ways: (5, 6) or (6, 5).
Strictly speaking Leibniz is absolutely committed to the view that there
must be just one uniquely best possible world if God is to create anything.
90. Lewis, D., Counterfactuals, Cambridge, Mass., 1973, 84-91; and
"Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic," J. Phil., vol. LXV,
1968, 113-26.
91. Counterfactuals, 85-6.
92. Grua, 270.
93. G: VI, 363.
94. OF: 26.
95. OF: 26.
96. See the works of Kripke and Lewis cited above and Chisholm, R.,
"Identity through Possible Worlds: Some Questions," and other essays
in Loux, M., The Actual and the Possible, Ithaca, 1979.
97. Letter of Arnauld to Leibniz, M: 9.
98. Articles 13-17, L: 310-5.
99. M: 58.
100. G. II:
101. M: 45:
102. M: 45, and see also 60-1.
103. M: 46.
104. Principles of Nature and Grace, art. 14, L: 640.
45
�Letter from a Polish Prison
Adam Michnik
Bialoleka Prison
Aprill982
Dear Friend,
General )aruzelski has announced that political prisoners who promise to give up all "illegal" activity will be
freed. Liberty is within reach. All you have to do is pick up
a pen and sign a loyalty oath ...
You don't have to do much to get rid of the barbed
wires and bars between you and "freedom." The steel
doors of Bialoleka Prison will open. No more prison walks:
you will see the city streets. You will see streets endlessly
patrolled by armored cars and sentries. You will see pedestrians and automobiles stopped for identity checks,. You
will see the informer surveying the crowd for people suspected of having broken "emergency security restrictions." You will hear words you know only from having
read them in history books: police round-ups, volksliste,
words suddenly stripped of the patina of time and revived
in all their horror by the present moment. You will hear
the latest news: summary sentences, the fate of friends arrested, hunted, hidden.
On Loyalty Oaths
But if you make a simple little calculation, the simplest
possible-supposing you are able-you will know at once
why signing a loyalty oath is of no interest to you: quite
simply, because it is not worth the trouble. Here, in
prison, no one is going to arrest you ''until the situation is
clarified." Here, you don't have anything to be afraid of.
One of the most courageous and dear-headed of the young Polish political thinkers and leaders, Ada'm Michnik wrote an important essay on tolerance that has been translated into French, L'€glise et la gauche (Paris,
Seuil 1979).
This article first appeared in Commentaire, Summer 1982.
46
It's paradoxical, I know. Here, w,hen there's a knock on
the door at daybreak, it's not strangers in uniform. It's
your flunky bringing you coffee: under his sharp eye you
know you are safe from spies. Bialoleka Prison is a moral
luxury and an oasis of freedom. It is also testimony to your
resistance and your importance. !f the government has
put you in prison it shows that they have been forced to
take you seriously.
Sometimes they try to frighten you. A friend of mine, a
factory worker from Warsaw, was threatened with fifteen
years in prison; another prisoner they tried to intimidate
by threatening to implicate him in a case of espionage.
One man has had to put up with being interrogated in
Russian, another was dragged from his cell to be trans·
ferred to the farthest reaches of Russia. He came to a little
while later at the dentist. But these blows are bearable. I
think it is easier to resist here than out there on the other
side of the barbed wire, where the situation is more com·
plicated, morally as well as politically. ("It may be easier to
be in prison than to be free," a friend writes to me. "The
waters have all burst and in their whirlpools the slime has
risen to the surface.")
The Primate of Poland has called it an outrage that loy·
alty oaths are exacted under duress. The Pope has called
this violation of conscience criminal. It is hard to think
otherwise. We condemn with all our heart those who are
guilty of extorting these loyalty oaths and brutally destroying another man's dignity. A young woman, the wife of a
Solidarity activist, was arrested and her sick child taken
away from her. They told her the child would be put in an
orphanage. She signed. One of my \riends was arrested,
and had to leave his mother who was riddled with cancer.
"There won't be a lame dog who will dare give her some·
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�thing to drink," they said to him. He signed. Useless to
give more examples: the brutality df some, the weakness
of others, sordid blackmailings, tragic slander, we know all
that well, and we also know well that subjected to such
pressures people don't all act the same way. The Primate
has left it open to each one to make his own choice.
Teachers particularly have to choose between two equally
important imperatives: to retain their self-respect and to
maintain their contact with the young. The decision rests
upon the· individual; it makes appeal to his intelligence
and to his conscience. No one can judge anyone else. To
resort to ostracism would only correspond to the desires of
the government: isn't it their idea to set us against one an·
other and thereby break down our resistance and our solidarity? But such a tolerant attitude, born of understanding,
ought not to lead us to conclude that to sign a loyalty oath
is a morally neutral act. No. To sign a loyalty oath is wrong,
whatever the circumstances are; it is only that circumstances can make it more or less wrong. A man who signs a
loyalty oath always deserves pity, sometimes understanding; praise, never. There are many reasons for this, first
among them the imperative of self-respect.
On Self-Respect
To be powerless before armed violence is to be deeply
humiliated. Set upon by six thugs, you are powerless. But
just because of this powerlessness, if you have the least
shred of self-respect, you will not find this the moment to
sign agreements and make promises. They force the door,
they bash the furniture, they take you to headquarters
with handcuffs on your wrists, they knock you down, they
squirt teargas in your eyes, and then they request you to
sign an oath. Your basic instinct for self-preservation and
simple human dignity force you to say "No."
For even if these people were fighting fbr an altogether
honorable cause, they would defile it by such behavior.
At that moment your mind is no longer clear. It's only
after traveling several hours, when you find yourself at
Bialoleka Prison, shaking with cold (later they'll talk about
"humane conditions"), and you can listen to the radio,
that you learn that war has been declared against your
people. This war has been declared against them by the
very men to whom they gave their mandate to govern, to
formulate policy, and sign international treaties. These
men offer us a helping hand in public and talk about rec·
onciliation at the same time that they order the secret police to arrest us in the middle of the night ...
It is immediately clear to you that you are not going to
give these people the gift of your loyalty oath; loyalty is
something they are not capable of.
You don't as yet know what this war will bring. You
don't know as yet how the factories and steelworks will be
stormed, or the shipyards or the mines. You know nothing
as yet about "Black Wednesday" in the Wujek mine. But
you do know that if you sign a loyalty oath you will be
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
haunted by the sense that you have denied yourself and
the meaning of your life, by the sense that you have be·
trayed people who placed their trust in you. It would
mean betraying friends who are in prison and friends in
hiding, betraying those who are trying to defend you by
printing pamphlets in Gdansk'Or in Krakow, by organizing
meetings in Paris or New York. You see before your eyes
the face of Zbigniew, in hiding, of Edward, convicted, of
Seweryn, waiting in Paris. Nothing is decided, many paths
are open, choices are not yet sealed, but you already
know, you feel it, that your self-respect is not the currency
with which to buy your liberty. At this point, another argument not to sign a loyalty oath emerges: good sense.
It is irrational to sign a contract with people for whom
even the term Hcontract" has no fixed meaning, who
blandly renege on their commitments and for whom lying
is an everyday matter. Have you ever met a security agent
who hasn't lied to you? These people, whose eyes are
blank but never at rest, whose minds are dull but keen at
the art of torture, debased and greedy for advancement,
see you only as an object to be worked over. These people
have a particular view of human nature. For them every
man can be "convinced": by that they mean corrupted or
terrified. The only question is the price to be paid or the
blows to be delivered. They go methodically about their
business-but your least slip, your least weakness, gives
meaning to their lives. To them your capitulation means
more than simple professional success: it proves their
raison d'etre.
The Meaning of the Confrontation
You are engaged in a philosophic confrontation with
them. At stake in this confrontation is the meaning of
your life and of every human being's life-and the loss of
meaning in theirs. It is the confrontation of Giordano
Bruno with the inquisitor, of the Decembrist with the police, of Lukasinski with the Tsar's destroying angel, of
Ossetsky with the blond fellow in the Gestapo uniform, of
Mandelstam with the Bolshevik in the uniform of the
NKVD. It is a confrontation which has never ended and
whose stake, as Elzenberg said, isn't measured by your
chance of emerging victorious, but by the intrinsic worth
of the idea. In other words, it is not in overcoming the
forces against you that you carry off the victory, but by remaining true to yourself.
Reason also tells you that in signing a loyalty oath you
give the officials the weapon they'll make use of to make
you sign the next declaration: that of collaboration. In
signing .the loyalty oath, know that you sign a pact with
the devil. Be wary of giving these uniformed inquisitors so
much as your little finger: they'll soon grab your whole
hand. How many men do you know who have destroyed
their lives in a moment of weakness? Today they are pursued by phone calls at home and at work, subjected to
blackmail every time they go abroad. They pay for a min·
47
�ute of thoughtlessness with years of.humiliation and fear. ,
If you don't want to be afraid, if you want to respect yourself, an inner voice tells you, don't .make compromises
with the government police. The police official inspires in
you less hatred than pity. You know he suffers psychologi·
cal complaints, he is often ashamed in front of his children;
you know he will disappear, buried in collective forgetful·
ness. (Who remembers the informers and executioners of
the past?) And this brings us to the third reason for not
signing: memory.
Memory
You think about your country's history; to sign a loyalty
oath in prison has always been a disgrace; to remain faithful to yourself and your country has always been a virtue.
You think of people who have been tortured and who
spent many years in prison but who never signed. And
you know that you will not sign either because you will
not renounce their memory. Especially will you not sign
when you remember what happened to those who did
give up in prison. You remember Andrzej M., the distinguished literary critic, your friend, who, in prison, wrote a
clever pamphlet cooperating with the authorities, evidence of his spiritual death; Henryk Sz., an intelligent and
ambitious young man, who rose to the rank of chief Informer on his comrades; you remember Zygmunt D., that
charming and witty companion who, once he gave in, con~
tinued to inform on his friends for years afterwards. You
remember with horror this human flotsam, these creatures destroyed by the police; and you wonder what will
become of you. Of course, the choice is yours alone, but
memory reminds you that you, too, could find yourself in
their ranks: no one is born a spy. You and you alone daily
forge your lot, sometimes at the risk of your life. You
haven't heard as yet the loyalty oaths on the radio, the disgusting interviews, you don't know that Marian K., that
intelligent and courageous activist from Nowa Huta, who
in his loyalty oath wanted to render unto God that which
belongs to God and to Caesar what is Caesar's, ended by
rendering everything to the police for want of understanding that in certain situations ambiguity loses its shades of
meaning and the half truth becomes a total lie. You
haven't heard the interview with Stanislas Z. a workeractivist also from Nowa Huta, cunning, resourceful,
whose voice was never clear until it joined the government propagandists; you haven't yet read the statement
of Marek B., spokesman for the National Committee, protege of Leszek, the doctor of Gdansk, who dragged the
name of Solidarity in the mud; neither have you read the
statement of Zygmunt L., from Szczecin, Marian j.'s adviser; it was he who, at that time, whispered him absurdities about the "jews in government," and "gallows for
profiteers"; today he denounces the "extremists." In
short, you don't yet know that this time, as always, there
will be people who will allow themselves to be manipula-
48
ted into telling lies Oike Zdzislaw R. from Poznan with
whom you spoke at the time of the dedication of the monument), influenced by threats. This time, as always, the
rats will leave the sinking ship first. But you know that
this situation is not new and that you are not going to
agree to talk to the official no matter how much he waves
your release papers before your eyes. You are not going to
explain to him that he is the slave here, and that no order
is going to come to free you. You are not going to explain
to him that these activist workers, these teachers, writers,
students, and artists, these friends and strangers who
crowd the smokey corridors of police headquarters, embody the freedom of the country-and that just for that
reason war has been declared upon them. You are not going to explain to this official, after he has slugged you with
the force of the sadism pent up these last fifteen months,
the meaning of Rosanov' s essay i.n which he asks the fundamental question for European culture that arises when
the man who holds the whip is face to face with the man
who is whipped. You are not going to explain to him that
meeting him in this place is nothing but a new version of
that old confrontation. No, you will explain nothing; you
won't even speak to him. You will give him an ironic
smile, you will refuse to sign whatever there is to sign (including the internment order), you will say how sorry you
are and ... you will leave the room.
On Jailers as Slaves
You will be transfered to the Bialoleka Prison in the
company of men who are a credit to the best of Polish society; a famous philosopher, a brilliant historian, a stage
director, a professor of economics, members of Solidarity
from Ursus and from the University, students and workers. You won't be beaten in prison. On the contrary. They
need you as a proof of their liberalism and their humanism. Won't you be shown to the Red Cross delegation? to
the deputies of the Diet? even to the Primate of Poland
himself? They will be fairly polite, fairly obliging, fairly
pleasant. Only occasionally will they make you run the
gauntlet of helmets, truncheons, and imported japanese
shields. But the only effect of this masquerade will be to
make it even more evident that the regime is like a bad
dog who would very much like to bite but cannot because
his rotten teeth make him powerless. The day of Pawka
Kortchaguine is past. Today it is enough to raise your
voice to kindle a gleam of fear in the eyes of the official.
Fear and uncertainty are betrayed despite the helmet, the
uniform, and the shield. And you will understand at once
that this fear on the part of the official is a source of hope
for you. Hope is essential. It is perhaps the most important thing there is ...
Hope is precisely what's at stake in the present struggle.
The officials want to force us to to renounce our hope.
They understand that the man who declares his loyalty to
a regime of violence and lies abandons all hope of seeing
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�Poland free from lies and violence. The loyalty oath aims
to transform us into servile beasts who will no longer raise
our heads to defend liberty and dignity. In refusing all en·
ticement to talk with the official, in refusing him your CO·
operation, in rejecting the role of informer and spy, in
choosing the human condition of political prisoner, you
preserve your hope. A hope not only in yourself and for
yourself, but one which is also in others, for others. Your
declaration of hope is like a bottle you cast from your
prison to be carried by the sea across the world to go
among men. If you succeed in reaching even one single
person, you have won.
I know what you will say: he is spouting commonplaces,
he is playing the hero, his head is in the clouds. That's not
exactly true.
True, I do assert commonplaces. Ordinary truths, how·
ever, have to be repeated frequently in order to endure,
particularly today when it takes courage to assert ordinary
truths. In contrast, relativism, otherwise so useful in intel·
lectual activity, may confound moral criteria and call into
question moral principles. . . Is this attitude synonymous
with the cult of heroism? I don't think so. You know you
are not a hero and you never wanted to be one. You didn't
want to die for your people, nor for freedom, or for any·
thing else ... You did not envy Ordon or Winkelride their
fate ... You wanted to live a normal life, to be able to con·
tinue to respect yourself and your friends. You loved the
moral ease that allowed you to feel free inside yourself, to
love beautiful women, to enjoy good drink. This war
caught you with a beautiful woman, not on the point of
attacking the offices of the Central Committee.
But since this war has been declared on you, along with
more than thirty thousand of your fellow citizens, normal
life is out of the question. A normal life, in which self·
respect is joined to material security, cannot be found in
the midst of police raids, summary sentences, outrageous
radio broadcasts, and underground Solidarity publications.
You must choose between moral and material luxury. You
know that your "ordinary" life today would have the bitter
taste of defeat. It is precisely because you want to enjoy
life that you won't give in to the seductive propositions of
the government bureaucrat. He promises you freedom, he
gives you glimpses of ordinary human happiness, but he
brings you only slavery, suffering, and damnation.
No, this is not heroism. It is a rational choice. Brecht
said; "Woe to the people who need heroes." He was right.
Heroism implies an exceptional situation, while the Poles
mili~
tary and police power.
I do not want to be misunderstood. I do not propose ro·
mantic intransigeance, but social resistance. It is not,
therefore, appropriate to bring up in this context, as
Daniel P. did in his article in Polityka, the two opposed
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Romantic Revolt and Organic Struggle
While he acknowledges the validity of both these posi·
tions, the writer defends those who espouse "organic
struggle" on the staff of Polityka, the journalists who con·
tinued to ply their trade. At the risk of finding themselves
questioned by their own children, "What did you do when
guns took the place of reason?", they decided to assume
the responsibility of staying at their posts instead of quietly
withdrawing. "There's no point in pursuing lost virtue,"
The Value of Morality
today need a "normal" and "general" resistance to
positions which have become classic in our history: the
one of romantic revolution and the other of "organic,
struggle. Let us see why.
writes Daniel P. "There's no point in mouthing grand
principles and forgetting the practical. There are no spurs
on bedroom slippers." (This apropos of the rebellious
journalists of Polityka.)
It is his view that "it is not in the interest of society that
the press disappear in Poland or that it should see 'its di·
versity even more restricted. We must work to send the
soldiers back to their barracks. Who will do it if we take on
easy jobs as spokesmen for exile organizations abroad, as
editors for nonpolitical newspapers?" Daniel P. uses here
arguments you know well beginning with the controversy
about the Essay on Grubs by Piotr Wierzbicki. He doesn't
beat around the bush, he doesn't ramble, he uses serious
arguments and states clearly the dilemmas that weigh
upon every Pole today.
To argue these points one must apply two standards,
one for particular issues and another one for general ques·
tions.
It may be true, as Daniel P. says, that the people who
believe in defiance are as essential as the people who be·
lieve in organic struggle, but I should like to add, however,
that it is important to be "organic" in form and "defiant"
in content. We need men who don't befoul themselves in
the lies of public life, who enjoy the good opinion of soci·
ety, who refuse to compromise with the sort of system
imposed on our country, but who do not endorse irrespon·
sible actions such as terrorism or guerilla attacks. In other
words, the dilemma isn't expressed simply in the terms
"organic struggle" versus "defiance" but in the terms
ganic struggle" versus ''collaboration."
"or~
Compromise is an indispensable element of a healthy
public life, on the condition, however, that society per·
ceives it as compromise. As soon as public opinion perceives it as a device or a betrayal, compromise loses its
validity. It becomes a mistake or a lie. To come out on the
side of WRONA* today amounts, as we both know well,
to coming out against the country. The loyalty oath the
officials demand of you, like the one, couched in slightly
different terms, demanded of the journalists of Polityka,
*WRON: The Military Council for National Defense; wrona means
"crow."
49
�has nothing to do with compromise: it is a certificate of
collaboration and so conceived. In signing it, those who
wanted to save the "renewal" (I don't like this official ex·
pression, I prefer "democratic form") put the seal on their
final condemnation. [An illegible phrase.] Daniel P. pre·
tends to believe that Polityka can once more become an
oasis of half-truths and of halfway honesty. I cannot agree
with him; the day is gone for this way of thinking. It was
gone well before December 13, 1981, even before the first
of September 1980. Which brings us back almost to the
middle of the time of Gierek when Polityka gave up its
role as liberal and moderate critic of the government to
become its glib apologist. Beginning in June 1976, with the
uprisings of U rsus and Radom, Polityka lost its credibility.
It wasn't even interesting any more; it was an anachronism.
The political rise of the editor-in-chief coincided with the
political death of the newspaper. Today Polityka exists
only as a caricature of its former self. Its history is the history of many Polish intellectuals who cherished the illusion that the system could be reformed from above, by
finding one's way into the corridors of power, by knocking
at the door of the Central Committee, by joining forces
with the minister in power. This idea has had its day.
Nothing can bring it back. The battlefield of social conflict, and therefore of the social compromise to come, is
today the factory and the university, no longer the halls of
the Central Committee or of the Diet. Despite the past
complexity and the distortion of the relations between
Communist power and Polish society, the Party only lost
its mandate with its declaration of this last "war." It's easy
to replace the policeman's helmet with the traditional
chapka of the Polish army. But that alone won't change
anything.
Resistance to the Government
If we, as an organized society, want to exert the least influence upon the future of Poland, we have to forge that
influence by a constant pressure on the machinery of
power. To count upon the good will of the military leadership is to rely on miracles. To count on their weakness, on
the other hand, has nothing irrational about it. It is not
irrational to think that the machinery of power could be
obliged to compromise. The obvious ideological and practical vacuum of the Party are proof. The government
50
defends its power and its privilege, not ideas or values.
The fact that it has had to resort to the definitive argument of force proves it. To paraphrase Hegel: "Minerva's
crow flies at night."
There you are, overwhelmed by the piercing sense of
your loneliness and weakness in the face of a military
machine which went into motion that December night.
You don't know what developed after that. You don't
know that people will gradually recover from the shock,
that underground newspapers are going to appear, that
Zbignew B. is going to direct the struggle from his hiding
place, that Wladyslaw E. from Wroclaw is going to escape
from the police, that events at Gdansk, Swidnik, and Poznan are going to make Poland tremble again, and that the
structure of the outlawed union will reappear. You don't
yet know that the generals direct a machine that jams and
sputters, and that the wave of repression and slander has
no effect.
Alone, facing police officers who wave their guns at
you, handcuffed, with teargas in your eyes, you can see
clearly despite the starless night, and you repeat the words
of your favorite poet: "A stone can change the course of
the avalanche in its path." And you want to be that stone
that changes the course of events, even if it is to be flung
at the ramparts.
Translated from a French translation of the Polish
by Linda Collins
Afternote:
The military regime in Poland has recently accused Michnik along with
other leaders of KOR (the Committee for Social Self-Defense)-Jacek
Kuron, Jan Litynski, Jan Jozef Lipski, Henryk Wujec-of treason and conspiracy, which carry the maximum penalty of death. The official press
treat them as guilty before "trial." In the judgement of the Hungarian
writer, George Konrad, in a letter of November 1 (see The New York Review of Books, December l, 1982), they may be shot before the West, or
anybody else outside of Poland, notices their danger. L.R.
AUTUMN/WJNTER 1982-83
�Not Just Another Communist Party:
The Polish Communist Party
Branko Lazitch
Communists parties the world over are much the same
in their doctrine: Marxism-Leninism; in their structure:
democratic centralism; in their history with its identical
periods: Lenin, Bolshevization, Stalinization, destalinization~ etc. As anyone can see at the present time, however,
the Polish Communist Party is a special case-a party unlike the other "brother parties." No other Communist party
in the world has entrusted its fate to the army; taken a career officer for its First Secretary; declared a state of war
against its own citizens. This is not the first time the Party
has been at war with the people of Poland. They have
been at war for more than sixty years.
Summer 1920
The story starts in the summer of 1920: the Soviet Polish War, the first revolutionary war of the Bolsheviks after their victory in Russia. A war in Lenin's conception on
two essential fronts. First: the collapse of the home front
through revolutionary propaganda (Agit-Prop). The call to
the people, and especially the soldiers, to rise up. A pamphlet in circulation in June 1920 reads:
Soldiers of the Polish Army! Work for the Victory of the
Revolution in Poland. No longer obey your leaders, who are
betraying you. Instead of fighting against your brothers, the
workers and the peasants of Russia and the Ukraine, turn
your arms on your officers, on the bourgeois and the landlords. Whoever fights against Soviet Russia fights against the
working class in the whole world and joins the enemies of the
people.
Second front of the revolutionary war: under the protection
of the tanks and cannons of the Red Army, the organization
of a provisional "national" power meant to bring Socialist
Poland into immediate existence. In Bialystok a revolutionBranko Lazitch writes for L'express. His most recent books are Le Rapport
Kroutchev et son histoire (Paris, Seuil1976) and L'€chec permanent, l' alliance communiste-socialiste (Paris, Laffont 1978).
This article first appeared in Commentaire, Spring 1982.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ary committee (a provisional government) was organized
under the presidency of the most well-known Polish revolutionary, Julian Marchlevski (Karski), with several other
Polish Communists who already held high positions in Soviet Russia and in the Communist International. From
the start Lenin counted on the success of this revolutionary war.
At his reception of the French Delegation to the Second Congress of the Co min tern on July 28 in the Kremlin,
Lenin overflowed in optimism: "The world revolution will
have taken a decisive step if Poland gives herself to Communism. Yes, the Soviets in Warsaw means Germany
shortly afterwards, the reconquest of Hungary, the revolt
of the Balkans against capitalism, Italy shaken-bourgeois
Europe cracking on all sides in a fearful hurricane."
The two Polish Communists in his immediate circle did
not share Lenin's euphoria. Of the first of these, Julian
Marchlevski himself, Trotsky was later to say: "There was
an unknown: what attitude would the Polish workers and
peasants have? Some of our Polish comrades, for instance
Julian Marchlevski, friend and companion of Rosa Luxemburg, entertained considerable scepticism." Later Lenin
revealed the doubts of the second ranking Polish Communist, Karel Radek, secretary of the International: "Radek
foresaw how it would turn out. He warned us. I was furious. I accused him of 'defeatism.' But he was essentially
right."
A military set-back outside of Warsaw followed this political setback throughout Poland. On August 18 the Red
Army began its retreat. It would not return for twenty
years, and then in the wake, not of revolutionary war, but
of the Hitler-Stalin pact in September 1939.
Pro-Trotsky
After this first conflict with the Polish people, the Polish Communist Party was compelled to set itself against
Moscow within the International. In the months that immediately preceded Lenin's death (January 21, 1924), the
struggle for the succession already raged. The Bolshevik
51
�old guard had banded together to remove the candidate
with the greatest prestige-who, however, had not always
been a Bolshevik-Leon Trotsky. The top of the International, the controlling troika of G. Zinoviev, the President,
and Kamenev and Stalin, were involved in this manuever.
Only two voices rose at the highest level of the Comintern
to denounce the plot against Trotsky in almost the same
words: the leadership of the Polish Communist Party and
Boris Souvarine, the representative of the French Communist Party at the Comintern. Made up of the three
W's: Walecki, Warski, and Wera Kostrzewa, the Polish
leadership declared: "For our Party, for the whole Comintern, and for the world revolutionary proletariat the name
of Comrade Trotsky is irrevocably linked to the victorious
October Revolution, to the Red Army and Communism."
Six months after Lenin's death, in the summer of 1924, at
the fifth Congress of the Comintem, this attitude of the Polish Communist Party came under examination. A Polish
Commission was formed, presided over by a Bolshevik who
had never spoken during the congresses of the Comintem,
and who, unlike the other Bolsheviks involved in the business of the organization, did not know a single foreign language: Stalin. At the time his name meant absolutely nothing
to almost all the foreign delegates at the Congress. But the
Poles knew him well-and he them.
Unlike the other Committees that, since the birth of
the Comintern in 1919, had used German, the Polish
Committee under Stalin carried on its work in Russian.
The discussion moved immediately from the realm of
ideas to the realities of power. Stalin circulated in the cor-·
ridors of the Congress to assert that the "bones of the obstinate must be broken." "Not those whose bones can be
broken for the same reasons as ours but those who have
no bones at all are dangerous to you," Wera Kostrzewa replied, not in the corridors, but on the floor of the Congress. Her words pointed to the increasing political, moral,
and material corruption within the Comintern. At another time she also objected to the excessive dependence
of the foreign branches on the Russian Communist Party,
the dominant force in the Comintern: "The most important branches of the Co mintern ought to enjoy greater independence in the making of policy within their party and
greater responsibility in all international questions." But
in the following years in the Comintern things turned out
exactly the opposite.
The Russians had already mastered the technique of
manipulating meetings both in committees and in plenary
sessions at this fifth Congress, the Congress of Bolshevization. The immediate consequence was the removal of
the leadership of the Polish Communist Party with a resolution that: "The Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party, under the political direction of the group
Warski, Kostrzewa, and Walecki, despite its revolutionary
words, has shown itself incapable of applying the line of
the Communist InternationaL"
This was only a prelude. It took ten years for Stalin to
52
show the Poles his true stuff: to make blood flow. He
made blood flow not only in the Russian Communist Party
but throughout the Comintern. In the Comintern he
began, fittingly, with the Polish Communist Party.
1933: Second Purge
The time came in 1933, the victim was Jerzy Sochacki:
member of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party since 1921; Communist deputy to the Sejm;
member of the Politbureau; permanent representative of
the Polish Communist Party to the headquarters of the
Comintern since 1930; member of the two supreme bodies of the Comintern, the Praesidium and the Secretariat.
On the fifteenth of August 1933, the Soviet police arrested Sochacki, and accused him of spying from the time
he joined the Communist Party in 1921. A complete dossier was drawn up to cover his twelve years {(work" as a
spy. A secret trial was staged. "I die proud and happy for
my leader Pilsudski," were quoted as Sochacki's "last
words" before execution. Stalin's justice had moved swiftly
between Sochacki's arrest on the fifteenth of August and
his execution on September 4, 1933, Sochacki's postumous rehabilitation, in contrast, had to wait for the destalinization that followed the Twentieth Congress of the
Soviet Communist Party in February 1956, and Gomulka's
return to power in Warsaw.
A Pole thus became the first foreign Communist to lose
his life in Moscow. Shortly afterward, in 1936 and 1938,
the Polish Communist party knew slaughter. The Polish
Party suffered more victims than any other foreign
branch of the Comintern. The Hungarian, German, and
Jugoslav Communists suffered Stalin's extermination but
in fewer numbers than the Poles. The nature of factscommon revolutionary past, linguistic facility, and geographical proximity-made for more Polish Communist
political exiles in Russia than from any other country in
Europe. The men and women from the rest of Europe depended on the protection-relative-of their respective
Communist Parties, members in good standing of the
Comintern. The only branch of the Comintern that Stalin
had dissolved, the Polish Communist Party, had no such
resort.
193 8: Dissolution by Stalin
In January 1938 the official organ of the Comintern,
The International Communist, published an article called
"Provocateurs at Work" that held that agents of Pilsudski
had long ago infiltrated the Polish Communist Party up
to, and including, its top leadership. After this article,
Communist publications ceased to mention the Polish
Communist Party. There was no public notice of the decision in Moscow in April1938 to dissolve it. The party simply no longer existed physically or politically. Alone, Stalin
could only undo the Polish CP. The next year, 1939, Hit-
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�ler's alliance made it possible for Stalin to abolish the Polish State as well.
1942: Resurrection
After his pact with Hitler, Stalin had no need of either
the Polish Communist Party or the Polish state. Hitler's
attack on Russia on June 22, 1941, however, overturned
the situation. Stalin recognized Poland in 1941. In 1942
he authorized the resurrection of the Polish Communist
Party. The beginning of 1942 was a critical moment for
the Soviet Union: Hitler's military superiority was beyond
doubt; the alliance with the democracies was only at its
first steps. Two reasons for Stalin to muffle the emphasis
on Communism on its doctrine, practice, and even on
the word itself. Stalinist vocabulary saw the disappearance
of the adjective "communist." The new Communist parties organized during the war avoided it: in Switzerland,
the Labour Party; in Iran, The Party of the Masses (Tudeh);
in Cyprus, The Progressive Party of the Working People; in
Poland, The Worker's Party.
This new label did not make the Polish CP anymore
successful. By the summer of 1944, on the eve of Soviet
troops' entry into Poland, the Party numbered about
20,000, a ridiculous total. The Communists who had survived Hitler's occupation or Stalin's Gulags could count
on only one power, the Red Army. In the summer of 1944,
at Lublin, a Committee was formed, a carbon copy of the
1920 Committee of Bialystok-except for the inferior
quality of its members. The Lublin Committee became
the nucleus of the future regime, because the Red Army
occupied the country.
1
1944-1945: Satellization
Between 1944 and 1945 Poland, like all the other countries under the Soviet jackboot, underwent satellization.
The usalami tactic" was the same as in Hungary and else-
where: first, the gradual elimination of adversaries; then
of allies; the compulsory fusion of Communist and Socialist Parties. Soviet colonization offered Poland the prize of
a Marshal of the Red Army, Rokossovsky, to head the
Polish "National" Ministry of Defense. There was more:
the persecution of the Catholic Church: the arrest of Cardinal Wysznski; purges of Party leadership: the pushing
aside and the arrest of Gomulka who, however, was neither hailed before a People's Tribunal nor shot.
1956: Rehabilitation
Starting in 1956, the year of the Twentieth Congress of
the Soviet Communist Party and of destalinization in Soviet Russia and elsewhere, the story of the Polish Communist Party again takes its distance from the "brother parties."
The Polish Party took the lead. The Twentieth Congress
opened on the fourteenth of September without at first
1HE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
arousing excitement in Moscow. Warsaw, in contrast, felt
its effects immediately. Large-scale photographs of the
three founders of the Polish Communist Party, Warski,
Walecki, and Wera Kostrzewa-all three victims of Stalinappeared on the front page of the Communist daily Tribuna Ludu on the nineteenth of February. The same
front page also carried a declaration of the five "brother
parties" that for the first time revealed what had happened
eighteen years before: "In 1938 the Executive Committee
of the Communist International adopted a resolution to
dissolve the Polish CP on the grounds of an accusation of
widespread penetration of the ranks of the Party by enemy
agents. It has now been established that this accusation
was based on documents forged by a gang of saboteurs
and provacateurs whose true role was not brought to light
until the unmasking of Beria". No mention of Stalin. It
was as if he had played no role in the history of the Polish
CP.
In the aftermath of the Twentieth Congress another
exploit distinguished the Polish CP. Khrushchev's Secret
Report in circulation among the "brother parties" in the
East found its way westward through Warsaw. The most
explosive document ever to come from leading Communist circles came in this way to have its world-wide effect.
The Gomulka Experiment
In June 1956 Poland also saw another historical event,
the first of its kind after the initiation of uncertainty: the
revolt of the people in Poznan. The same year in October
there was another unprecedented event: Khruschev came
to Warsaw at the head of a Soviet delegation determined
to impose its will on Warsaw and the Polish CP. The attempt ended abruptly. Gomulka came back to power.
This Polish "October Spring" began a new experiment-a
reexamination of Communism and a reform from within.
The result was negative. Instead of democratizing the
Communist system, the Polish CP only weakened itself.
Movements of the workers and people brought about
three changes in the top leadership of the CP. In 1956,
1970, and in 1980 three first secretaries fell under pressure from the masses, facts unprecedented in the history
of "real" socialism. Once again the Polish CP knew a lot
different from the other "brother parties". Its acceptance
of powers parallel to its own made its lot unique in addition: the spiritual power of the Church starting in the
mid-fifties; the power of the Solidarity Union after 1980.
The military coup on December 13, 1981, brought this exceptional situation to an end at the price of a no less exceptional situation: it reversed the roles of Army and Party.
The Party now transmits the orders of the Army. Such a
situation cannot last. There will be new sudden changes
and reversals in the chequered history of this Party-and
in the tragic story of Poland.
Translated by Brother Robert Smith and Leo Raditsa
53
�A Nighttime Story
Linda Collins
On the day the president of Egypt was assassinated,
Charles Pettit's little boy had stayed home from school
with a temperature. In the middle of the morning, his
mother found him sitting on the floor of the living room
looking at television.
"Let me tie your bathrobe," she said. "It's too chilly to
be sitting there with your bathrobe open."
He didn't look around. When she glanced at the screen
to see what he was watching, she knew by the chaotic way
the camera was moving that again something bad had
happened.
A while later Charles telephoned from his office in
Greenfield. He had heard the news on the car radio, but
he hadn't called her right away, he said, because he hoped
it wasn't true.
"It's true," she said.
"I know if s true," said Charles.
She said she thought Robert might not have understood what he had seen. He could have thought he was
looking at a movie, she said.
"Perhaps," said Charles.
In the evening, the children made brownies with their
mother while Charles watched the news, turning from
channel to channel. Then he went outside and breathed
the cold night air.
The next day Robert was well, and the following day he
went back to school.
On Friday, Charles drove the five miles home from
work as the sun set and the sky flamed. Yellow stacks of
freshly split wood sat beside each house, and in the openings of sheds and outbuildings he could see the same raw
color. An occasional meadow was still bright green, and
here and there a dark horse raised its head as he drove by.
Remembering they were to use the car later, he left it half
way out of the shed, where his own firewood was stacked.
Linda Collins has previously contributed "Going to See the Leaves"
(Autumn 1981) to the St. Johh's Review. Her stories have appeared in
Mademoiselle, the Hudson Review, and other magazines.
54
His wife was in the kitchen straightening up after the
children's supp.er. He kissed her on the cheek. She put
down the sponge and turned to him for another kiss.
"Make your drink," she said. ''I have a few more things
to do."
The children were waiting for him in the living room.
Robert was in his dinosaur pajamas, and the younger
child, Lizzie, wore a thick one-piece suit with padded feet.
An outsized zipper ran up to her chin.
Charles put his drink down on the coffee table and took
off his glasses to receive their embraces.
When they were all sitting on the rug near the fire he
put his glasses back on. Lizzie moved into his lap.
"Daddy," she said and pressed his cheek with her hand.
She stroked his sleeve, touched the buttons of his jacket,
patted his face. She was rosy from her bath and her fingers smelled of soap. He took her wandering hand and
held it still.
"Daddy!" she said.
Releasing her hand, he ran his finger over her fine pale
hair. She looked up at him with a fierce expression.
"Tell us a story," she said. "Tell."
Robert, who was six, sat with his legs straight out in
front of him. He rotated his feet in their new bedroom
slippers and watched the elastic stretch and retract. His
eyes were brown and his hair was smooth and brown.
Where his sister was fat and flushed, he was thin. He was
sitting slightly apart from his father and sister, and
although he kept his eyes on his slippers, having noticed
that the firelight lent them a shine which could be made
to slide from the toe to the heel by twisting his foot, every
now and then he directed a quick look at his father. He
busied himself with slippers, dinosaurs, and whatever diversions the fire could offer: sparks, gleams, the collapse
of a burnt-out log, but when he looked up his glance measured the distance between his father and his sister. He
waited.
"All right, kitty cats," said Charles. "What shall it be?"
"Ticky tats," said the little girl.
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�"Kitty cats," said Robert. "Kitty cats." He was mocking
his father who would not have said "kitty cats" had he
been directing his attention only at him. His father could
make him laugh when he didn't want to, and often did, by
saying things like "kitty cats," and worse.
Suddenly he felt tired of keeping this stiff watch and
unbending guard. He sighed, acknowledging a kind of de·
feat, and he moved in closer to Daddy and Lizzie.
"All right/' said Charles. "Ready?"
"Ready," said the children.
Lizzie put her thumb in her mouth and then took it out
and looked at it. It was wet. "Ready," she said.
Charles began the story: "Once there was a little girl
and her name was Frimble. She was a very good little girl.
She always did whatever her mother asked her to do, and
she always did what her father asked her to do. In nursery
school she was good, and she was good in the supermarket. She stayed on her side in the car and she never forgot
to brush her hair. She smiled at the good and frowned at
the bad-"
"And sometimes she was very sad," said Robert, rapidly
and in a slightly confused tone as though surprised to find
himself saying anything at all.
"No," said his father. "She wasn't actually ever sad. She
was quite happy. Reasonably happy."
Both children looked at him. The little boy moved
closer and the father reached toward him and grasped
with two fingers of one hand the slender column of the
back of his neck. The child put his head to one side to relish the feeling and to bear the happiness that had begun
to mount inside him. He let his eyes close.
The little girl shifted her weight on Charles's thigh, and
he, feeling a sudden strain in his back, said, "Why are we
sitting on the floor? Let's go sit on the couch."
They stood up.
The move meant they had to pick up and start again.
From the couch the fire looked far away and formal.
"Daddy!" said the little girl imperiously.
He put an arm around each of them and started again:
"But one fine day-"
"Charles, not too long." His wife had stopped in the
doorway to look at them. Her arms were full of bathtowels. Later, when the children were in bed, they would
have a quick supper, and then, as they sometimes did on
Friday evening, as soon as the neighbor's daughter came,
they would drive down to Greenfield and go to the
movies.
"And then?" said Robert.
Lizzie was standing up on Charles's leg. He could feel
her toes inside her rubberized pajama soles as she tried to
balance on his thigh. Gently, by pressing his hand against
the small of her back, he persuaded her to sit down. "But
one day, one fine and cloudless day, when Frimble had
gone with her nursery school class to buy fish food for the
class goldfish, she got separated from the other children
and the teacher, and she found herself all alone in the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
middle of the shopping center. She looked down the ar·
cade on her right and saw no one. Then she looked to the
left and saw no one there. She was all alone." The story
went on, almost by itself. He knew he wasn't doing his
best. Sometimes his stories amazed him. Some stories
poured through him as though they came from some·
where else; they bemused even the teller, and he could
imagine that years from now, when the children were
grown up, they would remember the best ones, like The
Boy Who Had X-ray Vision, or the one about the children
who lived in the woods on the far side of the dump.
He went on, speaking in a soft voice, and told them how
Frimble was at last rescued from the locked and echoing
supermarket by a certain first-grade boy whose intelligence in deducing her location was equalled only by his
agility in squeezing into narrow places. "And so the boy,
having found his way into the warehouse, edged past
boxes and cartons and crates. How dark it was! He knew,
however, that he must not let himself be frightened. If he
panicked, he would not be able to tell which cartons held
paper towels and paper diapers and toilet paper-the
large light ones that rocked if you gave them a little
push-and which, heavier and pungent, held soap powder
and soap flakes. For then he'd never find Frimble whose
voice he had heard over the intercom before the power
failed, telling him she was between the dogfood and the
place where the candy was. 'Courage,' he said to himself,
and so, listening and feeling and sniffing, he made his
way."
Charles glanced from his son to his daughter and saw by
their grave, wide-opened eyes and their parted lips that
their hearts lay with the lost girl and the brave frightened
boy. His own heart went out to them and he decided,
while he was speaking, to edit one or two effects he had
had in mind and hasten the denouement.
The fire made a popping noise.
The children were sitting close to their father. Robert
was holding one of his father's hands in his hands.
As he finished the story, Charles could hear the children breathing.
"And then she went home?'' asked his daughter.
"And then she went home," he said.
The movie took place in California. The camera slid
around a house in such a way as to induce apprehension
in the viewer. In the house lived one of the main characters, a fifty-year-old woman, played by an actress who was
making a movie for the first time in many years. Charles
was reminded of his youth by the sight of her face. He had
liked her in college and even in high school. There was a
lot of driving in the movie, particularly by women, who got
in and out of their cars in a way characteristic of women
in movies and on television. The way they slammed car
doors and drove away said: This is California, this is modern life, this is dangerous and exciting. The woman lived
55
�alone in the house, and in the evening, after her housekeeper and gardener went home, it \VaS clear she was in
danger. She had lovers. Someone was going to kill her.
One of her lovers was going to kill her. Her death was prolonged. Charles knew at some point his wife would turn
her head away. When she did, he smiled and gave her a little pat.
«Tell me when it's over," she said.
"It's only ketchup," he said.
"I don't think so," she whispered back.
During the time the several police officers were weighing the probable involvement of the known suspects, the
minor characters were portrayed in places familiar to nonCalifornians from other movies: at a Pacific beach house,
at an orange ranch, and at a dusty gas station and general
store at a crossroads in the desert. The killer did turn out
to be one of her lovers, but not the obvious one. The
shoot-out took place at the tiny motel where the housekeeper's aged mother lived.
"How did you like it?" asked Charles in the lobby, feeling for the car keys.
44
Horrible," said his wife. "They said he was an Ameri-
can Lelouch. I'm sorry I brought you."
44
You didn't make me come," he said. "Anyway, I liked
it."
They drove home through the quiet countryside. From
time to time their headlights picked out of the darkness a
tree whose leaves had turned yellow or flashed on the
black window panes of a farmhouse where everyone had
gone to bed. "I think we could use some heat," said
Charles, and turned the knob for the heater ·and the one
for the fan. After a minute they felt the warm air. It was
soothing to drive through the pale autumn fields. Neither
spoke. Just before the road started its rise toward their
village it passed through a marshy place where mist was
thick on either side and they were plunged into milky
obscurity. Charles reached with his right hand under his
wife's skirt and felt for the elasticized edge of her undergarment.
At home, she paid the baby sitter and watched at the
window while the girl ran across the road to her own
house where the outside light was on. When the light
went off, she let the curtain drop and went upstairs. She
pushed the children's door open over the stiff new carpet
56
and Charles stood in the doorway while she touched both
children and adjusted the window and the shade. Then
they went together into their own room.
Much later in the night, Charles woke up. The television was still on. Dread had seized him in his sleep. He
had dreamed they were all in a train, his wife and both
children, and the outside of the train was being pounded
by bullets. There was a terrible racket of metal against
metal and it was not at all clear he was going to be able to
continue to protect them. Awake, he was as afraid as he
had been asleep. He lay still and waited for his arms and
legs to stop trembling.
After a while he felt calmer. He turned on his side, toward the television. It was a movie, in black and white, set
in Prague during World War II, about three Czech exiles
who parachut~d into Czechoslovakia on a mission to kill
the Reichskommissar; one of the three, it seemed, had betrayed the others. Intrigued now, and wide awake, he
reached for his wife's extra pillow, which was lying between them, and stuck it under his head. His heart was
still beating heavily. The room was silvery. He stretched
his legs and began to relax. The wife, or the girlfriend, of
one of the exiles came and went, bringing messages.
There was a lot of running. It must have been the sound
of gunfire from the television he had heard in his dream.
In the dream he had tried to lie on top of the children to
protect them from bullets. He had tried to lie on top of
them without hurting them.
In the crypt of St. Vitus, the two loyal Czechs met their
heroic end while gunfire sounded from the street.
When the movie was over, he turned to the news channel and watched a summary of the events of the week.
The film had been edited. He was never able to find what
his wife said Robert had seen: the arm, the clothing, the
expression on the injured man's face.
He saw the sky above Cairo and the plumes of colored
smoke expanding as the formation of Mirages flew by the
reviewing stand. Within the reviewing stand the chairs
were all turned over. It looked as though no one was there,
but then, like anemones on the sea floor, the chairs
started to move and wave about, and one by one the men
appeared from beneath the chairs, their hands first, as
they reached from below for leverage to help them rise.
AU1UMN/WINTER 1982-83
�Marx's Sadism
Robert J. Loewen berg
"The death of mankind is ... the goal of socialism." Igor Shafarevich, The Socialist Phenomenon
It is a notorious fact, or for some an ironic and scandal·
ous one, that Karl Marx's hatred of the bourgeois intellec·
tuals, of liberals, has not prevented them from becoming
the heirs and custodians of his ideals. Except for the liberal
intellectuals who today dominate the universities and al·
lied institutions, principally the media, there is no respect·
able Marxism. That is, unless one counts as respectable
the wrinkled pedagogues of dialectical materialism and
their dozing charges in Russia or the freakish ideological
concoctions of Oriental tyrants. Moreover, insofar as the
bourgeois intellectuals have inherited the mantle of Marx
in a culture that cheerfully submits its offspring to instruc·
tion in today's liberal ideals, ideals that in part descend
from the abolitionists, the very civilization of America can
be called Marxist. In fact it has been called this by the world's
most outstanding Marxist scholar, Alexander Kojeve in
delight, over twenty years ago.'
'
That Kojeve's observation was not entirely wishful
thinking by a frustrated communist is suggested by the
comments of another more recent Russian emigre, not a
Communist, who only months ago confirmed Kojeve's
judgment. Lev Navrozov was shocked to find that America
is "a Left-biased" culture, that is, one in which all political
opinions agree upon a vocabulary that is largely Marxist.
Navrozov called this discovery, in sadness, "the most eye·
opening experience I have had since my arrival. .. from
Associate professor of history at Arizona State University, Robert Loewenberg has previously contributed "The Trivialization of the Holocaust
as an Aspect of Modern Idolatry" (Winter 1982) and "That Graver Fire
Bell: A Reconsideration of the Debate over Slavery from the Standpoint
of Lincoln" (Summer 1982) to the St. fohn's Review. He is at work on
studies of Emerson and of the abolitionists.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Russia in 1972."2 Important here is not the sadness or the
delight of Russian observers but their agreement about
what is, after all, a commonplace: America is a Left-biased
culture. History, it almost appears, has turned the master
dialectician, Marx, on his head. Having reduced Marx to his
antithesis, bourgeois communism, history now evidently
prepares to sweep even him into its ample dustbin. Ko·
jeve, a Marxist who transcended Marx, believed he had a
more properly Marxist explanation.
"The United States," Kojeve said, "has already attained
the final stage of Marxist 'communism,' seeing that, prac·
tically, all the members of a 'classless society' can from now
on appropriate ... everything that seems good to them ... "
The classless society, Kojeve continues, is "the end of His·
tory [that is, it is the eternal present when] men ... con·
struct their edifices and works of art as birds build their
nests and spiders spin their webs, ... perform musical con·
certs after the fashion of frogs and cicadas ... and ... in·
dulge in love like adult beasts .... But there is more ... the
definitive disappearance of human Discourse ... [that is,
human] 'language' ... would be like what is supposed to
be the 'language' of bees." 3
What Kojeve tells us then is that the liberal intellectuals,
the same liberals that he as well as Marx despised, are not
so much Marxists as the products of Marxism. They are
witnesses to Marx's truth. America is the realm of free·
dom. How else, Kojeve suggests, shall we understand the
conceptual egalitarianism of our culture or relativism? Has
it not transformed words into gestures and made a kind of
language of bees the law of the land? And do we not ap·
proach the free love ideal of Kojeve, to say nothing of the
character of our edifices and our popular concerts? But im·
pressions can be misleading, at least as justifications for
sweeping generalizations such as Kojeve's. There is no
doubt something wrong or even self-serving about his idea,
because his experience of America did not lead Kojeve
to question his Marxism.
57
�If we are to accept that America has already achieved
the final stage of Marxist communism, the realm of freedom, certain serious problems and questions arise. In the
first place such an achievement can hardly be supposed to
satisfy Marxists. For them the violent revolutionary over·
throw, at least, of bourgeois capitalism is an article of faith.
There has been no such event in America as there has been
no abolition of property. Nor can today's liberal intellec·
tuals be remotely likened to a revolutionary cadre. As·
suredly they are not the descendants of one. But there is
another set of questions that arises in connection with Ko·
jeve's observation. If it is at all correct to say that America
has attained the final stage of Marxist communism, what
are we to identify as the sources, both historical and philo·
sophie, of American culture and of the notorious fact that
our liberal intellectuals are heir to Marx's ideals? How has
American culture arrived at the final stage of Marxist
communism without Marx and without a vindication of
Marxist historical processes?
Perhaps the obvious answer is the right one: Marx was
not radical enough. American culture is not Marxist com·
munism but some other "ism" that looks like Marxism. We
may reasonably suppose that our present-day American
ideal and practice of freedom has its sources in indigenous
traditions and institutions. In fact the historical beginning
of what Kojeve describes as the attainment in the United
States of the final stage of Marxist communism is found
in the abolitionist movement, in particular in the thinking
of its radical figures. In addition to William Lloyd Garrison
and other famous abolitionists, these include two of the
more daring, and as they were called, ultraist reformers of
that day, Stephen Pearl Andrews and John Humphrey
Noyes. And, although Emerson and Thoreau were not ac·
tive abolitionists, their contributions to the movement in
the form of conceptual elaboration of the ideal of freedom
were great. Finally, we are guided by the abolitionists' vi·
sion, actually by the movement's most acid and brilliant
contemporary critic, George Fitzhugh, who was a socialist
and the nation's top defender of slavery, to the philosophic
source, that is, to the source of the institutions that have
grown up from abolitionist seed to become the "final stage
of Marxist 'communism'."
Fitzhugh's judgment (and it is important to know that
he was a proto-Marxist of the kind to attract favorable in·
teres! from communist historians in our day) was this: the
abolitionist ideal of freedom did not really differ from his
own ideal of slavery.4 The difference between slavery and
abolitionism was, he said, that abolitionists would cure the
problems of free society, above all the problems stemming
from inequalities created by profit, by giving men yet more
freedom rather than less. Fitzhugh, however, said the abolitionists' ideal of freedom would lead them to free love and
this, he concluded, would lead them to despotism.
The discovery of Fitzhugh that abolition must lead
either to Southern slavery or to free love, which would lead
to despotism, was an insight of genius. He made this dis·
58
covery after reading the abolitionist and communist writer
Stephen Pearl Andrews who later beca!Tie the Pontiff of
Free Lovism in America, and the first American to print
the Manifesto. What Fitzhugh did not see was that free
love was a radicalization of the socialist labor theory of
value, or the principle of Marx that man is "nothing but the
creation of ... labour.''' This discovery, in particular the
uncovering of an infallible linkage between the timeless
and universal fact of human sexuality and the founding
doctrine of modern political theory, the state of nature, according to which man has no telos, was made by another
man more radical than Marx. Historians should now begin
to recognize that the lines of liberationist reasoning reaching into our time from the abolitionist and reform movements of the nineteenth century have their philosophic
source much less in Marx or even in Hegel than in a certain
Frenchman. Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade (17401814), a self-described "libertine" (his American editors remind us that this word is drawn "from the Latin liber:
'free' -an exceptional man of exceptional penchants, passions and ideas") is an author whose real thought, as these
same editors rightly say, ''remains . .. unknown.'' 6
Unlike Friedrich Engels, the Marquis de Sade did not
find it "curious ... that in every large revolutionary movement the question of 'free love' comes to the foreground.'''
Sade understood that free love is the revolution. Neither
have the liberal epigones of Engels as yet uncovered their
intimate connection with the man who is defined by the
"Latin liber: 'free'." This is striking considering that these
same thinkers have not' been slow to count men such as
Engels among the great leaders of the international antislavery movement.' Even more important, today's liberals
regard themselves as the descendants of the abolitionists
who, like them, "dream of extending the intimate love of
the private family to a wider circle of social relationships
.. '[and] debate ... the justifications for monogamous mar·
riage, the proper role of woman, and the best methods
of child-rearing."' In sum, the oversight regarding Sade's
proper and central place in the history of modern freedom
is a grave one. Except for a few daring poets, for the Surre·
alists, and more recently a handful of avant garde literary
critics all of whom consider him a heroic figure, Sa de is in
truth "unknown."lO
First and foremost a political writer and theorist, Dona·
tien de Sade is, however, known only as a pornographer.
Certainly he was a pornographer. But it seems unlikely to·
day that anyone except the most hopelessly prurient or
naive student could doubt that pornography is intrinsically
political even if it is more subtly, and more effectively, PO·
litical than utopian or science fiction. Pornography stands
in automatic rebellion against civility and against the so·
cia! as such. Indeed, as we shall see, it stands in opposition
to the human condition. Unlike theft or prostitution which
cannot easily thrive without honesty and chastity respectively, pornography, especially in Sade's expert hands (and
especially in its written form) is the enemy, rather like mur·
AUTUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�der, a crime Sade prized, of everything civil. Sade sought
to found a critique that would justify the destruction, as
Marx put it, of "everything existing." 11 His aspirations, also
like Marx, were cosmic. To men living in the last third of
the twentieth century when pornography of the sort Sade
wrote secretly in jail can be bought in supermarkets, and
when the ideals he promoted are legal or social commonplaces or soon to become so (for example, homosexuality,
incest, abortion, murder, cannibalism), it seems fair to say
that Sade had a better understanding of the role of "the
abolition ... of the family" than his more famous revolutionary successor who regarded it as a mere "practical measure."" Sade had a profound understanding of why "the
attack on the family ... could not be shirked," as a student
of the socialist idea and of Robert Owen, its most famous
popularizer prior to Marx, has said. This attack is in truth
"central to the whole communitarian position." 13
The failure of our historians to grasp Sa de's great importance in the history of the communitarian movement cannot be explained by any secret writing in Sade or by any
lack of historical interest in an approach such as Sade' s
that emphasizes material factors. We cannot read very far
in Sade, in Marx, or in the history of American radical reform movements before we come upon an intersection that
relates property and freedom. Property, they all concur,
has its roots in the self, in amour propre or vanity. This of
course is Rousseau's idea, the foundation of his critique of
civilization. Moreover, it was Marx's solution to the problem of civilization considered as exchange deriving from
the division of labor, his solution, that is, of the problem of
the labor theory of value, that made him famous. A critique
of human enslavement based upon unequal exchange,
Marx's idea was that man's freedom lay in the principle
that all labor is equal. Men shall be freed by work. Sade (and
the American abolitionists as well) agreed that the inequality arising from the division of labor was man's slavery.
But Sade's solution to this problem was more radical than
Marx's. As for the solutions of Fitzhugh or the abolitionists, they were more Sadean than we have guessed until
now. Sade's idea was that men shall be freed not by work
but by pleasure.
Marx, we know, shared the assumption of his time that
labor is the basis of all value. It was, however, Marx's revision of this idea, his "trenchant distinction," as a recent
Marxist writer and admirer of Fitzhugh has put it, that the
ground of exchange was not use-value (for example hats
and corn are not commensurable in use.)l' Rather the
basis of exchange is labor as such or labor measured by duration. Where the means of producing hats and corn are
privately owned, and where labor itself is therefore an item
in exchange (labor power), and also privately owned in its
right (by the laborer), it follows, said Marx, that profit, hence
also alienation and unfreedom, is precisely a consequence
of exchange. Exchange serves capital, not needs. Marx
then radicalized the labor theory of value by applying it to
labor itself. He counted profit as the sale or exchange of
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
labor-value. According to this view, labor as work is credited
or paid its value at the same time that the product of the
labor is paid its value. The "surplus value," or profit, is
then a legitimate theft from labor.
The abolition of the division of labor and exchange,
thereby of civil society and all that goes with it, is tantamount to the appearance of man as absolutely free. Freedom, in other words, is no other than the abolition of
amour propre, of vanity. Vanity in the sense of selfish is
understood by Rousseau, as by Marx, to be the product of
meum et teum; all relationships are founded in property
and are property. This commutative proposition makes relationship as such, or dependence, property. But the substance of this freedom in Marx and in Rousseau as well is
problematical. What is this nonselfish, or as we say in common speech, unselfish being? What is freedom?
Marx did not explain the realm of freedom perhaps for
the same reason that he was at pains to insist, at the other
or starting end of his thought, that the inevitable question
regarding the origins of man and nature is impermissiblean "abstraction," as he says. 15 Instead, Marx explains the
source of freedom. Sade, however, admits of no such restraints. He merely drew out to its fullest extent the idea
that all labor is equal, that what Fitzhugh called skill and
wit and what Andrews called natural wealth is nature's
gift.I6 Like water from a spring this natural wealth is free
to all men.
If one's natural wealth, actually one's possession of those
endowments of nature which make for inequality, is as
free to everyone as air and water, then it follows that all
exclusive relationships, especially marriage, are radically
unfree. It was Andrews who had said, in explaining natural
wealth, that "when man deals with Nature, he is dealing
with an abject servant or slave ... man is a Sovereign and
Nature his minister. He extorts from her rightfully, whatever she can be made to yield. The legitimate business of
man is the conquest and subjugation of Nature." 17 This was
Sade' s opinion, too. Man's overcoming of the involuntary
or natural distinction between the sexes, the distinction at
the root of all division oflabor (thus the source of all property and pain), is the final, actually the first freedom; it is
the highest pleasure. Pleasure, not labor, sex, nor reproduction explains man's origin and his purposes. Where
Marx had said that "the whole of what is called world history is nothing but the creation of man by human labour,
and the emergence of nature for man ... has the evident
and irrefutable proof of his self-creation, of his own origins," Sa de proclaimed that man's origin is in pleasure.IB
In fact he does not distinguish pleasure or creation from
masturbation or pornography. Human freedom places the
endowments given by Nature to oneself and to others, like
air and water, at the disposal of all.
Sade' s idea of freedom looks forward to the replacement
of selfhood and the unmooring of all selves for use by others.
This is free love. And Sade realized, as would Kojeve, that
this objective involved the "definitive annihilation of Man
59
�properly so-called" along with the destruction of language
and philosophy." Sade realized the need for an attack as a
kind of self-rape on all creative powers, human and divine,
by the liberating and death-defying pornographer. This is
a political and philosophic undertaking, and because it flies
with greatest daring in the face of all human history and
fact, it begins with seizure of the world.
It will be obvious to the reader that Sa de's ideals, whatever else may be said of them, do not entail revolution. He
regarded the abolition of private property, following the
politicization of all human affairs that attends the liberation of the sexes~ as a mere "practical measure". Any vestiges of "this barbarous inequality" might legitimately be
cured by so traditional a means as theft: "Is theft, whose
effect is to distribute wealth more evenly, to be branded
as a wrong in our day, under our government which aims at
equality?" The state must indeed stimulate this useful if
simple equalizer in view of the admirable way that it "furthers equality and ... renders more difficult the conservation of property."20 Sade had no need of dialectical materialism. A pragmatist in economic matters as in others, he
would have dismissed Marx's contemptuous labeling of his
ideas as bourgeois radicalism while attacking Marx as an
absolutist. If man is made by pleasure and not by labor he
requires only pornography and a certain education in the
"sublimities of Nature."21 Sade's elaboration of these ideas
is found in an ingenious essay entitled "Yet another Effort,
Frenchmen, if you Would become Republicans."
The positioning of this essay is part of its meaning. Sade
embeds it in the middle of his pornographic novel-play entitled Philosophy in the Bedroom in which sexual acrobatics
is the main theme. In addition to the amorous relationship between a brother and sister with which the story begins, the plot turns upon the efforts of the protagonist, a
homosexual named Dolmance, a paramour of the brother,
to instruct a fifteen-year-old virgin, Eugenie, paramour of
the sister and the daughter of "one of the wealthiest commercial figures in the capital" (thus the story's predictable
anticapitalist element), in libertinism and debauchery."
Dolmance' s success, of which there was never any doubt,
is illustrated at the book's theoretical center, the womb of
the book, when Eugenie delightedly leads the revelers in
the near murdering of the story's sole antagonist, her
mother. The crime of this woman, easily guessed for all of
its implausible oddity, is that of being a mother. She confused the act of sex with its consequence, or children. The
woman is also guilty of failing to recognize that she has no
rights as a mother except that of instructing a child in sexual matters. Fittingly, then, the daughter administers just
punishment for her mother's crime. Eugenie's sewing together of her mother's womb "so that you'll give me no
more little brothers and sisters" is the occasion for a carnival flow of blood and semen. Like the mingled screams
of pain and pleasure, they flow as one. Dolmance, overwhelmed by the scene's perfection, is immediately aroused."
Eugenie has been educated. She has seen with her own
eyes that life is being unto death by means of sex. This is
60
freedom. Eugenie has witnessed, actually participated in,
the fact of man's equality with all other men, indeed with
all other beings. Sade has demonstrated that in making love
like an adult beast man severs the connection between sex
and reproduction. But this is death.
Freedom is death. In Kojeve's words for which Marx is
his source, "Death and Freedom are but two ... aspects of
one and the same thing .... j'To say 'mortal' is to say 'free'.24
And what of future generations, of reproduction simply?
Where freedom is death and reproduction is separated from
sex, the danger and the hope of the future is transferred
from God to man. The future is no longer a providential
matter. Sade intended, as did Noyes, as we shall see in a
moment, that the control of reproduction by means of
abortion, infanticide, and promiscuity would take the
power of childmaking and childrearing from the private
sphere and from God and place these powers in the hands
of mankind, that is, of the state.
It is Dolmance who reads the essay, "Yet another Effort, Frenchmen," to his partners. As the group's leader
and an advertised "cynic," his action on the occasion of
Eugenie' s triumph over her mother is the essay's meaning. Dolmance is the apparent author of the essay just as
Sade is the apparent model for Dolmance. But Dolmance,
although he admits that his thinking "does correspond
with some part of these reflections," is not the real
author. 25 Here, brilliantly, Sade insinuates the theme of
his work into his characterization: the theme is creation
by each self of new selves. Each self, generated by sex not
by reproduction, is interchangeable with other selves. Of
course a homosexual imitator of Sa de shall be Sa de's hero
and persona.
The essay that Dolmance reads but has not written is
said to have been picked up at a Paris newsstand. That Dolmance does not take credit for "Yet another Effort,
Frenchmen," or that he is not named Sade, is a joke at the
expense of philosophy and truth: philosophy is an undertaking appropriate only in the bedroom; more exactly philosophy is action, sexual action particularly, of which the
ideal is "philosophy" raped or pornography. The ideal of
philosophy so conceived is ''realized" in a scene such as
the one just described.
Philosophy is action which expresses the self in context
of the most liberated sexuality. This activity puts all false
philosophy, and all reality which is less than pornographic
sexual activity, out-of-bounds. Philosophy in the bedroom
is the highest action. This is idealism or theory conceived
as the goal for action to achieve. It is the restriction oflanguage to sense objects, but sense objects created by a pornographer. Reality, here susceptible of definition, is also
achievable or nearly so. The action of the mind in creating
the standard for action is the highest activity because it
defines action and precedes it. Sa de's creativity places
reality at the service of mind. Sade imagines libertinism,
therefore he exists.
Consider the extent of Sade's onanism. For him the
wasting of seed is creation. He is performing an act of ereAUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�ation by his own standards more obscene and blasphemous than anything even he can describe. Yet because it
is not a sexual act but a properly philosophic one he cannot explain it without seeming to undermine his point that
philosophy in the bedroom is the sole philosophy. Sade is
simulating an act of would-be creation, in particular the
creation of non-reproducing or death-seeking beings who,
like him, seek new reality, that is philosophic pleasure, by
means of a theoretical or hypothetical auto-eroticism modeled upon real auto-eroticism, masturbation, as an ideal.
Sade's aspiration here causes us to reconsider the judgment, made by one of the rare philosophic intelligences of
our time, that Marx's Theses on Feuerbach is "the best
world fetish ever constructed by a man [Marx] who wanted
to be God."26
It is appropriate to note here that it was not Marx's ideas
or his influence that affected the thinking of the American
communist John Humphrey Noyes, the results of whose
ideals Kojeve and Navrozov have described as Marxist
communism. Noyes, often considered the most revolutionary of modern times, was the founder in Oneida (New York)
of a free love commune in the 1840s. But Noyes goes beyond Marx: his ideas are Sadean; for instance, his remarkable system for human reproduction. Only couples chosen
by Noyes could mate for the purpose of conception. In
this way Noyes intended to efface the real mother and father and make himself, almost literally, the creator of the
offspring of others. Insisting, like Sade, upon the sinfulness
of egos, of what he called "selfish love", Noyes assured the
absolute equality of the sexes by implementing a thoroughgoing promiscuity without the possibility of offspring."
(Celibacy would achieve the same result and has been
adopted at times, for example by the Shakers in America,
to serve the same egalitarian goals Sade or Noyes had in
mind.) Noyes's object, the object of sexual equality, was
the disconnection of sex and reproduction. The resulting
offspring, products of Noyes's command, were touched in
only the slightest degree by human intervention.
Sa de's pornography or Noyes's system with its denial of
reality on principle raises the question how other, lesser
men will be induced to follow and to waive common sense.
Self-evidently Sade's answer, like that of America's "Leftbiased" culture, is that common sense can be seduced; it
can be sexually bewitched by pornography. Not the envious desire for equal porridge as Marx supposed but a lust
for nirvana, for "mind-blowing", is what Sa de supposed as
the basis for politics. But because real men differ from
creatures such as Sade's Minski, the fantastic and bestial
hero of The Story ofluliette, who is no more than a fleshed
phallic symbol housed in a metaphorical body, something
more is n~eded. Education is needed.
In pinning his hopes for Frenchmen upon education,
Sade showed himself a typical bourgeois radical of the type
so much hated by Marxists. Sade seeks to educate his fellows in the doctrine of political hedonism, to substitute the
pleasurable for the good. A cosmic thinker, Sade promises
immortality to his followers. It can be won, he explains, if
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
man will cast off his foolish and cowardly reliance upon the
gods. Sade's atheism, like that of Marx, is fundamental to
his project. It is in fact the project's purpose.
Sade establishes the foundation of education exactly as
Marx does. Sade prohibits questions about man's origin
and his end. He prohibits the subject of cosmology. "Let a
simple philosopher introduce ... [youth] to the inscrutable
but wonderful sublimities of Nature," Sade says. As for
anyone who might ask about man's origins, about God,
free will, and good and evil, let such a simpleton be told
"that things always having been what now they are, never
had a beginning, are never going to have an end." Such
questions, Sade indicates, are pointless. They are faintly
immoral as well. "It. .. becomes as useless as impossible
for man to be able to trace things back to an imaginary
origin which would explain nothing and not do· a jot of
good."28 Only egotistical people or those with too much
time on their hands seek answers to such questions. Compare Marx's treatment of a questioner of this type: "Are
you such an egotist/' Marx asks, "that you conceive every-
thing as non-existent and yet want to exist yourself?""
So as not to lose the sharpness of Sa de's thought it is
important to realize that he possessed the firmest possible
grip upon the problem posed by the rejection of classical
philosophy and Christianity. He understood what is meant
by Kojeve's principle that where "there is eternal life and
hence God, there is no place for human freedom." 30 Sade
boldly rejected "the grubby Nazarene fraud [and] ... His
foul, nay repellent mother, the shameless Mary," replacing
them with "atheism ... the one doctrine of all those prone
to reason .... Religion," he said, "is incompatible with the
libertarian system." 31 Sade hated the divine with a consuming hate of one who wishes himself to be creator. He
was quite clear about the necessity for atheism, actually of
nirvana or Nothing which is something more than atheism,
to the purposes of creation. Sade is a radical and does not
condescend to argue. Instead, he delights to sneer, challenging his reader to doubt, once all the veils are drawn, if
cannibalism, rape, murder, sodomy, and incest are other
than the most natural impulses to which objections are at
best hypocrisy. Indulging these so-called crimes, Sade insists, is noble and also revolutionary, since the performance
of, say murder, is liberation and freedom. Such indul·
gences, Sade believes, and his admirers agree, reflect only
the "singularity of. .. tastes." 32
Like a bourgeois radical, Sade demands absolute toleration and openness as his due. He knows that his tolerant
liberal reader, who dares not go so far as he, will grant him
the right to indulge his tastes. He knows, in other words,
that he will subdue his liberal reader. Yet Sade has only
contempt for toleration and for liberal readers. He cruelly
invokes toleration as an argument on his behalf. Finally,
he does not permit the tolerant reader to evade the consequences of his tolerance.
It is self-evident that Sade is not a liberal or one who discourses on the need for revolution while fully clothed and
within reach of a policeman. Sade is radical and insists
61
�upon raping, indeed sodomizing, one's mother and murdering her if necessary for the orgasm of everyone. In this
way Sade creates followers whose position, like that of today's liberals in face of their communist colleagues, is to
oppose his goal as inappropriate even as they insist that
this goal or absolute freedom is the essence of all morality."
Sade's appeal to the argument of radical toleration-"We
wonder that savagery could ever reach the point where
you condemn to death an unhappy person [sodomist, murderer, rapist] all of whose crime amounts to not sharing
your tastes" -serves the double purpose of embarrassing
liberals while condemning the principle of toleration as
evidence of liberal fears and egotism." In other words, Sade
demonstrates that the dreadful outcome of liberal egotism
and toleration is intolerance (his position), and the destruction of egos (also his position). Toleration permits what liberals call "victimless crimes" which, however, destroy egos
(e.g., sadism) and are therefore intolerant. Sade had a perfect understanding that the meaning of radical toleration,
the essence of which is a hatred of the philosophic or an
embrace of the proposition that all truth claims are equal,
is freedom: it is the destruction oflanguage or its mutation
into the language of bees. "Debate" on the subjects of"extending the love of the private family" and the rest, Sade
knew to be cowardice, for the principle that admits debate
concedes the legitimacy of the possibility. The purpose of
freedom (of speech and of actions) in the modern context,
he well knew, was to liberate men from reality so that good
and evil would possess whatever meanings he assigned
to them.
Certainly if man is to be free he must be free above all
from a standard of good and bad beyond himself. This was
especially clear to those American abolitionists and femi- •
nists who considered the conscience the primary site of
freedom. That many abolitionists could, however, say as
much without acting on what they said reflected a failure
on their part to realize Sa de's point: that sexuality and the
overcoming of any distance between men and women was
the true test of all liberation.
In this respect it will be necessary to revise the historians' estimate of the abolitionists in light of a more comprehensive and more historical context. They were rather
less radical or liberated than previously supposed. As one
recent student has put it in a study aptly entitled The
Slavery of Sex, many of the radical female abolitionists
were "limited by their elitism ... [for example] women who
were socially and sexually deviant were not accepted ....
These women were prudish in sexual matters, and many
were willing ... to impose their moral standards on others."35
Like Andrews, these ~omen were not quite ready, with
Sade, to embrace deviation-what is today routinely called
"deviationn-as virtuous, an expression of individuality,
or freedom, let alone to tolerate it. Their "elitism, ... the
denial of radical equality to all, brought them up short of
the goal of abolishing slavery to sex as a social and a political principle.H36
It is sufficient to mention only Garrison, widely consid-
62
ered to have been the most radical of abolitionists active in
the cause and undoubtedly a feminist. His speech or rather
the conceptions he propounded were radical enough. He
looked for the dissolution of the Union, of government as
such, and considered there was at once nothing more contemptible "than the exclusive spirit toward women," or
nothing higher than the "right of every soul to decide ...
what is true ... [so that] no man can be an infidel, except he
be false to his own standard." 37 But he could not bring himself to endorse, much less to engage in, free love. Even the
petty anarchism of his sometime pupil, Nathaniel Rogers,
caused him to act the tyrant. In identifying Garrison as the
head of the "extreme wing of the Socialist, Infidel, Women's-Right" party, Fitzhugh was only partly correct. 38
What the abolitionists broached and what their historians today praise as true freedom Sade had conceived in
1795, the year of "Yet another Effort, Frenchman." Sade
contemplated ·a revision of personhood or what is today
recommended to us as the "twilight of subjectivity.'' 39 It is
doubtful if even now men fully understand what Sade understood so well, namely that this ideal must encourage,
not prevent, victimization. Only the most advanced twentieth century thinkers in the abolitionist tradition seem to
have grasped this point. For example, joel Feinberg argues
for the necessity to "withhold noncontingent rights from
infants ... [basing] the case for prohibiting infanticide on
reasons other than ... rights." 40
Sade attempted to resolve the conflict between liberty
and equality as posed by the premises of modern political
theory. He sought to resolve the claims of individuality
versus the community, of liberty versus equality, by transforming rights into needs and needs into pleasure. The
problem of liberty versus equality has proven insoluble in
all modern systems except the Marxist theory of value and
its promise of the realm of freedom, a faith rooted in historical processes. But Marx's solution, as we have said, has
no respectable believers but liberals. It is in fact Sade's solution, for which Marxists such as Koji:ve have taken credit
without making clear that it goes beyond Marx, that leads
observers to confuse America with the final stage of Marxist communism. Sa de simply radicalized freedom: freedom
must be free. The enslavement of others that must follow
this doctrine Sade greeted amiably as the means of yet
greater liberation, that is, the liberation from vanity or
natural wealth. Here in fact is the key to his thought. He
begins with the primacy of sex or, rather, he substitutes
sexuality for reproduction as the basis of human existence.
The core of life is the moment of lust.
"There is no moment in the life of man," Sa de writes,
"when liberty in its whole amplitude is so important to
him." But while "no passion has a greater need of the
widest horizon of liberty than this one, none, doubtless, is
as despotic.''41 Sade's resolution of this apparent dilemma,
a form of the essential dilemma of the political conceived
as a contest between the individual and the community,
i.e., as a form of the theory of unequal exchanges or the labor theory of value, is ingenious. ''Never," says Sade, ''may
AlYTIJMN/WINTER 1982-83
�an act of possession be exercised upon a free being."42 Such
an exercise is the acme of tyranny. He supports this asser·
tion with a predictable and telling comparison. The "ex·
elusive possession of a woman," he says, "is ~o less unjust
than the possession of slaves."43 No one will doubt that
Sade was an abolitionist. He was more of one than Engels
and a better one than Andrews. Sade's doctrine here, com·
mon to abolitionists in America, implies a revision of the
idea that labor forms selfhood. Sade, who was impatient
with what he considered, rightly in this case, derivative
matters, was not interested in the labor question but rather
in its source. Unlike Charles Fourier, for whom work could
be transformed into play, or Marx, for whom work or pro·
duction is constitutive of man in the realm of freedom-or
like other modern thinkers and leaders who also conceived
work as an instrument ofliberation-Sade had his own novel
and seductive formulation.
If exclusive possession is prohibited for men, must it
not work a correlative freedom for women? Sade insisted
upon it: "All men are born free, all have equal rights." Ac·
cording to this principle, one of which we should "never
... lose sight," it is also true that "never may there be
granted to one sex the legitimate right to lay monopolizing
hands upon the other, and never may one of these sexes,
or classes, arbitrarily possess the other."44 But then what
of liberty's need for the widest possible horizon? Has Sa de,
too, run aground in the narrow passage between Commu-
nism or equality and Individualism or freedom?
Sa de's response to this challenge shows his position.
"No man," he says, "may be excluded from the having of
a woman ... [because] she ... belongs to all men. The act
of possession can only be exercised upon a chattel or an
animal, never upon an individual who resembles us."45
Consider, Sade says, that in permitting all men access to
all women, females are freed from possession by a single
male. Does the principle of freedom, Sade asks, not give
the appearance of the enslavement of women? This is an
appearance only. Of course, freedom must include rape,
murder, and cannibalism, but Sade does not suppose for a
moment that a woman's freedom is affected adversely by
this fact. Actually a woman is freed marvelously precisely
in the act of rape. The freedom expressed in rape is "a
question of enjoyment [i.e., of pleasure] only, not of property."46 And to this distinction between ownership and
pleasure, which is no less trenchant than Marx's regarding
the theory of labor, S'l\le adds an example especially instructive because it occurred later to Andrews.
"I have no right of possession upon that fountain I find
by the road," Sade explains, "but I have certain rights to
its use."" Andrews's example also demonstrates the principle of ownership and pleasure with a reference to the use
of water. "So soon as I have dipped up a pitcher of water
from the spring or stream," Andrews expounds, '~it is no
longer ... natural wealth; it is a product of my labor."48
But his example, in contrast to Sade's, tells us why American abolitionists moved, as Andrews himself complained,
festina lente in sexual matters. If natural wealth becomes
1BE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
property through the intervention of labor, all hope of resolving the dilemma of freedom and equality, of Individualism and Communism, vanishes. Again Sade had the
better answer.
The radicalization of the labor theory of value is Sa de's
solution to freedom's conflict with possession or ownership. The taking of natural wealth, water from a stream,
on the principle of pleasure-not labor-insures that the
object taken does not become a possession. As Marx turned
the labor theory of value back upon itself to show how
capital was a theft from labor, Sade radicalized the labor
theory of value by making all possession, the product of
labor, an encroachment upon pleasure and upon natural
wealth.
The effect of Sa de's reasoning in practical, or at least in
"philosophical," life (i.e., in pornography) is surprisingly,
we may say dialectically, a boon to women. Women are
liberated by submitting to men. But because pleasure, not
possession, is the basis of ownership and at the same time
destroys ownership, pleasure liberates men from self-possession or egotism in the act of possessing women. That
every man has of right equal access to all women is simply
justified: women are no different from other natural objects such as water and air. Moreover, women do not choose
to be beautiful to men or indeed they do not choose to be
women. Rape is then liberation in a fundamental sense of
overcoming womanhood or the outward self, the unfree
or involuntary eleinent of a "woman's" being.
Of course no woman can be said to possess womanhood
or to choose it. What women do not possess and what
costs them nothing is free, like water, to all who wish it for
the sake of pleasure. Regardless of any egotistical or possessive and selfish objection women may have, men have
the right "to compel their submission."49 Sade proclaims
in the name of freedom that "I have the right to force from
her this enjoyment, if she refuses me it for whatever the
cause."so But because pleasure, the purpose of rape, is not
labor, the raped woman is not a possession of the rapist. It
follows finally that men can have no rights to pleasure itself as a possession as this would be a contradiction in
terms.
The apparent enslavement of women, or rape, which
liberates women from the slavery of womanhood, hence
from unfreedom, thus pain, is also the means for women
to liberate men. If it is allowed to all men that women, and
"all sexes ... [and] creatures," shall yield to lust, it cannot
be doubted that men must equally yield to women. 11 Is
not the basis of right found in pleasure the most complete
freedom? But what is pleasurable is by definition not a
possession. What is pleasurable is free. Natural wealth is
free to everyone on the same principle that women are free
to everyone. The pleasure of men, guaranteed by their
freedom of access to all women, is itself a natural product
like air and water.
Certainly it would be unnatural and irrational for an individual male to deny himself pleasure, i.e., to deny himself freedom. Such a denial, moreover, would constitute
63
�exclusivity and egotism, a hoarding, of natural wealth, his
own or others. This would be precisely that elitism deplored
by antebellum abolitionists and by neoabolitionists. It
would be to suppose that one's own special pleasure, like
one's own special skill or wit, was his when in fact it is
everyone's. In other words, individuals may not discriminate or distinguish egos or persons where pleasure is concerned without contradicting the principle of pleasure
itself, thereby committing an act of self-enslavement. Certainly pleasures may be various-in fact, must be so. But
pleasure as such, whatever its variations, is common to all.
It must be free to all if it is to be free to any.
Pleasure or freedom, the opposite of labor or slavery,
having no costs, works the same effacement of ego and
selfhood in men that male access to women works upon
women. This is why love, ego, and self-interest are evils
for Sade as they were for John Humphrey Noyes. Again
Sade, however, is far ahead of most contemporary neoabolitionists. It is only in recent times that the possibilities
of "sex without love" have begun to expose themselves to
radical scholarship.52 Sade realized that "love ... is no more
a title [to a man or a woman], ... and cannot serve the happiness of others, and it is for the sake of ... happiness ...
that women have been given to us."53
Sade was not affected by elitism. He was its constant
enemy. Moreover, as pleasure is the instrument to cure
men of egotism, it is especially effective in the hands of
women who are, in Sade's view, capable of greater pleasure, hence of greater freedom and selflessness than men.
"Women [have] been endowed with considerably more
violent penchants for carnal pleasure then we," Sade contends.54 For this reason he considers it necessary to say, al
want laws [sic?] permitting them to give themselves to as
many men as they see fit. .. [U]nder the special clause
prescribing their surrender to all who desire them, there
must be subjoined another guaranteeing them a similar
freedom to enjoy all they deem worthy to satisfy them."55
Laws, it appears, are instruments of permission. But why
laws at all in the reign of freedom and pleasure? Sade has
a special conception of laws in mind.
Sade yokes the seeming extremes of absolute liberty
and abject tyranny in a perfect mutuality. Of course this is
possible only in the realm of the pleasure-made man who
has donated his selfish ego for a better human future.
The drift of Sade' s thinking leads one to suspect that he is
about to counsel the effacement of man as such and the
merging of the human with the natural in a kind of species
cannibalism. Perhaps the refusal to go beyond a hint of
this possibility is the only concession Sade makes to his
reader in Philosophy in the Bedroom.
Describing the sexual, and the transsexual, meshing
and entwining of bodies and beings, of "all parts of the
body" among "all sexes, all ages, all creatures possible,"
Sade calls finally for an annihilation of every possible distinction among hurrians. 56 Here is equality. It is a doctrine
of salvation. Sade calls for an engorging of the human by
64
the rest of nature. Celebrating the immortalizing effects
of a kind of enmaggoting of the human, Sade makes no
distinction between humanity and plants and animals.
Sade announces his ontological contribution in a formula
characteristic of the modern liberator as suffering servant.
"The philosopher," he says, "does not flatter small human
vanities ... [but in the] ever ... burning pursuit of truth,"
he utters huge veriti~s regardless of the consequences and
the squeals of conformists. 57 Because the truth is philosophic, that is, because it is an action idealized, or philosophy in the bedroom, a disquisition can do no better
than ask, and with a rhetorical sneer, how anyone dares to
suppose that man is different from a rat or a manure pile.
"What is man?" Sade inquires, jjand what difference is
there between him ... and all other animals of the world?""
In fact man is reducible to his physical being. But this is
no bad thing. Far from it. Man's natural condition is the
source of the greatest liberation of all.
Because man is part of nature and does nature's bidding,
he is freed from the greatest enslavement. What is more
repugnant and more completely contrary to all desire and
freedom than death? And what, if not the fear of death,
enslaves men to religion, that is, to superstition? Sade proclaimed immortality or liberation from death because he
could also proclaim man is liberated from the divine.
Above all, immortality is the fitting reward of those who
bravely reject the "absurd dogmas, the appalling mysteries,
the impossible morality of. .. [Christianity], this disgusting
religion." 59 Christianity promises immortality in order to
control and limit nature. But just as pleasure is liberation
because it is sensual, atheism is knowledge of the highest
things because it too is sensual. Atheism is a true judgment because, like "every [true] judgment [it is] the outcome of experience, and experience is only acquired by
the . .. senses."60
It is also perfectly obvious that, as man has no beginning
except in sex, there· can be "no ... annihilation; what we
call the end of the living animal is no longer a true finis,
but a simple transformation, a transmutation of matter
. ... According to these irrefutable principles, death is
hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible
passage from one existence into another ... what Pythagoras called metempyschosis."61 Sex and all allied pleasure
insure everlasting life, but it is the orgasmic, not the reproductive aspects of sexuality, which do so.
Self-sovereignty, absolute liberty and pleasure having
made necessary the elimination of egos, requires as well
the abolition of man. But the cost is only pleasure and the
reward, or immortality, is the highest pleasure of all. Sade's
inversion of Christianity includes necessarily a vision of
the good regime since his kingdom is emphatically of this
world. The philosopher in the bedroom speaks not only to
Frenchmen, whom he urges to make "yet another effort if
they would be republicans"; he speaks as well to the "legislator" whom he also openly addresses in the course of
his essay as you. 62 He speaks to us.
AtnlJNUN/~UNlllR
1982-83
�.i
The republican regime of liberty is unquestionably a
regime of laws. It is already clear that the freedom of
women is to be assured by laws. But radical individualism
and self-sovereignty are manifestly incompatible with laws
in the accepted sense. How could one possibly "devise as
many laws as there are men," asks Sade. He answers by
promising that laws shall "be lenient, and so few in num·
her, that all men, of whatever character, can easily observe
them."63
Laws must suit the variations of people, their tastes es·
pecially. Laws must be particular, not general; they must
be value-free. But of course there is a universality in this
version of law, namely every case is special. The man above
the law or the philosopher is here everyman. And unlike
the classic philosopher, the lawgiver, everyman, conceived
by Sa de denies nothing to himself in the way of pleasures.
Indeed, law is solely for the sake of pleasure. The purpose
of law so conceived is to incite passions and indulgences,
not to control them. This is all there is of virtue and law in
Sade. He explains why the law, in the accepted view, is
unfair, that is, unjust to human nature·. His rationale proceeds in light of a dialectic of sorts to the effect that man
has a nature, but in a special sense. Man has no fixed nature. "It has been pointed out that there are certain virtues
whose practice is impossible for certain men ... ," Sa de
begins. Since this is so, he continues, "would it not be to
carry your injustice beyond all limits were you to send the
law to strike the man incapable of bowing to the law?"64
What kind oflaws should the republican regime devise?
What meaning might law have at all? Sa de's answer is a
model of the bourgeois radical's vision of the liberation of
individuals. "The legislator ... must never be concerned
with the effect of that crime which strikes only the individual."65 In other words the republican regime, which
sets about to liberate the individual and to fashion laws for
him particularly, is now to be unconcerned about individuals
and care only for itself, the state. Sade describes here what
Kojeve commends as the universal and homogeneous
state, the state that has the appearance of having attained
Marxist communism. 66 This is the realm in which we are
to witness what Rousseau called a "change ... [of] human
nature ... transforming each individual, who by himself is
a perfect and solitary whole, into a part of a much greater
whole."67 The objective of law in such a state is the enlargement of the public sphere and the destruction of the
private sphere in the name of and for the sake of the individual's liberty. But this object is no other than the widest
horizon of pleasure or liberty, namely the elimination of
all distinctions and exclusivities. The object of law is
equality. This object, Sade realized (much before Tocque·
ville and with less evidence for his inferences), demands
the destruction of what sociologists call mediate institutions. This destruction is to be done by the omnicompetent state in the name of liberty, a procedure that must
enhance the power of the state and its reputation as the
source of benevolence. "Equality," said Tocqueville at the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
conclusion of his famous study of 1835, "prompts men to
think of one sole uniform and strong government. ... In
the dawning centuries of democracy, individual indepen·
dence and local liberties will always be the products of art.
Centralized government will be the natural thing."68 Historians, who have of course paid great attention to Tocqueville, have wondered if Tocqueville considered this
tendency benign or malevolent. Sa de is not ambiguous on
this point. He considered this tendency Sadean.
It remains only to address the vestiges of exclusivity and
inequality, of elitism, in the residual superstructure oflife.
Sade turns to this subject with relish.
Because ego and selfishness are melted in the furnace
of pleasure and all sexual or natural distinctions turn to
ashes, the state must do its part to extinguish all derived
distinctions. Sade encourages with vigor the work of man's
compulsory education. Surely life is the absolute possession of the state, first of all. A human being who does not
possess a self cannot be said to possess life either. Rather
he "possesses," as aspects of his (more properly "its") immortality as matter, those feelings and functions which he
shares with all other humans and indeed with all nature.
The urge of self-preservation, for example, does not convey a right to self-preservation in the individual. This right
is the state's. In fact Sa de's position that "the freest of
people are they who are most friendly to murder" further
underlines his ideal of liberation of the self from egotism.69
The instinct for self preservation is in Sa de's view outmoded. Moreover, it is man's finitude or death that
justifies Sa de's reasoning on all forms of murder. Murder,
infanticide, and abortion result from the principle that
severs the relation of sex and reproduction. All of these
murderings sever man from the divine or eternity. Sade
writes: "If all individuals were possessed of eternal life,
would it not become impossible for Nature to create any
new ones? If Nature denies eternity to beings, it follows
that their destruction is one of her laws." 70 The logic of
these sentences, in addition to licensing all murder that
will cut the connections of sex and reproduction, is that
the state may murder at will just as it may create at will.
"Every individual born lacking the qualities to become
useful. .. has no right to live, and the best thing ... is to
deprive him of life the moment he receives it." Likewise
the state may "prevent the arrival. .. of a being."71
Undoubtedly the independence, the freedom and equality of each being, warrants such measures. These measures
will appear harsh only in the eyes of those individuals who
persist in selfish and egotistical ways. The source of selfpossession is vanity, after all. Rousseau was not the only
one to see that the absence of freedom, that is, dependence, means vanity and egotism. Sade simply decreed
dependence a crime against freedom, its contradiction.
The extinction of what the American communist John
Humphrey Noyes called the "I spirit" can mean only that
the I who acts and speaks must be We. Elimination of egos
or creation of the we spirit is critical to the interdepen·
65
�dence of the community and to the freedom of all to do
what they desire to do. A weeding' out of those who are
dependent because they cannot participate in their own
liberation and that of others, while superficially an act of
cruelty, is in the larger view an act of magnanimity.
Sade does not flatter small vanities. The truth is that
the elimination of useless individuals is a function of free·
dam. "It is not unjust," Sade proclaims, that "the human
species ... be purged from the cradle; what you foresee as
useless to society is what must be stricken out of it."72 Of
course uselessness is defined only by whatever suits the
ruler's pleasure. First of all men and women must be made
to give way to others without qualifications of any sort,
and as all must yield their egos to pleasure, so government
must enforce these activities and promote them. In addition to providing free and certainly compulsory state education (Sade understood the necessity of compulsory and
free education in a regime founded in equality and freedom), the legislator must encourage every effort in the
direction of freedom and equality .73
The government must promote the most complete independence of every individual, the freedom of each person. As we have already seen, the state shall encourage
theft as an instrument of equalization. Much more important, the state must prohibit those activities with a tendency to establish vanity. Offenses tending to inhibit
sexual indulgences must be rooted out and punished with
utmost severity. The government for its part will establish
"various stations, cheerful [and] sanitary" for the satisfaction of every possible lust. "The laws ... will oblige
[women] ... to prostitute themselves ... [This] is ... the
most equitable of laws ... all egotistical sentiments quite
aside."74 What other law could be more useful to freedom?
But the fundamental purpose of the state's provisions
for individual freedom is "absolutely destroying all marital
bonds."75 Because sexual activity is not for the sake of reproduction but serves the opposite purpose, suicide, murder,
annihilation, and nothingness are as much to be encouraged as other pleasures. Incest, for example, is a new virtue:
"It loosens family ties .... [It] ought to be every government's law."76 Sade means it must not simply be permitted.
It must be forced. Whereas certain ancient gnostics, seeking to free men from the body, urged activities designed
to extinguish human life, Sade put sex in the service of
these goals. Offspring are not only an annoyance rightfully to be disposed of, they are an affront to pleasureseeking liberators. Only the state is the creator of beings.
Sade turned the business of reproduction over to the state,
to "you", the legislator, much as Noyes took this task
upon himself at Oneida. In other words, the creation of
human beings is taken from men and women in the name
of their liberation. This reverses the way of civilization as
well as the first commandment gi'(en to men in the book
of Genesis to multiply and replenish the earth. Opposite
principles are set in their place. These are the substitution
of man's power for God's power, finitude and mortality
for infinitude and immortality; above all death for life.
66
Sade invites a new view of children, thus of being.
HThere are no longer born, as fruits of the woman's plea-
sure, anything but children to whom knowledge of their
father is absolutely forbidden." Children, instead of "belonging to only one family ... must be ... purely les enfants
de Ia patrie."77 The formation of a family of man, deriving
from the "annihilation" of the traditional family, is the
special duty of republics.
Every individual must have no other dam than the nation . ..
from her alone all must be expected. Do not suppose you are
fashioning good republicans so long as children, who ought to
belong solely to the republic, remain immured in their families. By extending to the family, to a restricted number of persons, the portion of affection they ought to distribute amongst
their brothers, they inevitably adopt those persons' sometimes very harmful prejudices; such children's opinions, their
thoughts, are particularized, malformed, and the virtues of a
Man of the State become completely inaccessible to them . ..
[Those who], love ... their children less but their country
more [are most free ].78
Sade's reference here to "particularism" summarizes
his thinking. As a quintessential bourgeois radical for
whom particularism means tribalism, egotism, and selfishness, Sade proposes instead the family of m,an. But we
have just seen in Sa de's essay that the core of the family
of man lies with the reduction of philosophy to action, in
particular to sexual action. Sade's purpose reverses the
meaning of philosophy in two ways. Philosophy distinguishes act and contemplation; Sade combines them by
reducing thought to act. He is pragmatic. Philosophy regards thought as universal and action as particular; Sade
insists upon the opposite. But acts cannot be universal.
They are particular. Sade's inversion of philosophy, his reduction of it to action is profitably compared to the betterknown efforts of Marx and Hegel, the materialist and the
idealist, who also attempted to transpose the realm of philosophy to action, to history.
Marx and Hegel, as we know, invested history with
meaning, that is, with philosophy or universality. Kojeve
has described this as making the concept equal to time.79
Sade also made this equation but with a difference. This
difference is the institutional substance of that reality
Kojeve thought he found in America as the attainment of
Marxist communism. Sade equates the concept (philosophy) with time as pleasure. In other words he equates the
concept with temporality, with every moment of time.
The meaning of such an equation in practice would be
the eternal present or the realm of freedom. Philosophy in
the bedroom is then a universal language or the language
of bees.
The author is pleased to acknowledge the assistance of the Earhart
Foundation in the preparation of this essay.
l. Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Lectures on
the Phenomenology of the Spirit, Ithaca 1969, 159-61. Note to the Sec·
ond Edition.
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�2. Lev Navrozov, Letter to the Editor, Commentary 73 June 1982, 16.
3. Kojeve, Introduction, 161. Note to the Second Edition, 159-60.
4. Fitzhugh's chief work is Cannibals All! or Slaves Without Masters, ed.,
and with an introduction by C. Vann Woodward, Boston, 1960 (1856).
For a brief survey of his ideas see the present writer's "The Proslavery
Roots of Socialist Thought," The Conservative Historians' Forum 6 1982,
14-21.
5. Karl Marx, "Private Property and Communism," in T. B. Bottomore,
Karl Marx Early Writings, New York 1964, 166.
6. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, eds., The Marquis de Sade,
The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings,
New York 1965, viii, v.
7. Friedrich Engels. "The Book of Revelations," in Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, Works [in Russian] Moscow-Leningrad 1928-48, xvi,
pt. 1, 160. I am indebted to Joseph Dwyer, deputy curator, Hoover Institution, for this citation.
8. For example, David Brion Davis, who is the leading as well as quintessential abolitionist historian. See his The Problem of Slavery in the
Age of Revolution 1770-1823, Ithaca 1975,468.
9. David Brion Davis, "Ante-Bellum Reform," in Frank Otto Gatell and
Allen Weinstein, American Themes, &says in Historiography, New York
1968, 153.
10. A recent work in literary criticism is Jane Gallop, Intersections. A
Reading of Sade with Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski, Lincoln, Neb
1981.
11. Karl Marx to R. Kreuznach in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The MarxEngels Reader, New York 1972, 8.
12. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party,
in Tucker ed., The Marx·Engels Reader 360.
13. J. F. C. Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World, New York 1969,
59.
14. Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made, Two Essays
in Interpretation, New York, 1969, 176.
15. Marx, "Private Prop~rty and Communism," 166.
16. Fitzhugh, Cannibals All!, 21 and following. Stephen Pearl Andrews,
The Science of Society, New York 1851,76.
17. Andrews, The Science of Society, 81.
18. Karl Marx, "Private Property and Communism," 166.
19. Kojeve, Introduction, 159, note 6.
20. Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom, 313-14.
21. Sade, Bedroom, 304.
22. Bedroom, 192.
23. Bedroom, 363, 365.
24. Kojeve, Introduction, 247.
25. Sade, Bedroom, 339.
26. Eric Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution, Durham, N.C.
1975, 299.
27. Charles Nordhoff, The Communistic Societies of the United States,
New York 1875, 292.
28. Sade, Bedroom, 304.
29. Marx, "Private Property and Communism," 166.
30. Kojeve, Introduction, 258.
31. Sade, Bedroom, 299, 300, 301.
32. Seaver and Wainhouse, The Marquis de Sade, viii.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
33. Based on Irving Kristol, "Taxes, Poverty, and Equality," Public In·
terest 37, 1974, 25.
34. Sade, Bedroom, 325.
35. Blanche Glassman Hersh, The Slavery of Sex, Urbana 1978, 225.
36. Hersh, Slavery, 225.
37. Walter M. Merill, ed., The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison 6 vo1s.,
Boston 1971-1981, III 148, lV 387.
38. Fitzhugh, Cannibals Alll, 95.
39. Fred Dallmayr, Twilight of Subjectivity: Contributions to a PostIndividualist Theory of Politics, Amherst,-Mass. 1981.
40. Joel Feinberg, Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty: Essays on
Social Philosophy, Princeton 1980, xii.
41. Sade, Bedroom, 317.
42. Bedroom, 318.
43. Bedroom, 318.
44. Bedroom, 318
45. Bedroom, 319.
46. Bedroom, 319, note 15.
47. Bedroom, 319, note 15
48. Andrews, The Science-of Society, 77.
49. Sade, Bedroom, 319.
50. Bedroom, 319, note 15.
51. Bedroom, 316.
52. Russell Vannoy, Sex Without Love: A Philosophical Exploration,
New York 1980.
53. Sade, Bedroom, 319.
54. Bedroom, 321.
55. Bedroom, 321.
56. Bedroom, 321, 316.
57. Bedroom, 329.
58. Bedroom, 329.
59. Bedroom, 298.
60. Bedroom, 304.
61. Bedroom, 330-l.
62. Bedroom, 316, 317, 325.
63. Bedroom, 310.
64. Bedroom, 310.
65. Bedroom, 312.
66. Kojeve, Introduction, 139 and elsewhere.
67. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, ed., Charles Frankel,
New York 1947, 36.
68. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in American, ed., J.P. Mayer and
Max Lerner, New York 1966, 649.
69. Sade, Bedroom, 333.
70. Bedroom, 3 30.
71. Bedroom, 335 note 20, 336.
72. Bedroom, 336.
73. Bedroom, 321-2.
74. Bedroom, 316, 319-20.
75. Bedroom, 322.
76. Bedroom, 324.
77. Bedroom, 322.
78. Bedroom, 335, 321-2.
79. Kojeve, Introduction, 100-149.
67
�Meetings, Recognitions
Meyer Liben
1 - - - How do you know him?
- - - Oh, we met about a month ago at a party, at a
friend's house, he didn't know anybody there, he had just
moved into the city-he's from out West somewheres-and
came with a girl who was a friend of the hostess, really of
the host's wife, that was more the effect, met the girl
through a fellow he used to go to college with, I think they
roomed together for a year and then he (I mean the one
you're asking about) switched to another school, didn't
like the place or maybe it was his marks, anyway he's in
some phase of T.V., or maybe he just watches it a lot, I
don't know him very well, we just met him at this party,
and hardly spoke to him at all.
2 - - - I didn't know that you knew him.
- - - Oh yes, we met about seven years ago, one of
those relationships where, if you pass in the street, you
nod without talking, never quite sure whether she remem·
bers who you are or not (or sometimes imagining that she
thinks about you quite often, covering the interest with a
nod) and then when someone mentions her name you say:
Oh I know her slightly, or, after a while: I've met her but
don't really know her, I think we actually met at the
beach, she was with mutual friends, people I'm still friends
with, tho I've never seen her with them again, you know
how it is at the beach, everything stands in the way of real
contact, the ocean's vastness, solar somnolence, we're all
half·naked and insignificant, the meetings are unreal, so
you nod, faintly, when you pass in the street, or say:
We've met, but I don't really know her.
3 - - - I didn't know you knew them.
- - - Are you kidding? We've known them for years,
we don't see them as much as we used to, they used to live
across the street from us on 84th Street, that was before
Meyer Liben's (1911-1975) collection of short stories, Street Games and
Other Stories will appear in 1983 (Schocken Books). Justice Hunger and
Nine Stories appeared in 1967 (Dial Press). His stories have often appeared in the St. John's Review Ouly 1980, Summer 1981, Winter 1981).
68
the West Side was making its comeback, the kids used to
play together, and we used to visit back and forth, naturally
see each other in the park. Then they moved, and we
moved. For a while (especially when we were still on the
old block) we'd see each other, but now I don't know,
maybe they moved into another bracket or something,
not that they're highhat or anything, anyway we kind of
drifted apart once we were in neighborhoods to which the
other was strange, we know them at least sixteen years,
lived on the same block for let's see, nine years, our kids
practically grew up together.
4 - - - How did you meet?
- - - It was a foggy day, I was standing on the beach,
looking out into the mist, and she suddenly appeared from
the water, pretty weird, because I'd been there for about
an hour, and hadn't seen anyone, but we didn't talk, and I
actually met her a week later at a friend's house, we recog·
nized one another right off, but we never have said any·
thing about that first meeting, I'm pretty sure it was the
same girl, I mean how can you forget, under the circum·
stances?
5 I don't really remember how we met, I mean I don't
remember the exact occasion, it's funny how the exact
moment of meeting tends to be forgotten, we can place it
by years, or season, or place, but things seem to conspire
against the exact moment, maybe it's because we rarely
meet a person for the first time, but have seen him, at a
distance, on a number of occasions, or have heard about
him, so the first meeting is blurred by those views from a
distance, or by the previous mention, and it becomes
quite impossible to pin down.
6 I can tell you the exact moment that I met her, I came
down to the dock with a friend, and she was sitting there
with a group of youngsters, reading, that was absolutely
the first time that I laid eyes on her, never saw her in a back·
ground of other figures, had never heard her name men·
AU1UMN/WINTER 1982-83
�boned, that was absolutely the first contact, when I came
down to the dock, a meeting of str~ngers, loveliest and
purest of all meetings.
7 The first time we met we didn't seem to have very
much interest in one another, but then we met for the
second time and fell very much in love, and as the years
went by, remembered that as the first meeting, but it
wasn't it was really the second meeting, and we've put the
first meeting out of mind, as tho we're ashamed not to
have fallen ih love then, but that was really the important
meeting, for had we not met then, the second meeting
would have meant nothing at all, we're both sure of that,
and yet we keep forgetting that first meeting and think
only of the second meeting, when we fell in love, but not
as strangers.
8 He claims that he knows me, tells me exactly where
we met, at whose house, the company present, what was
said, even the actual date, but I don't remember him at all,
know that I never saw him in my life, and the more pre·
cise he is in his details, the surer I am that I never saw
him, tho I have been at the house where he claims we met,
been at parties there, and if indeed he was there on an occasion when I was there, then all I can say is that our meet·
ing created absolutely no impression, so that it's as tho I
never met him, but is it really possible to meet a person
and have absolutely not the slightest remembrance, is it
possible that his recollection is accurate (but I know that
I've never seen him) that things happen to people, and
then it's as tho they never happened?
9 We've met, we know one another, we used to see one
another as parts of a group (I don't mean as individuals
who also happened to be part of a group), and we occa·
sionally meet now, for we work in the same area, but it
doesn't mean a thing, in the sense that we have no inter·
est in one another, no concern; if one of us died, the other
would shrug condolingly, part of the news of the day;
there's an edge of hostility, but not enough to create real
interest, and all in all it would have been much better had
we never met at all, for our connection is a kind of waste
of human energy, we have nothing to say to one another,
and have learned nothing from one another (such things
happen) except the knowledge that we ought never to
have met, call it, if you will, one of Fate's discards.
10 I had actually met him in the park, we were intro·
duced by a random acquaintance, but then we met a few
weeks later in the company of my husband and his wife (I
mean to say that I was with my husband and he was with
his wife), we were introduced and acted as tho this was
the first time we had ever met, but I don't quite understand why we acted that way, because our first meeting
had been casual, and, how shall we say: innocent?
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
11 You know how it is when you meet a person you
haven't seen for maybe 40 years, since you were in the
same elementary school class, you recognize him immediately, but make no sign because you are not sure that he has
recognized you, tho it is entirely possible that he has recognized you and passes you by because he thinks you
have not recognized him, at any rate you pass one another
by, maybe both of you knowing that you have recognized
one another and both chary of picking up the ancient strand.
12 - - - I thought that you were old friends.
- - - Oh, we used to be old friends.
13 How we met? A blind date-you know, one of those
dates where I'm wearing a grey suit, red tie, and you're
wearing a yellow dress and what color necklace would go
with yellow, and then we stand in the lobby and look around
wonderingly or anxiously, and then we recognize the color
combines, but that is not the true recognition, the way it
is after a long, grim, separation, or the way it is when eyes
meet for the first time, and bring old dreams to life.
14 We met just once and I've never seen her since, and
you can carry an impression like that for a long time, for it
will not be sullied by experience, but buried warm and secretive, lives its own life.
15 We met just once, and I can tell you exactly where
and when. It was four years ago, on New Year's Eve, at
the home of a person, who, it turned out, neither one of
us knew. We got into a bitter argument, over immortality,
he held that it is morally indefensible even to discuss the
question, being an escape from reality and from the demands of terrestrial life. That was the only time I ever saw
him, I'm sorry to hear of his death. I usually remember
people by what we talk about, but in this case it was not
only the topic of conversation, it was also the time, the occasion, I don't think I've ever forgotten any person I've
ever met on New Year's Eve.
16 We neither one of us recognized the other, but as we
spoke, it turned out that we came from the same neighborhood, and then we discovered that we had gone to the
same school, and then it turned out that we were in the
same class for a year, there was no question about it, we
double-checked graduation dates, etc., we recalled (he admiringly, I with reverse emotion) our teacher, a number
of the kids in the class-there was no one not remembered by both of us-various episodes in which we had both
apparently participated, but we did not remember one
another at all, looked at each other blankly as we recalled
the childhood scenes we had lived through together.
17 It's kind of a joke between us, we argue about it, she
claims that we met, briefly, at a friend's house about two
weeks before my recollection of the time we met, at a
69
�cocktail party which she too recalls very well, but I don't
remember the first occasion at all: and every now and
then (jokingly) she reminds me of that earlier occasion,
saying that she apparently didn't make much of a first impression on me, but I frankly don't remember seeing her, I
stayed at the party for only a few moments, she was probably in a corner, out of sight, we joke about it, I say she was
probably absorbed in an interesting conversation with
some handsome gent, cornered off, but she says she definitely saw me, even remembers the suit I wore (blue serge),
we joke about it, she brings it up at argumentative moments, and as the years go by, fills in more and more details of that party, that party seems to be more important
to her than any social event of her life, she is constantly
adding figures to it, coming up with new scraps of conver-
stantial than you might think, more than air, but we could
be in the same room and not recognize one another (much
harder if we were in different rooms), in fact, after all
these years-we've done an awful lot of business together-I'm kind of scared to meet him, the voice has become disembodied, spectral almost, I really don't want to
meet him, I hope the occasion never arises, I don't want
to bring that familiar voice and that strange body together, I just hope that our relationship remains telephonic,
friendly, faintly personal.
become celebrities, I was there for just a couple of minutes, being late for a dinner date, but I know I didn't see
her there, sometimes I wonder if I actually was at the party,
if only I could prove that I wasn't.
22 What bothers him, you see, is that I met his wife before he did, I met her almost a year before he did, I don't
know why that should annoy him as much as it does, but
it doe~ annoy him, it upsets him in fact, it isn't as tho I
went out with her seriously (but even if I had, why should
that upset him?), we were friendly, and apparently he keeps
throwing it up to her, he seems to blame her for my knowing her before he did, I can't understand his attitude, of
course I met her first, it was at least a year before he met
her, it might have been more than a year, but what of it,
18 You have to be of a certain age before you meet people, otherwise you see them or are exposed to them, the
way it is with children and parents, no formal introduc-
lance, absolutely no other kind of priority is involved, why
does he make such a big deal of the fact that I knew his wife
before he did, met her perhaps two years before he did?
sation, new interpersonal connections, nuances of the be·
havior of strangers, comments on people who have since
it's just a matter of chronology, it's of no intrinsic impor·
tions necessary.
19 I'm very pleased to meet you, it was very nice to have
met you, haven't we met before, don't I know you from
somewhere, it was very interesting to have made your acquaintance, I trust we'll see each other again soon, I didn't
quite catch your name, I hope this will have proved to be
the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship, I've looked
forward to this for years, it's a great thrill to shake the
hand of the man who, h'ya, how do you do, sir, I trust this
will have proved to be, an unexpected pleasure, I didn't
quite catch the name.
20 He says that he doesn't know her, in the sense that
he doesn't know her name, or anything at all about her, but
that their eyes met across the room, and he feels in that
sense (not the Biblical) he knows her, in fact he says that
when he meets anyone (particularly an attractive girl) he
prefers not to know anything about her, in that way, he
contends, he is not distracted from the essential, the real
presence, and he knows this girl, he says, by the mixing of
the glances.
21 One of those telephonic connections-we've had
occasion to speak to one another for some twenty years
now, business-wise, his voice is as familiar to me as that of
my closest friends, hut I've never seen him, we're very
friendly on the phone, not quite personal, of course I've
built up some notion of what he looks like, building a body
from a voice, of course the sound of a voice is more sub-
70
23 How do I know her? In the ancient meaning of the
word. As a youth, in a great midwestern university (name
disclosed on request), we went off, on a Saturday night,
for a little fun in town, .rounded the bars, and then wound
up in a house of prostitution, poorly reputed, the address
of which one of us had unbelievably remembered from a
conversation he had overheard between two seniors two
weeks back, and that woman was my bed-mate, I imagine
that's her husband next to her, she's put on weight, but I
recognized her immediately, I doubt if she remembers
me, do you think she would, after all these years, I don't
think we even spoke at the time.
24 He has a very odd habit when he meets ehildren of
bowing in a very grave and courtly manner, shaking the
hand of the boy, kissing the hand of the girl; the children
tend to be very impressed, they feel the importance of a
first meeting, they like something to be made of it, for
these are strange figures, coming from a distance.
25 Having met for the first time, and now taking our departure, we say: nice to have met you, or: very pleased to
make your acquaintance, or: it was a pleasure meeting you,
or: very nice meeting you.
26 When he meets you, it is not like one meeting you
for the first time, and either glad or sorry for the opportunity, but rather he is sizing you up for some reason which
you cannot comprehend-as a prospective buyer (or a proAUTUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�spective friend), as a subsidiary character in a novel he is
working on (or the main character in an unwritten novel),
as a most·wanted criminal, as a sexual rival, he looks care·
fully at the cut of your clothes, tries to figure out your income, the state of your health, your weaknesses and strong
points, not at all interested in making your acquaintance.
27 I'm sorry, you're making a mistake, I don't know you
at all, you're mistaking me for someone else, absolutely a
case of mistaken identity, no, I've never seen you in my
life before, you're confusing me with another person, it's
possible that the resemblance is there, no I don't have a
twin sister, I've never been in Detroit, I never went to
George Washington High School, I never spent a summer
in a camp near Berlin, New Hampshire, I never worked in
Kresges, I never went to summer school at the University
of Washington, never been on a cruise to Haiti, I've hardly
been anywheres, and you definitely don't know me, this is
positively the first time that you've ever seen me.
28--- It was very embarrassing, she said, I went up
to him, thinking that he was my old teacher, my old favorite teacher, then as soon as I said hello and introduced myself, I saw that I had made a mistake, that at close range he
didn't resemble my teacher at all, tho he seemed to from a
distance, I guess I must have been thinking about him,
anyway this fellow was pretty fresh, I guess he thought I
was introducing myself because I was attracted to him, or
something, anyway he was very nasty and suggestive, and I
walked off fast, there couldn't be any two people more unlike than this man and my old teacher.
29 Have you ever noticed how two children act when
they meet for the first time? But of course you have, what
man yields to what other man when it comes to closeness
of observation, we all of us note the most delicate nuances,
the slightest tremors of change or novelty, seismographers
all, so you've certainly noticed how two children, small
ones, act when they meet for the first time, and I am talking here of the relief they experience in meeting a person
of the same height, they look straight ahead, they do not
have to look up (that looking up is the primary cause of all
future neck troubles, orthopedists' bonanza) the strain is
taken out of their world view, and then too there is that
joyful recognition of the contemporary (for only contemporary peers understand one another), no talking down,
no struggling to make yourself understood (seeking neither
the disciple nor the sage) and that accounts for the way
they move apart from the first movement (the way it is
when things are too good to be true) and then they joyfully
turn to one another and begin-joyfully-to wreck Paradise.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
30 Their hands clasped, one was dry, one was clammy,
their eyes met, one pair frank, open, the other conniving,
sly, they spoke, one straightforwardly, to the point, the
other circuitously, avoiding the issue, but do not think that
(in this introductory meeting) the dry hand, the frank eyes
and the straightforward speaking style belonged to one of
the men, because there was a division (obviously unequal).
31 Last night, for the first time, I met Death, in the naturalist, the Lucretian manner. Exhausted, I fell asleep after dinner, but as is my habit, I heard and was aware of all
the significant events in my household-the phone ringing, the sibling quarrel, the peal of laughter-! heard the
bell ring and knew that my daughter's escort had arrived, I
heard another child leave for her party, I heard the familiar
introduction to the T.V. program, telling me the time, but
asleep nevertheless, and then I fell deeper asleep, and in
that sleep heard nothing, not the voice of my wife reading
our youngest to sleep, not the 11 o'clock voice of Ron
Cochran, I did not hear the one child return and did not
hear the other return, did not hear the front door open
and close, or the Frigidaire open and close (formerly
known as raiding the pantry), did not hear the silence of
the house asleep, the milkman's approach and departure,
awoke to greet (without ceremonial) the dawn of a glorious
summer day, realizing, the way it is when you meet Death
in the Lucretian manner, that life goes on, and you not
aware (maybe not even aware that you were not aware).
32 It was pretty funny-we passed each other in the
middle of the block, looked at one another, with that air of
vague familiarity just short of recognition, went on, both
looked back, the recognition on the tip of the unconscious,
and when we reached our respective corners, we turned
around and rushed back, meeting again in the middle of
the block, crying out each other's names, in an orgy of delayed recognition.
33 I've seen the oddest things in the way of introductions-a man forgetting the name of his oldest friend, his
mind an absolute blank, until his friend (luckily remembering his own name) announces it; a woman introducing
24 people-half of whom she had met for the first time,
skipping 14 people mutually known-in drumfire order to
the most recent arrival at a party; a man introducing himself by a wrong name, or introducing an arrival by the introducer's name; a woman introducing her husband by
her lover's name, a man introducing his third wife to her
first husband; a man who introduces people by names and
occupation; and other oddities at the moment of bringing
strangers together.
71
�Achilles
In Memoriam:
John Downes
His heel, just a palm-full when
She held him there, now is gone
As far as body can; arch-ended,
Is walked under stone.
Annapolis (1909-1926)
Myth will recall what bone
Forgets: so heroes burn
In their own flame desired beyond all,
0 beyond beauty, beyond love.
All changed now, all he looked
At, even what he never truly saw:
Monuments, ribs of old ships
Stuck through sand; ribs of cattle.
And culled across an open mouthed sky
Birds chirp at breakfast. Their acid
Droppings scald the outraged marble, toppled
Capitals of such and such a style,
Rubbed to ether, to cinders of
A pureness so intense the hands melt
Touching them. Silence like a blade's
Unfelt acuity parts flesh from blood.
Never under the sun did a friend
Warrant more violence for daring
To die first, or lover less faithful
Require more deaths for slaking
Than such a thirst loosened by dusty
War into the shape of sobbing:
That lovely throat now dust
Itself in no known place, and nowhere known.
Above the bay he lies, bone-dead to dreams
Protected from desires by flowers and grass,
Young Jack asleep whose parents on their way
To bed admired an instant by the light of lamps.
Deep deep in loam, his grief is uncompared
By birds that rise to argent dawn and cloud;
This sleeping sailor, narrowed to his name,
No legends make him prince, no crown his doom.
For in his youth the merry dancers stopped
Behind his eyes prepared to scan the sea.
The dolphins bright as love removed his life
From wave to wave to final silent beach
Where enemies and friends alike are good.
Not lost at sea but on the land betrayed,
To sickness logging down his youth he fell,
Landlocked by tides before he shot the sun.
His lovers, now already less than strangers,
Like stars, like drifting wood, like tides,
Curve through the night-course of his memory
Remembering him who cannot say their names.
0 may his death be brief, appear no more
Than banks of cloud between whose clearing poles
The hill he lies in, with its flags and stones,
Moves slowly out upon the unsafest wave.
LAURENCE JOSEPHS
Laurence Josephs teaches English at Skidmore College. His poems have
appeared in the St. John's Review (Autumn '81, Winter '82).
AUTUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�The Lost Continent
The Conundrum of Christian Origins
Joel Carmichael
The countless thousands of books devoted to Christian
origins, including hundreds and thousands of lives of
Jesus and Paul, while deploying a vast amount of scholarship in a variety of fields, are all obliged to concentrate,
finally, on a very small number of documents: the New
Testament (essentially the Four Gospels and Paul's Letters) and the works of F1avius Josephus, especially The
Jewish War. Aside from these, the number of references to
Jesus and to early Christianity fill no more than a handful
of lines.
The .critical analysis of Christian origins began only two
centuries ago: until very recently it was hampered in its
criticism by preconceptions that even conscientious schol·
ars were unaware of. In the case of Jesus and Paul it has
been difficult to escape from the bondage of tradition,
which is itself the product of the documentation under
examination.
It took many generations of scholarship before it was
possible to discuss seriously what was really obvious at
first glance: if Jesus had been executed by the Romans for
sedition, might he not, in fact, have been a rebel against
Rome?
The reluctance to ask this simple question is all the
more surprising since Hermann Reimarus, the first critical
student of the historic Jesus, flatly laid it down in the eighteenth century th"t the Kingdom of God agitation carried
Among his many books, Joel Carmichael has written important studies
of Trotsky and Stalin, Trotsky (New York, St. Martin's Press 1975) and
Stalin's Masterpiece (New York, St. Martin's Press 1976). He translated
the memoirs of N. N. Sukhanov (The Russian Revolution 1917, Oxford
1952), the only full-length eyewitness account of the February and October events in Russia in 1917. First published in 1963, his Death of Jesus
appeared in a new edition in 1982 (New York, Horizon Press). In 1980
his study of Paul, Steh auf und rufe Seinen Namen, Paulus, Erwecker der
Christen und Prophet der Heiden, appeared in German (Munich,
C. Bertelsmann). Since 1975 he has been editor of Midstream.
The above essay summarizes the conclusions of a new study, The Unrid-
dling of Christian Origins.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
on by Jesus had a political aim. After Reimarus, however,
the question was not to be raised again until our own day,
and then only in a few scholarly and semi-scholarly books
that have not affected most people.
Our sources, taken together, do not create a unified picture: the facts they include must be disentangled from
tendency, apologetics, and obscurities, both intentional
and unintentional, to allow a real-life picture to emerge.
In the case of the Four Gospels, especially, the warp is
embedded deep in their very conception and purpose-in
the very reason they came into being.
There are two factors in the genesis of the First Three
Gospels (the historical and chronological basis for our
knowledge of Jesus):
On the one hand there was a global transformation of
perspective between the events of Jesus' own lifetime and
the germination of a new belief founded shortly after the
crucifixion on Simon the Rock's Vision of Jesus resurrected.
On the other hand this shift in perspective was paralleled by a socio-political upheaval-the destruction of the
Temple in Jerusalem in 70, the consequent emancipation
of the new belief from its institutional restraints, and the
concomitant fact that for generations after the destruction of the Temple the new sect of believers in Jesus was
opposed by the Jewish elite-the rabbis who had inherited the Pharisee tradition.
Thus the writers and editors of the Gospels after the destruction of the Temple, whose belief in the Vision of the
Risen Jesus necessarily distorted their view of events beforehand, found it natural to transpose their own contemporary disputes with the rabbis to the lifetime of Jesus,
especially since by then the Jews were no longer regarded
as targets for conversion and the leaders of the new sect
were directing their propaganda at all mankind.
Paul's Letters are, of course, by far the oldest source for
the history of the earliest phase in the formation of the
new sect. But Paul, though a slightly younger contempo-
73
�rary of Jesus, tells us almost nothing of the flesh-and-blood
Jesus: he was preoccupied with working out his own ideas
concerning the significance of the resurrection of Jesus.
The historical material that can be extracted from his Letters is, however, invaluable.
The Gospels, too, contain nuggets of historical information, though they were written under the pressure of a
specific situation and are biased in a characteristic way.
They have, in addition, an ait of timelessness, of motion-
lessness, in which Jesus expresses various ideas without
the reader being able to see their meaning against an historical background: it is hard to see, from the text alone,
just what there was about the Kingdom of God, or about
his ideas in general, that could have led to his crucifixion.
When we consider, further, that his whole career as outlined in the first three Gospels could scarcely have lasted
more than a few weeks, and that the Kingdom of God he
proclaims at the outset of all three accounts seems peculiarly abstract and anodyne, we are bound to be baffled.
It might be thought that the works of Flavius Josephus,
which cover a lengthy period before the Roman-Jewish
War, would fill in all this background. And for anyone
studying the first century of the Roman Empire they are,
indeed, indispensable.
Josephus was an aristocratic priest, and a commander in
the war against Rome. After defecting to the Romans during the war he became an outstanding propagandist of the
Flavian dynasty that came out of it victorious. The
Church Fathers took over the texts of Josephus's works
very early on-he died at the end of the first century-because it was the only account covering this densely packed
epoch and because it served as a vehicle for a very early
forgery designed to make Josephus a "witness" to the
supernatural status of Jesus, a forgery whose blatancy,
while obvious in any dispassionate examination, was not
exposed until the sixteenth century.
Josephus has become a special subject: specialists concentrate on fine points called for by each one's specialty.
By segregating Josephus's chronicles within a special area
of biased, though recondite, scholarship, and by projecting its own version of events as exclusively authoritative,
Church tradition insulated the whole era against empirical enquiries.
Josephus's account is packed with action and personalities: it conveys unmistakably the throb of life in Palestine
for the generations preceding the outbreak of the RomanJewish War. It is steeped in blood: murders, revolts, cruelty,
rapacity, cataclysms of all kinds are intertwined. Grinding
oppression on the part of the Romans, desperate uprisings
on the part of the Jewish Kingdom of God activists,
against a background of well-nigh total corruption, ferocity, and deceit, are routine. His descriptions provide a
blanket contrast with the eerie calm of the Gospels.
The Gospels and the Church tradition founded on
them indicate no friction at all between Romans and Jews
in Palestine. Everything that happens to Jesus takes place
in a Jewish milieu; even his trial before the Roman procu-
74
rator is explained as a Jewish plot. The stateliness of the
seemingly simple anecdotes, shot through with camouflaged theological motifs, casts an atmosphere of motionless pageantry over what we know was a most turbulent
era. And in our own day the countless books describing
the life of Jesus from a traditional point of view make life
in Palestine at the time sound well-nigh idyllic.
The Gospels suppress any criticism of the Romans. The
word itself, indeed, occurs only once (J n ll :48), and the
Romans are assigned a role only twice-Pilate himself and
the Roman centurion who on seeing Jesus on the cross
calls him "Son of God" (Mk 15:39).
The Romans, who crucified countless thousands of
Jews, so that the cross became the conventional symbol of
Jewish resistance to Roman power, go completely unnoticed by the writers and editors of the Gospels. Contrariwise, the Pharisees who were equated with the rabbis, the
chief opponents of the nascent sect by the time the Gospels were composed, after the destruction of the Temple,
are more or less constantly reviled (though here too
numerous indications of the opposite peep through the
web of apologetics).
It was the global transformation of outlook inherent in
the germination of a new belief inspired by Simon the
Rock's Vision of the Risen Jesus, reinforced by the reaction of the new sect to the Jewish debacle of 70, that distorted the Gospels systematically: all the basic ideas that
had a living context in the life of Jewry beforehandKingdom of God, the Messiah, Son of David, salvationwere wrenched out. of their true context: national insurrection.
In Jesus' lifetime not a single day could have passed
without some inflammatory incident; the mere presence
of the Romans constituted a constant provocation. All of
this is glossed over in the Gospels.
Nevertheless, the mere fact that Jesus was announcing
the Kingdom of God-i.e., a total transformation of the
universe in which the pagan powers, pre-eminently
Rome, were to be destroyed-together with his execution
by the Romans for sedition, irresistibly brings to mind the
Kingdom of God agitation that had dominated life in Palestine from the installation of direct Roman administration in 6 A.D. until it brought about the Roman Jewish
War in 66, and even later flared up in the abortive Bar
Kochba revolt in 132-35.
It is evident, in short, that any discussion of Jesus'
career, even if it is limited to the Gospels alone, will bring
us face to face to face with the Zealots, Kingdom of God
activists par excellence. If these diehards were capable of
swinging the bulk of the Jewish population of Palestine
into the. desperate rebellion against Rome, their mood must
have been incubating for a long tiine~losephus' account,
dense with real-life detail and vivid characterizations that
articulate a long-drawn-out process of alienation leading
to a last-ditch insurrection, fills in the background of the
Zealot agitation.
He has, to be sure, a bias of his own: he comprehen-
s
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�sively vilifies the Zealot movement in all its variations,
partly in the conviction, no doubt sincere, that the Kingdom of God activists were destroying Jewry and that God
himself had favored the Romans by giving them victory,
and partly, of course, because he was making propaganda
on behalf of his Roman patrons.
Nevertheless, the texture of his chronicles is so closeknit that the broad outlines of the Zealot movement, beginning with Judah the Galilean's agitation in 6 A.D., are
unmistakable. It is easy to allow, so to speak, for Josephus's
bias: when he describes people he calls "thieves" and
"brigands" as being tortured to death for refusing to call
Caesar "Lord," we are bound to conclude that they could
not, after all, have been mere thieves and brigands.
Josephus, however, says nothing whatever about Jesus
(aside from the forged paragraph mentioned above); he
does mention John the Baptist, innocuously, and also Upright Jacob, in a brief and equally innocuous passage. But
for the fleshing out of the realities of life in Palestine
around this time he is our only source. He is also priceless
for the study of the earliest phase of the new belief in
Jesus. His chronicle creates an infinitely broader, deeper,
and more ramified framework for judging the historical
material in Paul's Letters, the Gospels, and the Acts of the
Apostles.
If we compare Josephus's treatment of the Zealot movement with the treatment given by the Gospels, especially
Mark, to the complex of ideas, personalities, and events involved in the Kingdom of God movement, we see a striking
parallel. Both, for substantially the same reasons, ignore
the true content of the whole movement: Josephus describes the Kingdom of God activists in such a way as to
downgrade their ideological, idealistic concerns; the Gospels wholly disregard their political aims, too.
Most illustrative of this negative attitude of the Gospels
is Jesus' complete silence about the Zealots. The Gospelwriters, intent on whitewashing the Romans and dissociating the nascent sect from any connection with the Kingdom
of God activists who, after harassing the Romans for so
many decades, had brought about the ferocious war of
66-70, would surely have found it very convenient to set
down Jesus' denunciation of the architects of the catastrophe, if he had ever made any. In Rome, especially (where
Mark was written during or shortly after the war), some
negative remarks attributed to Jesus would have eased the
embarrassment of his followers. But since the author, or
authors, of Mark could not actually forge anything, they
were obliged to disregard the subject altogether; this disregard is all the more striking since they did find, in the reminiscences they had at hand, echoes of Jesus' opinions
about real people (Pharisees, HHerodians", even occa~
sionally, Sadduccees).
Taken together, however, both Josephus and the Gospels enable us to divine the presence of a remarkably energetic, grandiose movement capacious enough to bring the
Jewry of Palestine to destruction during the Roman-Jewish War in 66-70. Both accounts, accordingly, radically
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
contrasting with each other in all respects, confirm,
through this same negative attitude, the existence of a
vanished movement that in the desert of our documentation can be pieced together only through analysis.
Paul's Letters, taken together with the Gospels and
Acts of the Apostles, disclose a 4affling enigma~the dense
obscurity overhanging the two decades, roughly 60-80
A.D., between the Letters written by Paul, a real individual, and the anonymous compilations in the Gospels that
came into being one by one after the destruction of the
Jewish State and Temple in 70.
Consciousness of this obscurity allows one to sense a
profound, inexplicable, and of course camouflaged contrast between the official version of Christian origins in
the Gospels and the realistic glimpses tantalizingly suggested both by Paul's urgent, passionate, real-life struggle,
and by the random nuggets of historic actuality embedded in the Gospels themselves.
From this point of view the indifference of both church
historians and academic scholarship to the fate of the Jesist
coterie in Jerusalem, headed by Jesus' brother, is bewildering. If the "Mother Church," in distinction to the Jesist
coterie, actually existed before the destruction of the
Temple, the total silence of scholarship is incomprehensible: if its leaders had ever had anything self-aware to say it
would have been easy and natural for whatever it was to
circulate throughout the far-flung Jewish Diaspora. It is
obvious that the very concept, "Mother Church," as well
as the phrase itself, is a retrojective fiction.
Around the middle of the Fifties, that is, the time of the
riot occasioned by Paul on the Temple premises, it is possible to infer a crisis in the history of the Jewish state and
hence within the coterie of the Jerusalem Jesists. From
then on all remains blank; we are thrown back on the evolution of the Zealot crisis that erupted in the Roman War
of 66-70, and then, as the earliest documents of the new
sect began to be assembled afterwards, beginning with
Mark, we can once again see the beginning of a continuity,
in which, however, the first phase in the evolution of the
new faith~ the lives of Jesus, John the Baptist, Upright
Jacob, and Paul himself~is twisted about to conform with
the later tradition embodied in Mark, Matthew, Luke, Acts,
and John.
I have mentioned the omission, suppression, and distortion in the Gospels, and also referred to the nuggets of information embedded in them: there was no question of
forging, but of selecting and stressing and, conversely,
neglecting.
If the Gospels had been fabricated, after all, there would
be no way of knowing anything whatever about the career
of Jesus the man. If we recall the sweeping powers assumed by the Church when Christianity became a state
institution under Constantine the Great in the first quarter of the fourth century, and the severity of the censorship he authorized, which from the fifth century on was
applied with energy, the survival of the few scraps of information we have is remarkable. We owe such scraps es-
75
�sentially to an indifference to mundane history and to the
reverence for traditional texts that piety forbade tampering with.
Some principle for distinguishing between grades of evidence is indispensable; it seems sensible to me to take as
a starting-point the global transformation of perspective,
i.e., the germination and spread of the belief in the special
status of Jesus entailed by his Resurrection and Glorification, which intervened between the events of Jesus' life
and their chroniclers.
In my Death o{Jesus I established a "cardinal criterion":
Anything that conflicts with that global transformation of
perspective is likely to be true.
If a document records something countering the prevailing tendency in the Gospels to exalt Jesus, to preach
his universality, and to emphasize his originality, it should
be regarded, other things being equal, as being ipso facto
likely.
Very soon after the execution of Jesus and until the
Roman-Jewish War the predominant attitude among the
believers in the Vision was that of the jerusalem coterie.
At the same time, a contrary tendency-against the Torah
and toward the escalation of Jesus as Lord.of the Universehad already made itself felt even in Jerusalem, when the socalled "Hellenists" epitomized by the name of Stephen
were expelled and took their characteristic views to Antioch and no doubt to many other centers in the Jewish
Diaspora.
Paul himself, after attacking the new sect, as he himself
says, was then converted and began to express a point of
view he shared with some unknown predecessors. Indeed,
Paul's own initial hostility toward the Jesists was doubtless
a reaction against the anti-Torah views of such "Hellenists," since before his conversion Paul had applied his passion, as it seems, to the defence of the Torah, and only
afterwards went to the opposite extreme.
At the same time it is evident that Paul's views were not
predominant among the Jesists in general. When they
were made known in Jerusalem they put him in a predicament that undid him.
It is evident, moreover, not only that he ran afoul of the
Jesists in Jerusalem led by Jesus' brother Upright Jacob,
but that throughout his own lifetime he had no serious
influence. A moment's reflection on the background of
conflict-totally divergent from the sugary, harmonious
version of Paul's relations with the Jesists in Jerusalem as
recorded in Acts-shows Paul's unimportance during his
lifetime: While the Temple was at the peak of its majesty-the most celebrated edifice of antiquity, a citadel
and magnet for all Jewry-Paul was necessarily overshadowed.
It is plain from Paul's Letters themselves that he must
have written far more than have come down to us. He was
intensely active, apparently, for some two decades-from
about 35 to about 55.lt is hard to believe that all he wrote
is summed up by the small number of letters that now
form the backbone of the New Testament.
76
The condition of the Letters themselves indicates as
much: they are plainly random selections, often fragmentary to boot. One of the major ones-2 Corinthians-is
practically incomprehensible; it is best understood as a mosaic of scraps of other, left-over letters gathered together
after the phenomenon of"Paulinism"made its appearance.
Moreover, it is evident from the content of the Letters
we have that a dominant theme in all his major Lettersthe theme that often makes them sound hysterically demanding-is his rivalry with others; he is plainly describing
a situation in which he is promoting his own ideas against
rivals. And the rivals are, equally plainly, precisely the
leaders of the community of Jesists in Jerusalem.
It is obvious, in short, that during Paul's lifetime his
Letters were disregarded. It was only later, with the destruction of the Jewish State and Temple in 70 and the
consequent· disappearance of any institutional brake on
the spread of the new faith among the Jews, that Paul's
ideas, originally conceived as an explanation of what was
for Paul a current historical crisis, became, through a systematic misunderstanding of the key phrase, the Kingdom of God, the foundation of something he could never
have dreamed of-a timeless theology.
The Jewishness of the first Jesist coteries, under the
leadership of Jerusalem, can scarcely be exaggerated. This
also applies to the coteries Paul himself was connected
with, for despite the development of his own views it is
plain that in developing those very views Paul takes for
granted the overwhelming authority of the Scriptures as,
quite simply, unchallengeable: not only does he use Scriptural texts in a rabbinical manner (which might of course
have been a mere personal mannerism taken from his
training), but he expects his readers to realize that the
Messiah had come, died, and been raised again "according
to the Scriptures" (Rom 1:2, I Cor 15:3); he takes it for
granted that they will get the point of the examples he
gives of Abraham and Isaac _(Rom 4:2,3; Gal 4:28), Sarah
and Hagar (Gal4:21-31), and, even more striking, Moses'
Tablets of Stone (2 Cor 3:2, 3), the Covenant (2 Cor 3:6),
Adam's Sin (Rom 5:14), and the Stumbling-Block (Rom 9:
32,33). He makes flat statements assuming the unquestionable acceptance among his readers of the Hebrew
Scriptures: "Through the comfort of the Scriptures we
might have hope" (Rom 15:4).
Whatever might have been the background of the pagans whose lives had become linked to the Synagogue,
once they had become involved either as God-fearers or
something similar their locus of authority automatically
had become the Hebrew Scriptures. This in and of itself
entailed the giving of respect to the Jewish authorities in
Jerusalem, in this case, of course, the Jesists.
The original centrality of the Jerusalem Jesists is, in
short, evident from all the earliest documents on: even
Acts, which takes pains to harmonize the disputes that
separated its hero Paul from the Jerusalem Jesists, concurs
with Paul in accepting the centrality of the Jesists in Jerusalem.
AUTUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�In their own way the Gospels disclose a profoundly Jewish substratum: it peeps unmistakably' out of texts that include additions or changes designed to camouflage that
substratum or focus it differently. The Gospels were written and compiled to serve an apologetic purpose, but the
many elements they contain, if detached from the tendency of the editors, can point to some historical realities.
The idea of the Chosen People was taken for granted
by Jesus' immediate followers with unquestioning matterof-factness: it is graphically illustrated in the story of Jesus
and the pagan woman: it surely goes back to the first community: here Jesus rejects the pagan woman's appeal for
help by saying: "Let the children first be fed, for it is not
right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs."
Whether this was said by Jesus himself may not be certain, but its preservation must surely imply its being embedded in documents too revered to be disregarded: it
means, plainly and simply, that the Jews come first: i.e.,
that the pagans-"dogs" -are outside the Torah. Jesus relents in the story, but only after the woman modestly asks
no more for herself and her daughter than a few crumbs of
the "children's food" (Mk 7:24-30).
This theme of the Chosen People is repeated a number
of times in the Gospels-as where Jesus is seen sending
out his twelve "apostles" to go through Palestine, but to
"go nowhere among the pagans and enter no town of the
Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the House
of Israel" (Mt 10: 5-6).
There are countless other remarks-recalled, no doubt,
from Jesus' actual life-that indicate the same Jewish substratum.
Jesus is asked a fundamental question: "Which commandment is first of all?" He answers:
The first is, Hear Oh Israel, the Lord our God is one: and you
shall love the Lord thy God with all your heart, with all your
soul, and with all your mind, and with all your might. The sec-
ond is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. [Mt 22:
36-39]
The first statement is the key affirmation of Judaism;
the second sums up its ethics.
Think not that I have come to abolish the Torah and the
Prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them.
[Mt 5:17]
And day by day, attending the Temple together ... they partook of food ... praising God and having favor with all the
people. [Acts 2:46]
Now many wonders were done by the . .. apostles . .. all to-
gether in Solomon's portico. [Acts 5:12]
God exalted (jesus) ... to give repentance to Israel [Acts 5:31]
[The pilgrims en route to Emmaus] We had hoped that (Jesus)
was the one to redeem Israel. [Lk 24:21]
For that matter it seems likely, in accordance with our
Cardinal Criterion, that Jesus, despite his constant arguments with the Pharisees, was in fact a Pharisee himself:
he says only Pharisees can interpret the Torah (Mt 23:1-3).
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
These nuggets of history, however, have been tucked
into a framework contrived to accommodate a much later
situation. Essentially, Mark plucks Jesus out of his place in
time and space and transcendentalizes him beyond his
own politics. And the historical rationale for this is obvious: On the face of it it must have been a source of acute
embarrassment for believers living in Rome during the
years just preceding the Zealot war against Rome that
their own leader, Jesus of Nazareth, had himself been executed only a few decades earlier for just the same reasonsedition. It was vital for them to dissociate themselves
somehow from the opprobrium naturally clinging to followers of an enemy of Rome at a time when Rome was
engaged in a ferocious struggle against Kingdom of God
activists. It was just this crisis in the Roman Jesist community, indeed, that led to the composition of our first Gospel, Mark.
Since there was, however, no way of twisting the basic
facts out of shape-i.e., the indictment and execution of
Jesus as "King of the Jews" by a Roman procurator-it was
necessary to create a narrative structure that, while accommodating the irrefragable facts of Jesus's execution,
plausibly explained them away.
This was by no means due to hypocrisy: In the Jewish
Diaspora Jesus the Messiah had been escalated into Lord
of the Universe, Son of God, and Savior of Mankind. Psychologically, indeed, the same impulse that divorced the
real-life Jesus from his historical background after the
destruction of the Temple, was a parallel to the original
impulse in the psyches of Diaspora Jews like Paul that
made them, too, transcendentalize all traditional Jewish
national ideas while remaining convinced, like Paul, that
that itself represented a realization of a Jewish concept.
In any case, the problem confronting the author of the
ground-plan of Mark was simple: he had to obliterate the
possibility that Jesus would be linked to the Zealots the
Romans were fighting. He had to exculpate him from the
charge of being an activist in general, and an enemy of
Rome in particular. To do this he had to denature the
Kingdom of God-to depoliticize it by twisting its undeniable association with Jesus out of its socio-political background and by giving it an elusive other-worldly meaning.
The corollary of this was to slide past the attack on the
Temple and the resulting trial of Jesus for sedition.
The convergence of two concerns led to the apologetic
distortion of the historical account in Mark (and subsequently in Matthew, Luke, and Acts, which all accepted
the ground-plan of Mark).
One concern was to stress the transcendentalization of
Jesus that had been going on in the Jewish Diaspora sideby-side with the Jewish tradition of Jesus the Messiah and
his Glorious Return as Bringer of the Kingdom of God;
the other concern, desperately urgent because of the bitterness surrounding a war, was to free the Jesist congregations in the Roman Empire from the stigma of the Zealots.
Whoever wrote Mark solved the problem more than adequately: he created a model, in fact, that still enthralls
77
�the hundreds of millions of people indoctrinated by the
Gospels and by the vast cultural heritage they underlie.
Though by and large details are missing in all Gospel ac·
counts of Jesus' attack on the Temple, it is impossible to
escape the implications of the enterprise, whatever its
specific shape. It is indissolubly linked to the primary fact
of the tradition-the most solid, unchallengeable fact of
all: that Jesus was executed by the Romans as King of the
Jews.
If we start from this fact, and consider the skimpy de·
tails embedded in the Gospels, to the effect that Jesus
events preceding his arrest there was a real-life, stark event
-an abortive insurrection.
If we recall that the Temple had been standing in
Mark's own lifetime, that the insurrection he was camouflaging had taken place only the generation before, and
that the reminiscences he himself was making pious use
of must have referred to some of the events, we can see
that Mark had to contrive an overarching aesthetic
framework to achieve plausibility. Some oversights, perhaps inevitable, were to survive.
The echo of the Zealots, for instance, is arresting:
Simon the Rock (Peter) is called "Baryon," as though it
meant Bar Yonah," or son of Yonah, but "Baryon"
<I
meant a "rebel, outlaw," a political or social outcast living
"on the outside," i.e., away from the settled areas controlled
by the state. Judas "Iscariot" must surely refer to sicarius,
or Daggerman, an extremist Zealot group; the two sons of
Zavdai (John and Jacob) are called "sons of rage," echoing
the violence associated with the Kingdom of God activists.
Also, two Kingdom of God activists, called "bandits"
and Hthieves," were crucified alongside Jesus: these were
simply pejorative expressions for such rebels used by Flavius Josephus as well as by the Romans, for tendentious
reasons: Barabbas, too, "arrested in the insurrection" (Mk
On this and opposite page: 67 A.D. Silver Shekel, Obverse (above), legend: "Shekel of IsraeL" Chalice. These coins were issued for five years,
from 66 to 70 A.D. (Roughly twice actual size.)
"preached" in the Temple for three days, "overturned the
tables of the money-changers" and "drove them out with
a whip of cords," we see that the whole incident, presented in the Gospels as though it were symbolical, or in
any case non-violent, becomes portentous: Jesus held the
Temple.
Now, how could he seize the Temple, and hold it for
any length of time? The Temple was a vast edifice,
guarded by a Roman cohort of 5-600 as well as by a Tern-.
pie police force of 20,000. How could Jesus have scattered
the money-changers and overturned their tables in the
face of the armed police units? (To say nothing of the
money-changers themselves,)
The group led by Jesus must have been armed themselves. This simple fact makes understandable the many
references to arms lurking in the present text:
One (of the party) drew his sword, and struck at the High
Priests' servant, cutting off his ear. [Mk 14:47]
Look, Lord, we have two swords here. [Mt 22:49]
(and parallels)
Lord, shall we use our swords? [Mt 22:38]
Jesus could seize the Temple only by armed force; his
execution by the Romans as "King of the Jews" was directly linked to his seizure of the Temple. Behind the
skimpy, distorted, and obscure Gospel references to the
78
15:7), was likewise a Kingdom of God activist.
Simon the "Kananean" (in the list of the Twelve appointed by Jesus [Mk 3:18]), is revealing: "Kananean," a
word incomprehensible in the Greek text, is evidently a
transliteration of a Hebrew-Aramaic work (Qanna'i) for
"Zealot". Now, it was Mark's habit to explain such words:
just before this, the epithet "Boanerges" ("sons of rage")
for the sons of Zavdai, has been explained by the narrator.
Mark's avoidance of an explanation in this instance makes
it obvious that a real translation of the meaningless
uKananean" would have been embarrassing in the atmosphere of Rome at the time. Later, to be sure, it lost its
odium: A half-generation or more after the destruction of
the Jewish State it was possible for Luke to translate it, for
a different readership, quite straightforwardly as "Zealot"
by using the Greek word "Zealot" instead of a transliteration of the Hebrew-Aramaic (Mt 10:4).
In the Palestine of Jesus' day the statement "Pay Ceasar what is due to Caesar, and God what is due to God"
(Mk 12:13-17), would be taken by any Kingdom of God
agitator in a real-life situation as self-evidently insurrectionist. To such an agitator it went without saying that
the Holy Land was God's alone and no pagans could profit
from it, and in particular that the taxation imposed in 6
A.D. was an outrage. But Mark places it in a context in
which it sounds unmistakably as though Jesus were endorsing the tribute to Rome: he uses the phrase as Jesus'
response to a trap set for him by the "Pharisees and the
Herodians." It was natural for the Romans to expect a
subject people to pay tribute, just as it was natural for a
Kingdom of God agitator to refuse to pay tribute; by
transposing the context of the question, accordingly, the
AUTIJMN /WINTER 1982-83
�architect of the Markan theme extract.ed its political taint,
as it were, and soothed his readers among the Jesists in
Rome as the Zealot war erupted.
In general, Mark depicts the Jewish authorities as hostile
to Jesus from the outset: "Pharisees" plot with "Herodians"
(the pro-Roman Jews headed by sons of Herod the Great
and ruling Galilee at the time) against Jesus (even though
it is the High Priests who finally engineer the crucifixion
[Mk 15: 10-11]).
By the time of the spread of the Gospels the High
Priests had vanished with the Temple cult, while the
Pharisee tradition was sustained by the rabbis, now the
chief opposition to the new sect: for the Gospel-writers,
the word "Pharisees" stood for the Jewish authorities in a
comprehensive, absolute sense.
Jesus in turn vilifies all Jewish authorities as cultically,
legally, and spiritually sterile, even evil. The hostility to the
Jewish authorities is extended to the Jewish people as a
whole, who fail to perceive that even someone they are familiar with since childhood is meritorious: hence Jesus'
comment that "a prophet is without honor in his own
country, and among his own people, and in his own house"
(6:1-6); the Jewish people as such is condemned for ritualism (7: 6-8); to cap the process the Jewish mob actually
calls for his death and derides him (15: 1lff., 29-30).
Moreover, Jesus is described as cutting himself off from
his kinship not only with his people, but with his own
family:
And his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside
they sent to him. Jesus replies: "Who are my mother and my
brothers?" and goes on: "Whoever does the will of God is my
brother, and my sister, and my mother." [3:31-5]
Mark tells us, in short, that mere biology is meaningless:
the Roman Jesists can be as close to Jesus as his own family. If we recall the importance of the dynastic factor in the
emergence of Upright Jacob in the Jerusalem coterie before the Roman-Jewish War, we discern a polemical thrust
at Jesus's family that must have entered the story at the
time the Gospel was set down after the destruction of the
Temple.
When the pre-eminence of Jesus's family in the Jerusalem coterie was made obsolete by its extinction together
with the Temple, it was possible to defy the vanished authority and virtuously separate the Roman Jesists from it.
Thus, the family of Jesus is presented as having thought
him out of his mind, to begin with, and as explicitly repudiated by Jesus.
This is complemented by the contemptuous description
of Jesus' Jewish companions, called the "Apostles," who
of course also constituted, together with Upright Jacob,
the core of the Jesist coterie in Jerusalem. They are constantly described as bickering over precedence and rewards
(9:34, 10:34-45) and as devoid of Jesus' own remarkable
powers (9:6, 10, 18) One betrays him (14:10, 11, 20, 21,
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
43-5); on his arrest they all abandon him and flee (14:50).
For that matter the leading apostle, Simon the Rock,
though acknowledged as the first to see in Jesus theMessiah, is said to '1 rebuke" Jesus for speaking of his resurrec-
tion and because of that, indeed, is called by Jesus "Satan".
On top of that there is an account of Simon the Rock's
unappetizing denial of any acquaintance with Jesus: not
only is it excessively long in such a short document, but it
is negative through and through.
That Simon the Rock recognized Jesus as Messiah but
denied the salvational function of the resurrection shows
Reverse, legend: "Jerusalem the Holy." Stem with three pomegranates.
that the Jerusalem group headed by Upright Jacob did not
believe in Jesus except as the Jewish Messiah-that his
role as Lord of the Universe, of Divine Savior of Mankind,
meant nothing to them. In short, the viewpoint of Paul is
put forth in Mark in such a way as to take advantage of the
Jewish defeat in war.
The ground-plan of Mark goes far beyond details: it has
a profound apologetic aim.
While bound to accept the historic fact that the Roman
indictment was followed by a Roman execution, Mark tells
us that Pilate was forced by the Jews to do what they
wanted. In the narration this has already been built up"planted," in literary parlance-by clear-cut suggestions of
a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Jesus.
The assignment of an executive role to the Jewish authorities in explaining away the Roman indictment and
execution of Jesus in and for itself expresses the anti-Jewish
tendency of Mark's ground-plan.
It is more than likely, of course, that the Kingdom of
God agitation engaged in by Jesus would have set him
against the Jewish aristocracy as well as the Romans, but
there was no need at all for them to be involved in an actual trial: in view of the public nature of the agitation, indeed, it is hard to see why the Romans had any need for a
trial either: a perfunctory hearing would seem to have
been sufficient.
In any case, any number of Kingdom of God agitators,
79
�would-be Messiahs and pretenders of all kinds were routinely exterminated by the Romahs. There was no need
for the Jewish authorities to intervene at all.
Moreover, since the tendency in:Mark is in any case to
highlight the evil intentions of the Jews, had there been,
in fact, any Jewish intervention to undo Jesus it would
have been both natural and easy to build up that theme
and omit the Roman role altogether.
The fact that the original writer of the ground-plan for
Mark was obliged, despite his reluctance, to record an important role for the Romans, confirms the matter-of-fact
historicity of the Roman charge on the cross itself-"King
of the Jews" -and demonstrates the tendentious artificiality of Mark's emphasis on the role of the Jews.
The theme was vital for Mark: to amplify it he enlarges
on how Jesus, though of course a Jew, was not appreciated
by Jews and how he expressly denied the importance of
any kinship.
Since the Jews in the Roman Empire were suspect at
the time because of the Kingdom of God agitation, which
had even penetrated the Diaspora, and because of their
success in proselytization (cf. Tacitus's sneer at Christianity for its Jewish roots), Mark has set himself the task of
splitting Jesus away from his original background.
From the very outset, the reader is informed that Jesus
did not follow the tradition represented by the "scribes":
he, in contrast, "has authority" (Mk I :22). Jesus, by absolving the sins of a paralytic he has just healed, forces the
scribes to charge him with blasphemy (2:6-7); then he attacks the "scribes of the Pharisees" for their objections to
his eating with "tax-collectors and sinners"; and in explaining that his disciples do not fast like "John [the Baptist's] disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees," uses a
metaphor-the futility of using new cloth to repair an old
garment or of putting new wine into old wine-skins-evidently intended to drive home the point of Judaism's
obsolescence.
This metaphor would have had compelling force precisely in the wake of the destruction of the Temple, and
not before: it gives lapidary expression to what has now become an historic fact-that the Roman Jesists, with a
large admixture of converts and semi-converts, have
found the solution to a problem that, as we know from the
evolution of Paul's ideas, must have begun to weigh on
them beforehand-i.e., the reinterpretation of the Torah
and of Jewish traditions in general in the light of Simon
the Rock's Vision.
The theme of Mark can be tersely summed up: the
Jews, both leaders and masses, are responsible for Jesus'
death; his immediate family thought him crazy; his
"Apostles", having misunderstood him, also abandon him.
Jesus himself provides the counterpoint to this series of
negatives: he rejects those who reject him, emphasizes
the importance of worshipping God through him in contrast to loyalty to blood-relationships, and denounces the
chauvinistic limitations of Simon the Rock, his pre-eminent follower.
7
80
In short, Mark, while depicting Jesus in a Jewish environment, has extracted him from it and placed him beyond it.
This point is driven home explicitly in what is, thematically, the climax of the Gospel: after demonstrating how
the Jews had failed to apprehend the divine nature of
Jesus, the narrator puts a key phrase-"verily, this man
was the Son of God" -into the mouth of the Roman centurion directing the Crucifixion.
Perceived beforehand in Mark only by demons (responsible in antiquity for the supernatural knowledge ascribed
to madmen), this basic idea is expressed by a normal
human being, that is, a pagan, like, perhaps, the bulk of
the Jesists in Rome. (The fact that Mark uses a Latin
word, when Matthew and Luke use a Greek, reinforces the
impression that Mark was indeed composed in Rome.)
The preliminary stage for the deification of Jesus has
reached its climax: Jesus has been crucified, the Gentiles
have seen the Light, Judaism has been definitively superseded.
The original author of Mark has solved the problem set
for him by the historical circumstances of Jesus' arrest, indictment, and execution by the Roman authorities. He
has demonstrated that it was a machination of the Jews,
who had either misunderstood or opposed him, that Jesus
had not been executed as a freedom-fighter in a nationalist movement against the Romans at all, but was, in fact, a
divine figure whose fate was part of a cosmic plan.
By elevating the drama to this supra-terrestrial terrain
Mark has wrenched Jesus out of his historical framework.
He gives the remark about paying tribute to Caesar,
which in a historical context would have been understood
as an insurrectionist slogan, a seemingly natural background in which its meaning is reversed, and Jesus, in his
only comment on politics, seems to be endorsing tribute
to Caesar, and blandly slides past the Zealots in Jesus's entourage by misrepresenting Simon the Zealot through an
unintelligible transliteration.
Mark's extracting of Jesus from his folk heritage bridges
the main chasm between Judaism and the world outside
by making it entirely unnecessary for pagans to become
Jews for any reason whatever, and facilitates their conversion by showing that belief has nothing whatever to do
with communal or biological bonds. Although Mark did
not specifically strip the traditional Messiah of a martial
function, by transcendentalizing Jesus out of his political
background he promoted a conception of Christ that also
transcended the provincial background of politics in Palestine and thus laid the underpinnings for a cosmic role to
be played by an eternal, divine Christ.
There is no reason to assume that Paul's writings,
which were not paid much attention to in his lifetime,
necessarily served as matrix for this idea. An anti-Torah,
transcendent view of Jesus was adumbrated, if not elaborated, only a few years after the crucifixion; there is no reason it shouldn't have been represented in Rome as well as
in Antioch, or indeed in any Jesist coterie anywhere at all.
AUTUMN I WINTER 1982-83
�It surfaced very naturally, just as Paul's ideas in general
were recovered, after the destruction bf the Temple, and
came to embody the official view of an evolving religious
·
fellowship.
Once a sharp contrast was drawn between Jesus the
Jewish Messiah and Jesus Lord of the Universe, the contrast itself became the pivot on which all subsequent speculation turned, and once the contrast was grasped by the
believer, and internalized, it became in and for itself a natural matrix for still further speculation.
Mark solved the primary problem involved in the transformation of a cluster of Jewish beliefs into a universal,
transcendent religion expanded far beyond the horizons
of Judaism: his solution, by explaining away the real cause
of Jesus' execution and shifting it to a theological plane involving a radical and unbridgeable difference with Jewry,
served simultaneously as the model for the dehistorizing
and theologization of the new religion.
Just as Paul's ideas were to create a universe of ideas for
the new sect, so the ground-plan of Mark created an original historic basis for it. By camouflaging a simple fact
-that Jesus was executed not as a reformer of Judaism
but as a rebel against Rome-Mark provided an historical
foundation from which Paul's ideas could soar aloft.
But before that something else had to happen: the idea
that the World's End was imminent had to be given up.
The Gospels recorded a number of postponements of
the advent of the Kingdom of God-from the "at hand"
of the very first fervor, to the few weeks implied by the
disciples going through the towns of Israel, to the end of
the lives of the listeners to one of Jesus' speeches. It may
well be that even by the time the first draft of Mark was
written the writer was no longer so sure of the imminence
of the World's End; by the time John was composed,
around the turn of the second century, the notion of the
World's End has been totally dislocated from the author's
cosmology: for him there is to be no Glorious Return at
all-the Lord has already come. On the other hand, some
scraps in the New Testament-such as I and II Peter and
Revelations, as well as small fragments of the Gospel John
itself-seem to return to the perspective of an imminent
Final Judgement (Jn 5:27-29; 6:39ff).
Though it took varying lengths of time before the
World's End idea was wholly extinct, it is plain that by the
time Luke was written, some decades after the destruction of the Temple, the idea had become at least quiescent. It was no longer held seriously.
Thus the general feeling had moved definitively away
from Paul's state of mind: he wrote because he felt the
World's End was imminent despite delay. By the time this
had evolved into the conviction that the delay was no
longer a delay but a condition of nature, it was possible,
indeed indispensable, for something to be put down on
paper. Thus, some decades after Mark, Luke and Acts
were drafted (parts of both of which were, as it seems, the
work of the same hand).
Acts is, indeed, our sole source for the earliest period of
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the new sect after the destruction of the Temple: it carries the process of socio-political accommodation begun
by Mark still further.
The sources embodied in Acts are so fragmentary that
no coherent account is possible; still less does it say anything about any individual except Paul himself. There is
almost literally no information about anyone mentioned.
The individuals are given names, to be sure, and an occa~
sional sentence or two purports to flesh out an inchoate
narrative, but there is no way of apprehending motive,
character, or activity.
The writings set down in this very early period had the
function of defining, that is, establishing the leadership of
the new sect: they were a major attempt at organization.
And to do so, decades after the destruction of the Temple
and two generations after the death of Jesus, it was vital
for the leaders to claim a living link between Jesus and
themselves.
Accordingly, the newly evolving Church was "defined"
by the Twelve Apostles, or rather, more accurately, by
apostles in the plural. This claim, wedded to the claim, implicit and explicit, that the founding Apostles' authority
was binding, became the theological principle underpinning the Church.
This principle of the binding authority of the Apostles
in and for itself was never to be challenged by the great divisions of the later Church (Catholics, both Roman and
Greek Orthodox, and Protestants); the only dispute was to
be the manner in which the authority attributed to the
Apostles was, in fact, binding (the Protestants, of course,
accepted the Scriptures alone as binding; the Catholics
considered the "Church tradition" equally binding.)
But in fact the "Apostles" were simply part of a theory.
In the very beginning there was no such institution as
"The Twelve": the figure itself, reflecting the World's
End expectations of the Kingdom of God activists, merely
stood for the Twelve Tribes of Israel. "The Twelve" never
played a role of any kind, even in the sources that mention them: after their first mention (in late sources) they
are never, except for Simon the Rock, mentioned again as
"Apostles." A major associate of Jesus, Jacob ben-Zavdai,
lived for a decade after Jesus' crucifixion and must have
been both eminent and active, since he was executed
in 43 by Agrippa I. But after the first mention he is not
called an "Apostle."
Most striking of all, in discussing his trips to Jerusalem
Paul makes no mention of "The Twelve" whatever-he
talks only of the three "pillars," the only ones he confers
with: they are obviously the leaders of the Jerusalem coterie. That is, even if there was such a group as "The
Twelve/' it was no longer in existence in the middle or
perhaps end of the Forties (44 or 48). Later on only
Upright Jacob, Jesus' brother, is mentioned as leader of
the Jerusalem coterie (Acts 32: 15ff).
It is obvious that the statement that there were apostles
is part of the early Church tradition itself: it is the way the
tradition substantiates itself.
81
�Though the church "theory" is very old, it goes back,
accordingly, only to the time when there was already a
huge break with the real-life background of the historic
jesus, and an awareness of that break-that is, to about
100, when the jewish Temple had been extinct for a
whole generation and when the jesists themselves were
swiftly being transformed into the first stage of what
could now be called "Christians," or perhaps only "protoChristians." Although Paul was now accepted and the
foundations of the religion accordingly laid, the organization of the Church itself was still rudimentary and uncertain, and a dogma that was to be indispensable-the Trinity-had not yet been thought of, let alone worked out.
But the generation of 100, aware that they were different as it were in essence from the historic jesus, Simon
the Rock, Upright Jacob, and Jacob and John ben-Zavdai,
and aware of the gap between them, conceived of themselves as being not the second link in the chain of generations-the break made that impossible-but the third;
i.e., they had to create a link between themselves and the
first generation. The concept of the Apostles fixed and
·amplified this link: it became the "Apostolic tradition," as
though it were a tradition about an historical situation.
The traditional definition of the "Apostolic age" as ending with the deaths of Simon the Rock (Peter), Paul, and
probably Upright jacob rests on the claim that until a few
years before 66 reminiscences directly derived from jesus
were still alive. This "living tradition" about jesus itself
consists, however, of assertions made about it by the tradition.
Hence the Gospels and Acts, while containing nuggets
of historical fact or probability, as I have indicated, no
longer reflect the circumstances of jesus's real life, but the
pseudo-tradition about them embodied in revered documents. The handful of what might have been historic
reminiscences committed to writing as the real-life first
generation began to die off, survive merely as fragments
embedded in theologically tinctured and slanted texts
that began to be assembled as a "canon" around the middle of the second century.
It is plain that the earliest current of belief in jesus had
already been expressed in two different styles. One had to
do with the homely tradition of jesus the Jewish Messiah
who had lived in Palestine, been executed by the Romans,
and been seen resurrected at the Right Hand of God; the
second was the visionary jesus stripped completely of all
earthly attributes and embodying a simple principle, to
wit, that he had died and been raised again. But basically
the two traditions were to become one, since the tradition
about the earthly jesus, though it underlies. what seem to
be the facts in the Gospels-sayings, miracles, snippets of
statements etc.-in fact has been twisted around as a
form of adaption to the disembodied, spiritual, abstract,
principled framework of the confessional formula inherited by Paul from his own predecessors very early on. The
significance of the seemingly historical framework of the
82
Gospels is in fact found only within the capsule of the confessional formula of the Death and Resurrection of jesus
Christ. The seemingly factual framework of the Gospels
was itself an adaptation of historical or semi-historical
fragments about jesus's life on earth only from the point
of view of fleshing out the formula of the confession.
This fusion of two beliefs about Jesus had little to do
with a lapse of time-it was a transformation of view that
took place very rapidly: it was already given a sort of
schematic representation by Paul: whereas before his
resurrection Jesus was the son of David-i.e., the jewish
Messiah-afterwards he was the Son of God, Lord of the
Universe (Rom 1:3-4). Thus the process of transforming
historical into theological materials that took place after
the destruction of the Temple was the same, writ large, as
the transformation already seen at work in Paul's Letters,
written before 55.
For Paul, too, a communal repast had already become
sacramental. It can be summed up in a single sentence:
When we bless "the cup of blessing", is it not a means of shar~
ing in the blood of Christ? When we break the bread, is it not
a means of sharing in the body of Christ? [I Cor 10:16].
The transition from the tim~ in which the early )esists
interpreted the Lord's Supper as a Passover meal-a
seder-to the time, much later, when Christ was himself
called a Passover lamb, is evident.
Though the factual information in Paul's Letters is peripheral as well as scanty-he was arguing a case, exhorting his audience; justifying his position-it is, to be sure,
illuminating: it gives us an insight, for instance, into the
authoritative position of Upright Jacob and his possible
role in Temple politics just before the Roman-jewish War;
negatively, too, his Letters tell us something: before the
Destruction of the Temple Paul was overshadowed by the
jerusalem jesists. We can also estimate the speed of expansion in the very earliest tradition: when Paul mentions
the appearance of the Risen jesus to more than "500
brethern" (I Cor 15:6) he is already employing a formulaic
expression typical of an already fixed tradition to events
that occurred fairly soon after Simon the Rock's Vision.
The jerusalem coterie did not interfere with the new
speculations that under Hellenistic influence began in the
jewish Diaspora after the Vision: no doubt they were
shapeless and unsystematic. Perhaps such speculations
came to the surface in only a few centers-such as Antioch-that were to become important after the extinction of the jerusalem coterie in the debacle of 70. And it
was just this fact of their later importance that was concealed after the debacle by the instinctive creation of a
legendary, mythological fabric to manifest the continuity
claimed by all institutions.
The conventional view of theologians today would have
it that the anti-Torah, transcendental conception of Jesus
held by Paul and Stephen had already struck deep roots
AUTIJMN /WINTER 1982-83
�throughout the "Christian" community long before the
destruction of the Temple in 70. From that point of view,
accordingly, the elimination of the "Mother Church"
-the Jesist Coterie-and all the more so of the Temple
and the Jewish State meant nothing-a mere clearing
away of the debris long since left behind by the evolving
faith.
This conventional view, is also, of course, the grand
theme of Acts-indeed, its purpose. Yet it can hardly be
correct: Paul's Letters, written many decades before the
destruction of the Temple and long before the evolution
of any theological "views" at all, show his second-class
status. They show his irritation with the contending
"Gospels" he kept colliding with, the hostile attitude of
the Jerusalem "pillars," the atmosphere of contention and
self. justification. The impression left by these striking motifs in Paul's Letters is reinforced negatively by their random and fragmentary survival.
From an historical point of view it is plain that Paul was
dead long before the triumph of his ideas: the destruction
of the Temple cleared the way for the tendentious slant·
ing of the Gospels, beginning with Mark, away from the
real-life career of Jesus, executed by the Romans for sedition, into the Pacific Christ, Lord of the Universe, and
Savior of Mankind, whose salvational powers were to be
mediated to believers via the magical apparatus of the
Church.
In one respect proto-Christianity carried on the tradition of Judaism: it was grounded in mundane history as
well as in reflections on its meaning. Yet the contrast with
Judaism, in which the Creator of the Universe stands
apart from his own handiwork, was fundamental: Incarnation, propped up on two great events, the Crucifixion
(and its meaning) and the Vision of the Risen Jesus (and
its meaning) was the very core of the new faith. For
Judaism, the Incarnation was inconceivable.
The surviving Letters of Paul provided a theological
framework for the pseudo-historical Gospels and Acts of
the Apostles. The combination of these writings into a
canon made necessary the obfuscation of the facts they
contain.
It seems fair to say that until very recently the sum total
of all scholarship dealing with Christian origins has been
confined to tendentious documents. Since it reaches conclusions implied in its premises, it constitutes no more
than a vast circular argument-a begging of the question.
The apologetics, both theological and practical, that generated the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles cannot, without incisive analysis, solve historical puzzles.
The warping of perspective inherent in our sources can
scarcely be exaggerated. Because of the very fact that
Christian tradition was itself fabricated by writings, the
conventional view today accepts without question a tranTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
scendental interpretation of those origins, an interpretation
that, overshadowed at first by the historical expectations
of the first Jesist coterie, later, after the Jewish debacle in
70, swept the field and was amplified, magnified, ramified, and consolidated precisely as the institutional expression of the triumphant tendency.
If the rationale of the Church is summed up in the
phrase ascribed to the Risen Jesus-"I am with you always, until the World's End" -and if its institutional continuity is guaranteed by the passage aimed at Doubting
Thomas-"Blessed are those who have not seen (the
Risen Jesus's) wounds and yet believe" (Jn 20:29)-we see
how essential it was for Christian theology from the very
beginning to wrench both Jesus and the Kingdom of God
out of their historical matrix.
It was thus the course of history itself that created
Christian theology-conditioned, to be sure, by the long·
ings of multitudes.
Yet historicized theology is imaginary history: the web
of myth has suffocated the history of real people.
What is, perhaps, astonishing is the durability of that
imaginary history. Christianity is the only major religion
whose essence is substantiated by supernatural claims
made on behalf of an historic individual-claims, moreover, expressed in actual documents. One might have
thought, once the documents were closely scrutinized,
that the real-life background of the supernatural claims
would eventually edge aside or at least modify the claims
themselves. Yet to this day the tradition has survived all
the assaults of commonsense; it has withstood the counterweight of probability, of rank impossibility, of pervasive discrepancies, of manifest contradictions, of outright
nonsensicality.
The hundreds of millions of Protestants-recently joined
by Catholics, now also allowed to read the Bible freely
-who even in childhood read and study the New Testa·
ment, which despite its ethereal cast constantly hints at
factual situations, look-and see nothing. Huge motion
pictures have been made depicting, in a naturalistic setting, the supposed events of Jesus' life in Roman Palestine. These motion pictures, conscientiously made with
the guidance of sincere experts, are so foolish when held
up against their real-life background in the vividness called
for by naturalism that one might well think the insulating
walls of traditional perception would surely be pierced.
They seem to elicit no reflection. Audiences are so con·
ditioned by the theological interpretation of the historic
setting that the setting itself is apprehended dimly or not
at all; the mythology is potent enough to plaster over all
the fissures between itself and real-life plausibility.
Accounts of Christian origins that diverge from the tradition are often called "hypothetical," even by skeptics, as
though the tradition itself were true to life.
This attitude on the part of believers and non-believers
alike seems to me due to a sort of shyness, a reluctance to
accept conclusions arising out of the logic of analysis.
83
�Some find it difficult to accept the contradictions in the
sources, as when, for instance, the ~.~pacific" passages attrib-
uted to Jesus contradict the martial passages, the references to arms and so on. Others, accepting one part of a
Gospel but not another, will doubt the likelihood of the
Romans' having allowed Jesus to survive as long as he did,
instead of arresting him, say, on the spot. At bottom many
are put off by the notion that the historic Jesus could possibly have been so utterly different from the Jesus conceived of by Paul; they require a palpable demonstration,
however tenuous, of a link between the two irreconcilable
portraits.
The "Higher Critics", after almost two centuries of
analysis, have not been helpful in filling the empirical void
left by the destruction of the tradition. No doubt this, too,
is due to a reluctance to venture into conjecture and surmise, away from the buttressing of documentation. For
instance, even though the connections between Judah
the Galilean, John the Baptist, Jesus, and the Zealot leaders of the war against Rome are unmistakable, they are
not, after all, fleshed out in sufficiently copious detail to
make a dense chronicle possible.
Still, three facts remain: Jesus preached the "Kingdom
of God;" he was executed as "King of the Jews"; everything expressly attributed to him was taken from one aspect or another of Judaism.
These three facts, which after all are also embedded in
our sources, entail two conclusions: The first is that for
the evolution of the later religion we are thrown back, in
sum, not to Jesus, but to what was said about him-to the
theology that after Jesus' death was layered around the
concept of Lord of the Universe and Savior of Mankind.
The second is that we can, very reasonably, extrapolate
from the nuggets of history I have mentioned a true
though, to be sure, scanty account.
These three facts, then, when propped up on the fac-
84
tual matter scattered about even in the Gospels and Acts
and downright abundant in Josephus's writings, constitute a tripod sturdy enough to warrant a "new" account
of Christian origins. It is possible to extract from the
sources a coherent chronicle of the Kingdom of God agitation against Rome during the first century of the Empire that will locate Jesus in time and space and explain
how normal history was later transformed-again, in time
and space-into the theology of a great Church.
Inevitably, that chronicle will be skimpy; while the factual structure, so to speak, is there, the details are bound
to be absent precisely because of the process we have
been discussing. The Kingdom of God agitation against
Rome-in other words, the Jewish independence movement-is a sort of Lost Continent: the historiography that
covered the two centuries between the successful Maccabee insurrection and the abortive Bar Kochba insurrection is, except for Josephus, simply missing. And even
Josephus, whose histories stop in any case with 70, is
warped, despite his copious detail, by his hostility to the
independence movement and in particular by his omission of the background to Christianity (it is, of course,
conceivable that self-serving parties might have eliminated references to Jesus in Josephus's early manuscripts).
What remains of the Lost Continent are skeletal vestiges and some glimpses-a few peaks, a spur or two, a
panoramic vista. Still, bare bones are better than nothing.
The philosophical implications of such a reconstruction
surely demand a re-assessment of our own history. For if
this reconstruction of Christian origins is accepted, it will
be evident that it was not the career or Jesus, after all, that
was the seminal event of the modern age, but the Jewish
debacle of 70.
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�New Year's Eve
Meyer Liben
It was twenty minutes to twelve, but there was nothing
to indicate that it was twenty minutes before the New
Year. I was sitting next to a man who had introduced himself as Hudson, and I immediately commented that Thomas
Hudson was the name of the hero in Ernest Hemingway's
posthumously published novel, Islands In The Stream,
which I had recently read.
"What's it about?" asked Hudson.
"It's about difficult work, desperate love, and death."
"How come you didn't put an adjective before 'death'?"
asked Hudson.
"That word can get along without an adjective," I replied.
We were looking north through a window at the familiar
nightscape of the city. I do not know what Hudson felt,
but I felt the comfort of shelter on a bitter cold night, and
that New Year's Eve sense of desolation and futurity.
There were a couple of dozen people in the room, broken
up into small groups in accord with inclination, accident,
and the arrangement of the furniture.
"You know," said Hudson, "it feels like the end of an
Old Year more than the beginning of a New Year."
"Past experience bears more on some than does the
ex~
pectancy of the unknown," I replied in the sententious
manner which many find annoying, including myself.
A nearby couple were having a serious low-keyed discussion about a family matter, and across the room an ex·
uberant drunk was telling a small group a long anecdote
which was being listened to with varying degrees of interest.
"When Hemingway died," said Hudson, ''a number of
critics commented that his stories would outlast his novels."
"Some race," I said.
The sound of a police siren faintly entered the steamheated room.
"How come he knocked himself off?" asked Hudson.
"What's your feeling about it?"
"Well," I said, "if you figure Hudson to be pretty much
autobiographical, and that's how it sounds, then he tells
you in the novel. He says that work keeps him alive, that if
he couldn't get that daily work done, he'd be lost, his day
would lose all its meaning. By work he means his painting,
which we translate into Hemingway's writing. Indeed, in
an earlier book, he wrote: ' ... I felt the death loneliness
that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your
life.' In this last book he talks about the matter in a strong,
single-minded way. Without work accomplishment, the
actuality or strong potentiality of it, he felt he was nothing.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The work was a talisman, a defense, a protection against
the inroads of mortality. There must have come a time
when he felt that the work, actual or potential, was not
under his control (Carlos Baker, in his biography, indicates
that). That bulwark gone, he did away with himself."
"There's plenty of other kinds of work in the world besides writing," said Hudson. "He could have worked as a
fisherman ... "
"Come on, Hudson/' I said, "at this stage it was not a
question of livelihood with him. He was a very competitive
man, kept comparing himself to the greatest writers, and I
suppose that when he was continually creating, he felt that
he was struggling with God, with the original Creation.
When that ceased to be the case, he left the world. All his
pride, duty, defiance, sense of being, and meaning in the
world, was tied up with that creative making."
"How about his children?" asked Hudson, "their need
for him?"
"The way he saw it, children need a courageous father.
Baker quotes him to the effect that the worst luck for a kid
is to have a coward for a father. And he maybe equated
lack of creative juices with cowardice.''
"Well/' said Hudson, <~courage is a most urgent quality,
but there may be other qualities just as important. Charity,
for example. He could have spent time, in his own way,
helping others, or working with them to transform lives
and institutions. The sense of justice."
"I guess for him there was no substitute for the courage
of creation."
Just then I heard the first ring of the telephone in a room
down the hall. As the second ring began, I was at the
phone, having excused myself abruptly to Hudson and
skilfully weaved through the scattered groups. My son had
promised to call me at midnight, and that young, hopeful
voice was indeed there.
"Hi dad. Happy New Year."
"Happy New Year to you. How's the party?"
"Great, really great. All the kids are here, music and
everything."
"Marvelous. Stay with it. I'm always with you."
"I know it, dad. I know it all the time."
And then I moved back into the party room, knowing
that the sense of the New Year was beginning to stirin the
hearts of all those here, and everywhere, all the ones loved
and unloved, neglected, forgotten, in the hearts of all the
undefeated.
85
�Gotthold Lessing
Ernst and Falk:
Conversations for Freemasons
Translation and notes by Chaninah Maschler
At Ephesus towards his life's end, when his disciples could
barely carry him to church and his voice could not put together sev~
eral words, St.John the Evangelist used to say nothing at each meeting except this: "My sons, love one another." Bored at always hearing
the same words, his disciples and the brothers who were present
asked: "Teacher, why do you always repeat the same thing?" John's
answer was worthy of him: "Because it is the Lord's command.
And if it only be done, it shall suffice."
Beatus Ioannes Evangelista, cum Ephesi moraretur usque ad
ultimam senectutem, et vix inter discipulorum manus ad Essiesiam deferretur, nee posset in plura vocem verba contexere, nihil
aliud per singulas solebat proferre collectas, nisi hoc: Filioli diligite
alterutrum. Tandem discipuli et fratres qui aderant, taedio affecti,
quod eadem semper audirent, dixerunt: Magister, quare semper hoc
loqueris? Qui respondit dignam Ionne sententiam: Quia praeceptum Domini est, et si solitm fiat, sufficit.
(Lessing concludes his short dialogue, the Testament of John
[1777], with this passage from St. jerome's Commentary on the
Epistle to the Galatians [6]).
Prefatory Note
Lessing died in 1781, the year in which Kant's Critique
of Pure Reason was published. Eleven years earlier he had
accepted a call from the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbi.ittel
to settle in Wolfenbi.ittel, there to superintend the Ducal
Library. His original reasons for accepting the Duke's invitation were financial, but he soon came to use his somewhat protected position as librarian to advance the cause
of Spinoza, Leibniz, and Locke~ the great cause of religious toleration. 1
Only a few days after settling in at Wolfenbi.ittel he had
discovered a manuscript on the sacrament of the eucha·
rist by Berengarius of Tours (died 1088), which gave sup·
A tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis, Md., Chaninah Maschler has
recently published an essay on Eva Brann's Paradoxes of Education in a
Republic in Interpretation (10,1, January 1982).
86
port to a Lutheran interpretation of the Lord's Supper.
He published it under the rubric Contributions to History
and Literature: From the Treasures of the Ducal Library at
Wolfenbuttel. At intervals he would, under the same head·
ing, publish carefully annotated editions of other manuscripts found in the Woffenbi.ittel Library.
Thus, in 1774, he announces in print, under the by now
established heading, that he has unearthed "fragments"
of a mysteriously untitled and anonymous work that was
hidden among the more recently acquired Ducal manuscripts. How the pages got into the library and whether
they originally constituted·one whole he has been unable
to establish, though he notes that all the fragments have
one and the same objective~to examine revealed religion
and test the trustworthiness of Biblical history. The first
fragment is sent into the world under the title On Tolerating Deists.
It doesn't cause a stir. Three years later he publishes
five more "anonymous fragments": On Decrying Reason
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�from the Pulpit, Impossibility of a Revelation which All
Men can Believe on Rational Grounds, The Israelites'
Crossing of the Red Sea, That the Books of the Old Testament were not Written to Reveal a Religion, On the Resurrection Narrative.
To protect the laity and needle the professional theologians he appends some "counter propositions by the Editor," the tenor of which can be gathered from the following
passage:
... Much might be said in reply . .. But even supposing there
could be no rebuttal, what follows? The learned theologian
would, perhaps, in the end, be embarrassed, but need the
Christian be? Surely not! At most, the theologian would be
perplexed to see the supports with which he wanted to uphold religion thus shaken, to find the buttresses cast down by
which he, God willing, had kept it safe and sound. But what
does the Christian care about that man's hypotheses and explanations and demonstrations? For him it is a fact, something that exists, this Christianity which he feels to be true
and in which he feels blessed. When the paralytic experiences
the beneficial shocks of the electric spark, does he care
whether Nollet or Franklin or neither of the two is right?
This time Lessing succeeds in provoking a reaction:
The orthodox, led by the Chief Pastor of Hamburg, J
ohann Melchior Goeze (1717-1786), proceed to the defense
of their territory, though they call it a fight for truth and
in behalf of the hearts and minds of the faithfuL
Given the manifest mystery-mongering of Lessing's original account of his finding of the Wolfenbiittel Fragments, most readers, unless otherwise instructed by a
scholarly note, will think of them as composed by Lessing
himself. They will be all the more disposed to take them
as expressing Lessing's own beliefs when they read the
very long final "fragment," On the Aims of Jesus and his
Disciples.
Yet the facts are otherwise: Before settling in Wolfenbiittel in 1770 Lessing had been given the manuscript for
a book entitled Apology or Defense of Rational Worshippers of God. Its author, Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Professor of Oriental languages at the Gymnasium in Hamburg,
had allowed it to circulate privately but expressly advised
against publication "until more enlightened days." After
Reimarus's death his daughter showed the manuscript to
Lessing and, either at her initiative or at Lessing's, the two
of them plotted to have the book published, thereby to
hasten the coming of enlightenment. Berlin publishers refused to take on the job, for fear of the censor. But as Librarian to the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbiittel, paid to
glorify the Ducal House by exhibiting its scholarly treasures to the world, Lessing was protected against the censors! Hence the scheme to publish Reimarus' s detailed
critique of Revealed Religion in "fragments" ostensibly
found in the Ducal Library. Reimarus's argument would
complete Spinoza's (in the Theologico-Political Treatise)
that faith and philosophy are fundamentally distinct, that
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the certainty of faith is not mathematical but moral, and
that freedom of conscience not only can be granted without imperiling public peace but must be granted in the interest of public peace.
But the power of the orthodox is too great for Lessing:
In 1778 he is deprived of his freed"m from censorship and
must turn in the manuscript of Reimarus's Apology. That
same year he publishes, anonymously, the Dialogues for
Freemasons translated below, the year thereafter Nathan
the Wise, and finally, in 1780 (again anonymously), the essay in which he shows more explicitly in what respects he
differs from Reimarus and Spinoza, On the Education of
Mankind. The difference lies in Lessing's different attitude toward human history: The hope for, the faith in the
gradual though always partial and Perspectival enlightenment of all mankind and some uncertainty about the location and permanence of the boundaries separating "the
few" from Hthe many" is what sets him apart from
Spinoza and Reimarus.
At their first appearance, the Conversations for Freemasons were dedicated to Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick- Wolfenbiittel, not the reigning Duke, Charles, but his brother.
The dedication is appropriate because the House of Brunswick-Wolfenbiittel seems to have had a tradition of supporting enlightment: For example, Duke Anton Ulrich,
two generations or so earlier, had invited Leibniz, who
then (about 1706) occupied the same position as librarian
later held by Lessing under Duke Charles, to design plans
for a building that would house the already magnificent
Ducal Library, and the plan offered by Leibniz, and executed, was for a kind of "library temple." Again, the
persecuted author of the first translation into German of
Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation as
well as of Spinoza' s Ethics, J- Lorenz Schmidt (1702-49),
spent his last years under an assumed name in Wolfenbiittel: The Duke of Brunswick had given him asylum.
Moreover, Duke Ferdinand and Duke Charles both were
Masons, but according to Heinrich Schneider ("Lessing
und die Freimaurer," 169, Zwolf Biographische Studien),
Duke Ferdinand carried more weight in local Masonic affairs.
Given the fact that not only the immediate addressee of
the Conversations for Freemasons, Duke Ferdinand, but
Lessing himself as well, were Freemasons, sworn to secrecy, the elusiveness of certain passages in the Conversations should not be surprising. Given the further fact that
many, to this day, seem to be attracted to the Brotherhood because they love to believe that there are secrets
which, if they live long enough, they may gradually learn,
while others, uninitiated, have no hope of learning them,
the occasionally irritating evasive allusions in the dialogues can, I believe, sometimes be taken ironically, as a
joke on insiders. The presence of odd-sounding words and
phrases such as HBrother Speaker" or "accept" is due to
Lessing's desire to give the dialogues Masonic coloring.
How, otherwise, could he convert his brethren?
87
�Translation
'
Ernst: Admittedly. But give me a straight answer, are you
a Freemason?
Dedication: To His Serene Highness, Duke Ferdinand:
I too stood by the well of truth and drew from it. How
deeply, only he can judge from whom I await permission
to draw more deeply still. The people have long been Ian·
guishing. They are dying of thirst.
Falk: I believe myself to be one.
Ernst: That's the answer of one who doesn't feel quite
sure of himself.
Falk: But I am.
Ernst: Then you must know whether, when, where, and
His Highness' most obedient servant.
Falk: I know those things. But they don't mean all that
much.
Ernst: How is that?
Falk: Who doesn't "accept." And who isn't "accepted"!
Ernst: What do you mean?
Falk: I believe that I am a Freemason, not because older
Masons have accepted me into an official lodge, but be·
cause I understand and appreciate what and why Freema·
sonry is, when and where it has existed, what fosters or
hinders it.
Ernst: And nevertheless you speak in such tones of doubt
-"I believe myself to be one"?
Falk: I've grown accustomed to that tone, not because of
lack of conviction, but because I would not stand in any·
through whom you were ((accepted."
Introduction by a Third Party:
If the following pages do not contain the true ontology
of Freemasonry, I desire to be told which of the innumer·
able writings occasioned by Freemasonry gives a more exact
idea of its true nature (Lessing's italics). But if all Freema·
sons, no matter of what stamp, willingly allow that the point
of view indicated here is the only one from which sound
eyes can see something genuine (rather than a phantom
rearing up before the nearly blind), why has it been so
long till someone spokeplainly?
Many and diverse things might be said in reply. But it
would be hard to come up with a question more nearly like
the one just uttered than this: Why were systematically
laid-out handbooks of Christianity produced so late? Why
have there been so many good Christians for so long who
neither could nor would give a rational account of their
faith? Indeed, such handbooks of Christianity as we now
have might still be said to have been produced prematurely
(since faith itself probably gained little from them), were it
not that [certain] Christians had conceived the notion of
explaining the faith in a totally nonsensical way.
The application of these remarks can be left to the
reader.
First Conversation:
Ernst: What are you thinking about, friend?
Falk: Nothing.
Ernst: But you're so quiet.
Falk: Precisely! Who thinks when he is enjoying himself?
And I'm enjoying the lovely morning.
Ernst: You are quite right. So, why not ask me what I'm
thinking about?
Falk: If I were thinking about something I'd be talking: No
pleasure compares with that of thinking out loud with a
friend.
Ernst: I agree.
Falk: Perhaps you've had your fill of quietly taking in the
fine morning. Why don't you talk if something occurs to
you.
Ernst: I've been meaning to ask you something for a long
time.
Falk: Ask away!
Ernst: Is it true, friend, that you are a Freemason?
Falk: That's the question of one who is not a Mason.
88
one's way.
Ernst: You answer me as though I were a stranger.
Falk: Stranger or friend!
Ernst: You were accepted, you know everything .... ?
Falk: Others, too, have been accepted and believe they
know.
Ernst: But could you have been accepted without know·
ing what you know?
Falk: Yes, unfortunately.
Ernst: How?
Falk: Because many who "accept" others do not them·
selves know it2 while the few who do cannot say it (Lessing's italics).
Ernst: But could you know what you know without having
been accepted?
Falk: Why not? Freemasonry isn't an arbitrary thing, a luxury, but a necessity, grounded in the nature of man and of
civil society. So to come upon it as a result of one's own
reflection rather than under the guidance of others must
be possible.
Ernst: Freemasonry isn't anything arbitrary? Doesn't it involve words and signs and customs every one of which
might have been different, and so must be arbitrary?
Falk: Sure. But these words, these signs, these customs
do not constitute Freemasonry.
Ernst: Freemasonry a necessity? How did people manage
before Freemasonry?
Falk: Freemasonry has always existed.
Ernst: Come off it! What is this necessary, this indispensable Freemasonry?
Falk: As I indicated earlier, something of which even
those who know it cannot speak.
Ernst: A nonentity, then?
Falk: Don't be hasty.
Ernst: What I understand I can put into words.
AUTUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�Falk: Not always, and often not in such a way that the
words convey to others the idea I have exactly.
Ernst: Approximately, if not exactly. '
Falk: Approximately the same idea would be useless or
even dangerous here: Useless, if it conveys less than the
idea; dangerous if it holds the least little bit more.
Ernst: Odd! If even the Freemasons who know the secret
of their order cannot impart it verbally, how, then, do
they spread their order?
Falk: Through deeds. They allow good men and youths
whom they deem worthy of more intimate association to
surmise, guess at, see their deeds (as much of them as is
visible). Their new intimates find such deeds to their liking and do the same.
Ernst: Deeds? Deeds done by Freemasons? I only know
their speeches and songs-more often prettily printed
than thought or recited.
Falk: (interrupting his friend)-as are lots of other songs
and speeches.
Ernst: Or am I supposed to take the things they boast of in
these songs as their deeds?
Falk: Do you think they are just boasting?
Ernst: And what are they boasting about, anyway? Noth·
ing except what is expected of every good human being
and decent citizen-that they're so friendly, so charitable,
so obedient, so patriotic.
F alk: Are those virtues nothing?
Ernst: Nothing that would set the Freemasons apart from
the rest of mankind. Who isn't supposed to be friendly,
charitable, and the rest?
Falk: Supposed to be!
Ernst: Aren't there plenty of incentives and opportunities
for these virtues apart from Freemasonry?
Falk: Yes, but the Masonic fellowship gives men an additional incentive.
Ernst: What's the good of multiplying incentives to vir·
tue? Better to strengthen one motive to the utmost. A
multitude of motives is like a multitude of gears in a
machine: the more gears, the more slips.
Falk: I can't deny it.
Ernst: Besides, what sort of "additional incentive is this
that belittles all others, casts doubt on them, gives itself
out as strongest and best?
Falk: Friend, be fair! Don't judge by the exaggerations or
petty vindictiveness of idle songs and speeches. They're
the work of apprentices, callow disciples.
Ernst: You mean, Brother Speaker was talking nonsense?
Falk: I mean, the things that Brother Speaker was praising
the Freemasons for are obviously not their deeds, since
(whatever else you may say of him) he doesn't talk out of
school,' and deeds speak for themselves.
Ernst: I'm beginning to see what you are driving at. Why
didn't they occur to me before, those deeds, those telling,
I'd almost call them shouting, deeds: Freemasons don't
just support one another, and powerfully so, like members
of any association. They work for the public good of any
state of which they are members.
11
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Falk: For instance? I want to be sure you're on the right
track.
Ernst: For instance, the Freemasons of Stockholm, didn't
they establish a foundling hospital?
Falk: I hope that the Freemasons of Stockholm showed
their mettle at other occasions.
Ernst: What other occasions?"
Falk: Just others.
Ernst: And the Freemasons of Dresden, who employ poor
young girls as lace makers and embroiderers, to reduce the·
size of the foundling hospital!
Falk: Erl)st, need I remind you of your name? Be serious!
Ernst: Well, seriously, consider the Freemasons of Brunswick, who give talented poor boys drawing lessons.
Falk: What's wrong with that?
Ernst: Or the Freemasons of Berlin, who support Basedow's Philanthropin.4
Falk: The Masons support Basedow's institute. Who told
you that fable?
Ernst: It was all over the newspaper.
Falk: You read it in the newspaper? I won't believe lt till I
see Basedow's handwritten receipt. And I'd want to be
sure that it was made out to the Freemasons, not just to
some Freemasons in Berlin.
Ernst: Why? Don't you approve of Basedow's institute.
Falk:: Me? I approve wholeheartedly.
Ernst: Then you won't begrudge him such financial assistance?
Falk: Begrudge? Quite the contrary. Who is a stronger
well-wisher of Basedow than I?
Ernst: Well, then .... You're becoming incomprehensible.
Falk: I suppose so. Anyway, I was unfair: Even Freemasons may undertake something not as Freemasons.
Ernst: Does that hold for all their other good deeds as
well?
Falk: Perhaps. Perhaps the several good deeds you enumerated just now are, to use scholastic jargon for brevity's
sake, their dee~ad extra.
Ernst: How do y u mean that?
Falk: Perhaps the e are the eye-catching things they do
only to draw the multitude's attention, and which they do
only on that account.
Ernst: To win respect and toleration from the multitude?
Falk: Could be.
Ernst: What about their real deeds then? You keep silent?
F alk: Perhaps I have already answered you? Their real
deeds are their secret.
Ernst: Ha Hal Yet another one of those things that cannot
be put into words?
Falk: Not very well. But I can and am permitted to tell you
this much: The Freemasons' real deeds are so great and so
far from realization that centuries may pass before someone can say, "This is what they achieved." Yet they have
done everything good in the world, note well, in the world.
And they continue to work for all the good that is to be in
the world, note well, in the world.
Ernst: Come now, you are pulling my leg.
89
�Falk: Indeed not. But look-there goes a butterfly that I
must have. It's a woepmilchraupe~a milkweed caterpillar.
I want to be off. The true deeds of the Freemasons aim at
making most of the deeds commonly called good super·
fluous.
Ernst: But are these themselves good deeds?
Falk: None better. Think about that for a bit. I'll be right
back.
Ernst: Good deeds whose object is to make good deeds superfluous? That's a riddle. 5 I refuse to guess at riddles. I'd
rather stretch out beneath this tree and watch the ants.
Second Conversation
Ernst: What's been keeping you? You didn't catch your
butterfly after all?
Falk: It lured me from bush to bush, down to the brook.
Suddenly, it was on the other side.
Ernst: There are such seducers!
Falk: Have you thought it over?
Ernst: What? Your riddle? I won't catch my butterfly
either. But I am not going to worry about mine from now
on. I tried once to talk to you about Freemasonry. That's
enough. You are just like the rest of them-obviously.
Falk: The rest of them? But they don't say the things I say.
Ernst: They don't? So there are heretics among the Ma·
sons, too? And you are one of them? But heretics always
have something in common with the orthodox. And that's
what I meant.
Falk: What did you mean?
Ernst: Orthodox or heretical-Freemasons all play with
words, provoke questions and then answer without really
answering.
Falk: Is that so? Well, then, let's talk about something else,
since you tore me away from my pleasant condition of
mute contemplation.
Ernst: Nothing is easier than getting you back into that
condition. just lie down beside me and look.
Falk: At what?
Ernst: At the life and activity in and around and on top of
this ant heap. Such busyness-and such order! Every one
of them fetches and carries and pushes, and yet none is in
the other's way. Look, they even help each other!
Falk: Ants live in society just like bees.
Ernst: And theirs is a society more wonderful than the
bees', because there is none in their midst to bind them
together or to rule over them.
Falk: Order can exist even without government?
Ernst: If every individual knows how to rule himself, why
not?6
·
Falk: I wonder whether human beings will ever reach that
stage.
Ernst: Hardly.
Falk: What a shame.
Ernst: Indeed.
Falk: Get up. Let's go: They're going to crawl all over you,
90
I mean the ants. I want to ask you something. I don't know
your opinion on this at all.
Ernst: On what? ·
Falk: Civil society, for human beings in general. How do
you size it up?
Ernst: As a great good thing.
Falk: No doubt. But do you consider it a means or an end?
Ernst: I don't follow.
Falk: Do you think that men were made for the state or
rather states for men?
Ernst: Some, it seems, want to maintain the former, but
the latter is probably truer.
Falk: I think so too. States unite human beings in order
that-through and in these associations-every individual
human being may better and more securely enjoy his
share of happiness. The totality of the shares of happiness
of the members is the happiness of the state. Apart from
this there is no happiness. Every other so-called happiness
of the state, for the sake of which some of the members,
no matter how few, are said to have to suffer, is only a
cover-up for tyranny.
Ernst: I would rather not say that so loud.
Falk: Why?
Ernst: A truth which each construes according to his own
situation is easily abused.
Falk: Do you realize, friend, that you're already a demiFreemason?
Ernst: Who? Me?
Falk: Yes, since you admit there are truths better not
spoken.
Ernst: Yes, but they could be spoken.
Falk: The sage is unable to say things better left unsaid.
Ernst: As you wish. Let's not get back to the Freemasons.
I don't want to know about them anyway.
Falk: I beg your pardon. But at least you see that I'm willing to tell you more about them.
Ernst: You are making fun of me. All right, civil society and
Political organization of whatever sort are mere means
to human happiness. What follows?
Falk: Means only! And means of human devising, though
I won't deny that nature has arranged things in such a way
that men would have had to invent political organization
sooner or later.?
Ernst: Which is why some have held that civil society is a
natural end: Because everything-our passions and our
needs-leads there, they believed that civil society and
the state are ultimate ends of nature. As though natural
teleology didn't bear on the production of means! As
though nature were more interested in the happiness of
abstractions like STATE, FATHERLAND, than in the
happiness of flesh and blood individuals!
Falk: Fine! You're meeting me half-way. The next thing I
want to ask you is this: Admitting that political constitutions are means, and means of human invention, would
you say that they alone are exempt from the vicissitudes
of human means?
AUTIJMN/WINTER 1982-83
�Ernst: What do you mean by "the vicissitudes of human
means"?
Falk: What makes them different from divine, infallible
means.
Ernst: What?
Falk: That they are not infallible: Worse than being unreliable, they often produce results contrary to their design.
Ernst: Give me an example, if you can think of one.
Falk: Ships and navigation are means toward distant lands
but they are also to blame for many a man's never arriving
there.
Ernst: Those who suffer shipwreck and drown? I see what
you are driving at. But the reasons for a constitution's failure, why it cheats so many individuals of their happiness,
can be learned. There are many types of constitution, one
better than the next; some very inadequate, blatantly at
odds with their purpose; the best may yet be undiscovered.
F alk: Forget about that. Suppose the very best constitution imaginable were invented. Suppose everybody the
world over accepted it. Don't you think that even then,
under this best constitution, things that are extremely disadvantageous to human happiness would necessarily occur, things of which men in the state of nature would have
been utterly ignorant?
Ernst: If such things occur under the supposedly best constitution, I infer it isn't the best after all.
F alk: Assuming that a better one is possible? Well, take
that better one as best and repeat the question.
Ernst: You seem to me to be disguising with spurious subtlety that you assume all along that every instrument of
human invention 1 including political constitutions, must
be flawed.
Falk: I'm not just assuming it.
Ernst: Show me.
Falk: You want examples of the harm that comes necessarily of even the best constitution? I could mention ten
at least!
Ernst: One will do for a start.
Falk: We are supposing that the best constitution has
been invented and that all mankind lives under it. Does
that imply that all human beings in the world make up
one single state?
Ernst: Hardly. Such an immense state would be ungovernable. So it would have to be divided into many smaller
states, all governed with the same laws.
Falk: People would still be Germans and Frenchmen,
Dutchmen and Spaniards, Russians and Swedes, or whatever they happen to be called?
Ernst: Certainly.
Falk: Wouldn't each of these states have its own interests,
and the members of each state have the interests of whatever state happens to be theirs?
Ernst: Obviously.
Falk: These state-interests would often clash, wouldn't
they, just as they do now? So wouldn't the citizens of two
different states be just as unable to encounter one another
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
without the burden of prejudice and suspicion if they lived
under the best imaginable constitution as a German and a
Frenchman, or a Frenchman and an Englishman today?
Ernst: Very probably.
Falk: When a German meets a Frenchman or a Frenchman
an Englishman, he does not meet him simply as a human
being, as a fellow man to whom' he is drawn because of
their shared nature. They meet as German and French,
French and English; aware of their nations' competing interests, they are from the start cold, distant, suspicious
toward one another.
Ernst: You're right, unfortunately.
Falk: Doesn't that prove that the means for uniting human beings, for assuring their happiness through association, also divide them?
Ernst: I suppose so.
Falk: One step further; these several states, many of
them, will have climates that are very different;_ consequently they will have quite different needs and satisfactions; consequently they will have different moral codes;
consequently different religions. Don't you think?
Ernst: That's an enormous step!
Falk: Wouldn't people still be Jews and Christians and
Moslems and such?
Ernst: I don't dare deny it.
Falk: In that case, Christians, Jews, and Moslems alike will
continue to deal with each other as before, not as one human being with another, but as a Christian with a Jew, a
Jew with a Moslem: Each will claim that men of his type
are spiritually superior to men of other type, and they will
thus lay the foundation for rights that natural man could
not possibly claim to be possessed o£.8
Ernst: It's very sad. But what you say is probably quite true.
Falk: Only "probably true"?
Ernst: I would think that, just as you supposed that all the
world's states would have the same political constitution,
so one ought to suppose that they would be of one religion.
I can't imagine how they could be the same politically without religious uniformity.
Falk: Me neither! Anyway, I proposed the hypothesis of
the one best political constitution only to prevent your
evading the issue [of the possibility or impossibility of a
perfect constitution.]' Political and religious uniformity
the world over are equally impossible. [The steps of our
argument were:] One state, several states. Several states,
several political constitutions. Several political constitutions, several religions.
Ernst: Yes, that's how things look.
Falk: That's how they are! Consider next the second misfortune which civil society, quite at odds with its end,
gives rise to. Civil society cannot unite men without dividing them, nor divide them without erecting walls or digging ditches to keep them apart.
Ernst: Those chasms are so· dreadful, those walls often so
impossible to climb!
Falk: I must add a third: Civil society doesn't just divide
91
�human beings along national an(! religious lines. Without
divisions and separations, that form subordinate wholes,
there would be no whole whatever. But civil society di·
vides on and on within each such partial whole. 10
Ernst: Explain.
Falk: Do you believe a state without differentiation of social
classes is conceivable? Let it be a good or a bad state, closer
or further from perfection, it is impossible for all its citizens to share the same conditions. Even if they all participate in legislative activity, they cannot all have an equal
share in it; at least, not an equal direct share. So there are
going to be upper and lower classes. And supposing that
originally each citizen got an equal share in the state's
wealth, this distribution cannot be expected to last beyond a mere two generations: One man will know better
than another how to increase his property; or the poorly
administered estate must, nevertheless, be shared among
more heirs than the well-administered one. Soon there are
bound to be rich and poor.
Ernst: Evidently.
Falk: Consider now, are there many evils that are not due
to such social differentiation?
Ernst: As though I could contradict you! But why would I
want to, anyway? To unite human beings one must divide
them, and keep them divided. Granted. That's how it is. It
can't be otherwise.
Falk: Precisely!
Ernst: But what's the point of dwelling on this conclusion? Are you trying to make civil society hateful to me?
Do you want me to regret that people ever conceived the
idea of uniting into states?
Falk: Do you know me so little? If the only good gained
from civil society were that human reason can be cultivated
there, and there alone, I would bless it even if the evils it
produced were greater by far than the ones mentioned.
Ernst: If you want to enjoy the fire you must expect to put
up with the smoke-as the saying goes.
Falk: Quite. But granting that fire makes smoke unavoidable, should one therefore prohibit the invention of chimneys? Is the fellow who invented them to be called an
enemy of fire? You see, that's what I was after.
Ernst: What? I don't follow you.
Falk: And yet the image was most suitable.ll If human beings cannot be united into states apart from such divisions
as we spoke of, does that make the divisions good?
Ernst: Why, no.
Falk: Does it make them sacred?
Ernst: How do you mean that usacred"?
Falk: I mean, so that touching them ought to be prohibited.
Ernst: Touching with what end in view?
Falk: This, of not letting them gain more ground than is
absolutely necessary, of canceling their ill effects as much
as possible.
Ernst: Why should that be prohibited?
Falk: But it can't very well be enjoined either, at least not
by the civil law, since the civil law holds only within the
boundaries of the state, and what is wanted is precisely
7
92
something that crosses these. So it can only be an opus
supererogatum ["a work of supererogation"; see note 5]:
That the wisest and best of every state freely undertake
this task beyond the call of duty can onlv be wished for.
Ernst: However ardent, it must remain merely a wish.
Falk: I believe so. May there be men in every state who
are beyond popular prejudices and who know when patriotism ceases to be virtuous.
Ernst: I join you in your wish.
Falk: May every state contain men who are not the creatures of the prejudices of the religion they were raised in,
who do not believe that everything which they regard as
good and true must be good and true.
Ernst: May it be so.
Falk: May every state contain men who are not dazzled by
high position and not put off by low, men in whose company the nobleman gladly stoops and the lowly confidently
nses.
Ernst: May it be so.
Falk: What if this wish of ours were fulfilled?
Ernst: Fulfilled? To be sure, here and there a man like that
might turn up.
Falk: I don't mean just here and there and now and then.
Ernst: In certain epochs and certain regions there might
even be several such men.
Falk: What would you say if I told you that men like this
exist everywhere today; that from now on there are always
going to be such men?
Ernst: Please God!
Falk: What if I told you, further, that they do not live ineffectually dispersed, like the Church Invisible?
Ernst: Happy dream!
Falk: I'll get right to the point-these men that we are
speaking of are the Freemasons.
Ernst: What's that you're saying?
Falk: What if the Freemasons were the ones who count it
one of their jobs to bridge those gaps and cross those
boundaries that estrange men from one another?
Ernst: The Freemasons?
Falk: Yes, I'm saying they count it as part of their business.
Ernst: The Masons?
Falk: I beg your pardon. I forgot that you don't want to
hear about them. Look-we're being called to breakfast.
Let's go.
Ernst: Wait a minute, you say the Freemasons ... ?
Falk: Our conversation brought me back to them against
my will. I do apologize. We're bound to find more deserving matter for conversation once we join the breakfast
crowd. Come!
Third Conversation:
Ernst: All day long you have been avoiding me in the
crowd. But I've tracked you down to your bedroom.
Falk: Do you have something important to say to me? I'm
too tired for a mere chat.
AUfUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�Ernst: You're ridiculing my curiosity.
Falk: Curiosity?
,
Ernst: Yes, which you so artfully piqued this morning.
Falk: What were we talking about this morning?
Ernst: The Freemasons.
Falk: Well, what about them? I hope I didn't give the
secret away when I was high on the rhinewine.
Ernst: The secret which, you say, no one can give away?
Falk: All right. That restores my peace of mind.
Ernst: You said something about the Freemasons that
came unexpected, struck me, made me think.
Falk: What was that?
Ernst: Come on, stop teasing me. I'm sure you remember.
Falk: Now that you mention it, it does come back to me.
That's why you were so absentminded with your men and
women friends all day?
Ernst: Right. I won't be able to get to sleep until you've
answered at least one question of mine.
Falk: The question.?
Ernst: How can you prove, or at least support, your claim
that the Freemasons have these great and worthy aims?
Falk: Did I speak to you of their aims? I was not aware of
it. You were quite at a loss when I asked what might be
the Masons' true deeds. I wanted to draw your attention
to something that deserves to be worked at, something
that doesn't figure in the dreams of our clever political
theorists (staatskluge Leute). Perhaps the Masons are
working on it. Perhaps they're working in that area. I
merely wanted to cure you of the prejudice that every
spot fit for building has been identified and occupied and
that all construction work has duly been meted out.!'
Ernst: Wiggle as you please: From your speeches I con·
elude that the Freemasons are people who have freely
chosen the responsibility to work against the unavoidable
evils of the state.
Falk: Such a conception of their undertaking will at least
not dishonor them. Hold on to it. But understand it right.
Don't include things that don't belong. We're talking
about the unavoidable evils of the state, of any state, not
about the evils that go with this or that particular state of
a given constitution. The healing and alleviating of evils
native to a particular state the Freemason leaves to its citizens, who must venture and risk themselves according to
their citizen insight and courage. Evils of a quite different, higher kind are the object of the Mason's efforts.
Though inasmuch as he is also a citizen, he may take part
in making civic ills milder.
Ernst: I understand. Without the evils that concern the
Mason there could be no happy citizens. They are not the
evils that cause citizens unhappiness.
Falk: Right, the Freemasons mean to-how did you put
it?-work against the unavoidable evils.
Ernst: Yes.
Falk: "Work against" may be too strong a word, if it is
taken to mean "undo them." These evils cannot be undone. It would destroy the state. They should not even be
made apparent now to those who do not yet perceive
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
them as evils. At most they can be mitigated, by distantly
stirring up this perception in people, by allowing it to germinate and send out shoots, by clearing away weeds and
thinning out the new plants. Now do you understand why
I said that, whether or not Freemasons have always been
at work, centuries may pass before one could say "This is
what they wrought"?
Ernst: Yes, and I now also understand the second part of
the riddle-"good deeds that are to make good deeds
superfluous." 13
Falk: Fine! Go, then, and study these evils. Get to know
them all. Weigh their mutual influences. This study will
reveal things to you which, in days of dejection, will seem
irrefutable arguments against providence and virtue. But
this discovery, this illumination, will give you peace and
make you happy without being called a Freemason.
Ernst: You say the word "being called" with so much emphasis.
Falk: Because one may be something without being called
it.
.
Ernst: All right. I understand. But to return to my question,
which I need only rephrase: Since I now know the evils
Freemasonry combats ...
Falk: You know them?
Ernst: Didn't you yourself enumerate them for me?
Falk: I merely named a few of them, by way of test, just
those which are obvious even to the most nearsighted,
just a few of the most uncontested and most comprehensive. But there are many less obvious and more debatable,
but just as sure and inevitable.
Ernst: I limit my question to the evils you have yourself
named. Prove to me the Freemasons have these in mind.
You are silent. Are you thinking?
Falk: Not about how to answer your question. But why do
you want to know?
Ernst: Will you answer my question if I answer yours?
Falk: Yes. I promise.
Ernst: I asked for evidence that the Freemasons think as
you say they do because I know and fear your ingenuity.
Falk: My ingenuity?
Ernst: Yes. I am afraid you're selling me your own speculations for fact.
Falk: Thanks a lot!
Ernst: Did I insult you?
Falk: I suppose I ought to be grateful that you call "ingenuity" what might have been given quite a different
name.
Ernst: No, no. Only, I know how easily a clever person deceives himself, how readily he attributes plans and intentions which they never thought of to others.
Falk: But how do we infer that people have certain plans
and intentions? Don't we reason from their several deeds?
Ernst: How else? Which brings me back to my question-from what individual, uncontested deeds done by
Freemasons can it be inferred that in and by their
fellowship they mean to overcome the divisions among
men of which you spoke? The unavoidable divisions
93
�within the state and among states. Show me that this is
even one of their objectives.
,
Falk: And that they mean to do this without threatening
the individual state or the continued existence of a plurality of states.
Ernst: I'm glad to hear it. Look, I am not necessarily asking
you to tell me of deeds. Oddities, idiosyncracies that spring
from or lead to union among men would serve. You must
have based your speculations about Freemasonry on some
such signs as I am asking for if your "system" is a hypothesis.
Falk: You continue suspicious of me? But perhaps you
will doubt me less if I cite a constitutional principle of
Freemasonry for you. 14
Ernst: Which?
Falk: A principle they have never made a secret and in accord with which they have always conducted themselves
before the world's eyes.
Ernst: To wit?
Falk: To accept into their ranks any worthy man of fit
character, without distinction of fatherland, religion, or
civil condition.
Ernst: Really?
Falk: Admittedly, such a constitutional principle seems to
presuppose men who already make light of national,
religious, and social distinctions. The constitutional principle itself does not raise up such men. But mustn't there
be Nitrogen in the air for saltpeter [KN0 3 or NaN0 3] to
accumulate upon the walls?
Ernst: Yes.
Falk: And may the Freemasons not have been resorting to
a perfectly familiar ruse, that of openly practicing some of
their secret objectives, so as to mislead such men as are
always on the look-out for something different from what
stares them in the face because they are driven by suspicion?
Ernst: Perhaps.
Falk: Why shouldn't the artisan who can make silver deal
in silver scrap, so as to allay the suspicion that he knows
how to make it?
Ernst: Why not?
Falk: Ernst, are you listening? You sound as though you
are half asleep.
Ernst: No, friend. But I have had enough, enough for
tonight. Tomorrow very early I'm going back to town.
Falk: Already? Why so soon?
Ernst: You know me and ask? How long will it be before
you conclude your [mineral water] cure?
Falk: I only started it day before yesterday.
Ernst: Then I shall be seeing you before you have finished
yours. Good night. Farewell.
Notice to the Reader:
The spark took. Ernst went and became a Freemason.
What he thus learned, at first, is the matter of a fourth and a
fifth conversation, in which there is a parting of ways.
94
Of the three conversations here translated, Lessing
wrote Duke Ferdinand on 19 October, 1778:
Since I make so bold as to deem the first three of the conversations in question the weightiest, most laudable, and truest
things that may ever have been written about Freemasonry, I
could no longer resist the temptation to have them printed.
(Da ich mire schmeicheln darf, class von den bewussten Gesprachen die drey erstern, das Ernsthafteste, Riihmlichste,
Wahrste sind, was vielleicht jemals tiber die Freimaurerei
geschrieben worden: so habe ich der Versuchung, sie driicken
zu lassen nicht Ianger widerstehen kOnnen.) [Schneider, Stri-
dien, Bern, 1951, 14]
Two years later a fourth and a fifth conversation between Ernst and Falk were published (some say contrary
to Lessing's wishes). Their dramatic date is long after the
conclusion of Falk's "cure." Ernst is disgusted with his
friend for having sweet-talked him into joining a society of
fools and charlatans. None of the hopes and expectations
that Falk had stirred up in him were met by the flesh and
blood Masons he encountered:
That equality which you gave out as a constitutional principle
of the order, that equality which filled my soul with such surprising hope . .. does it still exist? Did it ever? Let an educated
Jew ask for admission. "A Jew? Well, the candidate must be a
Christian, though we don't ca;e what manner of Christian."
"Without distinction of religion" means "without discriminating among the three officially tolerated religions in the
Holy Roman Empire." Is that your interpretation too, Falk? ...
Let a cobbler come ... even if he be a Jacob Boehme or a Hans
Sachs, they'll
s~y:
"A cobbler? Why, obviously, a cobbler ... "
The fifth conversation takes place after a dinner party
also attended by a Mason of whom both friends disapprove, a man who means to defend the American cause in
Europe and who believes, mistakenly in the friends' opinion, that the American Congress is a Masonic Lodge and
that the Masons are, in America, establishing their realm
by force of arms.~' In this conversation Falk explains what
he conceives to be the true history of Freemasonry:
Anderson's history, according to which "speculative"
Masons joined already existing lodges of "operative" Freemasons, is rejected. The word "masonry" is linked to
"masons" only by an erroneous folk etymology according
to Falk. Its true etymology is "Masonei," says he, meaning,
roughly, eating club. One of these eating clubs was, in Sir
Christopher Wren's day, close by St. Paul's, in London.
During the thirty years of St. Paul's reconstruction, Sir
Christopher Wren would frequent this eating club, of
which he was a member. All London wanted to get progress reports on the construction of the great church. Hearing that the architect frequented a masony, Londoners
mistook the word for a masonry, a fellowship of builders.
Sir Christopher, according to F alk, simply used the popular confusion for ends of his own:
He had helped conceive the plan-for a society that would make
speculative truths more directly efficacious in establishing the
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�public good and in making civic life mor:e e0mmodious. Then
it occmrred to him that a society that Fo-~e- £Fom the activities
of daily life to spectllation would be· a- fitting counterpart to it.
"There," he thought, "men would investigate what in the
realm of truth is useful; here what that iS useful is true."
be far better known in America tl\an they now are. His
every piece of writing is refreshing and instructive. Even
brief association with him, merely through his books,
makes it easy to credit Moses Mendelssohn's words of
condolence to Lessing's younger brother
Thus far Lessing's Falk.
His etymology sounds so wildly unlikely to me, and the
history attached to the supposedly Germanic origin of the
word-root so much like pseudo-history, that it is hard for
me to read them as anything but a spoof-of the eighteenth
century literary industry of fabricating Masonic pseudohistories, and perhaps of other kinds of make-believe history as well.
Readers of the foregoing translation may wonder why I
thought Lessing's dialogues worth translating and why it
seemed right that they be made known to members of the
St. John's College community. My reasons aren't all in
yet, but among them are these: Charlotte Fletcher has
argued in detail in the Maryland Historical Magazine (val.
74, no. 2, June 1979; pp 133-151), that St. John's College
was not named after the Cambridge University College of
the same name; rather~
. .. I thank Providence for i"ts benevolence in allowing me, so
early in life, in the flower of youth, to know a man who
shaped my very soul, a man whom I would conjure up as
friend and judge whenever I was deliberating about something to be done or written, a man of whom I shall at all times
continue to think as my friend and judge whenever I have to
take a step of some importance.
... the Maryland legislators named the Western Shore college
for the day when [Washington's Potomac bill] was enacted,
the Feast Day of the Evangelist. ... Not only was it a day
which they had enjoyed in the company of their former Commander-in-Chief, it was a day which would have had special
significance· for Washington, the Freemason [December 27,
the Feast Day of the Evangelist, is singled out by many British
and American Masonic handbooks as a day for important
transactions and special celebration] .... Records show ... that
a remarkable legislative performance ... [took] place on the
Feast Day of St. John the Evangelist, December 27, 1784,
when on behalf of their good friend, George Washington.
Maryland legislators enacted the first piece of cooperative legislation among the various states in the Confederation following
the definitive "Treaty of Peace" (my italics).
Moreover, she showed that it is worthwhile to ask whether
there is a more intimate, even curricular, connection between the college and the fellowship which, as has plausibly
been argued in a number of Masonic histories, preserved
ancient astronomical, geometric, and architectural lore (in
effect, the quadrivium) after the disintegration of Rome
in the West. 16
Second, it is hard for me to believe that there is no "real"
connection between the founding of these United States
of America and Masonic doctrines such as the one in the
"first charge" of Anderson's Constitution (see footnote
14). The Masonic insignia on our dollar bills, which got
there from the verso of the Great Seal of the United States
(designed in the eighteenth century), should not, I think,
be written off as boys-will-be-boys-even-when-grown
mumbo jumbo. They were put there to say something, to
Americans and to the world at large, and to those who
decided to put them there1 17
Finally, Lessing's name and Lessing's work deserve to
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
( ... Ich danke der VOrsehung fiir die Wohltat, class sie mich
so frUh, in der Bluthe meiner Jugend, hat einen Mann kennen lassen, der meine Sehle gebildet hat, den ich bey jeder
Handlung, die ich vorhatte, bey joder Zeile die ich hinschreiben sollte, mir als Freund und Richter vorstellte, und den ich
mir zu allen Zeiten noch als Freund und Richter vor-stellen
werde, so oft ich einen Schritt von Wichtigkeit zu thun babe.)
Quoted in Karl Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Leben,
Berlin 1795, 450.
l. Locke's first (anonymously) published work is the Epistola de
Raymond Klibansky writes: "It cannot be doubted that Locke
systematically collected all_ books on toleration which he could
find. , .. Even in one of his earliest notebooks, that of 1674, Locke, having
read Spinoza's treatise on Descartes' Principia Philosophiae, expressed his intention of finding out what other works there were by this author. When
in 1674-6 he was Lord Shaftesbury's confidential agent, he certainly
had the opportunity of perusing some of Spinoza's works, for
Shaftesbury reimbursed him for a sum spent on acquiring these books
for him. Later, Locke mentioned in his 'Catalogue de livres differends et
qu'on trouve avec peine' the Tractatus Theologico politicus ... . In a
catalogue of his [Locke's] books drawn up ... in 1693 the Tractatus [is
mentioned]. Perusal of the letter has convinced me that there is also internal evidence for Locke's having read and profited from Spinoza's
Theological-Political Treatise. For Leibniz on the subject of toleration,
see New Essays 416f. I accept the thesis of H. R. Trevor Roper that this
tradition of devoting one's life to the cause of toleration. goes back to
Erasmus (see The European Witchcraze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries and Other Essays, Harper Torchbook 1968). But its true begettor may well have been the Dean of St. Paul's, Erasmus's friend and
mentor, John Colet.'' (Oxford ed. by Raymond Klibansky and J. W.
Gough of the Letter of Toleration, xxxi, ii.)
2. The enigmatic "it" wants to be impenetrable and cannot be
eliminated from the translation. As Lessing wrote Duke Ferdinand on
Tolera~ia.
Octobe, 26, 1778,
I did not desecrate any secret knOwledge. I only tried to convince the
world that truly great secrets continue to lie hidden there, where the
world had at last become tired of looking for them.
(Ich babe keine geheime Kenntnisse enheiliget: ich habe bloss die
Welt zu ilberzeugen gesucht, class da noch wirklich grosse geheime
Kenntnisse verborgen liegen, wo sie derleichen zu suchen endlich
mOde ward.) Quoted in Heinrich Schneider, ZwOlf Biographische
Studies, Bern 1951, 15.
3. Lessing'·s word here is "plaudern," familiar from Mozart's Magic
Flute: "Ich plauderte, und das war schlechr,;• says Papageno toward the
end of Act ii.
4. Johann Bernhard Basedow (1723;_11790); was a German educational
reformer who established a teacher training institute in Dessau, where
his educational principles, much affected· by Rosseau's Emile, were
taught. This teacher training· institute· he called the Philanthropin. A
95
�student of theology earlier in his life, he,had come under the influence
of Reimarus.
1
5. I haven't cracked the riddle but suspect that in speaking of "Cute
Taten, welche darauf zielen, gute Taten entbehrlich zu machen," Lessing's Falk refers covertly and ambiguouslY to human charitable works,
Church sacraments, and the supreme, Divine work of charity, the
sacrifice of Christ. My guess depends on hearing the word opus-which
figures so prominently in Luther's doctrine of "salvation by faith, not
works," in the Catholic Church's rationale of the Sacraments, and in
the Bacon passage froiD the New Organon which Kant quotes as fronti·
piece to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason-underneath
the German Tat. Lessing himself introduces the Latin word in the second conversation, which is why I retained his expression opus
supererogatum. It is, unmistakeably, a technical locution-"works of
supererogation," beyond the call of duty, figure in Catholic teaching as
works by which the faithful gain extra merit.
6. Compare Adeimantus in Republic ii, 367 " . , . we would not now be
guard~ng ag~~nst one another's injustice, but each would be his own best
guardtan ...
7. Compare Aristotle's Politics i, 1253a30: phusei men oun he horme en
pasin epi ten toiauten koinOnian. ho de prOtos sustases megistOn
agathon aitios.
8. "Nimmermehr" in "Rechte ... die dem nati'lrlichen Menschen nimmermehr einfallen kOnnten," is ambiguous: it is not clear whether the
"natural man" of whom Falk speaks belongs to the past, the future, or
neither. This sounds very like Rousseau to me.
9. Compare Leibniz on oUrs being the best of all possible worlds: He did
not mean that it is perfect, as Voltaire foolishly thought. He meant that
the Very conceptiori of a perfect world is self-contradictory, so that ours is
the best of worlds that are possible. Lessing was a great admiror of Leibniz.
10. Lessing is borrowing Aristotle's word "whole." Compare note 7.
Students of Leo Strauss will recognize the degree to which the argu·
ments, the attitude, the very vocabulary of Ernst and Falk, are saved by
Strauss. Strauss refers to the work in a footnote on p. 28 of Persecution
and the Art of Writing, Glencoe, Illinois 1952.
11. Compare Republic vii. Much like Leibniz also in this respect, Lessing carried his very great erudition lightly. ThorOughly "modern," he
was intimate with the works of the AnCients, die Alten, as in "Wie die
Alten den Tad gebildet."
12. The use of architectural images is, unsurprisingly, prominent in
Masonic writings. I do not think that the extraordinary proliferation of
talk about "foundations", "architects", "clearing away the underbrush",
"corner stones", "city planning" in the books of Machiavelli, Bacon,
Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz in some measure, and certainly Kant
has been sufficiently noted.
13. See note 5, whence perhaps also "good works that are to make good
works superfluous."
14. Lessing is referring to the Constitution of the Grand Lodge of London, drawn up by James Anderson at the instance of the then Master of
the Lodge, John, Duke of Montague. A copy of Anderson's The Consti·
tution of the Freemasons (though in a later edition than the one pub·
lished in London in 1723) was in the Ducal Library in WolfenbUttel. The
"First Charge" of Anderson's Constitution runs as follows:
Concerning GOD and RELIGION. A Mason is obliged by his Ten·
ure, to obey the moral Law: and if he rightly understands the Art, he
will never be a stupid Atheist, nor an irreligious Libertine. But
though in ancient Times Masons were charg'd in every Country to
be of the Religion of that country or Nation, whatever it was, yet it's
now thought more expedient only to oblige them to that religion in
which all Men agree, leaving their particular opinions to themselves.
That is, to be good Men and true, or Men of Honour and Honesty,
by whatever Denominations or Persuasions they may be distinguished; whereby Masonry becomes the Center of Unition, and the
96
Means of conciliating true Friendship among Persons that must
have remain'd at a perpetual Distance.
I was unable to obtain a copy of Anderson's book and rely on Jacob
Katz's citation in his Jews and Freemasons in Europe, 1723-1939, 13
Cambridge, 1970.
Katz's book is a remarkable piece of sociological history. There is
hardly a page in it that doesn't throw light on issues far greater than the
seemingly recondite one of the title. About the quoted First Charge he
writes:
... There is no reason to assume that the authors of the English constitution intended, in their universal tolerance, to provide for Jewish
candidates in the flesh. Yet, when such candidates did apply for admission, the principle was followed in practice [in England, but not
in Germany] .... At least some of these Jews sought to retain their
own religious principles within the frame work of the lodges. In 1756
an anthology of Masonic prayers appeared in print, among them one
to be recited "at the opening of the lodge meeting and the like, for the
use of Jewish Freemasons." While the other prayers were addressed
to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the Jewish prayers contained nothing at variance with the Jewish tradition. [pp. l5ff]
Katz does not comment on the fact that the drawing up of a written constitution, which itself records what the proper procedures for amending
it are, was a Masonic practice, and one which may well have influenced
the American Founding Fathers, since a written constitution for a state
or nation was, in those days, ~ rarity.
15. There are a number of books on the theme of possible connections
between the American Revolution and Freemasonry. The author of one
of these, Bernard Fay, a Frenchman, maintains that the French Revolution too was "made" by Masons. It is extraordinarily difficult to sort out
whether-to speak in the voice of their critics-Masonic Lodges were
hotbeds of sedition or rather the reverse, whether illdeed Freemasonry
stood for anything in particular in the political realm. My interim
hypothesis is that it is probably pointless to speak of Masonic politics
without specifying the period and the countr'Y and perhaps even the particular Lodge. I do not believe that this means that the expression
"Masonic teachings" is simply empty: One of my contentions is that what
we usually identify as the distinctively modern linking of knowledge and
power, or knowing what and knowing how, or artes liberales and artes serviles is Masonic doctrine.
16. See for example George F. Fort, The Early History and Antiquities of
Freemasonry as connected with Ancient Norse Guilds and the Oriental
and Medieval Building Fraternities, Philadelphia 1875, and Tons Brunes,
The Secrets of Ancient Geometry and its Use, Copenhagen 1967.
17. Our coins too bear a motto-"In God we Trust-that can be linked
to the Masons: It was the motto of the London "operative" Masons in
the fifteenth and seventeenth century, except that their motto added
the little word "alone" between "God" and "we" (Georg Kloss, Geschichte der Freimaurerei in England, Irland und Schotland, 1848, 325. But
according to a little pamphlet of the United States Mint, the motto appeared on our coins only in the nineteenth century: Toward the end of
1861 the Secretary of the TreasUry received a letter from a certain Mr. Watkinson, Minister of the Gospel, who urged that the lack of some reference
to God on our coins might lead "the antiquaries of succeeding centuries"
to believe that we were "a heathen nation." In response to this letter, the
Secretary of the Treasury wrote the Director of the Mint: "You will cause a
device to be prepared without unnecessary delay with a motto expressing in
the fewest and tersest words possible this national recognition [of the trust
of our people in God]." But it turned out that, because of an earlier Act of
Congress, the Director of the Mint could not "cause" the preparation of
such a device. Legislative action was needed. Is there another modem nation where such an exchange of letters might have occurred?
AUTIJMN /WINTER 1982-83
�The Rainfall in the Pine Grove
Mter Gabriele D' Annunzio, "La pioggia nel pineto."
Be still.
On the leaf-strewn sill
of the forest I hear
no human words spoken,
but newer words sung
by the drops' tinkling tongue
and the broken
murmuration of distant leaves.
Listen! It is raining
from tattered clouds driven,
raining down from heaven
on the tamarisks burnt,
on the brackish tamarisks.
Raining on the tangled hairy kirtles
of the pine,
on the myrtles
divine;
on the thick -clustered broom,
on the juniper's loom;
Upon our sylvan
faces,
upon our naked
hands,
our vestments and our poses,
on each fresh -quickened thought
that the soul newly discloses;
on the fable richly-wrought
that yesterday
deluded thee, and today deludes me,
0 Hermione!
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Do you hear?
The rain is slanting
on the lawn's lonely green
with a tinkling silver sheen,
with a rustling and a canting
that varies in the air
as the foliage is there
more rare, less rare;
Listen! the cricket's chatter
replies to all this weeping:
What does it matter?
This flood of austral tears
provokes not his fears,
nor does heaven's windy whine.
And the pine
has one sound
and the myrtle yet another,
and the juniper another:
a pure liquescent round
of instruments
diverse:
played and plucked upon
by the rain's fluent fingers
and choir of the leaves,
0 green-mouthed singers!
So verse follows verse
until we are immersed
in the spirit of the wood,
of this life
arboreal
and your face immemorial
is washed in the rain
soft as a leaf;
and your hair
97
�falls fair
as the juniper's caresses;
as the rain's glistening grief
is the streaming of your tresses.
0 terrestrial creature
by name and by featureHermione.
Hear! 0 hear!
the harmonious hammer
of the cricket's shrill trill
fades still and more still,
muffled by the rain's
crescendoing roar.
Yet low
below
from depths unquenched,
from humid shadow
a melody mingles,
is drowned, expunged ...
only one note
trembles yet,
plucked from the fret;
resurgent, remote,surges ... shivers ... spills awaySeems, but is not, the voice of the sea.
And now you hear on every frond
the shattering sound
of the argent rain:
the downrushing Whence
that varies as the verdure
grows dense, or less dense.
Listen. The daughter
of the aria is mute,
but the unseen daughter
of the green-veiled water,
child of the distant bog,the frog,chants in denser shadow:
Who knows where? Who knows where?
And it is raining on your eyes,
And it is raining on your hair,
0 Hermione!
98
It is raining on your eyes ...
And as the downpour dashes
upon your black lashes,
tiny diamonds hang
and you seem to be weepingBut for joy! but for joy!
No longer wan
you emerge from the bark:
Vigorous, reborn
and freshly we turn
each to each,
And the heart in the breast is an intact
peach,
And the eyes in their lids
are springs in the grass,
And like almonds peeled
is the honeycomb of teeth.
So, slowly we pass
from hedge to hedge,
now together, now apart
(As rude-fingered weeds
ensnare our ankles,
entwine our knees)
Who knows where? Who knows where?
For the curtain of the air
Is a rustle of laces
As it rains as it rains
Upon our sylvan
faces,
Upon our naked hands,
Our vestments and our poses,
on each fresh-quickened thought
that the soul newly discloses,
on the fable richly-wrought
that yesterday
eluded me, and today eludes thee,
0 Hermione!
AUTIJMN /WINTER 1982-83
�The Donkey Rides
the Man . ..
The donkey rides the man
Swallows shoot the hunter
Sun rises in the West
Daisies bloom in winter
Constellations sunder
All singleness is lost
Adam's rod has wilted
Breasts are hard as frost
Contrarities now rule
Two perpendiculars
Fall to a single line
Peace plus peace make wars
0 Alice underground
Rise and take command
Scepter us with laughter
Orb with tickling hand
This topsy-turvy world
Spin it with your wand
All boys must be girled
All girls must be manned
Come Alice come from under
Nibble us high and low
Pacify with thunder
the apocalyptic show
The Mannequins
Flowing down Fifth Avegue
The shoppers in a churning stream
Flash dazzling semaphors of dew
Between the banks of deed and dream.
Where mermaids-sleeker for their sinsMay view in underseas of glass
Themselves beside the mannequins:
Shipwrecked, headless now. Alas!
Alas for the perfect thigh and breast!
Alas for the perfect lacquered smile!
Alas for the perfect all-the-rest
That lies beside her in a pile!
For he's entered there on sheepsoft feet:
That Devil-0 that panderer!
Stripped her on a public street,
With shameless hands he sullied her.
Yes, in the electric glare of noon
(Narcissus, transfixed, saw him do it)
Divested her of dress and shoon
And her lovely head, he did unscrew it.
Take heed, then, Beauties. Blemished be.
For perfect She is lifeless She.
Where reins of Yes and No
Ride us to no conclusion
In a dazzling merry-go-round
Of rectified confusion
SIDNEY ALEXANDER
Sidney Alexander has translated Francesco Guicciardini's The History of
Italy (New York 1969). The last volume, Nicodenz.us, t~e_Roman Ye~rs of
Michalangelo, 1534-1564, of his three-volume retmagmm? of ~e hfe of
Michelangelo is planned for publication in 1983 (Ohio Umvers1ty Press).
For the last twenty-seven years he has lived in Florence.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
99
�REviEw EssAY·.,
Defeat in Vietnam
Norman Podhoretz's Why We Were in Vietnam*
JOSEPH A.
For anyone over the age of twenty, Why We Were in Vietnam
is an unwanted attempt to face a painful past. Norman Podhoretz wants to reopen the Vietnam debate because he thinks
we have learned the wrong "lessons" from the disaster. The failure of American policy in Vietnam not only brought defeat without peace. It cancelled out the single most important lesson that
the Second World War, the "unnecessary war" in Churchill's
phrase, taught those who managed to live through it, the lesson
of Munich, that yielding in the face of aggression encourages
more aggression. For the lessons of Munich Vietnam's failure
substituted "new lessons": that the limitations on American
power no longer allowed the arrogance of policing the world; that
an ''ideologically-based anti-Communist foreign policy" must inevitably fail; and worst of all, that America's actions in Vietnam
made her equal to Hitler's Germany in "criminality" and showed
that now "the U.S., not the Soviet Union and certainly not Communism, represented the greatest threat to the security and wellbeing of the peoples of the world."
With evidence available during the war, Podhoretz faces the
charges of "genocide" and "atrocity" against American "policies" -the "McCarthyism of the left." The Geneva Convention
sanctions the U.S. "war crime" of clearing an area of civilians to
spare them before bombing enemy forces. In Vietnam civilians
numbered forty percent of the dead, the same percentage as in
the Second World War, in contrast to the seventy percent of the
War in Korea. He compares the war's suffering to Indochina under Communism: forced mass expulsions with millions dead; total suppression of political, religious, and press freedoms (South
Vietnam at war had twenty-seven daily newspapers, three televi-
*
New York, Simon and Schuster 1982. 240 pages. $13.50.
A lawyer in Washington, D.C., Joseph A. Bosco practices corporate and
administrative law arid represents European companies in the United
States.
100
Bosco
sian stations, more than twenty radio stations). "'Among the
boat people who survived, including those who were raped by pirates and those who suffered in the refugee camps, nobody regrets
his escape from the present regime.'"
Almost alone of contemporary writers, Podhoretz concludes
Americans need feel no shame. "That the U.S. involvement in
Vietnam should be described as a moral disgrace is itself a moral
disgrace." Reagan's description of the war as a "noble cause"
that made headlines during the 1980 campaign, again won a place
in the Washington Post's recent front-page story on the President's "gaffes".
Podhoretz calls to account the hypocrisy of those who proclaimed their desire for "peace" in Vietnam but who actually
supported the Communist victory; the malice of the "Amerika"
haters who likened the United States to Nazi Germany. (The in·
vective against America was palpable at teach-ins I attended in
Boston and Cambridge as early as 1964 .) These ''inveterate apologists for the Vietnamese Communists" still do not acknowledge
the suffering in Indochina today nor their complicity in it.
He criticizes the "anti-anti-Communists," the teachers and
media people who considered anti-Communism unsatisfying,
who said they opposed Communism but were against every antiCommunist government from Diem to Thieu, who fancied a
neutralist compromise or" coalition or "progressive ... 'third
force'". "[They] should now be ashamed of their naivete and the
contributions they made to the victory of forces they had a moral
duty to oppose .... In practice, and in its political effect, aritianti-Communism was often hard to tell apart from pro-Communism.'' Podhoretz concludes that the defenders of American
policy were right about its morality, but that the critics correctly
saw its futility.
But this moral calling to account is incomplete. Podhoretz ignores those Americans (many of my friends) who knew which
side was right and who certainly preferred our side, but who
nevertheless joined the anti-war movement, especially after the
Tet offensive in 1968, because, like Podhoretz, they thought vic-
AUfUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�tory impossible. To succeed, the anti-war movement, as Hanoi
realized, had to reach out beyond the MarxiS~-Leninists, the radical students, the anti-anti-Communists, to the ordinary, patriotic,
mainstream American citizens. Despite the: finest of motives,
these citizens strengthened the Communists. Why and how this
happened has to be understood. The prolongation of the war
and the absence of a strategy for victory that grew evident with
its prolongation had a lot to do with the disillusionment of many
ordinary Americans. With the concern for human life and public
opinion that distinguishes democracies from their totalitarian adversaries, how could Washington's "war of attrition," that took
the place of a strategy for victory, not have failed eventually? Recent Communist statements show that Hanoi, with the experience of the French in Indochina and the Americans in Korea
before its eyes, knew the importance of prolonging the war for
the spread of the anti-war moverrient in the United States and
throughout the world. From the beginning Hanoi planned to
out-last us, whether or not it out-fought us.
Podhoretz argues that the unwillingness (or inability) of the
elite in government to make the "moral, political, and strategic"
case for the war left a "moral vacuum" for the anti-war extremists. I find that charge curious and unfair. "Why, then, were we
in Vietnam?" asks Podhoretz. "To say it once again: because we
were trying to save the Southern half of that country from the
evils of Communism." The answer is hardly novel; Presidents
Kennedy and johnson gave it from 1961 through 1968. Most
Americans, "passive and unenthusiastic," in Podhoretz's description, understood that explanation: they remembered the
world wars, Eastern Europe, Korea, and they recognized the
evils of totalitarianism.
But the anti-war elites rejected those justifications. In April
1965, Secretary of State Dean Rusk raised a professorial firestorm when he remarked on "the gullibility of the academic
community and their shibborn disregard of the plain facts." A
teaching fellow at law school, I attended an "emergency" meeting of the Greater Boston Faculty Committee on Vietnam,
which included several prestigious academic names, convened
to draft an angry full-page advertisement for the New York Times
to answer Rusk. No one of the hundreds present defended U.S.
policy. The chairman, a professor of divinity, told me I could express my disagreement by "keeping my seat and remaining silent." (Later, the protests of a few won me a minute or two.)
Even Henry Kissinger, at Harvard in 1965, objected to the government's defense of the war on "moral grounds," because "in a
civil war it is not clear who the aggressor is; it is not like one sovereign nation attacking another." Later Kissinger modified his
view which confused a civil war with protracted war of aggression and which refused to see that a protracted, masked aggression did not differ in kind from open war as in Korea. By that
time, however, the "civil war'' argument had become favorite
anti-war mythology.
Podhoretz states that even though the anti-war positions clearly
represented a small, minority viewpoint, our government made
"the mistake" of believing "this meant that the American people
supported the war." He argues that until 1973 the public simply
"went along," more or less willing, to give their leaders the "benefit
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
of the doubt." At the same time that he criticizes the elites who
had gotten us into the war and· conceived and carried out our
failed policies, Podhoretz does not shrink from blaming the
American people themselves for the 1975 congressional action
that stopped further military aid to South Vietnam despite the
continuing danger from Hanoi. "At least a measure of responsibility" for this abandonment of an ally "belongs to the people ...
whose wishes their representatives believed themselves to be carrying out." The original intervention by the elites, he argues, had
been "an attempt born of noble ideals and impulses," but uthe
same cannot be said of what the American people did in 1975."
The American public demonstrated its own ultimate lack of
umoral capacity" to save South Vietnam-by contrast, they earlier
had been "willing to shoulder the burden of Korea."
Podhoretz is wrong to call the American people morally inadequate at the same time that he refuses to recognize their earlier
steadfastness. "Going along" and giving the· government "the
benefit of the doubt" meant seeing sons and brothers die in another faraway place for other men's freedom-without succumbing to hysteria or a new wave of McCarthyism despite provocations from the "wild men of the Left" with their Vietcong
flags and anti-American obscenities. In contrast, after only two
years of the Korean War the "stalemate" contributed to the rise
of McCarthyism and made Eisenhower pledge in the campaign
of 1952 to "go to Korea" with the implicit promise to end the
fighting one way or the other.
Nor were Americans really ever as "passive and acquiescent"
as Podhoretz describes them, until the very end. In election after
election they voted for candidates who supported U.S. policy in
Vietnam, they supported the deployment of forces and the military budgets to pay for it, and they expressed their belief in the
justness of the cause in numerous patriotic and "pro-war" demonstrations over the years-though never in as well-organized or
violent a manner as the anti-war activists.
In his mischaracterization of the people in both the Korean
and the Vietnam war, Podhoretz seems almost oblivious to the
working of the Communist strategy of protracted war and pro·
traded negotiations. Three years passed between the first commitment of American forces in Korea (never to number more
than roughly half the American forces, and the dead, in Vietnam) and the signing of the truce agreement at Panmunjom-an
agreement still enforced by our troops. In Vietnam it took twelve
years to get from Kennedy's first introduction of troops to the
signing of the hollow, non-enforceable agreement between
Henry Kissinger and Le Due Tho. Despite this, Podhoretz writes:
" ... Looking back on Korea from a perspective shaped by the experience of Vietnam, what seems most remarkable is the absence of any serious opposition to what Truman decided to do."
What seems more remarkable, looking at Vietnam in the light of
Korea, is that Americans held on for as long as they did! American patience and mahirity through this long national ordeal seem
nothing less than magnificent. Where is the "nobility" of the Vietnam cause Podhoretz celebrates, if not here?
The turning point in public support for the war was the 1968
Tet offensive, an overwhelming Communist defeat: the Communists suffered heavy losses and could not hold the scores of
101
�populated areas and military facilities they attacked; instead of
joining the liberating invaders, the 1 South Vietnamese fled in
every instance to areas with mor:e fighting but fewer Communists. But the media devastated suppbrt for the war in America
by portraying Tet as a Communist triumph. Why? In his important study, Big Story (new edition, Yale University Press 1982),
Peter Braestrup argues that not media "ideology" but "the limited ability of the press corps to cover so complicated and strange
a war" caused the "distortions ;md misrepresentations." To
Podhoretz instead, "Tet provided the occasion for a growing disenchantment with the war to express itself." Both may be right.
But Tet shocked me because it should never have happened at
all: it showed greater enemy strength and determination (suicidal
determination), and weaker allied intelligence, preparedness,
and security than should have existed at that point in the war.
Tel showed the futility of the "war of attrition" with its gradual
and "rational" bombing and troop escalation-with its official
guarantees of North Vietnam's territorial integrity and its assurances for the survival of the regime in Hanoi. In response, Hanoi
simply threw still more men south to be chewed up by superior
American military might-but not without taking their toll of
American lives and will. Most Americans were disturbed not by
the reasons for our involvement in Vietnam, but, especially after
Tet, by doubts about whether our policy was working.
Beneath this disappointment in the American people, nagging
at Podhoretz (and at many other Americans) is guilt, not for having defended Vietnam at all that the anti-war critics would have
us bear, but guilt at deserting an ally, furtively in 1973, openly in
1975. That this, our longest war, was the first in which the Yanks
came back before it was "over, over there," cannot help but
bother us.
Most troubling about Podhoretz' s moral analysis is his failure
to reconcile it with his own pragmatic judgement that we should
never have gone into Vietnam in the first place: "The only way
the U.S. could have avoided defeat in Vietnam was by staying
out altogether ... saving Vietnam from Communism was beyond
its reasonable military, political. . . intellectual. .. and moral
capabilities."
The moral and practical questions are intertwined. For if failure was unavoidable, the people of South Vietnam were cursed
with the worst of all worlds-the war and Communism. Wasn't it
deeply wrong-unconscionable-to impose such an unnecessary price on them and us? Bad enough to "destroy the country
in order to save it", but to put it through a war with no realistic
prospect of saving it? This seems less morally defensible than the
"arrogance" Podhoretz finds in the Kennedy and Johnson people who at least believed their policies would succeed, or than the
"naivete" of the moderate anti-war movement which could conceive of no worse fate for Vietnam than the war itself.
If it is true that American victory was not inevitable, as many
hawks wrongly believed, does it necessarily follow, as Podhoretz
maintains, that American failure was? Given the stakes, his fatalism is intuitively and historically unsatisfying. What was tried did
not work, but would an)lthing else have? Podhoretz criticizes
successive administrations for conducting the war militarily, politically, and strategically "on the cheap." Wouldn't avoiding or
102
correcting their "failures of leadership" have brought a different
result? Was America defeated militarily in Vietnam or politically
and strategically at home?
The United States in Vietnam forgot the lessons of conventional war in Korea and of counterinsurgency in Malaya, Greece,
and the Phi1lipines. In Korea, a conventional war of open and
unambiguous aggression, the first limited war of modern times,
the UN/US forces did not bring North Korea to negotiation until
they drove them from the South, invaded the North-and threatened its existence with a non-Communist reunification of Korea.
Until this invasion, numerous troop losses had not moved the
North Koreans to abandon their aggression. (Korea also, incidentally, showed that the Soviet Union and China would not intervene directly to defend the homeland of their ally-but only to
defend their own homeland, in that instance, China.) In Greece,
Malaya, and the Phillipines, the West prevailed by providing
material support without large troop commitments, because the
local Communis.t guerrillas were cut off from supplies and reinforcements from abroad. A hybrid of conventional and counterinsurgency warfare, our Vietnam strategy ignored the crucial
lessons of each: it did not invade the enemy's homeland and it
did not cut off the local guerrillas from supplies and reinforcements from abroad.
In contrast to the United States, the Communist world applied
the lessons of Korea in Vietnam. With Southeast Asia's largest
army, second in Asia only to China's, Hanoi openly proclaimed
its goal of Communist reunification; but it did not attack the
South directly and in force in 1955, because it feared the response
North Korea's open and unambiguous attack had provoked in 1950.
Instead it supplied the local guerrillas and infiltrated its own troops,
masquerading as guerrillas, into the South. All-out attack by regular mechanized divisions came twenty years later, after protracted disguised aggression had led the United States to abandon Saigon in fact in 1973 and by law in 1975. Vietnam ended
the way Korea had started, with brutal open conquest, but at a
time and under circumstances that prevented the response the
lesson of Munich required.
On leaving office, Eisenhower, who had refused to commit U.S.
soldiers to stop North Vietnamese advances in Laos and Vietnam, had no qualms about recommending to the new president
that he might have to intervene there, especially in the increasingly desperate situation in Laos. In early 1961-an incident
Podhoretz curiously ignores-Kennedy did in fact dramatically
and publicly commit the U.S. to the defense of Laotian "inde·
pendence." When a few months later, however, it became clear
that the defense of Laos required American troops, Kennedyin contrast to Eisenhower, who had supported a coalition that
favored the West-settled for a coalition government with Communists that conceded the Communist guerrillas two-thirds of
Laos with its access routes to Vietnam. (In 1965 Kissinger characterized Kennedy's decision as "backing down" and "abandoning an ally," a pattern he saw repeated in the Kennedy administration's, at least passive, involvement in the overthrow of Diem
in 1963.)
After his failure in Laos (and the Bay of Pigs and Khruschev's
"traumatizing" summit bullying) Kennedy decided to take a stand
AUTUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�in Vietnam. Because of fear of a big~power confrontation, however, his intervention was "timid and hesitant. .. half-hearted
and gradual." He decided on counterinsurgency without, however, sealing-off Vietnam's borders. By dealing with a protracted
and disguised invasion as if it were a guerri11a'war-and not tak~
ing the measures necessary for victory in such a war-Kennedy
allowed the myth of a "civil war and local insurgency" to take
hold of the world.
We cannot know whether, had Kennedy lived, his Irish would
have prevailed over his Harvard and he might have decided on a
more Truman-like response, or whether (as JFK apologists have
argued) he would have followed the cut-and-run model of Laos.
Either policy would have had better consequences. But even if,
as Podhoretz contends, he would have done more or less what
johnson did, the results probably would have been different.
Why? Because Kennedy doing it would have made all the differ~
ence: unlike LBJ, he had the "style" and "charisma" to mobilize
public opinion, and a network of media and academic allies.
Kennedy's closet doves would have remained there rather than
reacting to fate's cruel blow in Dallas by attacking the besieged
sitting president, hinting at a Robert Kennedy "dump Johnson"
challenge in 1964, and actually launching one in 1968. (Would
we have heard chants of"Hey, hey, JFK, how many kids did you
kill today"?) And without its trump card-a combined anti-war
and "get Johnson" movement gradually draining America's
will-Hanoi would have had the incentive to make peace not
war.
But that was not to be. Kennedy's death three weeks after
Diem's sealed the fate of Vietnam-and of America in Vietnam. Just as Diem's murder unhinged events in South Vietnam,
the assassination of Kennedy permanently altered the course at.
home. Vietnam almost instantly became "Johnson's war'' and
then "Nixon's war." But the rules of the game had largely been
set, by Kennedy and even by Eisenhower before him: aggression
would be resisted, but on the enemy's terms, and not on his home
ground. Neither Johnson or Nixon would fundamentally change
these terms-Johnson because of the domestic turmoil, and Nixon
and Kissinger for the same fear but also because they nurtured
bigger "geopolitical" ambitions on the international stage: detente with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with China.
At Home and Abroad
LETTER FROM THE HoMEFRONT: ON MARRYING
This is an Apology. The deed for which I
must atone, or provide justification, is mar·
riage. My particular faults-youth and gender (I am 23 and a woman in the 1980's)
-are incidental. But they have helped to
magnify-by making my own situation
more extreme-the central issue of mar~
riage. So much for the overall "efficient
cause" of this essay.
The more immediate catalyst was my
observation of various long-term "relationships" (my use of the term excludes marriage) and their eventual dissolution. What
struck me in each case was the couples' surprise at the fading of love and the resigna·
tion with which they accepted their parting.
I saw a remarkable mixture of innocence
and cynicism. The surprise that accompa·
nied the couples' loss of passion showed
shallow understanding of the way men and
women work together. The easy resigna·
tion suggested weary sophistication. But
perhaps the combination, innocence and
cynicism, ought not surprise. In our time
the kind of experience likely to promote
such cynicism is readily available, but seri·
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ous and thorough thought about the malefemale relationship is rare. We are jaded by
our past, and as pure of any real insight as
if we'd led the cloistered lives of our ances·
tors. Experience rather than understanding
has become the god to whom we appeal
The old rules that governed such matters
have been overthrown, but the subsequent
void is yet unfilled. No new constitution
was born of this revolution but only pur~
poseless freedom. Experience is now avail~
able in plenty, to what end no one knows. If
wisdom is not the aim, and since we've es·
tablished no rights and wrongs it cannot be,
experience itself must be the end. We are
left with a society that uses up mates as it
does cars, with equanimity. We have learned
to cloak the absence of thought with the
jargon of "relationships."
For most of my generation, marriage has
been, at best, an irrelevancy. We have slept
together-if not carelessly, then certainly
without mutual promise or obligation. When
we grew somewhat more attached we have
moved in together rather than marry. We
were "not ready" for marriage although
what we were waiting for was never quite
clear. We wanted to "test" each other first
to ensure that our marriage would never
end in divorce. We did not see the point of
"a piece of paper," because if we loved
each other that was enough, and if love
ceased it was only reasonable that the
union should also dissolve. Lest we bind
ourselves to anything that might become
difficult, we chose the temporary over the
permanent, the safe and casual over the
risky and demanding.
Now, months or years later, we find that
"something has happened," that we do not
in fact feel about each other as we once did.
What a good thing we didn't marry! The
situation is unpleasant, and it seems a pity
to part after so much shared past, but at
least no divorce is necessary. Yet if we are
not quite satisfied with the knowledge that
our caution was justified, if we are perhaps
uneasy about relationships with "planned
obsolescence," then we may well Wonder
what "happened," what went wrong.
It is not a very difficult puzzle. The arrangement was from the beginning inten·
103
�tionally temporary. Is it surprising that the
love also should be temporary? No, promises were made, no future anticipated. Is it
surprising that there should in fact be no
future? When two people have shared (another word, like urelationships" which has
been grossly overused but seems hard to
avoid) everything that can presently be
shared but have made no promises about
future sharing, it is not surprising that they
should eventually weary of each other.
Indeed, that very refusal to promise future love must immediately lessen present
love. When lover says to beloved, "I love
you now, but can't guarantee the future,"
he has already damaged their present. Pea·
ple who love may, of course, themselves be
sensible and cautious, but only insofar as
they are and do something other than love.
For love, itself, is by nature immoderate and
demanding. It is content with nothing less
than total commitment: love is itself the
food of love. Promise of love-guaranteed
future love-enables present love. When
we deny our mutual future, we remove the
endless supply of love and so begin to starve
our present love.
It seems a simple truth, that love which
is not fed will die; but it is one which is extraordinarily difficult both to remember and
to act upon. Love must grow or decline. Unless the couple is willing to promise a shared
future, their love cannot grow,,indeed, must
fade. The couple have avoided the promise, and as they watch their love weaken,
they agree, not surprisingly, to part.
The self-defeating effects of intentioned
temporariness seem evident; but we have yet
to address explicitly the initially mentioned
objection to marriage. The second, that
the couple must "test" one another, must
live together for awhile to see if things
work out, seems obviously mistaken. ''Testing" assumes a possible end of love, when
it is precisely the opposite which must be assumed if the love is to be fed and so prosper.
More interesting is the first objection,
the notion of "being ready." At the root of
this phrase and of many difficulties with
marriage-whether of the initial decision
to marry or the later and sadder one of divorce-lies one particular problem: that of
identity (we seem hounded by these once
worthy, now sadly jargonized words for
which we can find no alternative). It is the
problem which Tolstoy addresses so mar·
velously in Anna Karenina where he treats
104
marriage as an identity-giver, and which has
become especially important with the rise
of "Women's Liberation."
The refusal to commit oneself to another
in the name of finding or perhaps preserving one's identity has today become commonplace. We wonder at those men and
women who are not interested in a career,
in contributing to the GNP-and who prefer to stay at home with a family. We assume they are less complete, more reliant
upon others for their identity, less selfpossessed. An unattached woman with a
promising career is respected because she
is "free," dependent on no one and able to
"be herself." A married woman with a child
(although we are taught to pay lip service
to the "homemaker") is considered a mere
adjunct of her family who is unable to "realize her full potential." If talk of "finding
oneself" is passe now, it is only because
such ideas have found almost universal ac·
ceptance. We act as if this "self" were out
there somewhere, ready made and awaiting
discovery; or if we have already "found" our·
selves," we suppose we must guard our findings assiduously to preserve our own sacred
"individuality.''
The obvious mistake in all this is the un·
ders~anding of the self as something apart
from what defines it. We are always defined
by others. We do not and cannot define ourselves. An internal search for identity is
doomed to failure, because our sense of reality is so entirely bound up with others
that we cannot be sure of anything on our
own. Alone, we are capable of endless selfdoubt. The inner dialogue arrives at no
conclusion and will trap us in circles if unaided by an external presence. We are in
fact known and know ourselves by the
company we keep.
The fear of losing oneself in marriage, of
denying one's identity by joining it with an·
other's, is groundless. If we are inescapably
defined by others, the question is not
whether we wish rather to identify ourselves by our mate than to maintain independence and individuality, but whether
we choose one alliance over another. The
choice against spouse is not a victory for
self, but only the decision to be defined by
other and inevitably larger groups: proponents of the ERA, Moral Majority mem·
bers, Soho loft-dwellers, Visa-Card carriers.
We are all constantly defining and redefining ourselves by membership in various or·
ganizations. But insofar as our definition of
self is acquired solely from such groups, we
have forfeited any claim to some special
unique identity.
Commitment to a single other gives one
a specificity, an individuality not achiev·
able by participation in a variety of groups.
The statement, "She is the one who married A_ B_" is manifestly more specific
than "She is 3 lawyer." There are, to be
sure, thousands of lawyers. There is only
one wife of A._ B_. Equally, the single
most specific statement A_ B_ could
make about himself is "I am the one who
married C_ D_." Neither of them there·
by become mere adjuncts of the other.
Rather, they have defined themselves with
utter specificity and so possess their selves
most securely. The fear of commitment in
the name of self is mere self-deception be·
cause we are bound to "find ourselves" in
others in any case, and because if we are
really concerned about individuality and
differentiation from others, we will always
be most individual when we ally ourselves
with one other.
Let us return to the phrase, "being ready."
One must grant its occasional legitimacy.
Until we begin to make sense of the many
larger identifying groups and claim membership in some rather than in others, it
might well be folly to attempt the conclusively defining decision: the choice of a
spouse. But to procrastinate indefinitely is,
quite literally, self-defeating. It is frighten·
ing to marry, consciously to choose and de·
clare one's ultimate definition. And it is
easy to understand why so many have happily taken advantage of society's relaxed at·
titude toward living together. If we can
avoid decisions, by all means let us do so,
but let us admit that we do so out of laziness and fear, not out of a lofty sense of
self-fulfillment.
It is a radical step to risk defining oneself
by a single other, but it offers wilder possibilities than any other alliance. To marry is
not to surrender one's own individuality
but to join it with another's to create some·
thing radically new and unpredictable.
Much has been made of the security of marriage. I have never desired that sort of se·
curity; it is precisely the larger insecurity,
the increase of possibilities and the risk of
creation, that entices me.
Finally, we must address the third of
those initial objections. Why bother with
AUTIJMN/WINTER 1982-83
�the "piece of paper" which is the evidence
of a public promise? If we have promised
faithfulness to each other, what does it
matter that society know? After all, is it not
a private affair?
In fact, the promise of marriage is anything but private. As marriage is the most
profound commitment between two persons, so its public declaration is the most
profound action we can perform in the
world of men. The public promise to love is
the remarkable merging of the private with
the public, of the individual with the universal, of the world of thought with the
world of action. For in the public sphere,
action rules, in the private, thought. To assume that One can promise love in private is
seriously to misunderstand the nature of
promise. Promise is action and therefore an
essentially public undertaking. It is through
promise that a lasting love-a love "till
death us do part"-is made possible, piecisely because we are thereby transferred
from the private, unsure, and always vulnerable world of thought to the public,
strong, and definite world of action. Public
promise frees us. from dependence on our
"feelings," which are dark and easily swayed.
We are set free in the clarity of action.
Faithfulness to one person and its public
avowal are essentially one and the same. If it
is through promise that faithful love is made
possible and promise is a public event, then
to promise faithfulness is to declare it publicly. Moreover, the problem we have with
the "piece of paper" is precisely the same
problem we have with commitment. Both
stem from a fundamental misunderstanding
of identity. I have already discussed the fear
of losing oneself in marriage. Unwillingness
to make public avowal is the same fear taken
one step further. It is again the attempted
separation of self (although this time "self"
includes the loved one) from the external
world. It is to forget that we are always defined by others and so are inescapably public. When I marry, my definition is radically
altered and must necessarily affect my relationship to my other "definers" -the Public. Denial of "the piece of paper" can only
be futile evasion.
Prevailing contemporary opinion maintains that the private is somehow more
"real" than the public. Again, this implies a
misunderstanding of "public." The publicprivate dichotomy is that of action and
thought, and it is, after all, action which
1HE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
shapes thought, which gives it final definition. We are all of us a strange mixture of
public and private, but to assume that the
one is more profound, more "real" than the
other, is to misunderstand the distinction.
Serious participation in public affairs is
increasingly rare. Indeed, we assume those
who do pursue public life to be either crazy
or crooked. More_ and more we desire only
to be left alone, free to pursue private happiness. It seems no coincidence that this is
the same time in which the fear of, or perhaps studied disinterest in, marriage is also
so prevalent. Confusion about identity is at
the root of both. Only when we fully understand that the self is not a separate entity,
that we can never be wholly private, will we
risk commitment to the other-whether an
individual or a group.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about
the public-private division is our ability to
transcend it. We do so daily but nowhere
more completely than in marriage. In marriage, the profoundly private-love-becomes public. The indefinable is defined
and so ensured. We receive our ultimate
identity by the choice of spouse even as
our love is identified through unconditional promise. For in marriage conditions
are surrendered. We promise a love "'till
death us do part," a promise made possible
precisely in the making, because it is the
knowledge that love must last which allows
it freedom and the chance to grow, and because promise as action allows love to
transcend the problems inherent in its own
realm of the private. That we are at once so
entirely divided and yet able to transcend
such division is most miraculous. The possibility of promise is, after all, something
we share with no other creature. Let us not
surrender the distinction.
KARl JENSON
An actress, Kari Jenson lives and works in New
York.
THE HOLOCAUST MISSION:
July 29 to August 12, 1979
At the end of 1978 President Carter establishe_d a Commission on the Holocaust.
It was charged with the task of proposing an
appropriate memorial to the Jewish victims
of the Nazi regime. There was an element
of retroactivity in the presidenes decision,
a reaching out for the five million dead
whose very identity as Jews was not readily
recognized by the United States at a time
when they were being subjected to a sys·
tematic process of destruction. Now they
were to have a monument under official
U.S. auspices to recall the days when they
died alone.
The drafting of such a recommendation
is quite an undertaking and the work was
to be carried out by (I) a small staff consisting of a part-time director, full-time deputy
director and full-time assistant, (2) the "President's Commission" itself-a large body of
twenty~four members chosen from the public, plus five from the Senate and five from
the House of Representatives, and (3) an
advisory board almost as big as the commission. To finance the half year or so of deliberations and planning, a . modest budget
was allocated to the commission by the Department of the Interior. Commissioners
and advisory board members accepted no
fees and their official travel outside the
United States was to be billed to them personally.
Most members of the commission as
well as the board were Jews, a number of
them survivors. The most conspicuous profession in the group was the clergy (Jewish,
Protestant, and Catholic), albeit one that
was drawn mainly from academic life.
There was an obvious tilt to the northeast,
although several members had come from
Georgia. A number of commissioners
could be described as prominent in public
or cultural life. Few, very few, were young.
I had little inkling or knowledge of the
consultations which led to the creation of
the commission and the selection of its
me~bership. No doubt I was approached
because I had devoted about three decades
of research and writing to the Holocaust,
but I have long been accustomed to working
in solitude. No wonder that in one of the
105
�first telephone calls informing me of the
commission's existence I was admonished
not to turn down an appointment ifl should
be requested to serve. I would be needed
because the memorial was to be more than
mute stone; it was to contain records, books,
films, and it was to be a depository of such
materials in order that one might progress
beyond remembering the imperfectly known
to know what was imperfectly remembered.
This was the offer I could not refuse. To
my surprise, virtually all of the commissioners espoused the idea of a "living" memorial, a building in which one could meet,
learn, and think. More than that, there was
to be an endowment to aid researchers
with fellowships and grants. Of course,
most of the funds for this program would
have to be private. We would not only have
to recOmmend a broad framework, but we
would also have to think about the means.
During an early meeting, mention was
made by the director of a journey abroad,
to visit some of the principal sites in Poland
and the USSR where the jews had been
killed and to survey hitherto unavailable
documentary holdings in the archives of
these countries. This mission preoccupied
me from that very moment; it filled my mind
long after it was over.
I had never been in Poland or the USSR;
I had never visited Auschwitz, Treblinka,
or Babi Yar. Something-not only lack of
money-had kept me from traveling to
these places. I had "seen" them, of course,
in German documents. It is in those files,
thousands and tens of thousands of them,
that I had wandered and it is there that I
had encountered "planet Auschwitz" and
the "concentration camp universe." Eventually I had become familiar with these
phenomena, their terrain, logistics, and operational characteristics. Yet in essence
they remained mysterious to me and inexplicable.
"No one who has not been there can
imagine what it was like." How often had I
heard this phrase from survivors. Its implications could hardly be overlooked: those
who had not lived through the experience
would not be able to recreate it, even if
they studied the original records or examined the old barbed wires. There is no way
one can be in Auschwitz anymore; it is not
a concentration camp today, but a museum. Nor can one be in Treblinka, it is a
106
sculpture. One cannot be in Babi Yar either, it is a monument in a park. What then
could one recapture in those surroundings?
What could we do there now?
The survivors on the commission were
to be our guides. The Holocaust mission
was in the first instance their journey. At
the opening meeting of the commission in
Washington, a procedural point had been
raised by a Christian member. He said that
survivors should always speak first. He was
gently overruled by the survivors themselves who preferred to follow a proper
American alphabetical order, but here, on
the grounds where they had been the outcasts of mankind, orphaned or widowed in
a single night, they were to be at the head
of the procession.
· The undisputed spiritual leader was Elie
Wiesel, once an inmate of Auschwitz, now
the chairman of the commission, ''prophetlike," mesmerizing, saying at every occasion not merely that which must be said to
a host, but also those things that for most
of us would have been unutterable, and
saying them in the morning, the afternoon,
or the night. Fluent in French, English,
Hebrew, Yiddish (not to mention Hungarian), this gaunt figure moved among us,
sleeping little and eating almost nothing.
We almost did not go. The Soviet Union
issued visas to us on the Saturday prior to
our scheduled Sunday departure, and it denied entry to the part-time director of the
commission as well as to a member of the
advisory board. (Both had visited the USSR
before and had apparently been in contact
with dissidents.) The detailed itinerary was
a series of last-minute arrangements that
must have been put together with the assistance of extraordinarily diligent officials of
the Department of State and embassies
abroad. The group was large. Though it included fewer than half of the commissioners and advisory board members (none at
all from the legislative branch), there were
wives, reporters, and invited guests, some
of them financial supporters of remembrance projects. At the many ceremonies
at graves and monuments, the cameras
would sweep across this crowd which numbered between fifty and sixty.
Only after we had left the United States
did I understand the multiple purposes of
the mission. We would not only have to absorb much that we would encounter dur-
ing our hurried visits and meetings; we
would also have to impart information to
others. Our foreign hosts in Eastern Europe would ask us what we meant when we
said the word "Holocaust" and we would
devote more time than we had anticipated
to answering that one question above all.
Poland
Today Poland is a homogeneous society.
Unlike the Polish state of 1939, the present
republic has no substantial minorities. The
territories inhabited by Ukrainians and
Lithuanians were yielded to the USSR,
and from the western provinces, acquired
after the war, the Germans were expelled.
The Jewish community, once 3,300,000
dispersed in the large cities and smaller
towns, now numbers 6,000. Ninety percent
of the prewar Jewish population were kiHed
in the Holocaust; most of the remainder
survived as soldiers, 'refugees, or forced laborers outside or inside the destructive
arena, and these people have since moved
to other countries, mainly to Israel and the
United States.
The three million Polish Jews who succumbed to German destruction represent
nearly three-fifths of all the jewish dead.
Moreover, Poland (as defined by the
boundaries of 1939) is the graveyard not
only of those three million, but also of a
million more transported there in special
trains from several countries of Germandominated Europe.
Before their final destruction, the Jews
of Poland were incarcerated in hundreds of
ghettos, large and small. Near some of
these ghettos the death camps appeared.
From these ghettos the Jews were moved
out to the gas chambers where they were
killed along with the other jewish deportees from the northern, western, and
southern portions of the continent.
Few are the traces of Jewry in the physical panorama of contemporary Warsaw. As
we stood in front of the monument-cast
in heroic proportions-of the Warsaw
ghetto fighters, I glanced at the ordinary
apartment buildings erected by the Polish
government on the former ghetto site. They
were already showing signs of wear. I knew
AUTUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�that the old quarter was no more. For sev- every unmarked grave, every prison bar." I
eral years I had been one of the editors of took down these words and almost memothe diary kept by the man who was Chair- ' rized them; they rang in my ears longer
man of the Jewish Council of the Warsaw than any others expressed in these official
Ghetto, Adam Czerniakow. Again and meetings.
again, I had consulted a map of the TYet I knew that during our century, Jews
shaped walled ghetto, some ten full blocks had endured misery in Polish society. It is
at its widest and twenty blocks long, which hardly an unknown story and in the Amerihoused well over 400,000 people in three can Jewish community it has shaped sentior four story buildings. After the deporta- ments much less mellow than my own. I
tions, and the battle ignited by the armed could imagine a reaction in America to
resistance of the last ghetto inhabitants, what we were hearing in Warsaw that day.
the SS razed the jewish quarter lest War- It would be said in our country that Poland
saw regain its prewar population size. Now is embracing its Jews, now that they are
that there are Polish houses where the gone, as much as it was rejecting them
ghetto stood, it is difficult to visualize its when they were still alive. In the extreme
former boundary even at the Umschlag- form of this view, Poland has been the antiplatz through which the official ghetto ex- semitic nation par excellence, discriminatports and imports passed and from which ing against the Jewish population before
more than 300,000 Jews were taken to Tre- the war, welcoming German actions against
blinka.
jewry during the_conflict, and all but exOn the first day we visited also a Polish pelling the remnant thereafter. I myself
monument commemorating the Polish have always attempted to assess evidence
struggle against the Germans. At that cere- of Polish hostility toward the jews in the
mony picked Polish troops stood by and broadest possible context. Long before the
the American ambassador was present as Holocaust, there was little tranquility for
we placed flowers at the foot of the memo- Jewry in several countries of Europe. After
rial. The Polish People's Republic does not the German invasion of Poland, the ghetdeny the Holocaust, it does not obscure toization process instituted by the occupathe fact that jews died as jews, but it will tion authorities resulted in a reallocation of
remind the world of the Poles who died as Jewish housing and Jewish trading to the
Poles, and it will present the two fates in a Polish sector. The Poles profited, if that is
formula suggesting parity. Repeatedly we the word, from a Jewish misfortune. The
heard a statistic indicating that three mil- Germans set up also their death camps on
lion Polish Jews and three million non- Polish soil, not, however, to take advantage
Jewish Poles had died as a consequence of of any Polish hospitality, but to reduce
the German occupation. The Polish toll- costs, particularly of transportation. There
casualties in battle, deaths in camps, and was no central Polish authority under Gerfatalities in epidemics-was calculated a man rule and it is not Poland that destroyed
long time ago and may well be reexamined the Jews-this deed was performed by Nazi
by experts, but when Polish Justice Minis- Germany.
ter Jerzy Bafia referred to this "Golgotha"
Still, I could not ignore the circumstance
as a trauma that after thirty-five years was that for the remaining handful of Jews, life
still being felt in every walk oflife, I believed in Poland had become difficult and even
oppressive. Only a few days after our stay
him without need for any substantiation.
For Czeslaw Pilichowski, Director of the in Eastern Europe, I was to meet a middleMain Commission for Investigation of Nazi aged Jew in Denmark who had emigrated
Crimes in Poland, the double disaster in- from Poland nearly a decade ago. I asked
flicted on Jews and Poles by the same im- him what his profession had been before
placable foe was more than a matter of his emigration. He was a major in the Poljuxtaposition. He cited a poem, "To the ish army. Had he retired? No, he had been
Polish Jews," by Wladislaw Broniewski, dismissed abruptly in 1967, one week after
which contains the verse "Our common the outbreak of the Six-Day War between
home has been wrecked and the blood shed Israel and the Arab states. No doubt, the
makes us brothers, we have been united by reasons for the action against him were
execution walls, by Dachau, Auschwitz, by linked to foreign policy issues, but I could
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
not help being troubled by his experience
and the similar dilemma faced by other
Jews in the Soviet Union. The problem is
the age-old lesson so ingrained in the mind
of the Eastern Enropean Jew that eventually he will suffer, not for a religion he does
not practice or a Zionist cause he does not
espouse, but for the fact that in the eyes of
all those around him he remains unalterably a jew.
Our hosts placed stress on the Polish
agony during the war, and they implied
that since those trying days Jews and Poles
have had much in common. They also reminded us of the help that ordinary Poles
had given to endangered Jews in the course
of the German occupation. This chapter in
the history of Polish-Jewish relations was
emphasized in speeches, books, and exhibits. I had occasion to look at some of the
evidence-it was documentary. In German
parlance, Poles who had extended shelter
or sustenance to Jews were guilty of Judenbeherbergung, a crime for which the penalty
was a swift death. The Germans had the
habit of posting the names of Polish men
and women who lost their lives for such
activities.
We had a great many meetings. Addresses were given, points made, themes
stressed. At the end of a long day, I would
walk alone in Warsaw. Once, before midnight, I saw a Polish family placing flowers
on a plaque at the entrance of a park.
We have moved from cemetery to cemetery, said Elie Wiesel later in Jerusalem,
and everywhere we went we found a strange
beauty. This observation about localities
in which masses of people were killed expressed in quintessence a thought I had
during our visit to-Treblinka.
We had traveled to the site of the death
camp in the stifling heat of a Hungarian
bus. On the way, a survivor pointed out to
us the small Jewish towns that had once existed nearby. We passed old wooden houses,
rode over a narrow bridge, and saw old
freight cars at a railway siding-a deportation train preserved there by the Polish
government. I wish we could have approached the camp by rail, as the deportees
of 1942 had come, but we were arriving on
a very' warm day at the end of July, at a
time of year when the first of the Warsaw
107
�ghetto transports were being hauled into
this killing center. Though the distance is
not long, the Jewish victims had been moved
much more slowly than we, and they must
have jumped out of the cars with forebod·
ings and parUy in shock, but also with some
sense of physical relief. Did they notice the
sky and the trees? It took but two hours for
the deportees to be deprived of all their
personal belongings and to be walked the
incredibly short distance to the chambers
where they were gassed.
A small German guard force, augmented
by Ukrainian auxiliaries, killed three quarters of a million Jews in Treblinka on a vir·
tual assembly line. Several hundred Jewish
inmates employed in maintenance and facing certain death rebelled in August 1943.
Few were the survivors of the break, but
those Jews who did not escape from T reblinka did not outlive the camp. In the end,
the bodies in the mass graves were exhumed. All the installations were razed,
and a Ukrainian farm was established on
the site to restore its pastoral appearance.
Only a cobblestone path, built by prison·
ers, was left where Treblinka had existed.
After the war, the Polish government laid
down concrete ties, arranged as a symbolic
railway track, and set up hundreds of jagged
stones, each representing a Jewish community, around the stone meffiorial. For this
construction, the entire terrain was used
on a scale of 1: l, in the place where it had
all happened. A guide pointed out that af·
ter every heavy rain, tiny bone fragments
are disgorged by the earth and mix with
pebbles on the ground. Involuntarily, one
or two visitors bent down to pick up what
might have been such relics, only to drop
them quickly. I was still gazing at the
woods and I thought I heard the whine of
heavy trucks in the distance. Where is the
highway, I asked? Where are the trucks go·
ing? There is no highway and there are no
trucks, I was told. I was hearing the famous
Treblinka wind moving through the trees.
Much farther from Warsaw, to the south·
west, was Auschwitz, the most lethal place
in Nazi Europe. One million Jews died
there, as well as several hundred thousand
Poles, Russians, Frenchmen-all the nationalities in the orbit of the German army
and the German Security Police. Auschwitz
was a complex of three camps: the main
one, or Auschwitz I, which housed the ad-
108
ministration as well as a large number of
inmates; the killing center of Birkenau,
designated Auschwitz II; and the industrial
camp, Monowitz, or Auschwitz Ill. The
entire cluster was photographed repeatedly
by allied reconnaissance aircraft in 1944.
Auschwitz I is still intact. Its barracks
stand where they were, a reconstructed gas
chamber may be viewed, and the crematory
is in working order. The death camp ofBirk·
enau is almost bare; the tall smoke stacks of
the crematories are gone, but near the rail·
way track one may climb over the ruins of
the largest gas chambers ever built.
Adjacent to Auschwitz I is the city of
Auschwitz with its large railway yard.
Houses now filled with children are ranged
along the edge of the former camp. Every
day the inhabitants of these buildings may
look out of their windows and see the roofs
of barracks.
We stepped in, wearing our tags with the
emblem of the United States and the leg·
end "President's Commission on the Holocaust.'' The main entrance crowned with
iron grill work still proclaims the slogan
Arbeit macht frei (work makes free) and a
smaller sign at the side says HALT Ausweise
vorzeigen (Halt-show identification). The
walkways and buildings were those of a
permanent military fort, but that appearance was deceptive. On iron bars still flank·
ing the street on which we were walking,
men had been hanged. Individual buildings,
which the Germans called blocks, were put
to unique concentration camp uses: in one,
surgical experiments were performed, in
another prisoners were pushed into a cage
and starved to death. Between two of the
barracks there was an alley used for shoot·
ings. The windows of the building to the
left had been filled so that prisoners housed
there could not see the executions. To the
right, however, no such precautions had
been taken, since the only inmates kept
there were the condemned, waiting their
turn.
Each of the buildings is part of the Ausch·
witz museum. I went to see the exhibits of
old shoes, eyeglasses, prosthetic devices,
utensils, and luggage left behind by the
Germans because of their unsuitability for
shipment to the Reich. I saw a hallway filled
with photographs of Polish prisoners, young
men and women, who were brought here
in 1942 and 1943. Each of them looked
healthy, for their pictures were taken on
the day of arrival. For each the SS had
noted also the date of birth, and the date of
death. Most had lived only a few months in
Auschwitz. I peered at these photographs,
one or the other adorned with fresh flowers
left by Polish friends or family. I wanted to
find some young man who had been as old
as I was at that time. The search did not
take long. My contemporary, born a few
days before me, was dead as a teenager in
Auschwitz even before my schooling in
New York was interrupted by the war.
In Birkenau, standing on earth, sand, and
what may have been ashes, I attached myself to a Polish young lady of noble beauty
and refined features who explained the history of the camp. She was obviously a professional historian and I admired her grasp
of complex information. She was preparing
an album of German SS photographs of
Auschwitz and I promised her aerial photographs from our own archives.
Our group was about to be divided, some
to visit an old synagogue in nearby Krakow,
the others to stay in Auschwitz. just at that
moment I began to feel an unmistakable
pain, a cramp brought on by a kidney stone
which I must have formed. I am prone to
this malady when there is too much heat
and not enough water to drink. The pain
always worsens and then I need morphine
for relief. Obviously, I should have left im·
mediately to see a physician in Krakow, but
instead I raised my hand to join those who
chose to remain in the camp. I returned to
the barracks, the old shoes, to the photo·
graphs of the dead Poles, to the alley, to
the cells. I wanted to stand where the present pontiff had knelt in prayer. My pain
subsided, my muscles relaxed, and at the
end of the day, I knew that I would have no
need of drugs.
There was to be one more visit to a cemetery in Poland, a real one in Warsaw. By
now, I had run out of time-time to look at
documents in the Jewish historical insti·
tute, and time to survey the land behind
the tombstones where 80,000 jews, dead of
emaciation and disease, had been buried
during the ghetto days. I wanted to see only
one grave, a regular large slab half hidden
in the growing thicket of weeds. It is the
resting place of Adam Czerniakow, the
chairman of the Warsaw Jewish Council,
who took his life upon the outbreak of de-
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�portations after he had failed to save his
people.
The Soviet Union
I was startled when Elie Wiesel, the chairman of our commission, called a meeting
of the group in the open environment of a
dining room of our Warsaw hotel to discuss
the advisability of proceeding to the Soviet
Union in the light of the refusal of visas to
the director of the commission and to a
member of the advisory board. So far as I
was concerned, that issue had been settled
before we left our homes in the United
States-we would go. Much to Wiesel's
dismay, several of us spoke up to reiterate
the earlier decision. Exhausted by a full
day, we reassured him in a sluggish manner
that at some appropriate time in the future
we would express our outrage to protest
the Soviet action. Only one member of our
group, Bayard Rustin, understood immediately that Wiesel was attempting to elicit
our outrage on the spot in order that he
might use it for yet another attempt to obtain the visas. I was too concerned with the
possibility that he migh't actually abandon
our original plans to be of help to him. For
me, the visit to the Soviet Union was essential, if only because we had been admitted
as members of an official Holocaust commission. Already my head was filled with
burning curiosity. How would we be received? What would be said to us?
The director of the commission, Irving
Greenberg, was not in Europe. Perhaps he
had expected an immediate statement of
solidarity from the membership. The advisory board member whose visa was also denied, had come with us as far as Warsaw.
He had in fact been instrumental in arranging the entire journey. It was his miserable
travel bureau we all had to use. Now he
conceded defeat: he wanted us to continue
without him. He only asked that we would
say one prayer for him at Babi Yar and
another in the Moscow synagogue. His
voice breaking, he sat down, but then rose
again to apologize for having displayed his
feelings so openly. Now he wanted to give
us a reason for leaving him behind. He had
been a member of a partisan unit in Eastern Europe during the war. There was an
iron rule in the unit that a wounded man
would be shot by his comrades lest their
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
mission be jeopardized. I liked Miles Lerman. This former partisan and current oil
distributor personifies the character traits I
, have come to associate with survivors.
They are men and women with fast reactions, high intelligence, great endurance,
and an extraordinary capacity for regenerating their lives from the impact of shattering experiences. When I saw Lerman again
in Copenhagen, barely a week after our
meeting in the Warsaw hotel, he was talking to all of us, full of inquiries and plans.
I was not prepared for the Soviet Union.
As a political scientist, I should not have
been surprised by anything, not the standard of living as exemplified by the merchandise in a department store, nor the
restrictions so evident in the mere absence
of foreign non-communist newspapers in
the lobbies of our hotels. I knew of the So·
viet belief that distant goals require constant sacrifices: for capital formation and
industrialization, many consumers goods
are not produced; for the stability of theregime, intellectual and physical mobility is
curtailed; and for the sake of unity in the
Soviet Union, the separate memories of
constituent nationalities, including the Holocaust that befell the Soviet Jews, must be
submerged. What I had not quite expected
was backwardness in so much art, architecture, and historiography, that stale conforming manner in which Soviet designers
and writers are casting the aesthetic qualities of life. Hence I was taken aback also by
the counterpart of this stylistic retardation
in the formula ridden answers of bureaucrats to central questions about the Second
World War and the Holocaust which had
transpired in its course. The approach of
Soviet officialdom to the meaning of history is fixed and rigid; the encounter of
these men with us could be no different.
In Poland, we had not only been warmly
received; we were given assurances that
the Polish archives would be open to American researchers interested in the German
occupation. Poland holds a large quantity
of German documents, particularly records
portraying the destructive scene at a local
leveL Much that occurred in the final hours
of Polish Jewry and of other Jews deported
to Poland is reflected in these files. The
USSR also possesses documents of Ger-
man occupation authorities, not to speak
of contemporaneous Soviet correspondence dealing directly with the German
onslaught and its effects on the civilian
populatidn. I was interested in these materials, though I realized that access to them
would be a major problem. Not only would
a segmentation of occupation history into
Jewish and other subject matter be unwelcome in principle, but such sorting requires
an examination of all the German records
in detail. We know enough about these documents to expect any report, whether by
German SS offices, civilian overseers, military government, railroad directorates, or
economic agencies, to contain information
about a variety of events-the production
of wooden carts and the shooting of Jews
might be described on a single page. Moreover, the researcher might be particularly
interested in comparisons and contexts; he
might wish to investigate the German "racial ladder" and the placement of various
groups in this scheme, or the role of native
auxiliaries in German service, or the psychological repercussions of shootings on
White Russian or Ukrainian communities.
It would be inherently impossible for So·
viet authorities to permit foreigners the
pursuit of information about any aspect of
the Jewish catastrophe without allowing
them some insight into the entire fabric of
Soviet society at a time when it was undergoing its greatest stress.
Tactically, there was yet another problem, one which affects all attempts to effect
exchanges of knowledge with the Soviet
Union. The United States is an open society, our libraries and archives are accessible
to all visitors without any stipulation of reciprocity. What Soviet or East German researchers want to know is given to them
without restrictions; for what we attempt
to find out, we have no more to give. In
Kiev, on our first night, walking with Bayard Rustin, I voiced the thought that one
argument-the only argument-might be
the point that it would be in the interest of
the USSR to open its shelves to us, that in
the United States there was little appreciation of the Soviet agony or the Soviet contribution in the Second World War, that
findings made by American researchers in
the Soviet Union would carry more weight
in our country than the selection and presentation of topics by Soviet historians and
109
�journalists. Rustin was without question
the most astute and experienced member
of our mission, and what he said to me that
evening in Kiev was somewhat as follows:
"I hope you do not mind, my friend, my
telling you that you are naive."
a
Kiev has the appearance of new city.
Before the war, its population was 900,000;
now the number is 2,150,000. From Sep·
!ember 19, 1941, to November 6, 1943,
Kiev was in German hands. As soon as the
city had been captured, a unit of the SS
and Police, Einsatzkommando 4a, ordered
the Jewish inhabitants by means of wall
posters to assemble for "resettlement."
They were taken to a ravine at the city
boundary wh.ere the Kommando, a small
company-size unit augmented by detach·
ments of German Order Police, massacred
them in a three-day shooting operation.
The count was 33,771 jewish dead. When,
in the spring of 194 2, the commander of
Kommando 4a, Paul Blobel, received a visi·
tor from Berlin (Albert Hartl), he pointed
to the mass grave, explaining that the Jews
were buried there. Now, more than three
and a half decades later, the Chairman of
the Executive Committee of the Kiev City
Soviet of Peoples' Deputies welcomed the
Holocaust commission to the city, and Soviet guides showed the recently built memorial to the American visitors.
I do not know what route the bus was
following from our hotel, but the ride
seemed very short and when we arrived at
the ravine called Babi Yar I immediately
asked how far we were from the center of
the city. Barely two miles was the answer. I
could not help wondering then how many
people, including the victims themselves,
must have heard the rifle shots and rna·
chine-gun fire. Babi Yar is a moon shaped
depression in the earth, covered with grass
and surrounded by trees. Raised on a ridge
that is jutting into the center of the dish is
a Janus-like monument. Facing the street
are heroic figures, while on the far side one
may see the tormented faces and contorted
bodies of Soviet citizens, including women
and children. I talked to the designer of the
memorial who explained, that the Germans
had shot captured partisans here and help·
less civilians there; the sculptor had kept
that geography in mind when he shaped
110
the monument. I knew that, unlike Blobel,
the Soviet planners of the memorial made
no mention of Jews. Our commission had
brought a wreath of flowers with streamers
commemorating Babi Yar as a Jewish tragedy and laid it down at the foot of the ped·
estal on which stood the partisans of stone.
The cantor sang, and I disengaged myself
from the coil of people around him, stepped
back twenty feet and looked up at the crown
of the monument. Two Soviet photographers rushed towards me and took pictures
of me at close range.
We were leaving Kiev for Moscow on a
Friday afternoon and I did not think that
we would have meetings until Monday. No
sooner, however, had we arrived when
several of us were asked to go to the headquarters of the Moscow Writers Union, a
building which in furnishings and atmo·
sphere reminded me of a typical student
center at an American university. It was
old and nondescript; on several of its floors
people were sitting, reading, eating. Our
delegation was headed by Wiesel and in·
eluded the theologian Robert McAfee
Brown, as well as Time magazine book
review editor Stefan Kanfer, not in his capacity as a correspondent covering our mission, but as a novelist pressed into service
at the spur of the moment to match the
formidable array of literary talent assembled on the Soviet side. To our surprise, the Soviet chairman introduced the
members of his group by citing their military records. Two had evidently received
high decorations and' another had risen
from private to major. "When you introduce us," I whispered to Wiesel, "you may
say that I was a soldier." "An officer perhaps?" Wiesel asked quickly. "No, just a
soldier." Kanfer did not stir. He is a veteran
of the Korean conflict. Wrong war.
The Soviet delegation consisted of eight
people; half of them were Jews. Were so
many Jews assembled as a courtesy to us?
The idea was unsettling. As if to read my
mind, one of the Soviet writers referred to
himself as a member of a minority~he was
a Russian. Later, the Soviet chairman
showed us two large tablets listing the names
of Moscow writers killed in action. Half
were Jewish names, he explained.
We were eating a full meal, the best I
was to be served in the Soviet Union, and
we were assured that we could have every
course without concern-the food was
completely kosher. While we were dining,
each of us spoke, not as one would in an official meeting with formal agenda, but to
say something personal. One of the Soviet
writers (the one who had risen from private
to major) was Anatoli Rybakov. This is
what he told us.
He had grown up, of Jewish parents,
wholly assimilated into Russian culture. He
did not attend religious services and he
knew no Yiddish or Hebrew. His eighteen
novels had no Jewish content. One day,
however, he wanted to write a short story
in which the two protagonists, a man and a
woman, were Jews. He wanted his story to
be about love, not merely the romantic
love of young people who had just met, but
also the mature love of a husband and wife
after they had lived with each other for
many years. He decided that his young
man should have migrated to Russia from
Switzerland in 1910, that he should have
met a young woman, married her, and
stayed on through the First World War and
the Revolution. To show them growing
older, he had to continue the story to 1941
and the German assault. He had spent three
years in research to construct a locality in
which his couple might have lived. By then
his story was becoming a novel. He had to
place them into a ghetto and inevitably he
had to_ construct the ultimate scene of a
German shooting operation. It troubled
him greatly that the Jews went to their
deaths with apparent docility, but he was
convinced that they had nO recourse and
that they died with dignity. After the publication of his novel he had received hun·
dreds of letters assuring him that he had
been right in his portrayal.
Wiesel spoke of his concern about Babi
Yar. Having been there only that morning,
still agitated by the experience, he had to
point out that it was painful to see the
monument without an inscription identifying the victims as Jews.
There are monuments and there are
monuments, the Russian chairman replied.
When,. for example, his -friend, Yevgenij
Yevtushenko, wrote a poem "Babi Yar" explicitly dwelling on the jewish fate, that
verse was a monument. Who could tell
which of the two monuments, the one of
rock or the other-on paper, would last the
longer?
AUTUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�The Saturday morning was devoted to Soviet archival administration. I had familan appearance by the commission and its iarized myself as well as I could with the
guests at the Moscow synagogue. I declined organization and holdings of the Soviet arto join the group. Religious observances chives by reading the standard work on that
make me uncomfortable and the political . subject by the American Sovietologist Paovertones of that particular visit disturbed tricia Grimsted. In her substantial volume,
me. We had come to the Soviet Union as a there is no mention of captured German
commission of the president and our man- documents. I would have to inquire about
date was the Holocaust. For me there was their location and availability in the course
no other purpose, but I realized that many of our discussions in Moscow.
of my colleagues did not share my singleThe chief of the Soviet team of archivists
mindedness. Our very presence in Moscow was the deputy director of the Main Archion a weekend was no accident; the Satur- val Administration, Vaganov. I pressed the
day in the synagogue had been planned to attack for the American group, supported at
show support for Soviet Jewry. Later I was every turn by my friends who were eager to
to learn that Elie Wiesel had asked for a widen any opening and exploit any breach.
private moment after a meeting with Proc- The Main Archival Administration, said
urator General Roman Rudenko to present Vaganov, had no German documents. It
a list of four incarcerated dissidents to the had no documents at all dated after 1940.
Soviet official. Wiesel is a deeply sensitive Furthermore, there was no "fond" or colman and he could not bring himself to re- lection identified as German documents as
member the dead by forgetting the living. I such. Where were they then? I asked. Did
myself was thinking about unknown, Rus- the Defense Ministry retain possession of
sified, and atheistic people whose lives in them? Documents dated after 1940, said
the. Soviet Union are increasingly filled Vaganov, were being kept by whatever
with questions and quandaries.
ministry was the appropriate custodian in
On Red Square, of all places, I was to accordance with their subject matter. In
have an unexpected encounter with one that case, I asked, when would documents
nameless individual. It was evening and dated 1941 or 1942 be transferred by minisfour of us, still wearing our tags, were stand- tries currently keeping them to the Main
ing there. He came up to us and in halting Archival Administration? There was a key,
but intelligible English said that he knew said Vaganov, according to which transfers
about our arrival from broadcasts on the were being made; the schedules varied on
Voice of America. His age was about twenty- the basis of different criteria. The Main Arnine and he was born in a small town far chival Administration did not know whe~
from Moscow of a Jewish father, long dead, documents would be handed over by the
and a Russian mother, still living. Some time Ministry of Defense. Was he saying, I asked,
ago he had moved to the Soviet capital that he had no German documents? The
with his Russian wife. By profession he was Soviet Archival Administration, said Vagaan engineer and he was working in his field, nov, may have documents needed for inbut lately he was contemplating emigra- vestigation of war crimes. One or another
tion. "Why?" I1 asked. "Because I want free- document may be found in the files of an
dom." Did he have access to military secrets Archive in Byelorussia or the Ukraine. We
in his job? Yes, he said, and that is why he should consUlt the volumes of the Soviet hiswas seeking employment in a position not tory of the Second World War for sources.
requiring knowledge of such information. We should avail ourselves of the existing
Once he had made the change he would system of cooperation between the Acadstay for a period of three years. Two of my emy of Sciences of the USSR and US acacompanions immediately handed him their demic bodies if we wished to utilize a Soviet
cards, but he would not give us his name. Archive.
Who was he? Why did he approach us?
Even before our queries to the archivists
Was I becoming paranoid for asking what were over, a larger group of our commishis purpose may have been?
sion had begun a meeting with Soviet hisBefore the commission had left the torians. We joined our colleagues to talk
United States, I had insisted on an oppor- with members of the World War II Section
tunity to meet with a representative of the of the Institute of the History of the USSR
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
in the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The
Soviet chairman was V. A. Kumanyov, but
the most active discussant at the Russian
end of the table was the military historian
of World War II Alexander Samsonov. It is
Samsonov who challenged our mission and
everything we stood for. In pursuing a study
of the Jewish disaster, he said, with World
War II as a background, we were reversing
reality and standing history on its head. As
a Marxist he had to conclude that the Fascist assault on the USSR was an attempt to
conquer the world. In the wake of this aggression, Jews were killed, Russians were
killed, Ukrainians were killed. The Fascist
plan was to wipe out entire peoples, including all of the Slavic nations. He himself was
a Bylorussian and more than thirty years
ago he had seen with his own eyes the devastation visited upon the area that was his
home.
Several of us replied to this argument.
We said that the jews had been the victims
of German actions from 1933 to 1945. The
ghettos were established on Polish soil in
1940 and when German armies suddenly
struck at the Soviet Union on june 22, 1941,
the Jews were facing mass death. We were
not unmindful of the fact that in German
plans the Slavic populations of Eastern Europe were destined for rapid enslavement
and ultimate extinction. Yet as Soviet forces
turned the tide of war in the titanic battle
of Stalingrad, the invader's vision of the
obliteration of the Slavs was dissipated in
the retreat. The Jews, however, were being
killed until the end; their annihil<ition became reality, and European Jewry, as we
once knew it, is no more.
Kumanyov now joined the debate. There
were differences of opinion, he said, particularly about Nazi policy vis-a-vis the Jews
in the total constellation of German planning. To Kumanyov the destruction of the
Jews was just an experiment which was to
lead to the annihilation of others. Thus he
agreed in part with Samsonov, in part with
us, but he had to add that if we were to look
at the Holocaust in an isolated manner, we
would weaken our common struggle against
Fascism.
We left the Soviet Union that afternoon.
The first of our two last stops was in Copenhagen, where we paid tribute to the
Danish people for their singular rescue effort of October 1943 which resulted in the
111
�clandestine transport in small boats of almost the entire Jewish population of Denmark to safety in Sweden. Our j~urney
ended with a depleted group in jerusalem
where our Israeli friends were worried that
the Holocaust Commission would not succeed in isolating itself from the urgings of
nationalities with martyrological claims of
their own. At Yad Vashem, Israel's Remembrance Authority, a display had been
prepared of original documents. One was
the last notebook of Adam Czerniakow
(the chairman of the Warsaw Jewish Council) opened to the last entry. My colleague,
S. ). Staron, and I had worked with type·
written transcriptions and a facsimile edition of the diary; only now did I notice that
at the moment of Czerniakow's suicide,
hours after his final entry, the notebook
was just about full.
On September 27, 1979, the commission
assembled in the Rose Garden of the White
House for a presentation of its report to the
president. Elie Wiesel spoke in front of the
microphone, as President Carter stood at
his side, erect and motionless, looking off
into the distance. Was he listening to the
words7'Was he thinking about one of the
many crises with which he had to deal?
Wiesel, still thinking of Babi Yar, remarked that this massacre had occurred
just thirty-eight years before. The world
had looked on then and in the following
years, as the Holocaust swept across the
European Jewish communities.
The president responded, commending
us for our work and the journey that in itself was an act of memorialization. Then
he recalled the omissions of the time when
the world had looked the other way.
It was in the middle of the afternoon,
and for the president, not yet the middle of
his working day. He is like a prisoner, I
thought, always under guard, pressured by
every summons. That day he had given us
an hour. Could it be that he had already
devoted more time and thought to the Holocaust than his predecessor during the
war, Franklin Roosevelt, had managed
while the Jews were dying?
It is natural, I said to myself as I was walking in the streets of Washington that night,
for me to feel slightly depressed. Not because of those who would deny the Holocaust, or those who would dilute it, or the
others who would forget it-1 understand
them all. If I did not feel all that well, I was
merely experiencing the reaction I always
had after some concluding ceremony.
What I had to do now was to plan my research. There were documents I had to
read, particularly the records in the Polish
archives, and I would have to travel again
soon. Next year, in Auschwitz.
RAUL HILBERG
Professor of political science at the University of
Vermont, Raul Hilberg wrote The Destruction
of the European Jews, (Chicago 1961), which will
appear in a revised expanded edition in 1983
(Holmes and Meier). With Stanislaw Staron and
Josef Kermisz he edited The Warsaw Diary of
Adam Czerniakow, (Stein and Day 1979). "The
President's Commission on the Holocaust," after
its final report, was replaced by "The United
States Memorial Council."
FROM OUR READERS (Continued.from page 2)
colleges, do likewise. Several of them who
had never heard, of St. John's asked me
abOut it after reading the Review, and you
can bet that they read the article about the
New York Times versus Pravda, not the one
about Plotinus.
I am not berating the article about Plotinus or any other such article; I enjoy reading
them, too. But I think that the new editorial_y-clicy you have in mind will upset the
admirable balance (between the two types
of articles I gave examples of) that the Review has maintained over the last several issues. The general public, and most alumni,
will have no incentive to read it because
nothing will grab their attention. Offer
them something that they suspect will interest them, though, and they might read
the rest of the issue as well.
There is a case of such a publication as
you seem to want the Review to become; in
fact, it is none other than the Review itself
in the days when it wa,s called The College.
As I recall, I seldom read it, and none of my
non-St. John's friends I showed it to ever
112
did. It had the same tone as the professional
journals that tutors and alumni who have
gone on to become college professors write
in: a cut above the competition, but nonetheless plodding and addressed to a much
too narrow audience. Of course, articles
that lack pizzazz, like great books that lack
pizzazz, often have important things to
say. However, a whole magazine full of
them makes for a whole magazine unread.
You tutors, who develop great patience for
texts as a part of your job, tend to forget
this.
"The disciplined reflection which is nurtured by the St. John's Program" (I quote
the statement of editorial policy) is also
nurtured elsewhere besides St. John's, and
on other matters besides those investigated
in the program. Let the St. John's Review
continue to reflect the best efforts of the
whole republic of letters, not just those of
the small citadel that is our college; that is
the best way to communicate the intellectual liveliness of St. John's to those outside
its campuses. If you do not, the Review will
become another one of those magazines
read only by those who write for it.
KURT SCHULER '81
The following is the Instruction Committee's
statement of editorial policy which the
writer cites:
Editorial Policy For The St.John's Review
The St. John's Review exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection which is nurtured by the St. John's
Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors-their familiarity with that Program
and their respect for it-and through the
style and content of their contributions.
Contributors are, for the most part,
members of the greater college community-tutors, alumni, and visiting lecturers
(continued inside back cover)
AUTUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�-and others who are friends and critics of
the Program. Appropriate submissions by
those less familiar with the Program are
welcome.
For the most part, contributions do not
observe the usual limits of research scholarship, nor do they use its apparatus. On
the other hand, however, they do not display the easy generalization and simplification of popular journalism. Rather, under
the discipline of the liberal arts, they aim at
the immediacy and directness characteristic of intelligent fundamental inquiry.
Contributions aim to provide their readers with a representation in print of the
continuing study and free discussion which
is fostered by the Program and by which
the tutors, alumni, and students of the College live and work: the interpretation of
texts of worth and power and the consideration of deep and troubling issues. Although
the perennial character of the concerns
nourished by .tf,Ie Program often lends contributions a ce~tain distance from current
practical affairs, a thoughtful investigation
of a present political problem is not inappropriate. From time to time, original works
of the imagination are presented.
As it represents the St. John's Program,
the St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and
its readers may accordingly expect to find
diversity of thought represented in its
pages.
Error:
This picture in Philip Holt's article (page 58,
Summer 1982) appeared upside down;
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<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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St. John's College
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ISSN 0277-4720
thestjohnsreview
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The St. John's Review (formerly The College), Autumn/Winter 1982-83
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1982-10
1983-01
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Radista, Leo
Parran, Jr., Thomas
Carnes, David
Bolotin, David
Wilson, Curtis A.
Sachs, Joe
Alexander, Sidney
Brann, Eva T. H.
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Volume XXXIV, Number 1 of The St. John's Review, formerly The College. Published in Autumn/Winter 1982-1983.
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The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_34_No_1_1982-1983
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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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Text
Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan
_
I
_,;
rY
. . . have m the past three years set up at Annapolis the only liberal arts •,..c~l~ e
m the United States.
This book describes what they have done; it ts a tribute to what t ey a
'
~
Barr
Mr.
St.
M R.summerand 1937 Buchanan came totheir John's Col~ e
to put into effect
answer to ~~e
of
major problems in liberal education today-the problem o o o
f
many people can go to college for four years, become b chel
arts, and still be uneducated. Their answer is the now amous St.
Johns Program, which consists principally in the Cu~d
discussion of the works of about one hundred and sevente~ut~rs
in the Western tradition.
~
From the beginning one of Mr. Barr's chief ·function
sident of the college has been to explain the St. John's P
to
assorted
the general public. He has made innumerable speeches
Rotary clubs, chambers of commerce, groups of educl'toiT," l_d
domestic clubs; has written magazine articles, has started a~d
on a series of radio programs describing activities at t~e,
and in general has played the role of public spokesm
or t e
college-a role to which his congenial and somewhat
ular
o
pefsonality is well fitted. Just as important has been h.
keep the college from falling off the financial brink it as been
teetering on for the past several years. Yet even though
very busy performing as college politician and master ~y
M
fieT k\>t
"'~"' in the New Program<lm< '" "'""""History 26
M,. ''"<Oil fu.rl,
·' ll•cl<
seminar
and to teach
popular course in the Old Program. Perhaps his most
characteristic from the student point of view is the fa
knows most of them well enough to address them by
t
st
g
e
st
~
names.
Mr. Buchanan as Dean of the college has necessaril
ad to
·
n
concern himself with the internal affairs of the college.
task has been to arrange the actual working structure o = i culum, to determine the subject matter and schedule of cia es, o
o~
provide the order and locus in which the various parts
gram function-in short to guide and co~ordinate the wo actua 1y
done on the great books. Besides his work on the curreue
serves as a reference point for disciplinary matters, and, n con£ r~
ence with members of the administration, faculty, and stu
y,
determines the great policies on which St. John's operat~
from his administrative duties Mr. Buchanan acts as the~eader o"\
the Junior seminar.
t:.__..
Even though separately they have different functions~~ad
inistrative men, both Mr. Barr and Mr. Buchanan are ss ta y
a · g
teachers, are working for the same end, and as a team ar
St. John's a liberal arts college which, oddly enough, tef'!y a"Jd
practices the liberal arts.
~
6
:c
~
�Editor's Note
FROM OUR READERS
With the Winter 1982 issue the St. John's Review began
to charge new subscribers. Old subscribers, St. John's
alumni and friends, students and their families will con·
tinue to receive the magazine without charge. My desire
to turn the St. John's Review into an unambiguously pub·
lie magazine and to win an additional audience prompted
this decision. The St. John's Review will appear three times
a year, in the fall, winter, and summer-L.R.
ON " 'SEXISM' IS MEANINGLESS"
Editor:
Leo Raditsa
Managing Editor:
Thomas Parran, Jr.
Editorial Assistants:
David Carnes
Janet Durholz
Consulting Editors:
David Bolotin,
Eva Brann,
Curtis A. Wilson.
Unsolicited articles, stories, and poems are welcome,
but should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed
envelope in each instance. Reasoned comments are also
welcome.
THEST)OHNSREVIEW (formerly The College) is published by
the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland
21404. Edwin J. Delattre, President, Samuel S. Kutler, Dean.
Published thrice yearly, in the fall, winter, and summer. For those
not on the distribution list, subscriptions: $12.00 yearly, $24.00 for
two years, or $36.00 for three years, payable in advance. Address
all correspondence to The St. John's Review, St. John's College,
Annapolis, Maryland 21404.
Volume XXXIII
SUMMERI982
Number 3
©1982, St. John's College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4 720
Cover: Page 6 of the nineteen forty St. John's College Yearbook.
ComPosition: Britton Composition Co.
Printing: The John D. Lucas Printing Co.
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
After reading Mr. Doskow's letter answering Michael Levin
("'Sexism' is Meaningless" St. John's Review Autumn 1981), I decided to abandon temporarily my subjugation as housewife and
respond to Mr. Doskow's myopic view of human nature. In his
letter Mr. Doskow accuses Mr. Levin of various "prejudices" concerning women. In so doing he examines the condition of women,
past and present, under two false assumptions. The first false assumption is that women have been forced by men to stay at home
and rear children. The second is that women are still being forced
by men to stay at home and rear children. Underlying both assumptions and embedded in the fabric of his letter (though nowhere stated explicitly) is the further assumption that the habit
of centuries has no connection with and is a violation of the laws
of nature. (It is, however, open to question whether or not Mr.
Doskow accepts the existence of permanent standards which
dictate certain modes of human behavior.) In answer to Mr.
Doskow' s first assumption, I must cite a book by George Gilder
called Sexual Suicide in which Gilder claims that men never forced
women to stay at home and rear children. In fact, women, because of the nature of female sexuality (which includes the processes of pregnancy and childbirth) have traditionally required
men to marry them and provide for the upkeep of the resulting
children. Male sexuality, according to Gilder, is characterized by
indiscriminate and temporary liasons, and only the necessity of
fathering a woman's children causes men to embrace monogamy. If Mr. Doskow would pause in his ruminations on the
plight of women and read the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, he would see there a clear demonstration ofthe necessity,
imposed by women upon men, that men marry in order to establish themselves in civilized society. The second assumption is
false because women are now encouraged to play more roles in
society than we ever have in human history. The present education of women encourages masculine, not feminine qualities.
Mr. Doskow assumes that the "environmental differences
boys and girls are subjected to" are responsible for different
forms of behavior in boys and girls and hence the "subjugation"
of the latter. (I would like to know what the term "environmental
differences" signifies-barometric pressure, or humidity???) I
can't disagree with the claim that girls have usually been educated
with their feminine characteristics in mind-receptivity, for example-until now. Mr Deskew does not bother to address himself to the question of whether or not it is proper to prepare girls for
motherhood, and I tend to think that he considers motherhood
such a casual affair that education regarding it is unnecessary.
The modern liberal has placed himself in the uneasy position of
asserting the primacy of early childhood development in the correct functioning of society, while maintaining all along that anyone-mother, father, daycare worker, psychologist, teacher(continued on page 2)
�.HESTJOHNSREVIEWSUMMER1982
3
St. John's under Barr and Buchanan: the Fight with the Navy
and the Departure of the Founders ]. Winfree Smith
20
Schiller's Drama- Fulfillment of History and Philosophy in
Poetry Gisela Berns
31
Some Chinese Poems
39
That Graver Fire Bell: A Reconsideration of the Debate over
Slavery from the Standpoint of Lincoln Robert]. Loewenberg
51
Sophocles' Ajax and the Ajax Myth Philip Holt
62
Toward Reading Thomas Aquinas
translated by julie Landau
Thomas]. Slakey
REvmw EssAY
68
Updike and Roth: Are They Writers? John Updike's Rabbit
Is Rich, and Philip Roth's Zuckerman Unbound review
essay by Lev Navrozov
�can assist in said developlnent equipped
with nothing more than a brief course of
training. Motherhood involves much more
than a course in applied social sciences,
however. For one thing, only a mother can
do it: that is, a woman who has given birth
to or accepted as her own through adoption an utterly dependent human person.
The commitment made is physical, emotional, and instinctive. It is the most powerful bond between two people in nature.
The idea that "mothering" can be accomplished by anyone but a mother is analogous to the suggestion that the function of
husband or wife could be performed by
someone hired for the purpose: the essential personal involvement which constitutes
a marriage would be absent. Motherhood,
then, is a role which demands a participation which is intrinsically connected with
the very soul of the mother; a participation
which never ceases to exist and never ceases
to demand the selfless cooperation of the
mother in a natural process which entails
the separation of the beloved (the child)
from the lover (the mother) with the cooperation and encouragement of the lover. In
this way the natural order provides for the
existence of society. It is only the personal
element in motherhood-"my child" vs.
"the child" which ensures the possibility of
moral education; moral actions are, fundamentally, not performed out of self-interest.
If I die for my country it is not because in
doing so I consider myself to be performing
a rational act, but because it is my country
and I love it. If this personal element, that
is, the task of "mothering" as performed by
a mother, is absent in child-rearing, then
the soundest basis for moral actions is removed from society. Given, then, the importance of the position of a mother to a
society, one must surely admit the necessity
of preparing potential mothers for such a
role.
Mr. Doskow seems to believe that nature
makes no significant distinction between
men and women. He also claims, implicitly,
that habit must necessarily be a perversion
of political and social truth. That nature
and convention, or habit, are distinct is not
to say that they are apposed, and it is here
that Mr. Doskow makes his mistake. That
education is purposive (which it necessarily
is) does not mean that it is a violation of
nature, and Mr. Doskow assumes that
2
throughout his letter without bothering to
substantiate his claim. In this he seems to
fall prey to a vice common to those who assume that human nature is malleable or
nonexistent: he neglects the problem of
necessity. Although political society is an
institution, that is, it is made by men, it
must do more than provide us with the opportunity for happiness. It must be able to
withstand the vicissitudes of fortune; it
must last. Although my tutors at St. John's
succeeded in giving me a phobia of secondary sources, I must cite a story I have had
occasion to read many times since I graduated. It is about three pigs and their varying abilities to survive in the "wide world"
after they leave home. The smart pig, of
course, worked hard at building ·a brick
house while the other pigs played. The
practical pig survived and protected his
brothers because he was able to provide for
protection against the gluttonous wolf. Mr.
Doskow's sentiments about the "rights" of
women reflect the finer sensibilities of the
less sensible pigs-it would be nice if society were constructed in such a way that
everyone could do what he wanted. Yesterday my son brought home a social studies
newsletter his kindergarten class reads.
This particular issue featured the story of a
female coalminer. In fact, every newsletter
he brings home features a woman doing a
job ather than rearing children and keeping
house. I have not yet seen an elementary
school textbook describe child-rearing as a
job particularly suited to women (so much
for evidence in favor of the "subjugation of
women" theory). What these newsletters
(and I think Mr. Doskow) forget to take
into consideration is .the fact that someone
has to raise the children and women usually do a better job of it than men. But
like every other job one must be trained to
perform it, and habit serves to reinforce aspects of motherhood which would otherwise be difficult to endure.
Men perfect themselves in political
society. That perfection rests on the qualities of each man and is accomplished by
means of his nature and not by its subjugation. Education is the means by which
common and permanent standards are
communicated to individuals in such a way
that each man participates, often unknowingly, in the propagation of aims which are
intellectually accessible to only a few men.
It is this unthinking participation in the
preservation of the moral health of society
by means of the family (which is the first
and most effective school) which Mr.
Doskow calls "prejudice". We must consider men and women not as interchangeable parts in a machine, units possessing
"rights", but as members of mankind,
working in cooperation for the greatest
good possible. Men are such that the greatness of one man shines on all of us, just as
the infamy committed by one man calls
the rest of us into question. When Father
Brown, of the Chesterton stories, explained
the method he used to discover the identity
of a murderer he said that he "became"
the murderer and hence could imagine the
circumstances of the crime and identify
the culprit. Father Brown understood that
what connects us to each other is not a superficial similarity of abilities or sympathies
but a common late. This unity shows itself,
strangely, in our ability to perform the various and separate functions necessary to
the well-being of a political society. In a
stable society these accomplishments-the
different kinds of work done by its members-will benefit both the fathers and
mothers who perform their work and the
society as a whole. Just as a mother raises
her child knowing that he will, if all goes
well, cease his dependence on her and become a father or mother in his own right,
our satisfaction at being citizens rests to
some extent on our capacity for selflessness.
The success of work depends on its being
performed in a political framework, and
upon this political nature of work depends
the stability of society. Those who complain of "prejudice," when differences between men and women are recognized by a
society in the education of its children are
apparently unable to make the essential
connection between human nature as expressed in habit and the higher aims of
society, which utilizes habit to further its
own aims and protect itself from decay. To
disregard the primacy of motherhood both
in a woman's life and in the larger context
of society is to disregard the fundamental
basis for moral education and the place
nature holds in our society. If Mr. Doskow's
objections to "prejudice" lie in a fundamental difference between his opinions
and the aims of this regime, then he should
{continued on inside back cover)
SUMMER 1982
�St. John's College under Barr and
Buchanan: the Fight with the Navy
and the Departure of the Founders
J.
Winfree Smith
Public Interest and Internal Changes under
Barr and Buchanan
The St. John's curriculum, differing so radically from
the curriculums of most American colleges, evoked wide·
spread interest as soon as it was inaugurated. In Decem~
ber 1938 Walter Lippmann wrote a column that appeared
in many newspapers in which he praised the St. John's
way. He praised it primarily because it promised a recov·
ery of an understanding of the principles on which the
American Republic was founded, the understanding that
the founding fathers had because of their own study of
the classics. HI do know," he wrote, ''that in this country
and abroad there are men who see that the onset of barbarism must be met not only by programs of rearmament,
but by another revival of learning. It is the fact, moreover,
that after tentative beginnings in several of the American
universities, Columbia, Virginia, and Chicago, a revival is
actually begun-is not merely desired, talked about, and
projected, but is in operation with teachers and students
and a carefully planned course of study." He concluded
with the prophecy: "I venture to believe that ... in the fu-
These pages are taken from Chapters IV, V, and VI of J. Winfree
Smith's history of St. John's College from 1937 to 1958, which the St.
John's College Press will publish in 1983. The work draws on many un·
published sources in the St. John's College Archives, in the Buchanan
Files at Houghton Library, Harvard, and elsewhere.
J.
Winfree Smith has been a tutor at St. John's College since 1941.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ture men will point to St. John's College and say that there
was the seed-bed of the American Renaissance." 1
There were many who wanted to know about the revival
as it was in operation. A series of articles in the Baltimore
Sun in January 1939 gave vignettes of what was going on
in the tutorials-' The freshmen in their mathematics tutorial were wrestling with some of the most fundamental
questions in mathematics raised by their investigation of
Book 5 of Euclid in the context of the discovery of incommensurable magnitudes. The same freshmen in their Jan·
guage tutorial were making careful analyses of Greek
sentences and were translating Plato's Meno, using the
Greek they were learning to try to find out what was happening in that dialogue, why Socrates said what he said, or
asked what he asked, and what Meno's answers might
mean in the development of the dialogue. The sophomores
were enthusiastically engaged with Apollonius' Conics,
being in a position to contemplate the beautiful logical
and analogical structure of the first book of that work,
which they had recently finished reading. In their language tutorial they were translating from a chapter of
Augustine's Confessions, and producing the following:
"They [Augustine's friends who wanted him to write the
book] are desirous to hear me confess what I am within;
whither neither eye, nor ear, nor understanding is able to
dive; they desire it as ready to believe me; but will they
know me?" This led to a lively discussion of Augustine's
effort at self-knowledge and of whether one can know
oneself thoroughly.
About a year later Life magazine sent to the college
Gerard Pie!, who later became the founder and publisher
of Scientific American 3 Pie! brought with him an excel-
3
�lent photographer and together they produced with words
and pictures a quite accurate and attractive account of St.
John's with the new program in operation. There was a pic·
ture of Buchanan leading a seminar, of a student, Francis
Mason, in rapt contemplation of one of Euclid's regular
solids, of a group of students in the snow using an instru·
mentwith which Aristarchus (third century B.C.) made measurements from which to calculate the sizes and distances
of the sun and moon. A two-page spread showed a shelf of
the great books with those translated by St. John's faculty
clearly marked. These pictures and the accompanying
story, both concise and complete, gave a great boost to the
enrollment. In the fall of 1940 ninety-three freshmen
enrolled as contrasted with forty in 1938 and fifty-four in
1939. People sometimes referred to the class of 1944 as the
"L"~e cIass ." ...
t1
Criticism from Outside and Inside
and Effect of World War II
Hutchins, Adler, and Barr were not simply advocates of
a different kind of college education from what was to be
found in American colleges and universities generally.
They were constantly attacking college education in insti·
tutions other than St. John's. Barr in a public address
would say such things as: "Modern college education is
being conducted in a new tower of Babel staffed by pro·
fessors often proud of their own ignorance, its corridors
crammed with bewildered students learning a hodgepodge
of useless skills and becoming increasingly unintelligible to
one another and to the world they face." Hutchins and Barr
were devastatingly witty, and this made their attacks all the
more effective and provocative. Hutchins and Alder tended
to blame John Dewey and his followers for much that they
considered wrong with American college education.
It was understandable, then, that there were various
counterattacks and especially from the followers of Dewey.
Dewey himself in August 1944 published an article in For·
tune called "A Challenge to Liberal Thought." The article
did not refer by name to any of the challengers except
Robert Hutchins. It did mention Hutchins's "theological
fellow travelers." It did not mention St. John's, but it was
generally taken to be directed at St. John's because of such
sentences as: "The idea that an adequate education can
be obtained by means of a miscellaneous assortment of a
hundred books, more or less, is laughable when viewed
practically."1 Dewey concluded from Hutchins's claim that
human nature is everywhere and always the same that
Hutchins must also think that the principles governing
human conduct are unchangeable, that they are to be
found not by experimental inquiry or direct observation,
but in books. He saw this partly as a reversion to antiquity
but even more as a reversion to what he considered to be
4
the anti-scientific dogmatism of the Middle Ages. Dewey
himself was, of course, particularly concerned that education should follow the way of experiment and observation
as much in the study of man and society as in the study of
non-human things. He saw this way as closely linked with
freedom of inquiry made possible by democracy and with
the technological control of nature. Hutchins and his
friends were, in his opinion, anti-scientific, anti-democratic
dogmatists, mindful only of the past and oblivious to the
present.
In the issue of Fortune for January 1945 Alexander
Meiklejohn had "A Reply to John Dewey." Meiklejohn
quite naturally supposed that Dewey was attacking the St.
John's curriculum, and his reply was largely a defense of
that curriculum.
Against the charge that the St. John's way of studying
the past led to dogmatism, to the acceptance of some set
of beliefs held by somebody in the past, he pointed out
that in reading and discussing the great books a St. John's
student meets not just one set of beliefs, but many con·
flicting sets; that he "will find Protagoras at war with Plato,
Kant at war with Hume, Rousseau at war with Locke,
Veblen at war with Adam Smith, and he must try to understand both sides of these controversies."' To the charge
that reading a miscellaneous collection of great books in
the four college years is laughable as a way of education,
when viewed practically, he replied that, for all the startling audacity of having college students read many such
very difficult books, the studying of these books was not
irresponsibly done, being subject through careful discussion to guidance, correction, and criticism. Against the
charge that St. John's ignores the way of experimental in·
quiry and observation, he pointed out that every student
at St. John's was required to devote half of his course of
study to the learning of science and of mathematics as the
'language' upon which scientific achievement depends.
In regard to this disagreement between Dewey and
Meiklejohn, it should be noted that they both assumed
that the St. John's kind of education involved an interest
in the past as such. That was, and still is, incorrect. Teachers and students have no interest in studying the past as
past. They have an interest in reading certain books that
were written in the past because those books raise impor·
tant perennial questions, questions which are always live
and present questions if we let our thought get hold of
them. Moreover, St. John's was and is perhaps more radi·
cal than either Dewey or Meiklejohn was. For Dewey,
while acknowledging that a study of the past is necessary
for understanding the present, was quite sure that modern
thought represents a tremendous gain over ancient and
medieval thought. Meiklejohn, though quite clear about
such thinkers as Hume and Kant, nonetheless thought
and supposed it to be a basic postulate of St. John's that
"from the time of the Greeks until the present the knowledge and wisdom of men have been growing." Actually, at
St. John's it would be a question whether there has been
SUMMER 1982
�such growth, a question not so easily answered if by wisdom is meant the wisdom about the whole of things. While
one could hardly deny that there has been a tremendous
growth of 'knowledge' in the modern natural sciences, of
which St. John's tries to take sufficient cognizance, it is
not easy to decide whether Plato or Hegel were closer to
the knowledge of the whole of things. ·
Dewey's response to Meiklejohn was a letter to Fortune
in which he said that he had not been referring to St.
John's at all in his "A Challenge to Liberal Thought."
The philosophy I criticized [he wrote] is so current and so
much more influential than is the work of St. John's, there are
only a few sentences in my article even indirectly referring to
St. John's. Rightly or wrongly, I had not supposed that the
program and work of St. John's was of such importance as to
justify my use of the pages of Fortune in extended criticism of
it, especially as a number of effective criticisms of it had already been made. 3
The criticisms to which he was referring were principally those of Sidney Hook, which had appeared in the
New Leader of May 26, 1944, and June 3, 1944, and were
later included in a book entitled Education for Modern
Man under the title "A Critical Appraisal of the St. John's
College Curriculum." Some of Hook's criticisms were the
same that Dewey had made of Hutchins and Hutchins's
"fellow travelers." He claimed that the people at St. John's
thought that man has an essential unchangeable nature
and that the unchangeable truth about man's nature and
about all things can be learned because it is written down
in ancient and medieval books, that to possess these truths
all one has to do is to read those books. He mentioned that
it was the hidden assumption in the philosophy underlying St. John's that "the true answers to our problems can
be found by assaying the heritage of antiquity and the
Middle Ages."4 He recognized that in studying books written in ancient Greece the St. John's people were not seeking to know Greek man but to know about human nature,
but he seemed to think that what one learns directly from
a Greek book is only something about Greek man. He
raised the question others have raised through the years,
of why there are no Chinese or Hindu books in the St.
John's list, why, granted that the reading of ancient literature develops the imagination, the reading of ancient oriental literature might not produce an imaginative sympathy
with the problems and experience of those Eastern people
with whom we have to deal and will have to deal. He attacked what he considered to be the St. John's doctrine
that there is "transfer of learning." Presumably he was referring, for example, to the assumption that in studying
the grammar of one language one can learn certain things
that appear universally in language, the knowledge of
which will be profitable in learning any language and in
learning how language may be a means of inquiry or may
convey truth about things. He also attacked the view that
a good way to learn mathematics and science is through
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the reading of classical works in those areas, and he invoked the formidable names of Richard Courant, Bertrand
Russell, and Albert Einstein in support of his attack, all of
whom in letters from which he quoted supposed that what
was in question was a study of the historical development
of mathematics and science rather than an understanding
of what is fundamental in them through sharing and exploring the thought of the original discoverers. Those responsible for the St. John's curJiculum never supposed
that it would always be the case that the original discoverer of a science or a scientific theory would make a more
intelligible presentation of it than someone else. That it is
usually the case is not something known a priori, but is a
matter of the long experience of both ways of presentation.
Some of Sidney Hook's criticisms were justified. Barr's
harsh judgments of other colleges went too far. Barr had
no doubt made exaggerated claims when he said that the
St. John's students were going to read every one of the
books on the list in its entirety. It was certainly debatable
whether the whole St. John's curriculum were suitable, as
Barr maintained, for all students of college age. It was certainly conceivable that a college student might learn as
much from analyzing a bad book such as Hitler's Mein
Kampf as from reading a good or a great book. All of these
were points that Hook made. But on the whole his "critical appraisal" was based on misconceptions. One reason
that he had so many misconceptions was that he assumed
that anything Hutchins or Adler said St. John's would endorse. This illusion on his part was understandable in view
of Hutchins's lose connection with the college, first as a
member, and then as chairman, of the board, and also in
view of Adler's position as lecturer at the college and his
constant support of it in public utterances. Hook referred
to Adler both as Hutchins's mentor and as the "mentor of
the St. John's educators." 5
Hook should nonetheless have known better, since before writing his articles for the New Leader he had had
several letters from Buchanan that attempted to limit and
define their differences. These letters indeed affirmed
"the rational scientific nature" of metaphysics, politics,
and religion. Buchanan could hardly expect Hook to agree
that metaphysics and religion were scientific. At the same
time, he explicitly refused to deny "the rational scientific
nature" of social studies, which he knew Hook would
strongly affirm. He vigorously resisted the charge of indoctrination, insisting that he would "defend the freedom
of the intellect and the will in considering them [the studies mentioned, especially metaphysics and theology] in
such a way as to show that indoctrination in them is impossible."' Later on he wrote urging Hook to come to the
college and lecture; he mentioned several possible topics:
"Karl Marx," "The St. John's Brand of 'Indoctrination'"
(as Hook saw it), "The Scientific Method, Intelligence and
Society."7 He suggested that such a lecture would be of
great aid in the lively controversies that had been going on
within the college now that there were faculty and stu-
5
�dents who had read the whole list of books, were caught
up in the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns,
and had engaged in considerable debate about Marx.
It was not possible for Hook to visit St. John's at that
time, and by the time he published the New Leader articles
the character of the exchange of correspondence that he
had with Buchanan made the visit increasingly unlikely. It
became clearer and clearer that his principal target was
Adler, but Hook could never come to terms with Buchanan
as long as Buchanan failed to repudiate publicly those
statements or positions of Adler with which Buchanan
disagreed. On January 26, 1943, Hook wrote to Buchanan:
I am glad to learn that you haven't joined the neo-Thomist
"gang." I don't recall Using the word, but now that you have
used it I think it quite apt. A "gang" is a group of people who
are unalterably committed to a vested interest or doctrine,
even if truth, honor, and justice be elsewhere . .. . A large number of people, however, believe, apparently on insufficient evidence, that doctrinally you are approaching the neo-Thomists
more closely than one would. expect on the basis of your personal outlook and better knowledge of your earlier philosophical position. As the leading spirit of an important educational
enterprise I think you should be concerned about the generality of this impression. I am taking the liberty of suggesting that
it would be helpful if you found an opportunity to state publicly what you thought about the doctrine of neo-Thomism
from its sacred theology to its educational philosophy.8
In spite of disagreements with Adler, Buchanan could
not repudiate him ip any way that would be satisfactory to
Hook. With his view that metaphysics and theology, even
if not wholly identical with any metaphysics and theology
of the past, were the sciences that would give unity to all
knowledge, Buchanan could not well repudiate the neoThomists in a way that would be satisfactory to Hook.
After the New Leader articles severely critical of Barr as
well as of Adler, the exchange between Hook and Buchanan became more and more acrimonious. Buchanan
kept inviting Hook to come to St. John's, spend a while,
and see for himself. Hook refused to come on the ground
that, if he came and found that things were just as he expected, Buchanan would discover one reason after another
to explain why he had not been able to put his ideas into
execution.
Buchanan did not in any of his letters to Hook reply to
the question about oriental classics. His position on the
subject was, however, made clear in a reply that he wrote
in the spring of 1940 to a letter that made a plea for the inclusion of such classics in the list of great books:
Four yecirs [he wrote] is a short time for reading the books we
already have on the list. If I did not think people would go on
gradually studying the books these lead to I should think we
were a complete fake. We are doing the first reading of the
few books which will initiate us to the study of all the things
6
we should know, including other books. I think the great books
of the Orient .are included in that perspective?
Clearly, Chinese and Hindu books were not in principle
excluded from the St. John's curriculum.
The students at St. John's have, on the whole, not been
critical of the conception and plan of the curriculum. Perhaps in many cases their decision to attend St. John's
rather than some other college has meant an acceptance
of that conception and that plan. Most of the students'
criticism has been to the effect that the college, while be·
ing right and quite articulate about its aims, did not in per·
formance live up to its aims. Not much of this criticism
was expressed until the program had been in operation for
a few years. Many of the first new programmers within a
very short time began to look back on their student days
as a "golden age."
The golden age probably never existed. There was indeed a certain excitement among the first new program·
mers which arose not simply because significant learning
is exciting but also because of their belonging to a group
who were engaged not in an experiment, but in something
new in relation to the conventionalities of other colleges.
One record of student commentary and criticism was
the college yearbook, the student editors of w):Jich, during
the Barr-Buchanan era, were exceptionally intelligent and
perceptive. The nineteen forty Yearbook mentions what
are called "difficulties" .encountered in the first year of
the program, difficulties that were said to have been overcome or to be in process of being overcome. The difficulties
seem to have been caused by the demands on the stu·
dents' time that went beyond those of the officially announced curriculum. There were lectures for all students
twice a week, each of which lasted from two to two and
one-half hours. There were, in addition, supplementary
lectures on Platonic dialogues. There was a special tuto·
rial for practice in writing in addition to the language tu·
torial. To discuss the dialogues of Plato in seminar fashion
was no doubt a more Socratic way of getting into them
than by listening to lectures. In any case, the supplementary lectures were soon eliminated, practice in writing was
assigned to the language tutorial, and the number of lee·
tures reduced to one a week with an hour and a half as the
time limit. "The greatest difficulty this class [the first new
program class] has met so far in connection with the cur,
riculum," the nineteen forty Yearbook reported, "has been
the laboratory. After the class had roamed aimlessly for a
year or so in its lab work a method of instruction has been
developed that runs much more smoothly and is better
correlated with the rest of the Program." 10
The entry of the United States into World War II
brought many changes in the college. In October 1939 the
St. John's Collegian took a poll among the students to get
their opinion about United States policy in relation to the
war which had clearly begun in Europe. Eighty-one students responded to the five questions that were asked.
The questions and the results of the poll were as follows: 11
SUMMER 1982
�l. Should the United States give immediate armed sup-
port to the European democracies?
Yes
No
Noopinion
8
72
1
2. Should this country assist England and France by filling, as far as possible, their demands for munitions
and commodities such as food, raw materials, and
manufactured goods?
Yes
No
34
42
No opinion
5
3. Should America pursue a policy of strict isolationism
concerning European affairs?
Yes
38
No
41
No opinion
2
4. Do you think Britain and France should attempt to
make peace with Germany at this stage of the war?
Yes
No
Noopinion
21
55
5
5. In case of this country's engaging in the present war
in Europe, would you volunteer before a draft were
effected?
Yes
No
No opinion
27
55
4
In over a hundred colleges throughout the country similar polls were taken and with similar results. At that time
American college students were strongly opposed to sending American troops to support England and France but a
larger percentage (42 per cent) than was the case at St.
John's were willing to volunteer if England and France
were in danger of defeat.
Student opinion at St. John's seems to have changed by
the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
When the news of Pearl Harbor came, there was, according to the nineteen forty-two Yearbook, much talk among
the students about enlistment. A college meeting was
called the day after and the students expected Barr and
Buchanan to plead with them to stay at least until June
1942. Barr did not plead with them to stay. Having made
the point that only a few ever take part in what the young
might consider the romantic adventures of war, he suggested a definite choice either to enlist or to stay and work
at studies. He even suggested that it might be their duty
to stay; he believed that it was of the utmost importance
that gopd thinking about war and peace should go on while
the country was at war, and that colleges, especially St.
John's College, should not close, but stay open and think
about war and peace. Buchanan at the same college meeting spoke of the problems that would arise in the relation
of the college to the townspeople who, as the country became more and more involved in the war, would judge
and condemn those young men who were studying God
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
knows what when they ought to be fighting in defense
of their country. The editor of the Yearbook, John Louis
Hedeman, ended his account of this meeting with the report that "for the most part, students, thinking things
over, found that a year or even two or three in the army
did not appeal to them and went back to their seminars to
discuss the same problems in the light of ages past." 12
The college administration took various steps to prepare the students in what they thought might be useful in
the war. There was a three-hour course once a week in
radio. There was a course in navigation. Franz Plunder, a
sculptor and boat-builder, who also possessed many other
skills, taught a group of about sixty persons the intricacies
of the gasoline engine, for, as the nineteen forty-two Yearbook put it, "no one knew which St. Johnnie might be
stranded in a tank somewhere on the battlefront, where
there would be no hardware store and mechanics for him
to turn to."ll The press poked a certain amount of fun at
the "great books" college for this course in the gasoline
engine. Actually the course was in line with Buchanan's
view that there is a training of the .intellect that happens
in the learning and practice of the manual arts as well as
the liberal arts. Also, Buchanan knew that one learns quite
a bit of physics if one acquires a full understanding of all
the transformations of energy that take place in the internal
combustion engine.
Whether these courses were in fact useful to many of
the students when later they were in military service is
doubtful. But at the time they helped them to feel that
they were not just engaged in talk about the war but were
doing something. In spite of the talk that went on in meetings to discuss the war, and in spite of the activities just
mentioned, the war did not have a great impact upon the
college during the session of 1941-42. Many students,
through joining the reserves, were able to finish the year.
All students, not just the reservists, were required to take
part in military drill, which all accepted, though some
found it irksome. It was in the following session that the
war really began to have a big effect. At the beginning of
that session there were 173 students enrolled. By the end
of the year there were fewer than a hundred. When the
next session began, there were only forty-two in the three
upper classes. Only seven of the ninety-three in the "Life
class" remained to receive degrees in 1944. Not only were
students leaving in droves for military service, but faculty
were leaving too, among them some who had contributed
most to get the program established and to make it go:
George Comenetz, Catesby Taliaferro, John Neustadt,
and Raymond Wilburn. There were also very promising
newcomers on the faculty who had hardly been at the college a year before having to leave for military service or for
some employment related to the war effort.
The president and the dean thought that it would be
fitting to mark with a ceremony the departure of students
for the war. During the 1942-43 session there were twp
occasions when a solemn ceremony was held in the college's Great Hall, and all those leaving for the war took the
7
�Ephebic oath administered by Barr. This oath was once
taken by Athenian youth as they were going off to war:
outstanding faculty was considered a serious injury to successful study within the program. Said Campbell,
I will not disgrace the name of my country and I will not desert my comrades in the ranks. By myself and with my fellows
I will defend what is sacred, whether private or public. I will
hand on my country not lessened but greater and nobler than
it was handed down to me. I will hearken diligently to those
The advent of the war, although unable to affect the Program, certainly introduced deficiencies into the teaching of it.
A good faculty is absolutely essential to good participation in
duly charged with judging, and I will obey the established laws
and whatever others the people with common consent establish. And if anyone attempts to overthrow the laws, or not
obey them, I will not stand idly by but by myself and with all
my comrades I will defend the law. And I will honor the religion of my fathers. The gods be witness of these things.l4
There were some who wondered how American youth
could honor the religion of their fathers and at the same
time call upon the Greek gods to witness their oath. But
everyone felt the seriousness of the occasion. Some of the
young men who took the oath were to give their lives in
combat. Many were to follow Barr's admonition, given on
that occasion, not to forget in the midst of all the irrationality of war that there is still such a thing as human reason. Many, too, would return when the war was over.
Obviously, the college had to take some drastic steps if
it were not to close its doors. It was decided to admit as
freshmen at the beginning of every term fifteen-year-olds
who had not finished high schooJ,I 5 and also to add a summer term to the three terms already current. In this way a
fifteen-year-old could complete his college course in three
years and do so before being subject to the draft. With the
admission of freshmen in June and September 1943 the
total enrollment went up to 138, and it never again fell as
low as it did in the spring of 1943. In the fall of 1946, when
the accelerated schedule had already been abandoned,
the return of veterans shot the enrollment up to 253.
The yearbooks for 1944 and for 1945-46, edited by
Robert Campbell and Eugene Thaw, reflect a considerable amount of self-criticism on the part of students and
also criticism of the college. The loss of such a large portion of the students in 1942-43 was very depressing for
those who remained, who, if they were not wondering
when they themselves might have to leave, were agonizingly asking themselves whether staying in college and
studying were the best thing to be doing when their
friends were engaged in a war, the outcome of which was
so important for human life on this planet. "We neglected
our studies," Campbell wrote in the· nineteen forty-four
Yearbook, "and sought diversion .... We became adept
and ingenious at excusing our own vices and our facility in
this respect usually manifested itself in criticism, not of
the Program itself (for we knew too well its necessity, goodness, and consequences) but of the way in which it was being applied." 16 The students do not seem to have shared
Buchanan's opinion that the books are the teachers and
that the faculty are decidedly of minor importance. The
loss not only of some of the best students, but also of
8
the program by the student body. It may be argued that the
books are, after all, the teachers, and that the student learns
from them rather than from the faculty, the latter being only
the means leading the students to the end, but from this it
would be difficult to conclude that the quality of the means is
unimportant. 17
He found the faculty who had come to replace those who
had left definitely inferior.
Also the great number of young freshmen and the small
number of upperclassmen, so Campbell thought, destroyed
the learning community as a community, even if individually some students were doing better work than they had
done before. The juniors and seniors, instead of communicating to the freshmen customs and habits conducive to
the kind of study most suitable for success within the program, retired into small groups and left the freshmen to
produce, or not to produce, their own traditions.
"The Iron Age" was the title given to the next yearbook, edited by Eugene Thaw, which was a two-year book
since the drafting of two editors into military service had
prevented the production of a yearbook in 1945. The title
indicated that the two years covered were being thought
of as a period of decline from an earlier 'golden age', but
also along with the dedication to Virgil it indicated a hope
for a golden age to come. The yearbook spoke of a "trend
of decline" in all sections of the program except the formal
lectures. It complained of student lethargy and of inadequate preparation for tutorials with the result that much
routine work which should have been done outside of
class had to be done in class. The claim was made that the
seminars had suffered as a consequence. The tutorials
were called the "mainstay of the program" as the place for
the acquisition of skills to be exhibited and tested in the
seminar. (<The seminar," it was said, His the finished product of the program, accomplished and consummate, however, only to the degree of success in tutoria1." 18
In the fall of 1945 there was a change in schedule from
five one-hour tutorial classes a week to three classes with
normal length of an hour·and-a-half. This was thought to
have produced improvement in the quality of the tutorials.
But it was set down as a disadvantage that the new scheduling had made it impossible for a student to attend alanguage or mathematics tutorial other than the one to which
he had been assigned. The mere fact that a student might
want to attend another such class with the expectation of
getting a better understanding than he had got in his assigned class pointed to the strong student opinion that it
mattered very much that the tutors were unequal in teaching ability and in their grasp of what they were teaching.
As Campbell had done in the nineteen forty-four YearSUMMER 1982
�book, Thaw made a plea for a place for the fine arts within
the curriculum. Music as a fine art has, since the time of
Barr and Buchanan, had some place in the curriculum.
Concerts have been given on certain Friday evenings in·
stead of lectures. Herbert Swartz in 1938, Elliott Carter in
1940, and Nicholas Nabokov in 1941 were all added to the
faculty in large part because of their musical knowledge
which, it was expected, would enable them to suggest how
music as a fine art might fit into the curriculum and also
to sponsor and supervise music as an extracurricular activ-
ity. None of them remained very long and little came of
their efforts. When Carter and Nabokov were at the college there were seminars on musical compositions 1 but the
musicians were at odds with Buchanan, who thought that
one should study the scores without listening to and without ever having listened to the sounds represented by the
staves with their whole notes, half notes and quarternotes,
etc., and without even knowing that those marks might refer to sounds.
In August 1937 Buchanan had written on the subject of
the college and the fine arts to an inquirer:
In our study of liberal college education, we have been forced
to consider the bookish classics as the basic medium of our
teaching. There is a sense in which great books are works of
fine art; on the other hand, we realize very vividly that we are
ignoring, or seeming to ignore, the classics in the fine arts
proper. When we have consolidated our program, we shall
turn very definitely to the problem of teaching the fine arts as
well as the liberal arts. In the meantime we shall proceed tentatively with extracurricular activities in the fine arts. 19
Buchanan had a theory about the fine arts, namely that
at the Renaissance they had become substitutes for the
sacraments. He no doubt would have liked to have St.
John's discover the right way of combining divine arts,
liberal arts, fine arts, and manual arts. During the BarrBuchanan era, however, little was done to encourage the
study of works of fine art besides musical works. Edgar
Wind of the Warburg Institute gave some excellent lectures
on the School of Athens, the frescoes of the Sistine ceiling, and Hogarth, but that was about all. When later Jacob
Klein became dean, he even called in question the meaningfulness of the term "fine arts" as applied in common to
music and the visual arts. Herbert Swartz, in a radio talk in
1939, explaining the place of music in a liberal arts college
program, argued that what music, painting, and sculpture
have in common is that they are end arts rather than useful
arts, arts the products of which are to be understood and
enjoyedfor their own sake rather than arts the products of
which are to be used. In any case, whether works of music, painting, and sculpture are all of the same kind or not,
Eugene Thaw in the nineteen forty-five-forty-six Yearbook
wrote convincingly, "It seems not too much to ask an undergraduate college concerned with producing well-educated men to take notice of Michelangelo and Pheidias." 20
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The Fight with the Navy in War Time
and the Departure of Barr and Buchanan
This is a strange, and perhaps incomprehensible, story.
The struggle over the possible acquisition by the Navy of
the St. John's campus had three distinct episodes. Its outcome was favorable to St. John's in the judgement of nearly
everyone except Barr and Buchanan, whose departure
shortly thereafter astonished nearly everyone. The first of
these episodes began in 1940. It was announced to the
faculty in September of that year that there was a rumor
that the United States Naval Academy, whose grounds
are separated from the St. John's campus only by a street, 1
wished to acquire the campus. Admiral Wilson Brown,
then Superintendent of the Naval Academy, and Stringfellow Barr, who had very amicable relations with each
other, went together to Washington on October first to
appear before the Senate Appropriations Committee who
were considering the question of the acquisition of the
campus by the Navy for the expansion of the Academy.
An exchange of correspondence between Barr and Brown
occurred shortly after that. Barr wrote, "It seems to me
desirable that I should repeat to you in writing what I
then stated to the Committee. You will recall that I was
asked by Senator Byrnes [)ames Byrnes, later Secretary of
State] what would be my attitude as President of St. John's
College towards a proposal by the Navy Department to
purchase the College in order to expand the present facilities of the Naval Academy. You will also doubtless recall
my reply that as President of the College I would urgently
recommend to the trustees that they reject such a proposal unless it could be clearly demonstrated that the exigencies of the national defense program required the
Naval Academy to secure our property rather than other
available land."'
Shortly after that the Secretary of the Navy, Frank
Knox, stated that the Navy would make no attempt to
take the St. John's campus provided that St. John's agree
to two conditions laid down by President Franklin Roosevelt: (1) that the college not dispose of her property without first notifying the Navy and giving the Navy a chance
to purchase it; (2) that the land not be used for any other
purpose than that of the college and that no other than
college buildings be erected upon it. Agreement on the
second condition put an end to an attempt by the Annapolis Housing Authority to take by condemnation one and
a third acres of the campus as a site for low cost housing
for white people of moderate income. Barr was only too
glad to assent to these conditions-and by january 31, 1941,
he was able to report to the St. John's board that "the
question of the Naval Academy's acquiring the property
of the College was now definitely settled." 3
The second episode was very brief. It occurred in july
1942 when the United States was already at war, and the
Navy was faced with the necessity of expanding its facili-
9
�ties for the training of officers. On July 15, Barr wrote to
Knox reminding him of positions taken by St. John's and
the Navy when Wilson Brown had been Superintendent
of the Academy, and reporting that an aide to the then
superintendent had appeared on the campus to look it
over to see whether it could be used as an indoctrination
school for Naval Reserve officers. He went on to say, "It is
most doubtful whether the College could survive transplanting," but continued, "I am certain you will not construe this letter as an objection to the Navy's defense
[presumably of the country]." The secretary replied that
such surveys as the aide was making were being made at
institutions in many places and that there was no specific
proposal about the St. John's campus 4
The third episode, the dramatic culmination, began early
in 1945. On February 28 of that year, Barr reported to the
board as follows:
Because of persistent and increasing rumors that the Navy
Department is about to seize St. John's College or that the
I told him [Roosevelt] of Senator Tydings' inquiry regarding St. John's College. He said he thought it was desirable to
acquire the St. John's grounds and buildings but would like to
see the buildings preserved. I told him I shared his feeling and
reported Admiral King's suggestion that we grasp the nettle
firmly and go across the river to acquire land for expansion of
the Academy. The general conclusion was:
a) Acquire St. John's
b) Keep the buildings and grounds intact
c) Proceed with acquisition of land across the river for
further additions to the Academy.
This entry in Forrestal's diary supports Admiral King's
statement to Mrs. Howard that the rumor had "substantial basis in fact.'' No one connected with St. John's knew
of this meeting with Roosevelt, but, because the persistent
rumor did appear to have a basis in fact, the Board, no
doubt with the approval, if not under the prompting of
Barr and Buchanan, on April21, 1945, formulated the following statement of policy to be sent to Secretary Forrestal:
State of Maryland might 'acquire' the College (possibly in order later to 'decide' to hand it over to the Navy Department) I
ought to report to you what facts I possess.
On February 13, 1945, Delegate Bertram L. Boone (D. 5th,
Baltimore) introduced a bill in the Maryland House of Delegates calling for appointment of a commission to examine the
possibility of the State's taking over St. John's. In presenting
the bill, Mr. Boone announced, 'The thing is going to pot.'
The next day I stated in the press that 'St. John's College is
not for sale,' and a 'spokesman' for the Navy Department
said, 'The Navy has no present plans for the acquisition of St.
John's College.'
Meanwhile, Mrs. Douglas Howard, widow of Captain Howard, once Dean of St. John's College, had written Admiral
Ernest King, who is an intimate friend of hers, urging that the
Navy Department disassociate itself from the Navy-Realtor
clique, a clique that has now resorted to defamation of the
College in order to squeeze it out of town. Mrs. Howard
showed me Ernie's reply which was to the effect that the
rumor has substantial basis in fact, that the Academy was to
be approximately double its size and that the most available
land for this expansion was our campus and the three blocks
of residence property between the Academy and King George
St. Admiral King stated that the matter would be decided by
the President at the end of this month. I have since learned
that Admiral Wilson Brown, formerly Superintendent of the
Academy and most friendly to the College, now once more
Naval Aide to the President, has several times blocked seizure.
I am personally disinclined to pull wires to prevent seizure.
The Navy, it should be reported, feels more threatened than
we do-by the California delegation in Congress, which is
working to get a part of their establishment here moved to the
Coast. This fact is known to the business element of Annapolis, who therefore feel the College is standing between them
and their bread and butter. The College's relations with the
town have, therefore, never been more painful during my
administration.5
On March 9, James V. Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy,
and Admiral Chester Nimitz had lunch with President
Roosevelt and, as F orrestal reports in his Diary:6
10
(1) The present uncertainty, aggravated by irresponsible
rumors of imminent condemnation of the College's property,
is harmful to the morale of the College, to its relations with
the Annapolis community, and to the College Administration's ability to exercise its function wisely or to plan intelligently for future building now in prospect. An immediate
understanding with the Navy Department is accordingly
imperative.
(2) This Board is entrusted with and proposes to fulfill the
continuing responsibility of carrying on vigorously the function of the College, and cannot deal with its property as mere
real estate and buildings. The Board believes that this function could be carried on elsewhere, in spite of obvious problems and difficulties, if an adequate site and the means of
acquiring it could be made available. The Board, however,
feels that it cannot properly or intelligently consider removing the College from its historic site in Annapolis unless the
Navy Department formally represents to the Board that acquisition of the College property is required in the national
interest. The Board, obviously, could not undertake to pass
judgment on the decision of the Navy Department. Nor does
the Board propose to interpose any objection to such acquisition, provided that the arrangements permit the Board, in its
judgment, to continue to carry on the work of the College,
and to discharge its legal and moral obligations to its college
community, including faculty, students, alumni, the benefactors, creditors, and the State of Maryland.
(3) The Board respectfully records its conviction that the
Navy Department has a genuine responsibility in the premises to dispose of the present damaging impasse by plainly advising the Board at this time whether or not it now requires
the College property for the national welfare; and furthermore, whether or not present plans for the future will require
it. [Statement of Policy, Buchanan Files, Houghton Library,
Harvard University.]
This statement of policy was the crucial document in
the whole affair. Whereas Barr's letter to Knox four years
earlier had said, "It's doubtful whether the College could
SUMMER 1982
�survive transplanting" this statement says "The Board believes this function [the function of educating] could be
carried on elsewhere in spite of obvious problems and difficulties, if an adequate site and the means of acquiring it
could be made available." Also, whereas in 1940 Barr had
said that he would recommend that the trustees reject the
proposal for acquisition unless it could be clearly demonstrated that the exigencies of the national defense program required the Naval Academy to secure the College
property, etc., this statement makes no mention of clear
demonstration but asks that the Navy Department formally represent to the board that "acquisition of the College property is required in the national interest." It goes
on to say that the board "could not undertake to pass
judgment on the decision of the Navy Department," that
the board does not "propose to interpose any objection to
such acquisition whether by formal condemnation or negotiation, provided that the arrangements permit the
Board, in its judgment, to continue to carry on the work of
the College," etc.
The admirals and the Secretary of the Navy little knew
what this statement of policy was going to get them into.
They understood it as tantamount to an offer. That this
was the Navy's interpretation is clear from the subsequent testimony of Admiral Moreell, Chief of the Bureau
of Yards and Docks, before the Senate Naval Affairs Committee. Admiral Moreell stated, "The acquisition of the
adjoining property [the St. John's campus] has been under
consideration for a number of years, but the Department
has not advanced this project due to the reluctance of the
board of governors and visitors of the college to dispose of
this property. The college authorities, however, have recently expressed a willingness to dispose of the property
to the Navy Department in the event that it is needed in
connection with the Naval Academy." 7 It certainly appeared to the admirals that St. John's was ready to let the
Navy have the campus provided the Navy did no more
than declare the acquisition necessary in the national interest and provided that the college receive sufficient
compensation to enable it to continue elsewhere as the
distinguished liberal arts college it had become.
The board's action, interpreted as it was by the Navy,
precipitated the Navy's final and most serious attempt to
acquire the St. John's campus. On April 27, 1945, Secretary Forrestal wrote to Thomas Parran, chairman of the
St. John's board and at that time Surgeon General of the
United States: "It now appears that the expansion of the
Naval Academy will require the acquisition of the present
property belonging to St. John's College." But he had not
declared that the acquisition was necessary in the national
interest. On May 5 Dr. Parran, in a letter to Secretary Forrestal, inquired when the Navy would acquire the campus
since plans for the removal of the college would require
more definite knowledge. A month later Forrestal replied
that negotiations would begin immediately.' The Naval
Affairs committees of the Senate and the House still had
to approve the acquisition, but the Secretary of the Navy
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
seems to have had little doubt that they would. On May 7
Buchanan wrote to Robert Hutchins:
Perhaps you ought to know my opinion of certain events
here. You will have seen our communication with James Forrestal. You may not have heard the reply. It is that the expansion of the Naval Academy will require the acquisition of the
St. John's campus. Action waits on Congressional appropriation. What had appeared in prospect as a desirable event is,
because of numerous circumstances, becoming a crisis.
Where do we go and how? Do we go or not?9
Hutchins replied, "You really say something when you say
the Naval Academy requires the campus and is merely
waiting for an appropriation. This sounds to me like an
Opportunity." 10
What was the event desirable in prospect? Was it the acquisition of the campus by the Navy? And was the "Opportunity" that of moving the St. John's program from a
place where, as Buchanan thought, the Navy was always
making it difficult to pursue the program? A letter of
about the same time from Buchanan to Senator Wayne
Morse claimed that the Naval Academy dominated Annapolis commercially, was pandered to by the city and
county governments, and that the state government paid
more attention to the Navy than to the public welfare_Il
He clearly thought that the mere presence of the Navy
was damaging not only to the college, but to the town and
to the state and to the citizens of the town and of the
state.
As early as June 1944 he had written in a letter to his
son Douglas,
Winkie and I have today been wondering again how to extricate the program from this place. It is now quite clear that the
academy is what has kept this poor little college sick for almost a century. We can't see how we move alive but we can
see that we ought to have done so a year ago last January
when we had to decide whether we would suspend operations or take youngsters. We should have suspended; a great
deal of damage to the idea itself has. resulted from our noble
decision to carry on.
A year later he wrote, "The Navy has turned the town into
a little Fascist community governed by greed and fear."
What caused the event desirable in prospect to become
a crisis? For one thing, alumni tend not to think of the college they have attended as an invisible chartered entity
which might exist on other land and in other buildings
than those in which they used to eat, sleep, study, and
learn. So it was with St. John's alumni. The president of
the Alumni Association, William Lentz, a Baltimore lawyer, wrote Senator Radcliffe on behalf of the association,
protesting the annexation of the campus by the Academy.
He stated that the alumni "feel that it is detrimental to
the national interest to emasculate a college of liberal arts
unless the most pressing and urgent national necessity requires it," and expressed the opinion of the alumni that
11
�"it should not be left solely to the Navy to determine
whether that existed,"i2
The public generally seemed to view what was happening as a fight between the Navy with the power of the big
federal government behind it and little St. John's. Almost
immediately the people of Annapolis and people all over
the country took sides. The Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun in editorials opposed the Navy's taking the
campusY The Post proposed in a front page editorial that,
because of the importance for national security of the
naval and air bases in the Pacific, there should be established a second naval academy on the Pacific coast. Several senators from western states were in support of that
proposal. Josephus Daniels, who had been Secretary of
the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, in a letter to the Post
supported a Pacific coast Academy as opposed to expanding the Academy in Annapolis. The businessmen of Annapolis became alarmed. They wanted the business that
would necessarily result from doubling the brigade of midshipmen and hence greatly increasing the payroll of the
Academy. They were fearful that Annapolis might lose
the Naval Academy, and their fear was strengthened by a
statement from Lansdale Sasscer, the Congressman for
the Congressional district in which Annapolis lies, to the
effect that, if a second academy were established on the
west coast, "The education of midshipmen will be rapidly
transferred to the West Coast Academy and Annapolis
will become only a specialist or post graduate school. ...
we have got to either press for the expansion program at
the Naval Academy which includes the taking of St. John's
... or else lose the Academy." The mayor of Annapolis,
William U. McCready, reminded his fellow Annapolitans
that the Naval Academy brought to the community $17.5
million in annual payroll.
In the meantime Buchanan had discovered the Dartmouth College case. Dartmouth College was incorporated
by royal charter in 1769. After the American Revolution
and in the course of a controversy between the Republicans and the Federalists of that time, the New Hampshire
legislature changed the college charter in such a way as to
replace the self-perpetuating body of trustees with a stateappointed body of trustees and a board of overseers. This
would have transformed what had been a private college
into a public one directly under the control of the state
government. The state court of New Hampshire upheld
the act of the legislature, but the Supreme Court of the
United States reversed the decision. Chief Justice John
Marshall, delivering the opinion of the Court, argued that
the acts of the legislature were unconstitutional because
they were in violation of Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution which declares that "no State shall ... pass any
bill ... impairing the obligation of contracts." The royal
charter was regarded as a contract establishing a corporation and therefore not subject to change by the legislature.
There is perhaps a superficial resemblance between the
New Hampshire government's attempt to change the institutional character of Dartmouth and the attempt by
12
the Navy in 1945 to acquire the St. John's campus. In each
case there was an action on the part of government against
a liberal arts college. But the federal government in 1945,
unlike the New Hampshire government in 1816, was not
attempting to alter the terms of the charter with which
the state legislature had incorporated St. John's in 1784
and hence was not "impairing the obligation of a
contract." Moreover, the Naval Affairs Committees were
concerned that St. John's receive adequate compensation
for the campus and buildings so that the College could
continue as the same incorporated entity on another site.
Buchanan, however, saw St. John's as leading a fight on
behalf of all liberal arts colleges as the old trustees of Dartmouth had fought and won a fight that had implications
for all liberal arts colleges in America. It was his ambition
to get the United States government to abjure the exercise against liberal arts colleges of the power of eminent
domain. As he wrote to his son Douglas on July 9, 1945,
"The big question is whether the right of eminent domain
could be challenged under the Dartmouth case. I think it
could be if one wanted to build a case." Recalling that it
was St. John's that in Aprill945 had first suggested negotiations with the Navy, he said in a statement to the Board
on July 31, 1946,
We were important members, albeit revolutionary members,
of the great liberal arts college family. We were ready to take
on the responsibilities of leaders in that family, and to fight
our own battle without their help if necessary or to fight their
battle for them if it could be seen that way. 14
It is a recognized principle that the federal government
may exercise the power of eminent domain and acquire
property whenever it is "necessary and proper" for it to
do so in order to carry out any of the powers conferred on
it by the Constitution,!' and it may do that by condemnation proceedings if no other way is open. It would seem
that no exception could be made in the case of liberal arts
colleges. The question, however, of the necessity and propriety of the Navy's takihg the St. John's campus remained.
No one voiced any desire to destroy St. John's as an invisible chartered entity or as such an entity embodied in
persons and buildings. For many Annapolitans it was just
a question of money. If the Academy were expanded in
Annapolis, that would mean more money for the town. If
the federal government compensated StJohn's financially
in a way that would make it possible for it to continue
with its liberal arts program elsewhere, why should reasonable persons object? The editor of the Annapolis Evening
Capital did go so far as to say,
In cold logical fact, Annapolis has been given the choice between allowing the expansion of a great national institution,
the only one of its kind in the United States and one which
guards the safety of the people and a college which is but one
of many similar educational institutions.l 6
On June 27, 1945, a five-man House Naval Affairs subcommittee, of which Congressman Sasscer was a member,
SUMMER 1982
�visited Annapolis to inspect possible sites for the expansion of the Academy. They also interviewed two Annap·
olis real estate men to inquire about possible sites for the
relocation of St. John's. The realtors suggested two sites
near Annapolis. One was at Holly Beach farm, the Labrot
estate at Sandy Point, nine miles away. The other was at
Hillsmere on the South River, five miles away. A Baltimore architect, James R. Edmunds, who was then president of the American Institute of Architects, after studying
the situation, indicated several other possibilities for the
expansion of the Academy than the purchase of the St.
John's campus. 17
The St. John's board, including Barr and Buchanan,
were indeed concerned, as the statement of policy of
April 21, 1945, shows, with having the wherewithal to
continue the function of the college on another s1te m the
event that the Navy were to take the campus. But they
meant what they said when they made removal of the college conditional upon the Navy's representing to the Board
that acquisition of the college property was necessary m
the national interest. They may have come to mean a little
more than they said, since Buchanan was soon to talk
about requiring the Navy not simply to "declare" but to
"find" national interest. Neither the House committee
nor the Senate committee on naval affairs had up to this
point made any formal declaration. Nor had the Secretary
of the Navy. There were hearings before the committees
during June 1945. Richard Cleveland, then secretary of
the board, appearing before the Senate Committee on
June 20, attempted to make sure that the committee understood what importance the board attached to the declaration of necessity:
First, the Board makes clear that it will cheerfully accede to
genuine national necessity if such necessity, as distinguished
from convenience, is formally declared by the Navy. We now
assume that the function of making such a determination and
declaration of national necessity has been transferred from
the Navy Department to the Congress [i.e. the Congressional
committees]. The Board waives the privilege of arguing national necessity, but waives this privilege on condition that
the terms of acquisition permit the Board, in its judgment, to
continue to do its duty to the college community. While waiving conditionally the right for itself to argue the issue of necessity, the Board would be disappointed if the Congress did
not exhaustively explore that issue. We respectfully suggest
that in the distinction between necessity and convenience
there is an issue much more significant in America's future
than the continued life of this little college . ...
If this Committee should determine that acquisition of the
College property is not in the national interest, we respectfully urge that the basis of that determination be made so explitit and so decisive that no rational persons can ever again
raise the issue. We would first prefer to stay in Annapolis under conditions which would guarantee our future security. If
that security is compromised, we would prefer to move to a
site where no overshadowing neighbor holds the power of
eminent domain . ... If the air is once cleared, we have no
fear of our ability to live near the Naval Academy in harmony
and mutual respect.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Perhaps this is no Dartmouth College case. But it is being
watched all over this nation by citizens who hope that this
war has not been fought in vain. 18
It seems that the committees and the Navy Department
still did not grasp what St. John's was after in asking for a
declaration of national necessity. 19 At a meeting in Secretary Forrestal's office on July 20, 1945, at which Senator
Walsh, Chairman of the Senate Committee and Congressman Vinson, Chairman of the House Committee and various naval officers were present, and after they had agreed
on the project of expanding the Academy by acquiring
the St. John's campus, "the Secretary suggested (and it
was adopted as the course of action to be pursued) that
Admiral Jacobs prepare a letter for the signature of the
Secretary to the Trustees of the College outlining the results of this meeting-i.e., that because of the needs of
the post-war Navy the Academy must be expanded, that
the Navy intends to acquire the property by negotiation if
possible, or by condemnation if necessary."20
I think it unlikely that the Board had received or knew
of this letter when they met the following day. 21 Buchanan
was obviously disappointed with what had, or had not,
happened at the board meeting. For the day after in a
lengthy statement to the board, after referring to "eight
years of startling success of the St. John's program," he
berated the members for not pressing hard enough for a
declaration about national interest. He said,
The Statement of Policy of April 21st recognizes and embraces our highest duty as trustees in the present situation,
namely to 'find' national interest. It does this by refusing to
give or sell the campus or discuss damages until national interest is 'found' by due process of law . .. finding na~ional interest allows of two courses, negotiation and condemnation.
The Navy has chosen the former. On a pfevious occasion
[probably in 1942] we chose condemnation and the Navy
withdrew.
He went on to say, "This campus is essential to this College and its defence is therefore a part of the essential obligation of its trustees." He tried to frighten the board by
saying that they could possibly be indicted for not fulfilling their function as trustees, and threatened to resign
from the board as a vote of lack of confidence in them 22
Whether there was some communication with the Navy
Department or the committees during the following week
is not clear. On July 27, probably as a consequence of the
July 20 meeting in Forrestal's office, Senator Walsh (D.
Mass.), the chairman of the Senate committee, was writing a letter to Talbot Speer, president and publisher of the
Evening Capital. He wrote that the Senate committee had
taken no action except to authorize the Navy Department
to enter into negotiations with the authorities at St. John's
to see if an agreement on price could be reached." He affirmed his understanding that the college would remain in
possession of the campus for the next academic session. A
postscript shows that, no sooner had he dictated the letter,
than it was brought to his attention that this would not
13
�satisfy th~ St. John's board. He was given the impression
that what the board wanted was simply action by the two
congressional committees to authorize the Navy Department to acquire the campus as distinguished from negotiation with a view to agreeing on a price. This authorization
he proceeded to obtain from House Committee and a majority of the Senate Committee by the next day.
On August 4 a special committee of the St. John's board
meeting in Baltimore decided on the basis of published reports that the congressional committees had not met the
first of the board's conditions. They agreed that they
should not at this point compromise their position by entering into any negotiation; and they requested Cleveland
to seek a personal talk with Senator Walsh.
Cleveland met with Walsh on August 15 at the senator's
office and, while he was trying once more to make the college's position clear, Vinson walked in. So he got to talk
with the chairmen of both committees. Apparently, almost up to this point they had believed, perhaps because
of the Statement of Policy of April 21, that St. John's
wanted to sell the campus without any fuss. They had
now begun to understand that this was not the case. According to Cleveland, Senator Walsh seemed to get the
point about the declaration of national necessity, though
Congressman Vinson did not. Vinson "stated emphatically
that he thought his committee would find national interest if that was what we wanted."24 Both chairmen declared that the action of their committees up to that time
had not authorized condemnation but only negotiation
and agreed that nothing would be done until the Congress
reconvened on September 5, after which hearings would
be held. At a hearing in the fall on October 2, the Board
stated flatly that they "would not willingly sell the historic
campus at any price."25
About this time Buchanan used the Collegian, the student newspaper, to report to the college as follows: "With
the help of Mr. Edmunds the College was resting its whole
case on the architectural problem and alternative solutions [for the expansion of the Academy] instead of the
campus. It should be noted that the full force of the attack
[St. John's attack on the Navy) was actually Socratic irony,
tending to make the Navy produce its wind egg ....
"October 24th has been set as the day for the formal decision by the House Committee. Will the College celebrate with hemlock or a feast in the Mess Hall in Bancroft? We shall discuss immortality26 while the ship returns
from Aegina.
"Proposed toast in case it is drunk in hemlock:
Here stood
St. John's College
The first liberal arts college
To be condemned by
The United States Government
1784-1946
They knew not what they did." 27
14
October 24 came and went and there was no announcement from Washington. In a new formal statement of policy dated November 21, 1945, the board reviewed the
events since April and asserted that it was unfortunate
that the project had proceeded so far before the record
could be set straight on this simple but vital point. They
expressed their belief that the Navy had not proved that
the acquisition of the St. John's campus was necessary in
the national interest. "It is now clear," they said, "that the
extensive testimony before the Committees fell far short
of establishing national necessity for this unprecedented
use of the power of eminent domain; that failure of the
Committees to act after their long and exhaustive inquiry
is in itself evidence that no such necessity exists. In the
light of these developments in the long interval since the
Board's statement of policy, made on April21, 1945, that
statement is no longer a realistic or relevant statement of
the Board's duty as trustees, and is hereby withdrawn.
The Board therefore regard the unfortunate episode as
concluded, and trust that the Naval Academy and St.
John's are now free to proceed in mutual respect and harmony, as neighbors, to get on with their respective functions." They urged the congressi0nal committees to declare
the acquisition not necessary in the national interest and
urged the Secretary of the Navy to withdraw the project,
stating their belief that the government should make a public declaration that "the Government does not intend to acquire in any manner, the campus of St. John's College." 28
Nothing conclusive was heard from the Naval Affairs
Committees or the Navy Department until well into the
next year. In the meantime Paul Mellon, who had been a
student at St. John's in 1940-41 and who had, by generous contributions over the years, kept the college going on
a year-to-year basis, wrote to Stringfellow Barr,
Ever since last June I have been interested in setting up an
initial endowment for the St. John's Program. I have been deterred from action by doubts as to whether St. John's College
could keep its campus. I have felt that if it could not, it might
be more in the interest of American education to find a
stronger institutional vehicle to develop the education program which you initiated at St. John's.
I am therefore placing at the disposal of the Old Dominion
Foundation securities currently producing an income of
$125,000 per annum, which may be used for the purpose of
developing the type of education now carried on at St. John's
College and for other similar purposes. I am instructing the
Trustees of the Foundation that they may rely on your personal judgment as to whether St. John's can be expected to
preserve the campus or whether some other college you may
designate will better carry out my intention and thereby become the beneficiary of these funds. 29
When later Mellon agreed to contribute a total endowment of $4.5 million, it looked as if St. John's College
might for the first time in its history become financially
secure. But the question whether it would or not depended on the outcome of the Navy affair. At the same
SUMMER 1982
�faculty meeting at which Barr announced Mellon's intention to endow the program, whether at St. John's or elsewhere, he also announced that "the Chairman and the
Secretary of the Board were requested to visit the Senate
and House Committees on Naval Affairs in an attempt to
clarify the relation of the College with the Navy." Evidently the committees had still not formally declared that
the only possible way for the Navy to expand its facilities
for training officers (it being assumed that such expansion
was necessary for the security of the United States) was by
acquiring the land and buildings of the college.
On june 8, 1946, Thomas Farran, the chairman of the
St. John's Board, received a letter from Secretary Forrestal
which read as follows:
I have recently been informed by the Chairman of the
House Naval Affairs Committee that his Committee on
May 22, 1946, adopted the following resolution regarding the
utilization of St. John's College Property for expansion of the
Naval Academy:
'Whereas, a proposal has been made that the expanding
program of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis,
Maryland, requires the acquisition of the adjoining site of St.
John's College,
'Whereas the Naval Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives has held long and exhaustive hearings thereon,
and
'Whereas upon careful consideration it is the sense of this
committee that the National Emergency neither justifies nor
warrants the proposed acquisition of St. John's campus. Now,
therefore, be it resolved
'That said proposed acquisition officially known as Project
No. 460C of the Real Estate Division, Bureau of Yards and
Docks, Navy Department, is hereby disapproved.'
I am happy to advise you that the Navy Department acquiesces in this action of the House Naval Affairs Committee.
The Department was most reluctant to undertake the acquisition of the college property for the required expansion of
the Naval Academy in Annapolis since the Department
recognizes that only considerations of extreme national
necessity would justify the taking of the campus of a liberal
arts college . ...
It is believed that the present considerations of the House
Naval Affairs Committee and the Department . .. coupled
with the fact that the Department has other plans for the expansion of the Academy in Annapolis, makes it possible for
the college to pursue its plans with assurance that it will be
secure on its historic site for the foreseeable future . ...
A few days after Forrestal's letter the Senate Naval Affairs Committee followed the example of the House Committee. Dr. Farran observed that this action consequent
upon the House Committee resolution and the secretary's
letter, drove "the third nail in the coffin" of the project to
take the campus.
Cleveland, who knew that Barr and Buchanan wanted
from the Congressional committees a strong statement
that it was not the policy of the United States government
to use the power of eminent domain against liberal arts
colleges, had been engaged in some activity behind the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
scenes to get from the House committee a statement that
would satisfy them and keep them with the program at St.
John's in Annapolis. He even persuaded Carl Vinson,
chairman of the House Committee, who had already written a letter saying that the committee's resolution wrote
"Finis" to the project, to write a second stronger letter.
But in spite of the death and burial of the project, and in
spite of this stronger letter, and in spite of Forrestal's
declaration that only extreme national necessity would
warrant the government's taking the property of a liberal
arts college, and in spite of the assurance given about the
foreseeable future, Barr, after consulting with Buchanan,
decided that the securities promised by Mellon should not
come to St. John's. He suggested to the board that the St.
John's campus be turned over to the State of Maryland to
provide educational facilities for the state since the state
would be better able to protect the campus and that the
board should seek a safe place for the college. In the event
that the board did not accept his suggestion he would resign and "seek another college for the program." Buchanan
had said the year before that the campus was essential to
the college, and Barr had said that it was doubtful whether
the college could "survive transplanting." Now they were
saying something else.
Barr has always maintained that he was not satisfied
that the Navy had given any substantial assurance that
there would not be another attempt to take the campus. 30
But that was not his only reason, and probably not his
principal reason, for taking the money elsewhere. He
thought that he could not dispense with the help of Buchanan in continuing the program on another site under
the charter of St. John's or in establishing the program at
another college. 31 Buchanan would probably have left St.
John's even if the fray with the Navy had not occurred. In
early january 1945 he was already beginning to withdraw
from the full exercise of the office of dean. At the first faculty meeting of that year he reported that new adult education duties he had taken on in the District of Columbia
would necessitate the reduction of his decanal duties. On
January 18, 1945, Barr sent a memorandum to the treasurer instructing him that the dean's salary had, at the
dean's request, been reduced by the board from $5,500 a
year to $3,000 a year in view of other salaried employment
undertaken in Washington. He would continue as "the officer of instruction," i.e., as chairman of the Instruction
Committee, and as adviser to students in relation to their
studies. Buchanan himself in a letter to Cleveland about
two years later wrote: "If things had gone as usual, I would
have resigned during this year [1945-46] to go into adult
education or something else. I never was made for an administrator." On june 1, 1946, he announced that he would
take a year's leave of absence. It seemed clear to everyone
that the unique role he had played for the eight years that
he had portrayed as "eight years of startling success" was
coming to an end. In addition to that, as Barr describes it,
while he himself was exhausted from the fight with the
Navy, Buchanan was both tired and sick.32
15
�The board had, since 1937, been guided in practically
everything by Batr and Buchanan. They failed, however,
to concur in the opinion that there was just as much danger as ever that the Navy would soon again seek possession
of the St. John's campus. They were unwilling to abandon
the campus and move the college and the program, and
they were also unwilling to resign as trustees of St. John's
and become trustees of some other college yet to be char·
tered in Maryland or some other state. They had been
convinced by Barr and Buchanan of the worth of the program, and they were resolved to continue it at St. John's
and in Annapolis. They tried, but failed, to persuade Barr
and Buchanan to reconsider.
Buchanan professed surprise at the board's decision. In
fact, in a memorandum of July 31, 1946, addressed to them
he declared that it was "surprising to all" that the board
had decided to continue the St. John's program in Annap·
olis "even when it was clear that the original pilots could
not honestly take the risk as they saw it and weighed it." 33
He, nevertheless, spoke of the ready respect commanded
by the board's insight and courage, but also asserted that
the board's action did not "convince the ex-pilots that
their return would be safe or wise." He already had plans
for a larger enterprise which would grow from the cooper·
ation of St. John's and the new college. The aim was the
eventual establishment of a university which would be
composed of (1) a graduate school for research in the "liberal arts and philosophy," (2) an adult school with many
communities, and (3) several undergraduate colleges. For
the immediate future the new college somewhere other
than at Annapolis would, with the Mellon gift as endow·
ment, be a "small model of the whole." In addition to a
small undergraduate school, it would include a committee
on the liberal arts to become a nucleus of the graduate
school, "and it would be situated in a place suitable for
"cooperation with a lively industrial community in adult
education." He even suggested that for a certain period of
transition there be one board and one president for St.
John's and the new institution.
Looking back over the nine years, he commented on
the successes and failures of the program. While denying
once more that the program was an experiment designed
to prove or disprove an hypothesis, he affirmed that there
had been a common search for a true liberal arts college
and that the search was based on guiding principles and a
common comprehensive sphere for exploration. There had
been found a pattern of the liberal arts as embodied in the
great books and it had proved to be "workable, versatile,
instructive, fruitful, and heuristic." He spoke of the "high
level of teaching and learning we had already achieved be·
fore the war" as well as of serious sickness caused by the
war. The case for the endowment could now be based, he
mailltained on achievement rather than "mere paper
1
promises.''
The Navy affair itself he cited as evidence of the college's growth and strength. He assigned as a reason for the
college's suggesting negotiations with the Navy in the
16
statement of April 21, 1945, the desire to "discover and
clarify the foundations of our own existence." He meant
more than the particular and local factors affecting the existence of St. John's. He meant, as he had said earlier, that
St. John's had been leading a fight on behalf of all liberal
arts colleges insofar as their existence depends upon the
policies of the federal government.
A few days after this memorandum of Buchanan's the
board made public the following announcement:
The Board wishes to record publicly its deep satisfaction at
the favorable termination ofthe Navy Department's proposal
to acquire the campus of St. John's College and joins heartily
in the gratification expressed by Secretary Forrestal that this
solution will make it possible for the College and Naval Acad·
emy to continue their long history as friendly neighbors . ...
The Board believes that this solution . .. places the College
in a stronger position than it has been in its long history to
press forward with plans for the future . ...
The firm foundation now achieved in Annapolis also makes
it possible sometime in the near future, to further the estab·
lishment elsewhere of an additional college to carry on the
program developed and now secure in Annapolis. Fortunately
a generous gift for this purpose makes it practicable . ...
In furtherance of this project the Board has agreed to re·
lease Mr. Barr from the presidency of St. John's College as of
July l, 1947, or such other date as may be determined, in or·
der that he may take over the leadership of the proposed new
college. 34
Buchanan in a letter to Adler gave his own very different account of what had happened:
The Board, primarily Dick Cleveland, had not earlier imag·
ined, say nothing of believed, that Winkie was actually thinking
of weighing old St. John's and making an objective decision
on his findings. They therefore had thought only of their and
his efforts to set things straight in Annapolis and were them·
selves ready to settle for anything that the Navy and the Con·
gressional Committees would do; no one in his right mind will
refuse four and a half million dollars because of an uncertain
future.3 5
He proceeded to describe a meeting in Paul Mellon's
office in Washington at which he and Barr were present
together with Mellon, Adolph Schmidt, and Thomas Parran. Parran spoke for the Board. Buchanan's version of
what he said is as follows:
First the Board was determined to continue the St. John's
Program in Annapolis; I am sure this implied that the pro·
gram, like the library for instance, was the property of the
Board, copyrighted and patented in the name of the College.
We would be stealing if we took it elsewhere and taught it,
and they would tell the public so. Second, Winkie was tired
and probably sick like me, and he ought to take a leave of ab·
sence this year to recover his right mind and allow the decision to be postponed. Third, if Winkie insisted on accepting
the endowment to go elsewhere, he should give it to some institution with which he would have no personal connection.
Farran delivered these threats in the presence of Mellon and
SUMMER 1982
�Schmidt. They behaved admirably ... Mellon and Schmidt
were very clear about their original intention and their full
confidence in Winkie.
At the November faculty meeting in 1946, Barr announced the formation of a foundation to be known as
Liberal Arts Incorporated to be a formal instrument for
acquiring property for the new college. 36 He further stated
that Liberal Arts Incorporated might eventually become a
"higher governing board for both colleges." At the December meeting he informed the faculty that the site of
the new college would be the Hanna estate in the Stockbridge Bowl in western Massachusetts, that his resignation would take effect on December 31, 1946, and that
john S. Kieffer had been appointed acting president by
the board.
By this time Buchanan had left and was living in Richmond, Massachusetts, not far from Stockbridge. In a letter to Richard Cleveland in late November he made as a
tentative proposal that Liberal Arts Incorporated take
over the financial and educational direction of St. John's
from the trustees "exactly as Winkie and I had taken it in
1937 except that this time we would recommend other
personnel to do the job on the spot." 37 He added, "I wish
with all my heart that the Board had had confidence in
Winkie and me and had wished to come with us- .. -The
new enterprise has lost immeasurably by the Board's refusal to come with us. We have some money but we have
lost a college. I saw that this was so and that it was intended
to be so when you read your announcement to us. Winkie
and I have lost nine years of work unless you and the
Board relent and give us some help. I am not regretting
our decision but I am suggesting that you are making the
cost maximum." The board of St. John's made no re·
sponse to the proposal that Liberal Arts Incorporated be
given responsibilities that were not properly theirs.
Shortly thereafter, in a letter to Hutchins, Buchanan
recorded his reflections about what had happened at St.
john's 38 He claimed that a controlled search for a liberal
college had been started, that some liberal arts had been
set into motion within a framework of great books, that
there was enough initial success to justify that kind of
practice and that certain things had to be added, such as
the graduate school to sharpen the focus on subject matter, and full commitment to adult education. "It is also
clear," he went on, "that the next thirty or forty years offer a desperately receptive world for us to bring light to.
As I have said in print, this is the day of the liberal college
which has been waiting for twenty-four hundred years to
be born." In the same letter he says "we don't know what
we have been studying and teaching, and we ought to find
out."
The inconsistencies in Buchanan's statements make it
difficult to know what he was thinking. On the one hand,
he had reported to the board that the first eight years of
the program were "eight years of startling success." On
the other hand, he says that he and Barr will have "lost
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
nine years of work" if the board don't follow in his footsteps. On the one hand he says he doesn't know what he's
been studying and teaching. But on the other, he thinks
that he and his associates will bring light not just to a few
who might be interested in "the liberal college," but to
the world. Presumably he means more than a little light,
since it is something that the world has been waiting for
since the time of Plato and Aristotle.
Buchanan tried to get his old friends, Adler and McKeon,
to join him and Barr in Massachusetts. He also tried to get
Hutchins, Van Doren, and Meiklejohn to leave what they
were doing and join the new enterprise. All refused. A few
of the St. John's faculty were invited; they too refused, believing that the outcome of the contest with the Navy was
decisive and that there was much more uncertainty about
the new college than about the future of St. John's in Annapolis. Liberal Arts Incorporated, as Acting President
Kieffer announced to the faculty on january 11, 1947,
would contribute $150,000 to meet the operating deficit
that year at St. John's. It was understood that this would
fulfill the intention of Liberal Arts Incorporated to cause as
few difficulties as possible for St. John's, and that by the
summer of 1948 the two colleges would be independent
but free to enter into any form of cooperation that might
at the time seem wise.
It became clear early in 1947, less than a month after
Barr's departure from St. John's, that he was running into
difficulties in founding the new college. On january 25 he
wrote to Paul Mellon, "The size of the endowment was
measured to fit an entirely different problem from the
new one we now face. It would have run St. John's well.
But St. John's already had a campus, a plant in good order,
and equipment." Around the middle of the year he requested Mellon to release the entire benefits of the endowment fund to Liberal Arts Incorporated for other use
than the establishment of an undergraduate college. Mellon refused to do so on the ground that it had been his
intention only to endow a "college for undergraduates
similar in size and curriculum to St. John's." He noted in a
letter to Barr of june 24, 1947, "Through circumstances
beyond your control that project now appears unfeasible,
if not impossible, within any reasonable amount of time,
chiefly due to lack of qualified teachers and adequate
building funds." 39 Barr, however, has claimed that the
whole effort was sabotaged by Donald Shepard, who, as
vice-president of Mellon's Old Dominion Foundation,
had a good deal to do with the terms of the disposal of the
funds. 40 It was announced to the St. John's faculty at the
first fall meeting in 1947 that on August 1 Liberal Arts Incorporated had met in Stockbridge and decided to abandon the project of a new college. "U npropitiousness of
building," it was said, "and difficulties of cooperating with
the Old Dominion Foundation were the chief reasons for
the decision. "41 The endowment fund reverted to the Old
Dominion Foundation.
Thus ended the last attempt of Barr and Buch;man to
form an institution which would be a beacon for colleges
17
�and universities to follow. They did not in the succeeding
years keep in close touch with St. John's College and
knew very little about what was happening at St. John's.
There were a few times when they returned, upon invita·
tion, to lecture or to speak at Class Day or Commencement. One such occasion was Class Day in 1948 when both
Barr and Buchanan spoke. Buchanan in his speech urged
that the liberal arts should have a subject matter and that
the core of the St. John's curriculum should be, not metaphysical (which had earlier been his constant theme), but
political. A few days later, when he had returned to Massachusetts, he wrote President Kieffer a letter in which
he told him that the decision that Kieffer and the board
thermore that he never knew to what extent he had laid
the foundations for a building that through many vicissitudes, was to increase in worth.
Barr, reflecting upon these events many years later,
could say of his decision to leave St. John's and to use the
Mellon money to start another college, "I don't claim for a
second I made a ·wise choice."43
Unless othenvise indicated, all records of meetings of the faculty and of the
Board of Visitors and Governors are located in the archives of St. John's
College in Annapolis.
11
made to continue the program in Annapolis was Stupid
and blind and therefore highly irresponsible to the vision,
highly misleading to the community, and disloyal to whatever leadership Winkie and I provided."42 He claimed that
the original program was "a revolutionary blueprint, an
attempt to subvert and rebuild education," that it was a
bull-dozer "inside a Trojan horse which was to be let loose
once the walls of the sacred city were passed and left behind." He said, "I fought the Navy fight, with the few who
cared, out of piety to the sacred city" .... There were no
reinforcements, and there was no outside recognition of
the sacred city, only a faint sentimental wish to live in the
ruins." He maintained, presumably referring to the agree-
ment that St. John's should have the income from the
Mellon endowment until July I, 1948, that he and Barr
had a fit of personal generosity which did not blind them
but blurred their vision, and that out of their clear vision
of what was the only hope for the program together with
their blurred vision produced by the board's bad decision
had come "the ordeal of Stockbridge which could only
commit suicide because of its high courage and generosity
to St. John's." He said that "the program should be laid on
the shelf and forgotten," that it was "not even a pattern to
be laid up in heaven and beheld, but a poison corrupting a
household at St. John's" and that because of its being at
St. John's it "would become a poison wherever it was
tried." He asserted that he and Barr had in 1937 made "a
mistaken historical judgment and a bad educational prediction" and that they should be counted out of any plans
that Kieffer and the people at St. John's might make.
Scott Buchanan had over a period of twenty years invested an enormous amount of love and work in formulating, planning, and trying to bring into being, whether at
St. John's or elsewhere, what had come to be called the St.
John's program. At this point it seemed to him that it had
all come to nothing. The tragedy, if it is to be dignified by
that name, is not that he had failed, or that the program
had failed, or that others had failed him, but rather that
he could not question the wisdom of actions that by denying the college the endowment it otherwise would have
had, jeopardized the existence of the only college where
had been established, however precariously, the program
for which he more than anyone was responsible, and fur-
18
Chapter IV
1. Walter Lippman, "Today and Tomorrow," New
Tribune, December 27, 1938.
2. Baltimore Evening Sun, January 23, 24, 25, 1939.
3. Life magazine, February 5, 1940.
Yorl~
Herald
Chapter V
1. John Dewey, "Challenge to Liberal Thought," Fortune, August
1944.
2. Alexander Meiklejohn, "A Reply to John Dewey," Fortune, January
1945.
3. John Dewey, Letter to the Editors, Fortune, March 1945.
4. Sidney Hook, Education for Modern Man, New York 1946, 209.
5. Hook, 2!, 213.
6. Buchanan to Hook, November 10, 1938, St. John's College
Archives.
7. Buchanan to Hook, December 15, 1942, St. John's College
Archives.
8. Hook to Buchanan, January 26, 1943, St. John's College Archives.
9. Buchanan to Emily S. Hamblen, April27, 1940, St. John's College
Archives.
10. Nineteen Forty Yearbook, 15.
11. St. John's Collegian, October 27, 1939, 1.
12. Nineteen Forty-two Yearbook, 14.
13. Nineteen Forty-two Yearbook, 25.
14. Nineteen Forty-three Yearbook, 20.
15. Robert Hutchins thought this a good idea anyway, believing that
the last two years of high school were usually wasted.
16. Nineteen Forty-four Yearbook, 7.
17. Nineteen Forty-four Yearbook, 8.
18. Nineteen Forty-five-Forty-six Yearbook, 11.
19. Buchanan to H. G. Cayley, August 25, 1937, St. John's College
Archives.
20. Nineteen Forty-five-Forty-six Yearbook, 13.
Chapter VI
1. In 1868 the Naval Academy had purchased from St. John's a triangular piece of land of which a part of King George Street is one side.
2. St. John's Faculty Minutes, September 1940.
3. St. John's Board Minutes, January 13, 1941.
4. Buchanan Files, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
5. St. John's Board Minutes, February 25, 1945.
6. Diary of James V. Forrestal, Copy in the Navy Operational Archives,
Naval History Center, Washington, D.C.
7. Record of the hearing before the Committee on Naval Affairs of the
U.S. Senate (June 20, 1945). Navy Library, Washington, D.C. Cf. the
testimony of Captain T. R. Wirth, representing the Superintendent of
the Academy, at the same hearing.
8. Copies of letters in Buchanan Files, Houghton Library.
9. Buchanan to Hutchins, May 7, 1945, Buchanan Files, Houghton
Library.
10. Hutchins to Buchanan, May 9, 1945, Buchanan Files, Houghton
Library.
SUMMER 1982
�11 .Buchanan to Senator Wayne Morse, undated, Buchanan Files,
Houghton Library,
12. Baltimore Sun, April.1945.
13. Baltimore Sun, July 3, 1945; Washington Post, July 30, 1945.
14. Dean's Nine Year Report (1946), St. John's College Archives.
15. Cf. the Supreme Court decision in Kohl v. United States (1875).
16. Evening Capital, October 22, 1945.
17. Testimony before the House Naval Affairs Committee, October 9,
1945.
18. Statement of Richard Cleveland before the Senate Naval Affairs
Committee, June 20, 1945.
19. Captain T. R. Wirth indeed stated at the Senate Committee hearing
of June 20, "Acquisition of the St. John's property is urgently required in
the national interest to provide the area determined to be essential to
the continuance of the Naval Academy mission: the fundamental education and training of the number of young men required for the commissioned personnel of the United States Navy." This, of course, was
not an official declaration of policy by the Navy Department or the
Committees.
20. Diary of James V. Forrestal, copy in the Operational Archives,
Naval History Center, Washington, D.C., 403-4.
21. Minutes of the Board for 1944-47 are missing.
22. Buchanan Files, Houghton Library.
23. Evening Capital, August 1, 1945.
24. Memorandum by Richard Cleveland to the St. John's College
Board, St. John's College Archives.
25. Statement of Policy by the Board of Visitors and Governors of St.
John's College, with reference on Navy Department proposal to acquire
the St. John's campus (November 21, 1945), St. John's College Archives.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
26.
the
27.
28.
29.
Buchanan had discovered from studying the Dartmouth case that
charter of a college confers upon it immortality.
Dean's Report, St. John's Collegian, October 19, 1945.
Statement of Policy, November 21, 1945.
Mellon to Barr, appended to the St. John's Faculty Minutes for
April 27, 1946.
30. Transcript of a recorded conversation with Allan Hoffman, July 27,
1975: "I thought, why not put an end to it by putting the College where
the huge beast couldn't suddenly attack again? And it was clear that a lot
of people in the Navy were damned determined to attack again." Since
1946 there has been no attempt by the Navy to take the campus. St.
John's College Archives,
31. Hoffman conversation.
32. Hoffman conversation,
33. Memorandum to the Board of Visitors and Governors, July 31, 1946,
St. John's College Archives.
34. Announcement by the Board of St. John's College, August 3, 1946,
Buchanan Files, Houghton Library.
35. Buchanan to Adler, August 14, 1946, Adler Files, Institute for
Philosophical Research, Chicago.
36. St. John's Faculty Minutes, November 2, 1946,
37: Buchanan to Cleveland, November 20, 1946, Buchanan Files,
Houghton Library.
38. Buchanan to Hutchins, December 5, 1946, Buchanan Files,
Houghton Library.
39. Buchanan Files, Houghton Library.
40. Hoffman conversation.
41. St. John's Faculty Minutes, September 15, 1947.
42. Buchanan to Kieffer, June 8, 1948, St. John's College Archives.
43, Hoffman conversation.
19
�Schiller's Drama-Fulfillment
of History and Philosophy in Poetry
Gisela Berns
Friedrich Schiller, the great German dramatist at the
end of. the eighteenth century, was not only a great poet,
but also a great historical and philosophical thinker. A
contemporary of the Founding Fathers of this country
and akin to them in thoughts and feelings about the political issues of the time, Schiller was inspired by the ideas of
the ancients in their striving for human excellence, but
committed to the ideals of a modern world in its fight for
the rule of law, based on the recognition of human free·
dom. At a time of social and political revolutions, Schiller
believed that art, and only art, through its mediation between the senses and reason, might be able to prepare
man for the difficult task of governing himself. Schiller's
drama-from The Robbers (started at the time of the Declaration of Independence) to William Tell (finished at the
time of jefferson's first presidency)-deals with one
theme: the problematic relationship between freedom
and rule. Focusing on great revolutionary ideas like the
conflict between nature and convention, explored in The
Robbers and in Intrigue and Love, or on great revolutionary figures of history like Fiesco, Don Carlos, Wallenstein,
Mary Stuart, The Maid of Orleans, and William Tell, all of
Gisela Berns, a Tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis, delivered the
original version of this essay as a lecture in Annapolis on February 26,
1982. Its main theme is the subject of her forthcoming book, Schiller's
Wallenstein~Fulfillment of History and Philosophy in Poetry.
20
Schiller's plays, even The Bride of Messina, modeled on
the Oedipus story, wrestle with the problem of freedom.
In recognition of this historical role, Schiller was awarded
honorary citizenship of the French Revolution (that the
document, issued in 1793, did not reach him till 1798,
long after the revolution vanquished its signer, Danton,
Schiller always considered an ironic reminder of the problematic nature of freedom).
An account of Schiller's life1 and work,2 culminating in
a discussion of Wallenstein, his highest artistic achievement, shall show in what sense he understood poetry to
be a fulfillment of history and philosophy.
Schiller's life, from 1759 to 1805, was, except for his early
childhood and the beginning years of his marriage, a
never ending struggle. First against a tyrannical ruler, later
against poverty and prejudice, finally against a fatal illness
which racked the last fifteen years of his short life. A
struggle it was, this life of Schiller's, but what a glorious
struggle! A testimony to man's ability to overcome or, in
Wallenstein's proud words, to the conviction that "it is
the mind which builds itself the body." 3 Schiller's father,
by his own report, offered a prayer at Schiller's birth:
And you, Being of all beings! You I begged, after the birth of
my only son, that you would add to his strength of mind what
I, for want of education, could not reach.4
Schiller's early plans of studying theology were rudely
shattered by the interference of the Duke of WurttemSUMMER 1982
�berg in whose newly established military academy the
promising sons of the country were educated towards
various professions. Separated from his family, Schiller
spent his young years, from age thirteen to twenty-one, in
an atmosphere of oppressive regimentation. After a year
of broad general education in sciences and humanities,
with strong emphasis on philosophy, Schiller, at first,
studied law, later, because "bolder" and "more akin to
poetry," medicine. A cross between medicine and philosophy, his dissertation On the Connection between Man's
Animal and Spiritual Nature for the first time explores a
theme to surface again and again in Schiller's poetry.
The great breakthrough of his passion for poetry came
after Schiller, at sixteen, had been introduced to Shakespeare. Emboldened by his love for Shakespeare, he was
obsessed with the idea of writing a play that would expose
all the evils of conventional society. Full of admiration for
the ancient heroes of Plutarch and the modern sentiments of Rousseau, Schiller, for years, feverishly and passionately worked on his Robbers. Forbidden to read or
write poetry, he risked life and liberty in the production of
this first play of his. With the performance of The Robbers, in 1782, at the famous theater of Mannheim, Schiller
gained immortal fame and lost his homeland. Hailed by
one reviewer as the coming "German Shakespeare,'' 5 he
was ordered by the Duke, under penalty of arrest, to stop
writing anything but medical works. With the help of a
young musician, Schiller, in disguise, fled to Mannheim
where he hoped to find support for his life as a poet. Even
there he had to spend months in hiding, at work on his
Fiesco and Intrigue and Love, before the authorities accepted him. In a letter of 1783, possibly meant to hide his
whereabouts from the Duke, Schiller toyed with the idea
of emigrating to America. Undecided among medicine,
philosophy, or politics, he envisioned a life in the New
World that, above all, would allow him to be a poet:
But tragedies, for that matter, I shall never cease to writeyou know my whole being hangs on it.6
A contemporary of the Founding Fathers of this country, inspired by the ideal of human freedom, and set on
writing tragedies (no matter what profession he would
have taken up in this New World), Schiller might have
given us that sorely missing drama on the American Revolution. Such a drama (as Harold Jantz, in his article William Tell and the American Revolution, suggests7) could
have been written either from the British point of view
(something like Aeschylus' Persians) or from the American
point of view (something like Schiller's William Tell).
In the spirit of revolution, Intrigue and Love, a "Bourgeois Tragedy," scourges the nobility's injustices against
the lower classes, most poignantly in the heartrending account of the forced recruitment of German troops to be
sold to the British for the Revolutionary War in America.8
With The Conspiracy of Fiesco at Genoa, a "Republican
Tragedy," Schiller, for the first time, strikes a theme
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
found, in one form or another, in all his subsequent plays:
the tragedy of the great political hero who, for the sake of
his vision of a more perfect world, destroys the existing
world, including himself.
After the "Storm and Stress" of The Robbers, Fiesco,
and Intrigue and Love, Schiller, in 1787, reached a first
classical height with Don Carlos-not only because of his
change from rhythmic prose to verse, but even more
because of his sovereign treatment of the theme, the conflict between revolutionary idealism and imperialistic realism. The stark contrast between good and evil of Schiller's
earlier plays turns to a dark and haunting complexity in
Don Carlos. The tragic beauty of Don Carlos has moved
more than one great writer after Schiller to integrate parts
of it into their own work: Dostoyevsky, the theme and setting of the "Grand Inquisitor" story in The Brothers
Karamazov; Thomas Mann, the burning admiration of
Tanio Kroger for the breathtaking scene in Don Carlos,
where the king, the absolute ruler of the catholic world, is
said to have wept-a scene to which Mann, in his late
Essay on Schiller, confesses to have "early given his homage."' Apart from its literary influence, Schiller's Don
Carlos always had a political voice and was felt to be a
threat to tyrants. During Hitler's Third Reich, both William Tell and Don Carlos disappeared from the German
theater. As Oscar Seidlin, in his article Schiller: Poet of
Politics, reports:
A quarter of a century ago, when darkness descended upon
Schiller's native country, a darkness that was to engulf all of
mankind in the shortest possible time, a theater in Hamburg
produced one of Schi11er's great dramatic works, Don Carlos.
It is the play which culminates in the stirring climax of its
third act, the confrontation scene between King Philip of
Spain and the Marquis Posa, the powerful verbal and intellec~
tual battle between the rigid and autocratic monarch, con~
temptuous of mankind and gloomily convinced that only
harsh and tyrannical suppression can preserve peace and
order in his vast empire, and the young, enthusiastic advocate
of revolutionary principles, who demands for his fellow citi~
zens the untrammeled right to happiness, the possibility of
unhampered self~development and self~ realization of every in~
dividual. The scene rises to its pitch with Marquis Posa's
brave challenge flung into the king's face: "Geben Sie Gedankenfreiheit!-Do give freedom of thought!" When this line,
one of the most famous in all German dramatic literature, resounded from the Hamburg stage in the early years of Hitler's
terror, the audience under the friendly protection of darkness
burst out, night after night, into tumultuous applause. So
dangerous and embarrassing to the new rulers proved a single
verse of the greatest German playwright, who by then had
been dead for fully a hundred and thirty years, that the management of the theater was forced to cut out the scandalous
line. But the audience, knowing their classic well enough
even if it was fed to them in an emasculated version, reacted
quickwittedly: from that evening on they interrupted the per~
formance by thunderous applause at the moment when Mar~
quis Posa should have uttered his famous plea on the stage_,.
and did not. After these incidents the play was withdrawn
from tlie repertoire altogether. 10
21
�In prepar,ation for Don Carlos, Schiller had occupied
himself more and more with historical studies and, finally,
published a History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands from the Spanish Rule. This comprehensive, dramatically written work, in 1789, won him a professorship
at the University of Jena. Besides lecturing on Universal
History and Aesthetics, Schiller devoted himself to his
second major historical work, the History of the Thirty
Years War, later to become the basis for his monumental
trilogy on Wallenstein, the imperial general of the Thirty
Years War.
The summer before settling in )ena, Schiller had met
Charlotte v. Lengefeld, his future wife, in whose circle of
family and friends the young poet, every evening, read
from Homer and the Greek tragedians. Filled with a kind
of Grecomania, Schiller threw himself into translating Euripides' Iphigeneia in Aulis, an activity he hoped would
give him classical purity and simplicity. In a letter to the
sisters v. Lengefeld Schiller writes:
My Euripides still gives me much pleasure, and a great deal
of it also stems from its antiquity. To find man so eternally
remaining the same, the same passions, the same collisions of
passions, the same language of passions. With this infinite
multiplicity always though this unity of the same human
form. 11
In the spirit of those days, Schiller composed a long
melancholy poem, The Gods of Greece, that laments the
disappearance of beauty and nobility from the modern
world:
"Als die Cotter menschlicher noch waren,
Waren Menschen gbttlicher.
When the gods still were more human,
Men were more godlike.
This immersion in Greek antiquity-and the study of
Kant that followed-became crucial for Schiller's aesthetic writings.
A terrible illness of Schiller's, in 1791, stirred rumors of
his death. At the discovery that Schiller was still alive,
months later, a circle of admirers in Denmark prevailed
upon the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Augustenburg to
ease the burden of the poet's daily existence and, for a
few years, bestow a pension on him. Schiller accepted, full
of joy over the unexpected freedom to devote himself to
the "formation of his ideas":
Serenely I look to the future-and if the expectations of
myself should prove to have been nothing but sweet illusions
with which my oppressed pride took revenge on fate, I for one
shall not lack the determination to justify the hopes two excellent citizens of our century have placed in me. Since my
lot does not allow me to act as benefactor in their way, I shall,
nevertheless, attempt it in the only way that is given to meand may the seed they have spread unfold in me into a beautiful blossom for mankind. 12
22
With the same mail, Schiller ordered Kant's Critique of
Pure Reason. Earlier that year, in the throes of his illness,
reading the Critique of Judgement had convinced him
that nothing short of a thorough understanding of Kant's
philosophical system would satisfy him. For three years, a
long time in so short a life as Schiller's, he studied Kant
and wrote his own philosophical essays: On Tragic Art, On
Grace and Dignity, On the Sublime, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, and On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. On
the Aesthetic Education of Man he wrote, as a gesture of
gratitude, in the form of letters to the Duke of Schleswig·
Holstein-Augustenburg.
Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man sketches
out a history of mankind from a state of nature to a state
of civilization, where the progress of the species towards a
fulfillment of human nature depends on the fragmentation of nature in the individual. Schiller complements this
view of history, reminiscent in part of Rousseau's Second
Discourse, with the hope that a higher art might restore
the totality of nature, destroyed by art in the process of
civilization. Far from romantic longing for a "Golden
Age" of nature, Schiller exclaims:
I would not like to live in a different century and have worked
for a different one. One is as much a citizen of one's time as
one is a citizen of one's country.B
At the beginning of his poem The Artists, a panoramic
history of mankind, written in 1789, Schiller speaks of
man as "the ripest son of time, free through reason, strong
through laws," standing "at the close of the century" in
"noble, proud manliness":
Wie schOn, o Mensch, mit deinem Palmenzweige
Stehst du an des Jahrhunderts Neige,
In edler stolzer Mannlichkeit,
Mit aufgeschlossnem Sinn, mit Geistesflille,
Voll milden Ernsts, in tatenreicher Stille,
Der reifste Sohn der Zeit,
Frei durch Vernunft, stark durch Gesetze,
Durch Sanftmut gross, und reich durch Schatze,
Die lange Zeit dein Busen dir verschwieg,
Herr der Natur, die deine Fesseln liebet,
Die deine Kraft in tausend Kampfen tibet
Und prangend unter dir aus der Verwildrung stieg!
Like Hamilton, in Federalist One, and Madison, in Federalist Fourteen, Schiller calls his contemporaries to the task
of deciding the fate of mankind:
Der Menschheit Wtirde ist in eure Hand gegeben,
Bewahret siel
Sie sinkt mit euch! Mit euch wird sie sich heben!
The dignity of mankind is in your hands,
Preserve it!
It sinks with you! With you uplifts itself! 14
Both Hamilton and Madison speak of the people as the
ones to decide the case:
SUMMER 1982
�Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they
have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and
other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for
antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience? To this
manly spirit, posterity will be indebted for the possession, and
the world for the example, of the numerous innovations displayed on the American theater, in favor of private rights and
public happiness.
Schiller, however, as in the Prologue to Wallenstein,
judges the artists to be responsible for the legacy of mankind:
Und jetzt an des Jahrhunderts ernstem Ende,
Wo selbst die Wirklichkeit zur Dichtung wird,
Wo wir den Kampf gewaltiger Naturen
Und ein bedeutend Ziel vor Augen sehn,
Und urn der Menschheit grosse Gegenstande,
Urn Herrschaft und urn Knechtschaft wird gerungen,
Jetzt darf die Kunst auf ihrer SchattenbD.hne
Auch hohern Flug versuchen, ja sie muss,
So1l nicht des Lebens Bohne sie beschamen.
Now at this century's impressive close,
As actuality itself is turned
To art, as we see mighty natures locked
In struggle for a goal of lofty import,
As conflict rages for the great objectives
Of ffian, for masterdorn, for freedom, now
Art is allowed assay of higher flight
Upon its shadow stage; indeed it must be,
Lest it be put to shame by life's own stageY
consciousness of the Moderns. Anticipating much of
Hegel's philosophy of history, both in perspective and in
formulation, Schiller portrays man's historical development
as progress from a naturally to a rationally given form of
humanity 18 In homage to this kinship of thought, Hegel
chooses two lines from Schiller's early poem Friendship as
Finale of his Phenomenology of the Spirit. The slight
change he makes in speaking of "Geisterreich" ("realm of
spirits") rather than "Seelenreich" ("realm of the soul")
points, I think, to a crucial difference between Hegel and
Schiller. The fragmentation of human nature in the individual for the sake of greater differentation in the species
moves the tragic poet more than the philosopher:
But can it be that man should be fated to neglect himself
for any end? Should nature, through her ends, be able to rob
us of a perfection which reason, through hers, prescribes for
us? It, therefore, must be false that the development of the
single faculties necessitates the sacrifice of their totality; or
even if the law of nature tended there ever so much, it must
be up to us to restore, by a higher art, this totality of our
nature which art has destroyed. 19
Aiming at a balance between reason and the senses,
Schiller (who, in 1793, was rereading both Kant's Critique
of Judgement and Homer's Iliad) uses a Homeric simile:
Reason herself will not battle directly with this savage force
that resists her weapons and, as little as the son of Saturn in
the Iliad, descend, acting herself, to the gloomy theater. But
from the midst of the fighters she chooses the most worthy,
attires him, as Zeus did his grandson, with divine weapons
and, through his victorious power, effects the great decision. 20
Anticipating an objection to his concern about aesthetic
education in a time of social and political revolutions,
Schiller claims that the "path to freedom" leads through
"the land of beauty." 16 The contemplation of beauty, because of its mediation between the senses and reason,
might be able to prepare man for the challenge of freedom. Looking back to the beginnings of civilization, Schiller states:
This use of Achilles as symbol of noble, and sometimes
tragic, beauty is only one of many in Schiller's work. In his
poem The Gifts of Fortune, Schiller extols the honor the
gods bestow on Achilles, in his poem Nenia, their lament
over him at his death. The idea, symbolized by Achilles, of
truth manifesting itself in beauty, and therefore speaking
to us through the senses as well as reason, implies a new
appreciation of the senses:
Nature does not make a better start with man than with the
rest of her works: she acts for him, where he cannot yet act
himself as free intelligence. But it is just this which makes
him human that he does not stop at what mere nature made
him to be, but possesses the power through reason to retrace
the steps which she anticipated with him, to transform the
work of compulsion into a work of free choice and to elevate
the physical necessity to a moral one.
The path to divinity, if one can call a path what never leads to
its destination, is opened up for man in his senses. 21
Deeply conscious of the challenge,
that the physical society, in time, may not cease for a moment,
while the moral one, in the idea, forms itself, that for the sake
of man's dignity his existence may not be endangered,l7
Schiller strives for a model of humanity that combines the
natural beauty of the Greeks with the historical selfTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Clearly in answer to Plato's Republic, Schiller considers
"the priority of the sensuous drive" in man's experience
"the clue to the whole history of human freedom.""
In a highly dialectical sequence of steps, Schiller presents first the synthesis of the senses and reason in man's
contemplation of beauty, then the synthesis of the material and the formal drive in man's play drive, and finally
the synthesis of the physical and the moral necessity in
man's aesthetic freedom. Aware that aesthetic freedom, as
a state of being, is only an ideal, but that, as momentary
balance between the senses and reason, it is part of our
human experience, Schiller proclaims one of the most
provocative sentences of his work:
23
�Man plays only where, in the full sense of the word, he is
man; and he is fUlly man only where he plays.B
The freedom of the aesthetic state that results from a balance between the necessity of the moral as well as the
physical state Schiller considers the "highest of all legacies, the legacy of humanity":
It, therefore, is not only poetically permitted, but philosophically right, if one calls beauty our second creator. For although she only makes our humanity possible and, for the
rest, leaves it up to our free will how far we want to actualize
it, she shares this trait with our original creator, nature, who
likewise provided us with only the capacity for humanity, but
left the use of it -to our own determination of will. 24
Like Plato and Hegel, before and after him, Schiller understands man's development from a natural to a moral
being in terms of an analogy between the individual and
the species. But where Plato and Hegel insist on the sovereignty of reason over the senses, Schiller claims that "the
path to the head has to be opened through the heart," for
the species as well as for the individual: 25
The dynamic state can only make society possible by overcoming nature through nature; the ethical state can only
make society (morally) necessary by subjecting the single to
the general will; the aesthetic state alone can make society actual because it consummates the will of the whole through
the nature of the individuaF6
In explanation, Schiller maintains that "beauty alone we
enjoy, at the same time, as individuals and as species, that
is, as representatives of the species."
Interpreters of Schiller's aesthetic theories have always
wondered whether, for Schiller, the aesthetic or the moral
state is finally the highest form of humanity. Like Meno' s
opening question about virtue, this dilemma has no direct
answer. In terms of actual achievement, the moral state
presents the height of human perfection, the aesthetic
state an ideal comparable only to the life of the Olympian
gods:
But does such a state of beautiful semblance exist, and
where is it to be found? As need, it exists in every finely tuned
soul, as reality, one might find it, like the pure church and the
pure republic, only in a few select circles, where not mindless
imitation of the ways of others, but inherent beautiful nature
guides human behavi(_)r, where man goes through the most
complex situations with bold simplicity and calm innocence,
and neither finds it necessary to offend another's freedom in
order to assert his own, nor to throw away his dignity in order
to exhibit grace. 27
This combination of Grace (Anmut) and Dignity
(Wiirde), an ideal realized among the Greeks but lost in
modern times, Schiller sees preserved in Greek works of
art:
24
Mankind has lost its dig11ity, but art has saved and preserved
it in significant stones; truth (Wahrheit) lives on in semblance
(Tiiuschung), and from the copy (Nachbild) the original (Urbild) shall be reconstituted."
This perspective, for Schiller, defines the artist's relationship to his time:
The artist certainly is the son of his time, but woe to him if,
at the same time, he is its pupil or even its favorite. Let a beneficent deity snatch the suckling betimes from his mother's
breast, nourish him with the milk of a better age and allow
him to reach maturity under a far-off Grecian sky. Then,
when he has become a man, let him return, a s_tranger, to his
own century; yet, not in order to please it with his appearance, but terrible as Agamemnon's son, in order to purify
it. The material he certainly will take from the present, but
the form from a nobler time, yes, from beyond all time, borrowed from the absolute unchangeable unity of his being. 29
This comprehensive task of the artist, to span the whole
history of human civilization in an attempt to give mankind its fullest possible expression, Schiller discusses more
specifically in On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. Understanding the poets as "preservers and avengers of nature,"
he distinguishes between two types, the Naive poet as
''being nature,'' the Sentimental poet as ''seeking nature.''
Expressive of two states of mankind, Naive poetry of a
union, Sentimental poetry of a separation between man
and nature, both forms of poetry, in different ways, show
a perfection of art: Naive poetry, as "imitation of reality,"
by fulfilling a finite goal, Sentimental poetry, as "presentation of the ideal," by striving for an infinite goal.
Schiller's terms Naive and Sentimental might sound
confusing at first. They certainly do not mean what they
mean today. The Naive poet, like a god behind his work,
lets the world speak for itself. In this sense, Schiller considers not only Homer, but also Shakespeare and Goethe,30
Naive poets. The Sentimental poet, on the other hand, an
intellectual presence in his work, reflects on the world he
portrays. In this sense, Schiller considers most modern
poets, including himself, Sentimental poets.
Striving for an ideal of poetry, Schiller wonders whether
and how far a work of art might combine classical individuality and modern ideality. To "individualize the ideal"
and "idealize the individual," in Schiller's eyes, would not
only constitute "the highest peak of all art," but also serve
as that "higher art," expected to restore the totality of
human nature which art had destroyed in the process of
civilization.
Understanding On Naive and Sentimental Poetry "so to
speak" as ua bridge to poetic production" 31 Schiller, again,
begins to write poetry-first philosophical poems, later
ballads and historical dramas:
I have, at the same time, the intention, in this way to reconcile
myselfwith the poetic :Muse whom, through my falling away
SUMMER 1982
�to the historic Muse (a fall indeed) I have grossly offended. If I
should succeed in regaining the favor of the god of poetry, I
hope tO hang up in his temple the spoils which I have labored
to obtain in the realm of philosophy and history, and to dedi~
cate myself to his service forever. 12
In 1795, Schiller writes to Countess v. Schimmelmann:
You wish, in your letter, that I continue in the poetic path
which I have entered. Why should I not, if you find it worth
your while to encourage me in it. Also by heeding your advice
I only follow the inclination of my heart. From the beginning,
poetry was the highest concern of my soul, and I only left it
for a time in order to return to it richer and worthier. 33
Encouraged by his friendship with Goethe, Schiller lived
the last ten years of his life for poetry. A constant source
of inspiration for both of them, this friendship had started
with a famous conversation in july of 1794. On the way
home from a meeting of the Society for Natural Science
in )ena, Goethe had outlined his Metamorphosis of Plants
to Schiller who, still a Kantian, had retorted: "This is no
experience! This is an idea!" To which Goethe, with courteous irony, had replied: "I certainly should be glad to have
ideas without my knowing and even to see them with my
eyes." In a letter following this conversation, Schiller
sums up the difference between them:
Your spirit, to an extraordinary degree, works intuitively,
and all your thinking powers seem to have compromised on
the imagination, so to speak, as their common representative.
... My mind works really more in a symbolizing way, and
thus I am suspended, as a kind of hybrid, between concept
and imagination, between rule and feeling, between technical
head and genius. This, especially in former years, has given
me a rather awk~ard appearance, in the field of speculation
as well as in the art of poetry; for, usually, the poet overtook
me where I was supposed to philosophize, and the philosophical spirit where I wanted to write poetry. Even now, it happens to me often enough that imagination disturbs my
abstractions and cold reason my poetry. If I can master these
two forces to the point that, through my freedom, I can assign
each one its limits, a beautiful fate shall still await me .... 34
Another friendship, with Wilhelm von Humboldt, the
great scholar in classical languages and literatures, was
crucial for Schiller's understanding of his relation to the
Ancients. In a Jetter of 1795, Humboldt writes:
I believe I can justify this seemingly paradoxical sentence that
you, on the one hand, are the direct opposite of the Greeks,
since your products exhibit the very character of autonomy;
and that, at the same time, you, among the moderns, again
are closest to them, since your products, after Greek ones, express necessity of form; only that you draw it from yourself,
while the Greeks take it from the aspect of external nature,
which is likewise necessary in its form. Wherefore also, Greek
form resembles more the object of the senses, yours more the
object of reason, even though the former, finally, also rests on
a necessity of reason, and yours, of course, also speaks to the
senses. 35
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
After the completion of his Bride of Messina, in 1803,
Schiller reminds Humboldt of this earlier exchange of
theirs:
My first attempt at a tragedy in strict form will give you
pleasure; you will be able to judge from it, whether as contemporary of Sophocles I might have been able to carry off a
prize. I have not forgotten that you called me the most
modern of all newer poets and, therefore, thought me in opposition to everything that could be called ancient.36
In an introduction to the publication of their correspondence, twenty-five years after Schiller's death, Humboldt
reminisces:
What every observer had to notice in Schiller, as characteristically defining, was that, in a higher and more pregnant sense
than perhaps ever in anyone else, thought was the element of
his life. Continual authentic intellectual activity almost never
left him, and only yielded to the more violent attacks of his
bodily illness. It seemed to him relaxation, not strain. This
showed itself especially in conversation for which Schiller
seemed most truly born. He never sought for a significant
topic of discourse, he left it more to chance to bring up the
subject matter, but from each he led the conversation to a
more general perspective, and after a few exchanges one
found oneself in the middle of a mind-provoking discussion.
He always treated the thought as a result to be reached together, always seemed to need the interlocutor, even if one
remained conscious of receiving the idea merely from him
.... Moving above his subject matter with perfect freedom,
he used every sideline which offered itself, and so his conversation was rich in words that carry the feature of happy creations of the moment. The freedom, however, did not curtail
the investigation. Schiller always held on to the thread which
had to lead to its end. 37
~chiller's gift for friendship which, throughout his life,
moved him, whether face to face or in letters, to engage in
conversation, found its early expression in a letter of April
1783:
In this wonderful breath of the morning, I think of you,
friend-and of my Carlos ... I imagine---Every poetic work
is nothing but an enthusiastic friendship or Platonic love for a
creation of our head .... If we can ardently feel the state of a
friend, we will also be able to glow for our poetic heroes. Not
that the capacity for friendship and Platonic love would simply entail the capacity for great poetry-for I might be very
able to feel a great character without being able to create it.
But it should be clear that a great poet has to have, at least,
the capacity for the highest friendship, even if he has notalways expressed it. 38
Schiller's return to poetry, and to dramatic poetry in
particular, begins with a work which stands out in many
ways. In the center between his four earlier and four later
plays, Schiller's Wallenstein, his only trilogy, surpasses the
25
�others both in subject matter and in poetic form. Like the
Republic among Plato's Dialogues, Wallenstein, among
Schiller's plays, in one dramatic poem of epic dimensions,
encompasses all the earlier and later themes.
Alternating between a stricter and looser dramatic
form, Schiller, in the last five years of his life, completed
Mary Stuart, a "Tragedy" about the Scottish queen and
Elizabeth I; The Maid of Orleans, a "Romantic Tragedy"
about Joan of Arc and her mysterious fight for France;
The Bride of Messina, a "Tragedy with Choruses," modeled on the Oedipus story; and finally William Tell, a
"Drama" about the Swiss fight for independent unity. Of
these later four plays only William Tell, Schiller's last
finished play (1805), is not a tragedy. Different from
Schiller's other heroes, Tell avoids the abyss of tragedy
because he does not presume any power beyond the
limits of republican government.
The translations of such diametrically opposed works as
Shakespeare's Macbeth (1801) and Racine's Phi!dre, (1805)
reveal the range of Schiller's dramatic sensibility as much
as his own poetic work.
The summit of that work, both in content and form, is
Schiller's Wallenstein, a modern historical drama about
the imperial general of the Thirty Years War. An account
of the last few days of his life that ends with his treason
and his assassination, Wallenstein confronts us with the
issue of war and peace as an expression of the tragic situa~
tion of man. Disregarding religious and political interests,
Wallenstein, a new Caesar, claims to be the only one able
to unify Europe. This ideal, though noble in itself, turns
into a treacherous weapon in the hands of lesser men and
thus, indirectly, is responsible for Wallenstein's tragic fall.
As Lincoln, later, formulated it in his Perpetuation speech:
Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task
they should undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition
would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a guber-
natorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle. What! think you these
places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a
Napoleon?-Neverl Towering genius disdains a beaten path.
It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.- It sees no distinction in
adding story to story, upon the monuments of fame, erected
to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to
serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any
predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.3 9
Like the Divided Line in Plato's Republic, Schiller's
Wallenstein, divided into the poet's Prologue and three
plays, leads from the realm of the visible to the realm of
the intelligible, from the realm of imagination and opinion to the realm of understanding and thought. Preceded
by a Prologue about the intricate relationship of life and
history to art and nature, the Wallenstein trilogy confronts
us first with Wallenstein's "shadow image," emerging
from the opinions of his soldiers, then with his "public
26
self,"' surrounded by his family and his generals, and finally with his "private self," suspended between the freedom of his heavenbound reflections and the necessity of
his earthbound actions.
The first dramatic poem after many years of historical
and philosophical studies, Wallenstein presents a fulfillment of Schiller's poetic ideal. As Hebbel's Schiller in his
Aesthetic Writings claims:
Unter den Richtern der Form bist du der erste, der einz'ge,
Der das Gesetz, das er gibt, gleich schon im Geben erfullt.
Among the judges of form, you are the first one, the only
Who, in the giving, fulfills already the law that he gives.
Schiller's "law" of aesthetic form, more than anything
else, implies a union between the natural grace and dignity of the Ancients and the historical self-consciousness
of the Moderns.
Even in Schiller's historical narrative of the confrontation between the Emperor, defending Catholicism, and
Gustav Adolf of Sweden, fighting for Protestantism, the
rise and fall of Wallenstein in the service of the Emperor
strangely suggests the story of Achilles. The historical figures and events of the Thirty Years War seem to fit the
poetic panorama of Homer's Iliad, where the natural enmity between Agamemnon, the ruler, and Achilles, the
hero, almost outweighs their national enmity against Hector, whose humanity encompasses both their natures. At
the end of his account of Wallenstein's role in the Thirty
Years War, Schiller writes:
Thus Wallenstein, at the age of fifty, ended his action-filled
and extraordinary life; raised by love of honor, felled by lust
for honor, with all his failings still great and admirable, unsurpassable if he had kept within bounds. The virtues of the ruler
and hero, prudence, justice, firmness and courage, tower in
his character colossally; but he lacked the gentler virtues of
the man, which grace the hero and gain love for the ruler.40
In answer to this Epilogue of the historian, the Prologue
of the poet promises:
Von der Parteien Gunst und Hass verwirrt
Schwankt sein Charakterbild in der Geschichte,
Doch euren Augen soli ihn jetzt die Kunst,
Auch eurem Herzen, menschlich naherbringen.
Denn jedes Ausserste fiihrt sie, die alles
Begrenzt und bindet, zur Natur zun1ck.
Blurred by the favor and the hate of parties
His image wavers within history.
But art shall now bring him more humanly
And closer to your eyes and to your heart.
For art, which binds and limits everything,
Brings all extremes back to the sphere of nature. 41
In the Preface to his Bride of Messina, Schiller speaks of
the relationship of historical truth to poetic truth or, as he
calls it in On Tragic Art, to the truth of nature:
SUMMER 1982
�Nature itself is only a spiritual idea, which never falls into the
senses. Under the cover of the appearances it lies, but it itself
never rises to·appearance. Only the art of the ideal is favored,
or rather shouldered with the task to grasp this spirit of the
whole and to bind it into bodily form. Though never before
the senses, this [type of art}, because of its creative power, can
bring it (the spirit of the whole} before the imagination and
thus be more true than all actuality and more real than all experience. From this it follows by itself that the artist cannot
use a single element from actuality as he finds it, that his work
must be ideal in all its parts, if it is supposed to have reality as
a whole and agree with nature.
Striving for a form of art that would be true both to historical reality and to nature, Schiller, in his Wallenstein,
surrounds the modern world of the Thirty Years War with
a mythical horizon of Homeric overtones- In a letter of
1794, in which he tells Korner of "writing his treatise on
the Naive and, at the same time, thinking about the plan
for Wallenstein," Schiller confesses:
In the true sense of the word, I enter a path wholly unknown to me, a path certainly untried, for in poetic matters,
dating back three, four years, I have put on a completely new
man.4Z
Reaching for the truth of nature by combining Naive and
Sentimental poetry, Schiller integrates Homer's "imitation of nature" into his own "presentation of the ideal."
In his advice to Goethe who, at the time of Schiller's work
on Wallenstein, was engaged in his Achilleis, an epic poem
about the death of Achilles, Schiller suggests:
Since it is certainly right that no Iliad is possible after the Iliad,
even if there were again a Homer and again a Greece, I believe I can wish you nothing better than that you compare
your Achilleis, as it exists now in your imagination, only with
itself, and in Homer only seek the mood, without rea1ly comparing your task with his . ... For it is as impossible as thankless
for the poet, if he should leave his homeground altogether
and actually oppose himself to his time. It is your beautiful
vocation to be a contemporary and citizen of both poetic
worlds, and exactly because of this higher advantage you will
belong to neither exclusively_43
Like catalysts in the process of establishing an ideal mode
of poetic expression, the echoes of Homer's Iliad in Schiller's Wallenstein accentuate its modernity.
In a major change from the History of the Thirty Years
War, Schiller's Wallenstein, like Homer's Iliad, begins in
the middle of the war. But where Homer, in the first
seven lines of the Iliad, describes the wrath of Achilles,
and the fateful clash between Achilles and Agamemnon,
Schiller, in the Prologue to Wallenstein, discusses the role
of art, and art's relationship to history and nature. Befitting the ancient epic poem, Homer's description centers
on Zeus and the fulfillment of his will; befitting the modern dramatic poem, Schiller's discussion centers on the
phenomenon of the great historical personality.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Both Homer's Iliad and Schiller's Wallenstein, with the
Catalogue of Ships and the first play of the trilogy, exhibit
the army and its various elements in a set picture. But
where the Catalogue of Ships, preceded by an invocation
to the Muse, merely lists the leaders of the Trojan war,
Wallenstein's Camp (the model for Brecht's Mother Courage), depicts the dissolution of life in the state of war
which, as a state of nature in the midst of the state of society, perverts all human values.
Both Homer's Iliad, in the center of its first half, and
Schiller's Wallenstein, in the center of its central play, The
Piccolomini, show the most tender human relationship
exposed to the harsh reality of war. But where Homer, in
the parting of Hector from wife and child on the wall of
Troy, focuses on the conflict between family and society,
Schiller, in the love scenes between Max and Thekla,
focuses on the conflict between individuals and society. A
poetic expression of Kant's Moral Law, founded on nothing but their hearts, love creates an island of freedom in
the sea of historical necessity.
Both Homer and Schiller, with the Shield of Achilles
and the chalice of the banquet at Pilsen, use the detailed
description of an artifact to highlight the world view implicit in each poem. But where the scenes on the shield
depict human life within the timeless order of nature and,
therefore, are self-explanatory, the scenes on the chalice
require an explanation not only for their reference to a
specific moment in human history, but also for their use
of allegory in portraying that moment.
Where Homer, in the First Book of the Iliad, tells of
Achilles' meeting with Thetis, and of her visit to Zeus on
Olympus, Schiller, in the opening scene of Wallenstein's
Death, the last play of the trilogy, shows Wallenstein concentrating on the long expected moment of the conjunction between the planets Venus and Jupiter. The change
of perspective, from trusting in divine powers that are
moved by will and fate to relying on heavenly bodies that
move in accordance with universal laws, does not affect
the hopes and the despair that either of them occasion.
Both Homer and Schiller, with dramatic suspense, portray their heroes in thoughtful solitude. But where Homer
paints the rich scene of Achilles sitting before his tent, in
the company of Patroclos, and singing about the glory of
men to the sound of his lyre, Schiller presents Wallenstein
absorbed in a monologue, reflecting on the relationship of
freedom and necessity in human nature. Unlike Achilles'
song which, in the creative process, unites freedom and
necessity, Wallenstein's reflection, in the form of a
syllogism with invalid premises, denies such a union and is
left with the fragments of abstract thought. Achilles' restful repose conveys the harmony of his song as much as
Wallenstein's restless stopping and starting the disharmony of his reflection.
In striking change from the History of the Thirty Years
War Schiller models the friendship between Wallenstein
and Max, the only non-historical character in the play, on
27
�the friendship between Achilles and Patroclos in Homer's
Iliad. Both Homer and Schiller, in the poetic constellation
of their characters and plots, make friendship, a middle
ground between a natural and a conventional bond, the
turning point for tragedy. Like the death of Patroclos for
Achilles, the death of Max brings Wallenstein closer to
realizing the tragic connection between freedom and ne·
cessity, borne out in the problematic relationship of
nature and convention.
The modern complexity of Schiller's Wallenstein, over
and against the relative simplicity of Homer's Iliad, shows
itself in content as well as in form. Expressive of the frag·
mentation of human nature in the course of history, Schiller's abstract language lends itself to portraying characters
that are torn between action and reflection. Striving for a
new totality of human nature, some of Schiller's characters parallel more than one of Homer's characters: Max,
both Patroclos and Hector; Thekla, both Briseis and Andromache. This double role of the modern characters is
the more significant, as it obliterates the enmity between
Greeks and Trojans and thus points to an individuality
which, viable or not, transcends the political nature of
man. Complementary to the parallels of characters, parallels of plots create a maze of poetic affinities· between the
ancient epic and the modern tragic poem. Discontinuous
and staggered, the parallels of plots seem to point not only
to the fragmentation of human nature in modern times,
but also to a new totality made possible through history.
Intent on exploring the way in which time and timelessness complement each other in the work of art, Schiller
and Goethe, in their letters during the years of Schiller's
work on Wallenstein, discuss the relationship of tragic to
epic poetry. Perceiving them as complementary art forms,
the one under the category of causality, the other under
the category of substantiality, Schiller defines tragedy as the
capture of ~'singular extraordinary moments," and epic
poetry as the depiction of "the permanent, persistent
whole of mankind."44 In agreement with Aristotle's no·
tion of tragedy as the more comprehensive art form of the
two,45 Schiller changes his early plans for an epic poem
about the Thirty Years War, centering on Gustav Adolf,
to his final ones for a dramatic poem, centering on
Wallenstein. Immersed in his task of translating Euripides,
in Schiller's eyes a poet on the way from Naive to Sentimental poetry, Schiller, in 1789, had written to Korner:
Let me add further that in getting better acquainted with
Greek plays I, in the end, abstract from them what is true,
beautiful and effective and, by leaving out what is defective, I
therefrom shape a certairi ideal through which my present
way shall be corrected and wholly founded.46
In a letter to Goethe, in which he speaks of "sketching
out a detailed scenario for Wallenstein," Schiller remarks:
I find the more I think about my own task and about the
way the Greeks dealt with tragedy that everything hinges on
the art of inventing a poetic fable. 47
28
Schiller's Wallenstein and Euripides' Iphigeneia in Aulis,
which Schiller had translated in 1788, apparently follow
the same poetic fable. In both dramas, the leader of the
army orders members of his family to join him at his
camp. In both, the political reasons for this move are disguised as personal reasons. In both, the heroic action of a
youth close to the leader interferes with his plans and finally causes tragedy and death. In the comparison with
Homer's Iliad, the main parallels were drawn between the
Emperor and Agamemnon, Wallenstein and Achilles, and
Max and Patroclos. In the comparison with Euripides'
Iphigeneia in Aulis, however, the main parallels would
have to be drawn between Wallenstein and Agamemnon,
Max and Achilles, and Thekla and Iphigeneia. The fundamental theme of Schiller's Wallenstein, the necessary connection between nature and convention, emerges in the
"living shape"48 of Wallenstein, presenting, in one
modern historical figure, Achilles, the archetype of the
natural hero, and Agamemnon, the archetype of the conventional ruler.
In the 26th letter On the Aesthetic Education of Man,
Schiller comments on the sovereign power of the artist:
With unlimited freedom he can fit together what nature
separated, as long as he can somehow think it together, and
separate what nature connected, as long as he can only detach it in his mind. Here nothing ought to be sacred to him
but his own law, as long as he only watches the marking
which divides his province from the existence of things or
realm of nature.
True to the reality of history, Schiller presents Wallenstein in a modern historical drama, set in the world of the
Thirty Years War. Separating what nature connected,
Schiller omits those features of the historical Wallenstein
that would disqualify him for being a tragic hero. True to
the reality of poetry, where the historical characters, as
poetic figures, become symbolic beings, Schiller presents
Wallenstein in a dramatic poem, surrounded by a mythical horizon. Fitting together what nature separated,
Schiller strikes parallels, respectively, between one historical and more than one mythical character, and between
one historical and more than one mythical plot. The fact
that the poetic figure of Wallenstein reflects the archetypes from Homer and Euripides in a cross between naturally opposed, but artistically complementary, characters
demonstrates both the fragmentation and the striving for
a new totality of human nature in the course of history.
By reflecting the Iliad as well as the pregnant moment before the Iliad, Schiller's Wallenstein, a living example of
the unity of time and timelessness, opens up a perspective
from history to epic as well as tragic poetry. With his integration of Greek "imitation of nature" into his own
"presentation of the ideal," Schiller seems to point to the
fulfillment of an ideal in which art and nature would meet
again.
SUMMER 1982
�To a letter in which Korner had suggested a few changes
in the plot of Wallenstein, Schiller replies with unusual
sharpness:
A product of art, insofar as it has been designed with artistic
sense, is a living work, where everything hangs together with
everything, where nothing can be moved without moving
everything from its place.49
Correlation of everything with everything can be detected
in more than one element of Schiller's dramatic poem:
the polarity of characters sustains the symmetry of plots
which, in concentric circles of scenes and acts, form the
whole of the trilogy. Corresponding to the three parts of
the Prologue, the three plays of Wallenstein explore the
relationship between nature and art, portrayed in the life
of individuals, representative of the life of mankind. Schil·
ler's integration of characters and plots from Greek epic
and tragic poetry into his modern historical drama con·
tributes to the symbolic nature of his poetic figures and
poses the question of the relationship between Ancients
and Moderns, fully discussed in his philosophical writings.
The correspondence between dramatic characters and
aesthetic principles ties together life and art by interpret·
ing them in terms of history, understood in the light of
nature.
The evidence of such complex relationships between
the various elements of Schiller's Wallenstein certainly
proves it to be a Hproduct of art/' but does it prove it to be
a "living work?" In a long, painstaking letter about Wallenstein, Humboldt writes to his friend:
We often talked with each other about this poem, when it was
scarcely more than sketched out. Yau considered it the
touchstone with which to test your poetic capacity. With admiration, but also with apprehension, I saw how much you
bound up in this task .... Such masses no one ever has set in
motion; such a comprehensive subject matter no one ever has
chosen; an action, the motivating springs and consequences
of which, like the roots and branches of a tremendous treetrunk, lie so far spread out and dispersed in such diverse
forms, no one ever has presented in one tragedy. 50
In a letter to Korner, Schiller confesses:
None of my old plays has as much purpose and form as my
Wallenstein already has; but, by now, I know too well what I
want and what I have to do that I could make the task so easy
for myself. 51
In the light of his notion of the poets as "preservers" and
"avengers" of nature, Schiller, in the letters On ihe Aesthetic Education of Man, compares the artist to Agamemnon's son who returns to the house of his fathers in order
to avenge the past on the present. Understanding him as a
contemporary and citizen of more than one world, Schiller advises the artist to take the material for his work from
the present, but the form from "a nobler time, yes, from
beyond all time, borrowed from the absolute, unchangeTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
able unity of his being." In compliance with his own advice, Schiller takes the material for his Wallenstein from
modern history, but the form from a blend of Naive and
Sentimental poetry, explicated in the aesthetic theories of
his philosophical writings. Fully aware of the artificial
nature of such a process, Schiller, nevertheless, expects to
achieve an ideal of poetry in which history and philosophy
would contribute to the vindication of nature. The fact
that no one, for now almost two hundred years, has seen
that Schiller's Wallenstein, in appearance the most
modern of his dramas, in substance is also the one where
Naive and Sentimental poetry blend most completely,
should be enough of an indication that history and philosophy, though indispensable for Schiller's work, are only
means towards a higher goal: their fulfillment in poetry.
To end with Schiller's own words:
All paths of the human spirit end in poetry, and the worse for
it if it lacks the courage to lead them there. The highest philosophy ends in a poetic idea, so the highest morality, the
highest politics. It is the poetic spirit that, for all three of
them, delineates their ideal which to approximate is their
highest perfection.sz
l. The main sources for my account of Schiller's life are: F. Burschell,
F. Schiller, In Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, Hamburg-1958; G.v
Wilpert, Schiller-Chronik, Sein Leben und Schaffen, Stuttgart 1958.
With a few exceptions, references to secondary literature have been
kept out of the account.
2. Translations of dramatic works, C.E. Passage, Wallenstein, 1958; Don
Carlos, 1959; Mary Stuart, The Maid of Orleans, 1961; The Bride of
Messina, William Tell, Demetrius, 1962; Intrigue and Love, 1971, New
York; F.J. Lamport, The Robbers and Wallenstein, London 1979.
Translations of philosophical works, On the Aesthetic Education of Man,
R. Snell, New York 1954; E.M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby, dual
language edition with extensive introduction and commentary, Oxford
1967; On Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, J.A. Elias,
New York 1966.
3. Wallenstein's Death, III, 13, 1813.
4. F. Burschell, F. Schiller, 7.
5. G.v. Wilpert, Schiller-Chronik, 41.
6. To Lempp (1), Jun. 19, 1783.
7. In A Schiller Symposium, ed. L. Willson, Austin, Texas 1960, 65-81.
8. See. T. Sowell, Ethnic America, A History, New York 1981,54: "The
British brought nearly 30,000 German mercenary soldiers to the col·
onies to try to put down the American rebellion. These were not individual volunteers but soldiers sold or rented to the British by the rulers
of various German principalities."
9. Th. Mann, Versuch ilber Schiller, Frankfurt a.M. 1955, 35 (Last
Essays: translation R. and C. Winston, New York 1966, 29, but without
this personal reference).
10. In A Schiller Symposium, Austin 1960, 31-48.
11. Dec. 4, 1788.
12. To Baggesen, Dec. 16, 1791.
13. On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Letter 2.
14. The Artists, 443-445.
15. Wallenstein, Prol. 61-69 (translation C.E. Passage; "great objectives,"
my correction).
16. Aesthetic Education, Letter 2.
17. Aesthetic Education, Letter 3.
18. Aesthetic Education, Letter 6.
29
�19. Aesthetic Education, Letter 6.
20. Aesthetic EduCation, Letter 8.
21. Aesthetic Education, Letter 11.
22. Aesthetic Education, Letter 20.
23. Aesthetic Education, Letter 15.
24. Aesthetic Education, Letter 21.
25. Aesthetic Education, Letter 8.
26. Aesthetic Education, Letter 27.
27. Aesthetic Education, Letter 27.
28. Aesthetic Education, Letter 9.
29. Aesthetic Education, Letter 9.
30. Note that Schiller's judgment (1794/95) dates from long before even
the First Part of Goethe's Faust {1806).
31. To Korner, Sep. 12, 1794.
32. To E.v. Schimmelmann, Jul. 13, 1793.
33. To C.v. Schimmelmann, Nov. 4, 1795.
34. To Goethe, Aug. 31, 1794.
35. To Schiller, Nov. 6, 1795.
36. To Humboldt, Feb. 17, 1803.
37. Ober Schiller und den Gang seiner Geistesentwicklung, 1830, in
Werke, II, ed. A. Flitner/K. Giel, Darmstadt 1969, 361-362.
38. To Reinwald, Apr. 14, 1783, quoted in F. Burschell, F. Schiller,
47-48.
39. A. Lincoln, "The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions," Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, Jan. 27,
1838.
40. History of the Thirty Years War, End of IV.
30
41. Wallenstein, Pro!. 102-107 (translation C.E. Passage; "within",
"heart", my corrections).
42. To Komer, Sep. 4, 1794.
43. To Coethe, May 18, 1798; in his earlier work Hermann and
Dorothea Goethe closely imitates Homer. Under the names of the nine
Muses, starting with Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry, and ending with
Urania, the Muse of philosophical poetry, the nine Cantos of Hermann
and Dorothea present the whole realm of poetic expression. Set against
the historical background of the French Revolution, the story of Hermann and Dorothea, together with the different modes of poetry evolving from each other, seems to be a modern version of Homer's Shield of
Achilles. The Muse of epic poetry, however, not only governs the First
Canto, but her spirit prevades the poem as a whole: Homeric meter,
Homeric diction, Homeric epHhets and episodes, though softened from
heroic to idyllic tone, echo Iliad as well as Odyssey in every line of
Goethe's poem. As Goethe, in his elegy "Hermann and Dorothea,"
states it: "Doch Home ride zu sein, auch nur als letzter, ist schon" ("Yet,
to be a Homeride, even if only the last one, is beautiful").
44. To Goethe, Apr. 25, 1797; Aug. 24, 1798.
45. To Goethe, May 5, 1797.
46. Mar. 9, 1789.
47. Apr. 4, 1797.
48. Aesthetic Education, Letter 15.
49. Mar. 24, 1800.
50. To Schiller, Sep. 1800.
51. Nov. 28, 1796.
52. To. C.v. Schimmelmann, Nov. 4, 1795.
SUMMER 1982
�Some Chinese Poems
Translated by Julie Landau
Six Dynasties Period (317-588)
Anonymous
Tzu- YEH SoNGS
Three Selections
I
When first I knew him,
I thought two hearts could be as one
My thread hung on a broken loom,
How could it make good cloth?
II
Through the long night, I can not sleep,
How dazzling the moon!
I think I hear someone callingAnd sigh 'yes' to the emptiness
III
I am as the morning star,
Fixed for a thousand years.
Your fickle heart goes with the sun,
Rising in the east, while it sets in the west!
Julie Landau has studied Chinese at Columbia University and for a year
(1967-1968) in Hong Kong. Her translations of Chinese poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Renditions {Hong Kong), and in the anthology, Song without Music: Chinese Tzu Poetry, edited by Stephen C.
Soong, (University of Washington Press, 1980).
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
31
�T'ao Ch'ien (365-427)
RETURNING TO 1HE FARM TO liVE
I
I never had a taste for men's affairs
Mountains and hills are what I love
Stupidly, I was drawn in
Once snared, thirty years went by
The fettered bird longs for the forest
The fish in the pool thinks of tbe lake
To clear some land in the wilderness
The foolishness I held to, and came back to farm.
Ten acres and a place to live
A thatched hut, a few rooms
Elm and willow shade the back
Peach and plum grace the front
A village in the distance
Sends up light smoke
Far down the lane, a dog barks
A cock crows atop the mulberryMy door is far from the world's muddle
I've room enough and time
Caged for so long
At last I am myself again
II
The wilderness is out of reach of men's intrigues
An alley leading nowhere attracts few wheels and reins
All day the bramble gate stays closed
In bare rooms, where are worldly thoughts to settle
From time to time, winding through rough country
Others too part the grass to come and go
We meet-no time for idle talkMulberry and hemp is all we think about
Mulberry and hemp are bigger day by day
And day by day I open up more land
We live in fear that frost and hail
Will kill the crop and scatter it like straw
These are from a series of five poems on the same theme.
32
SUMMER 1982
�IMITATION OF OLD POEM
A riot of orchids under the window
Dense, dense the willow by the hallWhen first we parted
You did not say it would be long
Once out the door, you went ten thousand miles
And on the way met others.
Hearts drunk before we spoke
What need then for wine?
But orchids fade, willows wither
Promises are broken.
Go, tell the young
To love and not be true
Rashly destroys a lifeFor parted, what is left?
T'ang Dynasty (618-907)
Tu Fu (712-770)
A LONGING LOOK IN SPRING
The country's in pieces, the river flows on
The capital, trees and grass, in full springAfflicted by the times, flowers cry
Birds grow restive in the air of partings
Warning beacons have burned three months
Letters from home are worth ten thousand in gold
White hair grows so thin
It can not bear a pin
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
33
�MOONLIGHT NIGHT REMEMBERING
MY YOUNGER BROTHER
The drums of battle interrupt my journey
The front in autumn, lonely as the wild goose cry
Dew from tonight: white
The moon, bright as at home
My brother and I, now parted
Without a home to send us word, who lives, who died
Our letters, forever on the way,
And war, and war, and war
THE GUEST ARRIVES
North of the cottage and south, spring floods,
Day in day out, my only guests are gulls.
The path has not been swept of petals
When I make wide the bramble gate for you.
Only a simple supper- the market is so far,
Even the wine is roughIf you'd care to drink with my old neighbor,
I'll call across the bamboo fence that we've a cup for him.
CLIMBING
Impatient wind, high sky, baboons shrilly lamenting,
Shoal in clear water, white sand, birds slowly circling
Space without bounds, the whisper of falling leaves,
River without end, rushing and tumbling.
Ten thousand miles I travelled in autumn,
Full of years, sick and alone, I climb.
Hardship, suffering, regret, frost my temples.
New misfortunes keep me even from my muddy wine
34
SUMMER 1982
�Li Po (701-762)
BRING WINE!
Don't you see the waters of the Yellow River come from the sky
Flow out to sea and never return?
Don't you see in bright mirrors of high rooms, white hair lamented
Black silk in the morning, by evening pure snow?
Of life and happiness, drain the cup,
Don't leave the gold bottle in the moonlight in vain,
Use the talent heaven bestowed,
Squander a thousand in gold, it can come back,
Roast a lamb, slaughter a cow, enjoy life,
In company you must drink three hundred cups!
Honored Ts'en,
Tan-ch'iu, good sir,
Bring wine!
Give the cup no rest
I'll sing you a song ...
Lend an ear ...
The bell, the drum and all life's luxuries are not enough
Stay drunk, and never come to
History is full of saints and sages, lonely and forgotten
Only the drinkers leave their mark
Prince Chen, in his day, feasted at Ping Le
Spent thousands on a measure of wine, the price of laughter
When buying, don't say you can't afford it
Just buy and drink and pour
The dappled horse,
The fine fur coat,
Let's trade them for a splendid wine
Dissolve ten thousand ancient sorrows
Ts'en and Tan-ch'iu are names. Ts'en is thought to be the poet, Ts'en Ts'an.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
35
�Kao Shih (702?-765)
SONG OF YEN
(written to music)
In the twenty-sixth year of K'ai Yuan, an officer
who returned from having served at the border
showed me "The Song of Yen." Affected by
thoughts of the campaign, I wrote this to the
same rhyme.
Lured northeast by the smoke of Han victories
Generals leave home to wipe out straggling opposition
A man by nature likes to use his power
And the emperor is pleased.
Brass and drums echo along Yii Pass,
Banners serpentine through rock
Battle orders fly over the desert
The fires of the khails light up Lang Shan
Mountain and river: bleak and chill
Wind and rain: allies to the Tartar horsemen.
Up front, half our troops are dead
In camp, girls still sing and dance.
Deep in the desert, autumn withers grass and trees
Few men are left to see the sunset at the lonely fort.
The privileged were intrepid
Strength spent, the pass still under siege,
Those in armor diligently endure, cut off.
Jade tears are shed at home
Young girls, south of the wall, despair
Soldiers, north of the front, look back in vain
They're out of reach
In that forsaken place what is there
But the stench of death, all day, rising in clouds?
Chill battle sounds fill the night
And everywhere white steel and blood,
Valor and death without reward.
Can't you see the misery of it all
That even now, it's only victory that counts?
The twenty-sixth year of K'ai YUan is A.D. 738. Yen is a state in north
China. "Song of Yen" belongs to a genre of ballad called ylieh-fu, folk ballads collected in the Han Dynasty and their later imitations. The imitations,
of which this is one, usually follow the original theme, and retain the tide,
but describe current ills or events. "White Snow Song" and "Bring Wine" are
also yiieh-fu.
36
SUMMER 1982
�Ts'en Ts'an (715-770)
WHITE SNOW SONG
Sending Field Clerk Mou Back to the Capital
A north wind snaps the frosted grass
Under the Tartar sky, snow in August
Everything suddenly transformed as by the first spring breeze
That in one night
Opens ten thousand pear blossoms
Snow sprinkles bead curtains, wets silk screens,
Fox furs aren't warm enough, silk quilts seem thin
The general can not arch his horn tipped bow,
Frontier guards' coats of mail, frozen, but still worn.
On tangled, jagged desert, a sea of ice,
Sad clouds, frozen, stiff, gloomy, extend ten thousand leagues
The garrison commander toasts the the departing guest,
Tartar instruments-lute, mandolin and reed pipe, play ...
Flake upon flake, the evening snow piles up against the gate;
Vainly, the wind rips the red banner, stiff with cold
Lun T' ai East Gate, I see you off
You go by the snow filled T'ien Shan pass
The road curves, you're out of sight,
You leave nothing here but the marks of your horse on the snow
Lun T'ai is a place on the northern border, outside the Great Wall.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
37
�Liu Tsung-yiian (773-819)
OLD MAN FISHING
An old fisherman passes the night beside the western cliff
At dawn, scoops clear water from the Hsiang, kindles bamboo
The mist clears, the sun comes out-not a soul in sight
The long oar whispers in the water; green hills, green water
Turn back and see the river flow from heaven
Above the cliff, clouds idly play tag.
The Hsiang is a river.
Afternote
These selections represent two disparate periods of Chinese
history: one of disunity, political instability, and confusion;
one of empire. After the Han Dynasty disintegrated in the
third century, attempts to reunify China faz/ed. The north
fell to barbarians and was ruled successively by a variety of
foreign dynasties; the south, by a succession of weak, regional, native dynasties. Among the intelligentsia- China's
traditional bureaucracy- many retreated from political life
rather than take the risks of aligning themselves with the
wrong usurping famzly. Confucianism, which had adapted itself to the exigencies of an orderly, unified empire, declined
in importance. The more mystical ideas of Buddhism and
Taoism were in the ascendant. Many poets sought nature,
wine, and seclusion. One of the greatest of the recluse poets
of the Six Dynasties period was T'ao Ch'ien.
Folk poetry, especially love poetry, constrained by the Confucian morality of the Han, re-emerged in this period of dis-
38
unity-free, suggestive, and amoral. Tzu-yeh (Midnight) is
thought to have been a singing girl of the fourth century.
Tzu-yeh songs, some of which she may have written 1 are un-
inhibited love songs whose simplicity and frankness are their
charm.
China, north and south, was reunited by the Sui Dynasty
(581-618). During the T'ang Dynasty (618-907} China was,
once more, strong and expansionist. Confucian values again
prevailed. Most poets chose to serve the state in China's vast
bureaucracy. Rarely in favor at court for long, many passed
much of their lives as minor offiCials in remote, often disease-
ridden, outposts of empire. Kao Shih and Ts'en Ts'an wrote
of life and war at the frontier in the far west and northwest.
Liu Tsung-yiian wrote from exz/e in the south. Tu Fu's war
poems descn'be the chaos around the capital at the time ofthe
An Lu-shan rebellion (755), an uprising which the dynasty
survived, but from which it never really recovered-J. L.
SUMMER 1982
�That Graver Fire Bell: A Reconsideration
of the Debate over Slavery from the
Standpoint of Lincoln
Robert Loewenberg
It was George Fitzhugh, the nation's most profound defender of slavery and the man who proposed to enslave
whites as well as blacks, who was the first to make the
point that the proslavery position and abolitionism do not
represent two opposite extremes but two sides of a single
extreme. Considering his own position in support of slavery a form of socialism, a view not disputed by Marxist or
radical historians now, Fitzhugh insisted that abolitionism
was akin to slavery in principle and in ultimate tendency.'
He contended that abolitionism was a malevolent brand
of socialism, however, while the slavery he defended was
benevolent.
But if the ideas at the root of both proslavery and abolition were alike, are we to suppose that the Civil War was a
gigantic hoax, each side fighting benightedly for the same
bad cause? Or is it more likely that the people of those
times had some reasonably clear understanding of what issues were at stake, while it is we who have been misled by
extremists? In fact, our present view of the period and all
that is connected to it is influenced by the assumption,
virtually universal and unquestioned, that the proslavery
and abolitionist extremes were opposed in theory because
they were opposed regarding the Southern slave. But contemporary Americans were not confronted with a choice
between abolitionism as pure freedom on one side, and
Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University, Robert Loewen berg has previously contributed "The Trivialization of the Holocaust
as an Aspect of Modern Idolatry" (Winter 1982) to the St. John's Review.
He has published Equality on the Oregon Frontier (University of Washington Press, 1976) and articles on the history of the American Northwest and on values in writing history.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
some brand of slavery on the other. The real extremes were
these: slavery and freedom, not proslavery and abolition.
It would seem that no opposition could be clearer than
slavery and freedom. The difference is commonsensical;
any slave or free man could tell the difference. But we are
accustomed to uses of language which convey more confusion than common sense regarding freedom or regarding most political terms. For example, are men free when
they are equal before the law, an ancient ideal which Lincoln cherished; or does freedom require an equality that
rejects law as a disguise for power, a bourgeois convention, as the abolitionists and their defenders claimed?
The antebellum debate over slavery was a struggle for
control of the terms of public debate. The struggle regarding words has, in the main, been won by abolitionism. Today we see the Civil War, and much else, in abolitionist
terms. How ironic then that George Fitzhugh, slavery's
great advocate, should now provide us with the means to
develop a more correct and historically accurate understanding of freedom. Fitzhugh demythologized abolition.
But, inadvertently, he did more than this. In identifying
abolition with his own proslavery position, Fitzhugh did
not explain its opposite, or freedom.
Fitzhugh's demonstration-and it was devastatingthat the abolitionists were the ones, even more than he,
who called for an end to free society as the source of all
enslavements, including wage slavery, child abuse, intern~
perance, and female political disabilities, amounted to this:
freedom as such did not exist except in a negative sense as
an absence of slavery. In other words, Fitzhugh, agreeing
that abolition was pure freedom while also insisting that
abolitionism was reducible to slavery, seemed to imply
39
�there could be no such thjng as freedom at all. Unless
common sense and philosophy both fail us, however, there
must be an opposite to slavery. Freedom is the opposite
of slavery.
In his critique of abolition, Fitzhugh unwittingly showed
that Lincoln was the real champion of the principle of
freedom in those times. Lincoln was, if anything, even
more alive to the character of abolition than Fitzhugh.
Not in the middle between the opposites of abolition
and proslavery, Lincoln, in fact, spoke for freedom as the
opposite of slavery. Lincoln, not William Lloyd Garrison,
Elijah P. Lovejoy, Horace Greeley, or Thaddeus Stevens,
is properly contrasted with Fitzhugh, the South's most
complete defender of slavery. And, if this is a proper pair·
ing, we might anticipate a certain congruence between
the analyses of Lincoln and Fitzhugh. As a matter of fact,
they made the same discoveries from opposite sides of the
debate about slavery and freedom. Fitzhugh detected
sameness where a difference had been supposed to reside.
Lincoln discovered that two things that seemed the same,
freedom and abolition of slavery, were really different.
Fitzhugh exposed the kinship of slavery and abolitionist
doctrines; Lincoln showed that his own defense of free·
dom, based upon the principle of consent of the governed,
was different from, actually antithetical to, Stephen A.
Douglas's supposed defense of freedom, which was also
based upon the principle of consent of the governed.
Lincoln called Douglas's doctrine of popular sover·
eignty, according to which voters living in the territories
would decid.e the question of slavery prior to statehood, a
"covert . .. zeal for . .. slavery." 2 Douglas said that a major-
ity had the right to do whatever it wished, that is, to be
free, even to vote others into slavery and to deprive them
of the consent of the governed. Douglas opposed slavery,
but would not, he said, intolerantly impose his personal
view on others. He did not care whether slavery were
voted up or down so long as people voted and the majority
governed. The good and bad of slavery for Douglas was a
matter of votes and personal conviction, "conscience" as
it was sometimes called.
Lincoln argued that Douglas's version of consent of the
governed subverted freedom in the moment it professed
to uphold it. The themes of reversal and betrayal are cen·
tral ones in Lincoln's thought during the years 1838 to
1865. Popular sovereignty twisted the principles of Ameri·
can government and made the Declaration of Indepen·
dence the foundation for slavery, just as the Dred Scott
Decision of 1857 misinterpreted the Constitution, making
it an instrument for slavery and force instead of an instru·
men! of law and right.3 Lincoln saw at the root of Douglas's
idea the reversal of the principle of consent of the gov·
erned as found· in the Declaration and the betrayal of law
and the Constitution. Fitzhugh also contemplated a rever·
sal of law and right, but from the opposite perspective.
Slavery, he said, is the "inalienable right" of everyone' He
dismissed as irrelevant the then common defenses of slav·
40
ery based upon biblical and racial grounds and proclaimed
that slavery was suitable and just. Slavery was the higher
law.
The higher law doctrine was, of course, not Fitzhugh's
slogan but William Seward's. Seward proclaimed it in
1850 during the debates that preceded the famous Com·
promise of 1850 which men hoped would extinguish all
debate about the slavery question. This was more than
ten years before Seward became Lincoln's Secretary of
State. Actually, Fitzhugh loathed every kind of law and
politics~like the abolitionists. In fact, the debate over
slavery and freedom focussed on just the point the aboli·
tionists and Fitzhugh wished away: It was a debate about
law.
From the standpoint of the abolitionist identification of
abolition and freedom, the measure of Lincoln and the
nation turns upon the correct relation of law to the higher
law. From this point of view Lincoln is seen to have sacri·
ficed the Declaration to the Constitution, principle to
expedience. In particular, Lincoln failed to make emanci·
pation the aim of the Civil War rather than simply the res·
!oration of the Union. Those who take this view also think
that Lincoln preferred property rights and states' rights to
human rights. This group, which contains most writers,
includes those whom C. Vann Woodward has called "lib·
era] and radical historians who identify with abolition." 5
These historians are divided between those who despise
Lincoln as morally obtuse and others who credit him with
prudence. But the important point is granted by all, namely
that the abolitionist rhetoric, with its conflicts between
the Declaration and the Constitution, the Union and
emancipation, human rights and property rights, is true.
Lincoln denied this. The abolitionist context and the sev·
era] sets of opposites that are part of it is exactly what Lin·
coln did not grant as properly framing the issues or dividing
the people in the years before or during the Civil War.
Above all, Lincoln did not regard law or the Constitution
as inferior to any "higher law," whether in the consciences
of abolitionists and transcendentalists such as Henry
David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, or in Douglas's
law of the majority.
It is taken for granted that Lincoln, however great a
man, was a "moderate," in the sense of one who stands
against pure good in favor of expedience. Not Lincoln's
version of freedom but Emerson's or Thoreau's is the one
that post-Civil War Americans have been taught in schools,
in colleges, and from the pulpit, where Lincoln called for
freedom to be taught. Moreover, freedom emphasizing, in
Thoreau's words, that "it is not desirable to cultivate are·
spec! for the law, so much as for the right," is contrary to
Lincoln's teaching.' Lincoln denied the conflict of right
and law, as Thoreau posed it, because he denied the eleva·
lion of what Thoreau and the abolitionists called "con·
science" to a level transcending law and government.
Abolitionist ideals which were articulated best by Emer·
son and Thoreau, who were not active abolitionists, are
SUMMER 1982
�part of a tradition that is hostile to Lincoln as are those related versions of American history we know as liberal and
radical. The "radical vein which the conservative and reactionary of Christendom had for centuries endeavored to
keep submerged," and that Perry Miller finds in Jonathan
Edwards, is the vein that also nourished nineteenth century abolition.7 What Miller calls reactionary and conservative, however, Christendom called heretical-in particular, gnosticism. Abolitionism proper had its beginnings
in the sixteenth century among the followers of Thomas
Miinzter. Although historian David B. Davis calls the
MUnzterites the
11
first abolitionists" in order to praise
them, he is not wrong as to fact 8 But Miinzter's and Jonathan Edwards's vision of freedom is the one Lincoln instructed Americans to reject.
In the decade of the 1850s, when George Fitzhugh was
at the peak of his powers, producing in his two books the
most important defense of slavery ever made by an American up to that time, Lincoln was embarking on the early
stages of a second career in national politics. The corner·
stone of this effort, like the first, was his conviction that
slavery was wrong and freedom was right. As Lincoln said
in a speech at Peoria, Illinois, in October 1854, "I say this
is the leading principle-the sheet anchor of American
republicanism ... this [is] our ancient faith .... Now the
relation of masters and slaves is~ pro tanto, a total violation
of this principle."' As a practical matter, Lincoln's position committed him to opposing the extension of slavery
into territories acquired from Mexico in 1848. One could,
as Lincoln often said, compromise about the existence of
slavery as a fact only if one did not compromise with the
fact of slavery as evil. The great point of difference between Lincoln and some contemporaries (as well as later
critics) is that they compromised in the other direction.
They would not give ground on the existence of slavery,
but they compromised, unknowingly, with freedom itself.
This was Lincoln's quarrel with abolition as well as with
Douglas. Freedom and slavery for Lincoln were absolutely
opposed: the house divided.
By freedom Lincoln meant nothing outwardly complex
or unfamiliar to the men of his day. Those who heard his
speeches, beginning with his first major address in 1838,
the Lyceum Address, or who listened to his debates with
Douglas two decades later, understood that when Lincoln
said "freedom" he had something clearly in mind. By freedom Lincoln meant this: law. By law Lincoln did not
mean what is sometimes called positive or public law, or
any other historical or relativistic idea. Rather, Lincoln
understood by law transcendence, which is the opposite
of relativism. The law is lawful because it transcends times
and places as well as majorities and the higher law of individual consciences. Lincoln saw that law is the "sheet anchor" of American republicanism; in his words, "No man
is good enough to govern another man without that other's
consent." 10 To this proposition Lincoln opposed popular
sovereignty. The fight against Douglas occupied Lincoln
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
untill860. After that time he defended his position against
the Radicals in Congress who said with Thoreau that "my
only obligation ... is to do at any time what I think right
[or] ... conscience."]\ But both periods and both fights
show the same understanding of the law and freedom.
Law and freedom, as they are found in the Constitution
and the Declaration, are alike a unity or a whole in Lincoln's thought. These two documents were related, he
said in January 1861, as an apple of gold to a frame of silver: "The picture was made, not to conceal or destroy the
apple; but to adorn, and preserve it." 12
The physical Union that Lincoln wanted to save, embodying the union of the Declaration and the Constitution, included other unions. Among these is the union of
the politic and the ethical. Lincoln did not suppose this an
impossible union as later Max Weber, the founder of modern social science, would do. Lincoln was certainly an
idealist. By idealism Lincoln understood the ongoing struggle of men, of talented men especially, to meet the challenges to virtuous and civil dealings posed by an opposite
idealism which holds that men should compel reality to fit
their ideals of it. This second kind of idealism, the source
of modern fanaticism, has its roots in a view of politics
and of words that Lincoln instinctively deplored. At the
root of Lincoln's union was a relationship ofChristianity ·
and law, properly understood. He called this union "political religion."
Political religion was Lincoln's answer to the question
which he himself raised in 1838 in the Lyceum Address
about how best to secure that ~~government . .. conducing
more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty
than any of which the history of former times tells us,"
i.e., American republicanism. He says:
The answer is simple. Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity swear by the blood of
the Revolution never to violate in the least particular the laws
of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.
As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration . .. so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let
every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred
honor. ... Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every
American mother to the lisping babe ... let it be taught in
schools, in seminaries, and in colleges ... let it be preached
from the pulpit . .. in short, let it become the political religion
of the nation. 13
This unity of Christianity and law, this political religion, is
what prompted Lincoln to call American republicanism
the second greatest institution in the world after Christianity. Let it be clear what political religion was not. Lincoln did not regard Christianity as a thing merely useful to
order. He also did not understand by political religion any
substitution of religion for politics. This substitution, especially in its insidious modern form, was the fanaticism
that threatened America. By political religion Lincoln understood a certain connection of the human to the divine,
41
�the connection that had long sustained Western political
thought about freedom.
Lincoln understood, as Aristotle before him, that all political life has as its condition the principle that "the mind
is moved by the mover." 14 In other words, man is free because he is related to the divine; he is, as Plato put it in a
pertinent observation on suicide, the possession of the
godsY It is not coincidental that the present expression of
the abolitionist position as elaborated by Alexandre Kojeve (whose doctrines influence such important studies of
American slavery as David B. Davis's) is opposite to this.
"Death and freedom," Kojeve has written, "are but two
... aspects of one and the same thing." Kojeve's understanding of freedom stands on suicide which, in its turn,
reflects and requires atheism. "If Man lived eternally and
could not die, he could not render himself immune to
god's omnipotence either. But if he can kill himself ... ,"
then he is free. That is to say, freedom rests upon "a complete atheistic philosophy." 16
Naturally, these two extremes regarding freedom partake of related extremes in politics. The practical aspect
of Lincolnian freedom is that human government is not a
meaningless and irrational undertaking, rather, government is essential to humans. If this is so, then questions of
good and evil regarding governments cannot be reduced
merely to the pleasurable. The good and the pleasurable
are not the same. Then freedom cannot be identified simply with desire, but must instead be identified with something outside a selfish will. Reason and not passion, the
good and not pleasure, constitute human freedom. All of
this together Lincoln signified by the word "law." It signifies transcendence. The substance of this view is the one
expressed by Aristotle that "men should not think it slavery to live according to the rule of the constitution; for it
is their salvation." 17 The implication of this doctrine is
that self-government demands self-control, not "popular
sovereignty" or "conscience." But we know that abolition-
ists looked at law and salvation, as well as constitutions, in
a different light.
Abolitionists considered constitutions and laws to be enslavements. Garrison's famous public burning of the Constitution in 1854 is the essential symbol of the abolitionist
movement. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 symbolizes Lincoln's answer to it. Against the Promethean
symbolism of Garrison, Lincoln emphasized Christian
symbols. Lincoln's use of religious symbols, as they apply
to law and freedom, is part of the rhetoric of his political
religion.
Lincoln's understanding of the American republic and
his assessment of its destiny turn upon his view that freedom provides for man's political "salvation." Constitutions, in other words, are not the means of enslavement
but of freedom. Lincoln's meaning is that law is man's salvation, his assurance of a humane, civilized life in this
world.
American republicanism was to man's political salva-
42
lion what Christianity was to the salvation of man's soul.
The two salvations for Lincoln were connected. As Jesus
made the family a sacramental union so as to provide a
metaphorical basis for knowledge of God (called Father
and bridegroom), so Lincoln, immersed in these same
meanings and their purposes, sought to make the Union
sacramental by posing the Declaration and the Constitution as a metaphorical basis for knowledge of the self
(called ruler and ruled). Moreover, because the divine or
transcendence is necessarily connected to or unified with
the human by means of reason or the soul, the relationship between the political and the religious realms is not
simply a metaphorical one. Christianity is marked by universality; it promises salvation to all men. The law of the
republic is both a replica of this universality as well as an
effect of all transcendence. Governments, that is, are natural to man, or, as the ancients put it, governments are
"divine." For good and evil to be possible, there must be
transcendence. Man is not just another kind of animal for
whom speech, as among bees, is solely a behavioral instrument. Hence time and place cannot be the determinants
of good and evil. But the truth about the political sphere,
though it hinges on the truth of the religious sphere, is always different and in some sense opposed. Lincoln did
not call for religious politics but for political religion. Accordingly, Lincoln contrasted Europe, or the old world as
Americans of that day called it, with the new, passion with
reason, and otherworldly with worldly aspirations. As
Christianity rests upon the crucifixion of a savior, the republic rests upon resistance to what Lincoln calls "suicide" in the Lyceum Address. Political salvation is not the
work of one man for all others, but the work of each man
through self-control. Political salvation is the Constitution
and the Union because the sovereignty of majorities(what
Douglas advocated) or the sovereignty of conscience (what
abolition advocated) are alike against the Union and unconstitutional in a moral and human sense as well as in a
legal one.
What do Lincoln's life and writings teach of political religion? The outward form of Lincoln's political life, like
his own outward form, is simple and inelegant. It was
bound at both ends, from 1838 to 1865, by the principles
already noted and by his consistent opposition in practice
to the extension of slavery. In 1847, during his sole term
in Congress, Lincoln voted for the Wilmot Proviso, stipulating that any territories acquired from Mexico must be
closed to slavery, "at least forty times" by his count. 18 Years
later in 1861 Lincoln made the principle of nonextension
of slavery the basis for his opposition to the Crittenden
Compromise, which would have extended the superseded
Missouri Compromise of 1820 to the Pacific. The event
that brought his life and thought into focus, and from
which comes our own understanding of political religion
as he practiced it, was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.
It was the passage of this bill for the settlement of Kansas and Nebraska on the principle of popular sovereignty
SUMMER 1982
�that brought Lincoln to the center of public controversy.
Douglas's bill repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
That famous piece of legislation stilled, at least for a time,
what Thomas Jefferson had called a fire bell in the night,
the slavery question.
Jefferson's anxieties in 1820 about slavery in the lands
of Kansas, lands he purchased from France in 1803 with
anxieties touching the constitutionality of his right to
make the purchase, took on a new urgency during Lincoln's day. This is because the politicians of the 1820s led
by Martin Van Buren had thought to use the conflict over
slavery, the fire bell in the night, as the means to build a
new party coalition that would keep the slavery issue out
of national politics. Lincoln's election in 1860, by shattering that coalition of Northern farmers and Southern yeomen, undid Van Buren's political work, forcing men once
more to consider Jefferson's warning. Van Buren's idea
had been to keep the country half slave and half free in
fact. The result of his effort turned out to be that the
country became half slave and half free in principle. It was
this dreadful consequence that Lincoln spelled out to
Alexander Stephens in December 1860, two days after
South Carolina seceded.
You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we
think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the
rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us. 19
Stephens, who was to become the vice president of the
Confederacy, had asked Lincoln, who was already president-elect of the Union, "to save our common country"
and to recognize that he and the Southerners were not
Lincoln's personal enemies.
But Lincoln had always recognized this. The distinction
between right and wrong, liberty and slavery, was superior
to all things because things perish. This was the rub. Liberty was above the "c.ommon country" and above Lincoln
and Stephens. The physical union, an object of emotion,
was destined to perish. But the union sustained by political religion would, as Lincoln said in 1838, "live through
all time."20 The wishes and desires of men, even men who
wished for emancipation, would have to yield to the law.
Lincoln made this point to Horace Greeley on August 22,
1862, in response to his Prayer of Twenty Millions, written to Lincoln three days before. Lincoln explained that
his policy would be to free slaves or not to free them "if
it would save the Union" quite regardless of his "oftexpressed personal wish that all men, everywhere, could
be free." 21
The prudence suggested in this observation by Lincoln
is not mainly expressive of expedience or trimming. Lincoln's prudence relates instead to self-control and to forbearance indicative of constitutional rigor in the personal
and legal realms. The Constitution did not permit Lincoln
to make emancipation the purpose of the war as Greeley
demanded. Lincoln's personal wish to emancipate the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
slaves did not overcome an inner law of reason and an
outer law, the Constitution, that salvation of all reason
and law, viz., no man has the right to rule another without
that other's consent. Lincoln understood he could not fulfill
the law by breaking the law as some messianic abolitionist
would do. To proceed in that way Lincoln considered tyrannical and un-Christian. A grant of freedom to the
slaves, at that point, however desirable or possible, would
have been an even graver fire bell in the night than the
one Jefferson warned about in 1820. It would have signaled that a new enslavement was about to begin.
What was this new enslavement, how and why was it
new? That Lincoln knew the answers to these questions
emerges from his struggle with the Radicals. With the secession of South Carolina in midwinter of 1860, the focus
but not the substance of Lincoln's quarrel with the ideals
of popular sovereignty shifted from Douglas to the Radicals. This new struggle began when Lincoln took office.
The main question was how to deal with the eight slave
states remaining in the Union after February 1861. Although both Garrison on the abolitionist Left and Greeley
on the abolitionist Right hailed the Southern departures,
they would soon be calling upon Lincoln to give no quarter to the South once the war started. Most people, however, looked for some way to save the situation. Congress
considered a host of plans and ideas for restoring the
Union. The end result was a cruel caricature of "compromise." The eight wavering states split their loyalty, four to
the North, four to the South. And, as if to mimic those
trying times, fifty-five counties in western Virginia seceded from the state of Virginia in May 1861. Adopting a
new constitution for itself, with slavery, West Virginia
joined the Union to the delight, not only of Lincoln, but
of Thaddeus Stevens, who was the Robespierre of Radicals. What this meant was obvious to Lincoln: the war to
come would not be about slavery as a practical matter,
however much slavery had been its cause. Even so, the
question of the war's aim became the subject of contention between Lincoln and the Radicals. For Lincoln the
seceded states were not a nation, and consequently constitutional provisions applicable to them remained intact.
The Radicals, for their part, were openly contemptuous of
the Constitution. They were also much less agitated than
Lincoln about the practical consequences to the Union
where the five Union slave states were concerned. For
Lincoln the triumph of the Union, that is, the defeat of
the eleven slave states, required the support of the five
Union slave states. And the triumph of the Union would
also be the resolution of the intolerable condition of the
house divided; it would be the triumph of freedom.
Lincoln's position was that the aim of the war should be
the perpetuation of the Union, so that the result of the
war would be the "ultimate extinction" of slavery. This result, as Lincoln had always insisted, at no time more importunately than during the secession crisis of 1860, could
be accomplished without war and without the violation of
43
�either the Constitution or the rights of the Southern
states. Essential to this result was obedience to the law
and the recognition of "our. ancient faith" that slavery was
the soul of lawlessness. The South well understood, rather
better than some Radicals, that an end to the fact and the
principle of slavery extension meant the ultimate extinc·
tion of slavery. This is why the South seceded. It is why
Lincoln refused to give his support to the Crittenden
Compromise in 1861.
The Republican leaders in Congress took a different
view of things. Falling under the skillful and often ruthless
leadership of men who called themselves Radicals, in par·
ticular Senators Zachariah Chandler, Benjamin Wade,
Charles Sumner, and in the House, Thaddeus Stevens,
James Ashley, George Julian, and H. Winter Davis, Con·
gress relished a power unknOwn to American institutions
to that time. The Radicals' outward objective, resisted by
Lincoln 1 was to make emancipation the aim of the war.
The struggle, as Lincoln saw it, however, was between po·
litical religion and its opposite, religious politics.
On its practical side this contest centered in the Radical
Committee on the Conduct of the War chaired by Ben
Wade. The Committee's main goal, whether in investigat·
ing generals or in cashiering them, was to make Lincoln
revise the purpose of the war. And the Radicals also pro·
mated the fortunes of their favorite generals, especially
General John C. Fremont. He had proclaimed martial law
in Missouri, declaring that all slaves were confiscated
property, thus free. Although Lincoln had countermanded
his order, other Radical generals imitated Fremont. Con·
gressional Radicals also tried to force the President's hand
by legislative means. They passed confiscation acts in the
summers of 1861 and 1862. The differences between Lin·
coln and the Radicals are clearest, however, in the contest
over the Emancipation Proclamation. This episode, one
of the most famous in American history, was also the
great "passion play" of political religion.
Much has been said about the Emancipation Proclama·
tion. There is now a strong tendency to think that only the
naive could credit the "stereotyped picture of the emanci·
pator suddenly striking the shackles from millions of slaves
by one stroke of the presidential pen."22 Moreover, the doc·
ument is considered deficient in grandeur. It resembles a
"bill oflading" in the view of historian Richard Hofstadter.23
It is also widely believed that the famous Proclamation
came about as a result of the President being forced onto
higher moral ground by the importuning Radicals. But
this view of events, like the wider abolitionist context it
sustains and reflects, does not square with the facts. That
Lincoln was forced to issue the Emancipation Proclama·
tion, in the sense that he was also forced to conciliate the
South before the war or to hang Union deserters during
the war, is likely true enough. But the complaints of the
Radicals, who called the Proclamation "futile" and "ridic·
ulous," as well as the comments of historians in later
44
times, would indicate that Lincoln did not do what he was
supposedly pressured into doing.
Lincoln was a master of the politician's art. What he did
in this case, as he so frequently did in others, was to make
the best of difficult circumstances. He served his own pur·
pose, which was to salvage the Union as a physical and
constitutional entity, and he tied even tighter the princi·
ples of emancipation and constitutionality. The Proclamation distinctly subordinated emancipation to the overriding
purpose of the war, reunion. Lincoln beat back the demand for emancipation on Radical terms, which demanded
the unconditional liberation of the slaves regardless of any
constitutional or military considerations. Regarding such
terms as the instruments of tyranny, Lincoln understood
what most of his contemporaries only glimpsed, as when
Henry Wilson, himself a Radical, discovered with shock
that radical emancipator Ben Wade, chairman of the
Committee on the Conduct of the War, had all the ear·
marks of the slaveholder. "] thought the old slave-masters
had come back again," said Wilson, speaking of Wade's
behavior in Congress in 1865.24
The Radicals lost the fight with Lincoln over the Eman·
cipation Proclamation and most of them knew it. Those
who were satisfied that the Proclamation had raised Lin·
coln to their level failed to see that Lincoln had raised
them to his. They conceded what Lincoln wanted from
the start, that only lawful emancipation was true emanci·
pation. They conceded, in other words, the necessity for a
constitutional amendment, the 13th. Later no one worked
harder for it than Lincoln. The Proclamation did not strike
off the slaves' chains because only a constitutional amend·
ment could do that. As a military measure that made the
continuation of rebellion the justification for freeing slaves,
the Proclamation only applied in the rebellious states, and
there, as the Radicals loudly complained, it could not free a
single slave because Union authority had been usurped by
the rebels.
The Proclamation was, as it says, a war measure. It was
written as a war measure and not as a grander measure
might have been. Yet in the subtlety of its ultimate pur·
poses, both its political purpose toward the Radicals and its
moral purpose toward the slaves and the aim of the war,
the Emancipation Proclamation must surely qualify as one
of the more remarkable bills of lading ever written.
Perhaps Hofstadter was more apt than he knew. Lin·
coln's political religion charged him with the delivery of the
Constitution to a recipient, the slaves. Lincoln at least con·
sidered his agency essential to the wholeness of the nation
and to the warrantability of the product, freedom. Com·
pare the Proclamation as a symbol of Lincoln the man and
the principle of self-government with Garrison's Prome·
thean gesture, his burning of the Constitution in 1854. The
contrast becomes sharper still as the elements of Lincoln's
political religion unfold. Lincoln's goal of self-government
for the republic was also his personal goal.
SUMMER 1982
�My paramount object [Lincoln said in 1862] .. . is to save the
Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery . ... [W]hat
I do about Slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe
it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear be·
cause I do not believe it would help to save the Union.ZS
Forbearance is in truth the soul of what Lincoln called
"political religion." In this connection, and in other star·
tling ways, the contrast between Lincoln and abolition
shows most clearly. At the level of personalities, the contrast
between Lincoln and William Lloyd Garrison is especially
obvious. Garrison was the nation's high priest of religious
politics. He was no doubt America's nineteenth century
Munzter. He regarded "politicians and philosophers [who]
... sometimes foolishly speculate ... about the best forms
of government" as idle men. 26 When men were "perfect,"
that is, beyond good and evil, they would have true government, which is to say no government. Thus Garrison
said, as did Lincoln, that America would be "immortal,"
but their meanings were perfectly opposite. Lincoln un·
derstood America's immortality in the sense supplied by
political religion. Garrison, on the other hand, meant that
America was to become a heaven on earth, a New Jeru·
salem.
Garrison, like Munzter and the first abolitionists before
him, understood human life and history to be in the grip
of immanent eschatological purposes: history had meaning
and America was history. Counting all men as potential
Christs, Garrison regarded religious salvation as measured
by one's willingness to sacrifice and martyr himself for the
heavenly realm of freedom in this world. Slavery was for
Garrison the sum of all villainies because the freedom he
craved was literally not of this world. This seemingly absurd vision is the apocalyptic one that Munzter also held
when he directed all European princes to submit to him
as the risen Christ. Looking upon this world as the field of
man's salvation, the reformer proposes to escape the con·
ditions of human reality by insisting that these conditions
are actually impediments to true humanity, hence the work
of some devil, for example, class, race, sex. Once the devil
is exorcised, man will be free in the radical sense once reserved to religion, i.e., man will be liberated from the con·
ditions of human being. Thus was America immortal in
Garrison's mind.
There are several other instances in which antebellum
reformers considered this release from the conditions of
being human to include actual immortality. The case of
John Humphrey Noyes, the famous founder of the Oneida
commune in 1840, where free love, eugenics, and birth
control methods were used to create what Noyes called
the We spirit that would liberate men from all possessions,
is the best Known. But Lincoln understood that abolition
offered in truth a kind of religion. Garrison's "idealism,"
which left "every man to decide, according to the dictates
of his conscience," promised as a matter of political doctrine that good and bad were only names." This vision of
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
man, which is loosely called relativism and egalitarianism
today, was a promise of immortality and certainty in this
world for those who had rejected Christianity's promise of
immortality in the next world. Garrison's cry for men to
become free by being "crucified with Christ" comprised
the betrayal of Christianity, as well as the reversal of Lincoln's political religion." Men who seek to be crucified
with Christ in order to bring about political salvation in
reality commit suicide. They subvert political religion by
turning politics into religion and religion into lawlessness.
Lincoln said the conflict with the abolitionists was a
struggle to maintain freedom by means of political religion,
a struggle against any form of religious politics. The contest was made more dangerous since both sides used the
language of freedom and the language of religion. Although there was not a group in America that more often
sought to connect Christian and political symbols than
the abolitionists, there were others who did it better and
who knew better what they were doing. America's poet of
freedom delighted most in braiding political and religious
meanings. The contrast of Lincoln with Emerson, who
compared John Brown to Christ, best reveals differences
between political religion and the ideals of abolition."
Where Lincoln's free man is marked by restraint and forbearance, Emerson's free man or Man Thinking is the
model of unrestraint. Man Thinking is radically free.
In 1836, two years before Lincoln made the Lyceum
Address, Emerson marked himself out as one of America's
outstanding spokesmen for freedom. Like Lincoln, Emerson spoke of freedom as a sacred thing. It was, however,
the will of man and not the law that Emerson considered
sacred. "Nothing," wrote Emerson in 1841, "is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." If so, is the law
profane? Emerson supposed it was. "No law," he insisted,
"can be sacred to me but that of my nature."30 What then
of morality or transcendence as the foundation of law?
For Lincoln the sanctity of the Constitution was its transcendence of individual minds and natures, singly or as
majorities. This transcendence, relying upon reason in
individuals as the means to discern law, demonstrates that
good and evil are truths beyond time and place, beyond
the consciences of individuals. Supporting law is the
divine. As Lincoln suggested, Christianity is the greatest
institution. Emerson was a transcendentalist of quite an
opposite kind.
Precisely, it was law that free men were to transcend;
they were to transcend transcendence. Emerson said ''good
and ·bad are but names ... the only right is what is after
my constitution; the only wrong what is against it."31 Here
was a very different constitution than the one Lincoln had
in mind. If Emerson was right, then Garrison was justified
in burning the Constitution and in calling it "a covenant
with death and a league with hell." 32 Whereas Lincoln's
prescription of political religion evoked Aristotle's praise
of constitutions as the source of freedom and therein sal-
45
�vation, Emerson's doctrine encouraged men to burn constitutions as the means of salvation. Freedom is the
release from covenants. But covenants of one type or another are the web of a man's life. How would ordinary
people know to burn covenants? Emerson, aware of the
question, as was Lincoln, had the answer. The gift of freedom must be the work of great men. Great men, not covenants, shall be the liberators. And the means to greatness
is no other than the destruction of all covenants, or freedom. Thus will the great man "have no covenant but
proximities," no covenants that outlast whim, thus the renunciation of all covenants. Emerson anticipates here the
disclosure of his most shocking teaching that true liberation is the release from an egoistic self, to be replaced by a
godlike unity that is not an "I" but a "We." This was his
ideal "ever new and sublime, that here is One Man."33
Emerson really meant all covenants, even a man's relation
to himself. This is why he counted the human memory a
hindrance to freedom. Lincoln noticed this version of
freedom and emphasized antidotes to it. He especially
nurtured memory, because it would help to preserve
covenants. Lincoln urged men to consider the Declaration a covenant ('undecayed by the lapse of time," a
means to knit together all customary and personal covenants which depended on memory. 34
We need not look far for the opposition of Lincoln and
Emerson on the subject of the sacredness of freedom.
Emerson rests freedom in the sacred recesses of man's
passion, in "unhandselled savage nature." 35 It is sacred because it is screened, as Emerson put it, from natural law,
from society, and from books and the past. But Lincoln
believed that only reason could sustain law. Moreover,
reason must overcome passion if good and evil are to be
more than names. For the ancients, and for Lincoln, slavery was the spontaneous submission to the will without
the mediation of reason, but this is what Emerson called
freedom. The source of this difference lies in what each
side considered reason to be.
For Emerson, reason is an instrument, at once the product and the producer of nature. Lincoln understood reason as the ancients understood it. He considered it, along
with those whom Perry Miller called the conservative and
reactionary of Christendom, the sensorium of transcendence. The ultimate imperative of Emersonian freedom
says, "do not choose." 36 In other words, let your will subdue all choices and all anxiety regarding them. Simply do.
This understanding of freedom and the will is the one that
Miller found so affecting in Jonathan Edwards. Moreover,
where Edwards named this necessitous or enslaving will
God, Emerson identified it as "Man Thinking." Freedom
is oneness with "God," or nature; the creation of human
constitutions is mere whim. A man is liberated in this way
from every interference. He is a new Adam, a veritable
Christ. This is the "reason and faith" that Emerson sought
in the woods where ('all mean egotism vanishes." 37
But how perfectly does this Emersonian ideal of free-
46
dom recall the worldly freedom of slavemasters. Emerson's
freedom, which does not wittingly or outwardly envision
slaves and masters, was this: complete liberation requires
the liberation of passion from the internal conflict of desires within one's self. This is the basis of that affirmation
of uman' s freedom" celebrated now by writers on the subject of freedom such as David Brion Davis. Davis, perhaps
the most highly regarded student of American abolition,
counts the Munzterites and their like as the West's "first
abolitionists" as we have already seen. If sin "was not a
reality," says Davis, characterizing the first abolitionists,
"but only a name that could be made meaningless by an
act of will [Emerson's position], there could be no justification for inequalities of sex and property which violated
the law of spontaneous love." Above all, the law of spontaneous love would overcome that most unconscionable
property and possession, the self, or what Emerson called
"mean egotism." Freedom from the ego is the red heart of
abolitionism that Fitzhugh, too, discovered. It supplies as
well those veins of radical, actually heretical, Christianity
that historian Miller found beating as a "mighty engine of
revolution" in Jonathan Edwards. 38
Lincoln linked memory of the Revolution to the Bible.
His purpose was to show that truth or transcendence partakes of the sources of all transcendence, hence of its sanctity. Indeed, Lincoln goes far beyond Washington, whose
own linking of religion and the political is not without a
pragmatic aspect. The parallel that Lincoln proposes between American republicanism and Christianity is, for
him, the source of all salvation in this world. Lincoln invests religious and Christian principles and their symbols
with political ends. He counts the reverse, the investing of
politics with religious ends, as of the essence of reversal
and betrayal; the reversal of the two realms, religion and
politics, and the betrayal of the separate purposes of each.
Abolitionism is religious politics.
American republicanism, compared by Lincoln to "that
only greater institution," Christianity, is, like Christianity,
a "rock against which the gates of hell shall not prevail." 39
Lincoln did not invoke the words of the Christian savior
Jesus to his chief apostle Peter without purpose. Let us
explore this comparison of Christianity with republicanism. It contains within it the essential elements of Lincoln's teaching on abolition. What is it, we must ask of
Matthew 16:18, the Christian source Lincoln drew from
for use in the Lyceum Address, that does prevail against
Christianity? The answer is "suicide": the danger to republicanism, like the danger to Christianity according to
Scripture, comes from within.
The rock against which the gates of hell shall not prevail
is the Church, actually Peter himself. In Matthew the
gates of hell shall not prevail against Christianity or against
the salvation provided to men by Jesus. But the -danger to
Christianity is that Peter as a man and the Church as a
body will behave falsely, suicidally. As the Church must
keep the teaching of Jesus, so Peter must be loyal to Jesus.
SUMMER 1982
�If these loyalties are kept, Matthew teaches, spiritual salvation is assured. These relations found in Matthew regarding man's spiritual salvation and the only institution
greater than republicanism are duplicated in the Lyceum
Address in which republicanism itself and political salvation are at issue.
The relationships of Peter to Jesus and of the Church
to the teachings of jesus compel us to consider the parallel
that Lincoln makes between the first and second greatest
institutions. In the Lyceum Address abolitionism (the real
subject of the address) stands in relation to freedom as
Peter stands in relation to jesus. Abolition as a movement
favoring freedom for the slave is an "apostle" of the
savior, freedom. If abolitionism is a faithful apostle the republic will be saved. If it is false-as Peter was at one crucial point-then Has a nation of free men we must . .. die
by suicide." The relationship of the Constitution to the
Declaration also expresses the relationship of the church
to the teaching of jesus. Specifically, the survival of freedom calls for each American "to .. _support the Constitution and Laws [with] ... his life, his property and his
sacred honor," just as the "patriots of seventy-six [supported] ... the Declaration of Independence."40 But just
as the Southern slaveholders hoped to see the Constitution upheld at the expense of the Declaration, so the abolitionists and the advocates of popular sovereignty
thought they could bypass the Constitution, the one by
majority rule, the other by individual conscience, in favor
of the Declaration.
All three groups would deprive political life of content,
none more so than abolitionism. Abolitionists were explicit in regarding all political things with contempt To
the abolitionist, the occupation of political man, called
upon to rank goods and evils in light of the vast complexities of civil life, was an evil enterprise. Where freedom of
conscience is the highest good, either all men think alike,
in which case no government is necessary, or each man
thinks and acts differently, in which case no government
is possible and certainly none is legitimate. Politics, in this
view, is a game at best At worst it is the sign of man's degradation. This is how abolitionists most often saw government and political life. Accordingly, the abolitionist John
Humphrey Noyes said to Garrison in the year of Elijah P.
Lovejoy's murder, that he would "nominate jesus Christ
for the Presidency" as the best means to "overthrow ...
the nations."41 Thus abolitionist relativism disguised a
dogmatic absolutism.
In the history of American abolitionism there is no more
perfect example of the fanaticism bred of such dogmatism
-than the affair of john Brown. Brown, like Lovejoy, who
courted martyrdom, confused the emancipation of slaves
with the emancipation of souls. He confused his martyrdom with crucifixion and made his death nearly a suicide.
Although john Brown was too pathetic and absurd to become more than a terrorist-Lincoln compared him to the
frustrated assassin of Napoleon III-the acclaim Brown
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
won from Emerson and Thoreau, who compared him to
Christ, is more important as an indication of the caesarism that Lincoln sensed in abolition than Brown's acts.42
Brown's comments in 1859 demonstrate the nature of the
caesarism involved in the transformation of religion into
politics.
Brown's religious politics were the same as Noyes's,
who abjured all political life, and also like Garrison's, who
renounced (until about 1859) all violence. "Christ," said
Brown, is "the great Captain of liberty; as well as
salvation." This expression of religious politics was uttered by Brown after Harper's Ferry when he had begun
to compare himself to religious heroes of old, including
Peter. In a remarkably revealing comment, meant to justify religious politics, Brown misstates the role of Peter
and thereby renders a Lincolnian judgment against himself. Writing a month before he was hanged, Brown said,
"Christ once armed Peter. So also in my case I think he
put a sword into my hand."43
But jesus disarmed Peter. When jesus was arrested,
Peter was disarmed by his Master to show that the
Kingdom of God, Jesus' presidency, was not of this, but of
another world. It showed that jesus was not the captain of
liberty as well as salvation.
But while abolitionists condemned Lincoln as a moderate, and Douglas deplored what he called Lincoln's moral
absolutism, that is, Lincoln's insistence that slavery was
evil-in fact popular sovereignty and abolitionism were
alike "absolutistic" in the sense disapproved by these foes
of Lincoln who said they favored freedom. This is simply
demonstrated: absolute freedom, whether for majorities
or individual consciences, rests upon the self~canceling
proposition that all truth is relative. The political or practical consequences of popular sovereignty and abolitionism
as political remedies are more important. Lincoln under-
stood that governments founded on the principle of popular sovereignty would destroy freedom by vote since that
principle made it possible to enslave individuals if a majority decided that it was good to do so. Lincoln also realized
that abolitionism would, for its part, make government
and all social life impossible. Lincoln, supporting both majority rule and freedom, as well as the Constitution, which
Southern slaveholders raised in their defense, sought to
unify all three of these fundamental principles of American republicanism-majority rule, freedom, constitutionalism-as a means to prevent their destruction at the
hands of any one of them. The method Lincoln employed
for this purpose and called political religion may be called
moderation.
By moderation Lincoln did not mean the taking up of a
position halfway between two extremes. This is what Fitzhugh meant by moderation or what modern liberals mean
by it In this view the center is a creature of extremes. By
moderation Lincoln understood a position above the extremes which, though partaking of principles found in
each, majority rule in popular sovereignty and emancipa-
47
�tionism in abolition~ transforms and unites the extremities
by means of a higher principle. The higher principle Lin·
coin had in view was political religion in its mechanical
and its essential aspects.
Lincoln considered that political religion involved the
substitution of persuasion for force as the essence of polit·
ical religion. Moreover~ his political religion as a mechanical or procedural principle, by seeking common intellectual
ground among members of the political community, ap·
peals to the interests and passions of reasonable men, so
that passion or force shall yield to reason, or to constitu·
tions. The aim, then, of moderation is the replacement of
force and passion with reason in each member of the
political community. Political religion is the teaching of
self-control.
Lincoln's life shows three examples of this self-control.
Two of these concern Lincoln's efforts toward others in the
first years of his political life. The third example concerns
Lincoln near the end of his life. Whether such consistency
as Lincoln's was "foolish ... [,] the hobgoblin of [a] little
mind ... ", as Emerson would have been bound to regard it,
is a matter the reader must decide for himself.44
The first example of political religion is Lincoln's first
public statement as a politician on the subject of slavery,
his now famous protest in the lllinois legislature, made
March 3, 1837, when he was twenty-eight years old. In
principle and in method this early affair set a pattern from
which he did not deviate. Although this protest is famous
because of its opposition to slavery founded on "injustice
and bad pGlicy," it is difficult to see why Lincoln should
have received much credit for it.45 And, while Albert
Beveridge, many years ago, could find little difference be·
tween the majority resolutions and the protest of Lincoln
and his fellow representative from Sangamon County,
Dan Stone, except the "moral" difference between slavery
and freedom, even this difference is not obvious.46
The majority resolutions of the Illinois legislature do
not say that slavery is moral. Rather the resolutions are a
high-flown defense of slavery as constitutional. The rna·
jority contend that "the right of property in slaves, is
sacred to the slaveholding states by the Federal Constitu·
tion." 47 Stone and Lincoln do not deny this or even dispute another point of the majority, that the federal gov·
ernment could not abolish slavery in the District of
Columbia. What then is the difference between the rna·
jority resolutions and Lincoln's protest? Is there indeed
any basis for praise of Lincoln in the drafting of the pro·
test at all? Lincoln not only agreed with the majority that
the Constitution protected slavery, he also roundly con·
demned the "promulgation of abolition doctrines [as tend·
ing] ... rather to increase than to abate the evils of slavery."48
Finally, when one considers that Lincoln, eleven months
later in the Lyceum Address, called upon every American
never to violate the Constitution and laws in the "least
particular," the difficulty in seeing any special point in
the protest becomes even greater and more paradoxical.49
48
But of course it was Lincoln's agreement with the major·
ity that makes the protest significant. The Illinois legisla·
lure, responding to petitions from Southern legislatures
seeking support and assurance that Northerners respected
the constitutionality of slavery and deplored the anti·
constitutional implications of abolitionism, had no oppo·
nent in Lincoln. But just as Lincoln would not later, in the
Lyceum Address, praise the mob that killed the abolitionist
Lovejoy, so he could not join the majority in the Illinois
legislature in giving unconditional support to the constitu·
tional right to slavery without protesting that slavery was
wrong. It is not the genius of Lincoln's rhetoric, however,
but the intent of his politics that should be emphasized.
Lincoln's intention in the protest was to call attention
to his disagreement with the majority by means of his
agreement with it. The "moral" difference was the only
difference as it was later between Lincoln and Alexander
Stephens. Here, as later, that difference was the rub.
Freedom is what the Constitution supported, not slav·
ery. Just as the framers had won support of the Constitu·
tion by appealing to the monetary interests and passions
of slaveholders, so Lincoln in his protest hoped to secure
the support of men whose interests in the constitutional·
ity of slavery had less to do with the Constitution than with
such commercial interests as trading in Southern ports
downriver from St. Louis or Alton.
The second example of Lincoln's teaching of political
religion is found in the Lyceum Address considered as a
politician's instrument. Lincoln's strategy in Springfield,
speaking to an audience caught up in the excitement of
Lovejoy's recent murder, was the same as it had been in
the Illinois legislature. Once again Lincoln's purpose was
to teach self-control by demonstrating it.
As we have already seen, Lincoln's objective in the Lyceum Address was to use Christian symbols to distinguish
political religion from religious politics. In the Lyceum
Address Lincoln identified abolitionism as a species of an·
tinomianism. Abolitionism makes a political principle,
freedom~ into a religious principle, salvation. Moreover,
its open despising of politics is as dangerous to freedom as
it is to religion. Abolitionism is the enemy of political
religion because it is the enemy of freedom as well as law.
But Lincoln was careful not to make this point in the
manner of an abolitionist. He was moderate and did not
say all he meant.
In the Lyceum Address Lincoln set himself the task of
showing that abolitionism is mob law, hence wrong. But
Lincoln did not wish to appear to applaud Lovejoy's lynch·
ers. Lincoln also wished to demonstrate that freedom is
right without appearing to take Lovejoy's side against the
mob (and against his audience which had no more affec·
lion for Lovejoy than had the Illinois legislature).
Lincoln's moderation is visible in the rhetorical struc·
lure of the speech. He did not mention Lovejoy, the first
and recent martyr to abolitionism, and also carefully sepa·
rated his discussion of Lovejoy from his discussion of other
SUMMER 1982
�victims of mob rule such as gamblers and murderers. In
this way the reader or listener senses a difference between
wrong behavior wrongly punished and abolitionism, also
wrongly punished. The impression is that abolition is a
churchly doctrine carried to the point of destroying both
Church or Constitution, and doctrine or freedom. Free·
dom liberated from its home in the law is a betrayal of
freedom. Allied with mob law and with slavery in its con·
tempt for law, abolition itself brings about lynchings. In·
deed, Lincoln suggested that freedom and lynch lawslavery, in a word-may become one. This, incidentally,
was Fitzhugh's point about abolitionism.
Lincoln taught in the speech before the Illinois legisla·
ture and in the Lyceum Address that self-control is the chief
instrument and end of political religion. The "suicides" of
Lovejoy and Brown should be called reversals of selfcontrol and betrayals of freedom, as the Lyceum address
suggests. The identification of a man's will with the law is
what men have always called absolutism.
In fact it is the danger of absolutism in the name of
emancipation or liberation that is the great center and focus
of everything Lincoln taught and learned about freedom.
Lincoln, a man whom his best friends knew to be exces·
sively ambitious, possessed considerable personal knowl·
edge about the freedom for which Emerson had only
wished. It is perhaps as important to us that Lincoln had
an opportunity to act on his knowledge. Thus Lincoln rea·
lized as early as 18 38, and proclaimed publicly, that a
"towering genius" and a passionate man who was unwill-
ing simply to do his part, with lesser men, in preserving
the gains to freedom brought by the Revolution, "would
as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire [distinction] ... by
doing good as harm."50 In particular, the great man who
was not content to abide the constraints of law, who wished
to tear down the "sepulchres of the fathers" 51 with Emer·
son, rather than add "story to story upon the monument
of fame erected to the memory of others," would as will·
ingly serve his passion for distinction "at the expense of
emancipating slaves" as by enslaving free men. Lincoln
had this chance himself in the middle of the Civil War.52
Lincoln had an opportunity to emancipate slaves in a
way satisfying to both his ambition for freedom as a prin·
ciple and to his personal ambition. Shortly after the
Emancipation Proclamation was issued, Lincoln was bid·
den by Salmon P. Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury, to
apply the Proclamation in areas specifically excepted by
it, for example, parts of Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia
that were under Union control. Such an application as
Chase asker! Lincoln to make would subvert the letter and
spirit of the Proclamation as a war measure. Lincoln
resisted. Perhaps this was a hard decision-he was a man
of genius after all. It was certainly a "religious" decision at
all events. His explanation of his course of action to Chase
is pertinent.
If I take the step [you recommend] must I not do so, without
the argument of military necessity, and so, without any arguTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ment, except the one that I think the measure politically expedient, and morally right? Would I not thus give up all footing upon constitution or law? Would I not thus be in the
boundless field of absolutism?53
Liberation was the graver fire bell. Unlike the bell that
frightened Jefferson, this bell rang at high noon when
men do not fear fire but are inclined instead to regard it as
a source of illumination and warmth. And Fitzhugh heard
this graver bell, too. Unlike Lincoln he was delighted by
its noise and especially by the abolitionists who rang it.
Did they not alert all men, ifmen would only see-and
Fitzhugh certainly thought the light was bright enoughthat the new freedom was none other than the old slavery? But here Fitzhugh may have been too sanguine.
There was, as Lincoln strongly hinted, something new
and far more dangerous in the new freedom.
It was the brightness that troubled Lincoln. He may
have guessed that someone would say, as Perry Miller did,
that "one has to look into the blinding sun" in order to be
free at all. 54 Yet who but a man with "a transparent eye·
ball" can look into the blinding sun? .Only such a man as
Emerson's Man Thinking or one who counts the tran·
scending of self, the extinguishment of the human I as
freedom; he says, in liberation: "I am nothing." 55 The
issue was the abolition of man, a consequence Fitzhugh
could not have imagined.
The author is pleased to acknowledge the assistance of the Earhart
Foundation in the preparation of this essay.
1. Fitzhugh was regarded as among the most important of slavery's defenders in his day, a judgement largely affirmed by later historians, including those who credit Fitzhugh with a Marxist-like critique of capital
[Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation, New York 1969}, and others who consider his defense of
slavery unusual or sui generis [C. Vann Woodward, "George Fitzhugh,
Sui Generis," in George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All/ or Slaves Without
Masters, Cambridge 1960, vii-xxxix; Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle:
The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South 1840-1860, Baltimore
1977.1
A recent collection of essays on Fitzhugh will be found in The Conservative Historians' Forum, 6, Spring 1982.
2. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed., Roy P. Basler, 10 vols.,
New Brunswick, New Jersey 1953, II, 255.
3. See Lincoln's "Fragment on the Dred Scott Case," Works, II,
387-388. Lincoln makes the argument here that the Supreme Court
must itself overthrow the Constitution, creating a kind of popular sovereignty among the three federal branches, if it can decide "all constitutional questions."
4. Fitzhugh, Cannibals All/ 69.
5. C. Vann Woodward, American Cotp;terpoint, Slavery and Racism in
the North-South Dialogue, Boston 1971, 38.
6. H. D. Thoreau, Walden, New York 1960, 223.
7. Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards, Westport, Connecticut 1949, 319.
8. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, Ithaca, New York 1966, 297.
9. Lincoln, Works, II, 266.
10. Lincoln, Works, II, 266.
11. Thoreau, Walden, 223.
12. Lincoln, Works, IV, 169. (Cf. Proverbs 25:11)
13. Lincoln, Works, I, 112.
49
�14. Metaphysics, 1072a30.
15. Phaedo, 62b4.
16. Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Ithaca, New
Yock 1969, 247, 259, note 41.
17. Politics, l310a34-36.
18. Lincoln, Works, II, 252.
19. Lincoln, Works, IV, 160, 161.
20. Lincoln, Works, I, 109.
21. Frank Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record, New York 1862-1868, Supplement, I, Part II, 483.
22. J. G. Randall and David Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction,
rev. 2d ed., Lexington, Massachusetts 1973, 380. One of the better recent studies is La Wanda Cox, Lincoln and Black Freedom; A Study in
Presidential Leadership, Columbia, S.C. 1981.
23. Richard Hofstadter, The American Poli~ical Tradition, New York
1955, 132.
24. Congressional Globe, 38 Congress, 2 sess, 497.
25. Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record, Supplement I, Part II, 482-483.
26. William Lloyd Garrison, Liberator, VII, June 23, 1837: 103.
27. Garrison, Liberator, VII, 103.
28. Garrison, Liberator, VII, 103.
29. See the present author's "Emerson's Platonism: and 'the terrific
Jewish idea'," Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of
Literature XV, 1982.
30. Robert Spiller and Alfred Ferguson, The Complete Works of Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Cambridge 1971, 1979, II, 30.
31. Spiller and Ferguson, Complete Works.
32. Garrison, Liberator, XXIV, July 7, 1854: 106.
50
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
ent
Emerson, Works, II, 42; I, 53.
Lincoln, Works, I, 108.
Emerson, Works, I, 61.
Emerson, Works, I, 82.
Emerson, Works, I, 10.
Davis, The Problem of Slavery, 299, 298; also on Davis see the presauthor's "The Idea of Freedom in American Historical Writing,"
The Center Joumal1, Fall, 1982; Miller, Jonathan Edwards, 319-20.
39. Lincoln, Works, I, ll5.
40. Lincoln, Works, I, ll2.
41. Noyes to Garrison in William Lloyd Garrison, the Story of his Life
Told by his Children, 4 vols., Boston 1894, II, 147.
42. Lincoln, Works, III, 541.
43. John Brown to E. B. in Louis Ruchames, A John Brown Reader, London !959, 135, !29.
44. Emerson, Works, II, 33.
45. Lincoln, Works, I, 75.
46. Albert J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 4 vols., Boston 1928, I, 195.
47. Quoted in Lincoln, Works, I, 75.
48. Quoted in Lincoln, Works, I, 75.
49. Lincoln, Works, I, 112.
50. Lincoln, Works, I, ll4.
51. Emerson, Works, I, 7.
52. Lincoln, Works, I, ll4.
53. Lincoln, Works, VI, 429.
54. Miller, Jonathan Edwards, 195.
55. Emerson, Works, I, lO.
SUMMER 1982
�Sophocles' Ajax and the Ajax Myth
Philip Holt
The Greek tragic poet worked with myths, with stories
shaped by tradition and known (at least in outline) to his
audience. 1 He was not wholly in control of his material.
The poet interpreted the myth; he did not invent it. Myth
required that Troy fall to the Greeks, that Agamemnon be
murdered upon returning home, that Oedipus discover
the truth about his birth and marriage. Yet myths were
flexible within limits-sometimes, broad limits. The playwright could usually choose among different versions of
his myth, and he could even make innovations of his own
-not simply in drawing characters and writing speeches
to flesh out the myth, but in constructing the plot. Aristotle (Poetics ch. 9, 145lb) took notice of this freedom:
One must not aim at a rigid adherence to the traditional stories
on which tragedies are based. It would be absurd, in fact, to
do so, as even the known stories are only known to a few,
though they are a delight none the less to all.
In view of this flexibility within tradition, we can approach a Greek play by contrasting it with earlier treatments of the same story. What did its author emphasize
that his predecessors had played down, or add which they
had omitted, or delete which they had included? With
these questions answered, we can go on to interpret the
play itself: precisely what did the playwright create by presenting his version of the story rather than some other?
1. The Myth
The story of Ajax' death, as Sophocles tells it, is complicated. After Achilles died, Ajax and Odysseus laid claim to
his armor. The Greeks awarded it to Odysseus. Enraged at
this slight to his honor, Ajax set out by night to kill the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Greek leaders, but Athena clouded his mind so that he mistook the army's cattle for its men, and he killed and tortured the cattle instead. When he recovered his sanity and
saw what he had done, shame and fear of reprisals drove
him to fall on his sword. The Greek commanders sought
to punish him after death by leaving his body unburied,
but Odysseus persuaded them to allow his funeral.
Sophocles' authority and the excellence of his play made
this version prominent in later antiquity and standard for
modern times. But this was not the version Sophocles inherited, probably in the 440s B.C., when he wrote the
Ajax. The evidence on earlier treatments of the myth is
often spotty, but it gives us good reason to believe that
Sophocles' predecessors knew a simpler story with some
highly un-Sophoclean meanings-'
We first find the Ajax story in Odyssey 11.543-551,
where Odysseus tells of his journey to the underworld and
its ghosts:
Only the soul of Telamonian Aias stood off
at a distance from me, angry still over that decision
I won against him, when beside the ships we disputed
our cases for the arms of Achilleus. His queenly mother
set them as prize, and the sons of the Trojans, with
Pallas Athene,
judged; and I wish I had never won in a contest like this,
so high a head has gone under the ground for the sake
of that armor,
Aias, who for beauty and achievement surpassed
all the Danaans next to the stately son of Peleus.
Philip Holt wrote his doctoral dissertation on Sophocles' Trachiniae
(Stanford 1976). He has published several articles on Vergil and Sophocles.
51
�Figure 2. Etruscan bronze statuette, 460s B.c.; sui·
cide of Ajax; Kappeli collection, photo courtesy of
Antikenmuseum und Skulpturhalle, Basel.
Figure 1. Corinthian cup by the cavalcade painter, sixth century B.C.;
Greek leaders discover Ajax' suicide; private collection, photo courtesy
of Antikenmuseum und Skulpturhalle, Basel.
Odysseus goes on to tell how he tried to speak to Ajax, but
Ajax walked off without saying a word. Beyond the bare
facts that Ajax lost the judgment of arms and died, Homer
tells us only that "the sons of the Trojans" decided the
dispute. He probably means (as one scholiast tells us) that
the Greeks summoned a group of Trojan prisoners and
asked them "by which of the two heroes they had been
more greatly harmed." There is nothing about Ajax' madness or the slaughter of the cattle.
Pindar tells the story with considerable sympathy for the
fallen hero in three passages written from 479 to 459 B.C.:
The greater mass of men have blind hearts. If it were possible
for them to know the truth, then mighty Ajax would not have
become enraged over the arms and thrust a smooth sword
through his breast. [Nemean 7.23-27]
Envy devoured even the son ofTelamon, rolling him upon his
sword. Oblivion overcomes in grim strife the man who has no
tongue but is mighty in heart; the greatest honor goes to the
elaborate lie. For with secret votes the Danaans showed
Odysseus favor. Ajax, deprived of the golden arms, wrestled
with death. [Nemean 8.23-27]
The art of inferior men has seized and overthrown a stronger
man. Consider mighty Ajax, who slaughtered himself late at
night and won blame from aU the sons of the Greeks who
went to Troy. [Isthmian 4.36-40]
Where Homer committed the judgment of arms to "the
sons of the Trojans with Pallas Athene," Pindar has it
decided by the "secret votes" of the Greeks. He also regards the judgment of arms as unjust. Ajax deserved to
win, but he lost because "the greater mass of men" were
"blind" to his true worth, or because of the Greeks' envy
and desire to curry favor with Odysseus, or because the
hero "who has no tongue, but is mighty in heart" is vul-
52
nerable to "the art of inferior men." Pindar's view of Ajax
as a victim of injustice and corruption carried weight in
later decades. The Socrates of Plato's Apology (41 b) muses
that if he must die,
It would be marvelous to pass time in Hades and meet Palamedes and Ajax the son of Telamon and ariy other of the
men of old who died because of an unjust verdict, and to
compare my sufferings with -theirs.
This hero is not, however, the Ajax of the Odyssey, where
Odysseus mourns Ajax' death without admitting that
Ajax was cheated. Nor is it the Ajax of Sophocles.
Both Homer and Pindar move immediately from the
judgment of arms to Ajax' death. They put nothing in between-no plot to murder the Greeks, no delusion sent by
Athena, no slaughter of the cattle. They might have known
of these things and chosen to leave them out, for the picture of Ajax as a murderous, cattle-killing madman would
mar Homer's sorrow over the passing of a great warrior
and Pindar's indignation at heroic virtue misunderstood
and unrewarded. Or they might not have known them.
Their version of the story is quite intelligible, without any
gaps to be filled with madness or attempted murder from
Sophocles' plot. Homer and Pindar may present the original version of the myth, for time and retelling are more
likely to complicate a myth than to simplify it. The short
version kept its appeal in later times. Ovid gives us the
shortest version of all, with Ajax killing himself on the spot
the minute the verdict goes against him (Metamorphoses
13.1-398).
The Odyssey and Pin dar's Odes contain the only surviving accounts of Ajax' death in poetry before Sophocles.
More complicated versions (if any) must be sought among
the fragments (often meager) of lost epics and dramas, and
in works of art.
Our story appeared twice in the "cycle" of epics composed not long after Homer to round out the story of the
SUMMER 1982
�Figure 3. Etruscan carnelian scarab, early fourth century B.C.; suicide of
Ajax; photo courtesy of Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
Trojan War and its aftermath. The Aethiopis closed with
it, with the essential events of the short version. Proclus,
the author of a plot summary from the fifth century A.D.,
tells us that the Aethiopis included the judgment of arms.
After Achilles' death, he says, "the Greeks made a grave·
mound and held a contest, and a dispute arose between
Odysseus and Ajax over Achilles' arms." The suicide is at·
tested by a scholiast on the Isthmian 4 passage quoted
earlier: "The author of the Aethiopis says that Ajax killed
himself towards dawn." The judgment of arms may well
have been settled by a jury of Trojan prisoners. A scholiast
on the Odyssey ll passage quoted earlier says the Trojan
jury is described in "the cyclic poets," and we shall see
that it does not come from our only other possibility, the
Little Iliad. There is no literary evidence that the
Aethiopis included Ajax' plot to murder the Greeks, his
madness, or the attack on the cattle.
The Aethiopis may have been content with the short
version of our story-Ajax killing himself "towards dawn"
after a night of brooding over his disgrace. This ending
would preserve the Aethiopis' focus on Achilles' exploits
after the death of Hector. The death of Ajax-best of the
Greeks after Achilles (Iliad 2.768 f., Odyssey 11.550 f.) and
Achilles' companion and (in one tradition) his cousinwould fit into the Aethiopis as a somber coda to the death
of Achilles himself. It would fit better in a short version
than in a long one.
This may not be the whole story. Scenes from the epic
cycle appear on a large relief sculpture from the early Roman .empire, the Tabula Iliaca Capitolina, and the section
devoted to the Aethiopis includes a brooding figure captioned "Ajax mad." The nature of his madness-delusion,
rage, melancholy-is not clear. In any event, the Tabula
Iliaca Capitolina is too late, and too far slanted towards
Roman versions of the myths, to tell us much about the
Aethiopis.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Figure 4. Athenian black-figure amphora by Exekias, 530s B.C.; Ajax prepares to commit suicide; photo by H. and B. Devos, courtesy of Musee
des Beaux-Arts et d'Archeologie, Boulogne-sur-Mer.
Another work in the epic cycle, the Little Iliad, opened
with the judgment of arms in a different version from the
Aethiopis. To settle the dispute between Odysseus and
Ajax, the Greeks sent spies up to the walls of Troy to learn
the Trojans' opinion of the two heroes. Conveniently
enough, the spies overheard two women debating that very
question. One praised Ajax for carrying Achilles' corpse out
of the thick of battle, but the other replied ("through the
providence of Athena") that Odysseus was braver because
of his work in fighting-presumably in fighting off the Trojans while Ajax made away with the body. This tradition of
a decision on narrow grounds in the judgment of arms (best
service in rescuing Achilles' corpse, not greatest overall
prowess) was disregarded by Pindar and Sophocles, but it
was fairly widespread in epic. It even left traces in the third
or fourth century A.D., in the Posthomerica of Quintus of
Smyrna (5.125, 158-160).
More important, our sources on the Little Iliad tell us
that after the judgment of arms, "Ajax went mad, slaughtered the cattle of the Achaeans, and killed himself," and
that because of this deed "he was not cremated in the usual
way, but was buried in a mound because of the anger of the
king." Scholars tend to assume this means Ajax set out to
kill the Greeks but was blinded by Athena and killed the
cattle instead. They use Sophocles' plot to fill out the gaps
in our evidence for the Little Iliad, and then they turn
around and conclude that the Little Iliad gave Sophocles
his plot. Sophocles certainly took the slaughter of the cattle
from the Little Iliad, and the "irregular" burial there probably inspired the debate over Ajax' burial in the last part
of his play. The madness in the Little Iliad, however, invites another explanation once we stop using Sophocles'
Ajax to piece out the story. If we read that "Ajax went
mad, slaughtered the cattle of the Achaeans, and killed
himself," the natural inference is that Ajax went berserk
53
�Figure 6. Athenian red-figure cup by Douris, c. 490 B.C.; quarrel of Ajax
and Odysseus over Achilles' armor; photo courtesy of Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna.
Figure 5. Athenian red-figure lekythos, 460s B.C.; Ajax prepares to commit suicide (sword planted in ground to right); private collection, photo
courtesy of Antikenmuseum und Skulpturhalle, Basel.
Figure 8. Detail of Figure 7. Odysseus;
Kunsthistorisches Museum.
Figure 7. Other side of the cup by Douris; vote on the judgment of
arms; Kunsthistorisches Museum.
Figure 9. Detail of
Figure 7. Ajax; Kunsthistorisches Museum.
54
SUMMER 1982
�and vented his wrath on the nearest available object, the
cattle. This madness is a frenzy, not a delusion. Agamemnon's anger can be explained by the attack on the cattle
(army property) without reference to a plot to murder the
Greeks.3
The epic cycle gives other evidence of an enraged (not a
deluded) Ajax. A fragment of the Sack of Ilium praises the
diagnostic skills of the physician Podalirius, "who first
recognized the flashing eyes and burdened mind of the
wrathful Ajax." These symptoms may have boded an attack on the cattle or a simple suicide; they hardly suggest
the onset of a hallucination.
The elaborate and melodramatic story found in the Little Iliad, with its spy mission, madness, and rampage among
the cattle, stands in contrast to the more somber and
straightforward version which seems to have appeared in
the Aethiopis. Intrigue and adventure are characteristic of
the Little Iliad. It is an episodic work, fond of complicated
and varied incidents. Aristotle complained that it was too
episodic: one could find eight or ten tragic plots in it,
where a properly focused epic like the Iliad offered only
one of two (Poetics ch. 23, 1459b). Amid all its romance
and adventure, and no doubt because of these things, the
Little Iliad maintains a special interest in Odysseus,
whose wiles and exploits occupy a large part of its action.
The Little Iliad glorifies its favorite hero by making his opponent's conduct as outrageous as possible. By contrast,
the Aethiopis seems to have been relatively sympathetic
to Ajax, who is much like its own favorite hero, Achilles.
Aeschylus wrote a play called The Judgment of Arms
and presented Ajax' suicide in The Thracian Women.
These plays included some interesting details not found
in other pre-Sophoclean versions of the myth. Aeschylus
seems to have used Nereids, not Greeks or Trojans, to
decide the judgment of arms (fr. 285). His Ajax was endowed with a magical invulnerability (fr. 292b):
According to the story, Ajax was invulnerable on the rest of
his body, but he could be wounded in the armpit, because
when Heracles wrapped him in his lion-skin he left that part
uncovered because of the quiver which he wore. Aeschylus
says of him that the sword bent "like a man stretching a bow"
when his skin did not give way to the blow, until (he says) a
goddess came and showed him in what part of the body he
needed to stab himself.
There is nothing in the fragments (admittedly scanty)
about madness or cattle. Aeschylus' two Ajax plays may
have presented the two essential events of the short version of our myth-the judgment of arms and the suicide
-with little in between.
In art, Ajax' death furnished material for vase-painters,
metal-workers, and gem-engravers throughout antiquity.'
Representations of the suicide reach back as far as the
seventh century B.C. They show Ajax bending over or lying face down as a great sword, planted hilt down in the
earth, pierces his body. On the manner of Ajax' suicide,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Sophocles was following an old and well-established tradition. Figure I shows an early example from Corinth, with
the Greek chieftains gathered around to look at the body.
Later artists, more adept at showing the human figure in
action, sometimes varied the poses. Etruscan artists of the
fifth and fourth centuries B.C. (with whom the scene was
rather popular) show Ajax in wild, contorted attitudes,
leaping on his sword almost like an acrobat (Figure 2 and
3).
Athenian representations of the suicide are fewer, but
more impressive, than those from Corinth and Etruria. A
well-known vase by the black-figure master Exekias from
the 530s B.C. shows a naked, intent Ajax planting his
sword in the ground (Figure 4). His armor sits opposite
him, a reminder of the warrior's life he is leaving and of
the warrior's honor that drives him to his death. In the
460s, an Athenian artist working in the later red-figure
technique .showed a similar scene (Figure 5).5 This Ajax,
less grim and more plaintive, kneels before his upturned
sword, arms raised in prayer, in a scene recalling his dying
speech in Sophocles. Both these scenes, though painted
well before Sophocles wrote, would make excellent illustrations for his play.
The other main event of our story, the judgment of
arms, is fairly popular with Athenian artists. The debate
between Odysseus and Ajax appears on vases before 500
B.C., and scenes of the Greeks voting on their claims enjoy
a vogue between 500 and 480. In one example (Figure 6),
the two heroes quarrel violently over Achilles' armor.
They rush at each other, one drawing his sword, the other
with his sword already drawn. Their friends try to hold
them back. Agamemnon, with the armor at his feet, stands
between them to keep them apart. The other side of the
cup (Figure 7) shows a more orderly scene: the Greeks
vote (with pebbles, like Athenian jurors) between the two
heroes. Athena presides-'-perhaps to bless democratic
procedure, perhaps to ensure Odysseus' victory. Since the
Greeks pile their pebbles up in the open rather than
follow the Athenian practice of putting them in urns, we
can see how the voting is going. The pile on the left is
clearly bigger, and at the far left of the scene Odysseus
shows his surprise and delight (Figure 8). At the far right,
Ajax turns away to lean on his staff and hide his head in
his mantle (Figure 9).
Another cup from about the same time gives us different versions of the same scenes. In the quarrel (Figure
I 0), we see the Greeks restraining the heroes again as a regal, but agitated, Agamemnon steps between them and
shouts for order. The other side of the cup shows the
scene immediately after the voting (Figure II). A close
look shows fifteen pebbles on the left and fourteen on the
right: the vote has been close, but Odysseus wins. To the
far right, Ajax claps his hand to his head in dismay. To the
left, the cup is badly broken, but we can make out the second figure from the left as Athena, for the tassels of her
aegis project from her back. The figure to her right is
55
�Figure 10. Athenian red·figure cup by the Brygos
painter, c. 490 B.C.; quarrel of Ajax and Achilles; collection of Walter Bareiss, photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; all rights reserved,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
probably Odysseus, for he is holding a shield, whose lower
rim can be seen below the broken edge of the cup. He has
just taken possession of Achilles' armor. ·
The painter of this cup carries the story a step further
(Figure 12). On the inside of the cup (for its strongstomached owner to see as he drained the last of his wine),
he shows Ajax pierced by his sword and lying dead as Tecmessa comes up to drape a robe over his body. Ajax lies on
a nubbly surface, probably a beach. The setting at the
seashore and Tecmessa covering the body appear here
forty years before Sophocles showed them on the stage.
In these details as in the manner of Ajax' suicide,
Sophocles was following an older tradition.
The artists, like the poets, appear interested primarily
in the two main events of our myth, the judgment of arms
and Ajax' suicide. They paid little attention to what happened in between. The slaughter of the cattle appears only
once in vase-painting before Sophocles (Figure 13). Only
fragments of the vase survive, but we can make out the
hindquarters of a bull, lying supine with legs upturned, on
one fragment and the hindquarters of a sheep in a similar
position on another. The human figures must be curious
or horrified Greeks on the morning after Ajax' rampage.
After this vase, the cattle drop from sight (except for one
appearance in Hellenistic timesf until the first century
B.C. and after in Rome.
The Romans more than made up for Greek neglect of
the slaughtered cattle, but only with repeated reproductions of one scene. Ajax sits on a rock~ resting his head on
one hand and holding a sword. Carcasses of slaughtered
animals are before him. We have over thirty copies of this
scene, mostly on engraved gems (Figure 14), based on a
56
Figure 11. Other side of the cup by the Brygos painter; vote oh the
judgment of arms; collection of Walter Bareiss; all rights reserved, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
work of art which somehow became popular in Rome in
the first century B.C. That work of art was more likely an
illustration of Sophocles' play than an inspiration for it.
Finding Ajax' madness in ancient art is almost as hard
as finding slaughtered cattle. The wild, contorted poses in
some scenes of Ajax' suicide suggest Ajax killing himself
in a frenzy, but the madness of Sophocles' play is different.
There are no scenes of Ajax' attempt on the Greeks in ancient art. Athena's intervention to cloud his wits might appear difficult to show in a painting, but it is not impossible;
Greek art is no stranger to mad scenes. No Greek artist~
however~ undertook this one.
2. The Play
Sophocles did not inherit a canonical version of the
Ajax myth. His predecessors in treating the story left him
a simple outline (judgment of arms, suicide of Ajax) and
ample room for choice in filling it out. Our study of the
myth shows what choices Sophocles made and how they
affected the meaning of the play. By examining the poet's
sources~ we discover something often undervalued in a
Greek writer: his originality.
Like other fifth-century writers, but unlike some of the
epic poets, Sophocles universalized the judgment of arms
by having it decided on the broadest possible groundsSUMMER 1982
�between the assertive and cooperative virtues. Ajax is
above all an individualistic hero, bold and self-assertive,
proud and independent. His prowess in battle makes him
a valued member of the community, needed by the Greek
army, needed even more by his own followers, Tecmessa
and the Chorus. His prowess also sets him apart-stationed at a post of honor at the extreme end of the Greek
camp (4), open to the envy and resentment of others (154157), repeatedly called ((alone," Single," "solitary" in the
language of the play. He does little to fit in with the community, to accommodate his rugged nature to its demands. His treatment of Tecmessa and the Chorus shows
how deaf he is to advice and entreaties from others; his attempt to murder the Greeks shows how little he cares for
the rights of others when his own are at stake.
Where his abilities and temper set him apart, he insists
on being set apart in honor too-in winning extraordinary
prizes to match his extraordinary merits. Like his cousin
Achilles, he meets the great crisis of his life when the loss
of a prize breaks down the correlation between his achievements and the community's recognition. From then on,
his individualism isolates him further. He becomes the
would-be murderer of his comrades in arms, an object of
universal hatred (457-459), a weak support for a Chorus
which cannot understand him and for a devoted woman
he does not care to understand, and finally a solitary suicide left to address his last words to the landscape. Only
his burial gives him a place in the human community
again 7 His character and fate show both the attractions
and the problems of the heroic imperative to excel, to
stand out from the rest of the community.
In contrast to Ajax, Odysseus is very much the man of
the community, endowed with the cooperative spirit, reasonableness, and readiness to try persuasion that Ajax lacks
-all qualities necessary for the smooth functioning of society. Odysseus shows these qualities most clearly at the end
of the play, when he breaks into a deadlocked debate between Teucer and the Atreidae to secure Ajax' right to
burial. This debate is almost surely Sophocles' invention,
although Ajax' "irregular" funeral in the Little Iliad probably inspired it. By including the debate, Sophocles displays Odysseus' conciliatory spirit to good adva_ntage
against the vituperation, intransigence, and petty pnde of
the others.
More impressive than Odysseus' persuasive skills in
breaking the deadlock are the humility and moderation
that bring his success. More than anyone else in the play,
he knows the limits set upon mortal life. He hated Ajax
"while. it was right to hate" (1347), but justice and respect
for Ajax' merits tell him not to pursue that enmity past
death (1344 f.):
11
Figure 12, Inside of the cup by the Brygos painter; suicide of Ajax; Tecmessa covers the body; collection of Walter Bareiss; all rights reserved,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
on who was the best of the Greeks generally, not on who
did the most to rescue Achilles' body. He further universalized the conflict by following a tradition that emerged
around 500 B.C.: the whole Greek community settled the
dispute by a democratic vote.
Classical authors universalized the conflict in different
ways. For Pindar, the conflict between Ajax and Odysseus
pits true worth against low cunning. Odysseus represe_nts
the art of inferior men," and he wins a popular electiOn
because "the greater mass of men have blind hearts." Something similar appears in Ajax' and Teucer's complaints that
the judgment of arms was rigged (445 f., 1135, 1137), but
this is mere propaganda, unsupported by the facts of the
play. Sophocles may be raising Pindar's idea of a corrupt
election only to reject it.
Other classical authors (mostly after Sophocles) see the
judgment of arms as the victory of intelligence and wit over
mere strength and courage. In the fourth century B.C., Antisthenes wrote two speeches for Ajax and Odysseus that
stress the conflict of intelligence and courage, and the conflict looms large in the later debate-scenes of Ovid and
Quintus of Smyrna. Ajax becomes the hero of brawn defeated by the hero of brain-though he is still far from the
"beef-witted lord" of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.
Again, Sophocles raises the idea, for we hear of Ajax' size
and strength as his main qualities (1077 f., 1250-1254; cf.
758). Again, he rejects it: the words come from Ajax' enemies, and the !).jax we see in the play is an intelligent man.
His speeches are forceful, well thought out, and eloquent.
On the battlefield, too, he is thoughtful. "Who was found
more prudent than this man, or better at doing what the
occasion demanded?" Athena asks rhetorically (119 f.).
Few other authors praise Ajax for prudence or sagacity.
For Sophocles, the judgment of arms shows the conflict
11
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
It is not just to harm a noble man once he is dead, not even if
you happen to hate him.
Since he knows human limits, he accepts human changes:
"Many who are now friends become enemies again" (1359).
57
�Figure 13. Fragments of an Athenian red-figure cup by Onesimus, 490s
{?); photo by M.
Chuzeville, courtesy of the Louvre, Paris.
B.C.; the Greeks discover the slaughter of the cattle
Ajax made the same observation earlier, but in a tone of
bitter, cynical disillusionment (678-683):
I now learn that we are to hate our enemy only so much, as
one who will be our friend again, and I shall want to help my
friend only so much, as one who will not always remain my
friend; for with most mortals the harbor of companionship is
untrustworthy.
In contrast, Odysseus accepts changes pragmatically and
finds in them a call for tolerance and magnanimity.
Odysseus thinks as he does because he knows we are all
weak and mortal. The fallen enemy is no different from
the rest of us; Ajax' fate can happen to anyone (1364 f.):
Agamemnon: So you bid me to let this corpse be buried?
Odysseus: I do, for I myself shall come to this.
Odysseus' words here recall his pity for Ajax in the prologue (121-126):
I pity the wretch, even if he is my enemy, because he is yoked
to an awful ruin, anO I think no more of his case than of my
own. For I see that we who live are nothing but phantoms or
a light shadow.
His enmity with Ajax matters less than their common humanity. This is the wisdom of Priam and Achilles in the
last book of the Iliad, but Odysseus uses this wisdom dif·
ferently. Priam and Achilles weep together, then part to
go to their separate dooms. Odysseus turns towards life,
formulates sound principles for guiding life in community, and applies those principles with telling force in the
final debate. In the words of Sophocles' famous praise of
human achievement, "he has taught himself the temperament that governs towns" (Antigone 354-356). Sophocles
sees Odysseus' famous versatility not as low trickery (as
Pindar did) or as cynical pragmatism (as Sophocles was to
58
Figure 14. Roman gem; Ajax amid the slaughtered
cattle; one carcass visible to the left; photo courtesy
of the British Museum, London.
do later in the Philoctetes), but as the humble flexibility
that we need to live with others.
Odysseus' victory over Ajax in a democratic election is
the result of his sociable wisdom. Sophocles could have
had him win through the favor of Athena or the caprice of
Trojan prisoners. Victory through the community's choice
shows the community's preference for humility and concern for the common good over boundless self-assertion
and love of distinction. Odysseus makes a better neighbor
(if not a better story-book hero) because he is good for the
community.
If Sophocles made Odysseus nobler than the tradition
did, he made Ajax more selfish, violent, and irrational.
Ajax is a fascinating and sympathetic figure in Sophocles'
hands, but one of the most significant conclusions that
emerges from comparing the play with the myth is that
our sympathy for him comes very hard indeed. Sophocles
included everything the myth offered-and possibly much
that it did not-that might discredit the hero. Unlike
Homer and Pindar, he makes Ajax slaughter the cattlean act both horrifying and absurd. Unlike the author of
the Little Iliad (probably), he makes the slaughter of the
cattle a diversion from something worse-the slaughter of
the Greeks. He adds other touches that might, if treated
differently, serve admirably to blacken Ajax' character: his
callous disregard for the loving Tecmessa and for the family ties that she invokes; his proud and foolish rejection of
divine aid, told to us by the Messenger in another apparent Sophoclean invention (762-775); his boast in the
prologue over the torture he thinks he is inflicting on
Odysseus. If Sophocles had set out to make a villain of
Ajax, or to debunk his brand of heroism after the manner
of Euripides, it is hard to see what more he could have
done to the story.
SUMMER 1982
�Yet the play does not debunk, and it is not the story of a
bad man's downfall-the sort of story Aristotle warned
tragedians to avoid (Poetics ch. 13, 1453a). For all his
faults, Ajax still merits Tecmessa' s love and the Chorus'
devotion. He is a greater, perhaps even a better, man than
most who survive him. Agamemnon and Menelaus are full
of petty spite, eager to abuse in death a man they could
never surpass in life. Teucer, though more sympathetic, is
a small-scale Ajax, a man of mere pugnacity, not of grand
wrath. Even the wise Odysseus is a small-scale figure, a
good and humble man rather than a great one. Display of
their smallness, and of Ajax' greatness by contrast, is one
reason for the debate over the hero's burial at the end of
the play. (It is also one reason why some critics find the
debate dull and undramatic.)
Ajax' greatness is not simply shown in his foils. It is
shown in the man himself. His courage and prowess are
beyond serious question, and Odysseus admits (agreeing
with the epic tradition) that Ajax was the best of the
Greeks after Achilles (13 39-1341 ). His faults are fascinating, not repugnant, because they are the faults of a great
man, not of a small one. His towering (and largely justified) self-confidence, his anger and self-assertiveness, his
refusal to accept the army's judgment or Tecmessa' s advice, all stem from the same nature that made him the
bulwark of the Achaeans. His heroic merits and heroic
vices are inextricably linked: we cannot have the merits
without the vices.
The same can be said of Sophocles' other heroes. The
qualities that make Philoctetes a worthy possessor of
Heracles' bow and an indispensable member of the Greek
army at Troy also give him a self-destructive grudge that
confines him more tightly than his exile and nearly keeps
him from going to the war. The same quick wit, keen
pride, and decisiveness that make Oedipus king of Thebes
and drive him to search for the truth also arouse his
groundless suspicions of Creon. Some years earlier, they
led him to kill his father at the crossroads. Sophocles' work
shows an enduring preoccupation with the problems and
appeal of a rugged, proud sort of human excellence, unquestionably great but not entirely good, needed by society but not amenable to society's desires or demands.
The paradoxes in Sophocles' heroes also show themselves in the hero-cults of Greek religion. A hidi5s, in
Greek terms, is a person who has died but who continues
to exercise unusual power over human life and who demands worship at his (or sometimes her) grave.8 Heroes
are not honored because they are good; they are appeased
and conciliated because they are powerful and dangerous.
Their power is often linked to a sinister force of character
that shows itself in pride, swiftness to anger, hunger for
honor. Heroes arouse in their worshipers a fascinated awe
or dread that is quite independent of moral judgment.
Sophocles was a devotee of hero-cults. He helped introduce the worship of Asclepius to Athens, and he founded
a shrine to Heracles. (These figures were not pure heroes,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
but their worship combined heroic and divine elements.)
He was the priest of another hero-cult and was honored as
a hero himself after his death. Every recorded example of
his famous piety is connected with a hero-cult.
His interest in hero-cults carried over from his life into
his art. Oedipus at Colonus tells, among other things, the
story behind a hero-cult in Sophocles' district of Athens.
The benefit that Oedipus can confer on the place of his
death, and over which Thebans and Athenians fight, is
the benefit that a city receives from the burial and worship of a hero in its territory.
Like the Oedipus at Colonus, the Ajax involves the
foundation-story of a local hero-cult. Ajax was a popular
hero in Athens, the patron of one of the ten tribes of
Athenian citizens. He and his family were invoked to defend their home island, Salamis, at the battle in 480 B.C.
(Herodotus 8.64, 121). The debate on his burial at the end
of the play is important partly because a proper funeral
and a recognizable tomb are generally prerequisites for a
hero-cult. Interest in Ajax' cult seems to have influenced
Sophocles' treatment of Ajax' character. He draws out the
tensions and sharpens the paradoxes latent in the worship
of heroes. He probes the fascination which heroes inspire.
In developing our own contemporary response to the
play, we should keep in mind that fascination with heroes
of this sort is not confined to ancient Greece. Something
like it lives on in popular culture. We find it in the romantic fascination with the temperamental artist or performer, who can treat family and friends abominably, be
moody, egotistical, and possibly mad, and still write great
poems or symphonies or deliver great performances on
the stage. On another level, there is something like it in a
type of athletic hero who has become popular (at least in
the United States) in the last fifteen years or so-the braggart, bully, or playboy who wins games.' It would be misleading to say that these people succeed in spite of their
irresponsibility, selfishness, and lack of restraint. In a
sense, they succeed because of them; the Hheroic" vices
stem from the same forces of character that produce gripping music, impassioned acting, and last-second touchdowns. Even in an age far more inclined than ancient
Greece to demand humility of its heroes, and far more
ready to spread moral standards into every department of
life, the archaic cult-hero has a place. Fans of Richard
Wagner and Maria Callas (not to mention joe Namath and
Muhammed Ali) know something of its power.
Sophocles' appreciation of Ajax' heroism is great, but
extraordinarily balanced and clear-eyed. He shows us a
hero worthy of admiration, but he does not ignore the
claims of the community or the dangers of the heroic temper. Sophocles knows the cost of having men like Ajax in
the world, and he produces a profound appreciation of
the moral ambiguities of the Greek heroic type. His appreciation of Ajax would not be so subtle and deep without Ajax' plot to murder the Greeks, or his slaughter of
the cattle, or his rejection of divine aid, or the other in-
59
�criminating details left out of most other treatments of
the myth.
Sophocles' most important departure from tradition concerns the nature of Ajax' madness. In earlier versions of the
story (certainly in the Sack of Ilium, possibly in the Little
Iliad), the madness is a rage or a frenzy-if it appears at
all. In Sophocles, it is the delusion that cattle were Greek
soldiers. 10 This is made quite clear in the prologue, where
Athena describes Ajax' adventures with the care and detail we would expect in an original (or at least, an unfamiliar) version of the story. By her account, Ajax was sane
when he set out to kill the Greeks. She did not intervene,
"casting hard-to-bear imaginings upon his mind" (51 f.),
until he was at the entrance of the Atreidae's tent. Ajax in
the prologue is mad .because he is still deluded. His recovery (described by Tecmessa) lies in regaining his wits and
recognizing what he has really done. Nobody in the play
blames madness for Ajax' attack on the Greeks, or for his
suicide, or for anything else except the delusion and the
accompanying slaughter of the cattle.
Identifying the limits of Ajax' madness does not reduce
its importance in the play. Rather, it helps us understand
its meaning and dramatic function better by focusing our
attention on the important theme of correct perception.
Perception gets little attention, as far as we can tell, in
earlier treatments of the Ajax story. Perception is, however, a theme dear to Sophocles' heart, especially in his
earlier plays. Discoveries and revelations are important in
the Antigone, the Trachiniae, and the Oedipus Tyrannus.
Both the Ajax and the Oedipus draw symbolic links between physical sight and deeper knowledge. In the
Oedipus, sight and knowledge are opposed: the blind
"seer" Teiresias has knowledge that the sighted Oedipus
lacks, and Oedipus blinds himself when he gains knowledge. In the Ajax, sight and knowledge are equated. Ajax'
delusion about cattle and men symbolizes ignorance about
more important matters.
In some ways, the ramifications of the hero's ignorance
are more complex and varied in the Ajax than in the
Oedipus. Ajax' delusion expresses (and aggravates) his
heroic isolation. He is so cut off from his fellows that he
cannot even see them plainly, and so full of contempt for
them that he sees no difference between them and beasts.
More important, the delusion reflects a basic confusion
that was already in his mind about telling his friends from
his enemies. 11
The Greeks, supposedly his friends, turned out to be
his enemies (as he sees it) by depriving him of Achilles'
arms. Tecmessa, once his enemy, has become a loving and
devoted friend (487-495). Odysseus, the friend turned enemy, does a friend's service by securing Ajax' right to
burial. Friends and enemies keep changing places. Ajax'
bitter reflections on that fact (678-683, quoted earlier) are
drawn directly from his experience. Odysseus, as we have
seen, accepts that mutability and acts with the appropriate moderation. Ajax is confused by it, and particularly
60
confused by the supposed treachery of the Greeks against
him. The confusion about cattle and men is a natural
result.
Even Ajax' confusion about friends and enemies is but
one aspect of something more general: confusion about
the nature of the world. The steadfast Ajax believes in a
world that runs according to fixed and definite rules. He
had every reason to think he would get Achilles' arms because of his lineage and deeds (434-440). There seemed to
be no way he could fail to kill the Atreidae (447-456). He
thought he could reject divine aid in battle because his
own strength would be equal to any challenge (762-775).
What these things have in common is Ajax' firm confidence that the qualities of things and men are fixed, not
to be altered by time and chance. His confidence is misplaced. The world of this play is full of unexpected and irrational change. "A day brings down and brings back up
again all things human," says Athena (131 f.). Ajax' experience is excellent proof of her words.
The Ajax is a story of discovery. The hero wrestles with
disillusionment, comes to see the way things really are,
and faces the problem of living in a world of change. This
intellectual enterprise has a symbolic model in Ajax' delusion about the cattle and his recovery from that delusion.
Sophocles first tells the story of the little delusion about
cattle, then goes on to develop the larger story of Ajax' discovery of the nature of the world.
We can now follow that larger story through the play.
Early in the play, especially in his first monologue (430480), Ajax confronts the shock that his loss of Achilles'
arms and his failure to kill the Greeks has dealt his preconceptions. He resents these failures not simply as personal
setbacks, but as violations of the proper order of things.
"If one of the gods interferes, even a weakling can escape
someone mightier," he says (455 f.). His rejection of divine
aid earlier in the war rested on a similar principle: "With
the gods, even a nobody can attain prowess, but I am confident that I shall win glory without them" (767-769). He
wants to succeed by his own merits, not by divine in~
tervention. The first monologue shows his bitter, disillusioned protests at his discovery that a man's fortunes do
not depend simply on his merits. In tone and in spirit, the
speech corresponds to Ajax' first cries of anguish upon
discovering that his attempt to kill the Greeks has failed.
Ajax faces his situation squarely, examines the different
courses of action open to him, and resolves to kill himself.
Tecmessa pleads with him to go on living-eloquently,
but to no avail. Ajax says his farewell to their son and goes
into his tent. The Chorus sings about his impending death,
and we have every reason to expect a messenger to enter
and announce the worst.
Instead, Ajax re-enters, still alive and holding a sword.
He delivers an eloquent and enigmatic speech on time
and change (646-692). Time, he says in words that recall
Athena's at 131 f., makes obscure things to grow and hides
away things that were manifest. Nothing is beyond expecSUMMER 1982
�tation. Even he has been softened by Tecmessa's words so
that he pities her. He goes on to say that he will go to the
shore to purify himself and to bury the sword which Hector once gave him. Then he will "be sensible" (sophronein)
and submit to the gods and the Atreidae. After all, harsh
things in nature yield: winter gives way to summer, day to
night, storm to calm weather, sleep to waking. He realizes
now (he says in words quoted earlier) that friends turn to
enemies and enemies to friends. With some final instructions to Tecmessa and the Chorus, he leaves the stage.
The Chorus sings a joyous ode to celebrate his supposed
change of mind. In fact, Ajax is going to his death.
Discussion of the speech tends to center on the question whether Ajax' apparent change of mind is sincere. I
shall avoid that issue to point out that on one important
matter, he is telling the truth. He is describing, with con·
siderable force and eloquence, the way the world (as presented in this play) really is. Athena enforces the law of
change and Odysseus shows us how to obey it, but it is
left to Ajax, the staunchest opponent of that law, to give it
its fullest and most poetic expression. He has now worked
past his early grief and disillusionment to see clearly and
soberly how the world really operates and where he was
wrong in his earlier conceptions and demands of life. In a
way, the Chorus is right when it sings that Ajax has
recovered from his sickness. The great delusion has passed,
much like the smaller one about men and cattle.
This discovery does not alter his decision to kill himself.
The old reasons for suicide-his shame over killing the
cattle, the army's hatred of him, his hatred of the armyhave not gone away. Rather, the speech on time shows
that Ajax has found new and more profound reasons for
dying. He cannot live in a world of change. When he
speaks of "doing reverence to the Atreidae" instead of
simply honoring them, and of "the untrustworthy harbor
of friendship," his language shows a bitterness and a vehe·
mence that mark him as the old Ajax still. He can see that
yielding is natural and necessary; he cannot imagine himself doing it, and he rejects the idea even while speaking
of it. Seeing the world clearly means seeing clearly the
reasons why he must leave it. 12
Yet paradoxically, Ajax' leaving the world is a form of
yielding to it. 13 The law of nature is that "fearful and
mighty things give way" (669 f.), and Ajax' examples of
change in nature (winter giving way to summer, storm
yielding to calm) all involve something grim and mighty
passing out of existence to make room for something mild
and gentle. Ajax will follow this law himself by passing out
of existence and leaving the world to the humanity and
tact' of Odysseus. Death takes him into a state where
things are most surely and permanently settled, but it is
also the ultimate change. There is more to Ajax' death
than defiance of the world. In an ironic way, and at great
cost to himself, he reaches a certain rapprochement with
it. Sophocles' most important contribution to the Ajax
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
myth was to see the story of a great man's spiritual
journey within the traditional tale of warrior pride.
l. An earlier version of this paper was read before the Fourth Comparative Drama Conference at the University of Florida on April 18, 1980.
My thanks to Frank Romer and the library staff of Johns Hopkins University for access to some excellent research materials and to Mark I.
Davies for advice on art and for reading a draft of the paper.
2. Sources for the myth (mostly literary) are collected and discussed in
the Ajax commentaries ofR. C. Jebb, Cambridge 1896, J. C. Kamerbeek,
Leiden 1953, and W. B. Stanford, London 1963. Jebb offers the fullest
collection of material, Kamerbeek the most incisive discussion, and
Stanford some good remarks about Ajax in Homer and at Athens. Also,
Carl Robert, Die griechische Heldensage 11.3.2., Berlin 1923, 1198-1207.
For the epic cycle, T. W. Allen (ed.), Homeri Opera 5, Oxford 1912, and
Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica,
Loeb Classical Library, London/New York 1964. For Aeschylus, Hans
Joachim Mette, Die Fragmente der TragOdien des Aischylos, Berlin
1959.
3. Apollodorus, Epitome 5.6-7, in the first century A.D., describes Ajax'
plot to murder the Greeks, his delusion, and the slaughter of the cattle
much as we find them in Sophocles, then adds the "irregular" burial as
it appeared in the Little Iliad. Did Apollodorus follow the Little Iliad
throughout-in which case Sophocles followed the Little Iliad closely
indeed? Or did he conflate Sophocles' version with that of the Little Iliad?
4. For the myth of Ajax in art, see Frank Brommer, Vasenlisten zur griechischen Heldensage, 3rd ed., Marburg 1973, 380 f., 418, and Denkmiiler·
listen zur griechischen Heldensage 3, Marburg 1976, 14-19; Mark I.
Davies, "The Suicide of Ajax: A Bronze Etruscan Statuette from the
Kappeli Collection," Antike Kunst 14, 1971, 148-157, and "Ajax and
Tekrnessa: A Cup by the Brygos Painter in the Bareiss Collection," An·
tike Kunst 16, 1973, 60-70; Mary B. Moore, "Exekias and Telamonian
Ajax," American Journal of Archeology 84, 1980, 417-434; B. B. Shefton,
"Agamemnon or Ajax?" Revue Archeologique 1973, 203-218; and Dyfri
Williams, "Ajax, Odysseus, and the Arms of Achilles," Antike Kunst 23,
1980, 137-145.
5. Discussed in Karl Schefold, "Sophokles' Aias auf einer Lekythos,"
Antike Kunst 19, 1976, 71-78.
6. Some fragments in relief from a molded bowl of the second century
B.C. appear to show Ajax among the cattle: see Fernand Camby, Les
vases grecs d reliefs, Paris 1922, 287 no. 10.
7. On Ajax' "heroic isolation," see Bernard M. W. Knox, "The Ajax of
Sophocles," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 65, 1961, 1-37, reprinted in Thomas Woodard (editor), Sophocles: A Collection of Critical
Essays, Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1966, 29-61 (whose page numbers I cite
hereafter) and Knox, Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater,
Baltimore 1979, 125-160. Knox has examined the heroic isolation of
Sophoclean heroes generally in The Heroic Temper, Berkeley/Los
Angeles 1966. Also useful is the chapter on the Ajax in Charles Segal,
Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles, Cambridge,
Mass. 1981.
8. For a good outline of Greek hero-cults and their connection with the
heroes of Sophoclean drama, see Knox, The Heroic Temper, 53-58.
9. There is a good account of the type in George Plimpton, Paper Lion,
New York 1966, 72-75 on Bobby Layne.
10. This is widely, though not universally, accepted by critics of the play
and stated with particular force by Knox, "Ajax," 34. I have argued it
and presented my interpretation of the play's madness theme in greater
detail in "Ajax' Ailment," Ramus 9, 1980, 22-33. Also useful are
Penelope Biggs, "The Disease Theme in Sophocles' Ajax, Philoctetes,
and Trachiniae," Classical Philology 61, 1966, 223-235; and Michael
Simpson, "Sophocles' Ajax: His Madness and Transformation,"
Arethusa 2, 1969, 88-103.
11. For discussions of this aspect of the play, see especially Knox,
"Ajax"; Simpson; and David Bolotin, "On Sophocles' Ajax," The St.
John's Review 32.1, 1980,49-57.
12. See Knox, "Ajax," 45-48.
13. For this important aspect of the play, see Simpson.
61
�Toward Reading Thomas Aquinas
Thomas ] . Slakey
that Thomas' particular endeavor
was to reconcile Aristotle with the Bible. While this is
true, it is only part of a much larger truth .. In late antiquity the process of weaving together Platonic, Aristotelian,
and Stoic materials was already well under way among
those in the Eastern Mediterranean who spoke Greek. In
addition, Cicero and others undertook the task of transmitting Greek wisdom to the Latin West. The early Christians
merely expanded this process, and in fact the first instance
is recorded in the New Testament itself, in the Acts of the
Apostles, where St. Paul is speaking in Athens. Paul uses
pagan worship of an unknown god and quotations from
pagan poets as starting points toward the Christian gospel
(Acts 17: 22-34; see also Romans I: 19-20; II, 14-15). Many
of the early Christians were educated in pagan schools
and some even saw Greek philosophy, especially in Plato,
as the means by which God, in His divine providence, had
prepared the Gentile world for Christian revelation. Augustine emphasizes the importance of Platonic specula·
tion to his own conversion, though it should be noted that
he knew Plato chiefly through Cicero and Plotinus. Augustine in turn was one of the chief vehicles of Platonic,
or rather neo'Platonic, thought to the medieval world. 1
Thus Thomas did not begin the process of combining and
adapting pagan and Christian materials. Rather he was
heir to a very long and wide-spread tradition.
Nevertheless, by his time the process had taken on a
particular character through the rise of the medieval university, which began about 1200, shortly before Thomas
was born. There were two chief methods of instruction in
the medieval university, the lectio and the disputatio. The
I
T IS SOMETIMES SAID
A tutor at St. John's College, Thomas J. Slakey gave this lecture at St.
John's College, Annapolis, on February 19, 1982.
62
lectio seems to have meant literally the reading aloud of a
text,in class, together with commentary. The commentary
could range from a brief exposition of words and phrases
to a detailed explanation and discussion of the positions
taken in the text. Thomas himself taught in this manner
throughout his career and we can get close to his Classroom because many of the commentaries survive, some
based on lecture notes taken by students or secretaries
and some refined and reworked for publication. There are
twelve commentaries on separate books of the Bible and
five on other theological works. In addition there are
twelve on separate works by Aristotle, but these seem to
have been written by Thomas directly for the use of students rather than for his own classroom teaching, since
Thomas himself was in the Faculty of Theology rather
than the F acuity of Arts, where Aristotle was studied-'
Nevertheless, the commentaries on Aristotle grew out of
the tradition of the lectio and they illustrate Thomas' way
of reading a book. He rarely permits himself the moves so
dear to modern scholars when they meet difficulties and
apparent contradictions: maybe the author changed his
mind, maybe the text is corrupt; maybe this passage was
inserted by some later editor; maybe this whole way of
talking merely reflects a distant and primitive past. Rather
Thomas tries to understand the author as saying something intelligible or maybe even true, a tactic sometimes
called benigna interpretatio, benign or kindly interpretation.
Benigna interpretatio does have a real danger: we can
rest too comfortably in our own opinions and assume too
easily that our own paltry ideas deserve the majestic clothing bequeathed by some great author. If we are, however,
able to face our real differences of opinion with the author
when they do finally emerge, this way of reading seems to
me the best way to learn from books, especially old books,
In fact, in its respect for texts, the lectio resembles our
SUMMER 1982
�seminars, although we substitute a joint reading by twenty
or so people for a lecture by a single teacher.
T
HE SECOND METHOD of instruction in the medieval
university was the disputatio (Weisheipl, 124-26).
This was an interruption in the daily routine of lectiones for an extended public discussion or debate of a
particular issue, called a quaestio disputata. The question
for the day would be set by one of the masters. Numerous
proposed solutions would be offered by the bachelors, or
junior teachers in the university, usually based on quotations from the authors in the curriculum, the auctores, a
word which can also be translated "authorities." There
would also be replies and counter arguments. Some time
after the public disputation was concluded, the master
who had proposed the discussion would publish his understanding of the question in writing. He would gather
the proposed solutions into some kind of order, offer his
own detailed resolution or "reply" to the question asked,
and then briefly comment on each of the alternative proposed solutions.
Several volumes of Thomas' quaestiones also survive,
and they extend throughout the whole period of his teaching life. Moreover, it is clearly the method of the quaestio
which is used in the Summa Theologiae, Thomas' longest
and most ambitious work, begun at about age forty and
left unfinished at his death at about age fifty. It attempts
to speak to all the major questions of theology in a way suitable to beginners (See Prologue to Part I). The topics are
organized into questions and subdivided into "articles," or
"joints," each phrased as a question. (On the word "article" see Ila Ilae, Q.l, a.6.) Each begins with a series of brief
arguments, usually based on quotations from received au-
thors, or "authorities." These arguments should not be
understood as "objections," as they are sometimes described in English translations, because this word suggests
that a position has already been arrived at. They are rather
proposals toward a solution, and they generally set the
terms in which the discussion will proceed. There follows
a sed contra, or "on the contrary/' again usually based on a
quotation, and usually counter to the general sense of the
first set of arguments. There then follows the "reply" in
which Thomas sets out his own position, followed by brief
comments on each of the initial arguments and sometimes
on the sed contra as well. Throughout, Thomas' strategy is
to save and use what he can from each of the arguments
put forward, to show that the truth as he sees it is suggested by, or at least not opposed by, the quoted authority.
His typical move is the distinction: taken in one sense an
argument is misleading, but in another sense it is true.
Dante brings this out nicely when he presents Thomas as
a speaker in the Paradiso. In Canto X, Thomas says of
Solomon, quoting Scripture, that he was "given wisdom
so deep that, if the truth be true, there never arose a second of such vision" (X, 112-114, Sinclair translation). But
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
then what about Christ Himself, and also Adam? Three
cantos later the qualification comes: Dante has Thomas
explain that Solomon was wisest in the wisdom proper to
kings. Thomas concludes: " ... let this always be lead on
thy feet to make thee slow, like a weary man, in moving
either to the yea or the nay where thou dost not see clearly;
for he ranks very low among the fools, in the one case as in
the other, who affirms or denies without distinguishing,
since it often happens that a hasty opinion inclines to the
wrong side and then the feelings bind the intellect" (XIII,
94-120).
The overwhelming characteristic of Thomas' writing is
its impersonality. It's as if the commentaries, the quaestiones, and the Summas could have been written by any·
one who brought various authors together and carefully
sifted and worked back and forth in a constant search for
the truth. In notable contrast to present day philosophical
and theological writing, Thomas almost never says anyone
is simply mistaken and he never, never claims originality
for his own positions.' Even his Christian belief is not
thrust to the fore. Though he sometimes singles out questions where only divine revelation can be a guide, and
where Scripture must be taken as decisive, Thomas more
commonly weaves together in a single article suggestions
from the Bible, from Aristotle, from Cicero, from Augustine, or from whoever else he finds speaking some part of
the truth. Finally, and again in marked contrast to present
day scholarly writing, Thomas almost never mentions his
contemporaries by name. The most burning issues of the
day appear in the Summa only in their assigned places.
The impersonality has its weak side. Thomas is not
good at arousing our interest, at leading us into a topic, at
making us care about the outcome. Feelings shouldn't
bind the intellect, but some kind of feeling helps to get
the intellect started. Also, the inexorable march of arguments can give the impression that Thomas always thinks
definitive solutions have been reached. The Summa appeals to some who want simple knockdown answers to
complex questions. The strength of Thomas' writing, however, is that if one is involved in a topic through a study of
the authors he quotes, the Bible, Augustine, Aristotle, and
others, then one can appreciate both the subtlety of his
distinctions and the testing, tentative character of his
work. I have used metaphors of sifting and weaving to describe it. I think he took for granted, without laboring the
point, that the sifting and the weaving would be continued
by others.
H
OW DOES THOMAS conceive of man's relation to
God? Let us begin with his discussion of religion
-not Christianity, but simply religion, what
would now be called "comparative religion." Thomas,
however, considers religion not as an aspect of human
psychology or sociology but, following Cicero's lead,
under the heading of justice. 4 Man owes a kind of debt to
63
�God. It cannot be a debt in the strict sense, for man in the
strict sense can bring nothing to the God who made him
and the whole universe out of nothing, and man can
therefore make no return to God. The reverence and
honor we show to God are not for His sake, but for ours.
To the extent that we revere and honor God, our minds
are subjected to Him, and in this the perfection of our
minds consists. For each thing reaches its just perfection
by being placed under its superior, just as body is
perfected when it is made alive by soul and air when it is
lighted by the sun (Ila Ilae, Q.81, a.7c). As Plato argues
that justice is reached only when each part of a man's soul
is in right relation to the whole man, and only when each
man is in right relation to the whole city, so Thomas
argues that justice is reached only when man is in right
relation to God. Religion is not an adjunct or department
of human life. It is central to human life properly lived.
Moreover, in joining ourselves to God, we need to ex·
press ourselves in physical ways (Ila, Ilae, Q.81, a.7c), by
voice, by gestures such as bowing and kneeling, even by
sacred buildings (Q.83, a.l2; 84, a.3). Acts of reverence are
not peculiar to religion. Many are shown to other men,. to
parents, to kings and presidents, to country. The word
pietas or piety, as used in Latin and still to some extent in
English, ranges from reverence towards gods to reverence
towards family and fatherland. But one act of reverence
Thomas considers proper to God alone, namely the act of
offering sacrifice. Sacrifice is a sacred act in which something is offered to God and generally destroyed in the pro·
cess, as in the-killing of animals or in burnt offerings (Q.85,
a.3, ad 3). Thomas sees sacrifice as common to peoples
throughout the world (Q.85, a. I, on the contrary). He says
that "natural reason tells man that he is placed under something higher, because of the lack which he feels in himself
so that he needs help and direction from something higher.
And whatever that is, it is what among all men is called
God" (85, a.lc). The external act of sacrifice expresses "an
internal spiritual sacrifice, in which the soul offers itself to
God ... as the source of its creation and the completion of
its happiness." Only God is our creator and only God is
the completion of our happiness. Therefore to God alone
should we offer ourselves and to God alone should we
make those external offerings in sacrifice which express
the offering of ourselves (85, a.2c).
to consider Thomas' study of humility.
He classifies humility under the heading of temperence, or moderation. The Latin word humilitas derives from the notion of "low" or "close to the ground"
and tends to have a pejorative sense in classical Latin
writers. Greek has a word with a similar meaning and precisely the same etymology, tapeinotes. Humility is a rather
striking omission from Aristotle's list of virtues in the
Ethics, especially when one considers the emphasis Soph·
N
64
EXT, I WISH
odes and other Greek writers give to the dangers of exces·
sive pride. Thomas' own comment on Aristotle's omission
is that in his study of the virtues Aristotle was concerned
only with man's civil life, whereas humility especially concerns man's relation to God (IIa Ilae, Q.l61, a. I, ad 5). According to Thomas we should see ourselves as assigned by
God to a certain level (secundum gradum quem est a Deo
sortitus, a.2, ad 3), and we should recognize that whatever
is good in ourselves comes from God. Even the exercise of
our abilities comes from God, who acts in us and through
us (a.4c).
This profoundly difficult doctrine gives rise to questions about how God can act in us without destroying otir
free wills, and also questions as to why God did not make
the world better than He has, with less sin and suffering,
the questions which so tormented Job. It is a doctrine,
however, which has its roots deep in the Bible, for example, in the claim that God uses whole nations and armies
as his instruments for the punishment and restoration of
Israel: first the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, and finally
the Persians under Cyrus (see, for instance, Amos 3:11,
Isaiah 7:18-20. Also Psalm 139). Isaiah says of Cyrus, who
delivered Israel from captivity in Babylon, "Who stirred
up one from the east whom victory meets at every step?
He gives up nations before him, so that he tramples kings
under foot ... Who has performed and done this, calling
the generations from the beginning? I, the Lord, the tirst
and with the last; I am He" (Isaiah 41:2-4). It is Cyrus who
acts, but it is also God who acts through Cyrus.
The doctrine also has its roots in the concept of crea·
tion out of nothing. If we are made by God out of noth·
ing, all we are and all we do comes from God. And yet
God has not made us like rocks, and stones, and trees, or
even like the beasts of the field. He has given us the capacity to think and choose, and when He acts in us it is as beings which think and choose. (See Ia, Q.22, a.4).
Finally, this doctrine of God's action in us has its roots
in the life of prayer. We pray to God for help. Do we think
that God who is Lord of heaven and earth can only affect
such things as weather and disease and not affect ourselves? Rather we pray, "Create in us a clean heart, 0
God, and put a new and right spirit within us ... Take not
thy Holy Spirit from us" (Psalm 51:10-11 ).
To acknowledge the fact that God acts in us and through
us, to pray by it and live by it, is to see ourselves as we really
are, creatures wholy dependent on God for everything we
are and do and this is what is meant by humility. We become, in the phrase from Matthew's gospel, "poor in
spirit" (5:3), and we feel that "fear of the Lord" which the
Bible so often calls "the beginning of wisdom" (e.g. Psalm
111:10, Proverbs 9:10; see Thomas Ila Ilae, Q.l61, a.2, ad 3).
Thomas sees no conflict between humility so under·
stood and the virtues which the pagan philosophers saw
as leading to achievement in public life, in particular with
the virtue which Aristotle calls megalopsychia, magnanimity
or greatness of soul. 5 Megalopsychia strengthens our resolve to attempt great things when we really are capable
SUMMER 1982
�of them. It requires an accurate judgment of our abilities
and a courageous use of them (Q.l61, a.lc; also Q.129, a.3,
ad 4). The vice Thomas opposes to humility is superbia, or
Hpride." The word is derived from super, meaning "over"
or "above," and it has a double sense in classical Latin
writers: it can mean loftiness of spirit but also arrogance
or haughtiness. Thomas takes it in the latter sense as a
vice.
Pride is not, properly speaking, the desire for honor and
recognition. Thomas calls the desire for honor and recognition vain glory (inanis gloria, IIa IIae, Q.l62, a.S, ad 2),
empty glory. The name suggests a trifling or even silly
vice. Pride in contrast is a vice of strength. It seeks not the
recognition of excellence but excellence itself. The proud
man seeks not so much to be recognized as first as to be
first.
Pride becomes a vice when it seeks excellence beyond
our capacity (Q.l62, a.lc). Thomas does not claim that
pride is the source of all sins. He recognizes that we sin
sometimes from ignorance and sometimes from weakness
(a.2c). But when sin involves a conscious and deliberate
turning away from God, a refusal to seek God as the final
goal of our lives, it is at least an expression of pride if not a
result of pride, a desire to put ourselves in the place of God
and to govern our own lives (a.7; see also Ia I!ae, Q.84, a.2,
and Q.88, a. I, on "mortal" sin.) In this sense pride is the
first sin. It was the sin of Adam and Eve in the garden.
The temptation of the serpent was that they might "be
like God, knowing good and evil." They determined for
themselves what was good and what was evil instead of accepting that determination from God (IIa Ilae, Q.163, a. I,
a.2.).
Pride is also the source of many other sins, such as what
Thomas calls a "distaste" for the truth (excellentiam veritatis fastidiunt). The proud delight in their own excellence to such an extent that they cannot experience "the
sweetness" of certain facts. They might know how the
facts are, but not "how they taste."6
bodily but not composed of matter and form at all. It follows, he argues, that each angel is a distinct form (a.2), and
therefore, as it were, like a distinct species of animal. One
angel is as different from the next as, say, a horse is from a
camel.
Thomas holds that the angels' powers of understanding,
varied as they are among themselves, exceed our own not
only in degree but in kind. (See Ia, QQ's 54-58, especially
Q.58, a's 2-3). All our knowledge begins from our five separate bodily senses. Through colors, sounds, textures, and
so on, we slowly and painstakingly put together concepts
of things. We then make sentences about them, sentences
which are combinations of subjects and predicates, sentences like "lead is heavy." What we call "speech" or
"thinking" is expressed, in both the Greek logos and the
Latin ratio, by the same word as a mathematical "ratio,"
that is, a relation between a pair of magnitudes. And this
is what is meant by saying that we are rational animals: we
connect things. Moreover, we make further connections
called inferences. We "reason," and thus we reach conclusions.
The angels, on the other hand, are intellectual creatures, which means that they apprehend by a kind of immediate insight or "reading into" things (intus Iegere).
Thomas describes their insight only in general terms, but
we can get some clue as to what it might be like by considering mathematical examples. After having gone through
a proof we can often see in the figure that a conclusion
must follow without having to recall all the intermediate
steps. For example, having learned why the angles of a
triangle equal two right angles we can see this immediately
in the nature of a triangle, in the fact that it is composed
of three sides. Even better would be to see this immediately without ever having gone through the proof-presumably the way Euclid first saw it. Such would be the
insight of a rather low ranking angel. An angel of more
powerful mind might see the whole of Apollonius in the
first sketch of the conic sections. And a still more powerful angel would have an intuitive grasp of vast amounts of
information which we cannot even conceive except in our
T
ROMAS" STUDY OF ANGELS (Ia, Q.50 ff.) also helps
clarify man's relation to God. It is frequently said
that ancient and medieval cosmology, with the earth
at the center of the physical universe and the sun, planets,
and stars rotating around it, gave man an extremely exalted
position. The Copernican revolution, placing the sun at
the center, is said to lower man. This seems to me almost a
total misunderstanding. In the medieval universe, man
does have a definite place but it is not the highest place.
The highest place is filled by God, and in fact so high is it
above our comprehension that we cannot speak of it as
place. Moreover, there also exist above us vast multitudes
of angels, greater in number than human beings and animals, in Thomas' opinion (Q.50, a.3). Angels are nonbodily, and, according to Thomas' Aristotelian analysis of
the Biblical and neo-Platonic materials, not only nonTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
piecemeal and haphazard fashion.
Although we do have some share in intellect, we are the
lowest of intellectual creatures. We have bodies and our
knowledge begins from our bodily senses. Our position at
the center of the physical universe is of little importance
compared to our position at the very edge of the intellectual and moral universes.
Moreover, as Dante shows most powerfully, the center
of the physical universe can be conceived of as the locus
of all that is heavy, slow, and evil. We begin to emerge
from sin only as we come out of the earth and ascend the
Mount of Purgatory. We still have to move beyond the
shadow which the earth casts on to the first three planets
(Paradiso, IX, 118), before we approach regions of greater
speed and perfect light, which can more nearly image divine perfection. It is the outer boundaries of the solar system and the heavens which are their true center. Man, far
65
�from being at the center, is at the edge. We are, as C. S.
Lewis puts it, 44 Creatures of the Margin."7
A
LTHOUGH ALL OUR KNOWLEDGE begins from the
senses, and although we are therefore on the very
edge of the intellectual world, we are on that edge.
We do have the capacity to know not merely sensible particulars, a cat, a horse, but to grasp universals, cat, horse.
As is clearest of all in geometry, we can understand certain properties as following not merely by physical observation and measurement of particular triangles, but from
the definition of triangle. To repeat the earlier example, it
is because a triangle is bounded by three straight lines that
its angles equal two right angles.
Moreover, in the case of certain properties like
"justice," we know that no physical manifestation in a just
individual matches our conception of what justice is.
Socrates may occasionally fail and fall short, and even if
he does not, our conception of what justice is does not depend on Socrates' being perfectly just. It points beyond
Socrates to something which Socrates can only aim at. To
use Platonic language, Socrates has only a "share" or a
!(participation" in justice. He does not reach justice itself.
Similarly with our conception of being. Socrates will
die, and any of the things we experience through our senses
will also degenerate and pass away. All physical things
have only a shared existence. They are not being itself.
But even the angels, though they will not die, have only a
shared existence. It is not part of their nature to exist.
Rather their existence is derived, like ours, from a creator
who made them out of nothing. We can strive to move beyond such beings to the conception of a being who simply
is, not by sharing or participation but by His own nature.
He is the source of all the lesser things we know and of all
that is good and just and wise in them. He Himself is
goodness and justice and wisdom. As Thomas puts it,
even though we develop words like "good" from our experience of physical things, such words point beyond themselves and ultimately to God. Their full meaning is realized
only in God. (See Ia, Q.l3, a.6.)
WO IMPORTANT ARGUMENTS follow from this conception of man as knowing universals. The first is
that man's life is not limited to the world of particular physical things. Even though man obviously dies, it is
his body which dies, not his mind or soul. The mind which
can grasp non-bodily things like goodness, justice, and being, must itself be non-bodily. This argument is of course
found in the Phaedo (64-69, 74-75, 78-79) and Thomas
also finds it, I think rightly, in Aristotle's De Anima, whatever Aristotle's final opinion on this question may be. (See
Ia, Q.75, a.6; De Anima III, 4,429a 18-b 22.)
The other argument is that man's happiness can be
found only in union with God. This argument is found at
T
66
the beginning of Part Two of the Summa Theologiae and
is reflected in the structure of the work as a whole. Part
One of the Summa starts from God as creator, and goes
on to treat of the angels and men and all the physical universe as coming forth from God. Part Two reverses the
motion. It begins from man and sees everything in human
life as leading man back to God. For instance, the discussion of law, which comes from the second part of the
Summa, deals with law as an instrument of man's service
to God and return to God. (See Ia Ilae, QQ's 90-108.)
We seek many things in life: wealth, sensual pleasure,
power, and knowledge. Each of these has, or at least can
have, some share in goodness and can therefore give us
some share in happiness. But only goodness itself can fully
satisfy our desire, our constant movement from one
par~
tial and temporary satisfaction to another. And goodness
itself is God Himself (Ia Ilae, Q.2, a.8). Whether we realize
it or not, all our confused and haphazard search in life is
really for God. The search Augustine describes in the
Confessions is the true search of every man. As Augustine
puts it, "Thou hast made us for Thyself, 0 Lord, and our
hearts are ever restless until they rest in Thee" (Confessions, I, l ).
There is a fundamental paradox in human existence. In
one sense man is firmly in place in an elaborate hierarchy,
a sacred order. He is a creature of God, he owes reverence
to God. He must humble his pride and bow his head before God. He is located in a range of creatures, neither
lowest nor highest, between animals and angels. In a different sense, his position is most unstable. He is a creature
of the margin. He shares something of the nature of animals and something of the nature of angels. His desire for
happiness leads him beyond anything he can find in the
world about him. His reason leads him beyond what he
can fully understand.
I
'VE EXPLORED THREE EXAMPLES, from the Summa
Theologiae, Thomas' study of religion, his study of
pride, and his study of the angels. Nothing I've said so
far is specifically Christian-' For Thomas, if I understand
him rightly, the world I've described so far is knowable, at
least in principle, by natural reason. I do not mean to say
that in developing his conception of the universe that
comes from God and returns to God, Thomas makes no
use of the Bible. He constantly draws on the Bible and on
other Christian writers. But following a passage from St.
Paul that he is fond of quoting (for instance, Ia, Q.2 a.2,
on lhe contrary), Thomas holds that "the invisible nature"
of God, "His eternal power and deity" can be "seen by the
mind in things made" (Romans, I, 20; see also, Romans II,
14-15).
Thomas' understanding of religious faith is very different from that most commonly expressed today when we
speak of "faith in God." For Thomas the existence of God
is not a matter of faith. Rather faith presupposes the exisSUMMER 1982
�tence of God. Speaking strictly, to have faith means to
believe that something is true because we believe that it
has been revealed by God (Ila Ilae, Q.l, a.lc).
In the Bible itself there is never any question of God's
existence. Faith is demanded only when God enters our
world and speaks in something like a human voice: when
He speaks to Abraham and promises him a son in his old
age, or to Moses from the burning bush and promises that
He will lead the children of Israel out of Egypt, or through
the prophets, or finally through His Word made flesh in
the man jesus Christ. Then those who have ears to hear
must believe that it is God who speaks and they must
trust in His word. This is where faith enters.
The good news of the gospels is that God has not abandoned us to our sins and to our own feeble efforts at finding him. God has revealed Himself as Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit, and especially in the Son made flesh in jesus
Christ. Christ has died on the cross for our sins and risen
from the dead. Through him we can begin to rise from
our sins in this life and later we can rise from death to live
with God. In that life we will find what we have been
seeking all along. It is our true home, our fatherland, our
patria. On this earth we are only viatores, travelers, pilgrims. (For the use of these terms, see for example Ila Ilae,
Q.18, a.2, a.3.)
HEN THOMAS APPROACHES the mysteries of revelation in study and prayer, his faith is serene. He
expresses neither the anxiety nor the bluster of
so many modern Christians. His world is open to the voice
of God. Like Samuel he can say, "Speak, Lord, your servant is listening" (I Samuel 3:10).
To what extent is our own world open to the voice of
God? I do not know the answer to this question, but I do
think there is something about the typical modern process
of inquiry, especially as it begins in Descartes, which
makes it difficult for us to hear God's voice when He does
speak. Descartes imagines true knowledge as a city of perfectly straight streets built by one skillful engineer in an
empty plain (Discourse on Method, Part II). Nothing could
be further from Thomas' manner of inquiry, which is truly
like the medieval city Descartes despises, making use of
all the twisting alleys and old houses, always building on
foundations laid by others, adjusting, modifying, combining.
Secondly, Descartes wishes that he could have been
born with the full use of his reason and that he had never
had to rely on any teacher or parent for anything he thought.
This suggests that he wished to think without even the
hindrance of any human language, in a new language of
perfect clarity and precision. Again, nothing could be farther from Thomas' manner of inquiry. Like Plato and Aristotle, Thomas began from what was said by others. He
ransacked old books, pagan, Moslem, jewish, and Christian, for whatever help he could find.
Finally, Descartes establishes as a criterion of truth
whatever is completely clear and certain to himself. The
W
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
first question of modern philosophy becomes, what can I
know for certain? The principal endeavor of modern philosophy from Descartes through Kant and to a large extent
to our own day, is to set limits to knowledge, to exclude
from inquiry those matters which do not sufficiently meet
the standards of certainty which are somehow prescribed
at the beginning, and the standards of certainty generally
come from mathematics and physical science. Even the
most evident truths of morality become suspect, since
they do not possess the kind of clarity that mathematics
and the physical sciences seem to have. Obviously any
purported truths of religion are even more suspect.
Again, Thomas turns this criterion of certainty upside
down. He invokes a metaphor of Aristotle's in which the
most certain and evident truths are precisely those hardest for us to grasp. The obscurity does not lie in those
truths but in our feeble knowing powers. Aristotle says,
" ... as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the
reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most
evident of all" (Metaphysics II, 1, 993b 10, quoted Ia, Q.l,
a.5, ad 1 and frequently elsewhere). It is not the truth of
God's existence and nature, or even the truths of revelation, which are obscure. God Himself is truth and the
source of all truth. The obscurity and the weakness lie
with us.
We ridicule medieval man for placing himself at the
center of the physical universe. Perhaps we have made a
more important mistake: placing ourselves at the center of
the universe of knowledge and truth.
l. Let me mention in passing that Plato's own writings were largely
unknown in the Latin West until the fifteenth century. No Platonic text
was ever the direct subject of instruction in any medieval school. See
Rashdall's Medieval Universities, ed. Powicke and Emden, Oxford 1936,
1, 38.
2. See James A. Weisheipl, O.P., Friar Thomas D'Aquino, New York,
1974, 281-82.
3. A notable exception is Ia, Q.3, a.S, where he mentions three "errors"
and describes one David de Dinando as having spoken "really stupidly"
(stultissime) when he identified God with prime matter.
4. See Cicero, De Invent Rhetor., Book II, chapter 53. See Sum. Theol.,
Ila llae, Q.80, A.un., obj. 1. I'm using the Marietti edition, Rome 1948.
All translations are my own.
5. David Ross's widely used translation of the Ethics unfortunately renders megalopsychia as "pride.''
6. Ila Ilae, Q.l62, a3, ad l. The metaphor of tasting the truth comes
from St Gregory's Moralia.
7. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, Cambridge 1964, 58.
8. See Lewis, The Discarded Image, 18-19.
67
�REVIEW EsSAY
Updike and Roth: Are They Writers?
John Updike's Rabbit Is Rich
and Philip Roth's Zuckerman Unbound
lEV NAVROZOV
When manuals entitled "How to Become a Writer" began to
appear in Russia in the 20s, they used the term zavyazka, which
is the opposite of denouement. The latter means the "untying,"
"release," "resolution" of the novel, while zavyazka means its
"tying-up"-its "conceptual beginning." After reading the first
eighty-eight pages of Mr. Updike's novel, we finally reach its
"tying-up." Nelson, son of the car dealer Rabbit, residing in
Brewer, Pennsylvania, leaves his college at Kent State, Ohio, and
visits his :Parents with a girl named Melanie.
First of all, Rabbit discovers that he is "not turned on" by
Melanie. In that pansexual phoneyland that Mr. Updike and his
colleagues describe as America, everyone at any age is or must be
"turned on" by everyone else. Indeed, Rabbit "feels even sexier
toward fat old Bessie," his seventy- or eighty-year-old mother-inlaw, than to the college girl his son came with. To make this
cultist pansexualism plausible, Mr. Updike goes into the lavatory
experiences of fat old Bessie, as witnessed by Rabbit. Besides the
incredible fact that his son's girl, Melanie, does not turn Rabbit
on, said Rabbit concludes that she does not turn on his son either.
Since everyone has to be sexually attracted to everyone else,
Rabbit's old sick subordinate named Charlie feels he must have
Rabbit Is Rich, by John Updike. Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1981. 467
pages. $13.95.
Zuckerman Unbound, by Philip Roth. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New
York 1981. 225 pages. $10.95.
Lev Navrozov has contributed "One Day in the Life of the New York
Times and Pravda in the World: Which is More Informative?" (Autumn
1981) and "A Pead Man's Knowledge" (Winter 1982) to the St. John's
Review. Author of The Education of Lev Navrozov (Harper & Row 1975)
and of the forthcoming What the New York Times Knows About the
World, he has written many articles for Commentary, Midstream, The
Yale Literary Magazine, and other magazines.
68
an affair with Melanie. Why should a pretty college girl of 20 or
so have an affair with an old, sick, boring, vulgar, and uneducated man who works as a car salesman's subordinate in a small
Pennsylvania town? Because Mr. Updike's phoneyland has even
less to do with America or any real society than the Soviet novels
of the Stalin era had to do with Russia. Sex in thi!'l phoneyland is
not a reality observed in any real society, but a figment of cultist
imagination.
Like many other Westerners mistaken today for novelists, Mr.
Updike is sure that realism in literature is the utmost absence of
all good manners, utmost obscenity, utmost vulgarity. Describe
all the lavatory experiences you can, and your amateur puppet
show will come wonderfully to life, and your cardboard figures
will begin to live. The sex Mr. Updike describes is no less detailed
than in a medical reference book or locker room conversation.
But as soon as Mr. Updike departs from medicine or locker room
lore into human relations, this sex becomes as false, fantastic,
and far-fetched as everything he writes about.
Apart from this, the-more-vulgar-the-more-realistic approach,
Mr. Updike uses two no less naive amateur techniques to give
realism to his puppet show. First, he believes that the more detailed
his description of everything is, the more lifelike his cardboard
will be. Rabbit jogs, and Mr. Updike proceeds to describe (I) the
color of his running shoes, (2) where they were bought, (3) what
sort of shoes they are, (4) what soles they have at toe and heel,
and (5) how the soles behave, owing to "resilient circlets like flattened cleats." Also, all puppets must be fashionable: "Melanie
was mystical, she ate no meat and felt no fear, the tangled weedy
gods of Asia spelled a harmony to her."
After this fantastic puppet show "nouement," we learn that
the fashionably mystical Melanie is not the girl of Rabbit's son,
Nelson. Quite the contrary. His girl's name is Prudence: this is
how she has been nicknamed for her insufficient promiscuity in
SUMMER 1982
�1\!Ir. Updike's sex utopia. For some reasons as implausible as
everything else in the novel, Prudence is so far into her pregnancy that Nelson must marry her. So Nelson has left the unwed
expectant mother Prudence at college and come to his father to
get a job at his car sales shop, with Prudence's friend Melanie to
chaperone him on this mission. "You (arc) such a goddam watchdog," Nelson complains to Melanie, "I can't even go into town
for a beer."
The idea that a college girl will go from Kent to Pennsylvania
to chaperone her friend's fiance in his father's home and will live
there as if she were the fiance's aunt or mother is again good only
for an amateur puppet theater. But Ivlr. Updike adds more hastily invented nonsense to this silly invention of his. We find that
in the middle of a grand Hollywood-movie affair with Rabbit's
old, sick, poor, uneducated, and vulgar assistant named Charlie,
the beautiful chaperone Melanie sleeps also with her charge,
Nelson.
Like those philistines who are, in any company, interested in
nothing except obscene jokes and are dead, bored, and monosyllabic until someone begins to tell them, Mr. Updike comes to the
same kind of phosphorescent animation only when he is at his
locker room jokes. Mr. Updike invented IYielanie and dragged
her all the way from college to chaperone her friend's fiance in
order to have a pretext for more locker room entertainment.
What is the attitude of Prudence toward the chaperon's cohabitation with her fiance? Explains Janice, the wife of Rabbit:
"They don't have this jealousy thing the way we do, if you can
believe them."
No, they don't have jealousy. Nor any other feelings. They are
Mr. Updike's sexual-gastric puppets which IYir. Updike puts
through various sexual-gastric acts of his imagination so narrow
that the impression finally is that the sexual-gastric automaton is
Mr. Updike himself.
After a series of locker room jokes strung out over the 467
pages, comes the denouement: Nelson marries Prudence and
even goes back to college. This is what Rabbit wanted: to get rid
of Nelson. Father and son hate each other. Mr. Updike, an exemplary Freudian cultist, thought it necessary to invent this as well.
I\llr. Updike seems to have a lower ability to observe human relations than an average person-a layman who has never dreamed
of becoming a writer. About sixty pages before the end of Rabbit
Is Rich, Mr. Updike decided again to compose Couples, a novel
about wife-swapping written about a decade earlier, and "plug"
it in somewhere at the end of whatever he had written under the
title Rabbit Is Rich. Why not? As it was, Rabbit Is Rich was a
string of desultory anecdotes. Why not plug in at the end some
wife-swapping anecdote as well? No sooner said than done. Instead of getting someone's wife named Cindy, as he wanted,
Rabbit got, according to the first night's arrangement, sorneone's
wife named Thelma. Nevertheless, there follows the novel's biggest in-bed scene. Since the time of Couples, Mr. Updike has
learned a perversion about which any boy of any country may
read in any standard textbook of general psychiatry. Mr. Updike
displays his discovery over a dozen or so pages.
The wife-swapping vacation is interrupted by the news of the
disappearance of Nelson. On their way back, Rabbit's wife, JanTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ice, begins to sob aboard the plane. Rabbit assumes that the disappearance of their son Nelson causes the tears. Finally Janice
explains to Rabbit:
"I felt so sorry for you, having Thelma when you wanted
Cindy so much." With that there is no stopping her crying.
The mother of a son who has disappeared cries over her husband's getting the wrong wife during a wife-swapping session.
Chekhov says about a character of his that he could multiply
big figures in his mind but he could not understand why people
cry or laugh. Can Ivlr. Updike multiply big figures in his mind?
He certainly cannot understand why people cry or laugh.
The New York Times celebrated the appearance of this
467-page volume of emetic pulp: the upper half of the front page
of the New York Times Book Review showed Mr. Updike against
a panorama of books, presumably his own. From an article below, "Updike on Updike," we learn from Mr. Updike that his
"20-odd books" have been translated into "20-odd languages, including Finnish, Serbo-Croatian, Hebrew and Korean." 1
I recall how we read that the worst novels of the Stalin era had
been translated into many languages. The psychology of selfevaluation is the same: "Look how many books I have written,
how many pages each of them contains, how many copies of
each of them sold, and how many prizes they have won."
Mr. Updike, speaking of "what the aim of my [Mr. Updike's]
fiction is," says: "let literature concern itself, as the Gospels do,
with the inner life of hidden men." A writer is a "secreter of images," l\!Ir. Updike explains, "some of which he prays will have
the immortal resonance of Don Quixote's windmills, of Proust's
madeleine, of Huck Finn's raft._" Mr. Updike's ambition does not
stop at the immortal resonance of Cervantes, Proust, and Twain.
"I want to write books ... " 1\!lr. Updike declares to l\!Ir. Updike.
Yes, what books? "Something like E=mc2 , only in words, one
after the other."
No Soviet literary charlatan under Stalin had Ivlr. Updike's insolence: it is truly cosmic.
Now listen to l\!Ir. John Leonard's riddles or pomposities in his
Books of the Times review. They are vague, confusing or obscure
enough to pass for wisdom intended for the select few:
He [Rabbit] wastes himself while the dead aren't looking [are
they looking elsewhere?] and God is short of meanings [or of
literary critics?].
Or:
After the death of God-after the chilling discovery that
every time we make a move toward "the invisible," somebody
gets killed-we require a myth of community, sm;nething as
Felix put it in "Coup," that fits the facts, as it were, backwards."
A hard lesson and, after three "Rabbit" books, a splendid
achievement. Let Felix also have the last word: "I perceived
that a man, in America, is a failed boy" [period, end of reviewJ.Z
69
�What does all this highfalutin rigmarole mean?
The "death of God" is Nietzsche's phrase which had been
worn threadbare (in Russia, for example) before Nietzsche died
in 1900. Mr. Leonard must think it terrifically new, for he repeats it several times. But what does it have to do with someone
getting killed? Who gets killed?
What is a "hard lesson?" That God is dead? That someone
gets killed? That we require a myth of community, as Felix of
Mr. Updike's Coup discovered?
What has all this to do with a man in America being allegedly a
failed boy, or a boy being a failed man?
The less comprehensible the better. An understandable text
will expose Mr. Leonard: everyone will see that he has no more
to say as a critic than l\llr. Updike as a writer.
But what was Mr. Leonard's evaluation of Rabbit Is Rich?
It consists of nine words. The book is the "usual Updike xylophone" (three words), and "I like his mus_ic very much" (six
words). Whereupon Mr. Leonard pounces on the critics who fail
to like Mr. Updike's xylophone (not saxophone?) music:
Let the critics, like Nelson, "suck the foam out of one more
can," their "surly puzzled" faces "drinking and eating up the
world, and out of spite at that."
How can Nelson and the critics suck the foam out of one more
can if they drink and eat up the world? Is the world the foam? Or
they do not drink and eat up the world, but only their faces do?
Anyway, these outpourings are to show that the critics, their
faces surly and puzzled, are against Mr. Updike, and only Mr.
Leonard is heroically out to appreciate and defend singlehandedly
the "usual Updike xylophone." It is amazing how conformist salaried officials of a corporation, like Mr. Leonard, praising John
Updike only because "everybody does it," are fond of imagining
themselves to be lone fierce intellectual heroes, fighting against
the overwhelming establishment.
The review in the New York Times Book Review presents a different style: the courtier describing the Emperor's nonexistent
clothes. This particular courtier is Professor Roger Sale of the University of Washington. Dr. Sale ends his review quite resolutely:
For me "Rabbit is Rich" is the first book in which Updike has
fulfilled the fabulous promise he offered with "Rabbit Run"
20 years ago. 3
How did Dr. Sale arrive at this (fabulous) conclusion? Thereview is either vague or vaguely pompous in this respect:
Harry Angstrom [Rabbit] can never be described as largeminded, but that does not prevent Updike from imagining him
largely [or large-mindedly?].
But at one point Dr. Sale decided to be specific. Rabbit's and
Janice's "lovemaking while talking about moving out of his motherin-law's house and worrying about their son Nelson is the best
moment in the book, maybe in all Updike." Prepare yourself for
the best moment:
70
"Could we afford it," Janice asks,"with the mortgage rates
up around thirteen percent now?"
He shifts his hand down the silvery slick undulations of her
belly .... [the dots are in the magazine].
"It seems hard on Mother," Janice says in that weak voice
she gets, lovemaking. "She'll be leaving us this place some day
and I know she expects we'd stay in it with her till then."
The quotation goes on in the same spirit for another twenty-four
lines but I grudge the space.
Mr. Updike describes common Americans who turn out, under
his pen, to be fantastic, obnoxious, stupid, and asocial animals,
driven by fantastic sexual-gastric urges of Mr. Updike's invention. Mr. Roth describes Americans like himself who turn out,
under his pen, to be like the phoney dukes and duchesses of old
pulp novels.
The first twentieth century Western pulp novel I read had
been published in England in the 1920s and was entitled The
Undesirable Governess. There was a difference between The Undesirable Governess and nineteenth century European dime fiction. The latter usually displayed dukes and duchesses, and all
the "appurtenances of luxury." "Tears streaming down her pale
face, the duchess was running to the pond." The pond was a
ducal "appurtenance of luxury." The Undesirable Governess displayed "people of culture" as the modern equivalent of dukes
and duchesses. Instead of running to the ducal pond, the heroine read the Upanishads, the most cultured pastime for the
English middle class of the 20s. The Upanishads had replaced
the ducal pond. Just as the 19th-century dime novel readers were
to gasp at the luxury of dukes and duchesses, the new pulp novel
readers were to marvel at the culture of "people of culture."
In Philip Roth's Zuckerman Unbound, Zuckerman is a writer
whose book makes a million dollars. "But what writer?" any more
or less intelligent American is bound to ask. "A hack like Gay
Talese, who has made millions of dollars, or a Chekhov, who
would be unable to live off his genius in New York today?"
Philip Roth is not that complicated. His Zuckerman is a great
writer-like Tolstoy, John Updike, Cervantes, Proust, Mark Twain,
Philip Roth. Naturally, his book makes a million, not millions. Millions of dollars would make readers suspicious: What if this great
writer were just another Harold Robbins?
A million dollars is enough for Mr. Roth to show "how the rich
live" -the subject of his pulp novel-and at the same time remove
any suspicion as to the greatness of his Zuckerman.
There is a writer's love affair, of course. With a Hollywood star,
of course. How do writers have affairs, in contrast to Mr. Updike's
car dealers or college students?
We have to recall again nineteenth century pulp literature in
which the readers who never had seen a real duke or duchess at
close quarters were shown how phoney dukes and duchesses lived.
In Zuckerman Unbound, the phoney Duke and Duchess have been
replaced by the phoney Writer and the phoney Movie Actress.
When Writer Zuckerman came to Movie Actress Caesara
O'Shea's hotel suite, what did he do-go to bed with her as Mr.
SUMMER 1982
�Updike's Rabbit, a car dealer? Little do you know about the life
of Writers.
Writer Zuckerman read S(,iren Kierkegaard aloud to her.
Do not expect that Writer Zuckerman or Movie Actress Caesara
or Philip Roth himself would say anything original about "Syiren
Kierkegaard" (or about anyone and anything else on earth). "Sy{ren
Kierkegaard" plays here the same role as the Duke's carriage
played in the nineteenth century pulp.
Now, the Movie Actress begins to fidget. After all, she is a Movie
Actress, not a Theatre Actress or Authoress. A Movie Actress corresponds to the illegitimate daughter of a duke and a kitchen maid
in old dime novels.
Is Writer Zuckerman going to read all of Sy{ren Kierkegaard at
a go?
Zuckerman laughed. "And what will you do?"
"What I always do when I invite a man to my room and he sits
down and starts reading. I'll throw myself from the window."
Writer Zuckerman has to descend to this half-duchess-halfkitchen-maid and explain to her that he is a Duke of literature,
not a Harold Robbins:
"Your problem is this taste of yours, Caesara. If you just had
Harold Robbins around, like the other actresses, it would be
easier to pay attention to you."
Writer Zuckerman is not like Harold Robbins who would go to
bed with the Movie Actre_ss instead of reading S0'ren Kierkegaard
to her. Just as in old dime novels there would be the villain who
was born and bred low, but who impersonated a duke, so, too,
Harold Robbins, in contrast to Writer Zuckerman (or Writer Philip
Roth), has no more refinement than Mr. Updike's car dealer.
Having proven, by dropping the name of S¢ren Kierkegaard,
that Zuckerman is a Writer, not a Harold Robbins, Mr. Roth shows
him and his life in a way no different from the way People magazine portrays Harold Robbins and his high-society life. Indeed,
we are treated to a clipp-ing frorri such a magazine:
I know, I know, actually you only want to know who's doing
what to whom. Well, NATHAN ZUCKERMAN and CAESARA
O'SHEA are still Manhattan's most delectable twosome. They
were very together at the little dinner that agent ANDRE
SCHEVITZ and wife MARY gave where KAY GRA.HAM talked to
WILLIAM STYRON and TONY RANDALL talked to LEONARD
BERNSTEIN and LAUREN BACALL talked to GORE VIDAL and
Nathan and Caesara talked to one another.
The actual descriptions of this kind in People and other such
magazines at least refer to real people like real Harold Robbins.
What Mr. Roth describes is phoneyness about phoneyness, society chitchat twice removed from life, a fictitious People magazine
column about a fictitious Zuckerman.
If Philip Roth were to describe an "unsuccessful" writer as,
say, Chekhov would be in New York today, all readers, including
those who read People magazine and other such, would find his
book unreadable, for Mr. Roth would have nothing to say on the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
subject. As it is, Mr. Roth sets up Zuckerman as a Kierkegaardreading Writer high above People magazine, and then proceeds
to write People magazine stuff "about how the rich live," to be
entertaining at least to some People magazine readers, or to
those who do not read People magazine out of college-educated
snobbery and read Mr. Roth for the same kind of "high-society"
pulp.
About two pages are devoted to Writer Zuckerman's ordering
of twelve suits at the most fashionable tailor. I am sure that Mr.
Roth is factual1y accurate describing the particular fashions of
1981 in New York since he has been a millionaire Writer himself.
But as soon as Mr. Roth departs from his consumer's report of
fashionable goods and services, phoneyness sets in:
One night a pretty rock singer whom he'd never seen before
told johnny Carson about her one and "Thank God" only
date with Nathan Zuckerman. She brought the house down
describing the "gear" Zuckerman advised her to wear to dinner if she wanted to "turn him on."
Silly and cheap as Johnny Carson and his show are, it is improbable that a rock singer on his show would brag of a date with a
writer (like Philip Roth) she had never seen, and would "bring
the house down" by inventing the "gear" he allegedly advised
her to wear. Mr. Roth sounds like a foreigner describing the
Johnny Carson show to a foreign pulp magazine.
Mr. Roth must have felt that the story about how a Writer
made a million dollars and proceeded to live like a Harold Robbins, except for reading Kierkegaard to Movie Actresses, as a
Writer should, is too little for a novel.
The new fashion seems to be to avoid in-bed scenes, and in
this respect Mr. Roth has become more fashionable than Mr.
Updike. Without such scenes, however, he has not much to say.
So Mr. Roth invented a substory, combining again amateur triteness and amateur implausibility to the same amazing degree Mr.
Updike does.
A former television quiz winner named Alvin Pepler from
Newark, Zuckerman's home town, comes to New York and
meets, on page 11 of the book, the celebrated Zuckerman. This
trite meeting of the trite admirer with the trite celebrity, worn
threadbare in humorous sketches and vaudevilles a century ago,
lasts to page 41, about one-fifth of the slender book.
Alvin Pepler turns out to be somewhat insane and threatens,
in the farfetched ways of Mr. Roth's invention, to kill the celebrated Zuckerman.
Finally, Alvin Pepler reappears on page 13 3-he is writing areview of Zuckerman's celebrated book for the New York Times
and wants his opinion of the review, because Alvin Pepler does
not 'want Sulzberger to read it if it stinks."
Everything in the "novel" is so farfetched, contrived, and amateurish that it is not clear whether this is a humorless spoof or if
Mr. Roth really believes that the New York Times accepts reviews from former Newark television quiz winners-and Arthur
Ochs Sulzberger reads them personally. Why has not this highbrow best-seller been reviewed before if it has already made a
million dollars? Is this Mr. Roth's idea of being funny? Or
Pepler's? Who is silliest-l\!Ir. Roth or Pepler or Zuckerman?
71
�This review-for-the-New-York-Times filler goes on for twentythree pages, about one-tenth of the book. Finally, Zuckerman
opines that Pepler's thoughts in the review are not original (are
Zuckerman's or Mr. Roth's?), but "Sulzberger could be crazy
about it." Pepler flairs up, like the professor from Ionesco's wellknown old play The Lesson, which Mr. Roth evidently decided to
imitate to fill in some pages, and besides, possibly to show how
well-read he is.
Still, Mr. Roth felt himself duly bound to fill in another dozen
or so pages. So Zuckerman's father dies, and the ensuing description, as trite and implausible as the rest of the book, does
the trick of bringing the "novel" to a decent minimum size.
Anatole Broyard entitled his Books of the Times review of
Zuckerman Unbound "The Voyeur Vu," for only the French can
-convey the subtlety of Mr. Broyard's perception of Mr. Roth's
novel. "Voyeur" is in French "peeper," "Peeping Tom," meaning a writer in this particular case, and when the latter becomes a
celebrity he becomes a "peeper peeped at."
Now, when he walks down the street, everyone he meets is
a literary critic. He is the voyeur vu. 4
How could one express this in plain English, instead of the language of Proust?
And what an achievement of Philip Roth, too! A celebrity is
peeped or peeked at. Voyeur vu. Perhaps Mr. Roth should write
his books straight in French?
As is usual, about two-thirds of Mr. Broyard's review is devoted to the "retelling of the plot." Then Mr: Broyard notes that
"Mr. Roth's voice is convincing and emotionally charged." He
refers to Mr. Rpth's "wit and grace." Not that the book is impeccably free from weaknesses: "Pepler is too monolithic, too quickly
comprehended." Mr. Roth's voice "seems to be pitched just a little too high up in the sinuses, too ready with ironic incredulity."
Mr. Roth suffers from too much irony (and also from too much
wit, grace, talent, intelligence, and beauty?).
The new book is reasonably funny, reasonably sad, reasonably interesting, and occasionally just plain reasonable.
The review in the New York Times Book Review is a bravura. It
reproaches Philip Roth only for his new avoidance of pornography, in contrast with his former pornographic self. The reviewer
(George Stade) is one of those middle-class males who imagine
themselves big-hearted, open-minded, and oceanically gifted hemen because they are noisy, pushy, and ill-mannered. Often
they also eat and drink a lot, do not pass a single woman without
a lewd observation-and this seems to prove their oceanic talent.
Listen to Mr. Stade's bojsterous masculine harangue:
Mr. Stade assumes that Fenny Cooper, Nate Hawthorne, Hermie Melville, and Sammy Clemens (as well as Em Dickinson and
Tommy Eliot, no doubt) larded their works with American middle-class locker room anecdotes, told in the most masculine locker
room manner of the most masculine he-man, as Philip Roth did
in his earlier works. This is why these writers are still read in
many countries. American middle-class locker room anecdotes
have been cherished all over the world. No country has ever had
such obscene language, or such noisy, pushy, ill~mannered males.
And look what Philip Roth has done-he has stopped pouring
out obscenities because of the retrograde and feminizing custodians of our high literary culture.
I had thought that our "high literary culture" and its "custodians" were steeped in pornography. Pulp culture thrives on pornography. How can "high literary culture" abstain, if it is mostly
just an amateur version of pulp culture? What else would Mr.
Roth or Mr. Updike sell?
But no. The custodians of our high literary culture are as they
were over a hundred years ago. Mr. Stade, the lone heroic heman, possibly the last male on earth, is fighting single~handedly,
just like Mr. Leonard, against the feminizing establishment, led
by the New York Times (and Playboy?), for the preservation of
that almost destroyed national treasure of treasures: middle-class
vulgarity. And IIOW Philip Roth has left the-cause. Alone, all alone,
Mr. Stade is, pitted against hordes of feminizing retrogrades.
Yes, only the feminized retrograde absence of modern robust
male pornography mars Philip Roth's book, which is
masterful, sure of every touch, clear and economical ofline as
a crystal vase, but there is something diminished about it as
about its immediate predecessors. The usual heartbreak and
hilarity are there, but they no longer amplify each other; now
both are muted.
If only there were a generous splash of pornography on every
page, as in the good old days-the 60s and 70s, when the fashion
was full on. How Mr. Roth's crystal vase of a book would sparkle,
and how the heartbreak and hilarity amplify each other, no longer
muted. Good old days. When Normie Mailer was mistaken for
Billy Shakespeare. Remember? Will they ever come back?
l.
2.
3.
4.
5.
New York Times Book Review, September 27, 1981, 1.
Books of the Times, September 22, 1981.
New York Times Book Review, September 27, 1981, I.
New York Times, May 9, 1981, 13.
New York Times Book Review, May 24, 1981, l.
The custodians of our high literary culture are as retrograde and feminizing as they were over a hundred years ago.
The ghosts of Mr. Roth's Landsmanner, Fenny Cooper, Nate
Hawthorne, Hermie Melville, and Sammy Clemens are nodding approval. Who cares what the Momma's boys think?5
72
SUMMER 1982
�FROM OUR READERS (continued from page 2)
probably say so. In that case, his reactions
to arguments against feminism would be
more consistent than they now appear.
TINA BELL
Nyack, N.Y.
Mr. Doskow replies:
Ms. Bell misses the point of my quarrel
with Mr. Levin. The issue is not one of
women being forced to stay home by their
husbands (though this has been known to
happen), nor is it a question of the importance of raising children, certainly a most
important task {I would only add that Fatherhood deserves equal billing with Motherhood). Rather the issue is whether women
should be judged on their individual abilities or considered congenitally incapable of
doing certain kinds of work, and whether
when they do the same work as men they
should be paid equally, something which
has not been and is not now the case. There
may well be significant distinctions between
men and women. But, as I thought I made
overabundantly clear, what seemed to be
natural differences not very long ago
(women's innate incapacity to be attor-
neys, e.g.) turn out to be merely prejudices.
To cite just one more example (from Stephen Gould, The Mismeasure of Man,
p. 118): G. Stanley Hall, "America's premier psychologist," attributed the higher
suicide rate of women to "A profound psychic difference between the sexes. Wornen's body and soul is phyletically older and
more primitive, while man is more modern,
variable, and less conservative .... Women
prefer passive methods; to give themselves
up to the power of elemental forces, as
gravity, when they throw themselves from
heights ... "
Incidentally, if Pride and Prejudice is to
be Ms. Bell's text, it is a pity that she misses
the profound irony of the first sentence
which remarks, among other things, that it
is not all men but only those "in possession
of a good fortune" who must be "in want
of a wife." Arc the others not to "establish
themselves in civilized society"? I might
also remark that in a more enlightened age
Charlotte Lucas might find something
more interesting and useful to do with her
life than to marry Mr. Collins and spend it
as a toady to Lady Catherine.
GEORGE DOSKOW
�The St. John's Review
St. John's College
Annapolis, Maryland 21404
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�Editor's Note
FROM
OUR READERS
'
With this issue the St. John's Review begins to charge
new subscribers. Old subscribers, St. John's alumni and
friends, students and their families will continue to receive the magazine without charge. My desire to turn the
St. John's Review into an unambiguously public magazine
and to win an additional audience prompts this decision.
From now on the St. John's Review will appear three
times a year1 in the fall, winter, and summer-L.R.
Editor:
Leo Raditsa
Managing Editor:
Thomas Patran, Jr.
Editorial Assistant:
Janet Durholz
Consulting Editors:
David Bolotin,
Eva Brann,
Curtis A. Wilson.
Unsolicited articles, stories, and poems are welcome,
but should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed
envelope in each instance. Reasoned comments are also
welcome.
THESTJOHNSREVIEW (formerly The College) is published by
the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland
21404. Edwin J. Delattre, President, Edward G. Sparrow, Dean.
Published thrice yearly, in the fall, winter, and summer. For those
not on the distribution list, subscriptions: $12.00 yearly, $24.00 for
two years, or $36.00 for three years, payable in advance. Address
all correspondence to The St. John's Review, St. John's College,
Annapolis, Maryland 21404.
Volume XXXIII
WINTER 1982
Number2
©1982, St. John's College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Cover: Thick-billed Murre by J. J. Audubon; photograph courtesy of the
New-York Historical Society, New York City.
Composition: Britton Composition Co.
Printing: The John D. Lucas Printing Co.
ON" 'SEXISM' IS MEANINGLESS"
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
Mr. Levin (" 'Sexism' is Meaningless") seems not to be able to
distinguish between what is in fact the case and his personal
prejudices, which he calls "factual beliefs" -a strange term since
if they were factual, they would presumably be knowledge, not
belief. Mr. Levin is, for example, concerned about the degradation of language as exemplified by the use of the word "sexiSm"
which, according to him, either has no reasonable meaning or
"simply encapsulates and obscures" the confusion which feminists have about their subject. To illustrate his notion of rhetorical abuse of language he chooses the word "exploit" which he
says means "to uSe another without his consent." From this definition it is then easy to argue that to use "exploitation" to describe contractual wage labor is to employ a rhetorical trap to
denounce wage labor itself. It was, however, not my impression
that consent, itself a rather tricky concept to analyze, had much
to do with exploitation. So I checked the dictionaries I have
around the house, the Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, the
American College Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary,
and the Oxford English Dictionary, and, curiously enough, none
of them used or implied the word "consent" as part of its definition. To quote just one of the four, the New Collegiate Dictionary, "exploit la: to turn to economic account (a mine); b: to t.ake
advantage of; 2: to make use of meanly or unjustly for one's own
advantage." I quote this not to be pedantic or to score cheap
points, but to indicate hQw Mr. Levin confuses his private view
of the world and language with that shared by most of the rest of
the English-speaking world. "Exploit" and "exploitation" are perfectly legitimate terms to use to describe contractual wage labor
if one believes either that surplus value is at the root of capitalist
profit, or, to be less doctrinaire, if one simply believes that
employers have, on the whole, more power than employees and
can use that power to arrive at less than equitable contracts
-not, I believe, a very radical position.
But we should turn to more substantive matters. When Mr.
Levin asserts in his title that "sexism is meaningless", this seems
to me to have two possible interpretations: l, that the term is
without clearly definable meaning; and 2, that there is no phenomenon corresponding to the term, whatever it might mean in
some loose, confusing way. I believe Mr. Levin to be wrong on
both counts.
As to the meaning of "sexism", Mr. Levin says the following:
" 'Sexism', then, is typically used to describe either the view that
there are general, innate psychological differences between the
sexes, or that gender is in and of itself important." He further as~
serts that "the first view is simply a factual belief supported by a
vast body of evidence, and the second view, however objectionable, is held by almost no-one." "Neither view," he asserts, "is
worth attacking." But, as I understand them, both are worth attacking, because the first is, I think, though clearly a belief, not
factual, and the second is, I believe, held by virtually everyone,
not no-one.
(continued on page 2)
�1
HESTJOHNSREVIEWWINTER82
•
1
I
3
George Dennison
Shawno (narrative)
24
Nietzsche and the Classic
William Mullen
33
The Trivialization of the Holocaust as an Aspect
of Modern Idolatry Robert Loewenberg
44
Proof and Pascal Brother Robert Smith
52
Five Translations
57
The Federal Republic of Germany:
Finlandization or Germanization?
Charles G.Bell
Anne-Marie Le Gloannec
63
Io (poem)
Laurence Josephs
64
Kekkonen, the "Finlandizer"
65
Hephaestus (poem)
Laurence Josephs
66
Mozart's Cherubino
Wye jamison Allanbrook
75
The Fury of Aeneas joe Sachs
Indro Montanelli
REVIEW ESSAYS
83
Objectivity and Philosophical Conversation:
Philosophy and the Mi?Tor of Nature, by
Richard Rorty
review essay by Arthur Collins
90
Afghanistan Fights: The Struggle for Afghanistan,
by Nancy Peabody Newell and
Richard S. Newell
review essay by Leo Raditsa
AT HOME AND ABROAD
98
Letter from Vietnam jean Dulich
FIRST READINGS
102
Laos; Marie-Noele and Didier Sicard, Au nom de Ma?X et de
Bouddha, Revolution au Laos: un peuple, une culture disparaissent, review by Leo Raditsa
106
A Dead Man's Knowledge; Varlam Shalamov, Graphite, review
by Lev Navrozov
Inside front cover-FROM OUR READERS
Michael Levin's "'Sexism' is Meaningless"
and Harry V. Jaffa's "Inventing the Past"
1
�(continued from inside front cover)
To defend the view that there are innate
psychological gender differences, Mr. Levin
says that he doubts that his daughter will
become a quarterback, not because of her
size, weight, and strength, but because of
psychology. I agree with him that it is unlikely that his daughter will become a quarterback, but I also believe that it is almost
equally unlikely that his son will become
one. It is a well-attested "factual belief'
that very few quarterbacks are the sons of
philosophy professors, not because of genetic psychological deficiencies but because
they are raised in homes where athletics is
valued less than other things. I think it is
also very likely that if Mr. Levin raises his
daughter praising her for docility, obedience, and gentleness and raises his son
praising his drive, aggressiveness, and assertiveness that his son will turn out more
aggressive than his daughter. And, in fact,
it is clear that that is, on the whole, how
sons and daughters have been raised. I
hope it is not necessary to rehearse the
whole dreary range of environmental differences that boys and girls are subjected
to, ranging from dressing daughters in
dresses and sons in pants (my wife as recently as the early 1960's taught in a Connecticut school system where girls were
allowed to wear pants only under blizzard
conditions), to spending years with school
books where the boys are doctors and the
girls are nurses looking admiringly at their
superiors, or where the boys are active
while the gids can only passively marvel at
their multi-talented male counterparts.
Certainly Mr. Levin's expectations for his
daughter will have consequences, but it is
less than clear that genetic differences are
the root cause of how she will turn out psychologically. The "vast body of evidence"
which he mentions is, at best, controversial, and to assume that the case is proven
as he does is to commit that marvelous
trick one can sometimes get away with in
geometry, namely to put what you're trying to prove in the given.
As to the second view, "that gender is in
and of itself important," that seems so
clearly true that he must mean something
other than what the words seem to say
when he denies it. Clearly the difference in
the reproductive systems is crucially important, as are differences in average size,
though what the psychological consequences
2
of those differences are is open to dispute, Now, in the extremes, this is clearly true.
and what the social and political conse- However, the amount of overlap between
quences should be are really the central is- women and men in even this test is so great
that it is not clear to me that any important
sue of Mr. Levin's article.
consequences follow. For example, in the
First, however, I would like to address
two other relatively minor linguistic mat- !980 Olympic Games, the winning javelin
ters because they are revealing of the way throw by a woman was 224 ft., 5 in., a disMr. Levin argues. The first is his assertion tance about 4 ft. less than that of the male
that he suspects that "feminists avoid the winner in !948. Even granted that 1980
word 'misogyny' because it carries no con- was a good year for women javelin thrownotations of system." The real reason they ers and 1948 a bad year for men, if I were
do not use it ("avoid" is, in itself, a rhetori- looking for a large group of spear-throwers,
cal gambit to suggest some devious game I would certainly open the competition to
they are playing) is because it fails to de- both men and women, because it seem eviscribe the phenomena they are concerned dent that some women are going to be
with. On the whole, men are not misogy- much better at it than most men. That is,
nists, though the amount of violence di- the statistical superiority of men even in
rected at women is appalling, the incidence this rather uninteresting and loaded inof rape being the most obvious example, stance is not such as to conclude that an
though by no means the only one. On the army of projectile throwers should autocontrary, men like women, when they stay matically be all male. We can note that
in their place. When the recently retired Plato, not a notorious egalitarian or femihead of the Baltimore Police Department, nist (women, after all, are dismissed before
Donald Pomerlau, was under attack for his serious conversation begins), makes a simitreatment of women on the force, he de- lar point in The Republic (456b): "Then we
nied vehemently that he had any preju- have come around full circle to where we
dices against women. He really was fond of were before and agree that it's not against
what he described as "little balls of fluff." nature to assign music and gymnastic to
Now misogyny is clearly not the word to the women guardians." "That's entirely
describe such an attitude, but I think "sex- certain." "Then we weren't giving laws
that are impossible or like prayers, since
ism" is.
Second, let us look at another little ploy the law we set down is according to nature.
of Mr. Levin's. He calls attention to the ug- Rather, the way things are nowadays
liness of "sexism" and comments on its proves to be, as it seems, against nature."
Mr. Levin then moves from this example
"grating sound," suggesting that that very
rather casually to the less obvious "factual
ugliness was the motive for coining it. Perhaps we don't all share Mr. Levin's delicate hypotheses" that women are inferior in
ear, but it should be noted that in the !8th "abstract reasoning" and superior in
century, a "sexism" was a "sequence of six "child-rearing." Here again the evidence is
cards" (OED) and I doubt that its "ugli- anything but clear. It is not clear what a
ness" disturbed anyone. And words like test of abstract reasoning would be; noth''saxophone," "hexadecimal," ''textile," ing that has yet been developed can lay any
and so on seem equally good candidates for claim to validity in judging that ability; and
rejection on grounds of ugliness, though I would certainly not trust Mr. Levin's
Mr. Levin is, I trust, not bothered by them. anecdotal evidence, given his prejudices.
But let us turn to the main issues. I fully That women, on the whole, do less well
agree with Mr. Levin that "better" means than men on the mathematical part of the
nothing without more specification of con- SAT's is true, but the reasons for that are
tent or context. " 'Better'," as he says, not obvious. A few of the many possible ex"must mean better at this or that particular planations are that male students are much
task." The issue then becomes, "Are men more likely to be directed into mathematics
generically better than women at signifi~ classes than female students (anecdotal evicant tasks?" He finds that "men are so ob- dence for this is everywhere), that the imviously better at some things than women" portance of mathematics is emphasized to
that it scarcely bears discussing. His first male students more than to female, or it
example is that men can obviously hurl may be that men are generally better a.t
(continued on page 107)
projectiles much farther than women.
WINTER 1982
�Shawno
George Dennison
A marathon. Euphoria. Sights and sounds in the
corridor of dogs. Finches and morning.
We could hear our children's voices in the darkness on
the sweet-smelling hill by my friend's house, and could hear
the barking of Angus, his dog. At nine o'clock Patricia put
our three into the car and went home. My friend's wife
and son said goodnight shortly afterwards. By then he and
I had gone back to the roomy, decrepit, smoke-discolored,
homey, extremely pleasant farmhouse kitchen and were
finishing the wine we had had at .dinner. It was late August. Our northern New England nights were drawing on
noticeably toward fall, but the cool of the night was enjoyable. He opened a bottle of mezcal he had brought from
Mexico, and we talked of the writings of friends, and of
the friends themselves, and of our youthful days in New
York. He had written a paper on Mahler. We listened to
the Eighth and Ninth symphonies, and the unfinished
Tenth, which moved him deeply. We talked again. When
we parted, the stars, still yellow and numerous in most of
the sky, had paled and grown fewer in the east. I set out to
walk the four miles home.
I was euphoric, as happens at times even without mezcal. For a short distance, since there was no one to disturb
(the town road is a dead-end road and I was at the end of
it) I shouted and sang. And truly, for those brief moments,
everything did seem right and good, or rather, wonderful
and strange. But the echoes of my voice sobered me and I
stopped singing. A dog was barking. The night air was
moist and cool. I became aware that something was calling
for my attention, calling insistently, and then I realized
that it was the stream, and so I listened for a while to its
George Dennison has published The Lives of Children (1969) and Oilers
and Sweepers (1979). His story, "Family Pages, Little Facts: October,"
appeared in the St. John's Review (Winter 1981).
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
noisy bubbling. The lower stars were blocked by densely
wooded hills. A dozen or fifteen old houses lay ahead of
me still darkened for sleep.
Angus came with me. He is a pointy-nosed, black and
white mongrel in which Border collie predominates, and
therefore he is bright-eyed and quick-footed, and is amazingly interested in human affairs. He pattered along beside me, turning his head every few seconds to look at me,
and it was as if he were keeping up continually a companionable cheerful jabbering. I spoke to him at one point
and he barked lightly and jumped toward my face, hoping
to kiss me.
Abruptly he sat down. We had come to the edge of
what he imagined to be his territory, though in fact we
had crossed his line several paces back. He sat there and
cocked his head and watched me as I walked away. I had
taken only twenty steps when on my right, with jarring
suddenness, came the explosive deep barking of the German shepherd tethered to the one new house in the valley. Angus sprang up, bracing his legs, and hurled his own
challenge, that was high-pitched and somewhat frantic.
He was answered by a barking that seemed limitless. I
could hear it speeding away, the same challenge repeated
in voice after voice, and growing faint. Surely it passed beyond our village, very likely beyond our state. I was in a
corridor of barking dogs.
A soft projectile of some sort spurted from the shadows
to my right and came to rest not far from my feet, where it
turned out to be a chubby little pug. It was shaking with
excitement and was giving vent through its open mouth
to a continuous siren of indignation. The cluttered porch
it had been guarding suddenly flared with yellow light.
Two elderly spinsters lived here. They rose with the sun,
or before it, as did many of the older folk. The clapboards
of their house had been a mustard color, the trim of the
windows white, but that had been thirty years ago. The
3
�barn beside the house had fallen down, the apple trees
had decayed, the mound of sheep manure was grassed
over. Across the road, in a smaller house, lived a childless
couple related to the spinsters, and they, too, owned a
pug. While the one barked in the road ahead of me, the
other barked silently inside the house, its front paws braced
against the window and its rear paws stamping the back of
a sofa. These dogs I praised for their attention to duty.
They did not alter my mood. Brave as they were, they
were hopelessly affectionate, and I knew it, and passed on
confidently.
But now came a barking that I feared and loathed, more
savage by far than that of the German shepherd. He was
chained to a dying apple tree before a collapsing gray
house, the hard-packed yard of which was crowded with
wheelless cars. The dog was a Doberman. His barking was
frenzied. He leaped at me again and again and was jerked
back by the chain, as by a violent master. Were he free
and approaching me I should certainly try to kill him.
Overlapping these disturbing tones were the melodious
deep tones of the long-legged black hound tied before his
own little house in the strange compound farther on: a
mobile home, half of a barn, some small sheds, a corral, all
huddled before the large trees that bordered the stream.
Nothing was finished. There was an air of disconsolate
ambition everywhere, failure, and disconsolate endurance. The hound himself seemed disconsolate. He was
not tugging at his chain. He did not even brace his feet.
He followed me with his eyes, barking his bark that was almost a baying and was actually beautiful. He cocked his
head and seemed to be listening to the other dogs.
What a racket! What a strange, almost musical hullabaloo! I myself was the cause of it, but it wouldn't cease
when I passed. The sun would be up, the dogs would keep
barking, every bird awake w<;>uld raise its voice, and that
wave of noise would follow the sun right across the land.
More lights came on. The sun had not yet risen, but the
night was gone. It was the morning dusk, fresh and cool.
Birds had been calling right along, but now there were
more. At intervals I could hear roosters. There were only
three. The valley had been noisy once with crowing, and
the asphalt road had been an earthen road, packed by
wagon wheels and shaded by many elms. The elms were
garious good cheer and selfish, robust curiosity. He left
me to consort with a fluffy collie, who was not chained
but would not leave the shed it crouched beside. Now I
passed a small house set back from the road by a small
yard. A huge maple overspread the yard. Beneath the rna·
ple there stood a blue tractor, and near the tractor an
orange skidder, a pick-up truck, two cars, a rowboat, a
child's wagon, several bikes. A large, lugubrious Saint Bernard, who all summer had suffered from the heat, was
chained to the tree, and she barked at me perfunctorily in
a voice not unlike the hound's, almost a baying, but not a
challenge bark at all, or much of one. She wanted to be
petted, she wanted to lie down and be scratched, she
wanted anything but to hurl a challenge ... nevertheless,
she barked. I came to a boxer, tied; a pure-bred Border collie, tied; a rabbit hound, tied; several mongrels, not tied,
but clustered and apparently waiting for their breakfasts.
One, a black, squat hound, had one lame foot and one
blind eye, mementos of a terrible mid-winter fight with a
fox in defense of newborn pups, who froze to death anyway. She barked vociferously, but then ambled out to
apologize and be petted. How fabulous our hands must
seem to these fingerless creatures! What pleased surprises
we elicit from their brows, their throats and backs and bellies, touching as no dog can touch another dog ...
At almost every house there was a dog. At absolutely
every house with a garden there was a dog. One must
have one to raise food, or the woodchucks take it all. A
second car passed me. My euphoria was abating to good
cheer and I was aware that I was hungry. .
I was approaching the turn to my own road. In the crook
of the turn there was a trailer, a so-called mobile home,
covered with a second roof of wood. There were three
small sheds around it, and a large garden out back, handsome now with the dark greens of potato plants and the
lighter greens of bush beans. Near the garden were stakes
and boxes for horseshoe pitching. A few steps away, at the
edge of the stream, there were chairs, benches, and a picnic table. Two battered cars and a battered truck crowded
the dooryard, in which there was also a tripod, taller than
the trailer, made of strong young maples from the nearby
woods. From its apex dangled a block and chain. Bantam
stumps now, huge ones.
Even so, it was beautiful. There were maples and pines
beside the road, a few cows were still milked, a few fields
were still hayed, a few eggs were still gathered from hens,
a few pigs transformed to pork, a few sheep to mutton.
Swallows were darting about. They perched in long
against which three paddles and four inexpensive fishing
rods were leaning. Swimming suits and orange life vests
hung from a clothesline. The house was silent. All had
watched TV until late at night and all were still asleep,
among them my seven-year-old daughter's new-found
friend. The uproar of dogs was considerable here. Six
rows on the electric wires.
were in residence, more or less. The young German shep-
A car passed me from behind, the first.
And Brandy, the Kimber's gray and ginger mutt, trotted
up from the stream and joined me. His hair was bristly, his
legs short. He was muscular, energetic, stunted, bearded
and mustachioed, like some old campaigner out of the hills
of Spain. He went beside me a little way, cheerfully, but
without affection. There was no affection in him, but gre-
herd was chained. The handsome boxer was free; in fact
all the others were free, and with one exception ran to upbraid me and greet me. The exception, the incredibly
pretty, positively magnetizing exception was Princess, the
malamute, who did not bark or move. She lay at her royal
ease atop a grassy mound that once had been an elm, her
handsome wolf-like head erect and one paw crossed de-
4
hens were scratching the dirt near an aluminum canoe,
WINTER 1982
�murely and arrogantly over the other. Her sharply slanted,
almond-shaped eyes were placed close tpgether and gave
her an almost human, oriental-slavic air. It was as if she
knew she were being admired, and disdained response,
but followed me impassively with those provocative eyes.
How stran!lf she was! She knew me well. Were I to ap·
proach her she'd suddenly melt. She'd sit up and lift one
paw tremblingly as high as her head in a gesture of adulation and entreaty. She'd lay her head adoringly to one side
and let it fall closer and closer to her shoulder in a surrender irresistible in its abject charm-"! am yours, yours utterly" -as if pulling the weight of a lover down on top of
her. She ends on her back at such times, belly exposed,
hind legs opened wide, lips pulled back voluptuously and
front paws tucked under in the air. Especially in the winter, when all six dogs are crowded with the eleven humans
into the lamplight of the little home, she indulges in such
tricks. What a press there is then of dog flesh and child
flesh in the overheated room! There are times when
everyone seems glassy with contentment, and times when
bad humor, apparently passing over into bad character,
seems hopeless and destructive. Then there are quarrels
as fierce and brief as the fights of cats, and peace comes
again, usually in the person of Betsy, the mother, who is
mild and benign. She has lost her front teeth and can't afford dentures, yet never hesitates to smile. The children
drink soda pop and watch TV, while Verne, who is deepvoiced and patriarchal, with the broad back and muscular
huge belly of a Sumo wrestler, sits at the kitchen table sipping beer from a can, measuring gunpowder on a little balance scale, loading and crimping shotgun shells, and
glancing at the program on the tube. He is opinionated,
vain, and egotistical, to the point of foolish pomposity,
but he is good-natured and earnest and is easily carried
away into animation, and then the posturing vanishes. He
issues an order, directs a booming word to one of the kids
or dogs, but especially to Princess, who draws effusions
one would not think were in him. "Well, Princess!" he
roars, "Ain't you the charmer! Ain't you my baby! Ain't
you now! Oh, you want your belly scratched? Well, we all
do, Princess! We all do! But you're the one that gits it,
ain't you! Oh, yes you are! Oh, yes!"
This morning I didn't stop to caress the malamute. At
the turn in the road I heard a far-off barking that made me
smile and want to be home. I crossed the cement bridge
and turned into a small dirt road. There wouldn't be a
house now for a mile, and then there would be ours and
the road would end.
Day had begun. There was color in the sky. The moisture in the air was thinning.
The land was flat and the road paralleled the stream,
which was to my right now. Here and there along its
banks, in May, after the flood has gone down and the soil
has warmed, we gather the just-emerging coils of the ferns
called ficjdleheads. Occasionally I have fished here, not
really hopefully (the trout are few), but because the
stream is so exciting. Once, however, while I knelt on the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
bank baiting my hook, I glanced into the water, deep at
that point, and saw gliding heavily downstream a fish I
scarcely could believe to be a trout. What a passion of
helplessness seized mel I would have leaped on it bodily if
that might have succeeded. I learned later that ice had
broken the dam to a private fishpond in the hills and this
prize and many others had· fled down tributaries to the
main stream and the river.
To my left, beyond a miniature bog of alders and swale
lay a handsome small pond. Its outlet joined the stream
fifty yards on, flowing under a bridge of stout pine stringers and heavy planks. The game warden had been here
several times with dynamite, but the beavers had rebuilt
their dam across the outlet, and once again the pond was
eighteen inches higher than the stream. It was not unusual to see them. They had cut their half-tunnels under
all these banks, creating concave, sharply overhanging
edges. I had stood here with the children one night, downstream from the bridge, at the water's edge, looking for
beavers, and two had passed under our feet. It was a windless, mellow night of full moon. I saw the glint of moonlight on the beaver's fur as he emerged from his channel
under the bank, and then I saw his head quietly break the
water. The dark shape of a second beaver, following him,
glided like a phantom among the wavering images of the
moon and trees.
I could no longer hear the barking on the hill. I was very
hungry now, and intermittently felt sleepy, but here between the pond and stream the morning air was endlessly
refreshing and I entered that pleasant state of being
wholly relaxed, utterly drained of muscular energy, yet
suffused by awareness, interest, and approval ... the mild,
benign energies of momentary happiness.
Five or six bright yellow streamers-so they seemed to
be-approached me and sped by, dipping and rising.
They were finches. The pattern of their flight was of long
smooth waves, in the troughs of which they would flutter
their wings to ascend the coming slope, but fold them before the top and soar curvingly over the crest. Sleek as torpedoes or little fish, they would glide downward again into
the next trough and there extend their wings and flutter
them.
Beyond the bridge, the road began to climb. On both
sides vigorous ferns, green but no longer the vivid green of
summer, crowded the sunny space before the trees. There
was a coolness of night in the woods and it poured mildly
into the road, mingling with the warmer air.
Abruptly I heard and saw him, and though no creature
is more familiar to me, more likely to be taken for granted,
I was thrilled to see him, and gladdened, more than gladdened, filled for a moment with the complex happiness of
our relationship that is both less than human and utterly
human. Certainly I was made happy by his show of love
for me. But my admiration of him is undiminished, and I
felt it again, as always. He is the handsomest of dogs, muscular and large, with tufted, golden fur. The sound of his
feet was audible on the hard-packed, pebble-strewn road. I
5
�leaned forward and called to him and clapped my hands,
and he accelerated, arching his throat and running with
more gusto. He ran with a powerful driving stride that was
almost that of a greyhound, and as he neared me he drew
back his lips, arched his throat still more and let out a volley of ecstatic little yips. This sound was so puppyish, and
his ensuing behavior so utterly without dignity, so close to
fawning slavishness that one might have contemned him
for it, except that it was extreme, so extreme that there
was no hint of fawning, and certainly not of cringing, but
the very opposite: great confidence and security, into
which there welled an ecstasy he could not contain and
could not express rapidly enough to diminish, so that for a
while he seemed actually to be in pain. I had to assist him,
had to let him lick my face protractedly and press his paws
into my shoulders. And as sometimes happens ~'l' my euphorias and early morning solitudes, there came over me a
sense of the finitude of our world, and of my own brute
fraternity with the other creatures who will soon be dead,
and I almost spoke aloud to my dog the thoughts that I
was thinking: how much it matters to be alive together!
how marvelous and brief our lives are! and how good, dear
one that you are, to have the wonderful strange passion of
your spirit in my life!
As he wound around me and pressed his body against
mine, I remembered another greeting when I had seen
blood on his teeth and feet. He was three then, in his
prime. I had been away for several weeks-our first parting-and he had been baffled. When I came back I had
reached this very place in the road, in my car, also in summer, when I saw him hurtling toward me. His first sounds
were pathetic, a mixed barking, whimpering, and gulping
for breath. I had to get out of the car to prevent him from
injuring himself. I had to kneel in the road and let him kiss
me and wind around me. He was weeping; I had to console him. And then he was laughing, and dancing on his
hind legs, and I laughed too, except that it was then that I
noticed the blood. He had been in the house, Patricia told
me later, and had heard the car. He had torn open the
screen door with his teeth and claws, had chewed away
some protective slats and had driven his body through the
opening.
He danced around me now on his hind legs, licking my
face. I knew I could terminate this ecstasy by throwing a
stone for him, which I did, hard and low, so that he would
not overtake it and break his teeth. A few moments later
he laid it at my feet and looked into.my face excitedly.
Patricia and the children were still sleeping. I ate breakfast alone, or rather, with Shawno, who waited by my chair.
I had hoped to spend the morning writing, and I went
upstairs and sat at my table. It was ludicrous. The mere
process of holding still caused my eyes to close and head
to fall. Yet I didn't want to sleep, didn't want to abandon
that mood-too rare to be taken lightly-of happiness and
peace; and so I went into the garden and pulled up the
bush beans that had already borne and died, and carried
tall spikes of bolted lettuce to the compost pile. There is a
6
rough rail fence around the garden to keep the ponies out.
Shawno lay beneath it and watched me. I cleared a few
weeds and from time to time got rid of stones by flinging
them absently into the woods. I pulled out the brittle pea
vines from their chicken wire trellis, rolled up the wire
and took it to the barn. After two hours of this I went to
bed. Shawno had gone in akeady and was enjoying a second breakfast with the children. I had forgotten about
him, but as I left the garden I saw by the fence, where the
grass had been flattened by his body, a little heap of
stones. He had pursued every one I had tried to get rid of.
His parents. Ida's delight. His leaping. Children in
the park. An elderly scholar.
When Patricia was pregnant with Ida we were living on
Riverside Drive in New York. One bright October day we
saw a crowd of people at the low stone wall of the park.
Many were murmuring in admiration and we could hear
exclamations of delight. Down below, on the grassy flat,
two dogs were racing. The first belonged to an acquaintance in our building. She was tawny and short-haired
with the lines of a greyhound, but larger and of more massive head and shoulders. She was in heat and was leading the other in fantastic, playful sprints, throwing her
haunches against him gaily and changing direction at
great speed. The male, a Belgian shepherd with golden
fur, was young and in a state of transport. He ran stifflegged, arching his neck over her body with an eagerness
that seemed ruthless, except that his ears were laid back
shyly. The dogs' speed was dazzling; both were beauties,
and the exclamations continued as long as they remained
in sight.
Shawno was the largest of the issue of those memorable
nuptials. He arrived in our apartment when Ida was
twelve weeks old. She looked down from her perch on Patricia's bosom and saw him wobbling this way and that,
and with a chortle that was almost a scream reached for
him with both arms. Soon she was bawling the astonished,
gasping wails of extreme alarm (his needle-point bites),
and he was yelping piteously in the monkey-like grip with
which she had seized his ear and was holding him at arm's
length, out of mind, while she turned her tearful face to
her mother.
These new beginnings, and especially my marriage with
Patricia, overtaking me late in my maturity, ended a period of unhappiness so extreme as to have amounted to
grief. And I found that loving the child, cradling and dandling her, watching her sleep, and above all watching her
nurse at Patricia's bosom, awakened images of my childhood I would not have guessed were still intact. Something similar happened with the dog. I began a regimen of
early morning running, as if he were an athlete and I his
trainer, and I had trotted behind him through the weathers of several months before I realized that my happiness
WINTER 1982
�at these times was composed in part of recovered memories of the daybreak runnings of my youth, that had been
so hopeful and so satisfied as to seem to me, now, paradisal.
The dog developed precociously. He was not a year and
a half old when, in pursuit of sticks or balls that I threw for
him, he was leaping seven foot walls. He was a delight to
watch, combining power and beauty with indolent confidence, though this last, no doubt, was an illusion of his
style, for instead of hitching up his hind legs as he cleared
the obstacle at the height of his leap, he'd swing them lazily to one side, as if such feats were no more difficult than
sprawling on the floor. He became a personage in the park
and soon acquired a band of children, who left their
games to follow him, or who, more correctly, played new
games to include him. It was not only his prowess and
beauty that attracted them, but the extraordinary love he
bestowed on them. He was simply smitten with our race. I
was crossing upper Broadway with him once; he was
leashed; the crossing was crowded. There came toward us
an old gentleman holding a four-year-old boy by the hand.
The boy's face and the dog's were on a level, and as they
passed the two faces turned to each other in mutual delight, and Shawno bestowed a kiss that began at one ear,
went all the way across and ended at the other. I glanced
back. The boy, too, was glancing back, grinning widely. In
fact, the boy and Shawno were looking back at each other.
This incident is paired for all time with another that I
witnessed in New Yark and that perhaps could not have
occurred in any other city. It was in the subway at rush
hour. The corridors were booming with the hammering,
grinding roar of the trains and the pounding of thousands
of almost running feet. Three corridors came together in a
Y and two of them were streaming with people packed far
tighter than soldiers in military formation. The columns
were approaching each other rapidly. There was room to
pass, but just barely. Alas, the columns collided. That is,
their inside corners did, and these corners were occupied
by apparently irrascible men. Each hurled one, exactly
one, furious roundhouse blow at the other, and both were
swept away in their columns-a memorable fight.
I would never have known certain people in New Yark
except for the loving spirit of the dog; worse, it would
never have occurred to me that knowing them was desirable, or possible, where in fact it was delightful. The people I mean were children. What could I have done with
them were it not for the dog? As it was, I changed my
hours in order to meet them, and they-a group of eight
or so-waited for us devotedly after school. Most were
Puerto Rican. The youngest was only seven, the eldest
eleven. They would spread themselves in a large circle
with the dog in the center and throw a ball back and forth,
shouting as he leaped and tried to snatch it from the air.
When he succeeded, which was often, there ensued the
merriest and most musical of chases, the boys arranged
behind the dog according to their speed of foot, the dog
holding the ball high, displaying it provocatively, looking
back over his shoulder and trotting stiff-legged just fast
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
enough to elude the foremost boy, winding that laughing,
shouting, almost singing line .of children this way and that
through the park. I discovered that many of the by-standers I used to see at this time came on purpose to watch
the children and the dog. One elderly, white-haired man I
have never forgotten. He was jewish and spoke with a
German accent, wore a felt hat and expensive coats. He
came to our playground regularly and stood with his hands
behind his back, his head dropped forward, nodding and
chuckling, and smiling unweariedly. His face was wonderful. It was intelligent and kindly, was still strong, still handsome, and it possessed a quality I have come to associate
with genius, an apparent unity of feeling, an alacrity and
wholeness of response. Whatever he was feeling suffused
his face; he did not have attitudes and counter-attitudes
toward his feelings. One sensed great confidence in this,
and great trust in himself. The dog delighted him. It was
the dog he came to see. He deferred to the headlong, boisterous children, who, when Shawno would appear, would
shout happily and in unison, and Shawno would go to
them, bounding exuberantly, but it would not be long before the old gentleman >'vould call him, and Shawno would
leave the children, not bounding now but sweeping his
tail in such extreme motions that his hind legs performed
a little dance from side to side independently of his front
ones. The old gentleman would lean over him, speak to
him and pet him, and the dog would press against his legs
and look into his face.
We usually chatted for a few minutes before I went
home. When I asked him about his work and life he waved
away the questions with gestures that were humorous and
pleading yet were impressive in their authority. One day I
recognized his face in a photograph in the Times, alas, on
the obituary page. He was an eminent refugee scholar, a
sociologist. I discovered, reading the description of his
career, that I had studied briefly with his son at Columbia.
By this time we had moved to the remote farmhouse in the
country and our second child had been born.
Past lives. Streams. An incident in the woods. Ferocity and family concern.
Our house had been occupied by Finns, as had many
others near us. The hill, actually a ridge, sloped away on
two sides, one forested and the other, to the south, open
pasture with the remnants of an orchard. At the bottom
of these fields was a stream, and in an arm of the stream, a
sauna. It was here that the old Finn who had built the
house had bathed his invalid wife, carrying her back and
forth every day until her final illness. From this same small
pool he had carried water in buckets to the garden a few
strides away. The sauna was damaged beyond repair, but
we let it stand; and we brought back the garden, which
now was one of three. For the few years that the romance
of country living endured, it was this garden that I tended
with greatest satisfaction, carrying water in buckets, as
7
�had the old man. Just beyond the sauna a wooded slope
rose steeply. Racoons and deer erttered our field here, and
it was here that the ponies and dog all came to drink.
There were other relics of those vanished lives: handmade apple boxes with leather hinges cut from old boots;
door handles in all the sheds made of sapling crotches; an
apple picking ladder that was a tall young spruce (the bark
was still on it) cut lengthwise down the middle and fitted
with rungs of sugar maple saplings; ten-foot Finnish skis
bent at the tips with steam from a kettle. There were hills
wherever one looked, and there had been farms on all the
hills. Some of the Finns had skied to market. They had
cruised their woodlots on skis. Some of their children had
skied to school.
The hills and ridges are so numerous that in the spring,
while the snow is melting, the sound of water can be heard
everywhere. It pours and tumbles; there is a continual roaring; and when the thaw is well advanced the large stream
in the valley makes the frightening sounds of flood, hurling chunks of ice ahead of it, crowding violently into the
curves, and hurtling over falls so deep in spume that the
rocks cannot be seen. Later, in the hot weather, one hears
the braided sounds and folded sounds of quiet water. The
orange gashes and abrasions on the trunks of trees are
darkening. More trees are dead. The banks of the streams,
however beautiful, and however teeming with new life, are
strewn with debris in endless stages of decay.
The streams have become presences in my life. For a
while they were passions. There are few that I haven't
fished and walked to their source. These have been solitary
excursions, except for the single time that I took the dog.
His innocent trotting at the water's edge disturbed the
trout. Still worse was his drinking and wading in the stream.
I called him out. He stood on the bank and braced his legs
and shook himself. Rather, he was seized by a violent shak·
ing, a shaking so swift and powerful as to seem like a vibration. It shook his head from side to side, then letting his
head come to rest seized his shoulders and shook them,
then his ribs, and in a swift, continuous wave passed violently to his haunches, which it shook with especial vigor,
and then entered his tail and shook the entire length of it,
and at last, from the very tip, sprang free, leaving behind,
at the center of the now-subsided aura of sparkling waterdrops, an invigorated and happy dog. It was at this moment
of perfected well-being that one of those darting slim shadows caught his eye. He was electrified. He hurled himself
into the stream head first, thrusting his snout to the very
bottom, where he rooted this way and that. He lifted his
head from the shallow water, legs braced, and looked in
amazement from side to side. The trout had vanished so
utterly that he had no notion even of the direction of its
flight. He thrust down his head again and turned over
stones, then came up, his streaming fur clinging to his
body, and stood there, smooth and muscular, peering
down, poised in the electric stillness of the hunter that
seems to be a waiting but is actually a fascination. Years
later, after my own passion for trout had cooled, I would
8
see him poised like that in the shallows of the swimming
hole, ignoring the splashing, clamoring children, looking
down, still mesmerized, still ready-so he thought-to
pounce.
During most of the thaw there is little point in going into
the woods. Long after the fields have cleared and their
brown is touched with green, there'll be pools and streaks
of granular snow, not only in the low-lying places in the
woods, but on shadowed slopes and behind rocks. For a
whiie the topmost foot of soil is too watery to be called
mud. The road to our house becomes impassable, and for
days, or one week, or two, or three, we walk home from
the store wearing rubber boots and carrying the groceries
and perhaps the youngest children in knapsacks and our
arms. This was once a corduroy road, and it never fails that
some of the logs have risen again to the surface.
Spring in the north is almost violent. After the period of
desolation, when the snow has gone and everything that
once was growing seems to have been bleached and crushed,
and the soil itself seems to have been killed by winter, there
comes, accompanied by the roaring of the streams, a prickling of the tree buds that had formed in the cold, and a
prickling of little stems on the forest floor, and a tentative,
small stirring of bird life. This vitalizing process, once be·
gun, becomes bolder, more lavish, and larger, and soon
there is green everywhere, and the open fretwork of
branches and trunks, beyond which, all winter, we had
seen sky, hills, and snow, becomes an eye-stopping mass
of green. The roaring of the streams diminishes, but the
spreading of the green increases until the interlocking
leaves cannot claim another inch of sunlight except by
slow adjustment and the killing off of rival growth. Now
the animal presence is spread widely through the woods,
and Shawno runs this way and that, nose to the ground, so
provoked by scents that he cannot concentrate and remains excited and distracted by overlapping trails.
It was in this season of early summer that we came here.
The woods were new to me. I was prepared for wonders.
And there occurred a small but strange encounter that did
indeed prove haunting. We had been walking a woods road,
Shawno and I, or the ghost of a road, and came to a little
dell, dense with ferns and the huge leaves of young striped
maples. Shawno drew close to me and seemed perturbed.
He stood still for a moment sniffing the air instead of the
ground; and then the fur rose on his neck and he began to
growl.
At that moment there emerged from the semi-dark of a
dense leaf bank perhaps thirty steps away, two dogs, who
stopped silently and came no further. The smaller dog was
a beagle, the larger a German shepherd, black and gigantic. His jowls on both sides and his snout in front bristled
with white-shafted porcupine quills. He did not seem to
be in pain, but seemed helpless and pathetic, a creature
without fingers or tools, and therefore doomed. The uncanny thing about the dogs was their stillness. That intelligence that seems almost human and that in their case was
amplified in the logic of their companionship, was refusWINTER 1982
�ing contact of any sort not only with me but with the dog
at my side. Shawno continued to growl' and to stamp his
feet uncertainly. Just as silently as they h~d appeared, the
beagle and the shepherd turned into the undergrowth and
vanished.
I was to see these two dogs again. In the meantime, I
learned that it was not rare for dogs to run wild, or to lead
double lives; and that such pairings of scent and sight were
common. The beagle could follow a trail. The shepherd
had sharp eyes, was strong and could kill.
In the city cars had been the chief threat of Shawno's
life. Here it was hunters. He was large and tawny, and
though he was lighter in color than a deer, he resembled a
deer far more closely than had the cows, sheep, and horses
which in the memory of my neighbors had been shot for
deer-certainly more closely than had the goat that had
been gutted in the field and brought to the village on the
hood of the hunter's car. With such anecdotes in mind. I
discovered one day, toward the end of hunting season,
that Shawno had escaped from the house. At least eight
hunters had gone up our road into the woods. I know now
that his life was not at quite the risk that I imagined, but
at that time I was disturbed. I ran into the woods calling to
him and whistling, praying for his survival and wondering
how I should find him if, already, he had been shot.
Several hours later, his courting finished (probably it
had been that) he emerged into our field loping and pant·
ing, and came into the house, and with a clatter of elbows
and a thump of his torso dropped into his nook by the
woodstove. He held his head erect and looked at me. The
corners of his lips were lifted. His mouth was open to the
full, and his extended tongue, red with exertion, vibrated
with his panting in a long, highly arched curve that turned
up again at its tip. He blinked as the warmth took hold of
him, and with a grunt that was partly a sigh stretched his
neck forward and dropped his chin on his paws.
In February of that winter I saw the beagle and German
shepherd again. We were sharing a load of hay with a dis·
tant neighbor, an elderly man whose bachelor brother had
died and who was living alone among the bleached and
crumbling pieces of what had once been a considerable
farm. He still raised a few horses and trained them for har·
ness, though there wasn't a living in it. I had backed the
truck into the barn and was handing down bales to him
when a car drew up and a uniformed man got out. I recog·
nized the game warden, though I had never met him. He
was strikingly different from the police of the county seat
ten miles away, who walked with waddling gaits and could
be found at all hours consuming ice cream at the restaurant
on the highway south. The warden was large but trim, was
actually an imposing figure, as he needed to be-two at·
tempts had been made on his life, one a rifle shot through
the window, the other a gasoline bomb that had brought
down the house in flames, at night, in winter. He and his
wife and adolescent son had escaped. He was spoken of as
a fanatic, but hunters praised his skill as a hunter. A man
who had paid a fine for poaching said to me, "If he's after
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
you in the woods he'll git you. No man can run through
the woods like him." His large round eyes were a pale blue.
Their gaze was unblinking, open, disturbingly strange.
He addressed the elderly man by his last name. The
warden, too, was a scion of an old family here.
"We'd all be better off," he said, "if you'd kept him
chained.''
His voice was emphatic but not angry. He spoke with
the unconscious energy and loudness that one hears in
many of the rural voices. "He's been runnin' deer, and
you know it. I caught him at the carcass. It was still
kickin' ." The warden handed him the piece of paper he
had been carrying, which was obviously a summons. "I've
done away with him," he said.
We had come out of the barn. The warden opened the
trunk of his car and brought out the small stiff body of the
beagle. Its eyes and mouth were open, its tongue pro·
truded between its teeth on one side, and its chest was
matted with blood. The warden laid the body on the snow
bank by the barn and said, "Come back to the car a min·
ute."
The black German shepherd lay on a burlap sack, taking
up the whole of the trunk.
uyou know who owns that?"
The elderly man shook his head. No emotion had ap·
peared on his face since the warden had arrived. The war·
den turned his blue, strangely un·aggressive eyes on me
and repeated the question. I, too, shook my head. The
shepherd had been home since I had seen him in the
woods: someone had pulled out the quills.
Shawno was barking from the cab of the truck. I had
left the window open to give him air, and the smell of the
dead dogs must have reached him.
After the warden left, my neighbor went into the house
and came back with money for the hay.
"Obliged to you for haulin it," he said, and that was all.
That night, on the phone, I told a friend, a hunter, about
the dogs.
"The warden was right," he said. "Dogs like that can kill
a deer a day, even more. Jake Wesley's dogs cornered a
doe in my back field last year. She was pregnant with
twins. They didn't bother killing her, they don't know
how, they were eating her while she stood there. She was
ripped to shreds. I shot them both."
There was a crust on the snow just then. Dogs could run
on it, but the sharp hooves of the deer would break through
and the ice cut their legs. They spent such winters herded
in evergreen groves, or "yards/' and if the bark and buds
gave out many would starve. Occasionally the wardens
took them hay, but this introduced another problem, for if
the dogs found the snowmobile trails and followed them
to the yards, the slaughter could be severe.
And what of Shawno? I realized that I regarded him
habitually with the egocentricity of a doting master, as if
he were a creature chiefly of his human relations, though
certainly I knew better. I thought of the many cats his fe·
rocious mother had killed. And I remembered how, the
9
�previous fall, while our children were playing with a neighbor's children in front of our house, Shawno had come
into their midst with a freshly-killed woodchuck. He held
his head high and trotted proudly among us, displaying
his kill. It was a beautiful chestnut color and it dangled
flexibly full-length from his teeth, jouncing limply as he
trotted. He placed it on the ground under the large maple,
where he often lay, and stretched out regally above it, lionlike, the corpse between his paws. I was tying a shoelace
for one of the children. I heard a rushing growl of savagery
and out of the corner of my eye saw Shawno spring forward. I shouted and jumped in front of him. One of the
visiting boys had come too close.
I doubt that Shawno would have bitten him. Nevertheless, in that frightening moment I had seen and heard the
animal nervous system that is not like ours, that is capable
of an explosive savagery we never approximate, even in
our most violent rages.
He was with me in the pick-up one day when I went for
milk to a neighbor's dairy. There were usually dogs in
front of the barn and Shawno was on friendly terms with
them. This time, however, before I had shut the motor, he
leaped across me in the cab, growling and glaring, his
snout wrinkled and his front teeth bared to the full. His
body was tense, and instantaneously had been charged
with an extraordinary energy. Down below, also growling,
was a large black hound with yellow eyes. The window was
open. Before I could close it or admonish him, Shawno put
his head and shoulders through it, and with a push of his
hind feet that gouged the seat cover, propelled himself
outward and down on the hound.
There were no preliminaries. They crashed together
with gnashing teeth and a savage, high-pitched screaming.
The fight was over in a moment. Shawno seized him by
the neck, his upper teeth near the ear, his lower on the
throat, and driving forward with his powerful hind legs
twisted him violently to the ground.
The hound tried to right himself. Shawno responded
with siren-like growls of rage and a munching and tightening of teeth that must have been excruciating. The hound's
yellow eyes flashed. He ceased struggling. Shawno growled
again, and this time shook his head from side to side in the
worrying motion with which small animals are killed by
large ones. The hound lay still. Shawno let him up. The
hound turned its head away. Shawno pressed against him,
at right angles, extending his chin and entire neck over
the hound's shoulder. The hound turned its head as far as
it could in the other direction.
The fight was over. There was no battle for survival, as
in the Jack London stories that had thrilled me in my
youth. Survival lay precisely not in tooth and claw, but in
the social signalling that tempered their savagery, as it
tempered that of wolves. It was this that accounted for
the fact that one never came upon the carcasses of belligerent dogs who had misconceived their powers, as had the
hound.
The victory was exhilarating. What right had I, who had
10
' done nothing but watch, to feel exultation and pride? Yet
I did feel these things. Shawno felt them too, I am sure.
He sat erect beside me going home, and there was still a
charge of energy, an aura about his body. He held his head
proudly, or so I thought. His mouth was open, his tongue
lolled forward and he was panting lightly. From time to
time he glanced aside at me out of narrowed eyes. As for
me, I could not forbear looking at him again and again. I
was smiling and could not stop. I reached across and stroked
his head and spoke to him, and again he glanced at me. He
was like the roughneck athlete heros of my youth, who after great feats in the sandlot or high school football games,
begrimed, bruised, wet-haired, and dishevelled, would
walk to the dressing room or the cars, heads high, helmets
dangling from their fingertips or held in the crooks of their
arms, riding sweet tides of exhaustion and praise. And I
remembered a few glorious occasions, after I too had come
of an age to compete, when my brief inspirations on the
field had been rewarded by teammates' arms around my
shoulders.
But more than this, I felt augmented by his animal
power, as if my very existence, both spirit and body, had
been multiplied, as a horseman is animally augmented
guiding the great power of the creature. And I felt protected. It was as if somewhere within me there were still a
little boy, a child, and this guardian with thick fur and
fearsome teeth, who could leap nonchalantly over the truck
we now rode in, had devoted his powers utterly to my wellbeing.
How little of this, how nothing at all of this, came into
my account when I said at home, "Shawno got into a fight!"
Ida and Patricia came close to me, asking, "What happened? What happened?"
Ida had never witnessed the animal temper I have just
described. What she wanted to know was, had he been bitten?
If anyone had said to Shawno what the little boy says in
Ida's Mother Goose-"Bow wow wow, whose dog art
thou?" he could not have answered except by linking Ida's
name with my own. He often sat by her chair when she
ate. Three of the five things he knew to search for and
fetch belonged to Ida: her shoes, her boots, her doll. When
I read to her in the evening she leaned against me on the
sofa and Shawno lay on the other side with his head in her
lap. Often she fell asleep while I read, and we would leave
her there until we ourselves were ready for bed. When we
came for her Shawno would be asleep beside her. On the
nights when I carried her, still awake, to her bed, she would
insist that both Shawno and Patricia come kiss her goodnight, and both would. Usually he would leap into the bed,
curl up beside her and spend part of the night.
When she was five or six we bought two shaggy ponies
from a neighbor, and having fenced the garden, let them
roam as they would. The larger pony had been gelded, but
was still inclined to nip and sport. Late one afternoon I
WINTER 1982
�Down to Searles.
shoe pits by the road and games before supper and at night
under the single light at the corner of the store. Three
roads converged here. One was steep and on winter Sundays and occasional evenings had been used for sledding.
That was when the roads had been packed, not plowed,
and the only traffic had been teams and sleds. Searles's
father-the second of the three generations of C. W.
Searles-though he was known as a hard and somewhat
grasping man, would open the store and perhaps bring up
cider for the sledders. There would be a bonfire in the
road, and as many as a hundred people in motion around
it.
Searles was sixty years old when we arrived. His store
was wonderfully well organized and good to look at,
crowded but neat and logical, filled with implements of
the local trades and pastimes. Searles had worked indoors
for his father as a boy. Later as a youth, he had gone with
a cart and horse to the outlying farms, taking meat, hardware, clothing, and tools and bringing back not cash but
eggs, butter, apples, pears, chickens, shingles. Now when
he bought the pate called cretan, he knew it would be
consumed by the Dulacs, Dubords, and Pelletiers. The five
sets of rubber children's boots were for the Sawyers and
were in the proper sizes. He displayed them temptingly,
brought down the price, and finally said, "Why don't you
take the lot, Charlie, and make me an offer?" He knew
who hunted and who fished, and what state their boots,
pants, and coats were in. A death in the town affected his
business. He saw the price of bullets going skyhigh, put in
several shell and bullet-making kits, and said, "Verne,
what do you figure you spend a year on shells and bullets?"
The owners of bitches, when their dogs were in heat,
were often obliged to call the owners of males and request
that they be taken home and chained. Shawno was gone
for four days. At last the call came. He had travelled sev·
era] miles. When I went for him he wouldn't obey me, was
glassy-eyed and frantic. The only way to get him home
was to put the bitch in the car and lure him. It was pa·
thetic. He hadn't slept, was thin, had been fighting with
other males, and had had no enjoyment at all: the bitch
was a feisty little dachshund. For two days he lay chained
on the porch lost utterly in gloom. He didn't respond to
anyone, not even to Ida, but kept his chin flat between his
paws and averted his eyes. He had gone to bitches before,
but I had been able to fetch him. He had suffered frustra·
tion before, but had recovered quickly. What was differ·
ent this time? I never knew.
Apart from these vigils of instinct, his absences were on
account of human loves, the first and most protracted of
which was not a single person but a place and situation ir·
resistible to his nature. This was the general store.·
The one-story white clapboard building was near the
same broad stream that ran through the whole of the valley. The banks were steep here and the stream curved
sharply, passing under a bridge and frothing noisily over a
double ledge of rounded rocks. There had used to be horse-
come to ... "
In the summer there were rakes, hoes, spades, cultivators, coils of garden hose, sections of low white fencing to
put around flower beds, and perhaps a wheelbarrow ar·
rayed on the loading apron in front of the store. In winter
there were snowshovels, and the large, flat-bottomed snow
scoops that one pushed with both hands, and wood stoves
in crates, and sections of black stove pipe, while in the
window, set up in lines, were insulated rubber boots with
thick felt liners, and two styles of snowshoes, glistening
with varnish. At all times there were axes and axe handles,
bucksaws, wooden wedges and iron wedges, birch hooks, a
peavey or two, many chainsaw files and cans of oil. For
years he kept a huge skillet that finally replaced, as he
knew it would, the warped implement at the boys' camp.
He carried kitchenware and electrical and plumbing sup·
plies, and tools for carpentry, as well as drugstore items,
including a great deal of Maalox. All this was in addition
to the food, the candy rack, the newspapers, the greeting
cards, and the school supplies.
People stopped to talk. Those he liked-some of whom
had sat beside him in the little red schoolhouse up the
road, long unused now-would stand near the counter for
half an hour exchanging news or pleasantries. One day I
heard Franklin Mason, who was five years older than
glanced from an upstairs window and saw Ida leading Liza
and Jacob across the yard, all three holding hands. Jacob
had just learned to walk and they were going slowly. The
ponies came behind them silently. Starbright, the gelding,
drew close to Jacob and seemed about to nudge him, which
he had done several times in recent weeks, knocking him
over. Shawno was watching from across the yard. He sprang
forward and came running in a crouch, close to the ground.
I called Patricia to the window. His style was wonderful to
see, so calm and masterly. There had been a time when he
had harried the ponies gleefully, chasing them up and
down the road without respite, nipping at their heels,
leaping at their shoulders, and eluding their kicks with
what, to them, must have been taunting ease. I had had to
chastize him several times before he would give it up.
Now silently and crouching menacingly he interposed
himself between the children and their stalkers. Star·
bright knew that he would leap but did not know when,
and began to lift his feet apprehensively. Shawno waited ...
and it seemed that the pony concluded that he would not
leap, and abruptly he leapt, darting like a snake at Star·
bright's feet. The pony pulled back and wheeled, obliging
the smaller pony to wheel too. Shawno let them come
along then, but followed the children himself, glancing
back to see that the ponies kept their distance. The children hadn't seen a bit of this. "What a darling!" said
Patricia. "What a dear dog!"
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
uoh 1 it's horrible. I don't practice no more, that's what's
11
�Searles, say testily, ((I seen 'em, 1seen 'em." He was refer·
1
ring to the shingling brackets that had been propped up
prominently at the end of the co[lnter. Searles had known
for two years that Mason wanted to replace his roofing; he
had JUSt learned that Mason had decided on asphalt shingles. "I might borrow Mark's brackets," said Mason, but
he added, in a different tone, scratching his face, "these
are nice, though ... "
People didn't say "Searles's place" but "down to
Searles." "Oh, they'll have it down to Se;rles." "I stopped
in down to Searles." "Let me just call down to Searles."
He was C. W. the third, but had been called Bob all his life.
Of the men in the village he was certainly the least
rural. He had grown up on a farm, loved to hunt and fish,
play poker, drink whisky, and swap yarns. But he had gone
away to college, and then to business school, and had
worked in Boston for three years. He was not just clever or
smart but was extremely intelligent, with a meticulous,
lively, retentive mind. He had come home not because he
couldn't make a go of things in the city, but because he
loved the village and the countryside and sorely missed
the people. He subscribed to the Wall Street Journal and
the New York Times, read many periodicals, was interested in politics and controversy and changing customs.
When I met him, his three children were away at college.
We disagreed irreconcilably on politics. I was aware of his
forebearance and was grateful for it. And I was impressed
by his wit and his kindliness, as when, without reproach or
impatience, he allowed certain desperately impoverished
children to come back repeatedly and exchange their
penny candies; and as when he built a ramp for the wheelchair of a neighbor who could no longer walk but was still
alert and lively.
He was not a happy man. He drank too much to be
healthy, and his powers of mind by and large went unused. Yet one could sense in him a bedrock of contentment, and a correct choice of place and work. He was tall
and bony, carried far too large a stomach, and was lame in
one leg. In damp weather he used a cane and moved with
some difficulty about the store. I came to see that most of
his friends were old friends and were devoted to him. I
learned, too, that he had forgiven many debts and had
signed over choice lots of land to the town, one for a ball
field, another for picnics. His gregarious cocker spaniel,
who possessed no territorial sense at all lounged in the
aisles and corners, and on sunny days ca'u!d be found on
the loading apron under the awning. And it was here, in
front of the store, beside the caramel colored spaniel that
one sunny day I encountered my own dog who had vanished from the house.
'
He leaped up gaily, showing no guilt at all and came beside me when I entered the store.
'
Searles, on the high stool, was leaning over the Wall
Street Journal that was spread across the counter. The moment he raised his head, Shawno looked at him alertly.
Searles smiled at me. "I've got a new friend" he said·
.
12
'
'
and to the dog, "Haven't I, Shawno? What'll you have,
Shawno? Do you want a biscuit? Do you?" Shawno
reared, put his front paws on the counter and barked.
"Oh, you do?" said Searles. "Well, I happen to have
one. "
He put his hand under the counter, where he kept the
dog biscuits that had fattened the spaniel.
"Will you pay for it now?" he said. "Will you? Will you,
Shawno?"
Shawno, whose paws were still on the counter, barked
in a deep, almost indignant way. Searles was holding the
biscuit, not offering it.
. "Oh, you want it on credit?" he said. He held up the
b1scmt, and at the sight of it the dog barked in lighter,
more eager tones. ((What?" said Searles, uyou want it
free? Free?" Again Shawno barked, the eagerness mixed
now with impatience and demand. "All right," said
Searles, "Here 'tis. On the house." He held it out and
Shawno took it with a deft thrust of his head.
I watched all this with a long-lasting, rather complicated
smile.
I said that I hoped the dog wasn't a nuisance.
((Oh, no," said Searles, uhe's a good dog. He's a fine
dog."
And I looked at Shawno, who was looking at Searles
and thought, "you wretch, you unfaithful wretch. Ho~
easily you can be charmed and bought!"
Yet I let him go back there again and again. He'd trot
away in the morning as if he were going off to work, and
then at supperbme would appear on the brow of the hill
muddied and wet, having jumped into the stream to drink:
I didn't have the heart to chain him. And I couldn't
blame him. What better place for a gregarious dog than
this one surviving social fragment of the bygone town?
There were other dogs to sport with, there was the store
itself with its pleasant odors, there was Searles, my rival,
with his biscuits, there were children to make much of
him, and grown-ups by the score. Moreover, there were
cars, trucks, and delivery vans, and all had been marked by
the dogs of far-flung places. We would arrive for groceries
or mail and find him stretched on the apron in front of the
store, or gamboling in the road with other dogs, or standing in a cluster of kids with bikes, or stationed by the
counter inside, looking up inquiringly at customers who
were chatting with Searles.
My jealousy grew. I was seriously perturbed. Somewhere within me an abandoned lover was saying "Don't
you love me anymore? Have you forgotten how I raised
you and trained you? Have you forgotten those mornings
in the park when I threw sticks for you and taught you to
leap, or our walks here in the woods, and the thousand discoveries we've made together?"
Most serious of all was his absence while I worked. I had
built a little cabin half a mile from the house. He had been
a presence, almost a tutelary spirit, in the very building of
it, and then he had walked beside me every day to and
from it, and had lain near my feet while I wrote or read.
WINTER 1982
�Often when I turned to him he would' already have seen
the movement and I would find his eyes waiting for mine.
Those inactive hours were a poor substitute for the attractions of the store, and I knew it, in spite of our companionable lunches and afternoon walks. But what of me?
One day, several weeks after his first visit to the store, I
jumped into the car and went down there rather speedily,
ordered him rather firmly into the back seat, and took him
home. The procedure was repeated the following day.
The day after that I chained him, and the day after that
chained him again ...
Life returned to normal. I took away the chain. He was
grateful and stopped moping. I saw that he had renounced his friends at the store, and I was glad, forgetting
that I had forced him to do it. Anyway, those diversions
had never cancelled his love for me-so I reminded myself, and began to see fidelity where I had established
dependence. But that didn't matter. The undiminished,
familiar love wiped out everything-at least for me.
Eddie Dubord. Sawyer's Labrador. Quills.
Just below us in the woods the stream was speeded by a
short channel of granite blocks, though the millwheel was
gone that once had turned continuously during thaw, reducing small hills of cedar drums to stacks of shingles.
There had been trout for a while in the abandoned millrace, but chubs, that eat the eggs of trout, had supplanted
them.
Upstream of this ghost of a mill, just beyond the second
of two handsome waterfalls, one stringer of a rotted bridge
still joined the banks. Snowmobilers had dropped a tree
beside it and had nailed enough crossboards to make a
narrow path. I had crossed it often on snowshoes, and
then on skis, and the dog had trotted behind, but there
came a day in spring, after the mud had dried, that
Shawno drew back and stood there on the bank stamping
his feet, moving from side to side, and barking. He had
seen the frothing water between the boards of the bridge.
I picked him up and carried him across, and could not
help laughing, he was so big, such a complicated bundle in
my arms who once had nestled there snugly.
Beyond the bridge a grassy road curved away into the
trees. In somewhat more than a mile it would join the
tarred road, but halfway there, on the inside of its curve, it
was met by a wagon trail, now partly closed by saplings,
and it was here at the corner of this spur that my neighbor, Eddie Dubord, built a small cabin similar to my own.
It was summer. The dog had gone with the children to
the swimming hole and I was walking alone carrying a
small rod and a tin of worms. I saw two columns of smoke
ahead of me, thinning and mingling in the breeze, and
then I could see a parked car and a man working at something. The smoke was blowing toward him and came from
two small fires spaced twelve feet apart. The man was
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
blocky and short. He wore a visored cap of bright orange
and a chore jacket of dark blue denim. His movements
were stiff and slow, yet there was something impressive
and attractive about the way he worked. Every motion
achieved something and led to the next without waste or
repetition. He went to one of the fires carrying an axe,
which he used only to lift some pine boughs from a pile.
He threw several on each of the fires. I walked closer, but
stopped again and watched him. We had never met, but I
knew that it was Dubord. He was seventy-four years old.
He had driven the corner stakes to mark the floor of a
cabin, had tied a cord on one of them and had carried it
around the others. Apparently he had already levelled the
cord. I watched him as he picked up a five foot iron bar
and went away dragging a stoneboat that was simply the
hood of an ancient car turned upside down and fitted
with a yoke and rope. He stopped at a pile of stones, and
with his bar levered a large flat stone onto the car hood,
which he dragged back to one of the corner stakes. With
short, efficient strokes he levered the stone onto the
ground. When finally I walked by he was on his hands and
knees firming the stone and didn't see me.
Several days later I went that way again, and without
fully knowing why, stopped to watch him. He had finished the floor and had built a low platform the length of
it, and had equipped the platform with steps. He would be
able to work on the rafters and roof without resorting to a
ladder.
He had assembled several units of studs, rafters, and
cross braces, and now as I watched he pushed one erect
with a stick, and lodged it in the fork of a long pole that
held it while he adjusted it for plumb. He nailed bracing
boards at the sides, and drove in permanent nails at the
base. His concentration was remarkable. It was as total
and self-forgetful as a child's. Later, after I had come to
know him well, I marvelled more, not less, at this quality. I
had seen him at work on almost every gadget the economy
afforded: radios and TVs, pop-up toasters, lawnmowers of
several kinds, snow-blowers, rota-tillers, outboard motors,
locks, shotguns, clocks. On several occasions I had come
close to him and had stood beside him wondering how to
announce my presence ... but it never mattered how: he
invariably looked up with a start of panic, and then
blushed. It was not merely as if his concentration had
been disturbed, but as if some deep, continuous melody
had been shattered. Then he would smile shyly and greet
me in his unassuming, yet gracious, almost courtly way.
He had already roofed the cabin and was boarding the
sides-on the diagonal, as the old farmhouses were
boarded-when we finally met. And as has often happened, it was the dog who introduced us, ignoring utterly
the foolish shyness on both sides.
The smudge fires were going again to drive away the
bugs. A small stack of rough-cut boards lay on a pallet of
logs. Dubord had just hung the saw on a prong of the sawhorse and was carrying a board to the wall when Shawno
trotted up to him and barked. He was startled and backed
13
�away defensively, ready to use the board as a weapon. But
Shawno was wagging his tail in, the extreme sweeps of
great enthusiasm, and he did something he had almost
abandoned since our coming to the country: he reared up,
put his paws on Dubord's broad chest and tried to lick his
weathered, leathery face with its smoke-haze of white
stubble beard. By the time I reached them Shawno had
conquered him utterly. Dubord was patting the dog,
bending over him, and talking to him in that slurred, attractive baritone voice that seemed to have burrs and
knurls in it, a grain and dark hue as of polished walnut,
and that he seemed to savor in his throat and on his
tongue, just as he savored tobacco, black coffee, and
whisky. And of course he- knew the dog's name, as he
knew my name, and as I knew his. It was the simplest
thing in the world to shake hands and be friends.
To hold Dubord's hand was like holding a leather sack
filled with chunks of wood. His fingers were three times
the size of ordinary fingers. He scarcely gripped my hand,
but politely allowed me to hold his. Gravely he said,
"Pleased to meet you," and then his small blue eyes grew
lively behind the round, steel-framed spectacles. "I'd ask
you in," he said, "but there ain't much difference yet between out and in. You got time for a drink?" I said I did,
and he opened the toolbox and handed me a pint of Four
Roses.
His skull was shaped like a cannonball. His jaw was
broad and gristly. Everything about him suggested
strength and endurance, yet his dominant trait, I soon
came to see, was thoughtfulness. He listened, noticed, reflected, though it was apparent, even now, that these
qualities must often have been overwhelmed in his youth
by passions of one kind or another. He had come from
Quebec at the age of twenty, and for almost two decades
had worked in lumber camps as a woodcutter and cook.
He had farmed here in this valley, both as a hired hand
and on his own-had dug wells, built houses, barns, and
sheds, had installed his own electric lines and his own
plumbing, had raised animals and crops of all kinds. In
middle age he had married a diminutive, high-tempered,
rotund, cross-eyed, childishly silly, childishly gracious
woman. They had never had children. They had never
even established a lasting peace. Her crippled mother
lived with them in the small house he had built, knitting
in an armchair before the TV while her daughter dusted
the china knickknacks and photographs of relatives,
straightened the paper flowers in their vases, and flattened the paper doilies they had placed under everything.
Dubord liked all this, or rather, approved it, but felt ill at
ease with his heavy boots and oilstained pants, and spent
his days in a shed beside the house. There, surrounded by
his hundreds of small tools, he tinkered at the workbench,
listened to French Canadian fiddle music on cassettes,
and occasionally put aside the tools to play his own fiddle.
The camp in the woods served the same purposes as the
shed, but promised longer interludes of peace.
I got to know him that summer and fall, but it was not
14
until winter-our family's third in the little town-that
Dubord and I realized that we were friends.
The deep snow of our first winter had made me giddy
with excitement. The silence in the woods, the hilly terrain with its many streams, most of them frozen and
white, but :; few audible with a muted, far-off gurgling under their covering of ice and snow, occasional sightings of
the large white snowshoe hares, animal tracks-all this
had been a kind of enchantment and had recalled boyhood enjoyments that once had been dear to me. I went
about on snowshoes, and Shawno came behind. The following year I discovered the lightweight, highly-arched,
cross-country skis, my speed in the woods was doubled,
and our outings became strenuous affairs for the dog. Often he sank to his shoulders and was obliged to bound like
a porpoise. Except in the driest, coldest snow, he stopped
frequently, and pulling back his lips in a silent snarl would
bite away the impacted snow from between his toes. His
tawny, snow-cleaned, winter-thickened fur looked handsome against the whiteness. When we came to downhill
stretches I would speed ahead, and he would rally and follow at a run.
We had taken a turn like this through the woods in our
third year, on a sunny, blue-skied day in March, and
stopped at the camp to visit Dubord.
I could smell the smoke of his tin chimney before I
could see it. Then the cabin came in view. His intricately
webbed, gracefully curved snowshoes leaned against the
depleted stack of firewood that early in the winter had
filled the overhang of the entranceway.
I could hear music. It was the almost martial, furiously
rhythmic music of the old country dances ... but there
seemed to be two fiddles.
Shawno barked and raced ahead ... and Dubord's pet
squirrel bounded up the woodpile. When I reached the
camp Shawno was dancing on his hind legs barking angrily
and complainingly, and the handsome red squirrel was
crouching in a phoebe's nest in the peak of the roof, looking down with bright eyes and maddening calm. The
music stopped, the door opened, and Dubord greeted us
cheerfully-actually with a merry look on his face.
"You won't get that old squirrel, Shawno," he said.
"He's too fast for you. You'll never get 'im. Might's well
bark ... "
"Come in," he said. ui just made coffee. Haven't seen
those for a while, Where'd you get 'em?"
He meant the skis. He had never seen a manufactured
pair, though he had seen many of the eight and nine foot
handmade skis the Finns had used. He didn't know why
(so he said later) only the Finns had used them. Everyone
else had stayed with snowshoes, which were an Indian invention.
"Nilo Ansden used to take his eggs down to Searles on
skis," he said. The Searles he meant was Bob Searles's father. "He took a short cut one day down that hill 'cross
from your place. We had a two-foot storm all night and
the day before. He got halfway down and remembered
WINTER 1982
�Esther Barden's chicken coop was in the way, but he
thought there's enough snow to get up on the roof. .. and
there was. Once he was up there there was nothin' to do
but jump, so he jumped. Had a packbasket of eggs on's
back. Didn't break a one."
In the whole of any winter there are never more than a
few such sunny days, gloriously sunny and blue. One be·
comes starved for the sun.
He left the door open and we turned our chairs to face
the snow and blue sky and the vast expanse of evergreen
and hardwood forest. He stirred the coals in the woodstove, opened the draft and threw in some split chunks of
rock maple. There was a delicious swirling all around us of
hot, dry currents from the stove and cool, fragrant currents from the snow and woods. Occasionally a tang of
wood smoke came in with the cold air.
As for the fiddle music-"Oh, I was scratchin' away,"
he said. "I have a lot of fiddle music on the cassettes. I put
it on and play along."
His cassette recorder stood on the broad work table by
the window. The violin lay beside it amidst a clutter of
tools and TV parts.
"If I hear somebody's got somethin' special or new, I go
over an' put it on the recorder. Take a good while to play
the ones I got now. You like that fiddle music, Shawno?"
-and to me: "That was a schottische you heard comin'
in."
He was fond of the dog. He looked at him again and
again, and there began a friendship between them that
pleased me and that I never cared to interrupt.
Shawno lay on the floor twisting his head this way and
that and snapping at a large glossy fly that buzzed around
him. He caught it, cracked it with his teeth, and ejected it
with a wrinkling of the nose. Eddie laughed and said,
"That's right, Shawno, you catch that old bastard fly."
The dog got up and went to him and Eddie gave him a
piece of the "rat cheese" we had been eating with our cof·
fee. For a long time Shawno sat beside him, resting his
head on Eddie's knee.
We laced our coffee with Four Roses whisky and had
second cups. The squirrel looked in at the window,
crouching eagerly, its hands lifted and tucked in at the
wrists, and its feathery long tail poised forward like a canopy over its head.
"I built that platform to feed the birds, but he took
over, so I let him have it. That's where the birds eat now."
He pointed to a wooden contraption hanging by a wire
from a tree out front. Several chicadees fluttered around
it angrily. It was rocking from the weight of the bluejay
perched on its edge, a brilliant, unbelievable blue in the
sunlight.
Eddie had hinged a tiny window in one of the panels of
the side window. He opened it now and laid his hand on
the feeding platform, a few peanuts and sunflower seeds
on the palm. The squirrel leaped away, but came back immediately and proceeded to eat from his hand, picking up
one seed at a time. Shawno went over and barked, and the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
squirrel seized one last morsel and fled. Dubord closed the
window and turned to the dog, chuckling. Again the dog
sat with him, this time laying his chin over one wide rubber boot.
I saw his packbasket in the corner. He used it daily to
bring in water and whisky and a few tools. The handle of
his axe protruded from the basket. The basket was of ash
strips, such as the Indians make. I had bought several two
towns away. Dubord had made this one himself.
"The Indians can take brown ash wherever they find
it," he said. "Did you know that? They used to camp
every summer on the Folsom place. Diamond National
owns it now. There's brown ash down there, downhill
goin' toward the pond. I used to trap beaver with one o'
the men, and he showed me."
The basket was thirty years old.
He sipped his coffee.
"Have you met Mister Mouse?" he said.
"Who?"
"Don't know if he'll come while Shawno's here."
Smiling like a little boy, he said, "Keep your eyes open,
but don't move. Don't even blink. He can see it."
He put a peanut on the two-by-four at the upper edge
of the far wall, stepped back from it and stood there making a strange little whimpering sound. Shawno perked up
his ears and was suddenly excited, but I whispered to him,
no, no ... stay.
Again Dubord made the squeaking sound, sucking air
through his lips. Presently, quite soundlessly, a roundeared gray mouse appeared on the ledge, sniffing. It crept
forward a few inches and stopped, sniffing alertly and angling the delicate long antennae of its whiskers this way
and that. It nibbled the peanut rapidly, listening while it
ate, its bulging black eyes glinting with light from the windows and the open door.
Shawno got to his feet ... and that huge movement and
the sound of his claws on the floor put an end to the performance.
We stayed for two hours. He talked of his early days in
the States, and his years in the woods. I could hear the
French Canadian and the Yankee accents contending in
his speech, the one wanting to stress the final syllables,
the other to drawl them. Shawno sat close to him, sometimes upright with his chin on his knee, sometimes lying
flat with his nose near the broad booted foot. Until now all
his friendships had been friendships of play. This was a
friendship of peace. It was one of those rare occasions on
which, perhaps only momentarily, a little family of the
spirit is formed.
It was good sapping weather. The days were sunny, the
snow melting, the nights cold. When we saw Dubord several days later he was gathering sap from the huge maples
near his camp.
A rapidly moving cloud of light gray smoke rolled over
and over in the lower branches of the trees. I skied closer
and saw that it was not coming from the cabin, as I had
15
�feared, nor was it smoke, but steam from a bubbling large
tray of maple sap.
He had shovelled away some snow and had built a fire·
place of fieldstones he had gathered in the fall. The sides
were lined with scraps of metal. The back had been cut
from a sheetmetal stove and was equipped with a metal
chimney five feet high. A shallow tray, two feet by four,
formed the top of this fireplace/stove. It was from the
tray that the clouds of steam were rising.
While I was examining all this Dubord appeared, plod·
ding blockily on snowshoes, pulling a toboggan that I rec·
ognized, since I had helped in the making of it, splitting
out boards from a squared-off log of ash, steaming the
tips, nailing them around a log to cool and set. On the to·
boggan were two five-gallon white plastic jugs, each halffilled with sap. A tin funnel bounced against one of them,
secured by a wire to its handle.
Eddie threw me a furious glance that was scarcely a
greeting. His teeth were clamped and his mouth was
pulled down. I knew without asking that he had been
quarrelling with Nellie, his wife. How long he would have
maintained this furious silence I don't know, but it was
more than he could do to hold out against the dog. A dark,
deep blush suffused his weathered round face. He
dropped the toboggan rope, and smiling helplessly at the
corners of his mouth, bowed his head to the uprearing
dog, petting him with both hands and allowing his face to
be licked.
He took off the snowshoes and put more wood on the
fire. The four foot strips of white birch-edgings from the
turning mill-had been stacked in the fall and covered.
Papery white bark still clung to them. The wood was well
dried and burned hot-the "biscuit wood" of the old
farmhouse kitchens.
The tray was slanted toward one of its forward corners,
and there, with his brazing torch, Dubord had attached a
little spigot. He drained some syrup into a large spoon,
blew on it, tested it with his finger. It was too thin to drain
off.
I helped him pour some of the new sap into the noisily
bubbling syrup. The steam was sweet and had a pleasant
odor.
Several galvanized buckets stood by the fire and we
poured the rest of the sap into them. I noticed that just as
he had not filled the plastic jugs he did not fill the buckets
-an old man's foresight, avoiding loads that might injure
him.
I went with him back to the maple trees, and at last he
broke his silence.
"Was a damn good farm here fifty years ago," he said. "!
wanted to buy it but I couldn't meet the price."
The huge maples lined the road. There were smaller
trees around them, some in the road itself, but the maples
were leafy and well exposed to the sun, and their sap was
far richer than that of forest maples. The boiling ratio
would be forty to one, or better.
Buckets, four to a tree, clung to the stout, coarse-barked
16
trunks waist high, as if suspended from a single belt. They
hung from short spouts of galvanized metal, and were cov·
ered with metal lids that were creased slightly in the middle and looked like roofs.
Since I was helping, we filled the jugs, and soon had
sledded sixty gallons to the fire.
Nellie's canary, whom they had called Buddy, had been
killed that morning. The quarrel had followed its death.
She had been cleaning its cage and had let it out to
stretch its wings.
"She could've put it in the other cage," Dubord said.
He was stirring the boiling sap with a stick of wood, and
in his anger he splashed it again and again.
"It was right there under the bed," he said. "Damn
thing shittin' all over the place! If I come in with one
speck o' mud on my boots she raises hell! I wanted to go
out. 'Don't open the door!' 'Well put 'im in the cage!'"
He thumped the tray as if he meant to drive holes
through it.
"Freddie Latham was outside fillin' the oil tank," he
said. "Nellie's mother'd knitted some mittens for the new
baby, so Nellie says to me, 'Cit Buddy,' and she comes
right past me and opens the door. 'Yoo hoo, Freddie."'
He ground his teeth a while.
"Cit the bird!" he muttered explosively. "What'd she
expect me t'do, fly up an' catch it? Damn thing flew out
the door right behind her and she didn't even notice.
Then she opened the porch door and it flew out that one
too. Damn! If I been holdin' a stick o' wood I'd heaved it
at 'er! You could o' heard her down t'village. 'Save Buddy!'
'Here, Buddy!' 'Cit Buddy!"'
Dubord never glanced at me. His eyes were re-seeing
the whole event.
"He perched on the roof o' the shed," he said, "And I
got the ladder and started U:p with some birdseed, and
Freddie went in and got my smeltin' net. Soon as the bird
saw me gittin 1 close, he flew over an' perched on the ridge·
pole o' the house. Then he flew up to the antenna, and
Nellie's whistlin' to him an' suckin' her lips. 'Eddie, git
that canary record, maybe if we play it Buddy'll come
down.'"
Dubord glanced at me fiercely and demanded: "If he
could hear it up there what'd he want t'come down for?"
"By the time I come down off the ladder the bird' d flew
up to the electric wire. He was just gittin' settled ... wham!
Some damn ol' red-tail hawk been watchin' the whole
thing. I never seen 'im. Where he come from I don't
know. Couple o' yella feathers come down like snowflakes. I thought, here's your canary, Nellie. An' I thought,
enjoy your dinner, mister hawk. You just saved me two
hund'd dolluhs."
Dubord glared at me again and said, "Yessuh! That's
what I said! Two hund'd dolluhs! That's what I spent for
birdseed! I'm tellin' the truth, I ain't makin' it up! And I
ain't sayin' Buddy et that much, I'm sayin' we BOUGHT
that much! You saw him do that Christly trick! You and
WINTER 1982
�the Missus saw that trick the first time you come down.
Sure you did! Yau had the girl with you ... "
The trick he was referring to was something Nellie had
taught the bird, or had discovered, namely, that when she
put his cage up to the feeding platform at the window, he
would pick up a seed from the floor and hold it between
the bars, and the chickadees would jostle one another until one had plucked the seed from his beak, and then Buddy
would get another. Nellie had loved to show this off.
Eddie was still glaring at me. "WHERE DID YOU THINK
THEM BIRDS COME FROM?" he shouted. "We had t'have
them birds ON HAND! We was feedin' a whole damn flock
right through the year so Buddy could do his Christly trick
two or three times a month! In bad weather he couldn't
do it 't all, but we still had t'feed the chickadees."
He paced back and forth by the evaporating tray grinding his teeth and glaring. "I guess I warn't upset 'nough
t'suit 'er," he said "God tamn! Hasn't she got a tongue!"
One last wave of anger smote him and he howled
louder than before, but there was a plaintive note in his
voice and he almost addressed it to the sky.
"IT WAS NELLIE HER OWN GODDAM RATTLE BRAIN
SELF OPENED THE DOOR!" he cried.
And then he calmed down. That is to say, he walked
around the steaming tray panting and lurching and
thumping the sides and bottom with the little stick.
He had brought some blankets in his packbasket and
was planning to spend the night.
He drained off some thick syrup into a small creamery
pail and set it aside to cool. He drained a little more into
an old enamel frying pan and with a grunt bent down and
thrust it under the evaporator tray right among the flames
and coals. After it had bubbled and frothed a while, he
knelt again and patted the snow to make it firm, and scattered the hot syrup over it. When Shawno and I went
home I had a jar of syrup for Patricia and a bag of maple
taffy for the kids.
At around two o'clock the next afternoon I answered
the phone and heard the voice of Nellie Dubord, whose
salutation, calling or receiving, it always Yeh-isss, as if she
were emphatically agreeing with some previous remark.
Eddie had not come home. She knew that he had taken
blankets to the camp, but she was worried.
"!just don't feel right," she said. "]can't see any smoke
up there. I should be able to see the chimney smoke,
though maybe not. Ain't he boilin' sap? I should see that
smoke too. Can you see it up there? Take a look. I guess
I'm bein' foolish, but I don't know ... I just don't feel
right."
I went upstairs and looked from the west windows.
There wasn't any smoke. I skied across.
There was no activity at the cabin, no smoke or shimmering of heated air at the chimney, no fire out front.
Shawno sniffed at the threshold. He chuffed and snorted,
sniffed again, then drew back and barked. He went forward again and lowered his head and sniffed.
The door was locked. I went around to the window. DuTHE ST. JOHNS
REVIEW
bard lay on the floor on his back beside the little platform
bed. He was dressed except for his boots. The blankets
had come away from the bed, as if he had clutched them
at the moment of falling. I battered the door with a piece
of stovewood and went to him. He was breathing faintly,
but his weathered face was as bloodless as putty.
He was astonishingly heavy. I got him onto the bed,
covered him with the blankets and our two coats, and
skied to the road. I saw his car there and cursed myself for
not having searched him for the key. The nearest house
was three quarters of a mile away. I telephoned there for
an ambulance, and made two other calls, then went back
and put him on the toboggan and set out pulling him over
the packed but melting trail, dreadfully slowly.
I hadn't gone twenty paces before the men I had called
appeared. The two elder were carpenters, the young man
was their helper. They were running towards us vigorously, and I felt a surge of hope.
But it was more than hope that I felt at that moment.
Something priceless was visible in their faces, and I have
been moved by the recollection of it again and again. It
was the purified, electric look of wholehearted response.
The men came running towards us vigorously, lifting their
knees in the snow and swinging their arms, and that unforgettable look was on their faces.
Ten days later Patricia, the children, and I went with
Nellie to the hospital. The children weren't admitted, and
Nellie sat with them in the lobby.
Dubord was propped up by pillows and was wearing a
hospital smock that left his arms bare. I was used to the
leathery skin of his hands and face; the skin of his upper
arms, that were still brawny, was soft and white, one
would say shockingly white.
"Sicker cats than this have got well and et another
meal," he said. And then, gravely, "Nellie told me you
went in for me. I'm much obliged to you."
"Did the girls like their candy?" he asked ... and it took
me a moment to realize that he was referring to the maple
taffy, the last thing he had made before the heart attack.
A few moments later he said, 11 How's my dog?" meaning
Shawno, and I told him how the dog had known at once
that something was wrong, and that rapt, shy look came
over his face.
A neighbor came in while I was there, Earl Sawyer, who
after chatting briefly, said to him, "Well, you won't be
seein' Blackie no more."
Dubord asked him what had happened.
"I did away with him," said Sawyer. "I had to. He went
after porcupines three times in the last two weeks. Three
times I took him to the vet, eighteen dollars each time. I
can't be doin' that. Then he went and did it again, so I
took him out and shot 'im, quills and all."
Sawyer was upset.
"If he can't learn," he said. " ... I can't be doin' that.
Damn near sixty dollars in two weeks, and there's a leak in
the goddam cellar. He was a nice dog, though. He was a
good dog otherwise."
17
�Sawyer was thirty-three or four, but his face was worn
and tense. He worked ten hours a day as a mechanic, belonged to the fire department, and was serving his second
term as road commissioner. He had built his own house
and was raising two children.
"I don't blame you," said Dubord. "You'd be after 'im
every day."
"He went out an' did it again," said Sawyer.
There was silence for a while.
"I can't see chainin' a dog," Sawyer said. ''I'd rather not
have one."
"A chained dog ain't worth much," Eddie said.
Months went by before Eddie recovered his spirits. But
in truth he never did entirely recover them. I could see a
sadness in him that hadn't been there before, and a tendency to sigh where once he had raged.
The change in his life was severe. He sold the new cabin
he had liked so much, and spent more time in the little
shed beside the house. I drove down to see him frequently,
but it wasn't the same as stopping by on skis or walking
through the woods. Nor was he allowed to drink whisky.
Nor did I always remember to bring the dog.
Most of the snow was gone by the end of that ApriL
One night Shawno failed to appear for supper, and there
was no response when I called into the dusk from the
porch. I called again an hour later, and this time I saw
movement in the shadows just beyond the cars. Why was
he not bounding toward me? I ran out, calling to him. He
crept forward a few paces on his belly, silently, and then
lay still. When I stood over him, he turned his head away
from me. His jowls and nose were packed with quills. He
could not close his mouth. There were quills in his tongue
and hanging down from his palate. The porcupine had
been a small one, the worst kind for a dog.
He seemd to be suffering more from shame than from
the pain of the quills. He would not meet my eyes; and
the once or twice that he did, he lowered his head and
looked up woefully, so that the whites showed beneath
the irises. I had never seen him so stricken.
I was afraid that he might run off, and so I picked him
up and carried him into the house. This, too, was mortifying. His eyes skittered from side to side. What an abject
entrance for this golden creature, who was used to bounding in proudly!
The black tips of the quills are barbed with multiple,
hair-fine points. The quills are shaped like torpedoes and
are hollow-shafted, so that the pressure of the flesh
around them draws them deeper into the victim's body.
They are capable of migrating then to heart, eyes, liver ...
He wanted to obey me. He lay flat under the floor lamp.
But every time I touched a quill with the pliers, a tic of
survival jerked away his head.
Ida was shocked. He was the very image of The
Wounded, The Victimized. It was as if some malevolent
tiny troll had shot him with arrows. She knelt beside him
18
and threw her arms around his neck, and in her high, passionate voice of child goodness repeated the words both
Patricia and I had already said: "Don't worry, Shawno,
we'll get them out for you!" -but with this difference:
that he drew back the corners of his open mouth, panted
slightly, glanced at her, and thumped his taiL
I took him to the vet the next day, and brought him
back unconscious in the car.
I thought of Sawyer and his Black Labrador, and saw
from still another aspect the luxury of our lives. I did not
go to bed exhausted every night, was not worried about a
job, a mortgage, a repair bill, a doctor's bill, unpaid loans
at the bank. And here was another of the homely luxuries
our modest security brought us: he lay on the back seat
with his eyes closed, his mouth open, his tongue out,
panting unconsciously. Great quantities of saliva came
from his mouth, so much of it that the seat was wet when
finally we moved him.
A walk with Ida. Waldo. Persistence of the city.
Kerosene light and an aphorism. The rock above
the town. Wandering dogs.
Spring comes slowly and in many stages. The fields go
through their piebald phase again and again, in which the
browns and blacks of grass and wet earth are mingled with
streaks of white-and then everything is covered again
with the moist, characteristically dimpled snow of spring.
But soon the sun comes back, a warm wind blows, and in
half a day the paths in the woods and the ruts in our long
dirt road are streaming with water.
Black wasps made their appearance on a warm day in
March, then vanished. This was the day that a neighbor
left his shovel upright in the snow in the morning and in
the evening found it on bare ground. It was the day that a
man in his seventies with whom I had stopped to talk
while he picked up twigs and shreds of bark from his
south-facing yard, turned away from me abruptly and
pointed with his finger, saying, "Look! Is that a bee? Yes,
by gurry! It's a bee! The first one!"
But there was more rain and more snow, and then, alas,
came the flooding we had hoped to be spared, as the
stream overflowed our lower road, this time to a depth of
two feet. For several days we came home through the
woods with our groceries in rucksacks, but again the snow
shrivelled and sank into the ground, and high winds dried
the mud. I saw a crowd of black starlings foraging in a
brown field, and heard the first cawing of crows. The
leaves of the gray birches uncurled. There were snow flurries, sun again, and the ponies followed the sun all day,
lolling on the dormant grass or in the mud. Shawno, too,
basked in the sun like a tourist on a cruise ship. He lay
blinking on a snowbank with his tongue extended, baking
above and cooling below. I pulled last year's leaves out of
several culverts, and opened channels in the dooryard
WlNTER 1982
�mud so that the standing water could reach the ditch.
Early one morning six Canada Geese flew over my head,
due north, silently, flying low; and then.at dusk the same
day I heard a partridge drumming in the woods.
Several days after Easter, when the garden was clear of
snow and the chives were three inches high, Ida came
striding into my room, striking her feet noisily on the floor
and grinning.
"Wake up, dad!" she called. "It's forty-forty!"
She was seven. I had told her the night before how
when she was four years old and could not count or tell
time she had invented that urgent hour, forty-forty, and
had awakened me one morning proclaiming it.
When she saw that I was awake, she said eagerly, "Look
out the window, daddy! Look!"
I did, and saw a world of astonishing whiteness. Clinging, heavy snow had come down copiously in the night
and had ceased before dawn. There was no wind at all.
Our white garden was bounded by a white rail fence,
every post of which was capped by a mound of white. The
pines and firs at the wood's edge were almost entirely
white, and the heavy snow had straightened their upwardsweeping branches, giving the trees a sharp triangular outline and a wonderfully festive look.
The whiteness was everywhere. Even the sky was
white, and the just-risen sun was not visible as a disc at all
but as a lovely haze of orange between whitenesses I knew
to be hills.
An hour later Ida, Shawno, and I were walking through
the silent, utterly motionless woods. We took the old
county road, that for decades now has been a mere trail,
rocky and overgrown. It goes directly up the wooded high
ridge of Folsom hill and then emerges into broad, shaggy
fields that every year become smaller as the trees move in.
We gather blueberries here in the summer, and in the fall
apples and grapes, but for almost two years now we have
come to the old farm for more sociable reasons.
After breakfast Ida had wanted to hear stories of her
earlier childhood, and now as we walked through the
woods she requested them again, taking my bare hand
with her small, gloved one, and saying, "Daddy, tell me
about when I was a kid."
"You mean like the time you disappeared in the snow?"
This was an incident I had described to her before, and
of which she delighted to hear.
"Yes!" she said.
"Well ... that was it-you disappeared. You were two
years old. You were sitting on my lap on the toboggan and
we went down the hill beside the house. We were going
really fast, and the toboggan turned over and you flew
into a snowbank and disappeared."
She laughed and said, "You couldn't even see me?"
"Nope. The snow was light and fluffy and very deep."
"Not even my head?"
"Not even the tassel on your hat."
"How did you find me?"
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
"I just reached down and there you were, and I pulled
you out."
She laughed triumphantly and said, "Tell me some
more."
While we talked in this fashion the dog trotted to and
fro among the snow-burdened close-set trees, knocking
white cascades from bushes and small pines. Often he
would range out of sight, leaping over deadfalls and
crouching under gray birches that had been pressed almost flat by the heavy snows of previous years, and then
he would come closer, sniffing at the six inch layer of wet
snow, and chuffing and snorting to clear his nose. Occasionally, snorting still more vigorously, he would thrust his
snout deep into the snow and then step back and busily
pull away snow and matted leaves with his front paws.
Watching all this, I understood once again that the
world of his experience was unimaginably different from
the world of mine. What were the actual sensations of his
sense of smell? How could I possibly know them? And
how were those olfactory shapes and meanings structured
in his memory? Snout, eyes, tongue, ears, belly-all were
close to the ground; his entire life was close to it, and mine
was not. I knew that in recent weeks complex odors had
sprung up in the woods, stirring him and drawing him excitedly this way and that. And I could see that last night's
snowfall had suppressed the odors and was thwarting him,
and that was all, really, that I could know.
After three-quarters of a mile the trail grew steep, and
the trees more numerous. We could not walk side by side;
I let Ida go in front, and our conversation now consisted of
the smiles we exchanged when she looked back at me over
her shoulder. I watched her graceful, well-formed little
body in its quilted red jacket and blue snow pants, and felt
a peace and happiness until now rare in my life.
Milky sky appeared between the snowy tops of the
trees. A few moments later there was nothing behind the
trees but the unmarked white of a broad field-at which
moment there occurred one of those surprises of country
life that are dazzling in much the way that works of art are
dazzling, but that occur on a scale no artwork can imitate.
I called to Ida, and she, too, cried aloud. The dog turned
to us and came closer, lifting his head eagerly.
The sight that so astonished us was this: several hundred birds, perhaps as many as five hundred, plump and
black, were scattered throughout the branches of one of
the maples at the wood's edge. The branches themselves
were spectacular enough, amplified by snow and traced
elegantly underneath by thin black lines of wet bark, but
the surprising abundance of the birds and their glossy
blackness against the white of the field were breathtaking.
I threw a stick at them. I couldn't resist. The entire tree
seemed to shimmer and crumble, then it burst, and black
sparks fluttered upward almost in the shape of a plume of
smoke. The plume thinned and tilted, then massed together again with a wheeling motion, from which a fluttering ribbon emerged, and the entire flock streamed
away in good order down the field to another tree.
19
�Shawno, who had remained baffled and excluded, resumed his foraging. He stopped and raised his head
alertly, then leaped forward in a bounding, enthusiastic
gallop, and in a moment was out of sight. When Ida and I
came to the spot he had just left, she, too, quickened excitedly, and with no more ceremony than had been shown
me by the dog let go of my hand and ran.
And if I had been a child, I would have followed, since it
was here, precisely here, that due to the lie of the land,
that is, the acoustics of the field, the playful, headlong
gaiety of two voices could be heard quite clearly, a girl's
voice shouting "I did, Leo! I did!" and the voice of her
brother, who was eight, replying, "Ha, ha, hal" and then
both shouting, "Shawno! Shawno!" I stood there and
watched Ida's diminutive figure running alone across the
snowy field in the direction of the house that was still to
come in sight.
I looked back for a moment down the long slope of the
field, towards the woods, the way we had come. I had intended to look for the birds, but our three sets of footprints caught my eye, and I could not help but smile at the
tale they told. They were like diagrams of our three different ways of being in the world. Mine, alas, denoted logic
and responsible decision: they plodded straight ahead,
straight ahead. Ida's footprints, in contrast to mine, went
out to the sides here and there, performed a few curlicues
and turns, and were even supplanted at one place by a
star-shaped body-print where she had thrown herself
laughing onto the snow.
But the footprints of the dog! ... this was a trail that was
wonderful to see! One might take it as erratic wandering,
or as continual inspiration, or as continua] attraction,
which may come to the same thing. It consisted of meandering huge loops, doublings, zig-zags, festoons ... The
whole was travelling as a system in the direction I had
chosen, yet it remained a system and was entirely his own.
The voices of the children grew louder. I saw the dark
gray flank of the made-over barn that was now their
home, and then saw the children themselves, running
with the dog among the whitened trees of the orchard.
These two, Gretl and Leo Carpenter, together with Ida
and myself and Eddie Dubord, complete the quintet of
Shawno's five great loves.
Gretl is Ida's age, Leo a year older. They are the children of Waldo and Aldana Carpenter, whom Patricia and
I have .known for years. But I have known Waldo since the
end of World War II, when we both arrived in New York
from small towns to the west.
Aldana was evidently waiting for me. She was standing
in the doorway, and when she saw me she beckoned. I had
not planned to stop, except to leave Ida and the dog, since
in all likelihood Waldo would be working, but Aldana had
no sooner waved to me than the broad window right
above her swung open and Waldo, too, beckoned to me,
cupping his hands and shouting. Aldana stepped out and
looked up at him, and they smiled at one another, though
his expression was not happy.
20
Aldana was fifteen years younger than Waldo. By the
time I came into the kitchen she was standing at the stove
turning thick strips of bacon with a fork. She looked
rested and fresh-it was one of the days, in fact, that her
entirely handsome and appealing person seemed actually
to be beautiful. She wore a dark blue skirt, a light sweaterblouse of gray wool, and loose-fitting boots from L. L.
Bean. Her long brown hair, that was remarkably thick and
glossy, was covered with a kerchief of deep blue.
"Waldo was up all night," she said to me, having already
urged me to eat with them. The large round table was set
for three.
She said, in a lower voice, ''We are going back."
She meant back to New York.
I had known that they wanted to. Waldo's excitement,
coming here, had had nothing to do with country life. He
had been fleeing New York and an art world that had become meaningless to him. His own painting, moreover, af
ter two periods of great success, was in a crisis of spirit,
and he had begun to mistrust the virtuosity (so he had told
me) that allowed him to cover this fact with achievements
of technique. But the isolation of country life had not had
the rejuvenating effect he had hoped for, and he had been
saying to me for a couple of months, "We won't be staying
forever . .. "
I was not surprised, then, to hear Aldana say that they
were leaving. Nevertheless, it was saddening, and I knew
that the loss, for Ida, would be severe.
I said as much to Aldana.
"We'll certainly miss you," she said. "All of you. All of
us. But we'll be back every summer."
"When are you going?"
"Soon. I don't know."
"How do the children feel about it?"
"We haven't told them yet," she said. "They've been
happy here ... but they do miss New York ... there's so
much to do ... "
I could hear Waldo walking on the floor above our
heads, and moving something. I asked him, shouting, if he
needed a hand. "I'll be right down," he called back.
Aldana looked into the oven, closing it quickly, and I
caught the aroma of yeast rolls.
The handsome kitchen had been the stables of the old
barn. The ceiling was low and was heavily beamed. Narrow horizontal windows ran the entire length of two sides
and gave fine views of our mountains, though today nothing could be seen in them but snowy woods and a misty
white sky. Many leafy plants, suspended in pots, were silhouetted in the white light. At the far end of the kitchen a
flight of open stairs led to Waldo's studio, and there also,
at that end, was Aldana's nook: a pine work table near the
window, on which there were several jars of small brushes,
a broad window-seat with cushions and many pillows, a
stool, more hanging plants, shelves with books and kerosene lamps. She was fluent in Lithuanian, and for two
years, at a leisurely pace, had been translating a cycle of
folktales for a children's book. She had done a great many
WINTER 1982
�gouache illustrations as well, and I knew that the project
'
was nearly finished.
I heard Waldo on the stairs. He stopped part way down,
and leaning forward called across to me, "Do you want to
see something?"
After the whites and blacks and evergreen greens of the
woods it was dazzling to see the colors of his work. He was
noted for these colors. Color was event, meaning, and
form.
Small abstract paintings on paper were pinned to the
white work wall, as were clippings from magazines and
some color wheels he had recently made. Larger paintings
on canvas, still in progress, leaned here and there, and two
were positioned on the wall. A stack of finished paintings,
all of which I had seen, leaned against the wall in the corner.
Waldo had placed the new painting on the seat of a
chair, and we stood side by side studying it. The paint was
still wet and gave off a pleasant odor of oil and turpentine.
Waldo's manner was that of an engineer. Physically he
was imposing, tall and strong, with a stern, black-browed,
grave face that was actually a forbidding face, or would
have been were it not that his underlying good humor was
never entirely out of sight. When he was alight with that
humor, which after all was fairly often, one saw an aston·
ishing sweetness and charm. Aldana, at such times, would
rest her hand on his shoulder, or stroke the back of his
head; and the children, if they were near, would come
closer, and perhaps climb into his lap.
The studio windows were sheeted with a plastic that
gave the effect of frosted glass, shutting off the outside
and filling the space with a shadowless white light.
Beyond one of those milky oblongs we heard a sudden
shouting and loud barking. Ida and Grell were shouting
together, "Help, Shawno! Help!" in tones that were al·
most but not quite urgent, and the dog was barking notes
of indignation, disapproval, and complaint, a medley that
occurred nowhere else but in this game, for I knew with·
out seeing it that Leo was pretending to beat the girls with
his fist, and was looking back at the dog, who in a moment
would spring forward and carefully yet quite excitedly
seize Leo's wrist with his teeth.
"It's a total dud," Waldo said dispassionately, "but it's
interesting, isn't it? Kerosene light does such weird things
to the colors. It's like working under a filter. Look how
sour and acidic it is. It's over-controlled, too, and at the
same time there are accidents everywhere. That's what
gives it that moronic look. I should have known betterI've done it before. When you rob the eye you rob the
mind."
Abruptly he turned to me and lowered his voice.
"We're going back to the city," he said. ''I'm going
down in a couple of days and see what has to be done ... "
I knew that he had not sublet his studio, which he
didn't rent, but owned-a floor-through in a large loft
building.
"We haven't told the kids yet," he said, "but I think
they want to go back. There's so much to do there ... "
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Aldana's voice came up from below. We cut short our
conversation and went down into the warm kitchen, that
was fragrant now with the odors of bacon, rolls, just·
brewed coffee, and fried eggs.
The rosy, bright-faced children stormed in just as we sat
down. Leo and Grell clamored for juice, while Ida looked
at them joyfully. Shawno came with them. He trotted to
Aldana, and to Waldo, and to me, greeting us eagerly but
without arresting his motion or taking his eyes from the
children. "Hi, Hi," they said to me. "Hi, daddy," said Ida.
All three tilted their heads, took on fuel, and with the dog
bounding among them rushed out again as noisily as they
had entered.
The sky was beginning to clear when I left half an hour
later, and it was blue now, but a pale, wintry blue. A light,
raw breeze was blowing.
I crossed the dooryard without calling to the children.
They were throwing snowballs at Shawno, except for Ida,
who was tagging along. They ran among the budded but
leafless apple trees, while the dog, who did not under·
stand that he was their target, kept leaping and twisting,
biting the snowballs with swift snaps that reduced them to
fragments.
I went alone down the snowy road to the right, toward
the river. Little clumps of snow were falling wetly from
the roadside trees.
I had been cheerful coming through the woods with Ida
and the dog, but now a familiar sadness began to creep
through me. There was an objective cause in the fact that
our friends were leaving, but I knew that this was not the
cause, the cause was old, and in truth I didn't know what
it was. It was as if this sadness, which at times was
touched by homelessness, were a zone between the animation I felt in the presence of others and the firmness I
felt in the solitude to which finally, after many years of
loneliness, I had been able to attain. And I was obliged to
pass through this zone, though I had passed through it
thousands of times already.
My solitary footprints were the only markings on the
short spur from Waldo's house to the back road, but as
soon as I made the turn I found myself walking between
the muddy tracks of a car. In ten minutes I stood on the
high ledge that overlooked the river and that invariably I
came to when I walked this way.
The river was broad in this stretch, and was still heavy
with spring flood. The water was dark. Huge pieces of ice
were strewn in a continuous line on the steep bank across
from me. The ice had been dirty with debris a week ago,
but now temporarily was white.
Two miles downriver lay the town, on which all such
villages as ours were dependent. There were its hundreds
of houses, its red roofs and black roofs, its white clapboard
sidings, its large, bare-limbed shade trees, all following the
slopes of the hills. I could see the gleaming belltowers and
white spires of the four churches, the plump wooden cupola of the town hall, also white, and several red-brick
business buildings. It was a lovely sight from this angle,
21
�but it no longer stirred me. Just the opposite. The town
was spiritless and dull, without a public life of any kind, or
any character of its own, but the usual brand names in the
stores and the usual cars on the streets.
Just this side of the town, the elegant timbered latticework of a railroad trestle crossed the river high in the air,
emerging from evergreens on one bank and plunging into
evergreens on the other.
Halfway to the trestle, where the hills, for a short distance, gave way to lowland, the broad pasture of a dairy
lay in a sweeping bend of the river. Its tall blue silo and
unpainted sheet metal barn stood close to the highway,
uphill from the fields. Black and white cows, a herd of
Holsteins which I knew numbered a hundred and fifty,
progressed across their snowy pasture toward the river, as
if without moving.
There came a loud metallic scraping and banging from
the gravel pit below me. A bucket-loader was scooping up
gravel. It swivelled and showered the stones heavily into a
waiting truck, that quivered under the impact. Another
truck, as I watched, drove down the long incline to the
riverbank.
I went home by the same route, thinking chiefly of my
work, that had become a kind of monastery, I had had to
empty it of so many things.
Shawno and the children were still playing, but they
were no longer running. Ida and Gretl were holding the
two sides of a flattened cardboard box, quite large, and
Leo, wielding a hammer, was nailing it to the rails of a
broken hay wain by the house, apparently to be the roof
of a hut. The dog sat near them, more or less watching. I
didn't call or wave, but Shawno saw me. He responded
with a start ... and then he did something I had seen him
do before and had found so touching I could not resent:
he pretended that he hadn't seen me. He turned his head
and yawned, stood up and stretched, dropped abruptly to
the ground with his chin on his paws, and then just as
abruptly stood up again and moved out of sight around
the house. What a display of doggy craftiness! It makes me
smile to remember it-even though I must now say that
this was the last that I saw him in the fullness of his life. I
did see him again, but by our bedtime that night he was
dead.
I went back alone through the woods, walking on the
footprints we had made that morning. In a scant three
hours the snow had become both wetter and shrivelled. It
was no deeper than three inches now, and was falling
noisily from the trees, leaving the branches wet and glistening.
At the bottom of the first hill, where I had to jump
across a little stream, and where that morning I had lifted
Ida, I noticed the footprints of two deer. The deer had
gone somewhere along the stream and then had come
back, running. I hadn't noticed the tracks that morning ... but I wasn't sure.
Instead of going home, I turned into the little field at
the far end of which my cabin/studio was situated. Every-
22
thing was quiet, the fresh snow untouched. I was halfway
across the field when I caught a movement in the sky.
High up, drawing a broad white line behind it, a military
jet drifted soundlessly. A moment later the thunderclap of
the sonic boom startled me ... and as if it had brought
them into being, two dogs stepped out of the woods behind my cabin. Or rather, one stepped out, a brown and
white collie, and came toward me. The other, a solemnlooking rabbit hound, stood motionless among the trees.
I thought I recognized the collie and called to it. It came
a few steps, and then a few steps more. It stood still when
it heard my voice, then it turned and went back to the
other dog, and both vanished into the woods.
I built a fire in the cabin, in the cast-iron stove, and
spent the rest of the day at my work.
Before the house at night.
As was my custom, whether I had done the cooking or
not, I mixed some scraps and pan rinsings with dry food
and went to the door to call Shawno, who ate when we did
and in the same room. Ida had come home that afternoon
with Patricia, but Shawno had not.
Half an hour later, after we had finished eating, and
while the water was heating for coffee, I went outside
again and called him, but this time I went across the road
and stood before the barn. The lie of the land was such
that in this position, and with the help of that huge sounding-board, my voice would carry to Waldo's fields, at least
to the sharp ears of the dog. I shouted repeatedly. As I
went back to the house I thought I saw movement on the
woods road we had travelled that morning. I was expecting to see him come bounding toward me, but nothing
happened and I went into the house.
We finished our coffee and dessert. Liza was staying
overnight with the twins she played with. Patricia sat on
the sofa with Jacob and Ida and read first a picture book
and then a story of Ernest Thompson Seton's, that enchanted Ida and put Jacob to sleep.
I telephoned Aldana. She said that the dog had left
them shortly after Patricia had come in the car for Ida. He
had stayed like that often with Leo and Gretl and had
come home through the woods at suppertime.
I put the porch light on and went across to the barn
again. I was preparing to shout when I saw him in the
shadows of the woods road, at the same place in which I
had thought I had seen movement before. A turbulence
of alarm, a controlled panic raced through me, and I ran to
him calling.
He lay on his belly. His head was erect, but just barely,
and was not far above the ground. He pulled himself forward with his front paws, or tried to, but no motion resulted. His hind legs were spread limply behind him. His
backbone seemed inert.
I knelt beside him and took his head on my knees. He
WINTER 1982
�was breathing so faintly that I doubted if any air was
reaching his lungs. I heard my own voice saying in the
high-pitched, grievously astonished tones of a child, "Oh,
dog, dog ... "
I ran my hand down his body. Near his lower ribcage,
even in the shadows, I could see a dark mass that here and
there glistened dully. It was smooth and soft, and there
jutted out of it numerous fine points sharper than a saw. I
.was touching the exit wound of a large-calibre bullet, in·
testines and shattered bone.
I put my face close to his and stroked his cheek. He was
looking straight ahead with a serious, soft, dim gaze. He
gave a breath that sounded like a sigh because it was not
followed by another breath, and instantaneously was heavy
to the touch.
I stayed there a long while with his head on my knees,
from time to time crying like a child.
I heard the front door open and heard Patricia calling
me. A moment later she was kneeling in the mud beside
Tiffi ST. JOHNS REVJEW
me saying, "Oh, oh, oh . .. " in a voice of compassion and
surpnse.
We conferred briefly, and I went indoors.
Ida sat on the sofa, in the light of the floor lamp, looking
at the pictures in the Seton book. Jacob lay asleep at the
other end of the sofa.
I said to her, "Ida, something has happened ... " and
knelt in front of her. She saw that I had been crying, and
her face whitened.
I said, "Shawno has been hurt very very badly ... " I did
not want to say to her that he was dead. "He's out front,"
I said. "Come."
She said, "Okay" quickly, never taking her eyes from
mine. She gave me her hand and we went outside, into
the road, where Patricia still knelt beside him just beyond
the light from the porch. She was bowed above him and
was stroking him. She looked up as we approached, and
held out one hand for Ida, but with the other kept stroking
his head, neck, and shoulders.
23
�Nietzsche and the Classic
William Mullen
Quod si tam Graecis novitas invisa fuisset quam
Horace
nobis, quid nunc esset vetus?
If you set out deliberately to make a masterpiece,
Balanchine
how will you ever get it finished?
T
O ASK WHAT CONSTITUTES A CLASSIC
is to ask
what kind of civilization we inhabit. Imagine, for the
sake of contrast, a purely archaic civilization in
which the paradigms for thought and action are so definitively expounded in the foundation myths that innovation is excluded altogether_ Then imagine, as its opposite,
a purely scientific civilization in which the piecemeal
progress towards greater knowledge and control relentlessly renders every aspect of the past an object for amusement and contempt If we like to think we have put the
first kind of civilization behind us forever (assuming it
ever existed) and yet have still not entirely succumbed to
the second (assuming it could ever entirely win out), our
conviction is somehow due to the presence of classic
works in our midst, holding at bay both the tyranny of the
past and the tyranny of the future by continuing to inspire new works in the present.
The usual lament of the classicist, of course, is directed
against the tyranny of the future, and the more threatened
he becomes by the ascendancy of science, the more Egyptological he becomes in his techniques-mummification of
the classics at all costs. But I am more interested in considering here the opposite threat, the tyranny of the past itWilliam Mullen is a Tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. His book,
Choreia: Pindar and Dance, will appear in the summer of 1982 (Princeton University Press).
24
self, and its only true check, the continuous creation of
new work fine enough to take a place beside the old. The
reason we secure the presence of classic works among us
is not that they are so fine that we can never equal them
but, on the contrary, that they are so fine that they will always challenge us to equal them.
In his earliest writings on the Greeks, Nietzsche pointed
out that it is no accident that the people from whom our
finest instances of the classic are taken was one that
pushed the principle of competition to its limits, in the
spheres of poetry and art no less than athletics and politics. 1 But the power of competition to incite the artists of
our civilization to do their best is inadequately shown by
its place in the culture of a single people, for competition
between peoples as well as within them has long been a
governing principle for us. The complex civilization of the
West assumed its essential form when the Romans worked
out a truce with Greek culture whereby classic status was
granted to Roman imitations that could join their Greek
models in rank without replacing them. This notion of a
highest rank that remains open to expansion is one to
which the word itself points, the Latin classicus originally
designating someone who belonged to the highest of the
five classes into which Roman citizens were divided when
the roll of the army was called.
Classics, of course, can only be so designated by later
generations. "Le classique," as Valery put it, "c'est ce qui
WINTER 1982
�vient apnes." As a new work comes into the light it may
well seem to rival the classics of the past for brilliance but
it is impossible to say at the time whether it will also rival
them for durability. And the question of durability becomes particularly problematic when one considers that
while some classic works exist as objects-paintings, statues, buildings-others exist as performing events-music,
dance, theater. In the case of the art object the materials
of which the work is made give a preliminary guarantee of
durability and it is only a question whether the work will
continue to be valued enough to be maintained in a position of honor. In the case of the performance event, however, durability can be achieved only by revivals, where all
is at hazard because there is no guarantee that the revival
will house the original informing spirit. And the difficulty
becomes acute when one considers that the original Greek
classics in the medium we call "poetry" were actually of a
dual nature, being performance events when they first appeared and turning into classics only after being stripped
of their musical and orchestic accompaniment in order to
become durable as texts. The work done by the classic
masters of Greek music and dance has completely van·
ished, both the work done to accompany poetry and whatever autonomous masterpieces may have been executed
in these media. In what sense, then, do we really possess
the classics of Greek poetry at all, and what is it we are doing when we set about to "equal" them?
If the question of durability is made difficult by the fact
of the variety of artistic media, then we must ask what is
the ground of this variety in the first place. In order to
come into its proper flowering, a work of art must be pres-
ent to the senses as well as the mind, and the fact that we
possess five different senses is in itself enough to necessitate a variety of media that can appeal to them either severally or in combination. The variety of media is in effect
one of the conditions apart from which we would be unable to experience art at all, for it flows from our bodily
existence in time as well as space. And works of the performing arts, which require fixed periods of time to be
unfolded before us, by that very fact also require that we
accept the element of transience in their conditions of
presentation. It should be clear, then, that this is a quint·
essentially Nietzschean subject I have in hand, since it has
ultimately to do with the status of the bodily and the tern
poral. The desire for the old works of art that are kept
present to be rivalled by new ones turns out to be grounded
in the disposition·of a healthy civilization to set high value
on the presence in its midst of works by which the human
senses are exalted. It is in new work, before the mind has
set about to gain distance by reflection and categorization, that the element of sensuous presence is most obviously compelling; and by juxtaposing new work with old
we remind ourselves of the importance of remaining open
to the same intensity of sensuous presence in the classics
themselves as well as their recent rivals, even when, as in
the Gase of the performing arts, this means exposing ourselves to transient revivals in the absence of the original
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
production. Nietzsche himself had a zest for theorizing
about the differences among the various artistic media,
and I should like, therefore, to try to extend some of his
leading ideas in the course of exploring the nature of the
classic as it is incarnated in different kinds of works of art
and different conditions of presentation.
B
EFORE DOING SO, however, it is best to acknowledge
at the outset how quickly these ideas come to grief
when transferred from the realm of art to the realm
of politics. Throughout his writing there runs a notion
which, color it how one will, remains irreducibly offensive,
namely, that a statesman aiming at greatness should consider himself an artist and other human beings his medium. Curiously enough, this monster first rears its head
in an early essay on "The Greek State" in which Nietzsche
praises Plato precisely for his cool willingness, in the Republic, to treat all other citizens as mere tools and means
for the production of "the Genius." 2 That Plato's ideal Genius was meant to be a philosopher and a scientist rather
than an artist, Nietzsche proposed, is only a regrettable
consequence of his appropriation of Socrates' negative
judgment on art, and should not distract us from the essential point that on the matter of treating citizens as a
Mittel-the German word for both "means" and "medium" -Plato had got things right.
I suggest that the very oddity of this way of reading the
Republic has the advantage of forcing us to face one of
the gravest questions raised by the speakers of that dialogue as they devise a city in speech rather than in deed. It
was Hannah Arendt, using an Aristotelian distinction, who
suggested that the reason the program of the Republic
would lead to such oppressive political consequences if actually implemented is that it is based on a mistaken substitution of the category of fabrication for that of action. This
is so because the craftsman (and the Greek language did
not explicitly distinguish between artificers and artists)
must first contemplate in solitude the mental model of
what he wishes to make-its idea, shape, or form, whence
the Platonic "idea" -and must then use violence on the
medium at hand in order to realize that model as best he
can. (Compare, for instance, Republic SOla and 54la.) In
raising her objections to the analogy between craftsman
and statesman, Arendt's immediate concern was to show
how the violence implicit in it was actualized when Marxism declared the "making" of a classless society an end
which justified any "means" and hence any treatment of
one's "medium." 3 But she might equally well have given
an account of the justification of violence by Nazism
through reference to its esthetic goals, for it is well-known
how many esthetes flocked to the early Nazi movement
and how belief in the supremacy of German art served as
a stimulus to the task of creating racial purity. In order to
transform the rough block of the citizenry into the fair
statue of the state one must be prepared to hack off the
25
�racially or physiologically sick and not to flinch if this human marble happens to make cries of pain as it is hewn.
To see the notion of men as both "medium" and "means"
in its most virulent form one needs to turn to Nietzsche's
late notebook jottings collected posthumously under the
title The Will to Power. "To keep objective, hard, firm in
executing a design-this is something artists are best at.
But when one needs men for that purpose (as do teachers,
statesmen, etc.) then the calmness and coldness and hardness quickly disappear. In natures like Caesar and Napoleon one can get a sense for jdisinterested' work on their
marble, whatever may have to be sacrificed by way of
men." 4 In the face of passages like this the convenient notion of Nazis as coarse literalizers of Nietzsche's refined
metaphors breaks down. Here a proto-Nazi esthete would
find just the sort of encouragement he needed to emerge
from his esthetic cocoon into totalitarian practice. 5 It is no
exculpation of Nietzsche to argue that he expressed contempt for the particular analysis that was later to come to
power, namely, that he preferred racial mixture as a better
breeding technique than racial purity. He is as explicit in
theory as the Nazis were in practice in his contempt for
the ethical principle at issue, whose classical formulation
is Kant's imperative always to treat human beings as ends
and never solely as means.
T
to Nietzsche's complexity, however,
we must take seriously the parenthesis in the jotting
just quoted, in which he mentions as instances of
those who must use men as their medium not only statesmen but also teachers. Insofar as the contents and methods
of an educational system are not entirely pre-legislated
and supervised, there is a temptation to see something of
the artist's prerogative over his material in the way the
teacher exercises authority over his students, and in fact
metaphors of "molding minds" and "shaping characters"
are seldom absent in discussions of the way educators
transform the young. We do not feel uneasy with these
metaphors because in a society of specialists we like to
think that the various things that need to be taught are in
various hands and that accordingly some kind of benign
separation of powers holds sway. The good is taught by
the parents inculcating morality at home, the true by the
teachers transmitting knowledge at school, and the beautiful by the artists passing on skills in their studios. The
nature of the authority of the molders of the young becomes more provocative, however, when we turn from
the problematic pluralism of the present to a highly integrated society like that of archaic Greece. I am referring
now not to the theoretical programs of Plato's Republic or
Laws but to the realities of the city in the time of Pindar
and Aeschylus.
In these archaic cities the choral poets who train young
dancers to perform sacred odes in public spaces are granted
authority simultaneously to teach them singing, dancing,
26
O DO )USTICE
morality, and the tales of the tribe. In Athenian tragedy
the authority the playwright exercises over his performers
is complicated by the fact that as part of a dramatic fiction
the chorus members assume personalities other than their
own and doff them when the play is over, so that even
though they are allowed to participate in the ritual only
if they are able-bodied and free-born male citizens of
Athens, it is not these aspects of their identity which their
role in the play is exhibiting to their fellow-citizens. In a
Pindaric ode, however, the free-born young men or young
women of the city perform in propria persona and are expected by their elders to believe in the words they recite
as they dance. The elders would have dismissed a poet for
training the youth in odes that exhibited bad morals no
less than bad dancing, false tales no less than false notes.
Not that we need sentimentalize the matter by assuming
that every single member of a Pindaric chorus was a good
Boy Scout and did in fact acquire the morals Pindar had to
teach him. Enough that through participation in many
choral events a young person would be trained in the public quality of morality and learn by instinct how he was expected to act. (Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.)
Moreover, by making these young dancers the mouthpieces for what his civilization most valued, the poet was
in effect arranging a spectacle in which truth and goodness were fused with beauty, and unabashedly so. In all
this the dancers are unquestionably the medium of the
poet, but far from being denied their human dignity by
such treatment they are in fact led by it, educatively, from
the confusion of adolescence to the bracing norms of
adulthood.
EADERS OF The Birth of Tragedy will notice quite a
difference between my very Apollonian account of
these Pindaric dancers and Nietzsche's very Dionysian one of the tragic chorus. His dancers are empowered
by their song and dance to doff their identities and merge
with the primordial unity, while those I have preferred to
fix my gaze on are rather bringing their identities into perfect focus, declaring by song and dance the essence of
what it is to be a free-born and able-bodied young man or
woman in a particular city 6 Moreover, the dithyrambic
improvisations in which Nietzsche wishes to see both the
origin and the essence of the tragic chorus would seem
to have dispensed with pre-arranged choreography altogether and to require at most a leader who impersonates
the hallucinated god, whereas the odes of Pindar require
the poet's presence in the city not only as leader of the
dance during performance but also as choreographer and
chorus-trainer beforehand.' The choreographer's engagement with the dancers as the medium in which he executes a. meaningful design is in effect an aspect of dance
which Nietzsche ignores in preference to some more mys~
tical situation in which the dancers improvise through
direct contact with the powers of nature. Consider his
R
WINTER 1982
�characterization of the tragic dancers in the last sentences
of the very opening section of the book. "Man is no longer
artist, he has become the work of art: the artistic power of
all nature, to the highest delight of the primordial unity,
makes itself manifest in the thrill of intoxication [Rausch].
The noblest clay, the most costly marble, Man, is here
kneaded and hewn, and to the chisel strokes of the Diony·
sian world-artist sounds out the Eleusinian mystery-cry:
'Do you bow down, Millions? Do you divine your Creator,
World?' " 8 Both the metaphor from sculpture and the
mystical HDionysian
world~artist"
here betray Nietzsche's
unwillingness to consider the choreographer's art on its
own terms. Indeed, throughout his writings he takes infinite delight in dance as an activity and a metaphor, but
never once considers it as an artistic medium and never
mentions a single choreographer or ballet.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche was positing the
chorus as the essence of the Dionysian in order to work
out an Hegelian scheme according to which the actors
represented the essence of the Apollonian and tragedy as
a whole constituted some higher synthesis in the history
of Greek genres. In order to fill in this scheme, he had to
posit Homer as the earlier type of the Apollonian, and
then lay Archilochus and Pin dar on the bed of Procrustes
as successive types of the Dionysian. Soon thereafter he
abandoned the whole Hegelian construct and began to
call in question the superiority of Athenian culture itself,
so that in the notes for We Philologists he is to be seen
playing with such tantalizing propositions as the following: "Athenian tragedy is not the supreme form we might
think it is. Its heroes are too much lacking in the Pindaric
quality."' I am, therefore, not interested in lingering to
discuss his earlier distortions, but wish rather to see what
his later use of the Apollonian/Dionysian distinction has
to say about the effects of various artistic media on those
who experience them, as artists, as participants, and as
spectators. The essential text lies in two consecutive
"Skirmishes of an Untimely Man" in Twilight of the Idols. 10
Here he restates his earlier association of the Apollonian
experience with the painter, the sculptor, and the epic
poet, and the Dionysian with the actor, the dancer, the
musician, and the lyric poet; but now he shows greater sophistication in suggesting both the physiological bases of
the distinction and the historical development which both
categories of media have undergone. In Apollonian art, he
theorizes, it is the artist's eye which is engaged, with the
result that the existence of the work as an object separate
from him is brought to the fore; while in Dionysian art,
the whole muscular and nervous system is engaged, with
the result that the artist'·becomes a mimic of whatever inspires him and hence a participant in the event which the
work of art becomes. The media of modern man are the
result of a process of specialization. The poet, the musician, and the choreographer, who used to be united in a
single performing artist who led the dance, are now three
separate specialists who do not necessarily form part of a
performance at all.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
A
S HEIDEGGER HAS SUGGESTED, Nietzsche's usual
interest in his characterization of art seems to be in
the state of the artist as he creates rather than in
the independent quality of the resultant work of art or the
particular modes in which the work is experienced by others11 This is the state Nietzsche calls Rausch- rapture, intoxication, frenzy, the feeling that "rushes" over the artist
and carries him beyond himself into creation-and it is
significant that in the sections just referred to in Twilight
of the Idols, the Apollonian artist is said to experience
Rausch no less than the Dionysian, only through the eye,
rather than the nerves and muscles of the rest of the body.
But in these sections the term Rausch is actually being
used by way of prelude to another, the famous "will to
power" itself. And, surprisingly, Nietzsche here assigns
the will to power a medium of its own, architecture. "The
architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollonian
condition: here it is ... the intoxication [Rausch] of the
great will that demands art. Architects have always been
inspired by the most powerful men; the architect has always been under the 'suggestion' of power. In architecture ... the will to power means to make itself visible ...
The highest feeling of power and sureness comes to expression in the great style."
Since elsewhere Nietzsche goes so far as to say that everything in the world is simply one form or another of the
will to power, one is at first perplexed. 12 Surely the will to
power will also be at play in the various states (Rausch
whether of the eye or the whole body) in which artists
turn to other media, and surely the resultant works of art
will also bear witness to it. Moreover, insofar as all art
brings things into full presence to the senses-into visibility, audibility, surface-why is it in architecture especially
that "the will to power means to make itself visible"?
Nietzsche is no longer interested now in setting up any
medium as a synthesis of Apollonian and Dionysian conditions, but rather in designating architecture as a medium that stands apart from them both and brings the will
to power into appearance in a special way.
A clue to his thinking here lies in the fact that this is
one of the rare occasions on which he mentions not only
the creators and participants in works of art but also their
patrons. To speak of these "powerful men" at whose b!'hest the architect creates a building is to raise the question of its purpose. In order to bring a great building into
being, an architect must employ more durable materials
than any other kind of artist, must claim more space, mobilize more resources, and give more commands. Above
all, he must consult more closely with the desires of his patron, whether individual, institution, church, or state, and
if the patron has commissioned a great building, then
these desires will reach beyond mere functionality. Whatever the intended function of the building might be, its
coming into appearance as a work of art shows that the
power of its patron is possessed of the will and the means
to stability and endurance. The patron will understand
this as well as the architect, and the cooperation of the
27
�two will always ultimately be with a view to the final effect of the building on other people. Churchill's saying,
that we shape our buildings and our buildings then shape
us, needs to be more precise. It is architect and patron
who shape the building, and it is us they are aiming to
shape by it.
I suspect, then, that Nietzsche sets such value on architecture precisely because it fuses the categories of art and
politics. And the suspicion is increased by the striking fact
that his favorite way of praising the Roman Empire is in
architectural metaphors. The most manic expression of
this association comes in The Antichrist: "Is it still not un·
derstood yet? The imperium Romanum . .. this most admirable work of art in the great style, was a beginning, its
construction was calculated to give proof of itself over millenia-to this day no one has ever again built in such a
way, has even dreamed of building in the same measure
sub specie aetemi! This organization was stable enough to
support bad emperors: the accident of individuals ought
to be insignificant in such matters-first principle of all
great architecture." 13 The praise continues into the next
section, which describes the Romans' act of consolidating
the classical heritage as "the will to the future of man, the
great Yes to all things made visible as the imperium Romanum, visible for all the senses, the great style no longer
merely art but rather become reality, truth, life . .. " 14
Underneath the dithyrambic phrasing it is not hard to
grasp the essential characteristics of architecture that
make it easy for Nietzsche to identify it with the will to
power. Any ambitiously constructed building is meant to
last longer than the lifespans of its builders and to be used
by future generations. These generations will be molded
by both the functional and the esthetic aspects of the
building. Architect and patron cooperate to cast the spell
of their power over the future both in art and in life, and
we may accept the legitimacy of this ambition without being forced to debate the morality of political ambitions for
the expansion of an imperial system in space. Roman ar~
chitecture remains our great symbol of the ambition to
make cultural institutions endure through time.
of art in its own right but also both a functional means
and a compelling symbol for the process by which a civilization honors its classical works. And as part of this process it also helps to create a space in which the new work
can be juxtaposed to the old, an act no less essential to a
healthy civilization than the preservation of the classics
themselves. To see a work of modern art exhibited in a
museum built in the neoclassical style is an experience
which, common as it may be, has some meaning if we consider the tension between old and new which these conditions of presentation intend to symbolize.
ITH ROMAN ARCHITECTURE as a paradigm, then,
I wish to bring this meditation on artistic media
to its proper culmination by offering a few examples of the ways in which some of the best works of art our
civilization has to offer have themselves symbolically acknowledged, as part of their own conditions of coming
into being, the crucial tension between the old and the
new, between that which is preserved in presence and
that which comes into presence for the first time. Buildings are not the only works of art capable of making such
acknowledgements, nor were the Romans the only people
to be conscious of their importance. I shall therefore include examples from poetry and dance as well as architecture, and take them from the earliest as well as the most
recent phases of the West. What I am looking for are cases
in which it is clear that an artist is not merely presenting a
new work of art by itself without any reference to its conditions of appearance, but on the contrary is going out of
his way to insure that the new work have old ones in its
background, and that the transience of the conditions of
its first appearance be assured of being transformed into
the durability of the conditions of preservation that will
attend it if its bid for classic status is successful.
My example from the earliest phase will be an ode of
W
Pindar, whose poetry is in many ways more archaic even
than that of Homer. The Fifth Nemean, one of his most
Mozartean compositions, is a victory ode, or epinician, for
a boy pancratiast from the island of Aegina, famous in antiquity both for its athletic statuary and its temple archi-
I
PROPOSED AT THE OUTSET that our civilization in its
essential form came into being only when the brief but
glorious artistic achievement of Greece was preserved
by the Romans in such a way that their own artistic efforts
might be juxtaposed to it. This is a process which it is one
of the most important tasks of architecture to make possible. It does so in one sphere by sheltering and setting in
relief those other works of art which endure as objects,
and in another by shaping a space for the performing arts
in which they can take on scale and project themselves to
a particular audience. If one includes churches and temples as well as museums and concert-halls, the comprehensiveness of architecture's roles becomes clearer, for
one is then speaking of sacred art and ritual performance.
A work of architecture is thus not only an enduring work
28
tecture.
To compliment his hosts, Pindar begins by having himself and his chorus of Aeginetan boys claim, as they strike
up the dance, that "I am no statue-maker, to fashion
sculptures at holiday as they stand on their own pedestals," an opening sally which may well have been underscored by choreography imitating sculptural positions for
a split second before whirling merrily on. In standard epinician form, the ode goes on to praise the boy victor, and
then to make its way back, by a series of allusions and
partly told stories, to the foundational age of the earlier
Aeginetan heroes, including the founding father Aeacus
himself, who had once saved all Greece from a drought by
supplicating his own father Zeus for rain. Finally, in its
last line and a half, the ode returns to the present and
WINTER 1982
�praises the athletic victories of the boy's grandfather in
the following language: "At the portals of Aeacus bring
him crowns luxuriant with flowers, in the company of the
blond Graces." The "portals of Aeacus" here are the fore·
court of a shrine to that hero at the center of the city,
fronting the agora, where victory dances were normally
performed. This shrine was decorated with friezes depict·
ing the same event alluded to in the ode, the moment at
which Zeus showed favor to Aeacus by showering on the
parched land; such moments of favor typically form the
climax both of the odes' mythical language and of their
choreography. Since the forecourt of hero-shrines was a
traditional place for erecting statues of victorious athletes,
the dancers may have been referring to a ritual custom according to which victors might have their crowns placed
on the statues of ancestors who had themselves been victorious in earlier games. Whether or not this is the case
here, it is clear that some kind of offering of flowers is being made before the shrine as the ode comes to its end, an
act carried out in stylized motion which is to be thought
of as a continuation of the ode's ritual choreography.
All we have left of this lovely event is the concluding
phrase quoted earlier about the portals of Aeacus and the
blond Graces: 7r/Jo8Vpoww llAtcxKofJ &ve~wv trouhvTlx 4>EPe
an</Jom;,,ara avv ~av8afs X&pwmv. Fully conscious that
his language is destined to endure as a memorial text, Pindar seems to be playing here, as often at the conclusion
of his odes, with the implication that as the never-to-be
repeated victory dance draws to its close the language
which it has sustained is begining to move into its own immortality as a text. He is seeking a symbol of the ode's
dual nature, as transient dance and as enduring text, and
he finds it in the contrast between the luxuriant flowers
out of which the young victor's crown has been woven
and the magnificently sculpted stone of the statues and
friezes at the front of the ancestral shrine. Nor is Pindar
satisfied to allude to this contrast by the language alone;
he seems also to have arranged to draw it into the circle of
the ode's choreography, by having the flowers placed in
the forecourt of the shrine at the very moment when the
language falls still and the motion of the dancers continues in silence. To this ritual motion the vivid archaic
smiles on the faces of the ancestral athletic statues and
the heroic friezes are witness, in that acclamation between living and dead which can be fully mutual only if it
is made in silence.
And somehow present in all this, through the invocation of the final phrase, is the consort of the Graces themselves, goddesses of the transient comeliness of dancing
and flowers, who as immortals can themselves never fade.
Through the fostering by these divine presences, as well
as by Father Zeus and Father Aeacus, the new work of the
poet has blossomed into public performance and is now
about to reach the moment at which it will cease to be a
ritual dance and begin to be a durable text. It is taking its
place among the immortal stone masterpieces by which
the center of the city is adorned, and by the act of naming
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
these masterpieces and declaring its place among them, it
becomes a monument to its own occasion. The old and
the new are thus made in the most essential way to belong
to each other, and the same is true of the transient and
the durable; it is a belonging registered by the combination of the several media at the occasion of the performance. The old and the durable are present as sculpture,
the new and the transient are present as dance, and sover-
eign over all is the language of the ode which both declares these dualities and transcends them.
SHALL NOT TRY to claim that such a blaze of civic splendor has been equalled by any poetic event of recent times.
If there is an absence at the center of our civilization it
may lie just here: in our inability to agree on any objects of
reverence deeply enough to summon forth our best poets
and have them arrange spectacles at the centers of our cities in which the young both embody and share our agreement in the course of their performance. Efforts to mount
such spectacles in the Twentieth Century have usually
been totalitarian parodies, and it takes only one look at
films of the Nuremberg rallies to make most people flee
back to pluralism with a sigh of relief.
Acknowledging this difficult absence, then, I nevertheless have no desire to end with yet another eloquent
grouse against the age. As Nietzsche puts it in one of his
aphorisms on the classic, "Both classically and romantically minded spirits ... are preoccupied by a vision of the
future, but the former out of the strength of their time,
the latter out of its weakness." 15 The more classically
minded tack here, the one which refuses to lapse into
complaining out of weakness, would be simply to let one's
eye rove in a fine frenzy until it lights on the best work
now being done and then to ask whether anything like the
same interplay of the old and the new, and of the durable
and the transient, is to be traced in the conditions in
which it comes into public appearance. The artists I wish
to honor by this kind of inquiry work in media which lie at
the two extremes of the spectrum I have proposed in
speaking of the combination Pindar arranges. They are
George Balanchine, whose repertory of dances currently
being offered at the New York City Ballet is acknowledged
to be one of the greatest choreographic achievements in
the century, and I. M. Pei, whose career seemed to reach
its peak recently with the opening of the East Building of
the National Gallery in Washington. And, as it happens,
next to both artists stand patrons worthy of them, respectively Lincoln Kirstein and Paul Mellon, whose roles and
intentions also deserve to be honored by reflection.
I
T
HE LEVEL OF EXCELLENCE at which the New York
City Ballet is performing right now is rather terrifying. One risks nothing in calling it currently the finest dance company in the world; the knowledgeable go
further and prophesy that what we have been seeing for
29
�Figure I: The architect's concept sketch, showing the existing network of streets
and the relationship between the National Gallery (West Building, left) and the new
East Building. The altitude of the larger of the two triangles which comprise the
new building prolongs the long axis of the old building. The numbers in the upper
part of the sketch refer to square feet of space in the two buildings. (Figures 1 and 2
courtesy I. M. Pei & Associates.)
the last few decades will someday be as legendary as Diaghilev's Ballet Russe. Balanchine has been choreographing
new works for this company uninterruptedly since 1935,
and his presence has set the finest dancers in the world
knocking at its doors. Since the company lacks a "star system," the number of dancers of the highest rank it can
admit is, like my definition of the classic, theoretically susceptible of indefinite expansion. These resources of talent
have in turn enabled it to maintain a prodigious repertory
from season to season, so that in the winter and spring
seasons of 1980-81, some forty Balanchine ballets were
performed in addition to those of the company's other
choreographers. The sense of superabundance is heightened yet further by the variety of musical scores represented. Of the musicians who have written expressly for
ballet, Balanchine prefers to choreograph to scores of his
fellow Russians Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, but he has
also choreographed a series of masterpieces in homage to
Bach, Gluck, Mozart, Brahms, Bizet, and others. Coming
away from an evening with a strong program, one feels
that by some miracle time has been collapsed and the
highest graces of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Centuries have been made present together in the
same theater, not as objects but as living bodies performing at the limits of skill under the direction of a master
fully capable of rising to the scores he has selected.
Modern technology is of course hard at work trying to
pin down these wonders, the choreography by dance notation and the performances by videotape, and Balanchine himself has lived to contemplate the production of
his works by many other companies around the world
whose stagings he has neither supervised nor seen. Some
speculate that his preponderance will only be augmented
after his death and might have something of the same
30
daunting effect as Beethoven did on later writers of symphonies, but all talk of monumental permanence is pleasantly mocked by the man himself. "I want to make new
ballets .... If you made a borscht, you'd use fresh ingredients. If you were asked to write a book twice, you'd use
new words. People say, what about posterity? What do
you preserve, I ask? A tape? What counts is now. Nobody
will ever be the same again. And I don't care about people
who aren't born yet." 16 If one wants to seek the frame of
permanence in which all this new work is held, it is to be
looked for not in recording techniques but in the concept
of repertory which Lincoln Kirstein has so well articulated.
"Increasingly, however, what pleases our audiences is rep~
ertory-illuminated, to be sure, by .well-trained dancers
.... Stars are replaceable by emergent students; choreography, in repetition, persists." 17 In any given season's of~
ferings of the New York City Ballet, there will be two or
three new works by Balanchine and two or three of his
own versions of the Nineteenth Century classics, and
both categories will be set in relief by thirty-odd of his
pieces choreographed since 1935 and deemed worthy of
repeating. Some of these are already granted classic status
by the audience, and in the rapidly changing world of
dance, anything preserved for as long as fifty years is
shown to be a classic by that very fact; others, more recent, are still making their bids and may eventually be
dropped and never revived again. The point to be stressed
is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The
consort of new and old works which this repertory maintains in performance is as healthy an image as our time
has to offer of that imperturbable ceremony, refusing to
be retarded or accelerated, by which the ranks of the classic are augmented.
T
O MOVE FROM THE STATE THEATER OF NEW
YORK to the East Building of the National Gallery in
Washington is to feel these equations change their
terms and yet remain the same. The original gallery was
completed by Andrew Mellon in 1941 as a gift to the nation, and the new free-standing extension was completed
in 1978 by his son Paul, with the superbly understated designation "East Building." The very Roman piety of the
son to the father is registered by the fact that both buildings are of marble from the same quarry in Tennessee,
and though the new building looks lighter in color now, its
stone will deepen to the same hue as that of the old in a
matter of decades. In his uncompromising demand for the
highest quality of execution, Paul Mellon sustained a
tripling of costs during construction, and the building's
prime location at the end of the Mall closest to the national Capitol only accentuates the contrast between the
level of quality to be achieved by private versus public
wealth. The old main gallery (now called the West
Building) is itself the most harmoniously executed of all
the neo-classical buildings on the Mall, and it is to the
glory of the East Building that it harmonizes with the old
WINTER 1982
�one in proportions and quality of design while speaking its
own assured modern idiom. By his choice of axes and
shapes I. M. Pei has in fact accommodated the new
building not only to the old one but also to the original
design for the streets of the city which dates back to 1791.
L'Enfant's whole system of traffic circles, with radial
avenues leading out from them and cutting diagonally
across the grid of the other streets, is generated by the two
major axes he projected from the Capitol building, one
leading along the Mall to the Washington Monument and
the other along Pennsylvania Avenue to the White
House. The East Building is situated just at the point
where the angle between these two axes from the Capitol
begins to create trapezoidal city blocks, and the building is
itself a trapezoid bisected into two triangles whose angles
observe those of the avenues outside. Moreover, Pei has
used these angles as his governing principle not only in
the shapes of the building's two halves but also at many
other levels of detail, from the space-frame over the vast
and airy central court down to the very shape of the
blocks in the floors. Thus should one's eye ever drop to
one's feet it would encounter, there too, in the very cut of
the marble, an homage to the design commissioned by our
own founding father for the city to be named after him.
In all these details of execution, then, there is manifested on the part of patron and architect alike a desire
that the new should take its place beside the old in a tension whose vibrancy only enhances the harmony that underlies it. This desire reaches its most dramatic realization
in the contrast between the actual way the two galleries
are intended to be used. The function of the reposeful
West Building is, now as always, to house the permanent
collection of the National Gallery, while one of the principal functions of the energetic East Building is to provide
space for temporary exhibitions, the new genre of internationally organized blockbusters that has emerged in the
last few decades. The central court of the East Building
gives a view of all levels of the building in the manner of
an opera-house, and the ('performances" for which this
Figure 2: An elaboration of the two·triangle plan of the East Building. The larger
triangle {divided by the arrow) contains public spaces-the central court and the
galleries, for example. The smaller (lower part of the sketch) is devoted to secondary
uses such as the study center. (The small figure in the upper right shows a preliminary sketch of a triangular building on the existing trapezoidal plot of ground.)
of course,
the name of Nietzsche has vanished altogether. I
should ·like to think, however, that far from implying
his irrelevance I have been paying him the right kind of
tribute. It may be that his greatness is less that of a philosopher, if by that word we mean one who offers us an account of the world and a guide to life through examination
of universals, and more that of a critic, if by that word we
mean one who leads us to make exacting perceptions and
valuations of the particular. By his sustained refusal to
slander the body, the senses, and the moment in all its
transience, Nietzsche gave us a fresh sense of what is at
stake when we submit ourselves to the power of a work of
art in the plenitude of its presence. But to consider what
is necessary for that plenitude means to consider the nature of the immortal, the monumental, the classic. And it
F
ROM MY ACCOUNT OF RECENT WORK,
means, finally, to be strong enough to sustain an irresolu-
court provides ''intermissions" are in fact going on around
ble paradoxical desire-the desire to be witness to a "new
the building's sides in the various galleries and towers,
where space has been left open by the architect, so that it
can be shaped anew by the curators through use of temporary walls designed for each specific exhibit. The East
Building is, in other words, a place for festivals, whose brilliance is inseparable from their transience 18 Patron and
architect have incorporated into the function of the new
building an element of festival brilliance which will stand
in perpetual tension with the marmoreal achievement of
its fundamental design. I should, therefore, like to offer
the two buildings together, with their complementary
styles and complementary functions, as my final image of
the interplay between the new and the old, and the durable and the transient, which a healthy civilization has the
sense and the will to sustain. Here too, as with dance repertory, the ceremony of the classical is, in Pindar's phrase,
classic" as it comes into being.
at perpetual ((holiday on its own pedestal."
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
l. See "Homers Wettkampf' in Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, ed. Karl
Schlechta, Munich 1966, III, 291-299. Hereafter all references will give
the title and section number of the work and then the volume and page
number in Schlechta. Unless otherwise stated all translations are my
own.
2. "Der Griechische Staat," Werke, III, 285-286.
3. The essential text in Arendt is The Human Condition (Anchor Books
Edition 1959), Chap. 31, "The Traditional Substitution of Making for
Acting," 197-206.
4. Der Wille zur Macht, no. 975, Werke, III, 850. Though Schlechta
abandons the section numbers of earlier editions of Nietzsche's Nachlass collected under the title Der Wille zur Macht, he provides in his fifth
volume (609ff.) a concordance by which a given section can be found in
his own edition.
5. Nor will it do to maintain that these notebook jottings remained unpublished by Nietzsche because he could not bring himself to recommend in public the adoption of such a stance of hardness. Consider the
quotation from Zarathustra with which he concludes Gotzen-Dam-
31
�merung: "All creators are hard. And you' must think it blessedness to
press your hand on millenia as on wax,-/-Blessedness, to write on the
will of millenia as on bronze,-harder than bronze, nobler than bronze.
Only the noblest are completely hard." (Werke, II, 1033) Compare this
with the laudatory remarks on Caesar and Napoleon in the same book,
"Streifzuge eines Unzeitgemassen" nos. 38, 44, 45, 49, Werke, II, 1015,
1019-1022, 1025. To be fair, however, it must be added that the connection between the artist's hardness on his material and the statesman/
general's hardness on human beings is not made explicit anywhere in
Gotzen-Dammerung but rather left as a hint, a not-too-esoteric doctrine.
6. Nietzsche shows himself quite conscious of the distinction: "The
young women who march solemnly to the temple of Apollo, laurel in
hand, and sing as they go a processional song, remain who they are and
maintain the names they possess as citizens; the dithyrambic chorus is a
chorus of transformed beings for whom their past as citizens and their
social position has become oblivious." Die Geburt der TragOdie no. 8,
Werke, I, 52. The second half of his characterization, however, is incomplete, for in all the tragedies we possess (as opposed to hypothetical
original dithyrambs), the dancers who have doffed their own identities
have donned others which are equally precise: those of old men, women,
slaves, foreigners, sailors, etc.
7. Nietzsche's assumption is based on the much-disputed statement of
Artistotle (Poetics l449a9) that tragedy arose &1rO rCJv to'~apxOvrwv rOv
tneUpap,{3ov, "from those who led off the dithyramb." For a very nonDionysian critical discussion of this passage and of Nietzsche's use of it,
see Gerald F. Else, The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy, New
York 1965, 9-15.
8. Die Geburt der TragOdie no. l, Werke, I, 25.
9. "Notes for 'We Philologists,'" trans. William Arrowsmith, ARION
N.S. l/2, 1973-1974, 361.
10. Nos. 10 & II, Werke, II, 996-997.
11. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Pfullingen 1961, Vol. I, "Der Wille zur
Macht als Kunst," particularly the chapter entitled "Der Rausch als
asthetischer Zustand," 109-126.
12. Der Wille zur Macht no. 1067, Werke, III, 917.
13. Der Antichrist no. 58, Werke, II, 1229.
14. Der Antichrist no. 59, Werke, II, 1231. Cf. GOtzen-Dammerung,
"Streifzuge" no. 39, Werke, II, 1016. Nietzsche was also fond of alluding
to Horace's claim that in his three books of odes he had erected a monument more durable than bronze: exegi monumentum aere perennius
(Odes III, 30.1). Earlier in Antichrist no. 58 he uses the phrase aere perennius to characterize the whole Roman Empire, and in the last section of
Gotzen-Diimmerung, "Was lch den Alten Verdanke" no. l, he names
32
Figure 3: View of the East Building from the vicinity of the east entrance of the
original National Gallery, looking in approximately the same direction as the arrow
points in Figure 2. (Photo by Tom Farran.)
Horace and Sallust as his two great stylistic models and says that "Even
in my Zarathustra one can recognize a very serious ambition for Roman
style, for the 'aere perennius' in style." (Werke, II, 1027). See also MorgenrOte no. 71, Werke, I, 1059. In Zur Genealogie der Moral, '"Gut und
BOse,' 'Gut und Schlecht"' no. 16, he praises the nobility of Roman inscriptions, a category which combines architecture and writing (Werke,
II, 796).
15. Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, "Der Wanderer und sein Schatten," no. 217, Werke, I, 965.
16. New York Times, "Arts and Leisure Section,'' Sunday, AprilS, 1979,
D 17.
17. Lincoln KirStein, Movement and Metaphor, New York 1970, 10.
18. Compare Lincoln Kirsteip's remarks on the lobby of the State
Theater of New York: "Philip Johnson built a festival ambiance in lobby
and promenade. Performances commence when audiences first enter
the houses which frame them; large theaters are more than shelter. Intermissions which link units of repertory are happy times for appreciation, disagreement, sharings of what has just been seen and heard."
New York City Ballet Souvenir Book, 1975.
WINTER 1982
�The Trivialization of the Holocaust as an
Aspect of Modern Idolatry
Robert Loewenberg
1
The Holocaust, the murdering of the Jews on Hitler's
principle that a "thorough eradication of even the last
representative and destruction of the last tradition"
should be realized, is the most mysterious event of modern
times, and perhaps the most characteristic. 1 Mysterious
and characteristic as well is the subsequent trivialization
of the Holocaust in Western discourse by those, especially
Jews, who profess detestation of Hitler and Nazism. The
trivialization of the Holocaust, and not its denial, for ex·
ample, by the Right, is the most significant post-Holocaust
phenomenon at our disposal for the purpose of understanding the Holocaust.
The charge of trivialization supposes certainly a justification of the view that the Holocaust is not trivial. One
must establish that Hitler's choice to eradicate the Jews
and Judaism instead of Armenians or Biafrans is what
makes for the Holocaust's particularity. The mystery of
the Holocaust, in other words, is not the murdering of innocents, or the number and manner of their killing. The
description of Hitler's murdering of the Jews as a holocaust constitutes a claim, a narrowly tribal one in some
minds, that the gassing of Jews was not solely a murdering
of innocents demonstrating man's inhumanity to man.
Rather the Holocaust was a murdering of another kind
that demonstrates profound truths. This claim is explored
in this essay in connection with the suggestion of Emil
Fackenheim that the Holocaust was the result of idol worship.'
Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University, Robert
Lo~wenberg has written Equality on the Oregon Frontier (University of
Washington Press, 1976) and articles on the history of the American
Northwest and on values in writing history.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The purpose of this essay is to locate the sources of trivialization and not to detail it-the latter a task that has
been undertaken by others 3 The best evidences of trivialization are found in the most likely places, in common
speech and in academic discourse. In both instances the
quite prominent involvement of the Jews in the trivializa·
tion of the Holocaust underscores the several points to be
developed in this study.
At the first level, that of common speech, trivialization of
the Holocaust is especially visible in the rights movements.
Here the language of the Holocaust and of European
Jewry is readily affixed to circumstances of victimization.
Civil rights proponents are inclined to refer to a Negro
ghetto as an "Auschwitz" or to the denial of a lunch program as "genocide." The denial of civil rights is fascist
while support of civil rights is in some ultimate sense Jewish. This perception of the rights movement and of Judaism is commonplace among liberal Jews today. Judaism,
1
once self-understood as chosenness or ' particularism," is
now to be conceived as universalist. Judaism's universalism has suggested to some advanced or Reform rabbis
that traditional or orthodox Judaism may itself be Nazi.
Accordingly, there has been a growing tendency in pro·
gressive circles to disavow the holiday of Chanukah,
which marks the defeat of Hellenists by a band of religious
zealots, as fascism.
Developments of this type at the popular level are informed by academic conventions regarding what is
thought to be praiseworthy about Judaism. At the aca·
demic level the trivialization of the Holocaust is, in fact, a
function or product of the insistence that Judaism is es·
sentially antireligious, actually a forerunner of secular and
atheistic humanism. The real Jew is the non-Jewish Jew.
This view, deriving from the distinction between universalism and particularism, is part of a larger vision of his-
33
�tory and human affairs in which the Holocaust is, above
all, an attack upon mankind. In this view of things, Nazism
and Hitler are perceived as reactionary, the enemies of
progress, secularism, and democracy. Thus Hitler was
among those "demonic enemies," as two Jewish writers
have recently and typically said, "of modernity."' As for
Mein Kampf, it is considered "deeply barbarous," a book
"to end books. "5 The Third Reich demonstrated once and
for all the evil of nationalism or particularism, of hierarchy
and authority. Nazism vindicated an opposite set of prin·
ciples: egalitarianism, universalism, internationalism, and
tolerance.
Scholars in fields other than German history, especially
if they are Jewish, are not hesitant to use the Holocaust as
in some respects a model and metaphor. A famous exam·
pie is Stanley Elkins' astonishing comparison of death
camp inmates with American slaves. Interestingly, the
comparison was offensive to some historians on the
ground that slaves did not behave as the Jews were alleged
to have done by Elkins. In other words, the comparison as
between murder and enslavement was not faulted, only
the suggestion that slaves behaved like death camp inmates. Uses of this type explain in part the popularity of
so-called Holocaust studies, a new academic subfield.
It is the burden of this essay to suggest that trivialization of the Holocaust partakes of the same philosophical
sources that informed the actual Holocaust itself. The hatred of Judaism (not equivalent to hatred of Jewish
people), whether in destroying Jews or in trivializing their
destruction, reflects neither prejudice nor fascist militarism, but a disordering of the terms of being, a disordering
of the relationship of the One and the many. This disordering and its consequences we call idolatry. Perhaps no
Jewish writer has done more to explore this question than
Emil Fackenheim.
Fackenheim's study of the Holocaust is notable for its
daring. He dismisses certain sanctified cliches of Holocaust literature, and ignores the taboos of normal political
theory. For example, Fackenheim does not suppose that
religion is an end equal to all others, but, on the contrary,
that it is "the most serious question facing a serious man."6
In this, Fackenheim offends behaviorists and secular humanists at once. But having done so, Fackenheim is free
to disregard as unhistorical and reductionist those accounts of the Holocaust which limit our apprehension of
Hitler or of Mein Kampf either to the influences upon
them or to behavioral inferences from them. Similarly, he
does not engage in a certain type of theologizing which,
by proposing that the Holocaust demonstrates the non-existence and irrelevance of God, suggests rather the nonexistence and irrelevance of any serious Jewish theology.
Fackenheim takes Nazism at its word and considers its
deeds in light of its word. In this he adopts the commonsense approach of Werner Maser, the outstanding historian of Mein Kampf. "To explain Hitler and to understand
the period of history over which he exerted so decisive an
34
influence," Maser has written, "nothing can be so impor~
tant or informative as Mein Kampf . ... Hitler clung faithfully to the ghastly doctrine set out in Mein Kampf."'
But the ghastly aspects of Mein Kampf are not always
the obvious ones. Hitler was an idealist, or one who is devoted to what modern liberal scholarship considers the
highest goal, freedom. Fackenheim takes note of Hitler's
idealism. The idealistic element in Mein Kampf is not outwardly ghastly. For example, Hitler writes of his wish to
replace one "spiritual" doctrine with another. He does not
idolize force in this matter. "Every attempt at fighting a
view of life by means of force will finally fail," he observed, "unless the fight against it represents the form of
an attack for the sake of a new spiritual direction." 8 This
new spiritual direction is what necessitates the "thorough
eradication" of Jews. Hitler seeks a "new . .. view of 1ife." 9
Hitler's ghastly doctrine aside, he was a moralist. Conversions and mere persecutions ofjews he regarded as destructive of idealism and immoral in other respects. 10 As
for persecutions, "every [one] ... that takes place without
being based on a spiritual presupposition does not seem
justified from the moral point of view." 11 Traditional Judeophobia failed to express "the character of an inner and
higher consecration, and thus it appeared to many, and
not the worst, as immoral and objectionable. The conviction was lacking that this was a question of vital importance to the whole of mankind and that on its solution the
fate of all non-Jewish people depended." 12
The eradication of Jews and of all Jewish things Fackenheim rightly considers to derive from a worshipping of
false gods or idolatry. Nazism sought to make the trinity of
Yolk, Reich, and Fuehrer into one. Hitler's purpose was to
replace the people, who are representative of the principle that God is One, with "eternal Germanity" as one. In
order to establish the significance of idolatry, Fackenheim
has recourse to Jewish sources. Idolatry is "false 'freedom,'" in particular, idolatry is the "literal and hence total
identification of finiteness with infinitude." 13 What relation exists between ancient idolatry and modern idolators?
The ancients were preoccupied with the problems of false
worship and false gods. Moderns are secular and do not
believe in gods. Fackenheim does not forfeit his fundamental discovery that Nazism is idolatrous by suggesting
the Nazis were antimodern pagans. He does not dilute or
caricature the rabbinic teaching on idolatry, but insists
that Nazism is the "most horrendous idolatry of modern,
perhaps of all time." 14 In making this his starting point,
Fackenheim assures us that he intends to show that
Nazism and its objectives were not trivial. Of course idolatry is not trivial in Jewish terms where it serves as a
counter to Judaism itself. But idolatry is also not trivial in
absolute terms. Rather it reflects a disordering of the relationship of man to nature and to the "divine Infinity."IS
Fackenheim points out that the ancient rabbis regarded
"one who repudiates idolatry is as though he were faithful
to the whole Torah. By this standard," says Fackenheim,
WINTER 1982
�"any modern Jew would be wholly faithful." 16 But it goes
without saying that modern Jews are not wholly fmthful
even though they do repudiate the w'orship of idols or
images. Does this not indicate the irrelevance of the rab·
binic teaching, and by implication the irrelevance of Juda·
ism? Fackenheim refers to the following talmudic passage,
a characteristic utterance regarding idolatry, to suggest
why such questions are not well-founded.
When someone in his anger tears his clothes, breaks utensils,
throws away money, this should be viewed as though he worshipped idols. For this is the cunning of the evil inclination:
today it says 'do this,' tomorrow, 'do that,' until it finall~ says
'go and worship idols' and he goes and does it. ... What 1s the
alien god that dwells in a man's body? The evil inclinationP
The danger of idol worship is not the "ludicrous anti·
climax" moderns suppose it to be. 18 Instead moderns who
suspect they are not subject to idol worship because they
are indifferent to the gods have fallen prey to idolatry
without even knowing it was a temptation. In the case of
Nazism, Fackenheim explains, idol worship is based in the
same feelings of ancient idol worship, that is, in "infinite
fear, hope, pleasure or pain." But the object of worship in
Nazism, namely the unity of Hitler, Yolk, and Reich, is
not recognized as an ido].I 9 On the contrary this object is
understood to bring about the liberation from "idolatrous
thralldom." In other words, modern idolatry understands
itself to be liberation or "demythologization." As Facken·
heim puts it, "the truth in this new false 'freedom' is that,
negating all worship, it negates all idolatry in the form of
worship. This new idolator takes himself for an enlight·
ened modern."20 Moreover, because the modern idolator
is enlightened, he scorns idols as mere sticks and stones at
the same time that he condemns all worship as superflu·
ous. But the idolatrous essence, the identification of finiteness and infinitude, survives like the duck inside the
wolf in the tale of Peter. "Because [the infinite feeling of
the modern idolator] is infinite, it does not vanish ... It
thus acquires the power of generating what may be called
internalized idolatry."21
Fackenheim recognizes two forms of modern "internalized" idolatry and distinguishes "internalized religion"
from both. Hitler's idolatry Fackenheim calls "idealistic."
It identifies finiteness with infinitude in making the finite
infinite. Nazism is "absolute whim ... the extreme in fini·
tude." 22 Naturalistic or empiricist idolatry is marked by
positivist and relativistic "anti-absolutism." It identifies fi.
niteness with infinitude in making the infinite finite; the
"degradation of the infinite aspect of selfhood to a false fi.
nitude."2' The so-called value-free perverters of Dewey
and Freud, but not Dewey or Freud themselves, are naturalist idolators according to Fackenheim because they
deny all goals, including even those of Dewey and Freud
that "man should make himself into the natural being he
is." 24
Internalized religion is carefully distinguished from idola·
THE ST, JOHNS REVIEW
try, whether of the idealistic or naturalistic sort. It would
be "a fatal error to confuse" internalized religion and inter~
nalized idolatry, says Fackenheim. 25 The knowing denial
of the divine Infinity, that is, the "raising [of an individual
or a collective self] to infinity in ... [the] very act of demal,"
is "internalized religion," not "internalized idolatry," when
this denial "issues, not in an atheistic rejection of the Divine but rather in its internalization. " 26 This situation, al~
tho~gh it "raises the specter of a modern, internalized
idolatry," is kept from becoming idolatry in the "modern
... philosophies ... [of] Fichte, Schelling, Hegel," because
"finiteness and infinitude are ... kept firmly apart." And,
what is true of these "idealist" philosophers is also true of
the "humanistic atheists ... Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche." The identification of finiteness and infinitude is
here "as firmly (if not as obviously) rejected ... by the fact
that Divinity vanishes in the process of internalization, to
be replaced by a humanity potentially infinite in its modern 'freedom' ... The potentiality never seems to become
quite actual." In sum, internalized religion is an ~~authen
tic challenge" to the divine Infinity which should be respected by Jewish and Christian thinkers. Internalized
idolatry, on the other hand, is "demonic perversion."27
Above all this distinction is rooted in the "honest rationality" of' the philosophers. Unlike idolatrous parodies of
thought which are "the product, not of reason, but of passion," the philosophers are not idolatrous.28 Naz1sm, mternalized idolatry, is a denial of the divine Infinity. At the
same time it is a literal and hence total identification of
finiteness with infinitude. Although Hitler was "no emperor-god ... and the Yolk, no worshipping community,"
yet the "will of a Fuehrer" and the will of the Yolk was the
sole reality. The object of idol worship is the will, internalized in Yolk and Fuehrer who are one. Nazism is a "bastard-child of ... the Enlightenment." 29
Fackenheim has undoubtedly pointed us in the direction of uncovering the source of the Holocaust's mystery.
The ground of idolatry or the identification of finitude
and infinity is false freedom. But Fackenheim's further
distinction between internalized idolatry and internalized
religion is not sound.
.
The philosopher's impulse, which does not deny the divine Infinity but which seeks only to bring the divine, "as
it were ... in[to] the same inner space as the human self,"
is surely an idolatrous aspiration 30 More important, .this
impulse participates in the same aspiration which informs
such demonic perversions as Nazism. The remainder of
this essay is devoted to exploring this suggestion and its
implications for the question of the trivialization of the
Holocaust.
2
Fackenheim's distinction between internalized religion
and internalized idolatry is outwardly commonsensical in
that thought is always different from action. But this dif.
35
�ference is especially inappropriate' as a distinction in the
case of the great philosophies, all of which sought to identify thought and act at some level. Commonsensical as
wen is the unmistakable difference between any of the
great philosophies and the comparatively low level theorizing of Hitler. But differences of this type have no philosophical relevance. Moreover, Fackenheim is himself
compelled to recognize the, to him, quite troubling compatibility of Heidegger and Nazism.
Heidegger's was "one of the profoundest philosophies
of this century," Fackenheim observes, and surely he was
an exponent of internalized religion. As late as 1946, however, Heidegger failed to recognize "radical evil" in the
Holocaust. Fackenheim considers this failure a "philosophical" one, not a challenge to the distinction between
internalized religion and internalized idolatry. 31 But Fackenheim does not explain how Heidegger's "philosophical
failure" differs from idolatry. One wonders if perhaps
there is no distinction between this philosophical failure
and idolatry or, put another way, if there really is a distinction between internalized idolatry and internalized religion.
Let it be noted here, before we consider this possibility,
that historically at least, there is no reason to suppose any
such distinction ever existed. Karl Liiwith has observed
that "nihilism as the disavowal of existing civilization,"
and not internalized religion, "was the only belief of all
truly educated people at the beginning of the twentieth
century." 32
Whether Heidegger is a nihilist or if nihilism is idolatry
are matters outside the present concern. But that Hitler
explicitly disavowed existing civilization and identified it
with judaism will not be doubted. Certainly it is this disavowal that Heidegger found "great" in Nazism. As for
Heidegger' s own statements against anti-Semitism, they
cannot be given much weight as evidence of a philosophic
intention as against an idolatrous one. The tradition of
modern philosophy is, of course, marked by hostility to Judaism1 as Fackenheim's study, among others, shows, even
as this hostility is almost always hedged about with the liberal's disdain for all "prejudice," especially for anti-Semitism.
A final observation about the great philosophies considered from the standpoint of Fackenheim's defense of the
distinction between internalized idolatry and internalized
religion is the supposed "authenticity" of the great philosophies. Consider that Fackenheim exempts Hegel from
an idolatrous identification of finitude and infinity, saying
he "reaches the Fichtean goal [of a divinized moral self],
but does so in the realm of thought only." Marx too is no
idolator, according to Fackenheim. Insofar as the theorist
of world communism realized that "society [is] as yet far
from classless," he did not identify the finite and the infinite.33 But one may question if these are plausible distinctions or authentic ones. Can Hegel or Marx, of all thinkers,
be defended on the ground that the idolatrous tendency of
an identification of finitude and infinity was not idolatrous
because it was limited to the realm of thought? Precisely
36
the identification of thought and act was their objective.
Hegel did not doubt the realm of thought would succeed
to action, in particular to the Prussian state. Certainly
Marx did not scorn the prospect of a classless society. The
distinction Fackenheim insists upon is here again not a
theoretical but a circumstantial and historical one. One
must look rather far to find a more pertinent example of
internalized idolatry, a knowing identification of the divine Infinity dwelling in a man, than Hegel's Wissenschaft
der Logik:
[The] logic is to be understood as the system of pure reason,
as the realm of pure thought. This realm is the truth as it is
without veil and [for itself]. It can be said, therefore, that this
is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence, before
the creation of nature and a finite mind. 34
We may not say of Hegel that he has taken "care [that] ...
the possibility of idolatry is ... recognized and avoided." 35
But the distinction Fackenheim would have us credit
between the great philosophies and demonic perversions
of them rests on what is itself a fatal error. Honest rationality, said to separate products of reason from those of
passion, in fact confoupd~ reason and passion.
Concerning the distinction between reason and passion,
it must at least be noted that the tide of modern political
philosophy, in which Leo Strauss noted three waves, is
dominated by philosophies of passion. 36 Beginning with
Machiavelli, who substituted glory for virtue, and Hobbes,
who replaced glory with power, the great philosophies
have been notable for their rejections of reason, whether
in hallowing folk minds as expressions of a general will or
in the sanctification of history as an expression of nature
or idea. In the third and present wave of modernity inaugurated by Nietzsche, the West has been inclined to think
"that all human life and human thought ultimately rests
on horizon-forming creations which are not susceptible of
rationa1legitimization."37
This historical consideration regarding passion and reason is not irrelevant to the distinction Fackenheim would
have us accept between the philosophies and Hitler. We
live at a time when it is the nearly universal presumption
of political thinkers that man is not a political being but is
instead an amorphous or "free" being, to be shaped by
history, by labor or by change. This presumption, a reversal of the understanding of Aristotle, is related to another
Aristotelian principle which modern political thinkers
have also reversed. This principle is that "the mind is
moved by the mover." 38 Reason, in other words, the an~
cients regarded as "revelation," not as a thing man-made. 39
These two related reversals of classical thought by moderns bear directly on our subject. They are the bases for
modern idolatry and for the too easy supposition that idolatry is not a modern possibility, or that honest rationality
is a hedge against such a possibility. The identification of
finitude and infinity in Nietzsche, one of Fackenheim's
great philosophers, is complete because the identification
of making and thinking is complete.
WINTER 1982
�In Nietzsche, thought is action, in particular it is vitalisrq. When Nietzsche internalizes the divine infinity (or
the One), his idolatry is not simply in the realm of thought.
It is palpable idolatry because thought is act in Nietzsche:
The greatest events-they are not our loudest but our stillest
hours. Not around the inventors of new noise, but around the
inventors of new values, does the world revolve; it revolves inaudibly40
And Zarathustra counsels:
'Will to truth' .... A will to the thinkability of all beings; this I
call your will. You want to make all being thinkable.4 1
Nietzsche's method is rational insofar as it is autonomous
and free, but it is openly passionate as well. What is art in
Nietzsche is system in Max Weber. Weber is the formulator of the principle of honest rationality as the basis for
the distinction between morality or idealism and immorality, the distinction informing Fackenheim's defense of
the great philosophies.
Weber's distinction between idealism and immorality
derives in part, as will be clear shortly, from his conviction
that facts and values are heterogeneous. It is not irrelevant
to add that Weber's teaching that only facts are knowable
while all judgments regarding values are relative continues
to inform both a naturalistic social science in which "value
judgments" are impermissible, and neo-Kantian secular
humanism in which the facts are said to be value-laden.
Academic social studies, in other words, must also be affected by the critique of honest rationality.
The context of Fackenheim's invocation of honest rationality is Weberian. But in a critique of Weber of the
profoundest kind, Strauss has shown the falsity of the distinction between products of reason and of passion fashioned by honest rationality.42 Honest rationality, or the
principle of freedom according to which one is free in the
degree that he is "guided by rational consideration of
means and ends," is said to be nihilistic.43 Strauss's critique
of Weber bears directly and with great force upon the subject of this essay and upon the question of idolatry.
According to Weber, reason, particularly in the determining of moral imperatives which appeal to intellect (unlike merely cultural or personal values and wants to which
our feelings are subject), is the glory and dignity of man.
Not choosing and not valuing is the equivalent of appetitiveness and passion. "Man's dignity, his being exalted far
above all brutes, consists in his setting up autonomously
his ultimate values, in making these values his constant
ends, and in rationally choosing the means to these ends.
The dignity of man consists in his ... freely choosing his
own values or his own ideals."44 Commitment to a value
which appeals to our reason Weber counted idealism.
But Strauss reminds us that the justification for this
view of idealism is a scientific understanding of values,
that is, an understanding that facts are possessed of transhistorical or universal character while values are relative
THE ST. JOHNS REVJEW
and discrete. Because the truth about values is said to be
inaccessible, a scientific and rational, as well as an honest
approach to values must be neutrality toward values. And
yet indifference to all values is precisely what Weber
counts as baseness. Freedom and rationality suggest a rational hostility toward theory. But this suggests an espousal
of unfreedom or passion. It is no accident that this hostility
to values and to theory is embodied in naturalistic social
science (behaviorism), and in the value-laden humanism
which frequently opposes it, that is, in those two forms of
academic social studies that grew out of Weber's distinction between facts and values. Thus, the positivist regards
theory as unempirical. He makes indifference to all causes
or Hopenness" a cause. At the opposite extreme stands
the humanist who dignifies all causes in the name of freedom and dignity regardless of whether a cause appeals to
our mind or to our passion. HA cause that appeals no further than 'the sphere of one's own individuality,' " the vitalism of Nietzsche, counts as a cause.45 The first position
is formalistic and self-canceling, and the second is simply a
doctrine of power. Weber, in sum, having undertaken the
defense of idealism as freedom and commitment to a value,
ultimately dignifies mere personal preferences and willing
as idealistic.
The distinction between idealism and appetitiveness
fades into freedom as such, as the distinction between values and facts, ought and is, collapses into an identity of
ought and is. The final formulation of Weber's ethical
principle would then be " 'Thou shalt have preferences'an Ought whose fulfillment is fully guaranteed by the Is."46
Honest rationality, the choosing of values as called for by
intellect as against acceptance of values which appeal to
our feelings, is obviously arbitrary. Why be honest or rational? Reason and passion, idealism and appetitiveness
are morally equal on the principle of honest rationality, or
rather there is no such principle.
Fackenheim's distinction between the great philosophies
and Hitler is subject to the same nihilistic consequence attaching to the distinction between idealism and immorality
in Weber. This would suggest that the distinction between
internalized religion and internalized idolatry is also inadequate. In fact, Fackenheim has not done full justice to
the rabbinic teaching, perhaps because he has done more
than full justice to the great philosophies.
Fackenheim's critique of the rabbinic teaching does not
do full justice to judaism. Certainly the rabbis would not
have supposed that the false freedom of the great philosophers in bringing the divine Infinity into the same space
with a human being was an "authentic challenge" to be
taken seriously as religious and not idolatrous. The rabbis
were not liberals for whom challenges to the divine Infinity counted as authentic. One cannot maintain that Nazism is idolatrous while consenting to an Hellenic gloss on
the rabbinic teaching. That "the Hellenic spirit of free inquiry ... is not rooted in judaism," as Husik has correctly
observed, is a fact that moderns find difficult to accept.47
37
�Concerning the subject of idolatry, one might even say
that this spirit of free inquiry is the essence of the yetzer
hara, the evil inclination. The divine Infinity which occupies the same inner space with the philosopher cannot be
God. Such an occupant, the rabbis say, is precisely "the
alien god." This is the god that says, "do anything," i.e.,
be free. Freedom, or the evil inclination, is the alien god.
In a word, freedom, understood as "false freedom," is
idol~
atry, even though we know it is today "a mark of intelligence and progress ... [to praise] serious consideration of
alien gods."48 Evidently the matter of "internalization"
has been the rabbinic interpretation from the start.
3
The Jewish teaching on false freedom is not ambiguous.
False freedom is false Exodus from Egypt. It is the making
of the golden calf while Moses is at Sinai preparing to deliver the Torah, or true freedom, to Israel. The remainder
of this essay is devoted to modern idolatry in two embodiments. First is the idolatry associated with the consideration of man as an animal lacking reason and a soul. Here
man exits from or escapes his condition as a being of more
than animal elements. Let us call this form of idolatry the
Mehan exodus, following Eric Voegelin, who locates the
contraction of man's being into a "power-self" as the
means of "concupiscental exodus" in the Melian dialogue
detailed by Thucydides.49 There is, in addition to the
Mehan exodus, a second embodiment of idolatry, or gnostic exodus. In gnosticism, men renounce the trappings of
their mortality, including history and culture, as if to bring
about, at God's expense, the conditions of perfection
symbolized in the garden of Eden. At the level of popular
and of academic discourse, these embodiments of idolatry
are understood in the language of political jargon as Left
and Right. This language does not intend religious meanings. Nonetheless, the present purpose is to suggest that
conventional political discourse misunderstands the difference of Right and Left, which it considers only political. The division, and opposition, of Right and Left, rather
than the content of either Right (Melian) or Left (gnostic),
is idolatry in its modern form.
It goes without saying that a judgment that Right and
Left touch religious aspects is offensive to much political
science. 50 But not all scholars are content that religious
questions should be divorced from political theory. Allan
Bloom has observed that "what is perhaps the most serious question facing a serious man-the religious question
-is almost a matter of indifference-" to political writers
in our time. This indifference is found in John Rawls, for
example, whose study of equality is considered by many
to be a significant contribution. But Rawls considers religion "just another one of the many ends that can be pursued in a liberal society."'!
Again it is Bloom who has pointed out that modern political writing which evades the serious questions also
38
evades the easy historical ones, inviting sloppiness and errors of fact. One may say, however, that what is most consistently mistaken by modern writers such as Rawls is the
involvement of political writing in idolatry. Rawls's equation of all ends is precisely idolatry of the gnostic type.
Knowledge that all ends or values are equal is not a human possibility, but a divine one. Must not metaphysics
and religion, dealing with questions about ends, be more
serious than other pursuits in a liberal society or in any society? If Nazism is idolatry, a political science such as
evinced in the work of Rawls is precluded from studying
it. One cannot undertake a study of Nazism as idolatry in
the context of modern political science because this science is implicated in idolatry. The following survey of Nazism as idolatrous suggests the nature of this implication.
The idolatry in Nazism is found in connection with the
Biblical teaching on freedom. The story of the Exodus is
an explication of true and false freedom. True freedom is
the recognition of God, and the recognition that follows
from the recognition of God, that man is radically distinct
from animals as well as from God. Man is neither raw desire nor spirit, man is
in~between
or in the metaxy, to use
the pertinent Platonic term. False freedom, in contrast, is
the freedom or exodus from the metaxy, symbolized in
the making of the golden calf, by which men simultaneously attempt to be gods themselves and to sanctify raw
desire.
The Exodus of the Jewish people is plainly not one
from Egypt but to Israel. Exodus from Egypt is marked
above all by wandering and by a desert. Moreover, the Exodus from Egypt and the opening of the Red Sea are not
effected by the Jews but by God. The Exodus is no war of
national liberation. Most important, to consider the Exodus as though it were a mere war of liberation from Egyptian bondage is idolatry. Thus, when the Israelites make
the golden calf they proclaim: "These are your Gods, 0 Israel, which brought you up out of the land of Egypt." 52
But this is a lie; the golden calf was newly made by the
Jews. But then who split the Red Sea if not God or the
golden calf? Naturally, it must have been the Jews: God is
a projection or superstition; freedom is man's work and
man is the maker. Exodus is then freedom or the exercise
of human will: absolute whim. It is the liberation to do as
one lists, to wander. Exodus is the freedom not to wait for
Moses: to go to Israel or not. But of course the Bible
teaches that this is all false.
The calf makers are idol worshippers; they are slain.
They have forfeited reason by equating their whim or freedom with rationality. They made the same error that
Strauss detected in Weberian idealism or honest rationality. And, as in the Weberian instance, the mistaking of
whim for rationality is equivalent to animality or mere desiring. The calf makers are considered as animals. In one
of the most famous expositions of idolatry in the Bible,
Nebuchadnezzar is punished with the loss of his reason
and sent to forage in the manner of oxen for his failure,
WJNTER 1982
�demonstrated in his making of a gold,en idol, to recognize
that "the most High rules in the Kingdom of man." 53
Only reason, by which I mean the revelation that God
and not man is the maker of all things, can distinguish be·
tween exodus as false and as true freedom. A calf is a thing.
All things perish. Things come into being and go out of
being. The bush that burns but is not consumed is a sign
of divinity because it does not perish. Being remains,
namely, the process of coming into being and going out of
being remains. This process is known only to man who
alone among things possesses reason or soul. This permits
him to see the sign of the burning bush and to understand
it. This recognition indicates that aspect of man's being,
spirit or soul, which is not a thing. We call this aspect of
perception immortality.
Freedom is false when men pretend they are animals or
gods. The literal and hence total identification of finiteness and infinitude is a form of idolatry because such
identification is a willful disordering of reality. Idolatry is
the knowing denial of the doctrine which founds Judaism,
or monotheism: "Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord is your God, the
Lord is One." The Biblical exposition of this principle, set
in the Exodus or Passover story, specifies idolatry as false
freedom or exodus from the metaxy. There are two modes
of exodus or false freedom.
Men may escape the metaxy or the conditions of human being in the direction Fackenheim calls naturalism
by identifying as finite those aspects of being which are
infinite. 54 The insistence that man is an animal who invents God for the sake of satisfying behavioral imperatives
is idolatrous in this sense. The value-free principle is a
doctrine of raw power, as are its derivatives, for example,
the "open society," and certain versions of equality and
free speech. Justice, which regards all value claims as equal,
is achievable only by enforcement of absolute toleration
and permissiveness or by enforcement of sameness and
intolerance in the name of humanity. 55 Force is inevitable
in either case to insure absolute permissiveness or absolute
conformity, since it cannot be the case that values will not
clash, or that self-control will be considered a value superior
to others.
In fact, the sole means of avoiding the arbitrary dilemma
of tolerance is to undertake a transformation of the self,
that is, to undertake the elimination of the self or amour
propre. In other words, this doctrine of freedom entails a
reordering of the relationship of the One and the many
whether in the reformation of selves into a general will or
into Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuehrer. As we shall see in
Hitler's case, work makes free because it destroys egotism.
In particular, freedom as work eliminates rewards based
upon skill. The individual is thus merged into the collective self. Freedom from values as the meaning of freedom
is simply power or will. We have already called this freedom from values the Melian exodus, after Thucydides:
"Men . .. rule wherever they can."56
Hitler's conception of right was certainly Melian. Alan
Bullock, who has called this aspect of Hitler's thought
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
<(crude Darwinism," notes that "no word occurs more fre-
quently in Hitler's speeches than 'struggle.' "57 "The
whole work of Nature," according to Hitler, is "a mighty
struggle.'' Again: "The first fundamental of any rational
Weltanschauung is the fact that on earth and in the universe, force alone is decisive."58
Voegelin explains that the "fictitious identity of conquest with reality can be achieved by identifying reality
with a humanity contracted to its libidinous self."" The
modern forms of this aspect of false freedom, according to
which values, and thus judgments concerning them, are
historical and ultimately identical to personal desire, is
embodied in historicisms of mind or spirit. In other words,
Melian exodus denies to philosophy all but historical and
pragmatic aptitudes. The difference between the ancient
and modern expressions of this exodus is the hint of tragic
fatality in the ancient and the absence of this hint in its
modern forms. The Athenian conquerors retain, "in the
background ... the tragic consciousness of the process."
They too will be massacred in time. Modern movements,
on the other hand, sink "to the untragic vileness of the
ideologist who cannot commit the murder he wants to
commit in order to gain an 'identity' in place of the self he
has lost, without moralistically appealing to a dogma of ultimate truth." 60
The dogma to which Hitler appealed was the Thousandyear Reich, eternal Germanity. This vision he conceived
as freedom and the elimination of Judaism. Freedom and
the replacement of Judaism with Germanity would prepare the way for a reconciliation of mankind. These objectives were exactly dogmas of ultimate truth for the sake of
committing murders. Moreover, these dogmas were the
instruments for the formation of selves.
We need not doubt Hitler used the word "struggle"
many times or that he identified morality with power. But
his object was not solely power. His murderous intention
was not arbitrary or irrational. Hitler's doctrine of the
blood is the key to the other side of Nazism and simultaneously to the idolatrous aspect of the great philosophies.
Hitler's notorious sacrifice of military goals so as to destroy the million Jews of Hungary reflects his commitment
to the doctrine of the blood. The doctrine of the blood is
an inversion of the doctrine of the soul. 61 Speaking often
of uour people" and "eternal Germanity," Hitler's purpose was to effect the "reconciliation of mankind/' or "all
non-Jewish peoples.''62 Nazism emerges as a counterJudaism at this point. The "purity of the blood ... [will]
enable our people to mature for the fulfillment of the mission which the Creator of the universe has allotted also to
them.''6l This, the "higher motive of national policy and
never narrow particularism" explains why the "State has
nothing whatsoever to do with a definite conception of
economics or development of economics."64 Nazism was a
moral doctrine of freedom for which race was the form.
As persecution of the Jews was immoral in Hitler's thinking, so the purity of German blood was not a medical or
39
�an anthropological doctrine, even though it had import at
such levels. One suspects we hear neither the hypocrite
nor the psychopath say, as Hitler did in 1932, "Let them
call us unhuman. If we save Germany, we shall have done
the greatest deed in the world .... Let them say that we
are without morality. If our people is saved, we shall have
paved the way for morality."65 The doctrine of the blood
introduces the gnostic aspect of Nazism.
Hitler's identification of right with power included the
second mode of exodus from the metaxy, or gnosticism.66
But the liberation of the spirit from the body in modern
gnosticism is not for rare men or for the elite as among an-
cient gnostics. The modern way of liberation is release
from the ego and egotism. The spirit, in other words, is no
private vision, it is a shared thing, for example, blood.
Modern gnosticism is distinguished from its ancient
forms in the same way that modern power politics differs
from Melian exodus of the ancients. For the ancient gnostic who strove to separate the soul from things, the instrument of liberation was the individuaL The soul with its
source in the divine was not thus denied. Liberation of
the souls of modern gnostics is altogether a thing of groups
which replaces the divine as the soul's source. Accordingly
modern gnosticism calls for the losing of the self as spirit.
The soul of modern man is liberated from the prison of
spirit, as well as the prison of the body, in becoming a thing
that does not perish, i.e., in submerging the ego in an immortalizing thing such as blood, sex, or excrement.
Consider Hitler's doctrine in connection with the tradition regarding the self extending from Rousseau. Since
Rousseau's description. of the self as formed by society, in
particular by the division of labor and the advent of property, there has evolved the idea that one's authentic self is
beneath the roles imposed by social life. Liberation is then
a release from property and its social and other derivatives.
Because this conception takes its rise in the doctrine of
the state of nature, or the doctrine that man has no nature
or telos, true personality or selfhood is freedom as such, or
becoming. At the same time, this vision of freedom imposes a conception of the self as selfless. Selflessness or
true selfhood is tantamount to compassion, and this is
how Rousseau defined it. The good self is not selfish in a
literal and a moral sense. The true self is not an I, but we.
This reversal of the classical and Jewish concept of the
self is part of everyday speech in which a self is virtuous if
it is selfless.
The tradition of this mode of thinking is long and considered honorable. It stretches, for example in American
letters, from john Humphrey Noyes who hoped to "extinguish the pronoun I," and replace it with "the we spirit,"
to Norman 0. Brown." Brown suggests that the "boundary
line between self and the external world bears no relation
to reality." Liberation for Brown is release from self by
means of return to the pre-socialized conditions of polymorphous perversity. The Hhuman consciousness can be
liberated from the parental (Oedipal) complex only by be-
40
ing liberated from its cultural derivatives, the paternalistic
state and the patriarchal God."68
This conception of self, including the role of man as
maker of God, is the one we have detected in Nazism. The
liberation from God, thus the liberation of the self, establishes the idea of freedom, of exodus from the metaxy.
The power to free the soul from the body is brought about
by freeing the self from an L The I perishes. What remains
is a thing possessed of the characteristics of God, that is,
of oneness. Those basic and selfless elements which outlast
the individual have become the instruments of immortality. What perishes excessively-excrement, sexuality,
blood-are now the bases for oneness and everlasting life.
Donatien de Sade uncovered these principles two centures before Hitler put them into practice. "What we call
the end of the living," said de Sa de (in praise of the motto
that "the freest of people are they who are most friendly
to murder''), "is no longer a true finis, but a simple trans-
formation ... of matter ... [D]eath is hence no more than
a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one
existence into another."69 Here in palpable form is the
identification of finitude with the infinite exposed by
Fackenheim. But Hitler is not a "parody" of the great philosophers. In assuming a material and communal replacement of the divine as the source of man's freedom,
Hitler's attack upon Judaism substitutes German blood
for the souL Hitler would, in this way, immortalize or
make infinite a finite thing. Hitler insists that judaism is
the negation of German blood-judaism is a race, not a
religion-exactly as Marx insists that judaism is the negation of communism-the god of judaism, he says, is
money. But if we consider, in Hitler's case, the actual doctrine of blood in judaism where it serves as a symbol of
the soul, Hitler's gnostic intention stands out boldly.
The Nazi's blood was his souL As a Jewish symbol that
had become an object of worship, the Nazi doctrine of the
blood is in truth "an absolute falsehood." 70 The blood as a
substitute for the soul of man is false. In judaism the blood
is typically considered to be in the soul only when the
body is alive. "The flesh whose blood is still in its soul,
shall ye not eat. ... Blood ... belongs to your souls." 71
This is plainly because the soul is not a thing. Preservation
of the blood of generations, what Hitler believed to be the
jews' purpose, and what he hoped to make the German
purpose, was to create oneness and immortality, as it
were, the salvation of souls. Jewish pollution of the racial
stock of others, imperiling the survival of non-jewish humanity, robbed souls by interruption of the transmission
of blood. In Nazism the soul is in the blood. The soul is
preserved after the ego dies, and because it is, the race is
preserved.
The doctrine of blood is false because it is wholly a distortion of the order of being. The source of human freedom is not the absence of the divine and its replace. men! by a Nazi or a communist community. It is hardly a
coincidence that both Hitler and Marx considered the
elimination of jews and judaism to be a condition for the
WINTER 1982
�establishment of their projects. 72 In both cases the extinguishment of the divine in the name of a man-made creation of freedom and of human being is critical. As for the
racist aspect of Nazism (and for the scientific and class
aspects of communism), they are perhaps best described
as opiates for the proletariat and the intelligentsia respectively.
The blood is then the soul made matter, an absurd idea.
The characteristic of the soul is immortality. What can it
mean to proclaim that the soul is not spiritual or that
some thing, perishable by definition, is immortal? What
aspect of a person does not perish? The answer, embodied
in the doctrine of the blood is: that aspect of a person
which is neither an ego nor a soul. Of course there is no
such thing. But what did Hitler think this thing was? Of
course he supposed it was freedom. The masses shall enter into the service of freedom once they understand that
the Jew intends the "enslavement, and with it the destruc·
tion, of all non-Jewish peoples."73 Blood is the oneness of
soul of the German people. Oneness will come about by
the destruction of vanity or egotism, the opposite of
oneness.
Egotism must be destroyed. But how is this possible?
By destroying the people of egotism. This is the people
that hides behind a false, unenlightened doctrine of elec·
tion and the divine as One. This people, the representa·
tive of the false God of spirit, and therefore the enemy of
oneness or the German people, is the Jews. "The Jew is
the mortal enemy of our people," said Hitler, because
"the Jew is ... nothing but pure egoism."74 And thus this
destruction of Jews is part of the means for liberation,
namely work. The people become one as they give over
their egos to the community. The doctrine that man is
one is egalitarianism.
"Egalitarianism," said Erich Fromm, uis not sameness
but oneness."75 Hitler's doctrine is egalitarian in the deep-
est and purest modern sense. As such, Nazism is the purest distillation of modernity. When Hitler proclaims that
"the Jew forms the strongest contrast to the Aryan" because only the Aryan is willing to give his "life for the exis·
tence of the community," he intends to be taken at his
word. 76 Giving up one's life for the community calls for
the relinquishment of ego. The means of doing so is of
course not prayer. Everyone knows, Hitler said, "a nation
cannot be freed by prayer." 77 Rather the way to freedom
is work. Work creates oneness in the process of effacing
egos. Work "establish[es] the equality of all in the moment
when every individual endeavors to do the best in his field
.... It is on this that the evaluation of man must rest, and
not on the reward." 78 Work makes free. Hitler promises
freedom from the ego, that is, from death, from anxiety,
by promising immortality in this world. This is the mean·
ing of Hitler's doctrine of the blood. It is the foundation of
the "everlasting [German] people." 79
It is correct to say, with Fackenheim, that Hitler is no
emperor-god; nor are the Yolk a worshipping community.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
It is Germanity in its immortalizing sacrifice of egos that
is God or one. This is the everlasting German people in
whose name Hitler professed to speak. The Jews, who are
said to live on behalf of an everlasting God, the God who
is one because man and all things are many, are the obvi·
ous spiritual power to be destroyed.
Hitler's idolatry is unmistakable. It reflects a disordering
of the relationship of the One and the many. Man is en·
joined, in the name of salvation, to leave his place in the
metaxy that he may assume full freedom. In the language
of political science Hitler's Melian exodus is fascist or
right-wing. Here, only power counts because all values are
equal, making law the rule of the stronger. Man is an animal. To this, Hitler's obvious or familiar side, is added the
other more subtle and as it were saintlier side. This is the
idolatry of gnosticism whereby men singly or together
take God into themselves or into their ideals.
Hitler's case suggests that modern idolatry cannot fail
to be both Melian and gnostic. We do not often, however,
credit Hitler's gnosticism or realize the Melian aspects of
gnostic or liberal idealism when it is expressed in the seductive language of opposition to Melian realism. The position of Judaism is obviously not the only representative
of the principles idolatry must oppose. It has long, however, been symbolic of all the enemies of idolatry. The hatred of Judaism is an aspect of modern if not all Western
idolatry, that is, of the impulse arising from the horror of
existence and the desire to leave the condition of the
metaxy. Consider the case of Jean Sartre, whose philosophy is the most recent great philosophy considered by
Fackenheim.
Sartre is the outstanding figure of left-wing humanistic
atheism. His insensitivity for Judaism, together with his
well-known sympathy for persecuted Jews, troubles Fack·
enheim. It may well be the case, Fackenheim thinks, that
Sartre's position is the product of his view that "an individual's freedom is ... destroyed by a divine Other," i.e.,
by God.BD But Fackenheim does not sufficiently consider
the effect the doctrine of freedom works upon Judaism.
Sartre' s view of freedom is idolatrous. It depends on the
replacement of the One with freedom. But this freedom,
gnostic in form, is not theoretically stagnant. It leads
somewhere. It leads to Melian exodus, that is, it permits
Sartre to say that he does not know if anti-Semitism is
"wrong or right" in socialist countries. 81 But Sartre would
know if racism is wrong or right. Is this another "philosophical failure" as in Heidegger's case?
The process we find in Hitler-from self-conscious Melian exodus to an unintended gnostic exodus imposed upon
him by the core of his project or the replacement of the
divine with the human-we also find in Sartre. In Sartre,
however, the order of exodus is reversed. Sartre's replacement of God with freedom is ultimately an assault upon
theory or reason; it is the idolatry we have discovered in
Hitler which does not distinguish reality from history or
the struggle for power. Accordingly Sartre must ultimately
41
�look to history, as had Hegel and Marx, as the source of
human reason. The individual's freedom then becomes a
matter of struggle against history in the manner of neo·
Kantians or Emersonians who look to the vanishing of
swine and madhouses brought about by an impulse of
spirit or will. But this is the same gnostic denouement into
which a crude reasoner such as Hitler evidently stumbled.
Hitler is not a bastard-child of the Enlightenment, only a
relatively childish enlightener. His erstwhile opponents,
those who have trivialized his deeds, are less childish but
not less idolatrous.
Trivialization of the Holocaust is the failure to consider
Nazism idolatrous. This failure is due to the implication
of the trivialization of the Holocaust in the sources of idolatry. Trivialization of the Holocaust accords what Fackenheim suggests is a posthumous victory to Nazism. 82
The Holocaust, according to two Jewish students of the
subject, is an example, unique in its excess, of how men
mistakenly put obedience above other, better traits. Seeking a model or prototype of this human failing in Western
civilization the authors hit upon the Akedah, the binding
of Isaac by Abraham, his father. Their reasoning is as
follows:
[In] the Judea-Christian tradition ... wrongdoing is utterly
clear . .. [It] is unauthorized pleasure. It is also very clear that
hardly anywhere in this tradition is there any story or statement to the effect that 'Thou shalt not obey legal orders from
superiors if they seem [sic?] atrocious to you.' Abraham, who
was prepared to obey the directive to murder his son Isaac as
a demonstration of his faith in the superior being Jaweh, is
not condemned for his blind obedience, but rather held up as
exemplary. 83
It is Abraham, the first Jew and the man who defied all
other men on earth in proclaiming God as the measure of
all things, who is here said to be the cause of the Holocaust. In other words, the cause of the Holocaust is
Judaism. Here, to be sure, is a literal trivialization of the
Holocaust. Obedience to Hitler by German Nazis is
counted the equivalent of obedience to God by Abraham
(and Isaac). It is clear the authors, Kren and Rappoport,
consider obedience to God or to Hitler the same because
honest rationality calls upon social scientists to regard all
objects of valuation as equal. The authors, as we say, do
not believe in God. But we have already suggested the
source of this atheism is not a theological investigation. It
is an opinion regarding theory, or rather the supposed
necessary limit upon theory imposed by the effort to insure man's freedom.
Harry Neumann has called social science of this type
modern Epicureanism because it seeks tranquility of mind
on the principle that Hfreedom from pain is man's summum bonum." If all ends are equal, if "no favoritism would
be shown to any particular claim," any suggestion of superiority or of divine election constitutes an impertinence, a
threat to science and peace. The equation of obedience to
God and to Hitler presupposes the equality of ends. But is
42
not knowledge of the "superhuman vantage point" reserved to God? This is the vantage point assumed by modern Epicureans who insist that "philosophy's quest to the
answer of the question of the good life is over." The good
life is freedom from pain and the good is pleasure. For this
reason modern Epicureans consider religion evil and
threatening. Religion cannot promise freedom from pain
as the equivalent of the good. Religion does not claim that
all ends are equal. In this religion and philosophy are together the enemies of "modern Epicureanism's final solution. " 84
In saying that Abraham was a model of "blind obedience" that should be despised, Kren and Rappoport wish
plainly to indict Judea-Christian civilization as the source
of the Holocaust. Above all, Judaism is the source of the
Holocaust.
The case of Abraham, the first Jew and the father of
Judaism, is undoubtedly pertinent to the subjects of obedience and idolatry. Abraham was the son of Terach, an
idol maker. Obedient to God, he cast his father's idols into
the fire. But Abraham was not a rebellious or whimsical
son. Hitler and Rimmler were obedient only to whim, to
themselves, and they cast people into furnaces. In other
words, the Nazis proceeded on the principle that Kren
and Rappoport believe to be the great truth after the
Holocaust, that "there is no morality per se, because there
is no immutable religious or legal standard for human behavior."85 Precisely the Nazis confounded pleasure, authorized or not, with the good. Abraham understood the
good to be distinct from pleasure, from his whim, because
he did not suppose he possessed divine knowledge to
regard all claims as equal. In recognizing reason he recognized its source. For this reason he rejected his father's
unreason or idolatry.
Abraham's obedience to God was disobedience to the
atrocious rule of men. More important, Abraham defied
Nimrod, the first "mighty man upon the earth ... a crafty
hero before God."86 The significance of Abraham's defiance of Nimrod could not be greater for an understanding
of idolatry. Nimrod is the founder of political idolatry, the
first to suppress men lefneh hashem, in God's name. Nimrod claimed the superhuman vantage point as his own.
Terach brought the idol-hating Abraham to Nimrod, but
Abraham did not recant. Nimrod, indulging an impulse
evidently natural to political idolators-it was of course to
become Hitler's trademark-cast Abraham into the fiery
furnace. But Abraham survived. Abraham is the founding
symbol, also in fire, that God and not man is the measure
of all things. Like the burning bush, Abraham becomes a
sign of the One that does not perish. But Abraham's
brother, Haran, supposing Abraham's survival demonstrated Abraham was now the new king, followed him into
the fire and, of course, he died.
Naturally, Judaism survived the burning of Jews by Hitler. Hitler, like Nimrod, was mistaken in thinking the soul
is a thing. Hitler was also mistaken in thinking man is a
god who can defy the order of being and assume the suWINTER 1982
�perhuman vantage point. As for the, trivialization of the
Holocaust, its source is the incapacity to distinguish the
blind obedience of Haran from Abraham's obedience.
Haran, unlike Abraham, obeyed any authority indiscrim·
inately, because he held that there is no morality per se.
l. Adolf Hi tie<, Mein Kampf, New York, Houghton Mifflin [1925, 1927],
1939, 221.
2. Emil Fackenheim, Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought, New York 1973.
3. See, for example, Edward Alexander, "Stealing the Holocaust," Midstream, November, 1980, 46-50.
4. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Yehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the
Modern World: A Documentary History, New York 1980, vii.
5. Dorothy Thompson, "A Review of Mein Kampf' in Hitler, Mein
Kampf, ii.
6. Allan Bloom, "The Study of Texts," in Melvin Richter, ed., Political
Theory and Political Education, Princeton 1980, 122.
7. Werner Maser, Hitler's Mein Kampf: an Analysis, London 1970, 11.
8. Mein Kampf, 223.
9. Mein Kampf, 221.
10. Mein Kampf, 155.
11. Mein Kampf, 221.
12. Mein Kampf, 155-56.
13. Fackenheim, Encounters, 189.
14. Fackenheim, Encounters, 175.
15. Fackenheim, Encounters, 190.
16. Fackenheim, Encounters, 173.
17. Quoted in Fackenheim, Encounters, 178.
18. Fackenheim, Encounters, 179.
19. Fackenheim, Encounters, 217.
20. Fackenheim, Encounters, 187.
21. Fackenheim, Encounters, 187.
22. Fackenheim, Encounters, 194.
23. Fackenheim, Encounters, 196.
24. Fackenheirn, Encounters, 196.
25. Fackenheim, Encounters, 190.
26. Fackenheim, Encounters, 190-91.
27. Fackenheim, Encounters, 190.
28. Fackenheim, Encounters, 192.
29. Fackenheim, Encounters, 197, 187.
30. Fackenheim, Encounters, 191, 194.
31. Fackenheim, Encounters, 217, 223.
32. Karl LOwith, Nature, History, and Existentialism, Evanston, Illinois
1966, 10.
33. Fackenheim, Encounters, 191.
34. G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, New York 1969, 50.
35. Fackenheim, Encounters, 190.
36. Leo Strauss, "What is Political Philosophy?" in What is Political
Philosophy and Other Studies, Glencoe, Illinois 1959,9-55.
37. Strauss, Political Philosophy, 54.
38. Aristotle, Metd.physics l072a30.
39. Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, Baton Rouge 1974, 188-190.
40. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Walter Kaufman,
ed., The Portable Nietzsche New York 1960, 243.
41. Kaufman, Nietzsche, 225.
42. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, Chicago 1953, 35-80.
43. Strauss, Natural Right, 44.
44. Strauss, Natural Right, 44.
45. Strauss, Natural Right, 46.
46. Strauss, Natural Right, 46.
47. I. Husik, "Hellenism and Judaism," Philosophical Essays, Oxford
1952, 13.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
48. Harry Neumann, "Torah or Philosophy? Jewish Alternatives to
Modern Epicureanism," The Journal of Value Inquiry, 1977, 23.
49. Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 182, 181.
50. Eugene Miller, ''Positivism, Historicism, and Political Inquiry," The
American Political Science Review, 66 1972, 796-817.
51. Bloom, "The Study of Texts," 122.
52. Exodus, 32:4.
53. Daniel, 4:25.
54. Fackenheim, Encounters, 196.
55. Neumann, "Torah or Philosophy?" 23.
56. Quoted in Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 182. "Of the gods we be·
lieve, and of men we know, that by a necessity of nature they rule wher·
ever they can. We neither made this law nor were the first to act on it;
we found it to exist before us _and we shall leave it to exist forever after
us; we only make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, if you
were as strong as we are, would act as we do."
57. Alan Bullock, "The Political Ideas of Adolf Hitler," in Howard Fertig
ed., The Third Reich, New York 1975, 352.
58. Adolf Hitler, Speech, 13 April 1923; Adolf Hitler, Speech, 2 April
1928, quoted in Bullock, "The Political Ideas of Adolf Hitler," 352.
59. Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 182.
60. Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 182.
61. Mein Kampf, 221.
62. Mein Kampf, 442, 217.
63. Mein Kampf, 288-89.
64. Mein Kampf, 841, 195.
65. Adolf Hitler, Speech 1932, cited in Mein Kampf, 402n6.
66. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, Chicago 1952, 107ff.
67. John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms, Philadelphia
1870. Reprint edition titled, Strange Cults and Utopias of Nineteenth
Century America, New York 1966, vii, 626.
68. Norman 0. Brown, Life Against Death, New York 1961, 155.
69. Donatien A. F. de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom, Paris 1795, in
Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, eds., The Marquis de Sade, the
Complete Justine Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings, New
York 1965, 330-1, 333.
70. Fackenheim, Encounters, 188.
71. Genesis, 9:4, 5.
72. "[T]he emancipation of society from Judaism" is equivalent to the
emancipation of man from exchange, "the bill of exchange [being] ...
the real god of the Jew." Because "Judaism attains its apogee [and its
"universal dominance"] with the perfection of civil society," the destruction of Judaism is equivalent to and necessary for the realm of free·
dam or the abolition of civil society. Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Ques·
tion" in T. B. Bottomore, ed., Karl Marx Early Writings, New York 1964,
40, 37, 38. Note the remarks of Erich Fromm on this topic in the forward
to this volume, iv-v.
73. Mein Kampf, 442.
74. Mein Kampf, 416, 487.
75. Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, New York 1956, 15.
76. Mein Kampf, 410,412.
77. Mein Kampf, 988.
78. Mein Kampf, 647.
79. AdOlf Hitler, Speech 26 March 1936 in N. H. Baynes, ed., The
Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April, 1922-August, 1939, 2 vo1s. New York
1969, II, 1317.
80. Fackenhdm, Encounters, 209.
81. Fackenheim, Encounters, 211.
82. Fackenheim, Encounters, 207.
83. George M. K:ren and Leon Rappoport, The Holocaust and the Crisis
of Human Behavior, New York 1980, 141.
84. Neumann, "Toiah or Philosophy?" 17, 20.
85. Kren and Rappoport, The Holocaust, 142.
86. Genesis, 10:8-9.
43
�·Proof and Pascal
Brother Robert Smith
To F. H. and to my friends just off Bambury Road
In his lecture, "Power and Grace," Douglas Allanbrook
said of Pascal:
One final question: what does Pascal's attitude toward
proof have to do with him personally, with Pascal as a
man?
For both Thrasymachus and Pascal, however, the voices of
power and persuasion are the only thinkable ways of talking
about politics. Reasoning about politics with any purity of discourse is foolishness. In reading over this pensee [103], most of
you have probably been struck by the lack of anything that
could be called . .. dialectic . .. the complete absence of premises . .. Pascal seldom argues: he states persuasively what is to
him the case. 1
Allanbrook may have been flattering us. When we hear
Pascal speak we may often be so dazzled by his epigrams,
his examples, and his similes that we do not think to ask
whether he is talking reasonably. It might not occur to us
that one example does not necessarily prove a general
statement or that his lack of dialectic is consciously antiphilosophical.
.
.
In his lecture, Allanbrook made good hts charges agamst
Pascal: that Pascal says we have no power to discover justice that according to Pascal we cannot know the differenc~ between a just and an unjust action, and that justice
has no power in this world.
These are shocking charges. They ought to make us ask
questions about Pascal himself. Did he reject argument
on all matters? Not only about politics, but about all that
is important in our lives? Why? What substitute for reasoning, for dialectical inquiry and proof dtd he propose?
How does Pascal proceed in a typical section of the Pensees? Does he argue? What is his attitude toward dialectics, toward philosophical inquiry in the tradition of Plato
and Aristotle, or theology, as practiced by St. Augustine
and St. Thomas? Does Pascal argue about philosophy and
theology or does he "state persuasively what is to him the
case" and. no more?
A second consideration. Aside from his practice in the
Pensees, what does Pascal think of proof itself? Does he
think it impossible? If it is possible, when is it so?
A tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis, Brother Robert Smith professed membership in the Order of Christian Brothers in 1939.
A lecture read at Annapolis on October 30, 1981.
44
1 Happiness
How can Pascal set out to defend the Christian religion
without resort to argument? He says he intends to show
that religion is not contrary to reason, to make it attractive, to make good men wish it were true, and, fmally, to
show that it is true. Wh at d o " sh ow, " " rnake, " an d "' "
ts
mean to him?
First a few remarks on the order, or lack of it, in Pascal's
text. Until forty years ago, when the work of a man named
Lafuma appeared, editors had arranged Pascal's thoughts
at their discretion. Lafuma showed that Pascal had tentatively chosen some thoughts for a work, an Apology for the
Christian Religion, for which the Pensees are only the
working notes. Pascal decided on twenty-seven numbered
headings like Order, Beginning, Conclusion. Not quite
chapters, they appear to be divisions of a whole work.
With his thoughts written out helter-skelter on large foho
sheets, he selected those that related to his division headings, strung them together with needle and thread, and
placed them in packets, each packet with a headmg. Lafuma was the first to realize the significance of these arrangements, especially the titles and needlework. Oth~r
arguments have since been advanced to conflfm Lafum~ s
view that Pascal selected about one th!rd of the matenal
included in what we know as the Pensees for his projected
work.
I have chosen to examine Section Ten of those thoughts
selected from the Pensees. It is called The Soverign Good. I
have picked it because it provides a good ~xample of Pascal's last, provisional arrangement, and gives a clear picture of his procedure:
The sovereign good. Debate about the sovereign good.
That you may be content with yourself and the good things innate in you.
There is some contradiction, because they [the Stoics) finally
advise suicide. Oh, how happy is a life we throw off like the
plague! (147)
WINTIR 1982
�Second part. Man without faith can know neither true good
nor justice.
'
All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. However
different the means they may employ, they all strive towards
this goal. The reason why some go to war and some do not is
the same desire in both, but interpreted in two different ways.
The will never takes the least step except to that end. This is
the motive of every act of every man, including those who go
and hang themselves.
Yet for very many years no one without faith has ever reached
the goal at which everyone is continually aiming. All men
complain: princes, subjects, nobles, commoners, old, young,
strong, weak, learned, ignorant, healthy, sick, in every country, at every time, of all ages, and all conditions.
A test which has gone on so long, without pause or change,
really ought to convince us that we are incapable of attaining
the good by our own efforts. But example teaches us very little. No two examples are so exactly alike that there is not
some subtle difference, and that is what makes us expect that
our expectations will not be disappointed this time as they
were last time. So, while the present never satisfies us, experience deceives us, and leads us on from one misfortune to another until death comes as the ultimate and eternal climax.
dence Pascal would have preferred this order. Number 148
should perhaps precede 147 because 148 begins with a
general statement of Pascal's point in this section: "Man
without faith can know neither true good nor justice."
This expression, "without faith," reminds us of the place
of Section Ten in the Apology. In saying, "Man without
faith," so absolutely, so uncompromisingly, without any
nuance or admission, Pascal runs head-long against a philosophical and theological tradition that he knows and refuses to follow. He does not turn to Aristotle, who was
known to the men around him, or to St. Thomas, whom
he had read selectively, or even to St. Augustine, who says
that the philosophical writings of the ancients, especially
those of Cicero, helped him on the way to his conversion
in the garden. (St. Augustine, for example, thanks Cicero's
lost work, Hortensius, for his turn to the search for wisdom
instead of the pursuit of political and financial success.)
Unlike Aristotle, who had a great deal to say about happi·
ness in the Ethics, and even defined it, Pascal does not
refer to human experience for his understanding of happiness. Instead, he says, "Man without faith can know
neither true good nor justice."
Pascal expects his reader first to despair of finding guidance by his reason. He hopes then he will be receptive to
the religious alternative.
The first sentence in the development of Section Ten
What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim
but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all
that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries
in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things
that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are,
though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled
only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words,
by God himself.
reads:
God alone is man's true good, and since man abandoned him
it is a strange fact that nothing in nature has been found to
take his place: stars, sky, earth, elements, plants, cabbages,
leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, plague, war,
famine, vice, adultery, incest. Since losing his true good, man
is capable of seeing it in anything, even his own destruction,
although it is so contrary at once to God, to reason, and to
nature.
How do we react when we hear this sentence? Pascal
expects us to agree. Very likely he is not mistaken, for the
contrary is too unlikely.
Pascal, however, does not even offer the weak argument that the contrary is too unlikely. He expects us to
agree without question, and he is willing to proceed with
that unexamined assent.
Some seek their good in authority, some in intellectual inquiry and knowledge, some in pleasure.
has not been discussed. We think we know well enough
Others again, who have indeed come closer to it, have found
it impossible that this universal good, desired by all men,
should lie in any of the particular objects which can only be
possessed by one individual and which, once shared, cause
their possessors more grief over the part they lack than satisfaction over the part they enjoy as their own. They have realized that the true good must be such that it may be possessed
by all men at once without diminution or envy, and that no
one should be able to lose it against his will. Their reason is
that this desire is natural to man, since all men inevitably feel
it, and man cannot be without it, and they therefore conclude ... (148f
A word on the numbering of the thoughts within the
sections. In Section Ten, Lafuma, relying only on his
judgement, put pensee 147 before 148. There is no eviTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
All men seek happiness.
We are not aware that the crucial term, "happiness,"
what the sentence, "All men seek happiness," means, and
that is all Pascal needs. In contrast, Aristotle, who began
his discussion of happiness in the Ethics with just such an
unexamined use of the word, devotes the whole of Ethics
I and most of X to clarifying what the word means.
Section Ten continues:
All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. However
different the means they may employ, they all strive towards
this goal. The reason some go to war and some do not is the
same desire in both, but interpreted in two different ways.
The will never takes the least step except to that end. This is
the motive of every act of every man, including those who go
and hang themselves.
Something extraordinary is happening in these sentences. Pascal has got us to agree that "happiness" applies
indiscriminately to anything that man seeks. We have
45
�agreed that, to use his example, there is no difference between leading a charge and leading a peace march.
Had we realized how Pascal was using the term, most of
us would have questioned whether happiness in that
vague sense is the goal of all man's efforts. Most of us
think "happiness" is a term with many complex meanings. We think that what we are doing now is better or
worse, more or less conducive to happiness, than what we
were doing, say, two years ago. We think there are kinds
and degrees of happiness.
Pascal has made us accept uncritically an apparently obvious statement containing a term whose meaning seems
equally obvious. With the acceptance of that statement,
we have been led to agree that all the things we strive for
are the same. Am I characterizing Pascal fairly?
Already wary of the consequences of our uncritical acceptance of the obvious, we will be even more suspicious
of what follows:
Yet, for very many years no one without faith has ever reached
the goal at which everyone is continually aiming.
Once more, we have a general statement. This statement is not, however, offered without discussion. We are
asked to accept it because there are indications in our experience that it is true:
All men complain: princes, subjects, nobles, commoners, old,
young, strong, weak, learned, ignorant, healthy, sick, in every
country, at every time, of all ages, and all conditions.
The opening sentence seems plausible because we know
that we all complain, and so we cannot imagine anyone
else not complaining. In that case, he would be, well, odd.
No, everyone complains. A parade of characters passes
through our imagination-all complaining as we imagine
them. So we agree.
Without protest, we are accepting a new definition of
happiness. Happiness now means "something that satisfies
us completely." Only when happiness means complete
satisfaction does our complaining show that no one has
reached happiness without faith. Because all men, including ourselves, complain, they cannot be. completely satisfied, i.e. happy. Everything comes out so clearly and with
such assurance that we agree. No one, including ourselves,
is happy. But, you will agree, Pascal's procedure does not
amount to an argument.
Tacitly and guardedly, Pascal admits that his conclusion
is open to question:
A test which has gone on so long, without pause or change,
really ought to convince us that we are incapable of attaining
the good by our own efforts.
By saying, "really ought to convince us," Pascal protests
too much. He raises the possibility that we have not been
convinced that we are incapable of attaining the good by
our own efforts. Why do we all keep scurrying about so
46
much when we really ought to know that all our efforts
are doomed to failure?
But example teaches us very little. No two examples are so exactly alike that there is not some subtle difference, and that is
what makes us expect that our expectations will not be disappointed this time as they were last time.
Pascal says we keep scurrying about because we think
that the future will be different. We think that we will be
happy next time because then, everything will turn our
way, to our complete satisfaction. We think this because
we want to, not because we are convinced by proof.
Pascal's argument that mere reason leads to despair
would be conclusive if our failure to be completely satisfied was the same thing as complete misery. Then we
would not get out of bed in the morning. In fact, though,
we do get some satisfaction out of writing our essays, such
as they are, and hope to write better ones. There is more
than a "subtle difference" between failing to be completely satisfied and suffering complete misery. We are
not fools to keep on hoping to improve our situation. A
more modest definition of happiness might make us accept some complaint. Even the chance to complain may
occasion a certain happiness.
I know this may sound unfair to Pascal. I am not without question granting him his definition, and so I lead you
to doubt his word. Pascal would not be at all surprised by
what we have done, nor would he think us guilty of bad
manners. I am pointing out that Pascal has, without saying so, substituted a definition of happiness derived from
faith for one derived from ordinary experience. A definition from faith, which restricts happiness to the complete
and unqualified happiness that comes from seeing God
face to face, supports his argument and will find acceptance among his readers if they are believing, though nonpracticing, Christians. The Apology was, in fact, addressed
to such Christians.
So, while the present never satisfies us, experience deceives
us, and leads us on from one misfortune to another until death
comes as the ultimate and eternal climax.
A man without a conventional religious upbringing
would be unprepared for Pascal's assertions that "the
present never satisifies us" and "experience deceives us"
or Hleads us on from one misfortune to another." He would
be even more unprepared for the assertion that death is
the "ultimate and eternal climax." This is the language of
sermons heard in childhood. It is useful for evoking sentiments felt then. Someone who has these sentiments to recall will follow the whole resounding periodic sentence in
the way Pascal intends. Someone who has not been exposed to religious oratory is not so likely to follow it
unhesitatingly.
I am saying that this enthusiastic tone will seem sincere
and justified to a reader who can bring to the text religious
WINTER 1982
�associations from childhood. Those qf us who have a deep
religious background, strengthened by childhood memories, will be carried along by Pascal's prose to his conclu-
do the things we did when we believed, the responses will
follow, revived by the automatism of habit:
sion: the present never satisfies us, experience deceives us
For we must make no mistake about ourselves: we are as
much automaton as mind . .. habit provides the strongest
proofs and those that are most believed. It inclines the autom-
with its endless variety and promise of something better,
we are led from failure to failure until lastly, our life ends
in a crash-the last resounding crash-death.
The text we have been studying is a powerful piece of
rhetoric, worthy of a sermon in the grand tradition, be·
cause, like all successful oratory, it ties the speaker's mes·
sage to sympathies dormant in the hearer's memory. Like
a speech in a dramatic production that makes a character
come to life, Pascar s prose succeeds in evoking our own
experience. Racine realized this when, smarting under
Pascal's boutade that a good playwright was as bad as a
public poisoner, he told the authorities at Port-Royal that
their darling Pascal was himself a dramatist in the Provin·
cia! Letters.
Pascal, in fact, has been practicing oratorical art. He be·
gan with something that any reader could accept without
reflection. He went on to talk about our futile search for
happiness. Those readers whose experience confirms
what they read, believe him because they find the truth of
his words in themselves, just as Pascal claimed to find the
truth of Montaigne' s words in his own, not Montaigne' s,
experience.
Pascal's discourse is, then, limited to those who have
had a conventional religious upbringing in childhood. His
discourse is like a discussion among a closed circle of
friends who agree on what is desirable but differ as to how
to achieve it.
To get his hearers to turn towards God, Pascal relies on
reviving deeply ingrained beliefs dormant in their memo·
ries. When he began the Pensees, he must have thought of
making the Apology a series of letters like the Provincial
Letters:
A letter of exhortation to a friend, to induce him to seek. He
will reply: 'But what good will it do me? Nothing comes of it.'
... The answer to that is 'the Machine.' (5)
After the letter urging men to seek God, write the letter about
removing obstacles, that is the argument about the Machine
... (11)
What does he mean by the "Machine?" It is the response
that arises in us when we see something that once moved
us deeply, in a new context:
The fact that kings are habitually seen in the company of
guards, drums, officers, and all the things which prompt automatic responses of respect and fear has the result that, when
they are sometimes alone . .. their features are enough to strike
respect and fear into their subjects ... (25)
The "Machine" also helps to recall dormant religious
sentiments. We who once actively believed can again experience the responses we made when we believed. If we
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
aton which leads the mind unconsciously along with it. (821)
In addressing this audience of those who once strongly
believed, Pascal defines happiness as the result of a direct
vision of a personal God, whom we know even as we are
known:
What else does this craving for happiness . .. proclaim but
that there was once in man a true happiness . .. an infinite
abyss which can be filled only ... by God himself. (148)
Does Pascal believe this reliance on faith is our only
hope for knowing anything about happiness? Cannot we,
with our reason, our good sense, explore experience and
discover something worthwhile? Does Pascal go so far as
to reject the possibility that man can acquire for himself a
high .and noble happiness? He does.
Debate about the sovereign good.
That you may be content with yourself and the good things innate in you. (147)3
The quotation is from Seneca and it is given so that
Pascal can immediately reject it:
There is some contradiction, because they [the Stoics] finally
advise suicide. Oh, how happy is a life we throw off like the
plague!
With this sarcastic comment, Pascal dismisses Seneca
and all others who find in man's nature a genuine good
capable of being the basis for a moral life. Man, in his fallen nature, cannot find any of the good things that Seneca
attributes to him.
God alone is man's true good, and since man abandoned him
it is a strange fact that nothing in nature has been found to
take his place: stars, sky, earth, elements, plants, cabbages,
leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, plague, war,
famine, vice, adultery, incest. Since losing his true good, man
is capable of seeing it in anything . ..
Pascal does not think that we can ever come to know
what is best by reasoning about our own nature or the
things around us. We have not succeeded in rising to that
knowledge and we never will.
2 Proof
From Section Ten, a single, though typical, section of
the Pensees, we have gotten some idea of the Pascal's conception of the limitations of philosophical inquiry. We will
be more confident we know his mind if we look at another
47
�work where he discusses proof and qur ability to produce
it. In a short essay called, On the Geometrical Art, he says:
To show how to make unbeatable proofs . .. all we have to do
is to explain the method that geometry uses, for geometry
teaches it perfectly by example.4
[Attempts to clarify these truths] confuse everything, and de-
A few lines further he says:
What goes beyond geometry, is beyond
ness because such knowledge cannot come to the level of
speech. Geometry falls short of the highest method of
proof.
.
We should not try to clarify these first truths, known
from the heart. Attempts to clarify these truths bring obscurity and disagreement. We are better off without them:
us.5
stroying all order and light, destroy themselves and get lost in
inextricable difficulty.8
We know the truth not only through our reason but also
[Geometry] does not define any of these things: space, time,
movement, number, equality, nor large numbers of similar
thirigs, because these terms naturally designate the things
which they signify for anyone who knows the language . .. and
any clarification which one might wish to bring to them will
bring more obscurity than instruction.9
through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first
principles ... like space, time, motion, number .. it is on such
knowledge, coming from the heart and instinct, that reason
The passage immediately following shows the limits of
philosophical discourse, in Pascal's conception:
Reason cannot go beyond geometry, the model of perfect reasoning. How does geometry serve as a model for
reasoning? In the Pensees we read:
has to depend and base all its argument The heart feels that
there are three spatial dimensions and that there is an infinite
series of numbers, and reason goes on to demonstrate that
there are no two square numbers of which one is double the
other. Principles are felt, propositions proved, and both with
For there is nothing weaker than the discourse of those who
wish to define these primitive words. What necessity is there
for explaining the word "man?" What advantage did Plato
think he was offering us in saying that man is a featherless
certainty though by different means. (110)
biped? As if the idea which I have naturally and which I can-
Pascal speaks of knowledge we have through the heart
as sentiment (751), from sentir, "to feel," "to sense." The
connection is more than verbal. Through the heart we
have knowledge that is certain and cannot be doubted
but, like our knowledge of "green" or "soft," cannot be
expressed.
Geometrical reasoning is perfect because it begins in
the knowledge of the heart:
Geometry only sustains things that are clear and unchanging
through natural reason. That is why geometry is perfectly
true, since nature supports it where reasoning fails. This
order, the most perfect on the human level, consists not in defining everything or demonstrating nothing, but in remaining
on the middle ground of not defining things that are clear and
understood by all men, and of not defining all others, of not
proving what is known by all men, of demonstrating all
others.
Like Pascal's favorite theologian, St. Augustine, we
know what time is as long as we do not try to say what it is.
We know what time is because our heart tells us what it is.
When we try to clarify what is already clear in its own way,
we only add confusion. Nothing that we know is clearer to
us than time or number. Time and number are examples
of first known truths, which cannot be clarified:
Geometry, when it has arrived at the first known truths, stops
there and asks that they be granted, since it has nothing more
clear from which to prove them.?
The first known truths are geometry's strength and its
weakness. They are its strength because they give geometry a universally agreed starting point. They are its weak-
48
not express were not more exact and more sure than the one
he has given me in his useless and even ridiculous example,
since a man does not lose his humanity by losing his two legs
and a capon does not gain humanity by having its feathers
removed. 10
In a moment of euphoria, Pascal said that to be a
geometer is the most beautiful profession in the world.
Geometry, however, cannot define its starting points. Pascal exalts geometry at the same time that he casts doubt
on other inquiries that attempt to define their starting
points. Geometry is the best thing man can do on his own.
In contrast, Plato believed that philosophy should begin
with the study of "primitive words" such as space, time,
and equality. He urged apprentice philosophers to start by
inquiring into the greatness, the smallness, and the equality of their fingers.
Just as when he held that the true good could only be
found in faith, Pascal by refusing to inquire into the nature of space, time, and equality rejects much of the work
of philosophers before and after him.
But there is a more serious obstacle to achieving a full
grasp of the world through geometry. In its three branches
~movement, number, and space-geometry lies between
the infinitely great and the infinitely small:
Consequently . .. [the three branches] are all contained between nothingness and the infinitely great . .. and they are infinitely removed from either of these extremes. 11
Man is not to conceive of these two infinities but to admire them. Their contemplation will keep man from making any rash statements about the whole of the universe
or the combination of its parts. The world is a sphere
whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is
WINTER 1982
�nowhere. Our discourse can start with the inexpressible
data of the heart, but these do not correspond to any starting point in the universe. Worrying ab,aut whether Copernicus is right makes no sense. We will never have a sense
of the whole, we can have no hope of reaching an end, a
limit. We must remain in an unpretentious middleness. At
no stage of our intellectual journey are we any further
along than when we started.
Descartes is right in thinking that things are put together out of matter and motion, but when he hopes to
construct in thought a world so like the one God made
that one cannot tell the difference between the two, the
two infinites will mock him.
Descartes useless and uncertain. (887)
Because they failed to contemplate these two infinities, men
have rashly undertaken to probe into nature as if there were
some proportion between themselves and her. (199)
We have no starting point, no fulcrum for the lever that
is supposed to move the world: the infinities " ... meet in
God and in God alone."
Geometry, the best of the sciences, cannot help us say
where we are. Even if it could:
... we do not think the whole of . .. [geometry} is worth one
hour of trouble. (84)
Remember, though, that geometry, despite these limitations, " ... alone observes the true method, while all
other discourses are by natural necessity in some sort of
confusion. 12
3 Morality and Politics
What does Pascal think about other forms of discourse,
discourse which, because it is beyond geometry, is also beyond us?
Pascal thinks there are only two domains in which men
aspire to excellence: science, on the one hand, and moral~
ity and politics on the other. He thinks we cannot succeed
in either domain because each demands that we obtain
the unattainable, namely, a comprehensive grasp of the
world.
We have, in a preliminary way, seen how little Pascal
thinks of our ability to see what is good. Because of this inability, we cannot establish moral order in our lives. Without faith, we have no reason to say that incest is inferior to
anything else that attracts men. Without grace, selfishness
is our ultimate guide.
In Allanbrook's lecture, we meditated on our inability
to discover what justice is and our consequent inability to
establish any political order. We are living in an insane
asylum, Pascal says. How could Plato or Aristotle, in the
Laws or the Politics, pretend to show us just ways of living
in society? They had no such intention. They were not serious when they wrote those books. They knew enough of
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the world to see that laughing with friends is our only serious occupation:
... When [Plato and Aristotle] amused themselves by composing their Laws and Politics, they did it for fun. It was the
least philosophical and least serious part of their lives: the
most philosophical part was living simply and without fuss.
If they wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a
madhouse. (533)
Since we live in an insane asylum, it might be useful to
ask our fellow inmates to treat one another less cruelly:
One cannot ask the insane to discover justice.
If we leave the matter there, you may wish to dismiss
Pascal as a misanthrope. It is fairer to try once more to see
things as he sees them before we bid him farewell. Let us
look at a passage where he describes the real difficulties of
any talk about human authority. A present-day writer on
Pascal says that the following passage is a paradigm of the
insuperable difficulties that Pascal thought stand in the
way of not only political, but of all discourseY
... Ordinary people honor those who are highly born, the
half-clever ones despise them, saying that birth is a matter of
chance, not personal merit. Really clever men honor them,
not for the same reason as ordinary people, but for deeper
motives. Pious folk with more zeal than knowledge despise
them regardless of the reason which makes clever men honor
them, because they judge men in the new light of piety, but
perfect Christians honor them because they are guided by a
still higher light.
So opinions swing back and forth, from pro to con, according
to one's lights. (90)
Pascal's statement here is anti-Cartesian. Descartes
held that if we could not persuade others of our meaning,
we did not know what we were talking about. Pascal says
we cannot persuade others unless they share our starting
point in discourse. Not normally transmitted by one
speaker to another, the starting point is given from nature, as in geometry, or by custom, or by private experi~
ence, or by faith.
Anybody who does not see the wider bearing of the passage we are about to study, might dismiss it as a piece of
baroque rhetoric, an example of Jansenist obsession with
the Fall of Man. But Pascal means what he says, in this instance, to apply to all human discourse.
For Pascal, the pattern of all knowledge about matters
moral or religious is illumination from above, and no dis~
course can be successful without it. With illumination
from above, lesser truths are made valid. Without it, they
are misleading.
Pascal has listed five successive opinions:
l. Ordinary people honor those who are highly born.
In an earlier pensee, he tells us the dark grounds for this
honor:
49
�I am supposed not to honor a man dressed in brocade and at-
tended by seven or eight lackeys. Why! He will have me
thrashed if I do not bow to him. (89)
Our ordinary man thinks as he does because he fears
the strong arms and stout sticks of the lackeys who follow
their expensively dressed master. Don Giovanni frightens
Leporello into submission by reminding him that stout
thugs ready to use their whips will punish his failure to
obey.
2.... the half-clever ones despise them [the highly born], say·
ing that birth is a matter of chance, not personal merit.
Pascal himself takes this view when he asks whether
sailors would allow someone to direct a ship at sea merely
because he was the first-born son of some nobleman.
Birth is not enough to determine the command of a ship.
Why should it be accepted for the rule of a country?
3. Really clever people honor them, not for the same reason
as ordinary people, but for deeper motives.
Pascal tells us their motives. Reason cannot discover
any universally accepted sign of legitimacy apart from custom or bring forth any laws that all men will think are just.
As soon as people begin to dispute about who should rule
them or whether the commands of the rulers are just,
there will be the greatest political evil-civil war. A really
clever man will know that we can never be sure about
right or wrong and that convention only determines who
rules us, president, king, parliament. The clever man will
say we should leave well enough alone because things will
only get worse through civil war. Protest against injustice
arouses passion-and passion may lead to rioting in the
streets, repression, or anarchy.
4. Pious folk with more zeal than knowledge despise them
[the highly born] regardless of the reason which makes clever
men honor them, because they judge men in the new light of
piety.
Here Pascal seems to be thinking of people who, in the
enthusiasm of new converts to religion, think that one
need not care about political matters or even fear civil disorder. They may be well-advised to place their hopes in
heaven, but they are short-sighted in not realizing what a
great evil civil war is in this life, a life that they and others
must share.
We should pause here to note how "opinions swing
Dack and forth, from pro to con" among the four groups.
Two groups say we should honor those highly born, two
say we should not. The two groups who say we should
honor them do not say we should do so for the same reasons. Neither do the two groups who say we should
despite the high-born.
Most important in all this is the extreme, perhaps insurmountable difficulty that those who hold one set of opin-
50
ions have in persuading those who hold other opinions. In
abject fear of the whip, an ordinary man like Leporello
does not need to be convinced to obey because of the
evils of civil war. He probably will never be detached
enough to think about the matter. Leporello does think
for a moment how unjust it is that he should remain outside as a sentinel while his master disports indoors, but
the mention of the whip makes him forget that thought.
Those who fear civil war will probably riot want -fo give
their reasons for enduring present evils to men like Leporello. They will also find it discouraging to argue with halfclever men who hope in the future and do not fear civil
war because they have not experienced it.
The new converts, who believe they have nothing to
learn from others, are similarly isolated and unlikely to be
able to talk to any of the others.
What of the fifth opinion?
5.... but perfect Christians honor them [the high-born] because they [the perfect Christians] are guided by a still higher
light.
Perfect Christians share Pascal's belief that we should
submit to those who hold power over us because we are
thereby submitting to God. God has ordained that the unjust power of rulers should weigh upon us in punishment
for original sin.
The first four explanations are all consistent with the
last one. If it is true, they all can be partially true as well,
even if they do contradict one another. Rulers do have the
power to frighten and punish us. We are in this slavish
state because an angry God has left us prey to the passions of the strong because we rebelled against him. Fear
belongs to a fallen nature. So does the cruelty of the
powerful toward the weak. The doctrine of the Fall accounts for Leporello's fear of Don Giovanni.
The doctrine of the Fall also accounts for the second
explanation, which holds the highly born in contempt.
Men are all equal in the state of innocence. None are by
nature superior. All are subject only to God and because
of him are well-disposed toward one another. Because of
the Fall, however, the restraints on human behavior have
been removed and the strong unfairly try to dominate the
weak. Their domination is unjust in itself, but that injustice is our reward for having rebelled against the only naturally superior ruler. The second explanation is both true
and incomplete. The fifth explanation confirms and completes its truth.
The third explanation, that of the really clever, who
fear civil war and on that account respect authority, is
based on experience. It is consistent with the fifth reason,
that of the perfect Christians.
The fourth explanation, that of the zealous convert,
though religious, is insufficient because it does not consider the crucial religious truth-that only the redeemer
can redress the Fall.
WINTER 1982
�The Fall and Redemption are the ~ey that resolves the
conflicting opinions about authority. That key opens the
understanding to whatever truth is contained in any hu·
man opinions. Pascal is calling all valid discourse about
moral matters-matters other than geometry-"ciphered
language." The doctrine of the Fall and Redemption
breaks that code. Supplied by faith, it illumines our
searching just as our instinctive knowledge of number illumines our geometrical quest. This key is given by God.
Those to whom he does not give it wander in the incompleteness of one of the first four partial truths. Only with
the fifth explanation, that of the perfect Christians, can
we preserve what validity lies in each of those explanations while avoiding their limitations, their semi-falsity.
Pascal would consider this account of the incompleteness of our knowledge of a prime political matter a paradigm of our knowledge in general. All knowledge of what
is important, of what is true for man and for the world, is
fragmentary.
_ Like the two infinities, all knowledge meets and is comprehended in and by God. Only those who see him face to
face will see clearly the general truths. Goodness, justice,
and happiness are revealed only dimly and in faith to
those who have the key of the Fall and Redemption.
Pascal uses the language of seduction when he wants to
make us feel as he does about these matters. God overcomes our resistance, he says, by an overpowering delight,
not by argument or proof. Pascal thinks God gives us the
ability to accept enlightenment, the will to surrender, because of Christ's death for us. Not only does he not think
we should look for arguments, he believes that to hope to
achieve enlightenment by them is blasphemous. To obtain moral knowledge by human means would make the
Cross useless. (808).
To know what Pascal thinks is true, we would have to
see within ourselves what he sees. By his own principles,
he can only hope to point us in a direction that leads us
on. He can remind us of the advantages of accepting
Christian doctrine. But Pascal also thinks that God must
move us to accept in order for us to yield. Short of that experience and lacking an interpretation of it that would be
identical with Pascal's own, all that we can do is look at
Pascal himself.
Before we leave him, let me read one passage where he
tells us how alone he felt in the world. Let us hear Pascal
describe what must have been his state of mind before the
religious experience on the night of Monday, November
23, 1654, that made him turn to God.
When . .. I survey the whole universe in its dumbness and
man left to himself with no light, as though lost in a corner of
the universe . .. incapable of knowing anything, I am moved
to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying
desert island, who wakes up quite lost and with no means of
escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive
people to despair. I see other people around me . .. I ask them
if they are better informed than I, and they say they are not.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Then these lost and wretched creatures look around and find
some attractive objects to which they become addicted and
attached. For my part, I have never been able to form such
attachments ... (198)
How consistent his language is with what must have
been his feelings! Never having been able to form any attachment to people or things around him, Pascal speaks of
those who have as "wretched and lost." We can see how
much religious reassurance and enlightenment must have
meant to him.
It need not be true that Pascal always felt the way he
did in this passage. "Never" may be a hyperbole justified
by the depth of his revulsion for things or people he no
longer admired. "Never" shows how unimportant they
were to him when he wrote those words.
Another sign of this solitariness is the harshness with
which he speaks about love, the passion of love:
A man goes to the window to see the people passing by; if I
pass by, can I say that he went there to see me? No, for he is
not thinking of me in particular. But what about a person
who loves someone for the sake of her beauty; does he love
her? No, for smallpox, which will destroy beauty without destroying the person, will put an end to his love for her.
And if someone loves me for my judgement or my memory,
do they love me? me, myself? Where then is this self, if it is
neither in the body nor the soul? . .. we never love anyone ex-
cept for borrowed qualities. (688)
How much must it have meant to such a man to have
felt that he knew that God cared for him, and that Christ
had died for his sake. We who remain outside this experience will remain unaffected by his account. Some of us
may even want to say that he is describing a delusion.
There is no need to argue about the matter. Nothing
could have been more important for Pascal than a revelation which, in his own words, brought him "certainty, cer-
tainty, peace." From the high point of that experience he
henceforth judged all else.
It will be no surprise to us that he could not prove what
he said, or, indeed, successfully point to it.
1. Douglas Allanbrook, ''Power and Grace," The College, January 1977.
2. All quotations from the Pensies are from the translation of A. J.
Krailsheimer, New York 1966.
3. Seneca, Ep. 20.8.
4. Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres Completes, Louis Lafuma, ed., Paris 1963,348.
Translations by Brother Robert Smith.
5. Pascal, Oeuvres, 349.
6. Pascal, Oeuvres, 350.
7. Pascal, Oeuvres, 351.
8. Pascal, Oeuvres, 351.
9. Pascal, Oeuvres, 350.
10. Pascal, Oeuvres, 350.
11. Pascal, Oeuvres, 352.
12. Pascal, Oeuvres, 349.
13. Louis Marin, La critique du discours, Paris 1975, 372~374.
51
�Five Translations
Charles G. Bell
By Victor Hugo, past eighty years old
Ave, Dea: Moriturus te salutatA judith Gautier
La mort et Ia beaute sont deux choses profondes
Qui contiennent tant d'ombres et d'azur qu'on dirait
Deux soeurs egalement terribles et fecondes
Ayant Ia meme enigme et le meme secret.
0 femmes, voix, regards, cheveux noirs, tresses blondes,
Brillez, je meurs! Ayez !'eclat, !'amour, l'attrait,
0 perles que Ia mer mele a ses grandes ondes,
0 lumineux oiseaux de Ia sombre foret!
Judith, nos deux destins sont plus pres l'un de !'autre
Qu'on ne croirait, a voir mon visage et le votre;
Tout le divin ab!me appara!t dans vos yeux,
Et moi, je sens le gouffre etoile dans mon arne;
Nous sommes tousles deux voisins du ciel, madame,
Puisque vous etes belle et puisque je suis vieux.
Death and beauty are two somber loves,
As deep in blue and shade as if to say:
Two sisters, alike fecund and destructive,
Bearing the burden of one mystery.
Loves, voices, looks, tresses dark and fair,
Be radiant; for I die. Hold light, warmth, solaceyou pearls the sea rolls in waves up the shore,
You birds that nestle, luminous, in the forest.
Judith, our destinies are nearer kin
Than one might think to see your face and mine.
The abyss of all opens in your eyesThe same starred gulf I harbor in my soul.
We are neighbors of the sky, and for this cause,
That you are beautiful and I am old.
Charles Bell is a tutor at St.John's College, Santa Fe. These translations are a sequence from a forthcoming collection of poems, The Five-Chambered Heart.
52
WINTER 1982
�. Goethe: Se/ige Sehnsucht (1814)
Sagt es niemand, nur den Weisen,
Wei! die Menge gleich verhonet:
Das Lebendige will ich preisen,
Das nach Flammentod sich sehnet.
In der Liebesnachte Kiihlung,
Die dich zeugte, wo du zeugtest,
Dberfallt dich fremde Fiihlung,
Wenn die stille Kerze leuchtet.
Nicht mehr bleibest du umfangen
In der Finsternis Beschattung,
Und dich reisset neu Verlangen
Auf zu hoherer Begattung.
Keine Ferne macht dich schwierig,
Kommst geflogen und gebannt,
Und zuletzt, des Lichts begierig,
Bist du, Schmetterling, verbrannt.
Und solang du das nicht hast,
Dieses: Stirb und werde!
Bist do nur ein triiber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde.
Sacred Lust
Tell the wise; the many lour,
And make ignorance their shame;
Say I praise the living power
That hungers for a death of flame.
Love-nights breed us as we breed:
In the candlelighted cool,
Feel the gates of dark go wide
For the moulting of the soul.
From its woven bed of shadows
Mere enclosure falls away:
Love spreads new wings to the meadows
Of another mating play.
Tireless, upward; spaces dwindle;
Nothing hems declared desire;
God is light and light will kindle,
And the moth wings leap in fire.
Know, until you learn to weave
Each flame-dying into breath,
Everywhere you haunt the grave
Of the shadowed earth.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
53
�Petrarch (1304-74): Sonnet XI,
After Laura's Death
Se lamentar augelli, o verdi fronde
mover soavemente a !'aura estiva,
o roco mormorar di lucide onde
s'ode d'una fiorita e fresca riva,
Ia 'v' io seggia d' amor pensoso e scriva;
lei che '1 ciel ne mostro, terra n'asconde,
veggio et odo et intendo, ch' ancor viva
di sl lontano a' sospir miei risponde:
"Deh perche innanzi '1 tempo ti consume?"
mi dice con pietate: "a che pur versi
degli occhi tristi un doloroso fiume?
Di me non pianger tu, che' miei dl fersi
morendo eterni, e nell' eterno lume,
quando mostrai di chiuder, gli occhi apersi."
If birds' lament, green leaves' or tendrils' stir
To the soft sighing of the air of summer,
Or through the wave-wash at the petalled shore
Of a clear stream, crystal's liquid murmur
Sound, where I sit bowed to the forest floorHer, whom heaven showed and earth now covers,
I see and hear and know, as if the power
Of her live voice responded from afar:
"Why do you spend yourself before your years?"
She asks in pity. "Or wherefore and for whom
Pour the wasting river of your tears?
You must not weep for me. My life became,
Dying, eternal; and to eternal light,
The dark, that seemed its closure, cleared my sight."
54
WINTER 1982
�Catullus, 55-54 BC: Attack on Caesar
for his favorite Mamurra (#29)
Quis hoc potest uidere, quis potest pati,
Nisi impudicus et uorax et aleo,
Mamurram habere quod comata Gallia
Habebat ante et ultima Britannia?
Cinaede Romule, haec uidebis et feres?
Et ille nunc superbus et superfluens
Perambulabit omnium cubilia
Vt albulus columbus aut Adoneus?
Cinaede Romule, haec uidebis et feres?
Es impudicus et uorax et aleo.
Eone nomine, imperator unice,
Fuisti in ultima occidentis insula,
Vt ista uestra diffututa mentula
Ducenties comesset aut trecenties?
Quid est alid sinistra liberalitas?
Parum expatrauit an parum elluatus est?
Paterna prima lancinata sunt bona;
Secunda praeda Pontica; inde tertia
Hibera, quam scit amnis aurifer Tagus.
Nunc Galliae timetur et Britanniae.
Quid hunc malum fouetis? aut quid hie potest
Nisi uncta deuorare patrimonia?
Eone nomine urbis opulentissime
Socer generque, perdidistis omnia?
The man who can face this, the man who can take it,
Is whored himself, a drunk, a swindler. Mamurra
Laps the fat of crested Gaul and farthest Britain.
Pansied Romulus, you see this thing, you take it?
How he struts his way through everybody's bedroom,
Like a white dove, a white-skinned soft AdonisPansied little Roman, you take it in, you bear it?
You are like him then, as drunk, as whored a swindler.
And was it for this, Rome's only great general,
You conquered the remotest island of the West,
To feed this screwed-out tool of yours, Mamurra?
See him spend, twenty or thirty million? First were
His own estates, then the loot of Pontus, then of SpainHear Tagus, the gold-bearing river. They say the Gauls
And Britains fear him? And you love the mongrel? Both
Of you, Caesar, Pompey? While he swills oil of patrimony?
For this, like in-laws, father and son,
You have sluiced wealth and all of the world-city.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
55
�SanJuan de la Cruz (1549-1591)
Cancion de Ia subida del Monte CarmelaThe Ascent of Mount Carmel
En una noche oscura,
con ansias en amores inflamada,
oh dichosa ventura!
sali sin ser notada,
estando ya mi casa sosegada.
In the dark of night
With love inflamed
By luck, by chance
I rose unseen
From the house hushed in sleep.
A escuras y segura
por Ia secreta escala, disfrazada,
o dichosa ventura!
a escuras, en celada
estando ja mi casa sosegada.
Safe in the dark
By a secret stair
My luck, my chance
And night for a veil
I stole from the house of sleep.
En Ia noche dichosa,
en secreto, que nadie me veia,
ni yo miraba cosa,
sin otra luz ni gu1a,
sino Ia que en el corazon ard1a.
By chance of night
By secret ways
Unseeing and unseen
No light, no guide
But the flames that my heart gave-
Aquesta me guiaba
mas cierto que Ia luz de mediod1a,
adonde me esperaba
quien yo bien me sab1a,
en parte donde nadie pareda.
Led by those rays
Surer than day
I came where one waits
Who is known to me
In a place where none seemed to be.
Oh noche, que guiaste,
oh noche amable mas que el alborada,
oh noche, que juntaste
Amado con amada,
amada en el Amado trasformada!
Night that guides
Purer than dawn
Night that joins
Lover and loved
And the loved into Lover changed.
En mi pecho florido,
que entero para el solo se guardaba,
all! qued6 dormido,
yo le regalaba,
y el ventalle de cedros aire daba.
In my flowered heart
That is only his
He lay in sleep
Lulled by the breeze
The fanning of my cedars gave.
El aire del almena,
cuando ya sus cabellos esparda,
en mi cuello her1a
y todos mis sendidos suspend1a.
Down turrets that air
With hand serene
As it stirred in his hair
Gave my throat a wound
That took all sense away.
Quedeme y olvideme,
el rostro recline sobre el Amado,
ces6 todo, y dejeme,
dejando mi cuidado
entre las azucenas olvidado.
I ceased, I was gone
My face to his own
All passed away
Care and all thrown down
There among the lillies where I lay.
con su mano serena,
56
WINTER 1982
�The Federal Republic of Germany:
Finlandization and Germanization?
Anne-Marie Le Gloannec
Is the Federal Republic of Germany headed for "finlandization"? Since Zbigniew Brzezinski detected neutralist leanings in West Germany nearly three years ago, the
charge has often been made. On both sides of the Atlantic, analysts and politicians and West German opposition
parties have followed the former National Security Adviser
in asking themselves about the Federal Republic's eastward slip. The most polemical have pointed to supposed
neutralization plans (the famous "Bahr Plan") and Bonn's
deplorable "Atlantic coolness" as something unusual, even
shocking, in a government that had supported American
policy with few reservations, even in the seventies. Others,
more prudent and at first loath to adopt conclusions they
regarded as hasty, have nevertheless discerned the first
signs of "finlandization" in the policies followed since the
winter of 1979. Rather, of "self-finlandization" or "voluntary finlandization." For we are dealing in this instance
not so much with neutrality imposed by the Soviet Union
as with a policy deliberately chosen by Bonn to soothe an
unduly touchy neighbor.
Richard Lowenthal, who is thought to have conceived
confuse the views of what the Christian Democratic-Socialist opposition calls the "Moscow wing" of the Social
Democratic Party with those of the governing Social Democratic-Free Democratic coalition. For instance, despite
his moral authority, Herbert Wehner did not speak for the
SPD majority-and even less so for the governing coalition
-when he called the Warsaw Pact's arms build-up defensible in the winter of 1979-80, and when even more recently
he did what he could to take the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan for the reaction of a power on its guard. Wehner's
controversial remarks in any case provoked opposition that
reached the center of his party. Moreover, the inclinations
of Helmut Schmidt's character, the makeup of the coalition, and the differences natural between party leaders
and men-in-office see to it that not even the SPD itself inspires government policy.
Even though the opinions of Social Democrats, snipers
or not, cannot be attributed to the government wholesale,
the government itself is not beyond suspicion. There is
plenty of evidence in relations between Moscow, Bonn,
and Washington: the West Germans' irritation with Ameri-
the term ufinlandization," calls "self-finlandization" ab-
can ((human rights" policy; their initial evasion of, then
surd. And in any case the Berlin political scientist holds
that neither term does justice to West German political
reality. The Federal Republic of Germany itself denies
that it wants to steer "a course between the blocs." In the
spring of 1980, it should not be forgotten, Chancellor
Schmidt did not succeed in hiding his annoyance at some
analyses (in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) that at-
hesitant and limited support for, President Carter's counter
reprisals after the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan;
their cautiousness at plans for the neutron bomb, and later
in regard to deployment of medium-range nuclear missiles; their lack of enthusiasm for the consolidation and expansion of the Atlantic alliance. Until recently, all signs
seemed to indicate that in loosening its Atlantic ties, Bonn
sought to forestall Soviet suspicions and objections, and
tacked the readiness "to appease" and the inconsistencies
of the government 1
In the past few years West German politics undeniably
betrays a number of ambiguities. One must not, however,
Anne-Marie Le Gloannec is on the staff of the Centre d'Etudes et de
Relations internationales de la Fondation nationale des Sciences Politiques in France. This article first appeared in Commentaire 14, Summer
1981.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
that in its wish to please Moscow, it reserved its criticisms
for its American ally. The new administration in the United
States does not appear about to win over Bonn completely
to its views on East-West policy.
We must not forget that German-American tensions
have a specifically Western dimension that comes of profound differences over economic policy and the export of
nuclear technology. In these two areas, pressures from
57
�Washington have caused bitterness, even exasperation,
on the other side of the Atlantic. Also, German-American
relations have always been susceptible to the conflicts
that exist in any alliance. In our examination of present
tensions and "slipping," we should avoid yielding to the il·
lusion of an over-idyllic past. In the fifties and sixties the
two partners entertained suspicions of each other. When
Washington sought agreement with Moscow, West Ger·
many feared Washington would drop it. And the American
administration feared Bonn's too-close understanding with
its Soviet neighbor.
Are the present transatlantic misunderstandings the
same as in the past-or have they changed with the change
in the relative strengths of the United States and West
Germany? In any event, are they great enough to justify
Bonn's apparent weakmindedness towards Moscow? Does
the loosening of transatlantic ties necessarily tempt West
Germany to "appease" the USSR? In other words, are
German-American relations and German-Soviet relations
a zero-sum game? Finally, is it really a question of pusillan·
imity and appeasement? Perhaps Bonn desires to play an
independent role, neither too pro-American nor too antiSoviet? As Raymond Aron asked:
Do the Europeans shrink from American leadership because
they have come to have confidence in themselves or because
the power of the Soviet Union frightens them? Or is there a
third reason that subsumes the other two: the decline of
America?2
Beyond Electoral Turmoil
With detente in danger, the disagreements between the
United States and West Germany have never appeared
deeper. What might have passed a few years ago as simple
disagreements over particular policies-over human rights,
or the arms build-up-have now spread over the whole
range of economic, military, and political relations between East and West, and after the Soviet intervention in
Afghanistan have come to bear on fundamental questions:
the nature of East-West relations, and more specifically
the assessment of Soviet ambitions and the development
of a suitable Western policy. Does the Soviet Union seek
to take advantage of local instability when the occasion
arises? Or does it pursue a policy of systematic expansion?
Should the West pursue detente, or return to containment?
Despite various shades of opinion, the Carter administration was pretty much united in its perception of a will
to expand in Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. In West
Germany, however, the various party leaders expressed
widely differing opinions that ranged from one extreme to
the other. The opposition leaders, Hans Kohl and FranzJosef Strauss, as well as the CDU's military affairs specialist
Manfred Woerner, reached conclusions similar to Washington's. Herbert Wehner, as already mentioned, saw the
move as a defensive measure; Willy Brandt minimized the
importance of the intervention. These reactions were
hardly surprising, for they came from the opposite sides of
58
the political chess board. The same cannot be said of the
attitude of Chancellor Schmidt, who did not see fit to interrupt his vacation, and who in his New Year's address
showed little of his usual vigor in his condemnation of the
Soviet operation. A few days before had he not declared
that Soviet leaders, far from being adventurers, desired
peace?
The nature of the Soviet intervention-surgical operation or act in a drama of expansion-raised the question:
what would become of Europe? Those who adopted the
hypothesis of expansion could not escape the fear that
sooner rather than later Berlin, Hamburg, or Paris would
suffer the fate of Kabul. A groundless fear, according to
Schmidt and his minister of foreign affairs-who considered the intervention "reversible" and thereby reduced it
to an anomalous case, limited in time and place. From
there it needed just a step to invoke the "divisibility" of
detente-a step some took, even though the FrenchGerman communique of February 1980 condemned the
concept.
There should be no exaggeration of the differences in
understanding between Chancellor Schmidt and Strauss.
Strauss denounced the Soviets' global ambitions, but
nonetheless still agreed with his political rival that Moscow did not want to unleash a Third World War. Schmidt
wanted detente to be divisible, but still claimed the dangers of the new balance of power in Asia or the Persian
Gulf region, and, consequently, for Europe. In the chancellor's perspective, the divisibility of detente did not
excuse West Germany or Europe from all action. He considered it of importance, however, not to react too harshly,
especially in the resort to sanctions. The Afghan crisis,
Schmidt would say in the course of 1980, did not recall
Europe in 1938-39 and Hitler's expansion-but 1914 and
the incapacity to master international difficulties. Such is
the explanation of Germany's silence in regard to American sanctions-a policy Germany judged inappropriate
and even dangerous.
It was actually as if almost in regret that Chancellor
Schmidt declared himself in favor of the Olympic boycott
that President Carter demanded, and he contented himself
with an embargo on strategic products and with symbolic
declarations at the same time that he refused sanctions
against the Soviet Union for its military intervention. This
was a compromise between the political necessity of supporting the American protector and the fear that America
would unleash the crisis. It was also a compromise between the Social Democratic Party that followed Willy
Brandt in his opposition to retaliatory measures and Foreign Minister Genscher, who favored a demonstration of
Atlantic solidarity. Ever ready to demonstrate its proAmericanism and to demand usacrifices," the opposition
had a field day denouncing the governing coalition's recantations and ((neutralist" leanings.
If one may trust certain public opinion polls, however,
~~neutralism" may respond to the wishes of a significant
minority, and in some cases, a majority, of the West GerWINTER 1982
�man population. Asked whether they wished for "greater
independence of the Federal Republic of Germany from
the United States" or "unconditional support of American foreign policy," 49 percent of those polled answered
"yes" to the first question (with 29 percent "no"), and 52
percent said "no" to the second (with 26 percent "yes").
Forty-five percent of the respondents believed that the
military neutrality of both Germanies "would make a fit
contribution to the maintenance of peace. " 3
The significance of these results should not be overestimated, quite apart from the debate over the reliability
of the methods used by different West German polling organizations. Since the beginning of the Federal Republic,
West Germans have favored a policy of neutrality. Sometimes a minority, sometimes, notably in the second half of
the fifties and during the seventies, a majority. When
questioned, however, not simply about the policy they
would like to see Bonn follow, but about the military position they prefer for the Federal Republic, only a few declare themselves for neutrality. The most that can be said
is that Social Democratic sympathizers, people under
twenty, and people with advanced education, are more
likely to favour neutral status than the rest of the population. 4 In the majority, West German public opinion remains as much attached to NATO as to the American
military "umbrella" that it expects will protect it in the
event of a Soviet threat.' To be sure, in 1980 public opinion
continued to believe in the possibility of war (58%). Most
Germans, however, did not believe that Moscow's resort
to force in Afghanistan called into question the detente it
damaged. And in 1981, most Germans favored a policy of
conciliation.' All in all, the coalition's attitude seems to
answer public expectations better than the opposition's.
The legitimate distinction between the Social Democratic-Liberal line and the Christian Socialist opposition
does not mean that lines are clearly drawn and policies
consistent. Despite their disagreements over the nature of
the crisis and the immediate measures to take, the government and the opposition were closer than they would
have liked people to think. In contrast to Washington, no
German political party, much less German public opinion,
was eager to question detente. The pace of official East·
West contacts slowed down in the early spring of 1980,
but it soon picked up again. Strauss was not the last politician to make his appearance in Communist capitals. (Unlike the government, however, the opposition says it is
ready to risk detente the better to preserve it.) Moreover,
in favor, in various degrees, of resumption or pursuit of
disarmament negotiations, both the governing coalition
and the opposition recognize the need for strengthening
NATO to restore the East-West military balance,' and for
providing economic, political, and military aid to countries close to the Soviet Union (Pakistan, Turkey, and
Greece; the cultivation of ties with the Islamic countries).
Lastly, except for those Social Democrats who, like Willy
Brandt, seem to give European solidarity first priority,
both sides emphasize the importance of the GermanTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
American alliance (even though the opposition appears to
consider it more important than the government).
The old divisions between the left and right wings of
the Social Democratic Party have reappeared with greater
force than ever in the last few months, really in the last
two years, to shake the Social Democratic consensus on issues of external security. This was especially evident when
Karsten Voigt, among others, appeared to question the
delicate compromise that emerged from the party conference on December 1979 (the Doppelbeschluss, or double
resolution). Voigt, the Social Democratic spokesman for
the parliamentary commission on foreign affairs, judged
early in 1980 that the lack of progress or results in the arms
limitations talks mortgaged the deployment of American
missiles in Europe. Social Democratic deputies also undermined the foundations of Bonn's policy towards the
Atlantic alliance by opposing arms sales to Saudi Arabia
and by proposing reductions in military spending. The
joining of this leftist opposition with groups as diverse as
the German Peace Union (DFU), close to the Communists, the churches, and the ecologists; the coordination of
pacifist movements, opponents of nuclear power, and the
extra-parliamentary opposition (APO) around the same
issue, a sometimes violent coordination whose capacity to
make a sensation does not necessarily mean it enioys a
wide following-all this disturbs the balance at the heart
of the SPD, without, incidentally, sparing the Liberals,
(FDP), and forces the governing coalition into a weak or
rigid position. Witness Helmut Schmidt's recent remarks
on Soviet policy, or on the pacifism of young Germans.
Much of the leadership and of public opinion, undeniably, would like, in one way or another, to see Europe as
an island of peace precisely because it wishes it were one.
There would then be no more worry about sanctions or rearmament; more costly decisions could be avoided. To
calm oneself with the attribution of reassuring intentions
to the Soviets-is that not already "finlandization" of a
sort? 8
The Ostpolitik and its Fragile Gains
People have outdone themselves in repeating that
detente brought tangible benefits to the Germans-and
until recently one could believe that the Ostpolitik bore
fruit in every area. The status of West Berlin, guaranteed
by the four powers in September 1971, assured that city
some military and political security and, in theory, reduced
the risks of a sudden Soviet seizure. With the fundamental treaty signed in October 1972, the two Germanies
resumed relations pretty much broken off since the beginning of the sixties. During the seventies, several million
West Germans visited East Germany each year, and several
hundred thousand East Germans went to West Germany.
Over fifty thousand East Germans have settled permanently in the Federal Republic. Thanks to a significant
audience for West German television and the development of trade, West Germany makes its presence felt be-
59
�yond the Elbe. In negotiating the, treaty of 1972, the
Social Democratic-Liberal coalition meant to maintain
and strengthen the ties between the .two Germanies and
thereby keep alive the idea of German nationhood. If we,
however, may believe West German public opinion, that
holds that the two states are growing further and further
apart, and if we believe certain analysts who report the
development of two distinct national consciousnesses, we
are led to ask whether the coalition has really reached its
goal.
These measures have, in any case, improved the lot of a
good many people and permitted a relative "normalization" of relations between the two Germanies. Bonn also
normalized relations with other Socialist capitals. In recent
years, over half a million Soviet, Rumanian, and Polish citizens of German origin have been allowed to settle in the
Federal Republic; the volume of West German trade with
these countries has quintupled since 1970. Chancellor
Schmidt figured along with Valery Giscard d'Estaing
among the preferred partners of Edward Gierek.
This relative ((normalization" of relations with Eastern
Europe, rather than any immediate gains, give the Ostpolitik its historical significance. By abandoning its revisionist claims and by no longer making German unity a
prerequisite for detente, West Germany ceased troubling
its Eastern neighbors and importuning its Western all-ies:
it made itself ordinary, and thereby undid the mortgage
that up to then had weighed on its foreign policy. With
this added maneuvering room and with a measure of prestige won for it by its skill in negotiation-not to mention
its considerable economic strength-the West German
government could now make its voice heard in international councils. German participation in the Guadeloupe
summit in January 1979 surprised some observers. But her
presence represented the logical outcome of previous diplomatic activity. This growth in West Germany's power
could not, however, obscure the fact that the gains of the
Ostpolitik depended, at least in part, on the goodwill of
the Soviets and their East German allies. The border incidents, the harrassment, the pin-pricks in West Berlin, during the sixties, were there to remind everybody. In spite of
everything, West Germany was not a state like any other.
Even without considering the 17 million East German
"hostages" of the Soviet Union, the Federal Republic remains extremely vulnerable: on the front line of battle, it
would be devastated in both a conventional and a nuclear
war-but with all that it remains powerless to assure its
own security by itself.
This special characteristic and its liabilities give the Soviets a political bargaining advantage that they have not
failed to exploit, when international tensions or the internal
weaknesses of the Socialist camp have provoked a more
rigid attitude in the Kremlin, or when Moscow hoped to
divide NATO by isolating West Germany. NATO's decision of December 1979 to strengthen its theater nuclear
forces in Europe, the deterioration of East-West relations
after Afghanistan, and the threat of destabilization in Po-
60
land, have revivified Soviet and East German pressures
and threats. The Soviets reminded the West Germans in
the summer of 1980 that their territory would be the first
and worst casualty in a nuclear exchange-and that American protection was not certain. Following that, the East
German authorities decided to restrict severely all travel
between the two countries. They also let it be known that
West Berlin could suffer the consequences if Bonn changed
the conditions of inter-German trade (in the event of Soviet intervention in Poland).
It is hardly surprising then, that the West German leaders attempt to keep detente alive, to continue to enjoy its
benefits, that they wish to slow further worsening of the
international climate, since they would be among the first
to suffer, or even that they censor their words or actions
in anticipation of Soviet objections. Bonn, for instance,
refused to respond with reprisals to East Berlin's affront
after the elections. It has since, it is true, contemplated
not renewing the "swing" accords-credits without interest granted to East Germany-if East Germany did not
rescind its decision. Such a display of deliberate firmness
was successful in 1973, when East Berlin also had decided
to increase the amount of obligatory currency exchange
for travellers entering East Germany. But circumstances
are now different. There are grounds for fearing that, unwilling to risk detente, Bonn finds herself without recourse. In such an event, powerlessness would succeed to
deliberate firmness.
Everything, including the vulnerability of her economy,
glaringly evident for a year now, has contributed to make
West Germany either directly or indirectly susceptible to
international tensions and pressures. Extremely dependent on world trade for her raw materials and energy, and
for the export of her finished goods, West Germany seeks
to diversify her raw material sources and her new markets.
Her trade with Eastern Europe and the USSR represents
a little less than 6 percent of her total foreign trade, but
certain sectors and industries export a larger proportion of
their production to the East: the exports of Mannesmann,
and Hoescht made up almost 9 percent of their output in
1979. By 1985, 30 percent of West German imports of natural gas will come from the Soviet Union.
Is there not a danger that in allowing this dependence
West Germany is granting the Soviets the means to exercise pressure and influence over her? Without entering
into the broader debate on the advantages of East-West
trade (structural advantages for the East, sectorial advantages for the West), we should note the disagreement
among experts on the threshold of independence. At the
Soviet Union's and West Germany's announcement of an
agreement on natural gas (whose conception had been
made public at the moment Chancellor Schmidt in Moscow condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), the
Americans warned West Germany against dependence on
more than 30 percent of any product from any one country. In contrast, German experts set the critical threshold
at 40 percent. The political dimensions of this labyrinWINTER 1982
�thine quarrel need to be remembe,ed: American objections and West German defiance.
In my opinion, the danger, if there is one, lies else·
where. The fear is not of Soviet pressures or threats of an
embargo. Nor is it deplorable that Bonn is reluctant to enact strict economic sanctions that the business community
would not hear of, and which the Christian-Democrats
might not have applied with any greater vigour had they
been in power. Sanctions, it turns out in retrospect, are of~
ten evaded.
What is questionable is "Arms-of-Peace" thinking itself,
the kind of thinking that impelled Egan Bahr' s remark
that it is "necessary to institutionalize the interest in the
maintenance of peace through large-scale economic projects beneficial to both parties."' Chancellor Schmidt
apparently shares the same perspective, for he favors the
establishment of long-term contractual economic relations between West Germany and the Soviet Union. In
1977 he even tried (in vain) to have the Bundestag solemnly ratify the Soviet-German twenty-five year commer·
cia! accord. The desire to bind the Soviet Union with a
network of contracts is like trying to tie Gulliver down.
This is the policy of the West German government, specifically, of the Social Democratic-Liberal coalition. Instead of resorting to sanctions it prefers to take advantage
of the commercial and financial ebb and flow to buy concessions and guarantees. But mutual economic ties do not
necessarily guarantee the partners' political goodwill, especially the goodwill of a centralized and authoritarian regime
-when Bonn risks excessive conciliatoriness because of
its anxiety to protect investments or because of its respect
for treaties (its rationale in the question of sanctions).
West German government and business circles showed
the political and economic powerlessness of this attitude
during the Polish crisis. Poland's creditors felt obliged to
lend her more money to save her from bankruptcy. At the
same time Bonn, haunted by the memory of 1968, refrained from gestures or statements that might give the
Soviets an excuse to intervene. For these two reasons
Bonn found itself even less desirous and able to attach political conditions to its loans to Warsaw. 10
As in the early sixties, West Germany's Eastern policy
shows no innovation. In the sixties, however, she had
nothing to lose. Now, any revision might endanger the
Ostpolitik's accomplishments, both the more immediate
(increased human contact) and the less tangible (security
and relative independence). To preserve these benefits,
Bonn no longer gives priority in her dealings to peoples in·
stead of governments, to "change" instead of "reconciliation." It is undoubtedly time in West Germany for a fresh
debate on the ultimate goals and means of the Ostpolitik,
a debate the coalition in power has up to now appeared to
wish to avoid.
An Actor in Search of a Role
The Soviet leadership that in 1980 raised some doubts
about the effectiveness of America's military umbrella,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
knowingly touched a raw nerve in Bonn. More than once
in the past Europeans have questioned American ability
and willingness to deter or repel a Soviet attack-doubts
more than ever justified by the progressive change in the
Soviet-American military balance since the beginning of
the seventies. The mutual "neutralization," to use Helmut Schmidt's word, 11 of Soviet and American strategic
forces, along with Soviet conventional and nuclear superi·
ority in Europe, separates the United States from Euro·
pean territory more than ever before, for it is not certain
that the U.S. would be willing to engage its strategic forces
in the case of a limited Soviet attack on the old world.
Western Europe and especially the Federal Republic of
Germany, a "state on the front line" without her own nuclear capacity-and subject not only to Soviet pressures
but also to Washington's goodwill-finds herself singularly exposed as long as war remains a textbook hypothesis. The decision of the NATO Council in December 1979
to deploy medium-range missiles in Europe starting in
1983 and at the same time to begin negotiations with the
Soviet Union on the reduction of theater nuclear forces,
will make up for Europe's military inferiority without,
however, undoing her political powerlessness: the mere
presence of Pershing and cruise missiles under American
control will not reassure further the Europeans against
the risk of American indifference; and the propaganda
campaign the Soviets unleashed from the fall of 1979 to
the summer of 1980 shows that they will hardly forgo the
crudest sorts of intimidation.
The uncertainties of the American commitment, and
Washington's demonstrated relative indifference to the
military balance in Europe, have led Bonn to its own initiatives to protect its interests: the call for the strengthening of European middle-range nuclear capacity, and, at
the same time, for negotiations for the reduction and re·
balancing of Soviet and NATO theater nuclear forces.
Bonn counts on both reinforcement and negotiation, the
United States tends to stress reinforcement. Is the coali·
tion yielding to pacifist tendencies that hold sway inside
the Social-Democratic Party? Certainly. But realistic considerations also guide it: the stationing of middle-range
nuclear arms on her territory that spares West Germany
neither political pressures nor destruction in the event of
nuclear war, will serve as a bargaining chip for the West in
the negotiations-negotiations that, thanks to Helmut
Schmidt's diplomacy in Moscow in June 1980, will open
without preconditions.
Both the relative success of the chancellor's mission to
Moscow and President Carter's suspicion beforehand that
the chancellor might trade his commitments for the proposal or acceptance of a moratorium 12 served only to reinforce a sense of isolation in West Germany, a sense that it
could hardly count on its American ally (not to mention
the disturbing effect of the failure of the raid in April1980
to save the hostages in Tehran).
Even more serious, the West Germany that doubted
the authority and efficacy of American leadership, also
61
�was losing faith in American values~at least in its conception of American values. The United States no longer
held a fascination for West German elites. 13 With the
United States itself in the throes of self-doubt how was it
to escape such disillusion? Such circumstances make it
easier to understand the government's and public opinion's tardy and lukewarm show of solidarity with Washington during the winter of 1979-1980. In their criticisms of
American policy and sometimes of the bases of Atlantic
solidarity, the West Germans seem unobtrusively to give
way to indifference to the Atlantic Alliance and to retreat
upon themselves 14 Those under twenty, significantly,
tend more to neutralism than their seniors.
This indifference and withdrawal is no easier to reverse
because concealed. Even if the new U.S. administration
succeeds in the restoration of America's political and
moral authority, and, at the same time, in respecting the
wishes of her allies, West Germany will no longer be the
model ally, Washington's right arm. As we have seen, the
Ostpolitik and the changes in the international system in
the seventies have combined to fashion a stronger, more
independent, and more self-confident Federal Republic of
Germany.
Until very recently, Bonn still refused a role consonant
with her power. In May 1978, Helmut Schmidt declared
at the U.N., "I speak in the name of a country that is neither able nor desires to assume the role of a Great Power."
Under a constant barrage of criticism for almost thirty
years, called too Atlanticist or not enough, too revanchist
or too accommodating toward the East, Bonn steered a
middle course without making waves. Barely two years
ago, however, the chancellor took to different words: he
demanded heavier responsibilities and a greater role for
his country. Even public opinion in West Germany conceives a powerful Federal Republic, more readily than in
the past-20 percent for enormous, 47 percent for great,
influence on the international scene15 All this has not
kept the government, nor in all likelihood public opinion,
from recognition of the limits of this influence, particularly in its relations with Eastern Europe, and of the political and moral constraints that still weigh upon its actions
-limitations that Bonn and the people sometimes find irritating. In contrast to the fifties and sixties, West German leaders dare assert themselves among their allies at
the same time that they exercise the greatest discretion in
t!Jeir dealings with the countries of Socialist Europe-all
in all a curious reversal.
The contrast between confidence toward the West and
timidity toward the East, the distortions that come of the
combination of economic might and military weakness,
the ambiguities of the Federal Republic's international
role, drive the Germans to question themselves. Once the
first enthusiasms faded-the enthusiasm for reconstruction under the auspices of the pax americana and the enthusiasm for a certain conception of Europe-the erosion
of the myth of economic invulnerability and a certain disenchantment with Social Democracy opened the way to
62
the uncertainty and insecurity that, according to Richard
Lowenthal, springs of cultural and political rootlessness. 16
The search for identity, with certain intellectuals as selfappointed scouts, compounds in Germany the malaise
general in Western democracies. My analysis, if correct,
should hardly occasion retrospective surprise-at least insofar as in the last ten years the Ostpolitik has encouraged
inter-German contacts and rekindled the concern of West
Germans for the Germans in the East. That the East German United Socialist Party's (SED) policy of ideological
demarcation-Abgrenzung-with its transplantation of
undesirable East German intellectuals to West Germany
has revived the awareness of German identity and the
search for it-that would be an irony of history. The
search for identity does not, however, necessarily amount
to the desire for national unity-as the declarations of
Guenther Gaus, former permanent representative to East
Berlin, and the public debate that followed tend to show.
Strong but vulnerable, faced with equally unsatisfactory
alternatives when it comes to political and military security, still afflicted with a "deficit in legitimacy" and with a
loss of cultural identity, West Germany is in some sense
an actor in search of a role. There is no certainty that she
will find this role either in a political union of Europe that
Walter Scheel and Hans-Dietrich Genscher recently did
what they could to revive or in the Franco-German dimension. Based on real but limited complementarities,
the Franco-German marriage rests on a double misunderstanding. West Germany, without doubt, relies more than
France on the Atlantic Alliance and on the continuation
of American protection. The defense of her national interests, however, which lie in Central Europe, will drive her
to greater Gaullism than France. It is a paradox that a
greater consciousness of her own interests and of her distinctive particularity could very well lead the Federal Republic to a certain kind of "finlandization." 17
Translated by Lisa Simeone, Philip Holt and
Preston Niblack
1. See especially Fritz Ullrich Fack, "Der Nebellichtet sich," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 23, 1980, and "1st das Friedenspolitik?"
FAZ, May 23, 1980.
2. Raymond Aron, "L'hegemonism sovietique: An I," Commentaire 11,
Autumn 1980, 358. (translation in The St. John's Review, Summer 1981,
20).
3. Poll said to have been made in March 1980 at the request of the
Chancellor. Cited with no further reference by the weekly Der Spiegel,
18, 1980, "Mit den Amerikanern nicht in den Tod."
4. I rely here on polls conducted by Emnid (especially those reported in
Informationen, Emnid-Institut, 5, 1980) and by the lnstitut fur
Demoskopie Allensbach (files).
5. See especially Werner Kaltefleiter, "Germans, Friendlier but Apprehensive," Public Opinion, March-May 1979, 10-12. See also Gebhard
Schweigler, "Spannung und Entspannung: Reaktionen im Westen," in
the excellent collection of Josef Fullenbach and Eberhard Schulz (eds.\
Entspannung am Ende (Munich 1980). Schweigler gives the following
characterization of German pUblic opinion: "Because of the complexity
of West German security policy, public opinion in the Federal Republic
appears to hide its head in the sand in blind reliance on NATO's deterence."
WINTER 1982
�6. See the Emnid poll in Der Spiegel, March 2, 1981, and the poll in Le
Point 442, March 9, 1981; The International Herald Tribune, April14,
1980.
7. Even if the government, despite earlier commitments, is not prepared to devote 3 percent of its gross national p[oduct to military spending.
8. Pierre Hassner, "Western European Perceptions of the USSR,"
Daeddlus, Winter 1979, 114.
9. The first assessment of the Ostpolitik in Die Zeit, December 14, 1973.
10. In the winter of 1980-81 the government-more particularly, the
Minister of Foreign Affairs-showed some firmness (at the heart of the
common market) in dissuading the Soviet Union from intervening.
11. Cf. the lecture Helmut Schmidt gave on October 28, 1977, at the Institute of Strategic Studies in London.
12. President Carter suspected that Chancellor Schmidt, who declared
himself in favor of a three-year moratorium, actually wanted to put an
indefinite freeze on the deployment of tactical forces in Europe.
13. See Gunter Gillessen, "Defiziten im deutsch-amerikanischen Verhalltnis," FAZ, July 31, 1979, as well as Martin Hillenbrand, former U.S.
ambassador to West Germany; "The United States and Germany" in
West Gennan Foreign Policy, 1949-1979, Wolfram Hanreider ed., Boulder,
Colorado, 73. See also the recent article by the Vice-President of the
Bundestag, Annemarie Renger, "Das Buendnis an einer Wegmarke,"
FAZ, April4, 1981.
14. See the words of Guenter Grass, Sarah Kirsch, Thomas Brasch, and
Peter Schneider to the Social-Democrats of Schleswig-Holstein: "Don't
let the American government that since the war in Vietnam, has lost
the right to launch moralizing appeals, draw you into (a policy that could
lead to the destruction of all life on this planet)." Quoted in "mit den
Amerikanern nicht in den Tod," Der Spiegel, 18, April 28, 1980.
15. R. Wildenmann poll, cited by Martin and Silvia Greiffenhagen, Ein
schwieriges Vaterland: Zur politschen Kultur Deutschlands, Munich 1979,
315. See also Dieter Bossmann, Schueler ueber die Einheit der Nation,
Frankfurt-am-Main 1978, 249.
16. Richard Lowenthal, "Incertitudes allemandes," Commentaire, 6, 979.
17. As Fritz Stern has aptly observed, "Germany in a Semi-Gaullist Europe," Foreign Affairs, Spring 1980. For a plea to anchor West Germany
in the Franco-German community within a united Europe and in the
Atlantic Alliance, Joseph Rovan, "De !'Ostpolitik a l'auto-neutralisation?," Politique Internationale, 10, Winter 1980-81, 85-100.
Io
Under a cloud, milky she stood,
Garlanded, surprised by her cow
Voice after love, and by his wife
In a fine rage planning revenge,
Skillful as Maupassant. The gadFly stung her beauty lumbering
Inside bovine embarrassment
To lurch through a sea she hardly
Noticed, though it was named for her.
A long time galloping, her flowers
Withered as an old joke, she came
To seed on Egypt, so arid.
That good girl, transformed by the careLessly human god-his quick loveLay in the hot desert, panting
Slow birth on monumental sand
Where every grain seemed in the heat
An eye watching her terrible
And unprivate delivering.
lAURENCE JOSEPHS
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
63
�Kekkonen, the "Finlandizer"
Indro Montanelli
One of the few voices that rose in protest on March 12,
1940, when the government in Helsinki announced that
Finland, bled dry after four months of heroic resistance,
had sued Russia for armistice, was the voice of a deputy of
the agrarian party. Urho Kekkonen said that Finland's sur·
render turned the blood split up to then into a "useless
sacrifice.''
I was not surprised. I knew him. A man of the people,
son of a game warden, Kekkonen had fought as a boy un·
der the flag of Mannerheim in the war of liberation from
Russia in 1919. His nationalism even drove him to a bit of
sympathy for fascism. He wanted war to the death, "heroic
suicide." I thought that such ideas would not get him very
far in the politics of a country that, abandoned by the West
and overwhelmed, had to resign itself to the role of satellite of the U.S.S.R.
I was much surprised, therefore, at the news in 1956 that
he had succeeded Paasikivi to the presidency of the Re·
public. With some worry-for I am a great friend and admirer of Finland-I asked myself how the Russians would
take it. As it turned out the Russians took it so well that
for twenty-five years they not only put up with the presidency of Kekkonen but urged his reelection-and now are
doing all they can to delay his retirement.
I do not know how Kekkonen, with his political past,
won their confidence. But I cannot conceive he resorted
to duplicity, because he did not have it in his character.
For he had not only the shrewdness, but also the abrupt
straightforwardness of a peasant. And perhaps it was just
this abrupt straightforwardness that won him the respect
of the arrogant victor. In 1950 Paasikivi, who knew men,
entrusted him with negotiations on which the survival of
Finland depended-negotiations that had failed two years
before. The story goes that Stalin took to him among other
reasons because of his capacity to hold his liquor, which
even the Finns considered phenomenal. In any case, for
the agreement he brought home, Kekkonen received the
reward of the office of prime minister. From that moment
Paasikivi of his own accord arranged to leave him his own
office, the presidency of the Republic.
Kekkonen assumed the presidency in 1956 at an espe·
cially dramatic moment. The government of Finland had
One of the great journalists of Europe, Indro Montanelli is editor and
founder, nine years ago, of the important newspaper, Il Giornale Nuovo.
This article first appeared in II Giornale Nuovo on October 16, 1981.
64
refused to allow the Soviet government to station troops
in Finland, and Moscow had broken diplomatic relations
with Helsinki, a move taken for a prologue to invasion. At
the Kremlin Kekkonen succeeded in fixing things up. But
four years later the crisis broke out again. Kekkonen
showed up alone in Novosibirsk for a stormy, nine~hour
exchange with Khrushchev. In Moscow there were ru·
mours that they had also let loose with slaps. Questioned,
Kekkonen replied only: "I was not slapped." Even if the
story is not true, the fact that it was told tells quite a bit
about Kekkonen's diplomacy in the face of the Russians.
In the last twenty-five years Kekkonen has done his best
to "finlandize" Finland. He had no other choice-and he
succeeded. Finland is the only satellite of the Soviet Union
where fundamental democratic liberties are respected and
whose door is open to the West.* I do not think that this
miracle is all Kekkonen's doing. Above all it is Finland's
doing and the doing of what even Kekkonen in his youth·
ful nationalistic extremism had called "the useless sacrifice." In fact nothing was more useful than that sacrifice.
Because of it Finland was not erased from the political
map of Europe like the three other Baltic countries, Esto·
nia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In those four months of hellish
winter war on the isthmus of Karelia, the Russians learned
at their own expense of what stuff the Finns were made
and that they could not take their subjection for granted.
Just this always escapes the promoters of the "finlandiza·
tion" of Europe. They forget that to finlandize themselves
the Finns in twenty-five years have dared look Russian
might three times in the face-in 1919, in 1939, and in
1941; that they have inflicted unforgettable defeats and
losses on those unspeakable battlefields; that they sacri·
ficed the best of the best of two generations. And defeated,
they did not bow their heads. The victors demanded trials
11
of War criminals." Instead of suffering a Nuremberg trial,
the marshall who led them against the Russians three times
became president of the Republic. The Finns found only
one "war criminal," Tanner, a former Social Democratic
minister whom they sentenced to ten years. Upon his re·
lease they reelected him deputy and president of the party.
*On February 5, 1982, in the General Assembly at the United Nations,
Finland along with all the free nations of Europe (except for Austria,
Spain, and Turkey, who abstained, and Greece, who voted in favour)
and the United States, Canada, Israel, Japan, Australia, New Zealand,
and Fiji-twenty-one in all-voted against a resolution punishing Israel
for the extension of jurisdiction to the Golan Heights.-LR
WINTER 1982
�As for the Communists, they were and remain a minorityand outside the government. Even' the Russians trust
Kekkonen more than the Communists.
There is no finlandization without Finns. In other
hands-for love of my country I shall not name names-it
does not take much to imagine what would become of
"finlandization": the rush to servileness, zeal outdoing
zeal, bulgarization.
According to news from Helsinki coming through Stockholm, Kekkonen, eighty years old and suffering from a
stroke, is now providing-with deliberation-for his succession. I do not think there is much to worry about. For
even if the finlandizer goes, Finland remains.
Translated by Leo Raditsa
HEPHAESTUS
Thrown away, damaged, thrown down, falling
Broken, limited except the hands, eyes;
Only the will intact, the need braced against
Those wrong legs, ugly and mechanically bad.
Still godlike, inventive craftsman holding
Metals in the indestructible brazier, that flame
Tempering what could be tempered-not his legsBut unchangeable beauty; and seeing it,
Praising it in the armor of the beautiful doomed!
Of Achilles who wept for love in the pursuit of glory.
Hephaestus the gifted dwarf, the talented lover
Of the garb of beauty, striking gold shell
To curve with his skill, grown warm
Over the breast of the more fortunate hero
In whose fame, in whose sulking annointment
The sound of the hammer rang like bells in a dream.
LAURENCE JOSEPHS
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
65
�Mozart's Cherubino
Wye Jamison Allanbrook
Cherubino makes his first entrance in Le nozze di
Figaro midway through the first act, as Susanna is angrily
reflecting on the pretensions of her old enemy Marcellina,
the Countess's blue-stocking governess, after an angry encounter with her:
Va' Ia, vecchia pedante,
Dottoressa arrogante!
Perche hai /etta due libri,
E seccato Madama in
gioventu .. . '
Cherubino brings with him a literary aura of a gentler sort:
while Marcellina clings to pedantry as the emblem of her
superiority, lovestruck Cherubino is not learned, but a
natural poet. He hands Susanna a love song which he has
written, either to one woman or to all (when she asks him
what to do with it, he gives her leave, "with transports of
joy" as the stage directions have it, to read it to every
woman in the palace 2). When she chides him for his impetuousness,3 he answers her in song. Unlike ''Voi che
sapete" -Cherubino's rendition, in Act II, of his own
composition, accompanied by Susanna on the Countess's
guitar-the lovely "Non so pili" is not intended as a real
performance. Yet it has much in common with the later
aria-staged-as-love-song.
Obvious similarities are their closely related key signatures C'Non so pill" in Eb major, ''Voi che sapete" in Bb),
their duple meters, and the prominence in them both of
winds and horns. But, more significantly, in an opera
whose arias are dominated by dance rhythms both pieces
are clearly meant to be apprehended as sung poems, "Non
so pill" as well as HVoi che sapete," even though in the
first case the plot does not suggest an actual performance.
Not measured gestures, but measured words seem to be
the native element of Cherubino's song.
This article comes from a book, The Motion of Character: Rhythmic
Gesture in "Le noz:ze di Figaro" and "Don Giovanni," that the University
of Chicago Press will publish in the fall of 1983.
66
Cherubino's nature unfolds gradually in the course of
the first two acts. A page in Almaviva's castle and probably the Countess's godchild,' at first he seems just a minor character, a member of a detachable subplot. Yet he
ultimately acquires transcendent importance as a touchstone for all the other characters in the opera.
The three principle occasions one has for observing
him in the first two acts are these two solo arias and,
strangely enough, a scene in which he himself is entirely
mute-his romp with Figaro at the end of Act I, "Non
pili andrai," where Figaro playfully initiates the boy into
the joys of war. When Cherubino's "second nature" is
made explicit, it becomes clear that this brilliant march
aria is actually a hymn to the young page, to his figure and
to his powers. But it is necessary first to examine Cherubino's literary idiom: to establish that it is indeed literary,
in HNon so pill" especially, and to discover what its
precise resonances are.
"Non so pili" is divided into two sections. The text of
the first half of the aria consists of two stanzas each containing three ten-syllable lines, and a fourth with nine
syllables:
Non so piu cosa son, cosa faccio . . .
Or di fuoco, ora sono di ghiaccio . . .
Ogni donna cangiar di colore,
Ogni donna mi fa palpitar.
Solo ai nomi d'amor, di diletto
Mi si turba, mi s'altera if petto,
E a par/are mi sforza d'amore
Un desio ch 'io non posso spiegar/5
In rhyme scheme the two stanzas are united by end
rhyme-aabc, ddbc. The first three lines of each stanza
have f~minine rhymes, but the c rhyme (palpitar, spiegar)
is masculine. Mozart sets the poem in a quick alia breve
(2/2) with a single bass note "plucked" on every beat
while the other strings 11 Strum" an accompaniment-the
WINTER 1982
�orchestra is a stand-in for the performer's guitar. Traditionally in popular musical settings pf Italian poetry the
metrical foot (anapests here) established the basic rhythm
of each member, while the number of syllables dictated
the primary and secondary stresses and the cadence;6 the
same principle seems to be in operation here. A rhythmic
germ with an anapestic shape
is repeated three times in each line, with a secondary
stress on the third syllable and a primary stress and cadence on the ninth. Each of the first three lines closes
with a feminine ending
JJ/JDJOjJJ
but the anapest is preserved in the fourth for a masculine
ending and thus a full stop. In order to direct attention to
its integrity as a unit line of a poem, each line is carefully
set off from the next by a quarter note rest: 7
/
'~:p
f
f
Example l
Furthermore, all repetitions are of)"hole lines, and not of
single words or phrases abstracted from their lines, as
would frequently occur in most arias.
All these elements work together toward the apprehension of the regular poetic rhythms of the aria. But there is
a musical problem with a series of lines or a series of stanzas:
"one thing after another" militates against the dramatic
curve of a piece which gives it conviction of a beginning,
middle, and end. In a poem read aloud, meaning, and to a
lesser extent rhythmic variations, provide a sense of crisis
and resolution where it is wanted (as it is not always in a
lyric poem). But in an operatic aria, particularly in Classic
music where climax always has to do with the dramatization of a departure from and return to a certain harmonic
place, a series of lines does not make a period, nor a series
of stanzas a fully shaped whole.; Mpzart always has to alter
the line and verse forms slightly to provide the contractions in .the material, the critical imbalance which creates
the demand for balance-regularity- to return. To shape
the first stanza into a period, Mozart works an augmentation, with syncopation, on the anapes_tic line:
original phrase:
in augmentation:
with syncopation:
n IJ n
J Jl IJ
J J IJ J J ]J J J IJ
J J ]JJ J fJ J..l']J
This transmutation of the regular anapests permits a
sense of closure at stanza's end while still carrying a suggestion of the poetic meter of the verse.
The second stanza raises the problem of the shaping of
the larger-scale formal elements of the aria. The usual
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
plan of an aria in Classic music begins with a statement of
the home key and then modulates to the key a fifth above
it, the dominant (this corresponds to the conventional
term ((exposition" of a "sonata form"). It then moves back
to the home key, or tonic, either directly or after a motion
through a few other keys in order to diffuse the power of
the dominant. This motion through foreign keys (the "development" of a sonata form) I call the X-section.8 Mozart
decides to locate the rhythmic crisis of "Non so piu" early,
in the move to the dominant, and creates it by first exaggerating regularity, then breaching it. He sets the first two
lines of the new stanza carefully as lines of poetry, but in a
somewhat different manner than before: the short syllables of the head anapest are lengthened to occupy an entire measure, a metrical adjustment which doubles the
breathing space between unit lines (two beats instead of
one), and results in leisurely-musically uncompellingphrases of 3 + 3:
IJ. Jli n J n !J J 3 ~IJ.JIJ JJJ OIJJ 3>1
These relaxed phrases, however, create a launching pad
for the motion to the second key area, a motion which is
paralleled by a transformation of the poetic diction which
is charming and dramatically apt. His words about the
movements of his own passion move Cherubino out of
the measured artifice of his verse to sing in a more direct
and passionate style. The three-measure phrases quicken
to urgent and breathless two-measure units,9 the harmony, also quickening, darkens to a diminished seventh
chord on the word desio ("desire"), 10 and desio is itself repeated a fourth higher as the Eli slips down to an Eb and
the beginning of a strong Bb cadential formula:
'"
]f,
r'
x•
Example 2
The repetition of the word desio is governed by an exclusively musical necessity: for the first time in the aria a single word is repeated, lifted from its unit length of poetry,
and it weakens the illusion that the singer is performing a
canzona. But it brings a passionate intensity to this important cadence which would be lacking if the strumming
metrical regularity were retained. Thus in retrospect the
introduction of the leisurely three-measure line length at
the beginning of this period serves to intensify the effect
of the contractions of desire at its final cadence. The great
wit in this manipulation lies in Mozart's realization that
after the lulling regularity of the poetic lines phrases measured purely musically-"aria-style" -would appear as
the accents of true passion, rendering the final cadence
on the dominant "heartfelt" and thus structurally strong. II
67
�"Non so pill" has no formal X~section, moving immedi~
ately back to Eb and a repetition of the opening period. (A
detail in the bass line of that repetition is further confirmation that Mozart intended the aria to be apprehended
as sung verse, as opposed to dance or declamation. At the
opening the bass played only roots of chords, as if to stress
the affinity of the orchestra with a "giant guitar" playing a
simple chordal accompaniment. Since by the return of
the tonic the poetic form is firmly established, the bass
can be put to a different use; compare the following measures with the bass line of example number 1:
1'1·
51
W.'bt• 1 "I p ra II $J ~lh p
jt' J sIr '-
Example 3
In the return the bass has been freed from its mimetic role
to add some contrapuntal interest, implying that it was
under some constraint before.) The fifty-one measures
ending with the repetition of the opening material represent the main body of the aria, a strophic song adapted by
clever modifications to the exigencies of the key area process. The forty-nine measures which remain, an extended
coda, introduce Cherubino the poet's special subject matter-the pastorale. Its text moves Jove out into the country:
Par!o d'amor veg!iando,
Parlo d'amor sognando:
A!l'acque, a!l'ombre, ai manti,
Ai /ion; al!'erbe, ai fonti,
A!l'eco, a!l'arta, ai venti
Che if suon de' vani accenti
Portano via con se."
The second time through, the text is set to a musette with
tonic pedal point, Cherubino and the violins taking the
skirl (ms. 72-80):
Example 4
The pastoral affect, which comes to dominate the opera
in its last two acts, makes a modest entrance here. Cherubino, the young court page, would surely have read or
heard some pastoral poetry. Here he mimics his models,
naively imitating Tasso, perhaps, or another Italian poet
of the pastoral mode. Yet the literary reference, and its
support in Mozart's canzona-like setting of the text, are
not merely for the sake of a convincing characterization of
the youthful poet. In "Voi che sapete" the literary frame
broadens to include Dante, and Cherubino's donne, by
then no longer the vague generality "Women" but clearly
68
Susanna and the Countess, will receive from him homage
of a more profound sort. In "Non so piu" the tremulous
youth who, if no one else will listen, tells his love to himself," becomes a creature in his own pastoral landscape;
the poet is rightly not quite at home within the narrow
bounds of Almaviva's castle.
Cherubino sings the canzona of his own composition
early in Act II, at the behest of Susanna, who is anxious
to comfort the Countess after some tactless words of
Figaro's have left her sad and distracted. Furious at the
Count, Figaro speaks with cruel banter to the Countess
about the Count's attempts to seduce Susanna. He exits
after having enjoined the two women to help him in a plot
to humiliate the Count which may involve new dangers
and humiliations for the Countess, for to set it in motion
the Count will receive an anonymous note about an assignation which the Countess has supposedly made with a
lover. To draw her mistress's attention away from her
troubles, Susanna suggests that Cherubino perform his
composition; the diversion is a welcome one, for Cheru~
bino wants to pay court to the Countess and the Countess
to put her unfaithful husband from her mind. Susanna indulges them both in a moment of loveplay, her indulgence in itself an act of Jove.
The loveplay must, however, be merely an innocent
tableau. It is crucial to da Ponte's and Mozart's conception of their story that the relationship between Cherubino and the Countess be treated less suggestively than it
was in Beaumarchais's original. They took pains to eliminate certain passages from Le mariage de Figaro which
suggested more than a delicate flirtation between the two.
Whereas in Le mariage the Countess often seems to be
hesitating between two lovers, in the opera Cherubino is a
pet, and never a real source of temptation. In Act II, scene
iii, of the play the Countess excitedly prepares herself for
Cherubino's arrival as one would for a lover. Da Ponte in
the corresponding scene (the recitative before this aria)
has her instead sadly lament the improprietous conversations Cherubino overheard when he hid in the chair in
Act I. He omits a scene from the Beaumarchais (IV, viii)
between the Countess and the Count in which the
Countess expresses surprising anguish over the departure
of Cherubino from the castle. The text of "Voi che
sapete" is another of da Ponte's interpolations. In Le
mariage Cherubino sings, to the tune "Malbroug s' en
va't'en guerre," a ballad-like poem about a particular lad's
intense devotion to his godmother. Da Ponte's text, on
the other hand, is conventional and impersonal, addressed
not to one donna, but to the collective donne:
Voi che sapete
Che cosa e amor,
Donne, vedete
S'io l'ho ne! cor. 14
WINTER 1982
�The change is a material one: it is important to Mozart's
conception of Cherubino's role in the opera that he be
more "in love with love" than with any particular object
of his desires.
Again, as in "Non so pili/' the text is plainly a poem,
consisting of seven four-line stanzas with abab rhyme
schemes:
2. Quello ch'io provo
f::i ridiro;
E per me nuovo,
Capir no! so.
5. Ricerco un bene
3. Sento un affetto
6. Sospiro e gemo
Pien di desir
Ch'ora e diletto,
Ch'ora e martir.
Senza vo!er,
Palpito e tremo
Senza saper,
4. Ge!o, e poi sen to
L'alma avvampar,
E in un momenta
Torno a gelar.
Fuori dime,
Non so chi'/ tiene,
Non so cos'e.
7. Non trovo pace
nario had a characteristic stress on the fourth syllable, and
was often set as a galliard: IJ J J IJ J I .16
Mozart's musical line reflects the same stress, although
not the galliard's triple rhythms:
These two measures constitute a unit length, corresponding to one line of poetry, which will be deployed in various
multiples as the aria progresses.
The first verbal stanza-and first period-consists of
four of these lengths (eight measures), brought to closure
by a four-measure cadential phrase (ms. 17-20). The first
two measures of this phrase are poetically anomalous,
smoothing over the quinario rhythms to provide a rhythmic and melodic climax which drives home the cadence,
and its second two measures are a rhythmic rhyme with
the second of the unit lengths:
Notte ne di:
Ma pur mi piace
Languir cos/. 15
Its sentiments are pure Cherubino. Again, as in "Non so
pili/' Mozart must set the poem as a convincing song, unw
derlining its literary origin. Furthermore, since in "Voi
che sapete" opera's great artifice and the reality are oneCherubino is actually meant to be singing-the stanzaic
nature of the piece must be more than just a suggestion.
Yet a straight strophic construction with the same music
repeated seven times will be monotonous, while the usual
key-area plan is too dramatic, obscuring by its spirited
curve the necessary poetic element of formal repetition.
Mozart solves the problem in much the same way as he
did in "Non so piil," combining the key-area plan with
outlines of stanzas asserted by attention to the configurations of Italian metrics. In "Voi che sapete," however, the
solution is even more of a triumph. Neither element is
submerged at the appearance of the other, and Mozart's
attention to the detail of the text is exquisite.
In 2/4 meter, Andante, "Voi che sapete" opens with a
gesture which could in theory be a slow contredanse:
But the stately harmonic rhythm of the opening, underlined by the plucking of Susanna's guitar (pizzicati in all
the strings), militates against the usual rhythmic excitement and compression of a key-area dance form. Cheru·
bino's music is ingenuous and leisurely, lacking the urgency
of dance. Clearly at the outset the principles of syllable
count and of the integrity of a unit line of poetry set the
limits. "Voi che sapete" uses the five-syllable line or quinario (the second and fourth lines of each stanza are quinarios with the fifth syllable verbally but not musically
mute-it is sounded in the orchestral introduction). QuiTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
In the truncated orchestral introduction this cadential
phrase serves as a neat consequent member for two unit
lengths:
I~'"
~~:;-
,~~~ &1 1Ipr1IrIJI11 r 'I Q' f3 •Iiii' iJrl r jj1i It rt zj
,
anl.u.At..f
J t
c.tnJ'<!flt"'"f-
I
Example 5
Once one knows the aria, however, the consequent
sounds tacked on: it is clear that the introduction is a compression and that the proper mode of the aria is the expansive spinning-out of poetic stanzas rather than the
antecedent-consequent symmetries of dance. After the
first period the consequent will be withheld until the two
crucial moments of closure which remain-the end of the
"exposition" and the final cadence of the aria. All the
other stanzas will be left open-ended, "poetically," rather
than "musically" conceived.
The second poetic stanza (ms. 21-28) moves to the
dominant of the dominant, F major, preserving the rhythm
of the preceding stanza's first eight measures except for a
few small variations. The modulation introduces the first
dark harmony of the piece, a d-minor triad, aptly on the
word nuovo ("new") for a nice poetic touch. The third
poetic stanza opens in F major, the proper key of the sec·
ond key area. Once the dominant has been achieved, all
that is lacking is the characteristic confirmation of the
new harmonic place. This stanza, like the second consisting of eight measures modelled on measures 9-16, only
postpones confirmation. Each four-measure member
ends on the dominant of F major, and the interest of the
69
�stanza is in a madrigalistic touch-a pretty painting of the
contrast between diletto and martir ("pleasure" and "torment"): diletto receives an ornamental division, while
Cherubino's warblings turn dark ori the word martn (an
f-minor chord and an augmented sixth), as the pretty
youth sings prettily of the pangs of love:
~
~
"'
Cl.'o#I'JI. ~ .11- kf·fto
..1_1_
'F ;r'
:I-
!-Jl
~
~
j•,
J,l·-~-~
J .L
""t-
*·
\r
Example 6
The conventional pathos of the turn is delicately comic.
The next stanza constitutes one of the critical moments
in the juggling of musical and poetic priorities, the problem being how to bring the second key area to an emphatic
close while preserving a sense of the repetition natural to
a strophic song. At this moment in "Non so piu" Mozart
breached poetic regularities, having first rather exaggerated them. Here he takes the opposite tack, violating a
firmly established principle of the key-area plan by closing
the exposition in an alien key. At the outset of the new
stanza (m. 37) the bottom of the C-major triad (V of F)
drops out:
The X-section begins with a harmonic move toG minor
and a new stanza-the fifth one-in rhythm essentially
resembling the second and third:
In ''\nnlJ. \
• Jfl ffflh nn !D Jn
' J n n J, J n !H J lffl .fff'lll J
; J n Jm J J n J J n J ; J
n
n
J~
J>
ms. 21-28
ms. 29-36
ms. 45-52
Again the text is apt for the harmonic motion, speaking of
Cherubino's search for a good outside of himself, the nature and whereabouts of which he does not know. G
minor is conventionally "outside" the place just abandoned, and the modulation to it is open-ended,_ "searching" (passing through G as V of C ~nd then backmg up to
a G tonic through an augmented stxth to D). But the ftrm
harmonic cadence at the end of the stanza (stanzas 2 and
3 both ended on a dominant, not a tonic) gives the lie to
the charmingly melodramatic words of Cherubino's
quest, settling gently back in a harmonic place and reasserting by its sing-song rhythmic rhyme the frame of the
poem.
In "Non so piu" Mozart disturbed the regular poetic
rhythm during the move to the dominant, balancing that
gesture against the return and expansive pastoral coda.
The balance is different in "Voi che sapete:" the rhythmic crisis helps to weight the eighteen measures of thereturn against the forty-four measures of "exposition." Now
for the first time the repetitive trochees
IJnJJJI
- "I_.,
Example 7
The entire stanza is set in Ab major, a key with a remote
and cool relation to the tonality of the aria. The strange
modulation is suited to the text-Cherubino's description
of the fire and ice of infatuation-and rationalized by the
repetition of the four-measure consequent which closed
the first period: it makes here a solid rhythmic rhyme back
to that cadence in order to counterbalance the harmonic
aberration. Thus by a brilliant manipulation of the elements which he set up as "musical" and "poetic" premises at the beginning of the aria, Mozart has managed a
convincing close to the second key area without at all
abandoning metrics. The strange key (a side-slipping modulation instead of the usual drama of the move up to the
dominant) and the eight-measure rhythmic rhyme-yet
another stanza-are unconventionally undramatic. (Literal end rhyme between the first and second key areas is
unusual, since the dramatic point of the new key area is
the movement to the new harmonic place.) Yet the fourmeasure consequent-marked as having a umusical"
function because it diverges just enough from the regular
strophic rhythms to act as a closing gesture-can still signal forcefully the end of a major formal section. Thus the
second key area of the canzona is dramatic in asserting an
essentially undramatic gesture-the rhythmic repetitions
of verse.
70
and the constant four-measure units lose their hold. Urgent and breathless sixteenth notes with an iambic stress~ffliR J' 'ffllh• fflifl J' nfl'ljl'
... - I .. -1"' - I "'-/
begin a long-arched nine-measure phrase which culminates
on the dominant (m. 61). Five of these iambic phrases ornament a chromatic scale in the bass which overshoots
the dominant by one note. A four-measure trochaic unit
length emerges from the iambs and the phrase backs
down to F, the dominant of Bb, ending in a harmonic and
rhythmic rhyme with stanzas 2 and 3. The text is appropriately breathless; for the first time two stanzas constitute one sentence, and the antitheses pile up to a climax;
"I sigh and moan without wanting to, I quiver and tremble without knowing it, I find no peace night or day, and
yet it pleases me to languish this way." These two stanzas
of text are crammed into the nine measures of music. The
rhyme, which provides a mimetic pause on languir (vii' of
V, m. 60) restrains their breathy passion;
/
..
.....
~
/1""*""~ ..
:
"'
r· e* ,..f-k ~ J,:
Jo.'f
p«r ,.;
..
.. "
.,.
,,,_ .,-k
(1-
"
~
Example 8
WINTER 1982
�Cherubino seems for a moment to step outside his formal
song, overwhelmed with emotion. Yet his outburst does
not violate the studied dramatic effects of a charming !tal·
ian song, since the end rhyme once again asserts the
frame of the poem. The piece plays itself out in a return
to the tonic and to the first stanza of text -a final rhyme
both of key area and of canzona. The four·measure conse·
quent makes its third and fourth appearances to provide
the rhetoric of cadence.
Cherubino is indeed a strange invention; some specta·
tors find him repellent, others merely silly. Certainly da
Ponte and Mozart went out of their way to underline his
mixed nature. A young and blushing girl, dressed as a boy,
tremulously singing the cliches of passion with a cool and
vibrato.free voice-the creature before us must be very
special. One expects him to dance-the established rhyth·
mic idiom of the opera-and his dance turns to song. His
conventionally melodramatic gestures-the chromatic turn
on the word martir for example-suggest a moonstruck
adolescent, yet suddenly his song turns to a cool and sub·
tie Ab major, a strange and otherworldly place, laid out but
never explored. Early adolescence is a peculiarly amor·
phous time of life, when youth is androgynous and uncle·
limited-unsure of what it is or what to expect from the
people around it. Cherubino knows of himself only that
he does not know himself, and he is strikingly undiscrimi·
nating in his relationships. "I no longer know what I am,
what I do," he confesses; "every woman makes me blush,
makes me tremble." The decision to compose the role for
a young woman did more than simply ensure a convincing
portrait of adolescence, however. It kept Cherubino from
being particularized and "embodied," located in a real
place and time like the other characters in the opera. He is
the only character who is "placeless," not generated and
defined by the manners of a particular social world (which
is one reason for his failure, when left to himself, to dance,
for affecting a particular social dance gesture must mark
him as a member of a particular class). More precisely, he
off triumphantly, accompanied by an entire military band
which Figaro has summoned up from nowhere. "Non pili
andrai" is an exuberant romp for the trio (Susanna is on
stage, although she does not sing), and a coming·of·age for
a dreamy adolescent engineered by his affectionate but
realistic "older brother," Figaro.
The aria is cast in rondo form. In its main section and
first episode Figaro describes Cherubino as he is now and
in the other sections as he will be on the field of battle,
both in a comically exaggerated style. Of Cherubino now
Figaro says:
Non piu andrai, farfallone amoroso,
Notte e giomo d'intomo girando,
Delle belle turbando il riposo,
Narcisetto, Adoncino d'amor.
Non piu avrai questi bei pennacchini,
Que/ cappello leggero e galante,
Quella chioma, quell'aria brillante,
Que/ vermiglio, donnesco color."
The music to which the first stanza is set is a C·major
march in 4/4 time with a dotted upbeat. Its opening mo·
tive consists almost exclusively of C·major triads, with a
rousing military fanfare to the words "disturbing the
beauties' beauty·sleep," a musical mixed metaphor which
becomes a substantive trope both in the aria and in the
opera. Here the mixture is one of amorous language and
military music, whereas in the first episode of the rondo
(ms. l5ff.) two musical styles mingle: amorous music in·
sinuates itself into the martial ambiance. Describing
Cherubino's appearance in a gently mocking idiom, Fig·
aro alternates a gavotte rhythm with the orchestra's
march:
Viol,.,. II
/1'-..
is "out of place/' for he is not in his proper home and his
genealogy is left unclear. There is, however, one sympa·
thetic portrait of Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro which
may help to make sense of his changeling natureFigaro's description of the boy in his aria at the end of the
i>•'.ta.· .,. ...;1\Wii bo: }"'........~-
R,..,JJ
ltJJ
p
t~
d.;. ,.,.·,
I
I
T
Example 9
first act, his "battle song," "Non pill andrai."
Following the Count's announcement that Cherubino
must leave the castle, Figaro, fond of the page and amused
at-some would say jealous of-his adolescent love pangs,
wants to sweeten the bitterness of his banishment from
his amorous playground. He sings for Cherubino an aria
containing consolation, paternal advice, and encourage-
ment, interlarded with affectionate jibes at the boy's
youth and cynical comment on the nature of that glorious
endeavor, war. Since Figaro is always actor and illusionist,
Cherubino can't simply walk off to war; he must march
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
A little Adonis on his way to battle deserves a mixture of
erotic and military gestures; the march and the coy gavotte
with its pastoral and amorous connotations are a wholly
appropriate conjunction here, and Figaro revels in them.
The brief gavotte dissolves into a dominant pedal, which
calls back the original march theme (m. 31). Figaro's fancy
is afire: after repeating the march he launches an enor·
mously expanded episode (ms. 43ff.)-the description of
Cherubino at the front-returning to the same dominant
pedal and bedroom march (m. 78) and adding a coda. Orig·
71
�inally the march gesture, found p~incipally in the strings,
was merely the orchestral accompaniment; now it becomes
a presence on stage, brought to life as a real military
march. Mozart calls on the full colors of the orchestra:
strings alternate with winds and brass, including trumpets, and the tympani sound for the first time. Figaro, no
longer singing a human vocal line, imitates a trumpet
voicing battle calls:
Example lO
In measure 61 the strings drop out entirely and a full military band plays a new march, suitable for the field and not
at all singable. In the coda this field march returns, and
the stage directions read "Partono tutti alia militare;" 18 in
this playful aria about playing the imaginative has drawn
playfully near to the real, with the help of the "realistic"
rhythms and colors of music.
Figaro's description of Cherubino goes a long way toward explaining some of the paradoxes which surround
him. There is much about the "little Cherub" which
evokes another moonstruck child, an antique deity-the
figure of Eros-Cupid. The imagery of the libretto of Le
nozze di Figaro, thoroughly pastoral, is also frequently
classical. Much of this language centers around Cherubino himself; even Basilio calls him "Cherubino, Cherubin d'amore," hinting at the connection with Eros, and to
Figaro in this aria he is a "little Narcisetto, little Adonis of
love." The classical and the pastoral were for the eighteenth century two genres inextricably mixed. The shepherd-lovers of late eighteenth-century pastoral pieces are
inevitably given classical-sounding names, often drawn directly from the pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Virgil;
they are distant descendants of that tradition. At the end
of the opera Figaro is moved to draw the connection himself: just after Susanna sings her beautiful pastorale,
"Deh, vieni," musings on the theme of the correspondence between the twilight night and the state of a lover's
soul (and meant to tease Figaro for the absurdity of his distrust of her), he is drawn, coming to interrupt her purported rendezvous, ironically to style himself as Vulcan,
and Susanna and the unknown lover as Venus and Mars.
The pastoral diction and musette of "Non so pili" place
Cherubino squarely in the Arcadian tradition; as Eros he
presides over the couples in the opera-the indigenous
deity of pastoral love.
The pastoral Eros of Le nozze di Figaro is very different
from whatever Eros presides, for example, in Don Giovanni. There Eros wounds, and often disastrously; he
strikes Donna Elvira just as Virgil's Cupid cunningly
pierced the breast of Dido with a fatal love for Aeneas. In
Figaro, on the other hand, Eros is love through his very
vulnerability. In his openness to all love and love for all, he
72
touches Susanna, Figaro, and the Countess, and makes
the Count suspicious and edgy, although Almaviva is
plainly never quite sure why he should distrust the young
page. The Count ought to worry less about the possibility
of Cherubino seducing the Countess and more about the
efficacy of Cherubino's selfless brand of love, which Almaviva is incapable of comprehending. In the dogma of
Cherubino's eros, being moved by someone is equally as
important as one's own su<;cess in moving the other toward oneself. Cherubino celebrates passion in the strict
sense of the word-the joys and pains of suffering the object of one's affections to move one. When in the finale of
the second act the Count gasps out "Rosina" (II, 15, 229230), he is beginning to learn about this "being affected."
Cherubino's relationships with Susanna, the Countess,
and Figaro reveal the many facets of his special "affection." One erotic thread runs through them all: an aliveness to the physical qualities of the beloved-his walk, his
gestures, the sound of his voice-so that merely glancing
at the beloved gives one an involuntary start. Cherubino
presides over many relationships not explicitly erotic. He
is fond of Susanna, and calls her sorella ("sister"), she
dresses him up like a doll, and they banter and plot like
brother and sister. When in Act II they are caught in danger together they behave like two frightened children. Yet
Susanna affectionately appreciates Cherubino's beauty;
his physical presence moves her. "Che vezzo, che figura!/
Mirate il bricconcello,/Mirate quanta e bello!" 19 she cries.
Cherubino's affection for the Countess is more explicitly
erotic; he steals her ribbon for a magic talisman, and she is
obviously fluttered by his presence. When Susanna admires him the Countess turns away abruptly, snapping
"Quante buffonerie!"20 as though to remind herself to keep
her distance from the charming boy. Rosina is not a middleaged matron, but a young girl recently married and suffering from the inattention of a philandering husband. But, as
I have already pointed out, Mozart and da Ponte treat the
erotic side of their affection more delicately than did Beaumarchais, combining it with Cherubino's hero-worship of
his handsome and benevolent godmother; if anything,
Cherubino's stammering when he speaks to the Countess
makes her seem more matronly than she actually is.
Despite his awkwardness and naivete, his constant facility for annoying, all the characters in the opera find themselves moved in some way by this absurd child. The
Count's exasperation at Cherubino's ubiquity goes deeper
than he realizes. When he cries "E mi fara il destino/Ritrovar questa paggio in ogni loco!"21 he is only admitting to
the boy's disturbing influence on all the loves and friendships in the opera. The affection between Susanna and
the Countess also patterns itself on Cherubino's eros:
awakened by each other's admirable qualities, they move
toward each other and toward friendship. The opera is in
fact about the friendship between the two women and its
possibility-how trust and affection can exist between
two people who share nobility of character, but not of
rank. Now it can be seen more clearly why it is fitting that
WINTER 1982
�Cherubino be a poet. The androgynous Eros-Cupid, neither young nor old, male nor female, .human nor divine,
sings a song which celebrates the passions which Susanna
experiences gladly, the Countess perforce sadly, which
the Countess is too dignified, Susanna too matter-of-fact,
to express outright. The utterly conventional poetry of
"Voi che sapete" from its first line suggests another, less
conventional poet and a more serious intent: "Donne
ch'avete intelletto d'amore"22 is the first line of Dante's
sonnet sequence about the fine discipline of love, and the
abstract quality of its language is a reflection of the tradition in which erotic love sets the soul on the path to
higher things. Cherubino the poet is celebrating the two
women themselves; the opening words of his song sweep
them into his court. He identifies them as "donne che
sanno che cosa e amor, che hanna intelletto d'amore."2 3
He dubs them secular Beatrices, mediums for the workings of Eros. A special aura surrounds them; comprehend-
ing "che cosa e amor," they are gifted with a surpassing
vision of the way things are. (The Countess, it should be
pointed out, returns the compliment, in "Porgi, amor,"
her aria at the opening of Act II, addressing her petition
there to the god of love, Cherubino-Eros.) Furthermore,
by addressing the two women indiscriminately as donne,
Cherubino reveals the special bond between servant and
mistress; initiates, at least, can address them on equal
terms. This relation fittingly comes to light reflected in
the eyes of its catalyst, Cherubino d'a more.
We return in a roundabout way to Figaro and "Non pili
andrai." There exist various interpretations of what Figaro is up to in the aria. It may be perhaps just what it
seems~Figaro's attempt to divert Cherubino from the
sorrows of parting~or, as some have suggested, actually
an attack on Cherubino, teasing banter meant to rub salt
in the wounds, stemming from Figaro's jealousy of the
boy's appeal for the ladies or from a plebeian's resentment
of the aristocratic page 24 In the latter case an aside which
Figaro makes to Cherubino just before the aria~"Io vo'
parlati/Pria che tu parta"' 5 ~is taken as a bullying invitation to a later showdown, whispered so that Susanna can't
hear. That aside, however, has a further audience~the
Count and Basilio. Although many editions have them
leave the stage just before the aside, in the 1786 libretto
(and in the corresponding scene from Le mariage de Figaro) they do not leave, and indeed witness the whole of
Figaro's performance; the scene is rarely played this way,
and loses most of its significance as a result. A scrap of dialogue from the beginning of Act II, just before Cherubino
sings "Voi che sa pete," clarifies the intent of the aside immediately. Figaro is expounding to the Countess the plan
for the Count's humiliation, which involves dressing
Cherubino as Susanna and sending him to the rendezvous
with the Count. Then Figaro says to the Countess, "Il picciol Cherubino,/Per mio consiglio non ancor partito . .. " 26
He plainly wants words with the boy here in Act I not in
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
order to vent his jealousy or class resentment, but to keep
Cherubino from leaving the castle, so that they can lay
plans about the plot he mentions in Act II. Thus all
through "Non pili andrai" Figaro is foresworn to keep
Cherubino back from battle; he has no intention ofletting
the Count disturb the ornamental life of the "amorous
butterfly, flitting around night and day." In the course of
the plot the lad will have to be disguised as a maiden, but
the task takes almost no effort; already his checks have
"that blushing, womanly color." By celebrating the imminent departure as if in rueful assent to it, Figaro's affectionate romp with Cherubino is meant to keep the watching Count off the scent.
Yet the artful dodge has deeper overtones. If Cherubino is the presiding genius of the opera, offering a paradigm of the right way to love, the moment of romping joy
must be more than a sugar-coated pill for a charming
young rascal and a dodge to deceive the Count. "Non pili
andrai" establishes an important relationship between Figaro and Cherubino. Least of all is Figaro teaching Cherubino; he is describing Cherubino, celebrating CheruCherubino, and enlisting Cherubino.
In the first case, Cherubino's comportment on the
stage will not in itself spell out his "second nature." We
need the comments of another observer who will single
out details which consolidate the scattered impressions
generated by "Non so pili." We hear Cherubino called a
"little Narcissus, little Adonis of love," have our attention
drawn to his "little feathers," his "sparkling air," his
"blushing, womanly color," and our impressions are confirmed; it was right that the youth reminded us of that
other love child, the pagan cherub Eros.
Secondly, Figaro celebrates Cherubino. Susanna and
the Countess need not be embarrassed about being moved
by Cherubino, even in his guise as a page; for women to
amuse themselves decorously with the castle mascot is
perfectly proper. Figaro must also be touched by the
power of the strange youth, but to show it is for him a
more delicate matter. Both Figaro and Cherubino are
male, and while they are near the same age, Figaro has attained his manhood. On the other hand, Figaro may be a
little jealous of Cherubino's luscious youth. Circumstances
prevent their sharing the innocent playmate-friendship of
Susanna and Cherubino. Later, at the end of the opera,
Figaro turns away momentarily from the graces of the two
women, giving in to the darker passions of jealousy and
distrust. It is important that he show here that his primary
attachment is to the court of Cherubino, and not to the
selfish brotherhood of the Count and his satellites. Figaro
will rarely reveal how Cherubino moves him; a fraternal
romp in which all three join is one of the few occasions
where it is possible. Figaro shows his affection for Cherubino by exercising for the boy his imaginative talents;
"Non piu andrai" is a moment of uloveplay" between
Cherubino and Figaro.
Finally, Figaro enlists Cherubino. Figaro in his tribute
to the page admits the power of Cherubino's kind of pas-
73
�sian. Only this eros will unite all the conspirators, later on
even moving an unlikely ally like Marcellina over to their
side (when she sees Figaro as if for the first time, and is
genuinely moved by the person of her son). To arm Eros·
Cupid with arrows and shield was an ancient conceit.
Here in "Non pill andrai" Figaro is arming Cherubino,
girding him for the struggle to come. In fact the figure of
the "bedroom soldier," usually the matter of vulgar jokes,
becomes in Figaro an emblem for the righteous of the
opera and for the right kind of passion; the gentle Count·
ess moves to a mixture of lyric and military modes in
"Porgi, amor," and in the finale to Act III a ragged band of
militants for Eros executes a stirring march, the uniformed Cherubino at their head, before they outmaneuver
the Count once again. The gesture of the military march,
taking off from Cherubino's imminent field commission,
becomes a testimony to trust in the powers of human af.
fection when matched against the assailing brutishness of
men. "Amor vincit omnia": the lyrics of Cherubino the
poet celebrate this maxim in all its delicate compulsion.
l. "Go on, you old pedant, you stuck-up lady scholar; just because you
once read two books, and annoyed Madame in her youth ... " (I, v,
75- 78).
2. "Leggila alia padrona,/Leggila tu medesma,/Leggila a Barbarina, a
Marcellina,/Leggila ad ogni donna del palazzo!" ("Read it to my mistress, you read it to yourself, read it to Barbarina, to Marcellina, read it
to every woman in the palace").
3. "Povero Cherubin, siete voi pazzo?" ("Poor Cherubin, are you
mad?").
4. In the original of Le nozze di Figaro, Beaumarchais's Le mariage de
Figaro, the Countess explains that Cherubino is related to her family
and is her godchild (1, x). Da Ponte omitted the scene in which these
lines occur, but the Countess is referred to as Cherubino's comare or
godmother (by Susanna-!, v, 86). It was customary to take nobJe.born
boys into noble households as pages.
5. "I don't know what I am, what I'm doing .... Sometimes I'm on fire,
sometimes I'm all ice .... Every woman makes me blush, makes me
tremble. At the mere names of love, of pleasure, I grow agitated, my
heart skips a beat, and a desire which I cannot explain forces me to
speak of love!"
6. See Putnam Aldrich, Rhythm in Seventeenth-Century Italian Monody
New York 1966.
7. Lines three and four of the first stanza might seem to be an anomaly
in an anapestic scheme because of the string of six eighth-notes with
which they begin:
Q-.~.,; do11·n4.. CM·11'.fr- ,1; e~-/D-r~
n1nn
J JJ/JJ
But the first eighth-note on the syllable don- is an appOggiatura varying
the line by embellishing the all-important word donna; it does not distract from the underlying rhythm.
8. For a more detailed discussion of the reasons for substituting these
terms for the more conventional ones, see Leonard G. Ratner, "Harmonic Aspects of Classic Form," Journal of the American Musicological
Society 2, 1949, 159-68.
9. Measure 22, using for the first two lines the syncopation from the
earlier cadence.
10. Measure 27-vii7 ofF, the new dominant. Or the Db could be regarded as a chromatic appoggiatura to a V~ of V; the effect is the same.
ll. Ordinarily to register "truest" passion in the middle of an operatic
aria the character moves from strictly measured music to the freer
74
rhythms of recitative. For example, in the finale to the second act of
Figaro, in the midst of a spirited 4/4 interchange between the Count
and the Countess, he calls her suddenly by her Christian name and she,
deeply stung, answers him in a phrase of recitative which brings the
rhythmic action to an abrupt halt (II, 15, 230-233). In "Non so pill" the
strictly "poetic" setting is apprehended as the artifice, and the singer
need not resort to declamation to register his natural voice.
12. "I speak of love when I'm awake, I speak of love when I'm dreaming: to the water, to the shadows, to the mountains, to the flowers, to the
grass, to the fountains, to the echo, to the air, to the winds, which bear
away with themselves the sound ofthe empty syllables" (ms. 54-91).
13. "E, se non ho chi m'oda,/Parlo d'amor con me"-the last two lines
of the text of "Non so pill."
14. "Ladies, you who know what love is, see if I have it in my heart."
15. "I shall tell you again what I'm feeling; it's new for me, and I don't
know how to understand it. I have a feeling full of desire; sometimes it's
pleasure, sometimes torment. I'm cold, and then I feel my soul all
ablaze, and in a moment I'm cold again. I'm looking for a good which is
outside of me; I don't know who has it, or what it is. I sigh and moan
without wanting to, I quiver and tremble without knowing it, I find no
peace night or day, and yet it pleases me to languish this way."
16. Alddch, 103-133.
17. "No more, amorous butterfly, will you go flitting around night and
day disturbing the beauties' beauty-sleep, you little Narcissus, little
Adonis of love. No more will you have these fine little feathers, that light
and rakish cap, that sparkling air, that blushing, womanly color."
18. "All exit in military style."
19. "What a bearing, what a face! Look at the little colt, see how beautiful he is!" (II, 12, 89-92).
20. "What foolishness!" (II, 12, 119).
21. "And will destiny make me find this page everywhere!" (II, viii, 8385).
22. "Ye women who comprehend love ... "
23. "Women who know what love is, who comprehend love ... " My
sentence is a conflation of the opening line of the aria and the opening
line of Dante's poem.
24. This suggestion is made by Siegmund Levarie (Mozart's Le nozze di
Figaro: A Critical Analysis, Chicago 1952, 72), and by Frits Noske ("Social Tensions in Le nozze di Figaro," Music and Letters, January 1969,
52). Because it is important ammunition for those who see the opera as a
revolutionary comedy in the tradition of its original, and not as a pastoral
romance about the nature of true attachment, as it seems to me to have
become, this suggestion needs refutation. It depends partly on the assumption that Figaro, while he defers to Cherubino in public, addressing him in the second person plural at the beginning of this scene ("E
voi non applaudite?"), is in private insolent (he addresses Cherubino
thereafter exclusively as tu).
But since all Figaro's remarks except for one aside are overheard by
the Count and Basilio (see above), there is actually no distinction made
here between public and private. According to the original libretto, Figaro's final words to Cherubino before the aria ("Farewell, little Cherubino. How your [tuo]fate changes in a moment!") are said with feigned
joy (finta gioia)-the public prevails. Furthermore, although Cherubino
is probably of gentle birth, he is nevertheless a child, not in his proper
home, and in a position of service; ordinary protocol will probably not
apply. The issue of Cherubino's aristocracy never seems to be a live one
in his relationships with Susanna and Figaro, and so tu is no more necessarily insolent than voi defers. Susanna calls Cherubino voi perhaps for
the same reasons as the Countess does-to keep the attractive and
amorous boy at arm's length. And Figaro's tu to Cherubino is probably
affectionate, his one public voi a perfunctory attempt, before he warms
to his role as fond older brother, to conceal from the Count and Basilio
their relationship as friends and-as I shall show in a moment-future
conspirators.
25. "I want to speak to you before you leave."
26. "Little Cherubino, who on my advice has not yet left ... " (italics
mine).
WINTER 1982
�The Fury of Aeneas
Joe
The story Homer tells in the Iliad begins with the eruption of the anger of Achilles. As the twenty-fourth book of
the poem opens, that anger has reached its greatest intensity. Achilles "let fall the swelling tears, lying sometimes
along his side, sometimes on his back, and now again prone
on his face; then he would stand upright, and pace turning in distraction along the beach of the sea ... (At dawn,)
when he had yoked running horses under the chariot he
would fasten Hektor behind the chariot, so as to drag him,
and draw him three times around the tomb of Menoitios'
fallen son, then rest again in his shelter, and throw down
the dead man and leave him to lie sprawled on his face in
the dust ... So Achilleus in his fury outraged great
Hektor." (24. 9-22) The wrath which has withstood the
events of twenty-three books has swollen into a rage
which denies Achilles sleep, food, or the cessation of his
tears, a rage which breaks forth in monotonous acts of revenge which do not relieve but frustrate and provoke.
Achilles now walks the circular path at the center of anger
in which it is quenchless, infinite.
But the Iliad is not finally the story of the victory of anger over Achilles, because Zeus has one last scheme. He
arranges for Priam to visit Achilles, to stand before him
risking his wrath, to ask in person for pity. Priam kills the
anger of Achilles by displacing it with the grief of Achilles,
which can meet and merge with the grief of Priam and
come to rest in mutual comforting. Here is Homer's de~
scription of that last and least-expected turning point in
the Iliad: as Priam ends his words to Achilles, saying, " 'I
put my lips to the hands of the man who has killed my
children,' " Homer continues, 10 So he spoke, and stirred in
the other a passion of grieving for his own father. He took
the old man's hand and pushed him gently away, and the
A tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis, Joe Sachs delivered this lecture in Santa Fe on September 18, 1981, and in Annapolis on October 2,
1981.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Sachs
two remembered, as Priam sat huddled at the feet of
Achilleus and wept close for manslaughtering Hektor and
Achilleus wept now for his own father, now again for Patroklos. The sound of their mourning moved in the house.
Then when great Achilleus had taken full satisfaction in
sorrow and the passion for it had gone from his mind and
body, thereafter he rose from his chair, and took the old
man by the hand, and set him on his feet again, in pity for
the grey head and the grey beard, and spoke to him and
addressed him in winged words." (24. 506-17)
Book twenty-four ends with one last Homeric dawn, in
which the doomed people of Troy celebrate the burial of
their beloved Hector with fitting ceremonies and a glorious feast. Such was the burial of Hector, breaker of
horses, only because, between his wrath and his own imminent death, Achilles rejoined the human community.
The climax of the Iliad, then, is the moment when Achilles remembers his father. That moment, which pierces his
heart and lets the anger drain from it, will not add a day to
his life or to the survival of Troy, but it does make supportable the enormous weight of grief which has built in
Achilles, in Priam, in the Trojans, and in the hearer or
reader of the poem.
Virgil's Aeneid is, above all else, a reply to the Iliad and
Odyssey and a rejection of the kind of comfort Homer offers. I have set before you at length the moment into
which Homer puts a power which counterbalances all the
horror and pain of the Iliad because Virgil frames the
Aeneid with two echoes of that moment. Twice in the
Aeneid, in scenes of battle, the image of Aeneas' father
comes into his mind. On the first occasion, Aeneas is looking at Priam, and the memory of his father stirs him to action. The scene is in Book two, but it is a flashback to the
beginning of Aeneas' story, and the memory of his father
marks the beginning of his undertaking of the deeds to
which he has been called. On the second occasion, Aeneas
has just watched a young man die whom he killed, and
75
�whose father he is about to confront. The two characters,
Lausus and Mezentius, evoke memories of Hector and
Priam for the reader, and in Aeneas a memory of his father which occasions a moment of understanding. This
scene is in Book ten, but it is a direct preparation for the
understanding of the concluding lines and action of the
Aeneid. Thus the climactic moment of the Iliad is present
in the first and last events in Virgil's story, and in both
cases it is put in a perspective in which its power is acknowledged but its weight is lessened.
In Book two of the Aeneid we watch alongside a helpless Aeneas while Achilles' one deed of comfort and kindness is desecrated by Achilles' son. Listen as this third
generation speaks to the first: " 'Carry off these tidings; go
and bring this message to my father, son of Peleus; and
remember, let him know my sorry doings, how degenerate
is Neoptolemus. Now die.' This said, he dragged him to
the very altar stone, with Priam shuddering and slipping
in the blood that streamed from his own son. And Pyrrhus
with his left hand clutched tight the hair of Priam; his
right hand drew his glistening blade, and then he buried it
hilt-high in the king's side. This was the end of Priam's
destinies ... Now he lies along the shore, a giant trunk, his
head torn from his shoulders, as a corpse without a
name." (2. 547-58) As Neoptolemus sinks back into the
horror from which his father had emerged, the words
"This was the end of Priam" overtake and destroy the
calm of the words "Such was the burial of Hector."
Aeneas can do nothing for Priam, since he watches
trapped on a roof-beam of the wrecked and burning palace. But as he watches Priam die, he remembers his own
father, and all his helpless loved ones whom he has left at
home while he fights a useless battle to vent his rage at
the conquering Greeks. It seems that the memory of his
father will recall Aeneas to the deeds the ghost of Hector
has asked of him: to let Troy fall, and carry himself and
Troy's holy things across the sea. Like Achilles, Aeneas
has been wasting himself in the effort to exact the satisfaction of revenge from his enemies, and like Achilles he
is restored to himself in remembering his father. But just
as we begin to expect Aeneas to return to save his father,
wife, and son, and leave revenge behind, his eye lights on
Helen. In that sight his father's need of him is forgotten,
and a blind fury to destroy the cause of so much evil overwhelms even his capacity to keep that evil from reaching
those dearest to him. As Aeneas' sword is about to fall on
Helen, his goddess-mother grabs his arm. Venus sends
him to save his family, after showing him that not Helen
but the gods are responsible for the destruction of Troy.
But the violent arresting of Aeneas' arm when it has been
set in motion by the strongest longing in his heart leaves
behind a feeling of frustration which is not released until
the last lines of the poem. That is the beginning of the
story of Aeneas' journey. Let us try to understand how it
speaks to Homer.
The healing of Achilles' anger is the last event in his
story, and nearly the last in his life. It is enshrined forever
76
by the structure of Homer's story, which makes it the resolution of twenty-three books of tension. Achilles' story
moves out of anger, through pity, to a peace in the midst
of war. But does Homer's framing of that story reveal or
distort? Does his emphasis convey the true weights of
things? Virgil carries Homer's story beyond Homer's ending, to submerge Achilles' humanity in the brutality of his
son and Hector's glorious funeral in the hideous, headless,
nameless corpse of his father. But more important, Virgil
appropriates the climactic moment of the Iliad to make it
a fleeting mood which has no lasting effect, none in the
world and none in the heart of Aeneas. The Iliad ends
with a frozen picture of a pendulum at the top of its
swing: the picture is beautiful but that of which it is a picture is unstable. If only the dualities in our lives could be
laid to rest by our embracing of their wholesome sides, if
only the death of anger could be an overcoming, once and
for all, of its power over us, then the world might be a turbulent but finally a simple good place, and evil our own
fault. But dead anger rises again; the self-destructive passions can be seen for what they are and still reassert their
power over us. The poet Homer can show us things that
make us glad, but is that seeing what we need? The anger
of Aeneas recurs throughout the Aeneid, and both its ebb
and its flow are destructive. One of the principal teachings of the Aeneid is that rage is ineradicable from the human heart, because its cure is worse than the disease. Let
us watch as Aeneas' eyes are opened to this ugliest of
truths, in Virgil's second echo of the climax of the Iliad.
The worst man in the Aeneid is undoubtedly Mezentius,
a tyrant who tortured his subjects for sport until they rebelled and he escaped. Thousands of those subjects unite
with Aeneas in his Italian war, solely for the chance to kill
Mezentius. Without any good reason, as Virgil puts it, another thousand remain loyal to Mezentius, among them
his son Lausus, called breaker of horses. When Aeneas
wounds Mezentius with a spearcast, Lausus, his valor
awakened by his love for his father, prevents Aeneas'
sword from falling, giving his companions the chance to
save Mezentius and drive back Aeneas. Fury rises in Aeneas as he is once again thwarted on the point of killing a
thing of evil, but as he waits in shelter for all his enemies'
javelins to be thrown he calms down, and shouts at La usus
to be sensible and withdraw. When Lausus insists on
fighting him, a greater anger surges in Aeneas, and in that
rage he kills Lausus.
At whom is Aeneas angry? Can it be at Lausus, whom
he has no desire to fight and for whom he has nothing but
admiration? As Aeneas looks at La usus' dying face he sees
the image of his own love for his own father, and gives the
dead Lausus to his companions for honorable burial. It is
at this moment that the transformation in the heart of
Achilles resonates most strongly in the Aeneid, but Aeneas felt his pity before Lausus was dead, and would have
spared him had he not been driven to a resurgence of his
dead anger. To understand the killing of Lausus is, I think,
to be halfway to understanding the killing of Turnus,
WINTER 1982
�which would be equivalent to understanding the whole
Aeneid. Let us keep trying.
'
Lausus loves a father whom no one could respect. His
motive is therefore pure, irrational love, with no other
support. By painting Mezentius as unrelievedly, monstrously evil, Virgil makes the central choice of Lausus'
life be between love and everything that makes sense.
Even further, the circumstances of the battle force Lausus
to measure the strength of that love, since after he has
saved his father's life he could retreat honorably, and
must decide whether to do so or to throw away his life.
Unrestrained love and loyalty are, for Lausus, consistent
only with what is wild and reckless: to attack Aeneas and
die. Both Lausus and Aeneas have a long time to think
about this before it happens. There is an irrational and inescapable logic at work in the scene: the better a man Lausus is the more is it necessary that he die in a bad cause,
and the more fully Aeneas recognizes his goodness the
more necessary is it that he kill him, and not do him the
insult of refusing his self-sacrifice. The rage which supplies the motive power for the killing Aeneas has no heart
to commit is a rage brought about by his recognition of
the way in which both Lausus and he are trapped.
Achilles and Priam, suffering the worst private grief,
could draw together in mutual recognition and give each
other what each needed most. Priam gave Achilles deliverance from his anger, and Achilles gave Priam the means
and the time to unite with his city and his dead son in one
last civic festival. In the corresponding Virgilian recognition scene, it seems that Lausus can give Aeneas nothing,
and Aeneas can give Lausus only death. With the image
of his own father in mind, Aeneas asks the dead Lausus,
"Miserable boy, what can I give you now? What honor is
worthy of your character?" (10. 825-6) He gives to the
corpse the weapons in which it found its only happiness,
and gives the corpse itelf back to its own people, to be
mingled with the ashes and shades of its ancestors, wondering aloud if that will matter to anyone. Finally, he dedicates to La usus the only gift in his power which can solace
such a miserably unhappy death: the resolve to make his
own greatness such that there will be no shame in having
fallen beneath it. Thus La usus has given something to Aeneas-the burden of another obligation to the dead. The
Homeric comfort of the sharing in human community is
not available either to Lausus or to Aeneas. Lausus, whom
Virgil introduces in Book seven as a young man worthy to
be happy, had the wrong father, and he cannot but be the
son of his father. Aeneas likewise cannot escape being the
man on whom Trojans, Italians, and gods depend to stand
divided in war from Lausus, and be his killer. The Homeric world, whatever divisions may be within it, makes a
whole; the Virgilian world is too full of purposes too
deeply crossed to be composed, ever.
Am I going too far in reading in an intensely painful but
small tragic event a vision of a tragic world? Is not Virgil's
theme the bringing of law to the world? Are not the tragedies of Lausus and Turnus and Camilla and Nisus and
1
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Euryalus and Pallas and Evander and Amata and Dido
and Palinurus the events which Virgil shapes into the
transformation of the world into a place in which such
things will no longer happen? It is true that the bringing
of the world to peace under law is the theme of the Aeneid,
but we must not let anyone but Virgil tell us what Virgil
thinks about that subject.
We hear of it first, early in Book one, from Jupiter. He
tells Venus that Aeneas' Roman descendents will be the
lords of all things, without limits in time or place, that one
of them, meaning Augustus, will carry his empire to the
Ocean and his fame to the stars, and in doing so allow the
rough ages of the world to become gentle under law. And
here are Jupiter's last words: "The gruesome gates of war,
with tightly welded iron plates, shall be shut fast. Within,
unholy Rage shall sit on his ferocious weapons, bound behind his back by a hundred knots of brass; he shall groan
horribly with bloody lips." (293-6) Forty lines devoted to
triumph and glory seem to dissolve in four lines of ugliness. One's gaze is turned not outward, to a world finally
free of the source of war, but to the struggling caged being
confined within. The last words of this first picture of
Rome are not of victory or victors but of a victim, Furor,
and of the sights and sounds of his pain. Why is rage presented as a person? Why is a reader who is incapable of
enjoying a description of torture made to sympathize with
the cause of war?
Three lines after this ghastly and troubling portrait we
hear for the first time in the poem the name of Dido. One
third of the poem of the founding of Rome is the story of
Dido, and more than a third of its impact is carried by Virgil's presentation of her. One famous commentator has
said that Virgil was "no master of the epic art" because he
allowed such things as the sufferings of Dido to overwhelm his efforts to glorify Rome. Another has said that
the Aeneid is the first wholly successful epic ever written,
because it is the first to have the unity attained previously
only in dramas, a unity evident primarily in the complete
merging of the Dido story into that of the triumph of
Rome. Each commentator is half-right. The Aeneid is unified, but not around the figure of Augustus; Dido is the
most powerful figure in Virgil's composition, but not by
accident. The theme of Rome's bringing of a new age of
law to the world enters the poem, modulates to a strange
sadness, and passes over into the story of Dido. Dido's
story is deeper than Rome's, and illuminates it.
Dido is, to begin with, in the same situation as Aeneas,
and she has handled that situation so well that everything
about her gives hope to Aeneas at a time when he has
none. She too has been driven out of her own country and
been responsible for the lives of a band of fellow-refugees.
She too has had to find a new life in the strange and unknown lands of the West. She has won a place for her people by winning the respect of neighboring rulers, and under
her leadership, her subjects are building the conditions of
a healthy communal life: fortifications, houses, a harbor, a
theater, a senate. Already built, in the center of the city, is
77
�a temple to Juno, filled with scenes of the Trojan War.
The work under way is to Aeneas a vision of happiness,
and the completed work feeds his soul. One of the other
Trojans sees in Carthage a city with the power to impose
justice on the proud and a ruler with the goodness to
spare the defeated. We will hear almost the same words
spoken in Book six as an exhortation to Rome. The story
of Dido, smaller only in geographical scale, begins where
the story of Rome aims.
Dido's Phoenician Carthage, where Aeneas tells the
tale of his long wanderings, is, like the Phaiakian Scheria
of Alkinous and Arete, a city ruled by virtue and strong intellect. Dido herself, like Penelope, is a woman with the
dignity to keep arrogant suitors at a distance. And the hospitality, the capacity to permit another to be at home in a
place that is not his own, that is so beautifully depicted in
the Odyssey, is enjoyed by Aeneas nowhere but in the
home of Dido. In Virgil's re-casting of Homer's story of
Odysseus, almost all its places and people are condensed
into the story of Dido. Like the Iliad, Homer's Odyssey is a
story of the recovery of human community. Its culmination is the restoration of political order to Ithaca. But Dido's story reverses the Odyssean motion from anarchy to
order, from savagery to serenity. In the midst of his journey Odysseus is cursed by a one-eyed monster, a nonhuman being who lives outside all law. At the end of his
stay in Carthage, Aeneas too is cursed by a being who is
outside all law and community, and that monster is Dido
herself.
Why was Dido so successful as a ruler? I think Virgil's
briefest answer can be found near the end of Book one:
because her soul was in repose, because in turn her heart
was out of use {resides animas desuetaque corda, I. 722).
Since the death of her first husband, she tells her sister,
Aeneas alone has caused her judgment to bend and her
soul to totter. (4. 20-3) The empty pathways which the
flame of love once burned through her have not closed or
healed. The ancient flame is still within Dido, just as a living rage is still behind the gates of war which Augustus
closes with force and with law. In Latin, the name of Augustus' victim and that of Dido's conqueror are the same,
furor. Virgil's one brief portrait of a happy city is of Carthage under the rule of Dido for only so long as the furious
love within her is out of use. In the Odyssey, political community is displayed as the natural and the only life which
realizes what it is to be a human being. In the Aeneid, political life is presented as depending upon the inhuman
constraint that Dido practices upon herself and Augustus
exerts on the world. Carthage thrives on Didp' s serene
control, and collapses into disarray when she falls in love.
Many readers have seen in the fate of Dido a dangerous
example which Aeneas must see and learn to avoid. Such
readers see the foundations of the political life in Aeneas'
rejection of her. Like an oak tree in the Alps shaken by the
North wind, Aeneas suffers from love and care for Dido,
but he withstands their fury. Reason holds firm against
passion and duty vanquishes desire. One pities Dido, but
78
rejoices that Aeneas does not let his own pity become a
morass in which the hopes of his son and of the world
would be lost. But Aeneas is bound to Dido not just by his
love for her, which is his to control if he can, but by the
fact that he has allowed her to love him. That is not passion but choice, and to reverse it is not duty but betrayal.
In the simile of the oak tree, it is Aeneas' mind which
overcomes the care in his breast, but that is merely the
overcoming of the last obstacle to a choice he has already
made. The widespread interpretation according to which
Aeneas' rejection of Dido is a victory of the rational and
political over the passionate and personal does not stand
up to a moment's scrutiny. He has already told Dido that
he loves her less than he loves the remnants of Troy
which he had been bidden to carry to Italy. (4. 340-7) His
choice is personal through-and-through. And in setting
out for the city he will build in Italy, Aeneas knows that he
is leaving Carthage in wreckage. (4. 86-9) His choice is political through-and-through as well. Aeneas cannot choose
otherwise than he does. He has gotten himself into a fix
from which there is only one way out. But he cannot pretend that what he does is not a betrayal. Aeneas does not
understand his destruction of Dido as he will later understand his destruction of Lausus, but we need not be fooled.
But if Aeneas' abandonment of Dido cannot be praised
as an act of Stoic virtue, must it not be given its due as an
act of piety? Twice Aeneas tells Dido that his leaving her
for a bride and kingdom in Italy is not by his own will but
in accordance with what is fated, and we have known from
the second line of the poem that Virgil is writing of a man
whose deeds are compelled by fate. But what is the nature
of that compulsion? What does Virgil understand fate to
be? He tells us that Dido's death was not only undeserved
but unfated (4. 696), and, narrating a battle in Book nine,
he tells us that if Turnus had hesitated a moment to break
the bolts on one gate, Rome would never have come to be
(9. 757-9). In order to understand what Virgil has written,
we must conceive a fate that is both limited and fallible.
The Latin fatum contains all the meanings of our word
fate, but in it they are derivative meanings. Never absent
from the Latin word is its primary sense of a thing spoken
or uttered. And Virgil does not present the speech which
is fate as an irrevocable decree, but uses the word with
verbs meaning to call or to ask. The source of fate is a mystery in the Aeneid, but the nature of its action is evident.
Fated outcomes are known to some among the gods and
the shades of the dead, but are brought about only by human beings who must be lured, persuaded, or tricked. Every device of rhetoric must be used, because fate in the
Aeneid remains always and altogether subordinate to human choice.
The fall of Troy in Book two, for example, is a fated
event. The destruction of the city is completed by Neptune, who shakes the walls and uproots the foundations
from the earth, but neither he nor any other god acts so
directly until the conquest of the Trojans by the Greeks is
an accomplished fact. First, an indecisive war has been
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�carried on for ten years. Second, the Greeks have concealed their best fighters in a counterfeit religious offering
left on the beach of Troy. Third, a lying story told by a
Greek has aroused the pity of the Trojans and inclined
them to bring the fatal horse into their city. But beyond
all the strength, cleverness, and rhetorical skill of the
Greeks, one more element was necessary, without which,
Aeneas says years later, Troy would still be standing: the
minds of the Trojans had to be made left-handed (2. 54-6);
they had to be brought confidently to trust that the divine
purpose was opposite to what it truly was. One respected
Trojan leader, Laocoon, priest of Neptune, would have
held Troy against all the resources of Greeks and gods,
had he not been made to seem to be profaning a sacred offering. Laocoon pierced the horse with a spear, before Sinon told the Trojans that their prosperity would depend
on treating the horse with reverence. At that moment a
pair of gigantic snakes came across the sea and the land,
making straight for the small sons of Laocoon, and killing
them and him. That horrible supernatural spectacle was
the call of fate which the Trojans answered to their own
rmn.
That which is fated must be recognized, interpreted, assented to, and carried out by human beings, who may be
mistaken or may have been deliberately deceived. Aeneas
is responsible not only for his choice to answer his fate,
but also for the judgment that what fate calls him to is
good. The half-understood future that could be brought
about by Aeneas' deeds does make a powerful claim upon
him, but so does the life of Dido, which he has allowed to
become dependent upon him. No one but he can make
the final decision that the former claim is more worthy of
respect than the latter. That Aeneas is not comfortable
with his choice is obvious when he begs Dido's ghost for
understanding and absolution. Her stony refusal and undying hatred make it forever impossible for anyone to say
that his choice was right. And the unforgettable example
of Laocoon makes it equally impossible to take any comfort in the reflection that Aeneas' choice was fated.
There is a powerful presence in the Aeneid of the inescapable, but it is not the same as nor even entirely compatible with the fated. The divine call which pulls one
toward the future may be refused or defeated, but the human entanglements which grasp one from out of the past
cannot be escaped. Aeneas can abandon Dido, but he can
never be free of the pain of the knowledge that he has betrayed the love and trust he had once accepted from her.
The true fatalism of the Aeneid is not a sense of the inevitable triumph of what is to be, of a healing and elevating
future, but a sense of the sad burden of all that has been,
of past choices and rejections that one has not gotten
beyond.
Readers are sometimes puzzled by a character in the
Aeneid who is mentioned repeatedly but to whom Virgil
seems deliberately to have given no human features or
qualities. He is the closest companion of Aeneas, but we
never hear either speak to the other. He is the true or
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
trusty Achates, whose name has become an idiomatic label for a devoted friend, but he seems to be nothing more
than a label; we do not know who Aeneas' friend is or
what he is like. But Virgil often gives his characters names
which are descriptive in Greek. A Greek soldier whom Aeneas encounters on Sicily and whose story he trusts is
called Achaemenides, "still a Greek." An aging boxer who
rouses himself to win one last fight is called Entellus, "mature" or Hat an end." A monster who seems to delight in
evil itself is called Cacus, "the evil one." As a Greek word,
Achates would name ''one who grieves," one whose spe·
cia! or characteristic business is to grieve. Never absent
from the side of Aeneas in anything he does is the true or
trusty grieving one; never, in the Aeneid, does hope overcome grief.
The burden of grief which one feels through the last
two-thirds of the poem is thus explicitly figured in the person of Achates as Aeneas' second self. The inescapability
of the past is also figured by Virgil in one of the great central images of the poem, that of the labyrinth. We hear of
it first in Book five, in connection with an intricate display
of horsemanship by the Trojan children, but the words
are too strong for their immediate occasion. The sons of
Troy are said to be entangled in "an undiscovered and irretraceable wandering" (5. 591) as in the dark and ambiguous Labyrinth of ancient Crete. Aeneas soon sees a carved
image of that Labyrinth on the walls of the Sibyl's cave,
when he begins his journey in Book six to the land of the
dead. The Sibyl tells him that it will be easy to enter that
land, but to retrace his way to the upper air, "this," she
says, "is work; this is labor." (6. 126-9) We are made to
think of the Trojans' journey to Italy as labyrinthine, and
to expect Aeneas' return from Hell to be especially so. We
are startled, then, at the end of Book six, when Aeneas' return to the upper world is no trouble at all. Notoriously,
that return is through the gate of false dreams. Great ingenuity has been expended by many interpreters to remove
the taint of falsity from Aeneas' mission, but it cannot be
done. Aeneas returns to earth with his soul burning with
the love of coming fame, and that is a false exit from the
land of the dead, the place of Dido. The Labyrinth image
is still with us, the sense of betrayal of Dido's love has not
been left behind, and the Sibyl is right: what lies before
Aeneas is the true labor. He has not left the place of the
dead; he will carry it with him wherever he goes.
The war in Italy which occupies the last third of the
Aeneid has a labyrinthine structure. When Turnus enters
the Trojan camp in Book nine, he is pressed back to the
walls and carried back to his comrades by the Tiber before
there is any decisive outcome. In Book ten, when Turnus
has killed Pallas, he and Aeneas fight toward each other,
but juno lures Turnus away from the battlefield with a
phantom-Aeneas made of wind. In Book eleven, when
there is a truce, Aeneas and Turnus are both eager to submit to single combat when a double misunderstanding
makes the war resume; the two men finally catch sight of
each other across a plain, just as night falls. In the last
79
�book, Turnus' goddess-sister, disguised as his charioteer,
keeps carrying him away when Aeneas catches sight of
him. It is only in the last lines of the poem that Aeneas
reaches the center of the maze. The monster he finds
there is not Turnus, now humble, resigned to death, and
gracious in defeat. What is the meaning of Aeneas' last
furious act of violence? What does the maze of war and
frustration that stands between Aeneas and his final confrontation with Turnus have to do with the false exit from
the land of the dead by which Aeneas seems to have entered his labyrinth?
The strange and abrupt ending of the Aeneid collects
into itself all that has gone before it. It is a vivid culmination of the theme of the labyrinth, but that image in turn
takes its meaning from a chain of connected images of
which it is part. The first of these images is Aeolia, the
vast cave of the winds in which, we are told, angry tempests rage in indignation at the mountain which confines
them (l. 53-6). Unrestrained, those winds would destroy
the seas, the lands, and heaven itself. Therefore jupiter,
here called the omnipotent father, confined them and
gave them a king skilled to know when to loosen, when to
draw in, their reins. Can the word omnipotens be intended seriously in this context? It seems that it cannot
mean more than "stronger than anything else," so that
even the winds can be brought under the control of the
strongest one. If jupiter were truly able to do anything, he
could change the nature of the winds, or destroy them
and replace them with others just as useful and not as
dangerous. Could it be that one with the power to choose
otherwise would judge it good to design a world in which
hurricanes must sometimes be unleashed? The single
word omnipotens leaves that question hanging over the
poem.
The second image in the poem which picks up the
theme of caged fury is one we examined earlier: Furor,
rage itself, removed from the world and imprisoned behind the iron gates of war. What we found strange in that
picture was the presentation of rage personified as an object of pity. We saw then that the image of Furor led directly into the story of Dido and that her story was of the
unleashing of furor within her. It is in the story of Dido
that the two earlier images begin to make sense. Dido is
ruined because she is capable of loving without restraint.
The years of her self-denial make possible the existence of
Carthage, because the chiefs of the surrounding countries
respect her fidelity to her dead husband, and because it
gives her reign a dignity and stability under which her subjects thrive. But her sister, who loves her, does not want
Dido to continue that life. Royalty does not fulfill the
longings caged within Dido.
When Venus wants to bind Dido to Aeneas by means of
lust, she begins by arousing in Dido tenderness for a small
child. Once Dido falls in love with Aeneas, her ruin is assured, but she only becomes vulnerable to falling in love
by first feeling a loving response to a child. Would Dido
have been better off if a child sitting in her lap could
80
arouse no irrational longing in her childless heart?-if intimate contact with a child left her feeling no more than
the general benevolence she had for all her subjects? If
not, if a cold, loveless life is never choiceworthy, then the
omnipotent father was right to leave the furious and destructive things in the world, and Virgil was right to grieve
over the imposition of law on the earth. For even a mother's love is potentially furious, as we see it in the mothers
of Euryalus and Lavinia. And the loving, irrational desire
to have a child of one's own is inseparable from all the raging loves and hates within us. It is not the political life
which fulfills us, if Virgil is right, but the loving attachments to particular other people, which also make us vulnerable to frenzy, madness, and war.
Virgil uses the cave of the winds and the gates of war as
images of the human soul, which always encloses irrational longings and loyalties capable of furious emergence
into the world. Madness, as of Lausus, anger, as of Aeneas, rage of battle, as of Turnus, passionate love, as of
Dido, prophetic frenzy, as of the Sybil, and poetic inspiration, as of Virgil himself: these are the meanings my small
Latin dictionary gives for the word furor, the name Virgil
gives to the being at the center. And what is the labyrinth
which surrounds the center? It is, I think, Virgil's picture
of any life which ignores or denies the furious things at
the center. Aeneas leaves the land of the dead glorying in
his vision of the Roman future, only to find in Italy the
same intractable opposition he has left behind in Dido,
and finally to yield to it in himself. And Augustus subdues
the proud of all the world, only to become a monster of
pride himself.
In Book eight a fourth image joins the winds, the gates
and the labyrinth. In the land of King Evander Aeneas
sees the rock on which the Senate of Rome will one day
stand, and learns that it once enclosed the home of a murderous, fire-breathing, half-human monster named Cacus.
From the "proud doorposts" of this senseless killer there
had always hung rotting, severed heads of his human victims. (8. 195-7) Evander tells how Hercules killed the
monster and exposed his dark cavern to the light of the
sun. Commentators routinely take the triumphant Hercules as a '~symbol" for Aeneas, who overcomes the monsters
of unreason, Dido and Turnus, and for Augustus, who will
overcome war itself. One who reads Evander's account
not as a symbol but as a story, though, must feel some unease as Hercules, before he can kill Cacus, must become a
thing of fury and frenzy himself. Hercules' triumph is not
an example with which one can be quite comfortable.
Book eight ends with a hundred lines describing the future glories of Rome depicted on Aeneas' shield, culminating with Augustus sitting in triumph over conquered
peoples from all the nations of the earth. In a characteristic stroke, Virgil says that Aeneas rejoiced in the images,
ignorant of the things, so that once again a portrait of
Rome just fails to come into focus as a sight at which one
could be glad. The attentive reader will have seen that Augustus on the shield hangs the spoils of all the world on his
WINTER 1982
�"proud doorposts," a phrase used qnly of him and of
Cacus. The same spot is still the home of a monster, but
the new one ravages the whole world-'
There are two kinds of motion in a labyrinth. The outward motion is an illusion of progress away from something. It is the more pitiable, because the more ignorant,
of the two kinds. It characterizes the march of imperial
Rome outward over the world. It is seen in what Virgil
calls in Book six the "proud soul of Brutus the punisher,"
expeller of the Tarquins, the first to rule as consul, who,
"for the sake of beautiful freedom" put love of country and
praise ahead of everything else and killed his own sons.
Virgil calls him "unhappy father, no matter what posterity
may say of his deed." (6. 817-23) And Augustus cannot escape the same human vulnerability that Brutus tried to
deny. A few lines later in Book six, the entire spectacle of
the shades of the heroes of Rome is immersed in grief
over Marcellus, the young man Augustus adopted and
named as his heir, but who died when he was twenty. No
political order holds any answer for or relief from human
troubles. It is after Aeneas hears the infinity of grief over
Marcellus in his father's voice, that he looks back over the
souls of his triumphant offspring, recovers his own love of
fame, and returns to the world through the gate of false
dreams.
But Aeneas is no Augustus. He is too aware of the losses
and pains of others for his own proud illusions ever to last
for long. Aeneas for the most part moves in the other direction, inward in the labyrinth. This is the direction of "if
only." If only Helen were dead; if only Dido could be
made to understand; if only Lausus would see reason; if
only Turnus would surrender. Aeneas never uses his quest
for political glory as an excuse to turn his back on a human being in distress, but he cannot relinquish that quest,
on which so many others depend, and he can never quite
find his way to the center of the source of distress to remove its cause. At the beginning of Book eight, the last in
a long succession of divine apparitions comes to Aeneas.
The old god of the Tiber tells him that his troubles are
near an end, and that home and rest await him. He must
fight and win a war with the Latins, but for once help will
be available. Inland along the Tiber live Arcadian Greeks
ruled by King Evander. They will happily join Aeneas in
his fight and he can put an end once and for all to the
troubles he has carried with him for so long and in which
he has involved so many others.
Aeneas does find welcome and help in Evander's city,
Pallanteum. As in Carthage, he finds too much welcome
and too much help. It turns out that Evander once met
Aeneas' father, and adored him with youthful love. The
gifts Anchises gave him seem to be the only signs of
wealth Evander has allowed to remain in his city. (8. 15569) History repeats itself in Pallanteum, in a double sense.
As with their fathers, Pallas is fired with a loving admiration for Aeneas. As he joins with him, we see in one brief,
lovely scene, a greater closeness between the two than we
ever see between Aeneas and his own son. (10. 159-62)
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
But Aeneas' recent Carthaginian history repeats itself at
the same time: from Evander and from Pallas, Aeneas has
again accepted the loving gift of a human life, entrusted
to his care. Pallas seems to think Aeneas can answer the
deepest questions of his life, but the two men know each
other only for a day. When Pallas arrives in Latium he
begins to fight, and two hundred lines later he is dead.
Like every young man in the Aeneid, excepting only Iulus,
who is deliberately kept out of the fighting, Pallas dies at
the moment of his greatest valor. That is the theme of
Book nine, in which, in Aeneas' absence, only young men
are fighting. It is embodied in the figure of Euryalus,
whose longing for glory leads him to put on the shining
helmet of one of his victims, immediately to become a victim because that shining makes him an easy target. (9. 35966, 373-4) It is embodied, too, in the similes of Book nine,
which liken the young warriors to beasts of prey which, if
they are daring and successful predators, become a danger
to men and an easy prey. Pallas cannot escape the Virgilian logic of glory and death.
The saddest words of this saddest of poems are spoken
by Aeneas to the corpse of Pallas: "The same horrible fate
of war calls me from here to other tears; hail from me eternally, dearest Pallas, and eternally farewell." (11. 96-8) In
the last lines of the poem, Aeneas recognizes that there is
no such thing as an eternal farewell. The dead live as
sources of obligation, and neither death nor any ceremony
can cancel such debts. If Dido can be assimilated to a
larger purpose, then she did not live. If Lausus' decision
to throw away his life were not acknowledged as binding
his adversary, then Lausus would not be recognized as the
source of his own choices. And if Pallas can be forgotten
for the sake of the living, and the greater number, then
Pallas himself is accorded no worth at all. Human worth
does not fit in any scales. Its claims are unconditional.
We admire Aeneas in the war books of the last third of
the poem because he always seeks the sanest and most
sensible solutions for his enemies as well as for his own
people. We rage along with him when trivial, irrational
causes produce and prolong the slaughter. Aeneas longs
for peace and for harmony with all the tribes in Italy. And
what does Turnus fight for? For wholly selfish reasons
and for the joy of fighting. Must he not be cut down like
the irrational thing he is, so decent citizens might get on
with the business of living in co-operation? To see that
this is not how Virgil regards Turnus, listen to this simile
with which Turnus goes out to fight: "He is delirious with
courage, his hope already tears the enemy: just as a stallion when he snaps his tether and flies off from the stables, free at last to lord the open plains, will either make
for meadows and the herds of mares or else leap from the
stream where he is used to bathing and, wanton, happy,
neigh, his head raised high, while his mane sweeps across
his neck and shoulders." (11. 491-7) Turnus is young,
strong, brave, and handsome. He is not made for submission to a foreigner who arrives saying he is destined to
marry his fiancee and be his king. In the line following the
81
�simile of the stallion, Virgil brings 'Camilla into the poem,
to fight beside Turnus. She is in .instant and complete
communion with Turnus. The freedom and the lordship
of Italy is theirs by birth and by nature. Each of them is
crushed by what Aeneas has brought to Italy, but each
dies with the sentiment that something unworthy has
happened.
At the end, when Turnus lies wounded at Aeneas' feet,
we begin to hear again the familiar echoes of the end of
the Iliad, but this time they are like a deceptive cadence in
a piece of music. Turnus asks Aeneas to remember his
own father and to return him, alive or dead as he prefers,
to his father. But as Aeneas begins to relax, and we expect
the gesture of reconciliation that Aeneas has tried so hard
and so often to make to come finally as a healing ending to
the poem, Aeneas instead remembers Pallas, and kills Turnus in fury. Why? It is his seeing the belt of Pallas, which
Turnus is wearing as spoil, that precipitates the deed.
What does Aeneas see when he looks at the belt? I think it
is not too much to say that he sees in it everything that
has happened to him through the eight years and twelve
books that have gone before.
The belt is carved with a legendary scene of fifty bride-
82
grooms killed on their wedding night. It recalls the spectacle
Aeneas watched from the roof of Priam's ruined palace,
with its fifty bridal chambers for his sons. (2. 503-4;
I 0. 497 -9) It must, too, re-open the wound of the memory
of the bridal chamber he himself shared so briefly with
Dido. And as showing men cut down in their youth, it must
remind him of much that has happened around him in
the war just fought. But more than anything else, it brings
back to him Pallas, to whom he could not succeed in saying good-bye. As he kills Turnus, Aeneas calls Pallas "my
own." His acceptance of the call of fate prevented Aeneas
from dying alongside his own people in his own city of
Troy. It prevented him from remaining loyal to his own
lover, Dido. But the gods have now left Aeneas alone. The
last act of the poem is the first one that is unequivocally
Aeneas' own, and on his own, though inclined toward a
characteristic and politically sound act of kindness, Aeneas commits a furious and painful murder out of love.
Turnus dies rightly feeling that his death is unworthy of
him. But Aeneas, finally at the center of the labyrinth of
his own life, could not let Turnus live and be worthy of
the gift of Pallas' life and death. In the inevitable conflict
of unconditional claims, one can only cling to one's own.
WINTER 1982
�REvmw EssAY
Objectivity and Philosophical Conversation
Richard Rorty's Pht!osophy and the Mirror of Nature
ARTHUR COlliNS
Men have confident beliefs which they take to be knowledge,
and then it sometimes turns out that what was confidently believed is discarded and replaced by contrary beliefs, perhaps just
as confident. Such convictions can be important beliefs at the
heart of a whole way of looking at the world. Naturally philoso·
phers have concerned themselves with this instability in our beliefs, and they have tried to find permanent foundations for our
claims to know anything. With foundations our knowledge is reliable and objective; without foundations our pretensions to know
collapse into the beliefs we happen to have. Discourse with no
foundations seems to reduce to a flux of opinions, for we have no
way of determining which opinions are really grounded and
which are not. But where shall we find foundations for knowledge, and how shall our claims to know such foundations themselves be insulated from the possibility of error and replacement?
Discussions of the objectivity of knowledge were already sophisticated in Greek philosophy. Protagoras held that no objec·
tive foundation of a belief can get beyond the fact that it seems
to be true to the man who holds it. All beliefs, then, are true for
those who hold them, and grounding is an illusion. So Protagoras
proposed to substitute the contrast: healthy versus unhealthy belief for the unavailable contrast: objectively grounded belief versus mere opinion. If this report of Protagoras' doctrine from
Plato's Theaetetus is reliable, Protagoras was the first pragmatist.
Socrates opposed this relativism and Plato's theory of Forms is
an effort to articulate foundations of knowledge solid enough to
enable a philosopher to rule against one man's conviction and in
favor of another's on objective grounds. The preponderance of
philosophers since Plato have defended the idea of objective
knoWledge and pursued its foundations. A minority including
Nietzsche and the American pragmatists have more or less sided
with Protagoras.
This conflict is the theme of Richard Rorty's Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature.* The thesis of the book can be summarized
in two general claims: The first is that modern philosophy has
been dominated by an essentially Cartesian and mistaken idea of
inner representations as the foundation of knowledge of all outer
realities. The second claim is the assertion of a sweeping historical and pragmatic relativism about human knowledge. In rejecting Cartesian inner mental representations, Rorty contends that
the dominant modern program that sought to furnish foundations for knowledge is a complete failure. In his general relativist
view, Rorty asserts, with Protagoras, that the objectivity philosophers have looked for cannot be found at all and knowledge can
have no foundations.
The conception of inner representations as the necessary
starting point for all knowledge is what Rorty calls "the Mirror of
Nature." The mind is this mirror. Descartes and most thinkers
after him place the source of objectivity in the knower's mind
rather than in any specially apprehended outer reality such as
Plato's Forms. Epistemology has been promoted since the Renaissance as a kind of bogus science that ·confirms its hypotheses
in terms of the ultimate evidence we find reflected in the mirror
of the mind. Rorty says that the rejection of this spurious epistemology will bring with it huge changes in philosophical practice.
This first claim is powerfully argued and richly illustrated, and
Rorty's many-sided discussion of it repays study.
According to his second general claim, Rorty' s Protagorean
relativism, philosophers are deceived in thinking that there can
be objective reasons for preferring one view of things to another.
In the course of exposition of this relativist view, Rorty denies
that science can be understood to attain a progressively better
approximation to the truth. He finds that we cannot successfully
segregate meanings and facts. We cannot distinguish features of
a conceptual scheme and truths that are asserted within and
*Princeton University Press, 1979
Review.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, Arthur Collins has published articles in many philosophical journals. He has previously contributed "Kant's Empiricism" (July 1979) and "The Scientific
Background of Descartes' Dualism" (Winter 1981) to the St. John's
83
�with the help of that scheme. So we qmnot suppose that earlier
scientists were talking about the same reality that we speak of, but
saying different things about it. Thus there is no way in which
we can see ourselves as the proprietors of a better understanding
of the same world. Our distinctions between conceptual truths
and factual truths, and between mathematical propositions and
empirical facts, are not absolute. Such distinctions are always dependent upon our own contingent decisions and relatively transient objectives of our discourse. There are no privileged truths,
no absolutely secure modes of reference, no irrefragible assertions about meanings, and no incorrigible data of sense. All these
candidates for an Archimedean fixed point in epistemology turn
out to be moveable. Our intellectual undertakings, systems, and
theories are endlessly adjustable in many ways and subtle ways,
but nothing is permanent and there is no given point of contact
with the real, no unchanging frontier between our thought and
what we think about.
Unlike his rejections of the Mirror of Nature, which is limited to
a particular conception of objectivity (the Cartesian conception),
Rorty's general relativism does not leave room for a contrast between the situations of philosophy and science. In rejecting traditional Cartesian epistemology, Rorty says that philosophers
have mistakenly tried to copy what scientists legitimately do. But
when he advances from this critique to a relativistic rejection of
the very idea of objectivity, Rorty asserts that philosophers and
scientists are alike in their susceptibility to the mistaken idea that
rational investigation can lead, and has led, to a better and better
understanding of things. There are no thought-independent
truths to be sought by philosophers or scientists and no objective
methods to be adopted by either.
Rorty is right to reject what he calls the Mirror of Nature. He
is also right to say that it has exerted an enormous and mostly
bad influence on modern thought. But he seems to think that if
we don't have Cartesian foundations for our knowledge we must
become relativists. If the Mirror of Nature is no good, there is
nothing else. That means that Rorty himself is still under the
spell of Cartesian thinking about the mind and knowledge. He is
agreeing that if there is to be objective knowledge at all, there will
have to be Cartesian foundations for it. If this is Rorty's assumption, it would account for the fact that he moves so easily from a
penetrating critique of the Mirror of Nature to the general repudiation of objectivity. On the whole Rorty treats these two very
different views as if they were one and the same reaction to the
history of modern philosophy. This is a mistake.
1
The goal of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is an assessment of the claims and prospects of contemporary philosophy,
especially the broad current of thought finding expression primarily in English, called "analytic philosophy." Rorty identifies
the most important historical roots of the modern outlook in the
pervasive influence of Descartes' philosophy of mind and in
Kant's two-sided philosophical project: the identification of objective knowledge and the demonstration of the inescapable
though disappointing limits of such knowledge. The Mirror of
84
Nature is really Descartes' invention. Descartes imposed on subsequent philosophers, and prominently on the British empiricists,
the job of trying to get from a perfect acquaintance with inner
mental representations (which are taken to exhaust our ultimate
evidence) to knowledge of extra-mental reality. This project,
which is hardly represented in classical thought, determines the
characteristic schedule of solipsistic problems which are the first
business of all modern epistemology. Endless variations within
this Cartesian epistemological framework have been articulated
since the seventeenth century. As recently as 1949, in the Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle aptly called Cartesianism "the official
doctrine." Russell, Moore, Santayana, Carnap, Ayer, Chisholm,
and Sellars are some of the best known twentieth century philosophers whose projects are decisively influenced by this tradition.
This is so even though some of these thinkers have expressly rejected Cartesianism and tried to break its hold on philosophy.
Rorty's repudiation ofthe Mirror of Nature is the repudiation of
this tenacious idea.
The Kantian contribution to the modern outlook is, Rorty
says, the idea of a universal system for judging and comparing
the credentials of all intellectual undertakings. In Rorty's terminology this is the "transcendental turn" which projects a scheme
for the universal "commensurability" of all doctrines, theories,
and beliefs. The rejection of this idea is Rorty's relativism. It is an
error, he says, to suppose that all our thinking belongS to the
same intellectual space within which views can always be tested
against one another and choices forced by a fixed rational procedure. Accepting the idea of such a universal scheme, philosophers
have thought of knowledge as a matter of gradual convergence
on the truth.
Rorty, however, allows no concept of truth external to the particular pragmatically judged intellectual constructions that men
make in grappling with the world. In their pretense to occupy a
viewpoint outside all viewpoints, Kantian foundationalists are
dogmatic and self-deceptive. Their claims to permanent judgments and fixed tests conceal the creative and constructive play
of human intelligence under the guise of ever-closer conformity
to truth. For Rorty, what we take as known can have no foundations apart from acceptance in the unending interplay of human
discourse. Accepted truths, systems, and sciences have the value
that they do have because they confer an understanding on
things that enables us better to negotiate our existence, not because they approach more closely to the final truth about things.
In this view, Rorty substitutes the idea of the utility of belief for
the discarded idea of objective truth, much as Protagoras substituted healthy belief for objectively grounded belief.
There can be no epistemological foundations and Rorty thinks
pursuit of them should stop and is going to stop some time soon.
Foundationalism has so contaminated the structure of philosophical thought and so determined the content of modern philosophy that its rejection will mean the end of most of what we
know as philosophy. When current practices have been abandoned, science will still be science, and scientists will continue to
generate and discard their own standards of admissibility. But, if
Rorty is right, epistemology will no longer be credited as a kind of
preliminary science. The philosophy of mind has been develWINTER 1982
�oped almost entirely in the service of Mirrqr-of-Nature projects,
so it too is finished. The same is true of the bulk of the philosophy of science. Language has become, for analytic philosophers, the refuge of foundationalist pretensioD.s which are denied
appeal to the mind by contemporary hostility to dualism. As a
consequence, philosophy of language is mostly "impure," Rorty
says. It has been fatally infected by the epidemic passion to find
objective foundations somewhere. Most of the aspirations of
philosophical logic and ontology, including the resurgent essentialism encouraged by Kripke, are also to be cancelled in the
coming purge. Even the value-oriented branches of thought
have been hopelessly compromised by foundationalist schemes
that try to identify the cognitive part of discourse involving values and to relegate the rest, in the positivist manner, to emotion,
arbitrary preference, and taste.
Rorty thinks that some kind of philosophy will survive the
coming demise of foundationalism and objective pretensions. He
admits that he is vague about the contents and purposes of this
philosophy of the future:
Our present notions of what it is to be a philosopher are so
tied up with the Kantian attempt to render all knowledge
claims commensurable that it is difficult to imagine what philosophy without epistemology could be. (357)
The predictions that Rorty does make are the least convincing and
the least appealing part of his book. He sees the tendency of things
to come in -the continental hermeneutics movement (H. G. Gada mer, in particular) and in philosophical "deconstruction" (Derrida). He endorses a considerable list of European existentialists,
structuralists, and phenomenologists whose writings are as longwinded as they are difficult to grasp clearly. Rorty says that the
new philosophy will be "conversational" without being exclusive
and competitive. Philosophy will be "edifying" which contrasts
with misguided efforts to be "systematic." Philosophical discourse will be "abnormal" in the sense of Thomas Kuhn's "abnormal science"; that is, it will take place without the benefit of
an inherited framework of standards and methods shared by a
consensus of those participating. 1 Philosophy will be open, pluralistic, even "playful." It will abandon its agressive assertiveness.
The work of philosophers will become more like activities in art,
politics, and religion.
Rorty does not succeed in saying (in fact, he does not try) what
will be the subject matter or the goals of the conversations to
which philosophers will contribute when they have given up the
hopeless search for objective foundations. Nor does he say why it
is that anything such a philosopher could say might strike us as
edifying. It often seems as if he is only dreaming of something
nice that otherwise unemployed philosophers can apply their talents to when most of the things they now do have been abolished.
2
Like most radical relativists, Rorty is not entirely consistent.
His examination of analytic philosophy finds that this whole enterprise is mired in the Cartesian-Kantian "problematic." Analytic philosophers are prominently guilty of presuming that they
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
have at least our concepts or conceptual schemes at their disposal. The accessibility of his own concepts is alleged by an analytic philosopher to be the source of the necessity and objectivity
of his conceptual analyses. Rorty rejects this allegation and the
philosophy it tries to legitimize. But his own arguments are full
of points which are indistinguishable in their standing from the
views he rejects as lacking any credentials at all. For example, he
finds that Locke's confusion of explanation and justification is
one of the great influential errors of modern thought. Maybe he
is right. But, in what sense can Rorty allow himself access to
what is really "explanation" and what "justification" while denying that analytic philosophers have access to concepts and thus a
basis for their analyses? He praises Wilfred Sellars for not offering "a theory of how the mind works" or a theory "of the 'nature
of concepts'." He describes a claim Sellars makes as "a remark
about the difference between facts and rules" (187). The use of
the informal word "remark" for the praised opinion of Sellars
and the weighty word "theory" for the bad views Sellars avoids
sounds like an effort to deflect the question. If the foundation of
this "remark" about facts and rules is not a kind of conceptual
analysis, then what is it? Again, Rorty says in the context of the
possibility of foundations for knowledge:
The question is not whether human knowledge in fact has
"foundations," but whether it makes sense to suggest that it
does-whether the idea of epistemic or mo.ral authority having a "ground" in nature is a coherent one. (178)
This kind of claim about what makes sense and what does not,
and what is and is not coherent, is just the sort of thing that analytic philosophers propose all the time. If their pretenses to know
what makes sense and what does not are empty, then what gives
substance to Rorty's identical pretenses?
These inconsistencies are predictable. As Socrates said of Protagoras, a relativist is always in trouble when he tries to assert
anything. He naturally thinks his relativism is objectively correct
and he thinks the foundationalist thinkers he opposes are objectively wrong. It is hard to see how a relativist can say less than
this and still have an intelligible position.
Rorty's general relativism sometimes appears to undermine his
own best insights. He is attracted by John Dewey's thinking be~
cause Dewey emphasized the social character of knowledge as
opposed to the solipsistic stance of Descartes. Similarly, in psychology Rorty thinks that a healthy materialism that is not a reductive mind-brain identity theory will supercede the confusions
of Cartesian philosophy of mind. Perhaps these are very sound
convictions to have. They fit ill with relativism. If we are to appreciate the validity of physiological psychology do we not have
to suppose that idealism is objectively wrong? It is not just another alternative conversational stance for philosophy. Rorty
thinks a materialist philosophy will survive the prevalent philosophical errors. Why? Surely he thinks we will be left with the
body and its relation to all our intellectual functions after the illusions of the Mirror of Nature have been dispelled. If so, this
material subject matter must be objectively available to us. In the
same way, if we are to base our understandings, like Dewey, on the
irreducible social context of discourse and knowledge, we must
85
�take that context as something that the world objectively contains. There really are other people with whom we speak and interact. How can we praise Dewey's vieW if we say that even these
convictions about social reality are just "optional descriptions"?
Even Rorty's customarily sensitive historical judgments are
sometimes distorted by his application of a set of standards to the
views he rejects which he cannot apply to his own views and
those he endorses. For example, he simultaneously praises Jerry
Fodor and condemns Kant in this passage:
The crucial point is that there is no way to raise the sceptical
question "How well do the subject's internal representations
represent reality?" about Fodor's "language of thought." In
particular there is no way to ask whether, or how well, the
products of spontaneity's theories represent the sources of receptivity's evidence, and thus no way to be sceptical about
the relation between appearance and reality. (246-7)
This passage actually describes Fodor's view in terms which do
not distinguish it at all from Kant's. Rorty knows that Kant's theory of the mind and empirical reality also rules out scepticism
"about the relation of appearance and reality" and, therefore,
deserves whatever praise Fodor deserves on that count. But
Rorty's rhetorical usage of the Kantian terminoloy (''spontaneity"
and "receptivity") seem to imply that Kant held the opposite and
that Fodor's stand is an improvement and a correction.
3
Rorty is entirely right to say that epistemological illusions are ·
responsible for the spurious format of scientific theory-building
that many modern philosophies have adopted. Mirror-of-Nature
thinking leads directly to this format. If our knowledge has to
start from acquaintance restricted to inner representations, such
as seventeenth-century ideas or twentieth-century sense-data,
then the mere assertion that there is an extra-mental world
stands in need of defense. In the absence of a successful defense,
we have no reason at all for thinking that there is any subject
matter for sciences like physics or biology to investigate. So a preliminary philosophical theory is needed to vouch for the existence of a subject matter for all other sciences. Empiricists have
constructed a great many such "theories" which introduce material objects only in hypotheses that are supposed to be accepted
because they explain the patterns we encounter in our mental
experiences. Here the philosopher imitates scientific theories
that posit unobserved atoms in hypotheses that explain observed
combining weights of elements, or that posit unobserved heavenly
bodies in hypotheses that explain observed orbital perturbations.
When philosophers argue in this way they are making epistemology into a hypothetico-deductive science. Philosophers then posit
unobserved chairs and tables to explain observed perceptual experiences! It is a virtue of Rorty's critique to release us from this
misapplied model of scientific thinking.
When we have fully rejected the Mirror of Nature, a lot of this
"scientific" philosophy will automatically be eliminated. This is
very much to be hoped for, but it gives us no reason at all for
thinking, with Rorty, that these misguided epistemological thea-
86
ries will be replaced by the incommensurable badinage that he
sees coming. In fact, a significant scientific influence in philosophy is unaffected by Rorty's critique. For philosophers of the
empiricist, rationalist, and analytic traditions, quite apart from
theory-construction, scientific influence in philosophy has meant
a tough-minded independence, it has meant adherence to the
ideals of self-criticism and clarity, and it has meant the open ac~
ceptance of tests of one's ideas in competitive intellectual confrontations. Rorty's general relativism and his predictions for the
future appear to depend on rejecting these wholesome influences along with the inapplicable pattern of hypothetico-deductive theory construction. The elimination of Cartesianism and
its aftermath, however, does not show that there is anything
wrong with these ideals, nor with their adoption in philosophy.
Rorty claims that once the epistemological bias is eliminated
there will be a general change in direction in philosophy which
will not be limited to those disciplines directly engendered by the
Mirror of Nature. It is in this spirit that he says that language
tends to replace the Mirror in the continuing but spurious foun~
dationalist projects of anti-dualist analytic philosophers. This is a
sensitive insight. Perhaps it is generally true in philosophy today
that real advance in understanding is only attained with the recognition that all theorizing is out of place. Our intellectual needs
are mischaracterized and our confusions made permanent insofar as we think that what is required is something like a theory.
This may be the clearest and most enduring part of Wittgen~
stein's elusive teaching. Here is Saul Kripke's appreciation of the
same thought in the context of theories about reference and
names:
It really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It's wrong. You
may suspect me of proposing another theory in its place, but I
hope not, because I'm sure it's wrong too, if it's a theory.2
If this attitude is right we have inherited a conception of philosophical thought which deforms our actual problems by forcing
them into the mold of scientific theory. The harmful conception
goes beyond the influence of the Mirror of Nature. To say that
we should stop this deforming and forcing is good, but that in it~
self does not show anything about what philosophers should do
instead, and it bodes nothing for relativism. The understandings
that survive misguided foundationalism ought to be, per se, more
objective, not less objective, than the illusory pursuit of philosophical theories where such theories can accomplish nothing.
4
Under the influence of Kant, most philosophers, according to
Rorty, have accepted the idea of the universal commensurability
of all opinions. Like the idea of theory-building in philosophy,
the idea of commensurability is modelled on scientific practice.
Scientists intentionally try to sharpen opposed views in order to
force a showdown which only one view will survive. The process
of sharpening differences and forcing choices is only feasible if
the holders of different opinions share a general framework
within which their views are commensurable. Rorty thinks that
WINTER 1982
�there is such a general framework which permits commensuration withiri particular sciences, or maybe wit,hin the whole scientific enterprise at a particular time. But there is no permanent
commensurating framework for science through all lime, and no
framework that embraces scientific,. moral, artistic, and philosophical activities all at once. There may be some great truth in
this view about commensurability. If so, Rorty's exposition of
that truth is inadequate. His discussions of incommensurable
discourse never get beyond the unresolved tension between insightful critique and disastrous relativism.
Can there be such a thing as discourse that does not presuppose a shared commensurating framework of meanings? How
can speakers get as far as conversation without commensurability? The framework of shared meaning may not suffice for formulation of a means for resolving differences, but this does not
establish incommensurability. Inability to resolve differences is
notorious, for example, in economics, but no one will conclude
that views on the effects of monetary policy are, therefore,
incommensurable.
We would, I_think, say that the views expressed in two different
poems are often incommensurable. To the extent that we would
say that, we would also say that poems do not make assertions in
any ordinary sense. If two speakers do make genuine assertions
for one another's benefit, that is, if they produce sentences that
they mean to be true and mean to be taken as such, then. they
must also hold out the hope, at least, that they can find some
way of telling whether their assertions are compatible OF ihcompatible, that is, they must presuppose commensurability. They
cannot be indifferent about this and simply go on with the conversation. So commensurability seems to be indispensable for
participation in a conversation in which assertions are made. It
may be that this is too rigid a conception of commensurability
for exhibition of the point that Rorty wants to bring to our attention about the multiple enterprises of the human intelligence.
He offers us no guidance on a less rigid conception.
These abstract difficulties find concrete illustration when we
turn to Rorty's examples of incommensurable discourse. He calls
Marx and Freud edifying philosophers whose discourses are incommensurable. He criticizes those who try to draw the thought
of these figures into the "mainstream," and that means those
who want to make the doctrines of Freud and Marx commensurable with other opinions and theories about psychology, physiology, economics, history, and morals. Rorty's relativism is out of
hand here.
We may all agree that the insights and theories of Freud and
Marx are hard to connect with less revolutionary patterns of
thought about man. These two are similar in that they both construct self-contained schemes of things with relatively clear internal rules for investigation and interpretation (though this is a
problem for these systems). Furthermore, for their initiation
such systems may depend on an exceptional willingness to ignore prevailing rules and concepts and entrenched opinions.
Rorty is sensitive to all this insulation of these radical theories
from the rest of the universe of thought. But this insulation is
necessarily only partial. Thinking, no matter how radical, must
preserve substantial contact with preexisting thought. This is the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
minimum price of intelligibility. Marx and Freud, in particular,
certainly do respond to earlier views and they both expect their
work to be preferred to other doctrines on rational grounds, even
on "scientific" grounds. Freud connects his work in straightforward ways to the international psychiatric thinking of his time.
He incorporates in his thinking some large ideas from earlier
German philosophy, and he openly commits himself to the ultimate commensurability, even the. reducibility, of his psychological
theory to the workaday conceptual scheme o£ physical medicine
and physiology. Similar points apply to the doctrines of Marx.
These thinkers regarded their own views as commensurable with
the "mainstream" and only in the setting of that commensurability were they able to think of their own views as important.
The question of commensurability arises for Rorty only when
he thinks about two beliefs that seem to be opposed. Freud's
opinions seem to be incommensurable just because he says such
things as, "Slips of the tongue and lapses of memory are intended." Assertions like this seem to be in flat contradiction to
our ordinary opinion that slips and forgetting are unintended.
Furthermore, there is something especially troublesome about
the seeming opposition of Freud's claim to the ordinary view
about slips and lapses of memory. The ordinary view is not
merely a widely held empirical belief. It belongs, rather, to a
framework of shared meanings. We all think, though we don't articulate such thoughts much, that a verbal performance is not a
slip, by definition, if it fulfills the speaker's intentions. This
comes, in some sense, from the meanings of "a slip'' and "intentional." Similarly, it is not just that we have found that people do
not intentionally forget things. They cannot intentionally forget
because doing anything intentionally entails knowing what you
are doing. If you knew what you were forgetting, that wouldn't
be forgotten. Within the context of this limited illustration, I
think it is this special character of Freud's opposition to ordinary
thinking that leads Rorty to the contention that his doctrines are
incommensurable and his philosophy edifying. Freud's view cannot be commensurated with the mainstream because it conflicts
with the framework of meanings within which assertions about
intentions and slips and forgetting can be logically related to one
another.
There is something in this. Freud expresses views which are
not only new opinions in psychology but which also deform the
accepted system of meanings within which psychological assertions are customarily formulated and compared. Freud does not
discuss these deformations himself. He seems to be far from fully
aware of them. But he is certainly not simply making false statements with the old concepts. He is trying to make true statements with altered concepts. No one seems to know just where
Freud violates the traditional system of interrelated concepts
and beliefs and where he relies on a common fund of meanings
in order to communicate anything at all. Now we have to ask,
Where does incommensurability fit in here? Can we say that
Freud is not really opposing established views but merely "sending the conversation in new directions," as Rorty thinks the new
non-foundationalist philosophers will? Can we agree that Freud's
opinions may become the prevailing belief by simply replacing
without ever confronting earlier opinion?
87
�I think that we must try to reconcile, or to choose between,
Freud's doctrines and the ordinary beliefs with which they seem
to conflict. For example, we can attempt reconciliations that
stress the unconscious status of the intentions Freud finds. We
can try reformulations of Freud's views that capture the spirit
without the conceptual deformations, for example, ascribing intentions to a subagent for behavior that is unintended by the
whole man. And we can try to soften the apparent rigidity of the
ordinary system of meanings by calling attention to non-psychoanalytic contexts, such as brain bisections, where the contrasts
"intended/unintended" and "forgotten/not forgotten" come
under remarkable pressure. These are suggestions for "continuing the conversation," and it may be that Rorty has in mind just
this development of conversational philosophy. But these efforts
at understanding Freud are also nothing short of efforts at making his thinking commensurable with the thinking of others. If
we are not trying to make Freud's ideas commensurable in such
ways, then we are just not trying to understand him. It will not
do to call this failure to understand edification or respect for a
kind of creativity.
Quite a bit of just this not-trying-to-understand is presently
done in the intellectual world. It generates the familiar self-enclosed cultish point of view in which unexamined and deformed
terminology become an insider's rhetoric. When this happens,
the failure of commensurability will not promote a democratic
conversational mentality. The very fact that there are still such
things as Freudianism and Marxism is in part a measure of the
extent to which incommensurability seals off thinking from the
give and take of ideas which Rorty values.
5
Rorty's thinking is very well-informed and he always tries to
use the views of other philosophers as guideposts even in cases
where he does not want to follow them. Throughout his book he
says that Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger have been his
greatest guides, showing him the path out Of epistemological
foundationalism. These three thinkers all reject the schemes
that have grown out of Cartesianism, and they all attack the Cartesian root and not just the modern branches. But Rorty actually
has little to say about the views of any of these three. In the
fourth chapter, which he calls the "central chapter of the book,"
he examines instead, and in quite a bit of detail, much more recent analytic philosophy and, in particular, the views of Sellars
and Quine._ It is as though these tough-minded analysts, who do
not reach the relativism he adopts and whom Rorty himself calls
"systematic philosophers," help him to see the virtues of the
much vaguer and more relativistic doctrines of Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. According to Rorty's exposition, Sellars
clearly grasps the hopeless defects of "the Myth of the Given,"
and all the foundationalist programs that have been based upon
it. His appreciation of "the logical space of reasons" marks Sellars's perception of the indispensable contrast between causal explanation and justification. But Rorty finds that Sellars remains
committed to the illusion of "analysis," which is the idea that
our concepts are, in any case, accessible to us, so that we can
88
make entirely secure judgments as to what is and what is not true
of these concepts. Just here Quine's thinking is most important.
Quine's rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction is aimed at
precisely this presumption of the availability of our own concepts as unshakeable support for analytic judgments. Rorty sees
the two ideas: (i) the incorrigible data of sense, and (ii) incorrigible
access to our own concepts as the twin supports of contemporary epistemological foundationalism. Therefore, a combination
of Sellars's critical rejection of the first view and Quine's rejection of the second, a combination that neither Sellars nor Quine
fully attains, is just what Rorty wants in order to disenfranchise
foundationalism.
Throughout Rorty's work there is erudition, sensitivity, and
much truth. At the end there remains a large gap in his argument. The failure of Cartesian foundationalism does not establish relativism. Rorty seems uncbaracteristically insensitive to
the problems of internal coherence bf relativism, problems that
have been known since Socrates criticized Protagoras. Even
Rorty's appeal to the painstaking work of analytic philosophers
seems odd, since they are, in his own characterization, systematic philosophers whose work would have to appear to be a waste
of time dominated by baseless illusions from the vantage point of
edifying conversational philosophy. Sellars and Quine are both
philosophers whose thinking is pervaded by the idea of science.
Given Rorty's meticulous presentation of their doctrines, and
given his appreciation of the clarity (Quine's anyway), the penetration, and rigor of this, the best philosophical thinking of the
analytic school, his final position that seems to applaud all the
voluminous obscurantism now produced in Europe is disappointing.
There is another kind of inconsistency in Rorty' s thought which
is understandable, maybe even attractive, if not altogether acceptable. At several points in his discussion, Rorty seems to draw
back from his own radical conclusions as though in recognition
of the fact that they are in themselves so profoundly unsatisfying. In this mood, Rorty describes the anti-systematic conversational philosophy he endorses as essentially reactive and critical.
Such philosophy demands a correlative systematic and objective
philosophy. Without systematic philosophy to react to, edifying
philosophy is nothing at all. In consequence, Rorty seems to envision a cyclical alternation between systematic and critical philosophy, each of which has its purposes and legitimacy:
Great systematic philosophers are constructive and offer arguments. Great edifying philosophers are reactive and offer
satires, parodies, aphorisms. They know their work loses its
point when the period they were reacting against is over.
They are intentionally peripheral. Great systematic philosophers like great scientists build for eternity. Great edifying
philosophers destroy for the sake of their own generation. (369}
Here Rorty seems to agree with my judgment that his conversational philosophers, left to themselves, do not have anything to
talk about. The only real views ever at issue are those of philosophers who look for objective truths. These truths try to be universally commensurable in that they are to be tested against all
comers. If this is Rorty's view, he may be right to oppose a partieWINTER 1982
�ular conception of foundations, but it hardly makes sense to oppose the very idea of objective knowledge daims.
It seems that Rorty might envision something like this: Some
day, through the reactive efforts of thinkers such as himself and
the great figures he admires (Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein), the program of the Cartesian Mirror of Nature will be set
aside and it will no longer have any appreciable hold on the philosophical imaginations of men. When that day arrives, a philosopher considering objectivity, rational methods, and truth will not
be planning to relate his beliefs to any supposed inner magazine
of perfectly apprehended representations. Of course, under
these circumstances edifying philosophers will have nothing to
say. Their conversations will have dried up as a consequence of
their own success. Their work will have "lost its point," as Rorty
puts it. Now, at this stage, we could imagine that there would be
no further philosophy produced at all out of a recognition that
any new objective theory is bound to have the same deficiencies
as its predecessors, or we could imagine a new systematic project
that is not obviously susceptible to the criticisms raised in earlier
reactive phases. When he says that edifying philosophy is essentially reactive, Rorty seems to me to envision the latter development, and in some passages I think he expressly foresees a future
return to thought with objective foundations. However Rorty's
speculations on this point come down, neither of these outcomes is compatible with the general relativism that he presents
in most of the book. For if there is no further systematic project
in the offing, then conversational, creative, and edifying philosophy is not a true successor to the philosophy we have known but
merely a final winding down of philosophy. And if further sys·
tematic projects are to be expected when conversationalism has
lost its point, then Rorty must concede the inadequacy of his
own arguments for relativism. If objective philosophy has a real
future, then we are not entitled to rule it out generally in favor of
pragmatic relativism.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
In this dilemma we can see that Rorty has become ensnared in
the very traps he detected in foundationalist schemes. A relativist
allows that, within the context of relevant human activities and
needs, one assertion may be warranted and another assertion not.
But the effort to elevate the concept of warranted assertibility to
that of objective truth allegedly fails because it presupposes that
we can abstract from any particular context of activities and
needs, or it presupposes that there is one all-embracing context.
This is the viewpoint beyond all viewpoints that Rorty repudiates. But his own efforts at characterizing the plural projects of
human intelligence have engendered just the same presupposition. Rorty thinks that he can assess objective projects from a
perspective in which they are a mere phase inevitably overcome
in the next phase of reactive criticism. The reactive phase, in
turn, is ultimately sterile and needs replacement by further objective efforts. Thus we are to see the intellectual life of man as a
permanent vacillation between the illusion of theory and the impotence of criticism. Perhaps this view can seem to be acceptable and not simply a form of despair, because possession of it
seems to embody a higher objectivity and understanding. But
really there is no such point of view and no occasion for despair.
It is impossible to accept a permanent role for systematic philosophy and at the very same time to repudiate the idea of such philosophy. Rorty's picture of alternating objective and reactive
phases of philosophy does invite us to regard his relativism as a
higher objectivity, but this is not so much a virtue of his account
as it is a contradiction in it.
I See Kuhn, T., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago 1962.
2
Kripke, S., "Naming and Necessity," in Davidson, D., and Harman, G.,
editors, Semantics of Natural Language, Dordrecht.Holland 1971.
Quoted from the slightly revised reissue, Naming and Necessity. Cambridge 1980.
89
�R:Evmw EssAY
Afghanistan Fights
The Struggle for Afghanistan
by Nancy Peabody Newell and Richard S. Newell*
LEo RADITSA
Le regime des Seleucides ne constituaitcependantnullement un
regime colonial dans le sens oil nous 1' en tendons aujourd'hui.
Comme ils n'avaient aucun zele missionaire, et ne cherchaient a
ameliorer ni la religion ni les egouts d~ leurs sujets, mais laissaient les indigenes aussi crasseux et aussi heureux qu'ils l'avaient
ete auparavant, la dynastie ne donna jamais lieu a aucune insurrection de leur part.
E. J. Bickerman
On December 8, 1978, just after signature of treaty between
Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, like the Soviet treaties with
Vietnam, Angola, and Ethiopia, the New York Times said, "Instead of being a strategic highway to India, as the Victorians
feared, Afghanistan looks more like a footpath to nowhere."! But
catastrophe teaches provincials geography. In the last three years
Kabul has become almost a household word. And people have
slowly come to grasp that places few had heard of before 1979,
Kandahar, Jalalabad, Mazar-i-Sharif, are not about to become
family estates of the Bonaparte family. The Afghans are fighting
to almost everybody's amazement in the West-and the rest of
the world.
This ignorance does not come from scarcity of books or lack of
involvement with Afghanistan. We have been more involved
with Afghanistan since 1945 than the British in the nineteenth
century.2 This.ignorance comes from lack of judgement.
In contrast to nineteenth-century accounts, largely written by
British officers in India, and to the diplomatic correspondence
the British government published at the time of the Afghan crises of 1836-42 and 1873-79, the writings in this century, especially those after 1945, betray little grasp of Afghan history. They
obscure fundamentals that nineteenth-century writings stressed:
*Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London 1981, 236 pages.
90
The difficulties of access that Afghanistan opposes on all
sides to an invading army, surrounded as it is by the vast
tracts of mountain and desert, the former only to be traversed
by surmounting steep ridges and threading narrow defiles
where a few hundreds of well-armed and resolute men could
effectually oppose the passage of as many thousands, entitle
it to be considered in a military sense, as one of the strongest
countries in the whole world, whilst the manly independence
of its hardy inhabitants, their sturdy valour, and their skill in
the use of weapons of war, to which they are trained from early
boyhood, combine to render them far from despicable oppo·
nents, especially on their own ground, for even the disciplined
warriors of Europe ... Afghanistan is the great breakwater established by nature against an inundation of northern forces
in these times. [Emphases minep
In the nineteenth century the British knew Afghanistan less
but saw it more clearly and respected it more. They knew less
but what they knew counted for more.
And wear~ busy relearning some of it-but it is already very
late. In its contrast with Richard Newell's earlier book, The Politics of Afghanistan (Cornell University Press, 1972), The Struggle
for Afghanistan betrays this relearning, for unlike the earlier
work it concentrates on events.
And events are teaching us what we should have known: that
Afghanistan is not a typical country of the so-called "Third
World" -a term that serves largely to undo nations, and to excite
them to undo themselves, by blurring the distinctions between
Leo Raditsa writes frequently on events in the world for Midstream
(most recently, "The Source of World Terrorism," December 1981). He
recently published a monograph on the marriage legislation of Augustus, "Augustus' Legislation concerning Marriage, Procreation, Love
Affairs and Adultery" (in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Roemischen Welt,
Berlin !981, II, 13).
WINTER 1982
�them-because it never experienced direct colonial rule and until1973 had a monarchy (not, of course, in ,the European sense)
that had lasted for more than two hundred years; because in its
many isolated valleys traditions of self-rule and assembly prevail
that are hundreds of years older than the monarchy. And that
just these traditions of self rule and their unwritten constitution
-and not the 1964 written constitution which in retrospect
turns out to have hastened the destruction of the monarchy
-give Afghanistan the strength of resistance: in May 1980 a traditional assembly-a jirgah-brought 916 representatives of
groups fighting in all parts of Afghanistan to Peshawar.
Based on the recognition of the fastness of the territory,
(greater than France) and of the courage of its peoples, British
policy in the nineteenth century supported Afghan independence-which meant independence from Russia and Russia's
manipulation of Persia-at the same time that it did not interfere with Afghan internal politics and its way of life except for
commerce. In the nineteenth century, the amirs of Afghanistan
carried on prolonged subtle and difficult negotiations with the
British government of India and much less frequently with missions of the Tsar-negotiations that betrayed a remarkable grasp
of relations between European nations and Afghanistan's place
in them, and a recognition that their capacity to cope with their
place in the world did not mean they had to become like the nations they dealt with. 4 The crises of 1836-42 and 1873-79 came
about when Britain forsook its own policy of support for the independence of Afghanistan, and interfered directly and unnecessarily in Afghan affairs.
The crisis that came to a head in 1878 and that, incidentally,
precipitated "The Second Afghan War," started in Europe in
1873, and especially in 1875, with the revolt of the Christian
provinces of the Turkish Empire, Herzegovina and Bosnia. Austria, Russia, and Germany, with Italy and France, in early 1876
demanded reforms of the Sublime Porte-demands that Britain
supported only after the Sultan's request. In May Bulgaria rebelled, in late June and early July, Serbia and Montenegro-in
the expectation of support from Russia. In September 1876, Turkey's brutal suppression of rebellion in Bulgaria reported in the
Daily Mail aroused public opinion and sent Gladstone out of
retirement to denounce in Parliament a government that countenanced such atrocities-a furor that hindered the British government's support of Turkey. With the failure of another attempt,
in this instance sponsored by Britain, at negotiations with the
Porte, Russia declared war on Turkey on April 27, 1877. Her
troops approached Constantinople in December.
In response to the threat to Constantinople, Disraeli summoned Parliament two weeks early and announced that the prolongation of fighting between Russia and Turkey might require
precautionary measures. In February 1878, the British fleet sailed
through the Dardanelles to Constantinople; British troops, some
from India, arrived in Malta, and, with Turkish consent, in Cyprus. War between Britain and Russia appeared possible.
In response to Britain's resort to troops from India, Russia mobilized an army of fifteen thousand men (whose size was exaggerated to thirty and eighty thousand men in the reports that reached
India) in Russian Turkestan along the borders of Afghanistan
and sent a mission into Afghanistan. At first in response to inTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
structions from London and then on his own, the viceroy of India
treated with the amir in Kabul for the establishment of a British
presence in Afghanistan, especially in Herat. Aware that the
pressure on Afghanistan came from the crisis in Europe and despite the insistence of his friends and associates that he sacrifice
the independence of Afghanistan in the choice between Russia
and Britain, the amir prolonged negotiations in pursuit of the inherited policy of preserving Afghanistan's independence by neither yielding to Britain and the British government of India or
Russia. The expectations of his delay were fulfilled when the
powerful nations of Europe came to an agreement with Turkey,
which deprived it of much of its territory in Europe, in July 1878
in Berlin, just at the moment of the arrival of the Russian mission in Kabul In part out of ambitious obstinacy-he apparently
dreamed of pushing the frontier of British India beyond the
Hindu Kush-and in part because of the slowness of communications, the viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, entered Afghanistan
with ill-prepared and badly equipped troops from the army of India, and started "The Second Afghan War" -after the resolution
of the crisis in Europe.
It had been the same in the crisis of 1838-42, "The First Afghan War." Britain had become embroiled in a war of succession
in Afghanistan on the side of the "legitimate" king after it had
foiled a Russian-manipulated attempt of Persia to seize Herat
from Afghanistan before it occurred. In 1838, in a letter meant for
Lord Palmerston, that accepted, without acknowledging it, Britain's understanding of recent events, the Russian diplomat,
Count Nesselrode, reaffirmed. with admirable clarity and nuance
the traditional policy toward Afghanistan, now generally identified with the catchword, "the buffer state":
La Grande Bretagne, comme la Russie, doit avoir a coeur le
meme interet, celui de maintenir la Paix au centre de l' Asie,
et d'eviter qu'il ne survienne dans cette vaste partie du globe,
une conflagration generale. Or, pour empecher ce grand
malheur, il faut conserver soigneusement le repos des pays intermediaires qui separent les possessions de la Russie de celles
de la Grande Bretagne. Consolider la tranquillite de ces contrees, ne point les exciter les unes contre les autres en nourrissant leurs haines mutuelles, se horner a rivaliser d'industrie,
mais non pas s'engager dans une lutte d'influence politique;
enfin, plus que tout le reste, respecter l'independance des
pays intermediaires qui nous separent; tel est, a notre avis, le
systeme que les 2 Cabinets ant un commun interet a suivre
invariablement, afin d'empl!:cher la possibilite d'un conflit entre 2 gran des Puissances qui, pour rester amies, ant besoin de
ne passe toucher et de ne passe heurter au centre de l'Asie. 5
The intelligence of British policy towards Afghanistan in the
nineteenth century was in part Afghanistan's doing. The Afghans
inflicted spectacular defeats on the British in the two instances,
in 1838-42 and 1878, in which they blundered into violating
their policy, defeats which brought the British Parliament
enough to its senses to have the government of India withdraw
its forces without being driven out.
In the story of these events there is nothing more instructive
than this capacity of the British government and public to learn
from errors-and Afghan courage. This capacity to acknowledge
error made the British blunders in Afghanistan different in kind
91
�from the present Soviet attempted conquest. In contrast to the
British, the Soviets, because they do not recognize opposition
and, as a result, have no parliament that can publicly acknowledge error, will not leave Afghanistan unless driven out. What officer in the Soviet army could say the words Lieutenant Vincent
Eyre published in London in 1844 and 1879!
We English went on slumbering contentedly, as though the
Afghans, whose country we had so coolly occupied, were our
very best friends in the world, and quite content to be our
obedient servants to boot, until one cold morning in November we woke up to the unpleasant sounds of bullets in the air,
and an infuriated people's voices in revolt, like the great
ocean's distant, angry roar, in a rising tempest.6
The unwelcome truth was soon forced upon us, that in the
whole Afghan nation we could not reckon on a single friend.?
Even a generation after the Second Afghan War the disasters
and the blunders of each war were vividly remembered and discussed clearly.
But Afghanistan was not to keep European ways out forever.
In the twentieth century the monarchs of Afghanistan, in varying degree, began to suffer the attractions of Europe they had resisted in the times of her greatest confidence. At the same time
the political experience they inherited allowed them to appreciate the full seriousness of the self-destructive convulsions that
overwhelmed Europe. "The Europeans demonstrated to the Afghans and other non-Western peoples that Western culture was
capable of self-destruction. Afghan modernists were confronted
with the realization that Europe did not have all the answers to
the needs of modern society," Newell sensitively observed of the
effects of the First V\'orld War on Afghanistan in his first book.
Fearful as they were, those convulsions intensified, rather than
weakened, Afghanistan's entanglement with Europe, because
they made it clear that Britain and Europe, with Russia turned
inside out in 1917, and refugees from Soviet Turkestan in
Afghanistan in the early twenties to prove it, no longer had the
control that the exercise of the traditional policy toward Afghanistan required.
Untill945, the monarchs remained capable of controlling the
European influence they encouraged: only their misjudgement
occasioned the excesses that occurred. But after 1945, they lost
control over the pace of "modernization" in part because of the
breakdown and reversal in the traditional policy toward Afghanistan that occurred, more or less unacknowledged, after the British left India in 1947.
At the end of 1948, with Europe still in ruins and Britain out
of India, the Afghan minister of national economy asked the
United States, without stating it in those terms, to take up the
traditional Western policy toward Afghanistan. At the same time
that he acknowledged the central government's need for arms
for domestic control, he foresaw that Afghanistan would fight
for the West in the war now actually going on:
._..it [Afg~an~sta~] wants U.S. arms in order to make a positive contnbubon m the event there is war with the Soviets.
Properly armed, and convinced of U.S. backing, Afghanistan
could manage a delaying action in the passes of the Hindu
92
Kush which would be a contribution to the success of the
armed forces of the West and might enable them to utilize
bases which Pakistan and India might provide.
Ab?ul Majid referred repeatedly to the "war", indicating his
behef that a war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. is inevitable, and said that when war came Afghanistan would of
course be overrun and occupied. But the Russians would be
unable to pacify the country. Afghanistan could and would
pursue guerrilla tactics for an indefinite period. a
Several years later, in the early nineteen-fifties, the United
States decided as a matter of policy to refuse military aid to Afghanistan for fear of offending the Soviets, and because they
judged that no amount of military aid could defend Afghanistan
from a determined Soviet conquest-an expectation Afghanistan's previous history and the events of the last three years
belie.
After the American refus;l, Prince Daoud, prime minister
from 1953 to 1963, turned to the Soviet Union for military and
economic aid. After Bulganin's and Khrushchev's visit to Kabul
in 1955, the Czechs in 1956 supplied the first arms to the Afghan
army, and Afghan officers, eventually as many as 200 a year,
went to school in the Soviet Union.
At first Soviet aid projects meant to attract attention with
quick results: in 1954 a highly visible, twenty-thousand ton grain
elevator in Kabul whose grain, although mostly supplied by the
United States, was often mistaken for Soviet; the paving of the
streets of Kabul, a project rejected as unimportant by the United
States. But soon the Soviets concentrated on projects that would
count when it came to force: besides equipping and training the
army, exploration for natural gas and oil and minerals, jet airports, communications, and spectacular all-weather roadsroads that with their reenforced bridges now bear Soviet armor
and gas _decontamination equipment into Afghanistan. In 1956,
the Soviets offered credits for a road through the Hindu Kush
with a tunnel at the Salang pass which would cut one hundred
and fifty miles and two days from the distance between northern
Afghanistan and Kabul A few years later, work started on another road from the Soviet border to Herat and Kandahar.
Despite the warnings of writers in the West alarmed by the
ominous possible uses of the roads, the governments of the
West, first the United States but then, as Europe recovered economically from the war, France, Italy, and Germany chose to
compete with the Soviets exclusively in economic terms. They
helped agriculture, improved the southern roads, organized an
airline, built airports and hydroelectric projects, improved local
education on all levels, sent Afghans abroad to study-"education" to turn out fateful for the country. In contrast to Soviet
money which was lent against barter arrangements for agricultural produce and for raw materials, like natural gas, whose terms
have never become public, gifts made up eighty percent of
American aid to Afghanistan until 1967.
The United States' decision to compete on unequal terms, in
economic but not military aid-which represented itself as a continuation of the old policy under a new name, "non-alignment,"
instead of "buffer state" -actually amounted to an unacknowlWINTER 1982
�edged reversal of the old policy, for it substituted engagement in
Afghanistan's domestic affairs for support of its independence.
The West's unwillingness to recognize the new policy's reversal
of the old blinded it to its greater risks-risks that plainly acknowledged would have made undeniable the recklessness of
fostering change within Afghanistan without supporting its independence. Did Afghanistan need an army, which the United
States allowed the Soviets to control, for anything except standing up to the Soviets?
We pursued the inherently more dangerous policy, because
we feared the bluntness and explicitness of the old. The old policy faced the risk of war-and appreciated Afghan courage and
Afghanistan's formidible natural defenses-the new policy ignored the possibility of war (and true to its evasiveness, acts as if
nothing is happening, now that war has occurred!) in the protestation of good intentions and the condescension of the assumption
that the Afghans could not resist a determined Soviet attempt at
conquest. In retrospect, in pursuit of this policy of changing Afghanistan's domestic life without supporting its independence,
the West appears unwittingly to have cooperated with the Soviets in undermining the central government of Afghanistan
(which both it and the Soviets mistook for the country).
The new policy with its almost exclusive preoccupation with
Afghanistan's domestic affairs had another fateful consequence
besides the forgetting of Afghanistan's past. It forgot where Afghanistan was. It forgot how the world was put together. It forgot
that the independence of Afghanistan meant the safety of Pakistan and India, and to a degree of Persia, the Persian Gulf, the
Sea of Arabia. Because of this readiness to forget that Afghanistan was an actual country in a specific place that came of not
facing the possibility that Afghanistan might have enemies, Afghanistan despite our greater involvement in it appears to us
much further away than in the nineteenth century.
Admittedly, the British in some sense had it easier, because
they did not have to defend India without being there-and being there, and riding and walking everywhere they went, they
knew how the world was put together. But there are deeper
causes for this incapacity to see that countries are in specific
places and to remember their past. So-called ideological competition serves to blind people to the past and to what is actually going on before their eyes. Besides the diplomats of the West,
much of the youth in Kabul and many in the government fell for
this ideological brooding which does not distinguish between
one country and another: forgetful of their monarchy's political
experience and their country's independence and self-rule they
took themselves for any country in the "Third World" -an expression which, Irving Kristol has profoundly pointed out, exists
only because of the UN's capacity to spread its illusions.
After ten years, in 1963, the king dismissed Prince Daoud as
prime minister. In his concentration on winning money from
abroad for economic development, Daoud had suppressed all political activity except for the distraction of agitation for the "autonomy" of the Pushtun peoples in Pakistan-agitation meant to
foster the illusion of "national" unity and coherence. The foreign money for improving Afghanistan's "infrastructure" and for
education had produced the beginnings of a middle class (about
one hundred thousand by 1973) but not the increase in producTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
tion for the trade the new roads meant to facilitate. Largely dependent on the Kabul government, the new middle class spent
its money for imported goods instead of investing in light industry and agriculture.
In an attempt to make up for Daoud's neglect of politics, the
King in 1963 appointed a committee to draft a new constitution.
Approved by a traditional countrywide tribal and ethnic assembly-a national jirgah-the new written constitution betrayed
the divided mind of the monarch-and his hesitations. At the
same time that it granted parliament legislative powers and excluded the entire royal family, except the king, from political office, it granted the king control of foreign and military affairs, the
appointment of the cabinet, veto of legislation, and the dissolution of parliament. At the same time that it sought the consent
of the people, it attempted to preserve the absolute powers of
the king: "The King is not accountable and shall be respected by
all." (Article 15)
Of the 209 members of the 1965 Parliament, the first elected
with universal suffrage, 146 were tribal and ethnic leaders, 25 religious leaders. There were only four deputies from Kabul, four
women, four from the newly founded People's Democratic Party
of Afghanistan (PDPA), among them Babrak Karma] and Hafizullah Amin. Traditional authority, status, wealth, not political issues,
decided most of the electoral contests, especially in the country.9
The king attempted to mediate between this parliament
(largely from the country) and the Westernized Afghans in the
government in Kabul. At the same time as he called himself the
"founder of the progressive movement in Afghanistan," the king
attempted to explain his reforms in Islamic terms. The king's ambivalence betrayed itself in his vacillations in regard to the independent press he alternately tolerated and suppressed, and in his
refusal to approve a law parliament passed for the establishment
of parties that might have in the course of time, a generation-but as it turned out there was to be nowhere near that
amount of time, brought the country into the politics of the city.
Unwilling to risk the organization of the popular will of the country through parties, the king unwittingly encouraged clandestine
groups in Kabul and the other cities of Afghanistan- where less
than ten percent of Afghanistan's estimated fifteen million people live.
In all its ambiguity the new constitution brought an explosion
of political action, outside parliament, at the University and on
the streets of Kabul. For the first time, less than two years after
the dismissal of Daoud, in 1965, organized Marxist-Leninist
groups, especially the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan,
appeared in Kabul During the debate for confidence for the first
cabinet under the new constitution in October 1965, the police
and the army killed at least three high school and university students in demonstrations in the streets. In October 1968, students
prevented the enforcement of a law on education they did not
like. In May 1969, an unimportant matter precipitated a general
strike that closed the University until November. In November
1971, new exam requirements provoked another general strike
that rapidly assumed political character, and again closed the
University for five months.
In the absence of other political organizations, Babrak Karmal
and other representatives from the tightly-organized People's
93
�Democratic Party of Afghanistan often dominated debate in parliament at the same time that their coffirades manipulated crowds
at the university and in the streets. But the students did not need
much encouragement. Western and Soviet money during the ten
years of Daoud's prime-ministership had increased the numbers
of students, but not the quality of education. In primary and secondary schools throughout the country, the teachers, often with
only a few years more study than their students, persisted in rote
instruction that allowed students little discussion or initiative. In
Kabul language difficulties plagued the University: in the sixties
about one hundred professors from abroad lectured in six languages, with the result that the one European language Afghan
students chose to learn determined the· education they got.
There were not enough books: of the hundred thousand books
in the library, the bare minimum for a university, eighty percent
were in English. Also, students wanted to study "letters," fashionable and customary. But the country needed technicians. By
the end of the sixties, Afghans in Afghanistan who had returned
from graduate study abroad numbered five hundred-and in Afghanistan, in contrast to many "Third-World" countries, most
had returned.
Out of this chaos came many students more ambitious than
qualified-and in addition unemployable-good prospects for
the political agitation and the clandestine organizations bent on
undoing the world in the name of bettering it. In some ways a
grotesque magnification, and to some extent a reflection of the
battling that undid many western universities in the same years,
this chaos had more brutal-or, at least more obvious-consequences in Afghanistan.
At its founding in january 1965, PDPA openly declared its allegiance to Soviet foreign policy and the Soviet model. Like many
organizations that cannot cope with opposition, it succumbed almost immediately to the hatred of faction. Each faction had a
newspaper that bore its name: Khalq (Masses), was closed down
by the government in 1966 after five issues, because of vilification of Western influences and of the royal family, and Parcham
(The Banner) lasted until 1969. By 1971, Pareham began to
organize Marxist-Leninist cells in the army, especially among
junior officers-and perhaps to establish contact with Prince
Daoud in forced political retirement, who was to destroy the
monarchy in 1973 with its help. At the same time that it kept up
open and close relations with the government and the army, the
Soviet Union secretly financed and manipulated the organizations meant to undermine them, Parcham and, to a lesser extent,
Khalq. In this situation in which the street counted for more
than a parliament that could not muster the will to legislate, the
king unnecessarily contributed to the heady disorienting atmosphere in Kabul by siding with the Arabs-and the Soviet Unionagainst Israel in the international propaganda war that sought to
undo victory on the battlefield in 1967.
In retrospect it is clear that the present war for Afghanistan
started with Daoud's destruction of the Monarchy in 1973-an
event whose significance was hardly appreciated at the time by
commentators not used to valuing inherited institutionsiO_and
that was hardly remembered in the catastrophe of 1978. Up to
1973 there had been abdications and struggles for succession, but
no direct attack on the monarchy. The only institution of the cen-
94
tral government that had survived more than a generation, the
two-hundred year old monarchy, enjoyed real respect among
educated and uneducated Afghans alike, who called it the
"Shadow of God." Such an enormity required a prince like
Daoud, who was also cousin and brother-in-law of the king, but
a prince with a mind confused by "progressive" ideas-and
with an army ready to obey him in part because of Parcham's
infiltration.
With the exception of some tribesmen, the countryside did
not react to Daoud's destruction of the monarchy, probably because they did not realize that Daoud intended to do away with
the monarchy, rather than substitute himself for the king, and
because they were used to defending themselves from the monarchy rather than defending it. With the monarchy gone, restraint
gradually disappeared in Kabul.
In his proclamation of a republic after his seizure of power,
Daoud called the king a "despot." Despite his promises to turn
the king's "pseudodemocracy" into real democracy, he adopted
the Marxist program and pro-Soviet foreign policy of Parcham.
He emphasized the bloodlessness of his coup at the same time
that he admitted eight murders. 11 The Soviet Union offered
much military and technical aid to the new regime that it, India,
Czechoslovakia and West Germany quickly recognized. For the
authority of the king which rested on the consent of the tribes,
Daoud tried to substitute the fascination of his personality-and
the distractions of his Marxist program, meant for the students
and intellectuals of Kabul whom he mistook for the people of
Afghanistan.
A little more than a year after his seizure of power, Daoud began to undo the Communist infiltration of his regime. In 1975 he
expelled the Parcham leaders. In 1977 he dismissed forty Sovie~
trained officers and began to send officers for training to Egypt
instead of the Soviet Union. Despite his success in undoing
Communist infiltration in at least the top positions in his regime-but not in the army-Daoud still did not, or could not,
conceive a program other than Communist: democracy, in his
1977 constitution, turned out to mean a one-party state that
recognized no opposition.
After its expulsion, Parcham, probably upon Soviet instigation, came in 1976 to an understanding with Khalq, that had
from the beginning considered Daoud too "reactionary" to support. At the same time, in order to lessen dependence on the
Soviet Union, Daoud conciliated Pakistan and turned for aid to
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and, more importantly, Egypt and
Persia. Aware of Soviet and Marxist infiltration in Kabul, the
Shah had already in 1974 offered two billion dollars in credits,
mostly for the construction of a nine-hundred mile railway to
connect Kabul, Kandahar, and Herat with Persia and the world
outside. Several hundred thousand Afghans had gone to work in
Persia and the states along the Gulf. In early 1978 a few months
before his murder and the destruction of his regime, Daoud
visited Sadat, who had recently won the attention of the world
with his visit to Jerusalem.
But it was too late. Unable to defend the status-quo because of
his destruction of the monarchy, Daoud could neither go backward nor forward. That he got into most trouble over women's
rights tells something of the disorientation in Kabul that abWINTER 1982
�sorbed Daoud to the point that he forgot the countryside. 12 He
had become a European in spite of himself. In the end those
who did not hate him would not support him.
Unlike the seizure of power of 1973, the coup of 1978 brought
much murder: guesses ranged from two to len thousand dead.
Carefully planned (according to Khalq, as early as 1975) and carried out by some of the same officers who had seized power in
1973, the coup of 1978 was precipitated by the unexplained
murder of Mir Akbar Khyber, an important leader of the Parcham
faction-one of seven political murders in the last months of
Daoud. Frightened by Khalq-Parcham demonstrations of mourning and defiance that numbered, perhaps, ten thousand, the first
demonstrations against him, Daoud ordered the arrest of the
most important Communist leaders. Either inefficient or infiltrated, Daoud's police allowed one of these leaders, Hafizullah
Amin, after his arrest, to write detailed instructions to army and air
officers to begin the seizure of power the next morning, April 27.
With air battles, spectacular in their precision, and intense street
battles, the coup took a relatively long time, something like
thirty-six hours, time enough for decisive mediation by Western
ambassadors who understood the significance of eventsY
The April 1978 coup brought a mounting fury of intrigue between one faction after another in Kabul and an attack on the
countryside that by early 1979 had provoked violent resistance
throughout Afghanistan. Open in its hatred of the destroyed
monarchy and the murdered Daoud, the regime at first sought
to win confidence at home and abroad with its denial of Marxism
and Communism. Its first proclamation acknowledged God. In
an interview with Die Zeit, Taraki, a leader ofKhalq and the new
President of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, denied
disingenuously that the violence of the seizure of power aimed
at anything other than democracy. 14 A leading expert on Afghanistan scolded the New York Times for calling the coup Communist.15 But soon the fancies that justified their violence overwhelmed the new leaders' capacity to distinguish their seizure of
power from an uprising of all Afghanistan, a "revolution." "But
he [Taraki] insisted on calling himself the leader of a revolution,
not a coup. The conviction that the masses were behind them
would lead Taraki and the clannish Marxist leadership to disaster."
Unwilling to know themselves in the distasteful role of despots,
which in any case was beyond their justification, the new leaders,
within a few months of their seizure of power, took the measures
that Montesquieu taught provoked the ruin of despotism: with
totalitarian arrogance which, unlike the open cruelty of despotism, knows no limits, they attacked Afghan customs and religion
in the name of freedom In October 1978 they unfurled a new
flag for Afghanistan, modeled after the flags of the Soviet Socialist
Republics, which by substituting red for Islamic green undermined their Islamic pretences before the whole country. In November they announced reforms that interfered with customs:
compulsory education; limitation of marriage price; required licensing of all marriages and prohibition of marriage before the
age of eighteen; prohibition of usury in customary credit arrangements between the poor in the country and their money
lenders; redistribution of three million acres of the best landmeasures all ·taken without adequate study of the conditions
they ostensibly meant to correct.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Used to heady "progressive" pronouncements of reform from
Kabul, the Afghans did not react until the arrival in the countryside of bands of fanatic Marxist university and high-school
students as government officials, backed by the well-paid and
radicalized police, showed them that the new regime, in contrast
to Daoud, meant what it said. Tribal and religious leaders who
resisted were arrested and executed.
The attempt to enroll by force all school-age children (up to
then families had voluntarily enrolled about fifty percent of their
boys but only ten percent of their girls) in schools of Marxist indoctrination in which Russian substituted for English amounted
to an attack by the privileged young of Kabul on the authority of
the parents in the countryside. Based on the crude brutality of
the expectation that the expropriation, and destruction, of the
top two percent of the population would free the rest from "oppression" and, even more cynically, win their allegiance to complicity in murder, and robbery, the land reform program ignored
many of the realities of land tenure in an old and poor country
only incipiently sensitive to economic differences. Despite the
recent appearance of something approaching a rural proletariat
of no longer independent nomads, a "majority of farmers and
herders appear not to be hopelessly poor" (by Afghan standards)
and own their own land. The uncertainty that came with the expropriation showed itself in a one-third drop in the spring wheat
harvest in 1979. In the Newells' judgement the abruptness of the
marriage reform shows that it aimed, not at the "emancipation
of women," but, like the compulsory Marxist education program,
at undermining families in order to expose individuals to "social
engineering." The resort to force in all these measures provoked
explosions of resistance throughout Afghanistan-resistance that
coalesced after Kabul showed its readiness to depend on Soviet
force, with its treaty with the Soviet Union on December 8, 1978.
With the countryside in resistance throughout Afghanistan by
the beginning of 1979, uprisings took hold of the cities: in March
1979, in Hera~ the Afghan city closest to Persia, perhaps five
thousand people, in a city numbering eighty-five thousand, including all known Soviet advisers and Khalq members, were
murdered, often with savage atrocity-an event that wants a
Livy to find its proper place in Western history; in April in Jalalabad Afghan soldiers, ordered to attack resistance groups outside
the city, killed their Soviet advisors in mutiny and fled to the resistance, after suffering defeat from loyal government and, according to some reports, Soviet troops. There was violence also
in Kandahar, Pul-i.Khumri, and Mazar·i-Sharif.
The first purges took place just two months after the KhalqParcham seized Kabul: in July, Hafizullah Amin expelled Babrak
Karmal and five other Parcham leaders to the exile of ambassadorships in eastern Europe and jailed hundreds of Parcham
members. Reckless, arrogantly confident that the Soviets needed
him more than he them, in some sense an amateur, with illusions of independence, for unlike Soviet trained Parcham members, he had learned his Marxism on American campuses,
Hafizullah Amin defied the Soviets in his fanatic impatience, only
to become more dependent on them. For instance, Soviet advisors, whose numbers increased from fifteen hundred at the
time of the coup to at least five thousand by the early summer of
1979 to ten thousand at the time of the invasion, often took the
95
�places in the ministries and elsewhere, of the Parcham members
Amin purged. By driving events beyoll,d anybody's control, Amin
probably more than anyone precipitated the Soviet attempt at
conquest that began with his murder.
Even as he jailed Parcham members and prepared the measures that by provoking rebellion in the countryside would make
him more dependent on the Soviets, Amin convinced visiting
American "experts" in the summer and fall of 1978, and apparently, the American ambassador, who saw him frequently, that
he could turn Afghanistan into a Communist country without
succumbing to Soviet domination. This fanciful expectation
came of the illusion, which led to the support ofTito in 1948 and
in the last ten years to the support of Communist China, that
the enemy is just another nation, Russia, and not Communism
that seeks domination by destroying governments of every sort.
Even the murder of the American ambassador in early February
1979 in a Soviet-directed attempt, supposedly, to rescue him
from unidentified terrorists, did not awaken the West to the
seriousness of the situation not only in Kabul but throughout
Afghanistan-and to the increase in Soviet penetration. After
all, what free nation makes a fuss about the murder of an ambassador? The United States which had up to then ignored
Amin's treaty with the Soviet Union meekly withdrew even further from Afghanistan after uttering its first disapproval of the
Communist regime. Perhaps nothing more shows the participation of Western diplomats and journalists in Amin's illusions than the sensation caused by Amin's foreign minister's
outburst against Soviet "unreliability and treachery," less than
three months before the invasion-in the fall of 1979. At the
same time Amin began to plot against his closest associate Taraki
who may have been in touch with Babrak Karmal and other Parcham members during his enthusiastic reception in Moscow in
September 1979.
Speculation about Soviet motives for invading Afghanistan on
December 25 with eighty-five thousand troops (soon to number
one hundred thousand) serves largely to continue the evasion
that kept Western journalists and governments from anticipating
the danger of attempted conquest throughout the preceding six
years, and taking action against it before it occurred-even after
intelligence reports of Soviet troop movements along the northern
bank of the Oxus River early in December 1979. According to
the Newells, Amin's defiance of the Soviets and his successive
purges of their favorites, Parcham and then Taraki, drew the
Soviets to attempt the conquest of Afghanistan. But the struggle
between factions that turned murderous in the end was at most
a precipitating cause. The reason for the attempted conquest is
that the Soviets can not face the uprising of almost a whole nation, of almost all the Afghans, not for their "world revolution"
but against it. "The most self-defeating aspect of Khalq's program was its failure to give those elements of the population it
championed anything they could recognize other than trouble.
As a consequence, Khalq ignited one of the most truly popular
revolts of the twentieth century." (Emphasis mine.)
In appearance abrupt, the attempted Soviet invasion of Afghanistan actually brought to a head a generation of active infiltration
in Afghanistan. Already in 1950, the year Spanish, incredibly, attained equal priority with English-and four years before the ap-
96
pearance of a ten-thoUsand copy edition of a Russian-Vietnamese,
Vietnamese-Russian dictionary-students at Soviet language
schools studied Pushtu.
To the surprise of both the Soviet Union and the United States,
it turned out, however, that without an open fight Afghanistan
was not for the stealing. Suddenly, the courage of the Afghans
rediscovered the buffer state, under all the obfuscations about
"non-alignment," and the wisdom of nineteenth century diplomacy. But the courage that was too much for the Soviets was
also too much for the West. The United States too could not
cope with the courage of men ready to fight, almost with their
bare hands and without waiting for support, against the soldiers
of a regime that terrifies it and the other leading nations of the
world. The Soviets tried to destroy the men of this courage; the
United States cynically took their destruction for granted. "The
primary inadequacy of American policy lay in the fact that it immediately conceded Afghanistan. Carter conveyed that concession even in his strongest denunciations of the invasion."
The unreality of the West's response showed itself in the ludicrousness of Western statesmen's remarks and proposals for
Afghanistan. Without blushing, the government of Germany remarked on the divisibility of detente, a remark which, if it meant
anything at all, meant that Germany expected Europe to be conquered last or next to last-and without fighting. Fresh from
handing Rhodesia to Mugabe with the acclamation of the whole
world, Lord Carrington proposed "non-alignment" for Afghanistan, just at the moment when the Soviets were lost in the attempt, and denying it, to destroy the buffer state, for which
"non-alignment" had been for a generation a kind of codeword
that obscured the realities of its survival both to the West and
the Soviets: the courage of the Afghans and nature's gift of
fastness.
The United States' admission that it would fight for the Gulf
of Persia but not by implication help the men and women resisting aggression in Afghanistan, showed for perhaps the first time
since 1945 that it was reduced to defending natural resourcesnot freedom. Against this shameless-and unintelligent, for it
forgets Afghanistan's strategic position (but mountains and courage do not appear in the defense budget)-admission of a policy
of expediency, nobody said a word. Least of all those who, with
the mindlessness of the "educated," had been quick to assume
that the lust for profits had driven us to fight for Indochina. The
consequences of preferring expediency to the defense of freedom-as if aid to those ready to fight for freedom in Afghanistan
were not expedient!-shows itself in the United States' readiness
to cater to the whims of Saudi Arabia and to forget that the importance of Israel comes not because of its ties with American
Jews, but because it has the reliable daring strength that can only
come of democracy-the only democracy in the Middle East ex·
cept for Turkey whose moderate temporary military dictator·
ship, terrorism's bitter fruit, now begins to awaken the contempt
of those who can only recognize freedom in its absence. It also
shows itself in the prevarications of our relationship to China, itself occasioned by our abandonment of Indochina, especially in
the refusal to recognize that China, which has not said a word
for Poland (but totalitarian countries fear nothing more than a
meaningful word), is more ruthless than the Soviet Union, and in
WINTER 1982
�the readiness to make embarassing compromises of dubious legality in the support of Taiwan. But the truth is that the struggle
that counts, and the only one we can win, r~ally win-and without major war, but at the risk of small wars in which individuals
but not whole populations die-is for freedoffi. We were in Indochina because of freedom.
United States and Western evasiveness shows itself most in its
incapacity to face up to the Soviet use of gas in Afghanistan, reported already in May 1980 by Newsweek-and in Laos since
1976, and in Cambodia-and to supply the Afghans openly with
elementary weapons and simple medicines. The Soviet resort to
gas in violation of two international treaties is an international
issue, that is, an issue that affects all countries if there ever was
one. It occurs at a moment when the government of the United
States, against its desires and probably unnecessarily, has yielded
to the importunity of some of Europe for arms control negotiations for both middle and long-range nuclear strategic weapons.
To enter into such negotiations in the knowledge that the Soviet
Union is violating two international treaties against the use of
gas, amounts to saying we will negotiate with you no matter
what you do. That is not to negotiate, but to yield without acknowledging, and even knowing, it-just what totalitarian countries mean by "negotiate." The only newspaper I know of that
has shown courage in facing up to Soviet use of gas, the Wall
Street Journal, is right in its judgement that the enormity of the
outrage is too much for the government.
Because the Afghans dare fight the Soviets we are afraid to
help them, not fight along with them, but simply to help. There
have been reports in the American press that the government
has seen to weapons for the Afghans from the beginning. But
then why the secrecy? And why President Reagan's casual remark in the first months of his presidency that he would aid the
Afghans if they but asked? 16 Do we really live in a world in which
Sadat dared say that he sent old weapons from East Europe, apparently paid for by the United States, to people fighting for
their homeland against brutal aggression with more or less their
bare hands in cold and heat we can barely imagine-but the
United States does not?
Whatever the truth of these rumors of covert aid to the
Afghans from the United States, every report I have read from
men who have dared enter Afghanistan and every report the
Newells cite tells of the absence of modern weapons, especially
of ground to air missiles, and of simple medical supplies. 17 We
may send some weapons, but they do not get through.
The underlying reasons for Western refusal to help the Afghans are not pretty. Fear, first of all And then condescension.
We are quite used to pitying the weak whom the Soviets, in
much of the world, know how to turn into unwilling victims of
their own hate and resentment, but not to respecting the brave.
Who are these unlettered rustics with their World War I rifles to
teach us courage? Who are they to fight for their country and us,
unasked?
The sixty to two hundred resistance groups, often acting on
their own and, thereby, baffling Soviet planning, draw their cohesion and authority not from European parliamentary institutions and "political" ideas, which served largely to destroy the
Monarchy and bring the European civil war to Afghanistan, but
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
from age·old tribal assemblies that make binding majority deci·
sions, assemblies where speakers with age, wisdom, courage and
brilliance in speaking, and lineage exercise the most influence.
That we take it for granted that these are ineffective and primitive tells a good deal more about us and our distance from the
past that made us than it does about the Afghans. For these institutions resemble those of Homer, who lived only a hundred generations ago.
The British in the nineteenth century were much closer to
that past. In 1841 Vincent Eyre knew who had marched in
Afghanistan before him-"a country hitherto untraversed by an
European Army since the classic days of Alexander the Great."
As a result Afghanistan was closer to them than Europe to Af~
ghanistan. In contrast, the Afghans now know the intimacy of
our minds and what Afghanistan means to us better than we
who can barely catch sight of their country in the distance. Several months ago, the leader of the National Liberation Front of
Afghanistan, Sayed Ahmed Gailani, explained the strategic and
moral significance of the war for Afghanistan to an Italian journalist with a clarity beyond most officeholders in the West:
The Pakistanis have done their Islamic duty by us, not only
because of solidarity, but also because they realize that in the
eventuality of the consolidation of their grip on Afghanistan,
the Russians already plan a blitz through Pakistani Baluchistan that would bring them to the Sea of Arabia-in the ful·
fillment of a dream of centuries. The Sea of Arabia means oil
and the strangulation of Europe. The Europeans either do
not grasp this sequence of events-or pretend they do not.
In answer to the reporter's question: "What would the Afghans like from Europe?" Gailani said:
A bit of solidarity, if not for humanitarian reasons, for the vulgar reasons of expediency. Would you dedicate to us a few of
those peace marches that occur everywhere often in favour of
our invaders. You walked for Vietnam where the two great
powers collided. You might walk for us, a country where nobody collided with anybody, which has been invaded in the
coarsest colonial fashion, the fashion we escaped in the time
of the British and which now comes to us from Moscow.
We ask ourselves over and over again: How can Europe, hypersensitive Europe, who rises to her feet for Chile and Cambodia, find the strength to close her eyes to our instance, the
most shameful of all?
Our fight can have three great consequences: the liberation
of Afghanistan from an invading army, the rescue of Pakistan
from probability of a similar fate, the frustration of the plan to
encircle Europe. Unless it is just this that you want-to be
encircled. 18
Tucked away in the pages of the New York Times several
weeks ago, the U.S. Army chief of staff remarked almost as a
matter of course that the Third World War had started in Af.
ghanistan. 19 It may also be won there. But there is not much time.
1. "Keeping Cool about Kabul," New York Times, December 8, 1978.
2. In his proposal on March 12, 1948 to President Truman to raise the
American Diplomatic Mission in Afghanistan from Legation to Em-
97
�bassy, George C. Marshall observed" ... that the American Community
in Afghanistan is now larger than that oLany other foreign state." Foreign Relations of the United States, Part 1, V {1948), 490-494.
3. Vincent Eyre, The Kabul Insurrection of 1841.42, London 1879, 1-2,
63. Published on the occasion of "The Second Afghan War," this second edition of Eyre's The Military Operations at Cabul, which ended in
the Retreat and Destruction of the British Army (London 1843) contains a
long introduction, not included in the first edition.
4. For an account, extraordinary in its intelligent subtlety, of the nego·
tiations that broke down in the crisis of 1879, see H. B. Hanna, The Second Afghan War, 1878-79-80, London 1899, 2 vols., especially I, 1-285.
5. Correspondence Relating to Persia and Afghanistan, London 1839, 261.
6. Eyre, Kabul 2, London 1879, 53-54.
7. Eyre, Cabul1, London, 1843,29.
8. FRUS, Part I,V (1948), 490-494.
9. Christine F. Ridout, "Authority Patterns and Afghan Coup of 1973,"
Middle East Jouma/29, 2, 1975, 165-78.
10. Without distinguishing between the king and the monarchy, the
New York Times called the King "conservative" the day after the coup,
July 18,1973. The next day, in perhaps a typographical error, it reported
that "Afghanistan had been ruled by the monarchy for 43 years." Two
days later, on July 21, 1973, C. C. Sulzberger assured everyone that
there was no significant difference between the King and Daoud: "Af·
ghanistan was no democracy under King Zahir nor will it be under President Daoud."
The former American Ambassador to Afghanistan (1966-73) Robert G.
Neumann ("Afghanistan Under the Red Flag," The Impact of the Iranian
Events upon Persian Gulf and United States Security, Washington, D.C.
1979, 128-148 also barely notices the disappearance of the monarchyprobably because the intensity of intrigue and gossip in Kabul robbed
him of perspective.
11. According to the New York Times ofJuly 26, 1973, Daoud stated: "I
can safely say that this was in every sense a bloodless coup. It not only
enjoyed the complete cooperation of all branches of the army but also the
support of all people, particularly the intellectuals and youth." (Emphasis
mine.)
12. Robert G. Weinland, "An Explanation of the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan," Center for Naval Analyses, Alexandria, Virginia 1981,7. For
an example of the disproportionate interest in the position of women in
a country with more tractable and pressing problems like a high infant
mortality rate, see the ideological but interesting study of Erika Knabe,
Frauenemanzipation in Afghanistan, Germany 1977.
13. See the interesting article by Hannah Negaran {pseudonym for an
Afghan), "The Afghan Coup of April 1978: Revolution and International Security," Orbis 23, 1, Spring 1979, 93-113. The reluctance of
Afghans even abroad to speak of events in Afghanistan openly betrays
the nearness of the violence that appears so far away.
14. Die Zeit, june 9, 1978.
15. Louis Dupree, New York Times May 20, 1978: " ... an enlightened
press should avoid the loose use of the term 'Communist.' All should examine the words of the new leaders carefully for governments, like persons, should be considered innocent until proven guilty."
16. New York Times, March 10, 1981. For the indications, all from unidentified sources, that the United States sends arms to the Afghans,
Carl Bernstein, "Arms for Afghanistan," The New Republic, July 18,
1981, 8-10.
17. I cite only the most recent reports: II Giornale Nuovo, December 2,
1981; Neue Zuercher Zeitung, December 20-21, 1981; Foreign Report,
January 7, 1982.
18. Il Giomale Nuovo, October 29, 1981.
19. New York Times, January 3, 1982.
See also the important article by Pierre and Micheline Centlivres,
"Village en Afghanistan," Commentaire 16, Winter 1981-82, 516-525.
AT HOME AND ABROAD
LETTER FROM VIETNAM
Hanoi, ecological city
Four A.M. at my hotel, right in the middle of Hano~ near the Grand Theatre. The
crowing of roosters from the yards nearby
awakens me. Not-to-be-believed! Thirty
years ago, at the age of thirteen, I had last
seen this colonial city that looked more like
a French provincial town-with, however,
every feature of an urban center-than a
capitol. In thirty years the regime has managed to rusticate Hanoi at the same time
that its population (not counting the new
suburbs) has quadrupled to 800,000.
98
In that early morning's walk and in the
following days, I saw other sides of the city's
"ecological" transformation. With the exception of a few public buildings, no new
housing had gone up within the city limits.
Banana trees, vegetables, chicken cages,
pig pens take up every square foot of the
gardens of the villas of the past. Fertilized
by the excrement of fowls and little pigs that
are raised like dogs, a vegetable green spills
from the terraces of even small apartment
houses. The inhabitants are even encour-
aged to take up part of the sidewalk to plant
fruit trees-or vegetables that the urine of
passing children waters.
Interior spaces are laid out with the same
ecological concern. Each individual takes
up an average of one and a half square
yards. He eats, sleeps, studies, works, and
entertains on a bed made of one large
wooden board. Thin panel-partitions and
balconies under the ceilings quadruple the
available space. Four to five households
now live in the space once taken up by
WINTER 1982
�one. This crowding makes for the mutual
surveillance the State desires. In the course
of time, however, it may make for loyalties,
and even connivance against the state's
hostility.
The housing crisis
Unventilated and usually dark, these low
houses in the center of town are still preferable to the recently and poorly constructed
dormitory houses of the suburbs that break
down into slums within four to five years.
They are preferable because the life of the
streets makes footage in front of these
houses worth a mint in rent or in sale price.
With their stands set up there, small craftsmen and peddlers earn ten times more than
state employees, even despite heavy taxes
and the necessity of restocking in the open
market.
In the suburbs humidity and mould
crumble the walls; doors and windows don't
shut; the stairwells stink; running water
reaches only to the second floor; the waste
drainage system is inadequate or nonexistent. Coming home from factory or office,
men and women have to carry pails of water
to the third, fourth, or fifth floor, and, for
fear of theft, in addition, their bicycles.
These houses in the suburbs are not available to anyone who wants them. Heroes of
labour and high-level state and party offi·
cials have preference; others may leave
their names on a waiting list that may drag
on four or five years. But money can always buy the right to rent from those who
enjoy preference.
The state also builds housing for those
who can pay lavishly for associative ownership-four to eight thousand dong down,
the rest in monthly installments, with salaries in the range from 50 to 200 dong a
month. And yet because of the crises in
housing the waiting lists for co-ownership
of these apartments are long: illegitimate
favors and illegal transactions are the rule.
The discrepancy between the earnings
of employees and bureaucrats and what
they spend always bewilders foreigners. A
family of four with two working adults
spends an average of 500 to 600 dong for
essentials: food, clothing, medicine, travelbut the two salaries together hardly add up
to 200 dong. How do people make up the
difference? This is one mystery in the everyday life of a citizen of Socialist Vietnam.
Small in size, the apartments hold a bewildering amount of stuff. Refrigerators
and TVs take center stage; then sewing
machines, radio-cassettes, thermos bottles,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
dishes, kitchen utensils, clothes, canned
and dry foods, table, chairs, bed; even a
mo-ped or a bicycle kept away from thieves
,-all crammed into a poor lodging of twelve
to twenty square yards.
No paintings, no vases with flowers. Even
in the homes of intellectuals, there is no
room for aesthetics. Only one picture hangs
on the wall, high above the many shelves
filled with useful objects-the portrait of
Uncle Ho, outward sign of loyalty to theregime, and protective talisman against the
indiscreetness of the cultural police.
Meant for lawns and children's play, the
space between houses was turned two years
ago into vegetable gardens with plots for
each apartment. Every family gets two
square yards of land for vegetables and its
pig or chickens. Dogs-traditional guardians of the Vietnamese house, children's
playmates, and a special holiday delicacyare nowhere to be seen. Utility and survival
are the only things that count.
The inhabitants of sprawling suburban
projects in Hanoi should count themselves
lucky in comparison to the half of Hanoi
dwellers who swarm in areas that have no
sewage system. On rainy days, it takes acrobatics to keep your knees dry crossing the
muddy lanes in these slums infested with
flies, mosquitoes, and rats. Thirty to fifty
people share a common toilet, a sink, a tiny
kitchen. Despite the single-story houses,
the population density makes the pollution
from the garbage and excrement left uncollected in the humidity among swarming rats
far worse than in the areas overwhelmed
by the exhaust of cars in Western cities.
The institute of health of Hanoi reports
the highest incidence of respiratory and intestinal maladies in just these areas that
the tropical heat makes ideal for the prolif·
eration of bacteria. And yet it is these streets
which house the favorites of the regime,
the proletarians of the workshops and factories-except when these rural-born workers still keep a house in the surrounding
countryside, fifteen or twenty kilometers
outside the city.
Urban life
In Hanoi people travel mostly by foot or
on bicycle, which should please the world·
wide ecological movement-except for the
anarchy of traffic. Fatal accidents occur
daily in the wild swarm of cyclists that
thread daringly between trucks driven by
young "bodoi" drivers still used to jungle
paths. No one pays any attention to the
traffic lights that hardly ever work because
of power blackouts. Without looking ahead
or behind drivers turn right or left. The
young policemen who casually direct traffic are completely overwhelmed. A cigarette
will do if you are stopped for a violation.
After dark, the undiminished traffic of motor·
bikes in the unlighted streets and boulevards
of Hanoi causes serious collisions between
cyclists-and fatal crashes between trucks
and motorbikes.
The use of electricity is severely restricted. With its frequent and prolonged
power cuts, Hanoi becomes a little village
after nightfall. Except for the embassy area
and the houses of the top men, darkness
covers the city. Ostensibly, the energy is
saved for the sake of factories and country
agricultural machines. But such darkness,
in a city of a million people, increases crime
-thefts, break-ins, rapes, prostitution in the
parks, juvenile delinquency. By depriving
the urban proletariat of its one relaxation,
TV sets and radios, it also invites a noticeable rise in a birth rate already rising at an
alarming thirty percent a year. One saying
in Hanoi goes: "I bury my joy deep in the
belly of my wife, and from year to year my
family grows."
Socialist "work"
Like space, time, especially work-time, is
used ecologically. The factories, workshops, and offices have realized the dream
of all Western ecologists, the two-hour day.
A worker, who barely lives five days on his
monthly salary, gives the Party-State its
due: two hours. The other six he keeps for
the pursuit of his private interests. In factory Number X in Hanoi, the team of mechanics makes spare parts for a series of
underground bicycle, kitchen-, and household-ware workshops. They draw upon the
state's raw materials, which rarely arrive at
the same time. This excess of some materials and absence of others equally necessary,
excuses non-fulfillment of quotas and leaves
workers with nothing to do. But since it is
the rule, the socialist rule, that machines
must run unceasingly, workers more often
than not turn the machines to practical advantage-instead of letting them run on
emptily. With the surplus materials or with
scraps that have a way of piling up, they
make themselves objects not forseen in the
plan. Garment workers have a way of cutting large scraps from the textiles the fac·
tory provides-scraps that they turn into
pretty blouses at home for their own use
or, more often, for sale on the open market
in competition with factory goods. When
99
�occasionally the local marketing of factory
"surplus" materials, or of items made out
of them, arouses the suspicions of the economic police, truck-drivers cart the illegal
merchandise away to sell along the roads in
the country~much to the delight of the
peasants, who usually have to do without
manufactured goods.
With such a duplication of effort, socialist enterprises have no chance of reaching
the goals they negotiate with the stateunless they indulge in the common practice of altering the books. The failure to
meet production goals, however, compels
managers to multiply expensive overtimea move that in turn encourages the workers to increase the amount of overtime by
further reducing their productivity during
the regular day.
For twenty years the Party-State has
thundered against the waste and theft of
the public property and means of production of the nation. But the workers and employees feel even more robbed and exploited by a state that pays them wages too
low for their biological reproduction. Who
is the thief here? That is the question.
Short of shutting down its own enterprises
-a move which it will never bring itself to
make-the state can always hold its managers "responsible" to more easily dismiss
them. But the system survives the removal
and replacement of advisors, unchanged.
Workers in distribution and service are
not to be outdone by factory colleagues. According to the Party's daily paper, the People, the Peoples' control committees from
a sample of 500 state stores exposed the following covert practices: the employees of
state stores keep the best of the merchandise, sometimes all of it, for themselves; in
food stores, employees sell customers flour
and other grains after buying up all the rice
for themselves; in the bicycle store M. K.,
the employees together buy up all bicycles
and tires for their own use and especially to
resell at large profit to relatives and neighbours; at a state "supermarket," Bach Hoa
in Hanoi, the shopper who asks for a piece
of fabric, a thermos bottle, a ballpoint pen,
a notebook, or a bar of soap, can expect the
automatic response of the saleslady, "All
out" -but he knows for a fact that a buyerspeculator ready to share his profit with
the saleslady could take home a good supply. Even for rationed items for which you
have coupons you often have to buy your
place in the long lines made up oflittle professionals between the ages of eight and fifteen. This mafia of buyers-speculators in
connivance with the salespersons, whose
wages rarely exceed twenty-five dollars a
month, infests almost all the state stores in
100
Hanoi and in the other cities of Vietnam.
In this racket, the buyer and saleslady
never deal alone but in concert with every
one of their colleagues-and with the omnipresent agents of the police.
Widespread corruption
The transportation business is just as riddled with corruption. It often takes weeks
to get the authorization necessary to move
from one city to another, and, especially,
from north to south-and just as long again
to get a train or bus ticket. The train ticket
from Hanoi to Haiphong, three dong at the
official state price, is available only on the
black market for ten times the price. State
officials take an unlimited number of "business" trips, often with their families. Employees of the railroad and bus lines sell at
least a third of their tickets to "relatives"
and friends who then renegotiate them on
the black market. The price of airplane
tickets is prohibitive. And yet the Vietnamese travel constantly, both to visit friends
and family and, more often, to speculate
on the significant differences in the price
of merchandise in different regions.
At least once a week the party papers accuse a bus or shipping line of misappropriating hundreds of tons of rice or wheat
flour. But the denounced crimes go unpunished. Prompt enough in handing down
harsh verdicts against their political enemies, public tribunals are slow and indulgent towards economic delinquents whose
hands are no dirtier than anyone else's.
The gangrene of corruption does not
spare the most "sacred" sectors of socialist
society, health and education. The managers and staff of hospitals and clinics skim
off substantial amounts of the medicine
and food intended for the sick. Managers
report an inflated number of beds or patients. If the state maintains it cannot meet
such inflationist demands, the patients
have somehow or other to pay for the supposedly free services and medications. In
this condition of severe scarcity and blatant inequalities, it seems only natural that
hospital workers attend to their own wellbeing before treating the rest of the people.
In the socialist system there are at least
three types of hospitals: those for the people, those for the middle-level bureaucrats,
and those for the higher officials of the
Party-State. Within each type treatment
varies according to wage or salary scales.
Everyone in Hanoi knows that the large
hospital, "Viet-XO" (Russian-Vietnamese)
admits only high-level officials, who are assigned to wards according to salary. Before
explaining his symptoms, a sick man who ar-
rives at a hospital must show his party card
or his certificate of salary.
The hard times of 1980 showed the weakness of the Vietnamese academic system. At
the start of the 1980 school year, the regime
took pride in an enrollment of 13 million,
from nursery school to secondary school,
and a teaching staff of 300,000.
At the material level, the academic system is totally inadequate. The buildings (including those made of wood and corrugated
iron or mud) barely suffice for a third of the
students. Classes are organized in shifts:
morning classes from seven to eleven or afternoon ones from one to five are for youths
following a normal course of studies; evening classes, from six to ten, are for adults.
Children are left to themselves a good half
of the day. The youth organizations cannot
cope with their numbers. They often loiter
in gangs in the parks or in the streets of the
suburbs. In the present hard times, children
help their families in their unofficial workshops or do their own small-time peddling in
front of state stores, train stations, movies,
and theatres. Some of them prove to be excellent pickpockets. A walk after dark in certain areas of Hanoi and Saigon is ill-advised.
In 1980, the students or their parents had
to buy textbooks and notebooks, often at
high open-market prices. In many schools,
students have neither paper nor pencils to
copy down the lessons of teachers, who cannot keep up standards. After school, students and teachers run into each other in
the pursuit of small deals on the sidewalks.
The teachers I interviewed said they had
never known their profession so debased
and humiliated. Their poverty wages allow
them no time for advanced study, for research, or self-instruction.
Secondary-school teachers with classes
preparing for degrees or for college entrance
are a bit better off. They reserve their best
teaching for those students whose parents
can pay extra for special lessons. To pass
the entrance and graduation exams of universities and technical schools, you had
better be the child of high-ranking officials
in the regime, or be able to afford large payoffs-or be a genius. The certainty that
their students, unless they are ready to go
till the soil in the New Economic Zones,
will be unemployed after graduation from
high school or university, discourages many
honourable teachers. In the south, the lot
of students and their teachers seems even
more desperate. There, in addition to the
material deprivation common to all Vietnamese, the newly "liberated" suffer the psychological torment that comes of not being
able to absorb socialist education based on
Leninist indoctrination.
WINTER 1982
�Indoctrination
Instruction in "revolutionary vigilance,"
even and above all towards one's parents
and relatives, replaces the teaching of mo·
rality. The outcome of an individual's exams depends in large part on his political
history and on the political history of his
parents and grandparents. As they say in
the South, "Hoc tai thi ly lich": "Study
with your brains, compete with your political past."
(Students in the South are divided into
four categories:
A. Militant, or belonging to the family
of a party militant;
B. Worker, or child of a worker-family
which did not work for the old regime;
C. Child of a petty official or non-ranking
military man of the old regime. Petty bourgeois origin;
D. Men who worked for the old regime,
or child of parents who held high positions
in the old regime.)
University professors and researchers
must keep strictly to "the eight valuable
hours of socialist work." A professor of
medicine from the faculty of the University of Paris, fifteen minutes late for his lecture, often puts up with the reproaches of
his doorman-comrade.
The regime appoints officials, recruited
from the illiterate peasantry, to watch over
the activities of Southern intellectuals
barred from all teaching. Former professors of literature and law hang on in untenured positions at the Institute of Research
in the Social Sciences. Others who are in
shape pedal bicycle-taxis. All of them
dream of leaving their country~now become a foreign land-even though not
many years ago most took part in the struggle against the American presence. The
Southern intelligentsia is most pitiable.
The regime distrusts the quarrelsome habits it took on in the long struggle against
the American war. To make matters worse,
the Stalinist conception of a proletarian
science and technology radically different
from, and far superior to, bourgeois science, still holds sway over Vietnamese
Communist bureaucrats.
During a national congress of the
Writer's Union, in Hanoi in May 1980, in
celebration of thirty-five years of literary
production under the regime, Nguyen
dinh Thi, famous writer and ex-president
of the union, conceded: "Over thirty-five
years of independence and socialist construction, we have seen a host of writers
and poets emerge, but not a single literary
work." This outrageous admission earned
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
him the total suppression of his play,
"Nhuyen Trai a DOng Quan," commissioned by the Party's Central Committee
: to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the
national hero, general, chief of state, and
poet. Party censors accused him of playing
down the great man's victorious resistance
to the Chinese army of occupation in his
overemphasis of his hero's time of disgrace
-and of implicitly slandering the present
socialist regime in his critique of the despotic monarchy of that time. The fate of
this party writer, producer of some twenty
novels extolling the anti-colonialist and
anti-imperialist struggles and the construction of socialism, sheds a harsh light on the
predicament of not-so-conformist writers
and artists.
Painters and musicians are encouraged
to take up subjects that will build socialism,
and socialist love of country and of work.
Eastern or Western Impressionism, abstract painting, and painting of nude figures are on the index. A squad from the
cultural police descended upon the studio
of painter B one day to seize his paintings
of too-delicate young girls, and to teach
him to draw "a hand with all five fingers."
The censors classify music into three
fundamental groups: red, yellow, and blue.
The radio broadcasts red or revolutionary
music, martial in its rhythms and lyrics, all
day long. Yell ow music, romantic and softening like the former music of the South or
agitated like the Western "disco" music, is
passionately condemned. Finally, blue music, like classical music and the light music of
the West, is to be listened to in moderation.
Repression is so severe that many intellectuals confess that they do not dare to
write their thoughts and real feelings, even
privately. They do not dare pursue unorthodox ideas for fear these might slip out in
conversation with an unreliable colleague
or in the course of police questioning. The
motto of Buddhist and Christian monks,
"Banish impure thoughts," has become a
party order to the subjects of the Socialist
Republic of Vietnam.
In twenty-five years of socialism, at least
sixty famous writers and artists have
known banishment, expulsion from the
Party, reeducation through work in camps.
Professor Tran Due Thao, once a student
and professor at the :Ecole Normale Superieure of Paris, is the most notorious
case. For requesting more freedom in university teaching and in literary and artistic
expression, and particularly for daring to
criticize the anti·intellectual Stalinist practices of the Party, he was arrested in 1958,
subjected to self-criticism and sent to tend
cows in a reeducation camp in the High
Regions. Upon his return to Hanoi in early
1960, he was barred from teaching and
publishing. In exchange for a food allowance, he translates works of Marx and
Lenin. Denied hospital privileges, he must
depend on the help of friends in case of illness. Since 1971, at the request of some intellectuals of the French Communist
Party, the Vietnamese Communist Party
authorized Tran Due Thao to publish
some articles on the philosophy of language in the French journal La Pensee.
Country life
Compared to country life, the cities with
all their poverty seem to the Vietnamese
peasants like little heavens-for they still
have medicines, white rice, sugar, cigarettes, and all sorts of amenities. Despite
Party propaganda, the young people (students or graduates) sent to the country see
that the peasants are even more exploited
than the urban proletariat. Unable to bear
the harsh conditions of country life, the ostracism of local officials, the ignorance the
Party fosters in the peasantry, most of
these young people sneak back to the cities.
Organized into cooperatives that have
collectivized all the means of production,
land, and equipment, the peasants take
their work in the collective rice paddies in
resignation for a corvee for the Party. They
control neither the production plan nor the
distribution that allots them the bare minimum of food: forty-four pounds of paddy
per person per month in a good harvest,
about thirty percent of total production.
The rest must be sold to the state at ridiculously low prices. The manure, agricultural
equipment, and other items of everyday
use supposedly supplied by the state at low
prices are available in far from sufficient
quality or quantity.
With the exception of Party schools for
the children of the political bureaucracy,
the schools, which are free, offer no prospect of advancement. Because in 1980 the
medical clinics had no medicines, the peasants had to seek their medicines in the cities at black market prices. To survive they
must, in addition to the eight hours of socialist work on the rice paddies of the cooperative, put in as much or more time on
their family plots. The productivity of
these individual plots, that taken together
make up five to seven percent of the communal lands, surpasses the collective rice
paddies six or seven times.
Thanks to a tropical climate that knows
no harsh winters, the peasant may, with
101
�deft rotation, manage four or five harvests
a year: one of rice, one of potatoes or corn,
two or three of kidney beans, soy beans,
tomatoes, squash, tobacco, etc. He takes
his tools and fertilizer from the cooperative's stocks.
Convinced the state exploits him, the
peasant flaunts a high rate of absenteeism.
In his five to six hours on collective land,
the peasant prepares his strength for the
pursuit of much more lucrative work at
home: truck farming, pig and poultry raising, handicrafts or peddling. In consequence
of these arrangements, young researchers
from Hanoi, engaged in a survey of rural
life, were astonished to find thirty-hour day
schedules for peasants: eight hours of work
on the cooperative farm, eight more of work
at home, eight hours for sleep, four hours
of domestic activities (kitchen work, housework, childcare ... ) and one hour for relaxation or political meetings.
The family economy resorts to all available labor, from six-year-old children tore-
tired grandparents. The children are given
the least burdensome tasks, such as babysitting or watching the pigs and poultry.
But the children's work in the family interferes with their schooling: most Vietnamese peasant children quit school after the
elementary grades.
The yield of the family plots not directly
consumed at home fetches prices on the
open market in the cities from eight to ten
times higher than in state stores. Only this
parallel economy, which the State tolerates
in suspicion, allows the peasant to add
enough to the meager collective-farm food
rations to satisfy his basic needs for clothing, housing, health, transportation, social,
and cultural life.
More spacious than city homes, half the
houses in the country in the North are now
solidly built, with brick walls and red tile
roofs. Not the productivity of the cooperatives, as the regime would have it, but
twenty years of desperate work on plots of
individual land have built these houses.
This article appeared in 1981 in the autumn issue of Commentaire.
Eight years ago the writers, a physician
and a professor of education at the top of
French professional life-Paris-and about
to join the Socialist Party, accepted an invitation from the French Ministry of Foreign
Affairs to spend five years in Laos. With
their three infant daughters they arrived in
Vientiane, for an at first sight "mad adventure" that reflection had told them actually
amounted to an "extraordinary opportunity," on September 14, 1974-little more
than six months before the Communist
conquest of South Vietnam that they enthusiastically took for the "liberation" of
Indochina. Despite their expectations, their
eyes were alive enough to see what went
on before them-and their souls strong
enough to stand the pain of their sight.
Every Communist victory in Vietnam
brought the Communist Pathet Lao nearer
to power. A little more than six months after the signature of the Paris accords to end
the Vietnam War January 23, 1973, a Provi·
sional Government of National Union was
formed in Laos in which Communist ministers matched right wing minist~rs in pairs.
Even the police was reduced to powerlessness by the resort to pairs: a Communist
accompanied each American-uniformed regular policeman. The conquest of Saigon in
April 1975 made possible-in addition to
the Khmer Rouge conquest of Phnom Penh
-the "Liberation" of Vientiane and the
seizure of power in Laos by the revolutionary committees supported by the Pathet
Lao on August 23, followed by abdication
of the king on November 29 and the decla·
ration of the Peoples Democratic Republic
of Laos on December 2.
The more the Communists in Vientiane
The state may complain that the oblig·
atory deliveries of produce from the cooperatives leave much to be desired-and
sometimes do not occur at all. At fault,
however, are not the collective-farm members, who receive only thirty percent of the
harvest-but the middle-men who each
skim something off the surplus: officials of
the cooperative, of the commune, of the
district, and of the province; managerial,
administrative, military, and political officials. In the endless "bureaucracy" in Vietnamese rural society, there is an official for
each four or five workers.
Hdnoi, November 1980
JEAN DULICH
Translated by Colette Hughes
Jean Dulich is a pseudonym for a Vietnamese.
FIRST READINGS
LAOS
Au nom de Marx et de Bouddha, Revolution au Laos: un people, une culture disparaissent, by Marie-Noele and Didier Sicard
InterEditions, Paris 1981, 207 pages.
Laos has long since returned to the strategic insignificance for which, one judges,
nature intended it and for which its inhabitants unquestionably yearn.
J. K. Galbraith
New York Times
January l, 1982
This is a real book, a book that had to be
written. Like most such books it is also a
story of self-education. It has an awkwardness, not to be confused with ineptness,
that tells in its dreadful simplicity indelibly
of experience.
102
WINTER 1982
�tighten their grip on Laos, the more they unity, and equality between the various
fall into dependence on the Communists peoples of Laos. Who could object? People
of Vietnam. For instance, the arrest in responded to the regime's call with undeniMarch 1977 of the king, whose legitimacy , able eagerness: after thirty years of guerrilla
the Communists had made a great show of warfare they yearned for reconciliation.
respecting in their years of infiltrating the Since all were to take part, reconciliation
royal government, came a few months be- meant meetings which people in the beginfore the signature of the treaty of "friend- ning attended with enthusiasm.
ship and cooperation" (july 18, 1977) with
This readiness to trust the regime's offer
Vietnam that spelled out the "special rela- of reconciliation and attend its meetings
tions" that obtain between the two coun- was, in the Sicards' retrospective judgetries in national defense, the arts, radio, ment, a mistake that could not be undone,
press, education-and secretly traced a new for the regime had no intention of keeping
frontier between the two countries.
its promise of reconciliation. "Caution! If
To some extent the Communist seizure you trust in good faith, if you honestly deof power in Laos amounts to a disguised sire an understanding, know that under
North Vietnamese conquest. But the North their apparent frankness and good will your
Vietnamese ascendance, like almost every enemies of thirty years' standing intend to
other fact in Laos, has to be denied. Since remain that way." "The function of the pothe "friendship" treaty, expression of anti- litical meetings is to invite people to tie
Vietnamese sentiments brings eight years their own hands of their own free will."
in the camps. Haircuts, accents, and the
At these meetings, that took place in the
availability in butcher shops of dogmeat, a beginning two or three times a week, on
Vietnamese delicacy Laotians despise, be- short notice, at any time of the day or night,
tray the Vietnamese, who disguise them- individuals had to demonstrate their adherselves in the uniform of the Pathet Lao. ence to propositions that changed with beOnly the Thai kids, for the moment safe wildering rapidity. There was no question
beyond the wide Mekong, dare refer openly of objecting or expressing one's thoughts.
to the North Vietnamese domination of The ever-changing line had to be repeated
Laos: they call the Laotian children on the as if one meant it. The primary experience
other side, "dog-eaters."
of these meetings was that one can be made
Because they were less obviously brutal to assent to anything: the writers agreed at
and murderous than the Communists in one of these sessions that foreign reporters
Cambodia and Vietnam, the Communists should be kept out of Laos, because their
in Laos thought they could undo Laos with- news might hurt the "revolution." At least
out anybody, either Laotian or foreigner, made to appear to assent to anything. " 'I
noticing. At a time of exclusion of foreign- am sure that ninety percent of us make beers not from the socialist countries from lieve we agree. But do we have any other
Vietnam and Cambodia, they allowed men choice .... '" "To give up speaking, means
and women like the Sicards the freedom of dying to yourself and thereby to others."
the country. This confidence of the ComAnd the self-betrayal requires actions as
munists in Laos that they could get away well as words. Often, the betrayal of friends.
with anything that was not unmistakable Or symbolic "political" action: on a night
-and with their, in appearance, frank and in December 1977 the whole population
open manner they won the Sicards at first- suddenly turns to digging trenches to defend
makes the Sicards fear that "the 'normal' the "revolution" from imminent attack beworld of tomorrow will perhaps be closer to cause the line holds that Thai "imperialism"
the world of Communist Laos than our threatens the nation.
own."
In addition to frequent political meetings,
In the beginning, immediately after the there are weekly sessions of self-criticism at
seizure of power, the new regime offered work and, especially at the university,
reconciliation. In contrast to the old gov- monthly rehearsal of political thoughts in
ernment it promised to explain all its ac- writing-"autobiographies" that allow no
tions: people would no longer be ruled from fact or feeling to escape the great simplistic
the outside without explanation, but would divide "before and after the revolution." At
themselves take part in decisions. All were self-criticism sessions a person criticizes
to help realize progress, reconciliation, himself before suffering the criticism of
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
everybody else. In grand self-criticism sessions, an individual, for instance, a young
woman, pregnant by a professor who has
fled across the Mekong, faces a thousand
people on her feet for six hours. These criticism sessions serve to isolate individuals
-and at the same time to make them feel
responsible for their isolation. "'The most
painful thing is not to be able to speak
openly to anyone. Out of fear, we use ambiguous language. But the torture is unbearable.'" They reinforce each person's
sense of his own powerlessness and of the
force of the state without limits-which
cannot be distinguished from everybody
else and from oneself-that does what it
pleases with impunity. The forced writing
of "autobiographies" makes individuals feel
that Party cadres can see through them-as
one student put it. But again they are the
ones making themselves transparent.
In 1979, four years after the seizure of
power, Party cadres addressing these meetings openly confessed the deceptiveness of
their initial offers of reconciliation:
Now that you have advanced in your
study of our politics, you can realize that
we never had the slightest intention of
carrying out the program announced in
1975. The announcement of the program
was simply a step necessary to reassure
the people, to win their acceptance of
us- in order to reach the only and glorious goal of socialism.
Reconciliation that looked like an offer
to negotiate meant only to disarm the people and turn them to their own oppression.
"Between brotherly countries there are
never negotiations-there is only one reality: the correlations of forces." Negotiation,
even the demand for an openly acknowledged surrender instead of the offer of reconciliation, would have meant the Party
recognized limitations, acknowledged another will than its own, another world than
the mind of Lenin. The seizure of power,
therefore, does not bring the end of fighting
but continuation of fighting by other means:
fewer are murdered but almost all made to
lead themselves to a living death. "To reduce the forces of the enemy to powerlessness without fighting them, that is the
greatest victory."
But such a victory has no end, it needs
triumph after unacknowledged triumph,
for an acknowledged triumph would mean
103
�recognition of limitation. After the -.seizure
of power, the life in a person which•might
lead him to say or think something unexpected and obvious, to say "no," bec'omes
the enemy. In order to survive physically
the individual must never cease denying
that life-the reason for the frequency and
unexpectedness of meetings, self-criticism
sessions and the rest. "This process of education/reeducation really means learning
to cover up your individuality and turning
yourself into a skeleton or body of marblethe only stuff fitted to this society."" ... biological existence becomes the only point
of reference that does not arouse suspicion .... "
You cannot read the Sicards' account of
the Pathet Lao's exploitation of the yearning for pe"!ce and reconciliation to continue
war without combat-but not without murder-without wondering what it tells about
big international "negotiations" with the
Soviet Union and China. Ever since 1944,
the back and forth between the yearning
for peace and the failure of negotiations,
for instance, the failure _to conclude a
peace in Europe, has served to keep many
people from realizing that the Second
World War continues in a succession of
wars-small only in the sense they are not
total-which served to ideologize and
polarize the perceptions, especially of
"elites," throughout the world in unprecedented fashion. (And polarization of perception means paralysis of the capacity to
see what is going on and to make common
sense judgements: in terms of the struggle
to destroy men's minds, all wars since 1944
have been waged throughout the whole
world.) The terror at nuclear extermination, and the negotiations to soothe it, are
major weapons right now in the struggle to
destroy the remnants of Europe's freedom.
The pursuit of settlement through negotiation played a role in the destruction of
South Vietnam. Those who should most
study this book, diplomats, will probably be
the last to read it.
Besides political meetings, forced-voluntary labor also continues the war after the
seizure of power without guerrilla combat.
It acts out the theses of political meetings.
Everywhere at all times individuals must
look active. In the morning before work in
front of the ministries they water vegetable
gardens to foster the self-sufficiency of
Laos-gardens whose produce is not gath-
104
ered, for the point is to sow, not necessarily
to reap. After work there are calisthenics
and sports. At the university the grounds
show continuous regimented activity-in
contrast to the easy-going leisure before the
''revolution."
The point of this labour is not to accomplish anything but "to realize a concept for
a moment": to show that the people together can do anything-and the individual
alone nothing. Like the "discussions" at
meetings it is largely gesture, but gesture
with the purpose of turning people to their
own oppression-with the excuse that it
will earn them entrance into the "socialist
fraternity." Sometimes the forced-voluntary
labour accomplished the opposite of its intention. For instance, because of the failure
to consult the "reactionary" experts of the
past, ditches dug from the Mekong to irrigate the rice paddies drained them. "The
display of energy in labour has only one
purpose: to express vengeance, the vengeance of the fighters of the Pathet Lao on
those who collaborated or waited, upon
those who thought the nation could come
to independence without turning Communist. And those who suffer this vengeance
must not only undergo it-they must
desire it."
Like the political meetings, the forcedvoluntary labour turns people into accomplices in their own oppression. That everybody suffers makes the suffering easier to
bear. The satisfaction people feel at the
sight of others, once their betters or their
elders, suffering like themselves, blinds
them almost against their will to the system
that crushes them.
But they want somebody to blame for
their self-inflicted misery. "I will bear oppression, the absence of liberty, hunger,
the hardness of life on condition that I can
let my aggression loose on somebody whom
I can hold responsible for my misery. To
survive and overcome my misery, I am ready
to turn in my neighbour-even at the cost
of my moral consciousness." And the readiness to turn in neighbours also means the
nations nearby still outside the "socialist
fraternity."
In this book that describes a society turning into a camp, there is little about the
camps that are nevertheless a distinct unmentioned presence. At the center of the
life left in Laos, the Sicards were about as
far away from awareness of the camps as
anybody could be within Laos. Behind the
still dead waters of a dam about sixty kilometers from Vientiane, there are islands
with a series of camps of increasing severity.
On the first of these islands, one for women,
one for men, open to the world in the boast
of the regime, weaving, basketry, gardening, songs, and dancing "mildly reeducate
parasites-drug addicts, the young unemployed, juvenile deliquents, criminals, lepers,
and prostitutes. The Sicards were turned
away upon their arrival to visit these islands. In other camps there are something
like fifty to sixty thousand officers, soldiers
and civil se~vants of the royal governmenT
-about 2 percent of the population of
Laos. Upon the seizure of power, the officers and soldiers of the royal army went
willingly to political meetings that, in their
instance, turned immediately, brutally into
a concentration camp.
Everybody exists with the unexpressed
fear that they too might disappear into these
camps. "The talk is of freedom, but in reality there is fear and spying." The students
of the Sicards disappeared, it turned out
never to return, often on the excuse of fortyday political meetings or of study abroad in
eastern Europe. "Seven of my students disappeared in October 1975. Arrested because
they insisted on thinking for themselves
and because they could not conceive that
their classmates would use their lives to
dress themselves in progressivism's rags."
A student, a cadre in the Party, obscure
and incapable before the "revolution," now
full of that feverish energy whose characteristic is that it cannot focus enough to accomplish anything, who has the power to
decide which students can go home or
abroad, who makes a show of not going to
his home village for his mother's funeral
(for the Party has become his parents), goes
to a splendid dinner at the house of a
young woman, a classmate. In self-criticism
session the next day at the University, he
denounces her for keeping "bourgeois"
ways. The anger of the Sicards leads them
to the despairing realization that normality
has come to mean such betrayal: people
make believe they take it for granted.
A society that turns into a camp means
paralysis-literally the freezing of movement, not only in private and traditional
life-that is, feeling and thought-but of
actual physical movement, simply getting
around. At night patrols, meant to protect
WINTER 1982
�that sometimes arrest arbitrarily, discour- body else but themselves-as capable of
age circulation. In Vientiane, people are re- anything-and with impunity.
duced to walking because of the scarcity of ' The attack on tradition and the rigidifipublic transportation, and because other cation shows itself perhaps most in the noise
means meet with disapproval: cars show that replaces traditional music and even
privilege, tricycle taxis "exploit" drivers- traditional sounds like the calls of farmers
who as a result without customers must to their water buffaloes. From five-thirty in
work in the fields in the country_ The "rev- the morning, martial music in alternation
olutionary" salute, the clenched fist, like with political announcements blares from
the Hitler salute in Germany, replaces the loudspeakers at almost every comer in Vientraditional, now "reactionary," greeting, tiane. At the hospital and elsewhere there
hands together with a slight bow of the is singing of "revolutionary" songs and
head 1 The young walk apart from each music-which makes the traditional and
other and no longer hold hands. Dress ancient music look somehow out-of-place
changes from the elegance and fresh care and ridiculous. "For the first time in Laos I
that once distinguished one individual from saw that people no longer lived music with
another, to the disguise of monotony: hair their hands and bodies ... they listened rigid
can no longer be worn long, nails painted; in silence." "We can do nothing about it. It
Ho Chi Minh sandals made of tires replace is the people's will," officials told Sicard in
traditional footwear; above all, no jeans; no answer to his complaint that the earsplitting
American cigarettes except in secret; the noise at the hospital disturbed the-seriously
uniform jackets of the liberation army for sick. Like the meetings and the forced volstudents.
untary labour, the noise aims to destroy the
The attack on the spontaneous centers capacity to think-or, at least, to hear your
on the goodwill that informs private and tra- thoughts. At one point Sicard, to his astonditional life: it desires to violate and devour ished bewilderment, comes upon a tradiit. More than ten people cannot meet with- tional Laotian orchestra at the hospital
out permission. Marriages also require per- playing "revolutionary" martial music. Sudmission-and occasion political speeches. denly, the players stop playing but the music
Upon requesting permission for a tradi- continues: the orchestra had made believe
tional Laotian party, a baci, for a newborn it played the music that came from recchild, a couple is asked whether it has for- ords. "Laotian easygoingness makes it imgotten that the "revolution," too, is an in- possible to keep up subterfuge for a long
fant. Not ready to attack Buddhist priests time."
directly, the Party drives them to violate
In the name of return to traditional Laotheir vocation in its exercise. For instance, tian medicine-that had at first stirred Si~
they are told to preach hatred of "Ameri- card-lepers, later accused of "spying for
can imperialism" or to work to avoid arrest the Americans for pay," no longer receive
for "parasitism" -both violations of their antibiotics. The paralysis of life also shows
tenets. Individuals must give the traditional itself in hunger and the incapacity to protest
alms to monks in secret for fear of accusa- against it. The significance of the recurtion for "abetting parasitism." As a result rence of food in her students' grammatical
of this interference individuals and families examples finally comes to Mrs. Sicard: they
now do secretly the things they did openly have nothing to eat between five-thirty in
"before the revolution" -and suffer guilt the afternoon and eleven-thirty the next
and conflict, for they must risk their lives morning-but they had been ashamed to
to live in their accustomed manner. They tell her until questioned! Time rigidifies
experience the state-that is, almost every- also into universal Socialist time: the dates
of Stalingrad, the "October Revolution,"
obliterate the Buddhist festivals of custom
that bore no fixed dates. "The only reality is
1. For an essay showing exact parallels in Nathe undeniable existence of a society that
tional-Socialist Germany, and stressing, like the
Sicards, the acquiescence and cooperation of inmakes its power to crush felt at every modividuals in their own oppression in order to
ment."
survive, see Bruno Bettelheim, "Remarks on
Escape is the only resistance. Since 1975,
the Psychological Appeal of Totalitarianism,"
three hundred thousand have fled-around
(originally published in 1952) in Surviving, New
Ymk 1979, 317-322.
!0 percent of the population. Of the about
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
three hundred thousand Hmong tribeSmen
who fought with great bravery alongside
the Americans and the South Vietnamese,
seventy-five thousand have fled, fifty thousand have been murdered-many by Vietnamese and Soviet gas attacks since 1975
or 1976, largely ignored by a press that has
too long taken self~hatred for indignation.
To flee one's native land forever always
leaves scars that last for generations. But
for Laotians, more timid and with less ex~
perience of the world than Westerners,
flight from their native land means the end
of everything. They flee because of their
children, they remain because of their parents. They flee because they feel "nailed"
to a past they will never be able to live
down: not to have fought for the Communists means to have made the wrong choice
for all time. In the beginning, scornful and
uncomprehending of those who fled, the
Sicards ended up helping anybody they
could to flee. They tell a story emblematic
of Western callousness and the incapacity
to grasp the significance of events at the
moment of their occurrence. At about four
in the afternoon at the luxurious swimming
pool of the Australian embassy along the
Mekong river, a woman, tipsy or unconscionable, rose as if at a football match to
cheer a swimmer she had just noticed making his way toward the shore of Thailand.
The head went down under the surface at
the sound of a shot from an until-then-inattentive Pathet Lao guard. With its disappearance, she collapased when, and perhaps
because, it was too late.
Except for the daring of these flights, the
Laotians do not protest or resist. Brought
up never to show their emotions, they pre~
tend not to notice what is going on. They
are helpless before this seizure of power
and conquest called "a revolution" that exploits every weakness of their character, es~
pecially their incapacity to yield to their
rational anger and to defend themselves.
They are helpless before the onslaught that
above all-and in this it differs from the
clas~ical despotisms of the past described
by Montesquieu-makes them complicit in
their own oppression.
Unlike many observers the Sicards do
not feel this helplessness differs in kind
from the helplessness of the West. "We fear
that this change we lived through in Laos,
in the heart of Indochina, has a universal
meaning. For what is at stake is not simply
105
�a political phenomenon, not simply some
abstract correlation of forces, not simply
the replacement of one culture with another. This is the death of man, and riddle
of riddles, with his own consent.''
The last most terrible pages of this book
tell of the Sicards' own helplessness. Didier
Sicard demanded antibiotics, available in a
nearby ward reserved for Party cadres, for
an adolescent dying of meningitis. He was
told to mind his medicine and stay out of
politics. He demanded vitamins to treat the
alarming increase in cases of beriberi. A
commission of Soviet doctors replied they
knew of no beriberi in Laos. The Sicards
are overwhelmed by the realization that
they did not get through to the men responsible for the outrages all around them.
They take their helplessness for the helplessness of the Laotians. Perhaps, like the
Laotians, they proved incapable of undoing
their good manners. At the end of their account they bravely print the criticisms of a
friend, an anthropologist who left Laos with
them after ten years: "Do not fool yourselves, you were quite popular in spite of
everything. They never did you the honor
of hating you. We were all class enemiesbut hardly dangerous. You began to try their
patience only at the end with your criticisms and unceasing talk. Then you really
became a nuisance with your readiness to
help people escape across the Mekong and
your visits to the refugee camps in Thailand.
But on the whole you were tolerated. They
took you for too idealistic to be taken seriously."
They observe profoundly that the Communists feed on merely verbal opposition
because they know how to outbid and turn
it to ridicule. (An observation reinforced by
the recent revelation that one of the most
outspoken energetic anti-communists in
Saigon government circles was actually a
Communist agent-the Wall Street Journal,
February 10, 1982.) "To argue with them
means you have already surrendered. Pay
attention to what they do-not to what they
say."
They observe with fear that "this flight
into an imaginary world (really the world of
another, of Lenin?) paralyzes the capacity
to oppose, to say no." They ask themselves;
"Who can be against the declaration that
history is progress? What can you say against
Hate excited in the name of Solidarity?
Against the extirpation of a culture in the
name of Progress? The words are Peace,
Independence, Neutrality, Democracy,
Prosperity-what can you say in their faces?
Are we to say they are not true? That the
truth is that instead of Peace there is war,
instead of Independence, dependence on
Vietnam, instead of Neutrality, alignment
with the Soviet Union, instead of Democracy, totalitarianism, instead of Prosperity,
poverty? But in the name of what? In the
name of whom? What are we defending?"
Events in Laos are much nearer to us
than we dare imagine, just because we take
them to be so far away. For in the name of
freeing itself from Europe, from which it
had achieved formal independence in 1954
at the time of the Geneva accords on Vietnam, Laos has been abandoned by the West
and itself to the European civil war, the
war that did not stop after victory in 1945.
LEO RADITSA
A DEAD MAN'S KNOWLEDGE
Graphite, by Varlam Shalamov, translated
by John Glad, 287 pp., Norton, 1981,$14.95.
One day in 1929, a gifted, decent, indeed
noble young man of 22, Varlam Shalamov,
disappeared. The Western expression "arrested" does not describe the situation. After a brief, ghost-like reappearance in 1934,
he disappeared again, presumably forever.
Yet, miraculously, in 1950 he came back
from the other world. He entered the other
world a tall, powerfully built, handsome
youth, and emerged an invalid, an old, sick
man.
The other world had a very prosaic geographic location: Kolyma, some fifty miles
from American territory, beyond the Arctic
Circle.
106
This is Shalamov's second book published in the West. What is it? Short stories?
No. Apparitions from Kolyma are beyond literature or scholarship or essays.
Shalamov tells what Dante would call
"strange narratives."
Right on the cover of the book and in
the reviews of his previous book, Kolyma
Tales, Shalamov has been compared with
and to Solzhenitsyn. Why? Both are Russians who were in "Soviet prison camps."
Jack London tells a story of a French policeman not able to distinguish between
two natives until one of them explained
that he was small and stout, the other tall
and thin.
Shalamov says about an Andreyev, an
old prisoner (who is himself), gazing at the
newer Kolyma prisoners:
These were living people, and Andreyev
was a representative of the dead. His
knowledge, a dead man's knowledge,
was of no use to them, the living.
According to Victor Nekrasov, a Russian
writer in exile, Shalamov lives in Russia in
poverty and obscurity, completely forsaken
and forgotten by his relatives and whatever
friends he had, except for one devoted person who comes to see him.*
F arne, literature, politics, Russia, greatness, Tolstoy~all that Solzhenitzen, immensely ambitious and immensely successful, wanted in his youth and wants nowburned out in Shalamov. Hark to a dead
*Shalamov died on January 17, 1982.
WINTER 1982
�man's knowledge. Andreyev's neighbor
was crying.
Andreyev, however, stared at him without sympathy. He had seen too many
men cry for too many reasons.
These reasons are then described by
someone who no longer belongs to the humanity that weeps-by God or by angels or
by the dead.
The only touch of literature Shalamov
affords is an occasional final punch linethe last sentence of the narrative. In
"Dominoes," a prison doctor (a prisoner
himself) whose privileges (such as a separate room) made him a semi-god in the eyes
of ordinary prisoners, has a fancy (gods and
semi-gods do have fancies) to play a game
of dominoes, and his favorite ordinary prisoner is escorted to the doctor's room by
another prisoner.
In the divine privacy of the room, a di, vine orgy unfolds: the semi-god treats the
mortal to some porridge and bread, and
they drink tea with sugor(certainly the food
of semi-gods). Hours fly by in this heavenly
bliss, and after a game of dominoes, apotheosis follows: the mortal is treated to a cigarette which he smokes almost in delirium.
Ecstatic, he says goodbye to the semi~
divine doctor and walks out of the room
into the dark corridor. The punch line: the
other prisoner had waited for him by the
door all these hours (in the vain hope to get
a crust of bread or a cigarette butt).
Some reviewers invoked Dostoyevsky's
"Notes from the House of the Dead." Shal·
amov says, with his terse, lustreless, dead
man's scorn: "There was no Kolyma in the
House of the Dead."
Or: "Dostoyevsky never knew anyone
from the true criminal world." Even criminals in the Russia of Nicholas I and serfdom
(the first, ferocious half of the nineteenth
century) were not real criminals compared
with criminals in post-1917 Russia.
Kolyma. What's the moral of Shalamov's
life? Of anyone's Kolyma life? There is
none. Every minute of Kolyma life is a
"poisoned minute."
There is much there that a man should
not know, should not see, and if he does
see it, it is better for him to die.
Shalamov saw. The tragic mask he speaks
through is his death mask.
LEV NAVROZOV
FROM OUR READERS (continued from page 2)
mathematics than women. On the verbal
part of the SAT's, scores are about equal.
Perhaps women, in their passive way, read
more and hence become better readers
and so overcome their intellectual deficiencies and test as equals to men, or perhaps
they are equal. Both the math and verbal
parts of the examination demand reasoning ability, and so no conclusion can be
drawn from these results. In the absence of
solid evidence, it seems to me incumbent
on us to treat men and women as equals
rather than assuming inequalitieS and thus
injuring those who, though equal (or often,
be it noted, superior), are treated as..inferiors.
As for child-rearing, it is my impression
that as men spend more time with their
children, many of them become quite proficient at rearing them (sometimes even
better than their wives). Again this may be
a case where habit and prejudice are seen
as laws of nature.
Mr. Levin claims that child rearing is
highly valued by all but feminists. What is
the measure of that valuation? In a society
in which the value of one's work is measured either in terms of money or public
honor (usually the former), child-rearing
seems among the least esteemed jobs.
Nursery school teachers, kindergarten
teachers, and day-care workers, not to
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
mention mothers, get about as little money
or public recognition as it is possible to get.
It is true that those who prefer to have
women at home rather than in the workplace have tried to puff motherhood and
family publicly, but they draw the line at
considering raising children sufficiently
important work to make mothering a qualification for, say, social security. Rather, it
seems to me that the respect paid to rearing children is the kind one typically gives
to those who relieve us of difficult and, on
the whole, unappealing tasks to keep up
their morale. Though I think it is certainly
the case that managing a household well
requires a variety of skills, managerial, financial, social, and political, it is equally
certainly the case that women trying to return to the work-place after years of raising
children and managing households are
treated as if they had been idly passing
their time and had no useful skills, unlike
their male counterparts, who, whatever
paid employment they have had, are treated
as eminently employable. If Mr. Levin really
does value child-rearing, not in some abstract "Yes, the future of our nation depends on h6w our children are raised" way,
but by actually valuing the people who do
it, I commend him; but I think he is part of
a small minority of men.
I do not wish to belabor the issue, but we
should consider at somewhat greater length
the issue of what "sexism" means in terms
of treatment of women in the work-place.
Mr. Levin introduces "a complaint of dubious relevance" at this juncture: namely,
that "judging people on the basis of what is
usually true is unfair to the unusual." His
response to that "dubious objection" is that
"expectations must be based on what is
generally, even if not universally, true."
But this response is inadequate for at least
two reasons. First, "what is generally true"
is sometimes true because of historical circumstances. When Dr. Johnson, a man not
full of the prejudices of his time, met and
was so impressed by the intellect of Fanny
Burney that he offered to teach her Greek
and Latin, he was not permitted to by her
family, most strongly by her brother, be·
cause it was inappropriate for English ladies
to learn Greek and Latin. It was indeed
"generally true" that English ladies were
not classicists, but it by no means followed
from that historical fact that they could not
or should not be. What we are accustomed
to seeing is often the result of a history of
discrimination, and we should not be misled into thinking that what is "generally
the case" is generally the case for good reason. Custom sometimes misleads us into
107
�finding invalid reasons for those appearances, as, for example, the notion of' women's genetic incapacities. The notio~ that
women are genetically lacking either'. certain abilities or psychological traits t:[anslates into their not being considered on
their own merits. Employers have not always employed the "brightest" or the most
skilled, despite Mr. Levin's claim, because
prejudices have prevented them from seeing the talents in front of their eyes or
because they prefer to hire those with
whom they are psychologically more comfortable (see, for example, the study of hiring practices of monopoly and non-monopoly companies of Harvard Business School
graduates by Alchian and Kessel in H. G.
Lewis's Aspects of Labor Economics). Since
Mr. Levin, for example, is convinced of the
inferiority of women in "abstract reasoning" as distinguished from "twenty questions", I would assume that women in his
philosophy classes would be looked at
somewhat differently than men, and his
judgements of students might reflect his
"factual beliefs". The Supreme Court,
after all, knew in much the same way as
Mr. Levin does, that it was perfectly appropriate for women not to be permitted to
practice law (in an 1872 decision the court
ruled that 111inois was within its rights to
deny women admission to the bar). Mr. Justice Bradley's opinion is strikingly like
Mr. Levin's. He, too, claims that "the natural and proper timidity and delicacy which
belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it
for many of the occupations of civil life."
He, too, is not a misogynist. He is in sympathy with the "humane movements" which
have for their object "the multiplication of
avenues for women's advancement." But
this should not be construed to mean that
they should have free admission to those
professions which require "that decision
and firmness which are presumed to predominate in the sterner sex." We can now
laugh at such closed-mindedness, but common sense must have made this home
truth seem obvious to those justices and, in
fact, they had, not surprisingly, never seen
successful women attorneys. Women trying to enter medical schools faced much
the same kind of prejudice, though different rationalizations for the prejudice were
found. And, even when women have been
able to get the jobs for which their abilities
fitted them, they have traditionally been
108
paid less than men. For example, in a lawsuit brought against the U. of Maryland, it
was determined that women were paid, at
the same ranks, in the same departments,
and with the same qualifications, several
thousand dollars less per year than their
male colleagues. And the U. of Maryland is
by no means unusual in this respect. The
most recent figures comparing the salaries
of male and female academics (The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 25,
1981) showed that women on full-time,
nine-month appointments earned, on the
average, approximately 15% less than their
male colleagues. And this difference does
not result from the fact that women tend to
teach in the less highly paid departments
such as the Arts and Humanities. The salaries of women teaching in the Arts were
only 74% of the men's salaries while in the
Humanities the women earned 86% of
what the men ·earned. The only area in
which women's salaries came close to
men's was, curiously, Physical Education,
where women were only 6% behind. And
if it should be objected that women are
paid less because they have earned their
doctorates only recently and hence are
concentrated in the lower academic ranks,
or that women change jobs less frequently
because of family ties, or that they are more
likely to interrupt their careers for childrearing, a study by the National ResearcP
Council (see the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec. 2, 1981) shows that "Objective
factors alone cannot account adequately
for the career differences which exist between male and female Ph.D.'s." And this
discrimination continues despite "affirmative action" programs which, according to
the study, have not produced "reverse discrimination." I would suggest that sexism
on the part of those doing the hiring and
promoting is the cause of these disparities.
The relatively new issue of equal pay for
comparable work is the old story in new
guise. The jobs open to women simply paid
less than men's jobs, and the differences
had nothing to do with skill, arduousness,
responsibility, or any of the other distinctions one might draw. The only significant
distinction was whether men or women
were doing the work. For example, when
almost all elementary school teachers were
women, elementary school teachers were
paid significantly less than secondaryschool teachers, many of whom were male.
As men began to move into elementary
school teaching, the salaries began to
equalize, and today, in most school districts, all public school teachers are paid on
the same scale. The work didn't change,
only the workers.
Second, we have a long-standing and
rightly respected tradition in this country,
one not always followed but one worth preserving, that people are to be judged on
their individual merits or lack thereof, not
by their belonging to some particular
group, religious, ethnic, or sexual. To act
counter to this deliberately is to invite a
system in which we are judged, not by
what we can do, but by some general notion
of what the group we belong to is capable
of. This seems to me to be a pernicious
doctrine and one to be opposed strongly.
We should note, in closing, that similar
prejudices in the guise of natural laws have
been operative for centuries. The notion of
a decadent "Jewish physics" could only
make sense because it was obvious that
Jews were greedy, treacherous, and dishonest, though clever. Without such prejudices
based on what was obvious to most, the
idea would have been still-born. The presumed obvious inferiority of blacks was
necessary to make slavery a reality and a
morally justifiable institution. Just as "racism" and "anti-semitism" are genuine words
describing genuine facts about the world,
so is "sexism," and to fail to see the evidence of it around one seems to me to be a
case of willful blindness.
GEORGE DOSKOW
St. John's College
Annapolis, Md.
To the Editor of the St. John's Review
... Sexism, according to Professor Levin,
is meaningless, for what it purports to
describe is really the honest recognition of
reality. Facts are facts: there are innate differences between men and women it is only
sensible to recognize ....
But consider this: the illiteracy of the
poor in former days was "confirmed by
experience countless times"; would it
therefore now be correct to assume innate
differences between rich and poor individuals? And would it be fair to deny a job to a
poor person on the assumption of his personal illiteracy? Most of us would agree
not, yet this is precisely what we do to
women in our society. We deny them opWINTER 1982
�portunities based on historical experiences
which have little to do with their innate
abilities or present circumstances, and
much to do with past conditions.
As a female scientist "comfortable in
milieus demanding aggression," I can easily
define sexism (haVing personally experienced it) as the assumption that a generalization true of some persons of a given
gender is necessarily applicable to anyone
of that gender, and the consequent denial
of an opportunity which would otherwise
be granted.
... And what of the exceptional
woman ... ? Prof. Levin would accuse me
of being "perniciously utopian" to expect
exceptional talents to be recognized, but
does not the advancement of society depend upon the recognition, and utilization,
of exceptional talent? ....
Prof. Levin is co.rrect that no one promised me at birth that I would enter the field
most suited to my talents, but having one
way or another managed to do precisely
that, do I not now have the right to be
judged on the basis of my achievements
and experience, without regard to my gender,
as I would expect to be judged without regard to my race or religion? And yet in spite
of my proven ability to work in dominantly
male environments, I am invariably asked
in job interviews how I will "manage," as if I
were a deaf-mute or paraplegic, as if my experience proved nothing. This is the meaning of sexism. That Prof. Levin fails to
understand the meaning of this word in no
way disproves that the word has meaning.
But what of the innate differences between men and women? I would not deny
that men and women "differ significantly";
few feminists do. I do maintain, however,
that with the exception of tasks requiring
great physical strength, these differences
(which Prof. Levin noticeably fails to enumerate) do not necessarily, or even generally, make men any more competent at
holding jobs, solving problems, or wielding
authority than women. Different, yes; better no ....
... apart from the gross biological features, we just don't know what the innate
differences between men and women are,
because we don't know how to distinguish
the. effects of social conditioning from genetic determinism. But to deny that social
attitudes have any impact on human behavior is clearly absurd ....
... in attempting to justify the sexist attitudes which women encounter as the natural result of historical experience, Prof.
Levin actually demonstrates the need for a
"women's movement." He cites the examTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ple of a professor who, used to encountering 1'inferior philosophy examinations"
from female students, comes to expect pre1
cisely that. (Should we ask who this profesl)Or might be?) His expectation is in fact
fulfilled by his own prejudiced perception.
This expectation is changed only by a "run
of good female tests," i.e., the woman must
first prove herself where a man need not.
She must, in fact, initially perform better
than that man in order to get the same
grade, in order to compensate for her professor's bias. Hence for women to obtain
equal recognition of their talents they must
change society's expectations; i.e., they
need a public umovement," a public declaration of intent.
Finally, albeit reluctantly, I must take issue with Prof. Levin's implication that to
be a feminist is to hate men, tacitly or
overtly, and that a woman who engages in
traditionally male activities is ~·m at ease
with her essential identity." As such an accusation can neither be proved nor disproved, Prof. Levin rna y further suggest
with impunity that such a woman "cannot
very well admit this to herself: no ego can
support such self-hate, such ·loss of
meaning."
Well, Prof. Levin, you may refuse to believe this, but I do not hate men. Indeed I
am close to both my father and my two
brothers and am romantically involved
with a wonderful man whom I hope, in
time, to marry. I also have every intention
of having children (by my lawful wedded
husband, I might add), although it may
take some time to work out the logistics of
doing so. How is it possible that I love men,
children, and science? ....
NAOMI 0RESKES
Unley
South Australia
To the Editor of the St. John's Review
I enjoyed the Autumn 1981 issue of the
Review, especially Harry Jaffa's remarkable
article, "Inventing the Past," which taught
me much about my adopted country.
One article, in my opinion, failed to
reach the high standards of this issue.
Michael Levin's" 'Sexism' is Meaningless"
does less than justice to either editor or
author, whose tastes, thinking, and attitudes are, I know, sympathetic to women,
their goals, aspirations, and difficulties.
Some of the article's arguments are clever,
but they have nothing to do with tbe subject at hand. In fact it is hard to say what
the subject at hand is, since Mr. Levin sets
up as a straw man the extreme rhetoric of
the "feminist,'' and then proceeds to ridicule it at the same shrill level. Much of the
discussion about feminism is certainly embarrassing and, as Mr. Levin says, confusing. Instead of helping to clear away the
confusion, the author adds to it by trivializing the argument.
It is silly to say that "sexism" is meaningless. It obviously means something important to a great many people, or he would
not be writing an irritated article against it.
His opening words point out the emotion
the subject calls forth. Should this emotion
not have alerted him to the fact that there
must be more to it than mere silliness? According to his own argument, the obvioUs
is often true, and people should trust their
own commonsense perceptions, feelings,
and beliefs. Are the perceptions of those
against whom he is arguing not bound to
have some validity? It seems perverse to
deny that there was a need for changes in
law and attitudes. Ten years ago I would
never have received a sizeable raise to put
me on the level of the men in my department had it not been for pressure to comply
with the new government rulings. Today
Time-Life has women writers, the Naval
Academy has women midshipmen, and it
works out fine-or at least as imperfectly as
usual. Some "obvious" things are true,
others are not, and it is part of growing up
to learn to distinguish between them.
Most surprising to me is the fact that an
article on "sexism" fails to mention the only
real difference between men and women,
the only difference which is not merely statistical and therefore endlessly arguable in
individual cases. (It need not maher to a
woman mathematician that there are few
other women mathematicians. A creative
person will always be different.) In not
mentioning that women are the only ones
who can and do bear children, Mr. Levin
agrees with 11 feminists" who strangely also
ignore this fact. Lysistrata, and Medea, said
they would rather face the enemy three
times than bear one child. Today, though
science has eliminated the dangers of
childbirth and-they say-fear of pregnancy, women have not changed in this respect. They are still usually responsible for
raising the children they bear; and raising
children is probably more difficult, not less,
than it was in the past.
The subject is highly charged, it seems
to me, because it is the area where public
and private can least easily be disentangled. Reason and emotion, individual and
family converge. How does a legal system
deal with this situation, ensure justice, and
allow freedom? How do men and women
109
�react, and children cope? Abortion legislation and ethics, open adoption r~Fords,
child welfare, ERA, pornography-all
these are highly emotional issues. And the
discussion is so often embarrassing beCause
it touches us personally, on the level of our
intimate feelings and fears. The irrational,
secret fears men and women have towards
each other are surely part of life; where
there is magic, as between a man and a
woman, or a mother and child, there is fear
as well.
Mr. Levin deals only with surface irritations. Does he mean-though he does not
say it-that many problems being discussed are part of life, private, and can
never be solved by political means publicly,
but only worked out privately, with as
much good will and understanding as
possible? His occasionally clever and amusing, irritated and irritating article has not
helped us to understand. And even today,
we need philosophers who will do that.
LARISSA BONFANTE
Professor of Classics
New York University
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
Mr. Levin has a point in his article
"'Sexism' is Meaningless" (St. John's Review, Autumn 1981). Many women are angry with men and for no apparent reason.
He concludes that a feminist is angry because she has "lost the sense of the values
peculiar to her sex." This conclusion is possible only if the word "sexism" is meaningless. I suggest that Mr. Levin has simplified
the argument and in so doing has missed
the case where "sexism" does have meaning.
Anger is a result of facing something
that you want to change but cannot. What
can't be changed does not have to be a law
of nature. An individual may become angry if he or she is treated in a way he or she
does not like. If this treatment stems from
applying characteristics true, in general, of
either sex to an individual of that sex, it is
"sexism." Mr. Levin denies that anyone
holds the belief that gender is intrinsically
important. It is true that men and women
are different and that some characteristics
are generally true of men and some of
women. Because I can generalize this way,
I can know a lot about someone immediately. If I meet a man, I know that chances
are he is more aggressive, better at math
and stronger than I am. He may later prove
to be none of these, but they are fair assumptions. This is not "sexism." All I am
saying is that most men are like this and
110
chances are that this individual will fit into
the generalization. I accept that gender is
intrinsically significant. I can be called
"sexist" only ifl am unable to see this man
in any other way than that which fits my
preconception. When a woman is angry at
all men, that too is "sexism." Sexism is the
attitude which holds that the differences
which exist between men and women in
general can be applied, without qualifications, to individual men or to individual
women. It is exactly the belief that gender
is intrinsically important in evaluating individuals. If this is not accepted as the definition of "sexism," then "sexism" is indeed a
meaningless word.
By this definition of "sexism," the word
seems to be susceptible to exactly the same
problems in application as Mr. Levin
points out with the use of "exploitation."
There is a stable central case, that between
individuals, and vaguely peripheral ones,
the judgment of men and women in gen~
eral. Mr. Levin, then, is ignoring the ''stable central case" which gives this word
meaning and focussing on those "vaguely
peripheral ones" to which it is not applica~
ble. "Sexism" has no meaning when ap~
plied to groups. It is entirely a question of
the treatment of individuals.
If "sexism" is not,_ in fact, meaningless,
the question arises whether "anti-discrimination" legislation is an appropriate solution. Can an individual ever be considered
not by the general rule but as an individual
through the law? The law is impersonal
but it is made personal by the judicial system. You are judged in a trial, in which you
are faced by individuals. You and your situ·
ation are judged as a particular one. The
sole purpose of the judicial system is to
interpret the law and to apply it to particular cases. Women should have the right of
recourse under law if they feel they are being treated unfairly. This, however, is a
negative solution. The other side is the
question of affirmative action. Should
quotas be legislated? People should have
the right to hire whomever they wish, yet
will people recognize that women can do a
good job if they do not see many women
working in responsible positions? The generality of the law makes it impossible to
solve this dilemma theoretically. The real
issue is not one of the meaningfulness of
"sexism," or of the ability of the law to address it, but of the extent to which legislation can be justified in doing so.
KATHARINE HEED
Annapolis, Md.
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
Mr. Levin uses the word "feminist"
with the same thoughtlessness and vehemence with which he claims feminists use
"sexism."
The author characterizes a feminist as a
woman who believes there is absolutely no
difference between the sexes and, therefore, objects to the, in her opinion, prevalent view that men are superior to women.
He also asserts that. feminists secretly know
there is a difference between men and
women although they profess otherwise.
As a result they are filled with self-loathing
and, in classical Freudian behavior, transfer their loathing onto men, the world, and
nature. Mr. Levin's very general argument
does not document this serious accusation.
Why does the request that people be
looked upon each as an individual meet
such rage? It seems reasonable that girls,
like boys, should perfect their talents in
sports, mathematics, physics, biology, literature, or language. Why shouldn't women
expect to have a career after they leave
school, and to receive the same pay as a
man for the same work? Most women will
have to work when they leave school. Mr.
Levin implies that the only permanent jobs
which have evolved naturally for women
are those of telephone operator and
mother. Where has Mr. Levin been if he
has not noticed that society has changed
drastically, not only over the past twenty
years, but since the Industrial Revolution
put women in factories? How can a woman's right to continue at these jobs but also
at others requiring physical or intellectual
ability be denied? Levin thinks it can be beqmse women lack the necessary aggression.
When Mr. Levin writes ''The discomfort
of women in milieus demanding aggression
has been confirmed by experience countless
times," I must question whose experience.
To survive, women must be aggressive.
More than half the households in the
United States require two incomes for sup·
port. Thousands of women work to support
families by themselves. Because women
pay taxes they deserve protection from the
government against discrimination.
Aggressive behavior is not limited to the
office. Perhaps Mr. Levin has never experienced shopping, especially in a bargain
basement or in a department store during a
big sale. Five minutes in Loehman's would
change even Mr. Levin's mind about ag·
gression. Perhaps Mr. Levin never has had
to return an unsatisfactory article of clothing or of food, or to argue about being overcharged for a service. No one can deny that
driving children to school or oneself to work
WINTER 1982
�requires aggression. Many women perform
at least one of these tasks daily.
Mr. Levin's expression "people think"
makes his argument less cogent. The people I know don't think the way Mr. Levin's
people do. My experience, both at St.
John's and in my job, shows me that a
woman is expected to perform tasks, both
academic and secular, as well as she can,
i.e., as well as a man.
On such a serious question which involves the lives of over half the population
of the United States, why does Mr. Levin
think he can dismiss legitimate demands
with the generalization "people think" or,
even worse, "ordinary people think"? How
can he attack with such vehemence "feminists" whose work and political beliefs he
does not clarify? Isn't his article merely
pOlitical cant?
ELOISE PEEKE COLLINGwOOD
Annapolis, Md.
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
... What is one to make of a philosopher
who identifies "essential identity" and "significance" with gender and who lets a simple comma serve as the only argumentative
transition in the statement that "Women
differ physically from men, and act differently"? Our bodies are ponderous and
absorbing fates, each one different, but we
are capable of directing them in moral actions and of giving them meaning with our
discourse. We do not increase our chances
of finding meaning when stereotyping is
deemed reasonable and factual. Prof.
Levin worries about tiny firefighters when
he might have been watching the Olym·
pies, but the variety of biological "fact" is
acknowledged even by him, despite his
confusion of instances and hypothetical
classes, instinct and behavior, and biology
and politics (for the last of which we have
another useful neologism, "racism," to give
suffici~nt historical warning).
The implication that troubles me more is
the denial of the brilliance and achievement of St. John's women and, manifested
right here, their unequal share in recognition. And the damage to both the taught
and the teacher if anyone should seriously
think that "if a professor has found over
many years that females write inferior philosophy examinations, it is reasonable for
him to anticipate that the next female philosophy examination will be inferior." A
nice ambiguity toward the end there: who,
after all, in the philosophical life is the
marker? In a society more severely maledominated and oligarchical than our own,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
and no less stultified, Dante submitted
himself under correction to "donne
'ch'avete intelletto d'amore." Such intelletto might get us all a better grasp of
public understanding and the cardinal virtues and help us distinguish the vicious circle of self-congratulating conventions from
the deep imperative of mutual liberation.
E. C. RONQUIST
Concordia University
Montreal, Canada
continue to enjoy the right to select national leaders, who routinely involve all of
us in crises that could destroy civilization
as we know it and, indeed, could destroy
the world and its ecosystems.
If the United States must remain militarily strong, women can help us do so. As a
feminist, I even dare hope they may help a
little to humanize the military.
LEON V. DRISKELL
Professor of English
University of Louisville
Louisville, Ky.
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
Professor Michael Levin's article "'Sexism' is meaningless" (St. John's Review,
Autumn 1981) so frequently violated stan·
dards of argumentation that I found it hard
to take seriously. Nevertheless, I suspect it
may do considerable harm, chiefly because
it appears in your publication-the standards of which have seemed to me generally high. I cannot undertake here to point
out all of the essay's faults, but I have selected one which seems to me particularly
flagrant.
Because it suits his purposes, or because
he is not paying attention to what he
writes, Professor Levin equates conscription with battle readiness. The issue of
conscripting women, particularly in times
of peace, must be separated from such issues
as degrees of aggressiveness and tolerance
of the stress of combat. When Professor
Levin writes that the "pivotal objection to
conscripting women has nothing to do
with any inherent 'inferiority' of femaleness, everything to do with the ability of
women to fight," he is guilty of grievous
equivocation.
Many a Norman has been conscripted to
do clerical work, administrative work, or
strategic work. Many a Norma has done
similar work in the private sector (with relatively higher pay, enormously greater freedom of choice), and some of those Normans
have been maladroitly thrust into combat
though no more aggressive or tolerant of
"the stress of combat" than their female
counterparts.
Conscription means yielding one's free~
dam of choice, but it does not automatically mean going into battle. Neither does
abandoning sex discrimination mean that
all of us-men and women-must give up
our differences or share bathrooms. Re~
turning from Korea some years ago, I
found that many of my male friends and all
of my women friends had been going
ahead with their lives while I submitted to
military regimentation. Meantime, all of us
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
I will not address Mr. Levin's callous misrepresentations of the positions of those of
us whose active vocabulary includes the
word "sexism," although anyone interested
in reasoning as opposed to sophistry could
not but take offense at the many misrepresentations in his article. I will, however, as
a social scientist in training, challenge Mr.
Levin, or anyone else, to present me with
clear evidence that " ... there are general,
innate, psychological differences between
the sexes." Mr. Levin claims that this is
" ... simply a factual belief, supported by a
vast body of evidence." I know of no such
"evidence" that can be drawn from the social science disciplines and that would withstand close scrutiny. If Mr. Levin's evidence
is drawn from disciplines or traditions other
than the social sciences, I would certainly
not object to seeing that as well. I ask him
to produce the evidence, and all can debate
it, and we will debate the larger question of
upon what basis is one able to make reasonable statements about human nature and
behavior, and what should be the method
of verification for such statements. These
are issues that members of the St. John's
community can get their teeth into, but in
order to do so we must move away from
the unsupported statements made by Mr.
Levin. Furthermore, I ask Mr. Levin to
produce this evidence because I believe
that the ultimate truth and validity of his
argument depend upon it.
I would like to make one further statement. (This should be allowed an irate alumnus.) I was deeply disturbed by the decision
to print that article. It was so clearly biased,
so badly reasoned and argued, in places simply so silly, that it does not represent St.
John's College well. Mr. Raditsa is using
The St. John's Review to propagate his own
political philosophy. I will not debate here
whether it is a good philosophy, or a correct one, I would only raise the question of
111
�whether it is the purpose of The Review to
propagate it. I think not. I also think that
his doing this is only made more unbearable
by the fact that he is in the process presenting us with articles which insult our illtelligence. I wonder if Mr. Raditsa does not care
more about propagating his political philosophy than he does about serving St. John's.
He must certainly see that the two goals are
not identical, and that he was made editor
of the St.john's Review to do the latter and
not to do the former at the latter's expense.
DAVID E. WOOLWINE
Princeton, New Jersey
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
As an alumnus of St. John's College, I
was morally and intellectually affronted by
your decision to print the article, " 'Sexism' is Meaningless," by Michael Levin, in
the recent issue of The St. John's Review.
Has The St. John's Review become such a
mouthpiece for right-wing views that it will
print anything which supports them-even
an article of such patently poor scholarship
and moral insensitivity as Michael Levin's
piece? The factual and logical errancies of
the article are manifest, and scarcely need
refutation. The flagrant moral callousness
of the article is more serious, flying as it
does in the face of obvious injustice, first
by belittling and denying the history and
continuing reality of that injustice, then by
supporting and sanctioning it. If the article
had been titled not " 'Sexism' is Meaningless" but rather " 'Racism' is Meaningless"
or even "'Anti-Semitism' is Meaningless,"
would you have printed it? Let the Editorial
Staff examine its memory and it will discover how the arguments put forward by
Mr. Levin, and similar unsupported claims
of "scientific" evidence, have previously
been used to "prove" the genetic, moral,
and intellectual "difference" of blacks and
Jews, supporting institutionalized bigotry,
the denial of civil liberties, and unequal
opportunities in housing, education, and
employment.
STEPHANIE SLOWINSKI
Princeton, New Jersey
112
Professor Levin replies:
Those of us who persist in noting that
men and women differ are so regularly accused of being "for discrimination" that
my wife dubs this "The Ritual Missing of
the Point." The point, of course, is that the
typical man does differ in certain systematic
ways from the typical woman. It is no one's
fault, and people are within their rights to
use this patent fact in making judgments.
Within their legal rights?, some correspondents ask. Certainly. Anyone who thinks
that individuals should be treated as individuals will repudiate the quota mentality
that has settled on our public officials like a
disease. Quotas should be repealed and
abandoned immediately. I also believe that
laws against discrimination are unsupportable. They conflict with liberty of association. If I choose not to hire you because of
your looks (or sex, or color, or religion) I
withhold from you my consent to enter into
an agreement. I am not thereby thwarting
your will or interfering with your liberty,
since you do not have any prior right to my
consent. Unless you regard me as your slave.
Some confusion has arisen about the
Norma-Norman example. I was simply repeating the sort of thing feminists cite. In
fact, this so-called "Pygmalion effect" has
not been scientifically replicated, and what
is more, educators are now generally agreed
that the ordinary methods of classroom instruction are somewhat biased in favor of
girls, who are temperamentally more inclined to sit still for lessons.
As for my Freudian analysis: in addition
to the evidence cited in the references to
Ed Levine, there is also some suggestive
work by S. Deon Henderson on the rising
female crime rate and its possible relation
to anomie. Unfortunately, as Miss Henderson herself reports, investigation into the
adverse effects of feminism is an absolutely
taboo topic in sociology. No one will touch
it. That is probably why we have no psycho·
social profile of the typical feminist, even
though social scientists will normally rush
to study just about anything. So, even
though I lack medical credentials, someone
has to begin suggesting hypotheses. I should
note as well Frances Lear's concession (The
Nation, 12/12/81) that "lesbians make up
a large portion of the volunteer work force"
in feminist political organizations, which I
take as some further confirmation.
I agree with Miss Heed that anger is often prima face evidence of a wrong; often,
but not always. Sometimes it is a symptom
of dysfunction.
I stress again that I approve as much as
anyone does "treating each individual as
an individual." With little faith that repeti·
tion will convince my more splenetic correspondents of my good faith, I turn to some
more specific points.
l) Neurologists like Restak and Pribram,
endocrinologists like Money, and even selfdescribed "feminist" psychologists like Mac·
coby and Jacklin have found that by four
months male and female newborns respond differently to such variables as speech
tone and exhibit neurological differences.
Benbow and Stanley found that 10-12 year
old girls who both tested as well as the ablest
boys on math aptitude tests and reported
finding math as much a girl's as a boy's subject, did less well than the same boys on
more difficult math aptitude tests. At the
upper levels of ability, innate differences
appear most clearly. Some people still tell
each other that all this is "social conditioning" (whatever that might mean). Some
people also still believe the Earth is flat.
2) A woman should indeed be free to do
what she wants. Who denies that? But even
sanguine feminists have lately admitted to
"logistic problems" in pursuing a career
and raising a family. Even the EEOC has
lately admitted that the famous wage dis·
crepancies between men and women are
entirely due to voluntary decisions women
make-e.g., having babies during their
prime career advancement years. The feminist "solution" tends, unhealthily, to be
advocacy of government intervention.
3) That there are bad arguments for jew·
ish covetousness does not rule out good
arguments for gender differences. Since no
one is planning concentration camps for
women, the implied analogy is even more
absurd. In fact, all questions about racial
and ethnic differences are empirical, in
many cases still open, and worth investigating. Given the number of Japanese Nobel
Laureates in physics, I would be neither
surprised nor displeased to learn that Japanese are smarter than the rest of us.
WINTER 1982
�Editor's Note
On Harry V. Jaffa's
"Inventing the Past"
The policy of the St. John's Review is '
to publish writing addressed to important
questions. Some of these questions are To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
disturbing as the response to Professor
Levin's article shows. Such open invesHarry V. Jaffa's article, '~Inventing the
tigation and discussion is in the tradi- Past," (Autumn 1981) was interesting and
tions of St. John's College. The views valuable, but I was bothered by his slightexpressed by the writers in the St. John's ing reference to the protests and demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. He
Review do not necessarily reflect the
speaks of the people involved as seeking a
opinions of the editor.
minority veto upon majority action, as trying, ' 4 in behalf of their Thoreauvian consciences," to "arrest the process of constitutional government."
I question whether the events of the sixties and early seventies actually fit the
categories of "majority action" and "constitutional government." To mention some
of them: in the election of 1964 the majority
elected Johnson as President after he denounced Goldwater's proposal for extensive bombing of North Vietnam-and after
the election, he did just what he had denounced. The Vietnam war was waged, of
course, not after a declaration of war by
Congress as provided by the Constitution,
but on the basis of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which itself was passed by Congress
after it heard misleading testimony by the
Administration.
Coming to 1968, the majority elected
Nixon, who had a plan to end the war-and
then waged it for four more years and included a secret bombing of Cambodia.
I submit that these events certainly do
not fit the categories of majority action and
constitutional process, and to talk as if they
do is to talk about a dream world.
THOMAS
RALEIGH
Cocheton, New Yark
Professor Jaffa replies:
Mr. Thomas Raleigh questions my assertion that the demonstrators against the
Vietnam war, or some of them, were attempting to "arrest the process of constitutional government." He does so on the
ground that the actions of the United
States, in prosecuting the war, were themselves unconstitutional
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The principal ground of his objections is
that the war was not waged "after a declaration of war as provided by the Constitution, but on the basis of the Tonkin Gulf
Resolution, which itself was passed by
Congress after it heard misleading testimony by the Administration."
The war in Vietnam was a limited war,
and the United States has prosecuted
many such wars without a formal declaration by the Congress. Among these have
been the naval war with France, during the
presidency of john Adams, Woodrow Wilson's war with Mexico, many Indian wars,
and, above all, the Civil War. The last, our
greatest war, was from the point of view of
the Lincoln government a "rebellion." To
have asked for a declaration of war against
"rebels" would have been to confer upon
them a political status that it was the whole
point of the war to deny. This points up
the paradox that there are circumstances
in which a declaration of war may defeat
the policy for which the war is waged.
Such was the case in Vietnam. Rightly or
wrongly, the Johnson administration (and
later that of Nixon) thought that North
Vietnam itself should not be invaded, and
that this "privileged sanctuary" could not
be maintained once a formal declaration of
war had been made. It was feared that if
North Vietnam was invaded that China
would intervene, as it did in North Korea
in 1950.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was not the
sole basis for the prosecution of the war.
Not a man or gun was sent to Vietnam except upon the basis of appropriations made
by the Congress. And not a dollar was appropriated, except upon the basis of extensive-sometimes exhaustive-hearings by
committees of both houses, and after
debates and votes in both houses. The
Congress authorized every step that the
administration took, and the American
people participated in such authorizations
through their elected representatives. The
opposition to the prosecution of the war
was extremely intense, and extremely vocal, but no one can rightly say that their
rights were ignored or suppressed.
To say that the American government
acted unconstitutionally in Vietnam is to
say that a free government cannot act in
such circumstances except upon something
like unanimous consent. This is absurd.
113
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Radista, Leo
Parran, Jr., Thomas
Durholz, Janet
Bolotin, David
Wilson, Curtis A.
Sachs, Joe
Allanbrook, Wye Jamison
Brann, Eva T. H.
Dennison, George
Mullen, William
Loewenberg, Robert
Smith, Brother Robert
Bell, Charles G.
Le Gloannecc, Anne-Marie
Josephs, Laurence
Montanelli, Indro
Collins, Arthur
Dulich, Jean
Navrozov, Lev
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�Editor:
Leo Raditsa
Managing Editor:
Thomas Parran, Jr.
Editorial Assistant:
Barbara]. Sisson
Consulting Editors:
Eva Brann, Beate Ruhm von Oppen,
Curtis A. Wilson.
Editor's Note
Unsolicited articles, stories, and poems are welcome,
but should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed
envelope in each instance.
Requests for subscriptions should be sent to The St.
John's Review, St. John's College, Annapolis, MD 21404.
Although there are currently no subscription fees, voluntary contributions toward production costs are gratefully
received.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW (formerly THE COLLEGE) is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis,
Maryland 21404. Edwin J. Delattre, President, Edward G. Sparrow, Dean. Published twice yearly, usually in winter and summer.
Volume XXXI!
WINTER 1981
Number 2
© 1981, St. John's College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0010-0862
Cover: Library of Hadrian, west facade. Photo by Alison Frantz.
Composition: Britton Composition Co.
Printing: The John D. Lucas Printing Co.
�~HESTJOHNSREVIEWWINTER8]
1
The Libraries of Ancient Athens Homer A. Thompson
17
Guardian Politics in The Deer Hunter Nelson Lund
29
The Scientific Background of Descartes' Dualism Arthur
Collins
43
Family Pages, Little Facts: October George Dennison
49
The Latin-American Neurosis
53
The Origins of Celestial Dynamics: Kepler and Newton
Wilson
66
Recent Events in the West Leo Raditsa
82
The Streets on which Herman Melville Was Born and Died
Meyer Liben
85
DeGaulle's Le fil de /'epee
95
FIRST READINGS
Irwin's Plato's Moral Theory
98
101
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Carlos Rangel
Curtis
Will Momsey
Davtd Bolotin
AT HOME AND ABROAD
Letter from Nicarauga and Guatemala Honor Bulkley
FROM OUR READERS
t
�Figure 1. West side of the Agora; view from the southeast, 1956.
tl
WINTER 1981
�The Libraries of Ancient Athens
Homer A. Thompson
Our knowledge of the Athenian libraries is now, and always will be, exceedingly scrappy. For the Classical and
Hellenistic periods we have a little, but tantalizingly elusive,
literary evidence, supported by virtually no archaeological
remains. For the Roman period, in contrast, we can point
to a couple of actual buildings, but the literary testimonia
become extremely meager. Nor need I remind you that
none of the individual libraries known from ancient Athens can compare in fame or in institutional importance
with the libraries of Alexandria or of Pergamon, which
stand out above all others. Athens, moreover, could not
vie in the sheer number of her libraries with Rome; according to the regional census of Constantine in A.D. 350,
Rome had twenty-eight public libraries.
Nevertheless we shall find reason to believe that it was
Athens which contributed the expertise, the "know how,"
essential to the organization of the Alexandrian Library.
The kings of Pergamon, in turn, in setting up their library
a century later, undoubtedly drew heavily on both Athens
and Alexandria. As for the contents of these justly famous
libraries, there can be no doubt that the contribution from
Athenian authors was greater than that from any other
national group.
Interesting also ·is the variety in the kinds of libraries
known to have existed in ancient Athens. We read about
private collections, academic libraries, and public libraries,
ranging in date from the Archaic period into Roman Imperial times. The money for setting up and maintaining
these libraries came from various sources: private philanthropy, culture-conscious foreign princes, the Roman emField Director of Excavations from 1947 to 1967, Horner A. Thompson
has worked on the most recent excavations, since their beginning in
1931, of the ancient Agora in Athens, where clearance of the Agora of
Classic'al times is now nearing completion. He has been a member of the
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J., since 1947.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
peror. The testimony of such non-Athenian writers as
Polybios and Plutarch indicates that Athens was a good
place in which to carry on serious scholarly research.
Aristeides of Mysia, writing in the second century after
Christ, observed that Athens had stocks of books such as
you could find nowhere else in the world, together, Aristeides adds, with splendid baths, race courses, and gymnasia. (Panathenaicus XIII, 188).
According to a widespread tradition the first library in
Athens was formed by Peisistratos, the tyrant who with
his sons dominated Athens for much of the sixth century
B.C. He is reported to have made his collection accessible
to the people, and after the expulsion of the tyrant's family
in 510 B.C. the people are said to have added to it. The
collection, we are told, was carried off by the Persians in
479 B.C., but was sent back to Athens after Alexander's
conquests by Seleukos Nikator. All this sounds rather too
good to be true. How many books were available anywhere in the Greek world at this time, and how many
Athenians were capable of reading in the sixth century?
We know, however, that there was a great upsurge of interest in the arts, notably architecture, sculpture, and
painting, in the time of the Tyrants. Distinguished poets
such as Simonides and Anakreon were induced to come to
Athens. Peisistratos and his son Hipparchos were credited
with bringing together the Homeric poems into their canonical form, and with making the recital of those poems
a regular part of the newly founded national festival, the
Panathenaia. In view of all this I am prepared to believe
that Peisistratos may indeed have put together a small
personal collection of books; if so, he may well, in keeping
with his genial character, have allowed these books to be
consulted by interested citizens. But I would stop short of
having this collection carried off by the Persians: if
readers were few in Athens surely they would have been
even fewer in Persepolis!
1
�Figure 2. The Athenian Agora in the 2nd century A.D.; view from the
northwest. Drawing by John Travlos.
There is little record of book collecting in Athens in the
century and a half between Peisistratos and Aristotle. The
Athenians perhaps, were too busy writing to have time
for collecting. Yet this period witnessed a marked growth
in the reading public in Athens. One of many indications
is the fact that the practice of publishing official docu·
ments such as laws, decrees, treaties, and financial accounts began for all practical purposes at the end of the
sixth century and increased steadily through the fifth and
fourth centuries. This was a costly procedure, and it was
not likely to have been followed had not a large proportion of the citizens been able to read the inscriptions. The
growing interest in the theater in the course of the fifth
century may also have been a factor in stimulating the
circulation and collection of written texts. Scripts were
needed, after all, by the performers, and they were no
doubt wanted by literary-minded citizens.
In this connection it is interesting that Euripides should
have been sufficiently well-known as a book collector to
have drawn jibes from Aristophanes in his Frogs (!. 943)
and to have been credited by Athenaeus (1, 4) with the
possession of "one of the largest libraries in the ancient
world." Another collector of the late fifth century of
whom we read was Eukleides, presumably the archon of
1
2
403/2 B.C., the year in which the Athenians turned officially from the old Attic script to the Ionic.
Let me note in passing that a date around 400 B.C. ap·
pears to have been a turning point in the history of the
state archives of Athens. Public records had of course
been kept in earlier times, but in a random way, whereas
from now on procedure became more regular. About this
time a new meeting place for the Council of 500 was
erected on the west side of the Agora, and the old Council
House seems now to have been made available for the
storage of all manner of official records. One should be
careful not to equate archives with libraries. In antiquity,
however, official documents were written on papyrus or
parchment just like books, and they were rolled in the
same way. Consequently the methods of storing and of
cataloguing must have been similar. The same feeling for
orderly arrangement was essential to success in the keeping of both records and books. (Figures 1-5.)
We are woefully ignorant of the physical arrangements
employed in the Classical period for the storage of books.
We get some help, however, from the school scenes that
appear occasionally on red-figured vases of the fifth cen·
tury. In these scenes the rolls stand upright in wooden
chests with folding lids of a type used for many purposes
WINTER 1981
�in the Greek household. It seems probable that in the
Classical and Hellenistic periods books were stored in
similar containers even in large libraries. In the Roman
period, however, we know that the rolls were stacked hori·
zontally on wooden shelves, sometimes set in cupboards.
Men of letters are often shown with book boxes by their
sides: round or rectangular cases in wich the rolls stood
vertically. (Figure 3a.)
Strabo, writing in the time of Augustus, observed of Aristotle that he was "the first man of our knowledge to col·
lect books" (XIII,!, 54: -rr:p&roo, §'v 'iop.<v, ovvor-yaywv
{3.(3f..ia). If by this Strabo meant, as he probably did, the
first to build up a library as distinct from amassing volumes, his statement is entirely plausible. Let me remind
you that Aristotle came back to Athens in 335 B.C. as a
mature, indeed a distinguished scholar. He rented some
buildings in a grove sacred to Apollo Lykeios and the
Muses, and there set up the school which took its name,
the "Lyceum," from the divinity. Various indications,
some archaeological and some literary, point to a location
in the area of the modern Syntagma Square and the Na·
tional Garden, i.e., outside the ancient city wall toward
the northeast. Here Aristotle lived and taught until he was
obliged to leave Athens because of anti-Macedonian feeling in 323 B.C.; he died the following year in Chalkis.
Aristotle's style of scholarship necessitated a new conception in the handling of books. His range was wide: the
natural sciences, moral philosophy, politics, literary criticism, to name only the principal areas. In addition to his
original writings on these subjects he put together various
lists for general use such as records of the victors at the
Delphic and Olympic festivals and at the dramatic con·
tests in Athens. He must have worked with great intensity
himself, and he also employed assistants. As an example
of the amount of research that might go into the making
of a single book let me remind you that in preparation for
the writing of the Politics Aristotle had monographs composed on the constitutions of no less than !58 states; only
Figure 3. (Above) West
side of the Agora in
the 2nd century after
Christ (view from the
southeast). Model by
John Trllvlos.
Figure 4. (middle)
Tholos and Old Bouleuterion (view from
the southeast, ca. 450
B.C.). Drawing by
W. B. Dinsmoor, Jr.
Figure 5. (below)
Headquarters of the
Council of 500 (Boule),
ca. 350 B.C .. Old Bouleuterion and Tholos
are dark, New Bouleuterion and its Propylon light. Drawing by
fohn Travlos.
Figure
3a.
Attic red.figure
Lekytho' (450-25 B.C.) attributed to the Kluegmann painter,
Louvre.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
one of these special studies has survived: The Constitution of the Athenians. From the tempo of Aristotelian
scholarship we may be sure that it was based not only on a
large, but also on a well organized collection of books.
Aristotle, we must remember, was not only a great
scholar; he was also a busy teacher and the head of an active school. We have no knowledge of where he kept his
books or of how freely they were made accessible to his
collaborators and pupils. One thing, however, is certain:
the library remained the personal property of Aristotle,
and as such it was bequeathed by him to his successor,
Theophrastos. Theophrastos added his own holdings to
Aristotle's and bequeathed the lot to a friend and fellow
3
�Figure 6. Marble
head of Aristotle,
copy (lst century
A.D.), probably of a
portrait commissioned by Aristotle's
pupil, Alexander,
Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.
scholar, Neleus, who was presumably thought to be in line
for the succession. But Neleus was not appointed; he
went off home to Skepsis in the Troad, taking the library
with him. (All this we Jearn from Strabo [XIII, l, 54], and I
continue to draw on Strabo's familiar and hair-raising
account).
Neleus's heirs in the Troad were ordinary people who
paid little attention to the library until alarmed by the efforts of the kings of nearby Pergamon to collect books for
their new library. The heirs then concealed the books in
an underground vault. Here they lay, suffering from moisture and bookworms, until eventually they were sold for a
large sum to one Apellikon of Teas. The sale included the
books of both Aristotle and Theophrastos. Apellikon is described as an ardent collector but a bibliophile rather than
a philosopher. He had copies of the damaged texts made,
but the gaps were restored with many errors. The result of
all this was that the Peripatetics who came after Theophrastos had virtually no books and so were not able to
philosophize in any practical way. After the faulty copies
became available they were able once more, to be sure, to
philosophize and Aristotelize but were forced to call most
of their statements mere probabilities.
Apellikon, Strabo continues, perished in the Mithridatic Wars. The original library fell into the hands of the
Roman general, Sulla, and was taken by him to Rome in
84 B.C. There the texts suffered once again through being carelessly copied for unscrupulous booksellers. The
next step is reported by Plutarch in his life of Sulla (XXVI,
l-2). The grammarian Tyrannion, a lover of Aristotle, saw
to it that a set of copies was sent to Andronikos of Rhodes,
later to become head of the Peripatetic School. This set
was used by Andronikos as the basis for the complete edi·
tion on which subsequent Aristotelian scholarship has for
the most part rested.
4
The account given by Strabo and Plutarch is very circumstantial and seems credible. But according to another
version preserved by Athenaeus, Neleus, the heir ofTheophrastos, sold the library to Ptolemy Philadelphos, King of
Egypt (283-246 B.C.). It may well be that the collection
was in fact divided, part going to Skepsis and so eventually
to Rome, the rest going to Alexandria.
So much for the most famous of all the libraries of Athens. It has had few rivals in the number of its vicissitudes,
and fewer still in the extent of its influence on scholarship.
Strabo, after describing Aristotle as the first man known
to have assembled books, went on to say that it was Aristotle who taught the kings of Egypt how to organize a library. This is an interesting but incredible statement. We
do know, however, that Aristotle's successor, Theophrastos, was invited to Alexandria by the first Ptolemy. Theophrastos declined, and Ptolemy had to be satisfied with
Theophrastos' pupil, Demetrios of Phaleron. In inviting
to his court a distinguished scholar such as Demetrios,
Ptolemy was following a practice already familiar at the
courts of Philip II and Alexander. Such persons were commonly expected to act as tutors to the royal family, to advise the monarch on matters cultural and scientific and to
enhance the tone of the regime. Although there is little
hard evidence for the role played by Demetrios, Peter
Fraser in his masterly book on Ptolemaic Alexandria
(1972) concludes that Demetrios' advice was significant in
shaping the two closely related establishments through
which Alexandria made its chief contribution to the culture of the western world,-! mean, of course, the Museum and the Library. The Museum has been regarded in
various ways. I have heard it described as the ancestor of
all institutes for advanced study. A contemporary poet,
Timon of Phlius, however, had this to say: "In the populous land of Egypt many are they who get fed, cloistered
bookworms, endlessly arguing in the bird-coop of the
Muses" (trans. P. Fraser). But there is general agreement
with the view that the Museum of Alexandria, as a small
and intimate society of research scholars committed to
the service of the Muses, was patterned chiefly on the
Academy and the Lyceum of Athens.
A similarly close link with Athens may be hypothesized
for the sister institution, the Library, or rather the Libraries, of Ptolemaic Alexandria. The older and much the
larger of the two libraries was included, like the physical
facilities of the Museum, in the palace complex. It would
seem to have been regarded chiefly as a research library at
the disposal of members of the Museum. The smaller
library, sometimes referred to as "the daughter", was incorporated in the Sanctuary of Sarapis founded by
Ptolemy Euergetes in the third century B.C. Here again
we are woefully lacking in specific information, but there
is good reason to believe that the Alexandrian Library, in
its breadth of scope, in its aim at universal coverage, and
in its careful organization reflects Athenian, more specifically Aristotelian, practice. In its turn, the Ptolemaic founWINTER 1981
�Figure 7. Ptolemy I Soter;
obverse of a coin of Ptolemy
II Philadelphos, British Museum.
dation was to exercise a role of incalculable importance in
the preservation, editing, and dissemination of earlier lit~
erature both Greek and non-Greek.
A word about the personalities, and first Aristotle. The
marble portrait now in Vienna admirably corresponds
with the image that can be recovered from his writings: a
man of great intellectual capacity seasoned with a little affectation and a good deal of astringency. (Figure 6.)
Demetrios of Phaleron, alas, has not been recognized
with certainty in any ancient portrait. He is said to have
have been recognized. Even the extensive excavations
carried out in the Sanctuary of Sarapis in the 1940s failed
to bring to light any plausible candidate for the daughter
library.
The most probable physical remnant of the Library is
this block of granite 17 1/4 inches in length. Found in
1847 in the garden of the Austrian consulate in Alexandria, the stone is now in Vienna. In the top, as you see, is a
shallow rectangular socket; on the front is the inscription:
!lto<IKOVp[O~<I r TOfWL (Dioskourides 3 volumes). The block
has generally been regarded as a container for books, and
for over a century scholars have been exercising their in~
genuity in fitting three papyrus rolls into the cavity. As an
alternative solution I would suggest that the depression
held a carved portrait of the author, either in the round
Figure 8. Granite base found in Alexandria, inscribed: flwaKoup[O"']S
r6p.ot, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.
Figure 9. Ptolemy III Euergetes; obverse of a silver coin
of Tarsos, Boston, Museum
of Fine Arts.
been honored by the Athenians with 360 bronze statues
in recognition of his services to the city. But when he was
driven out on the coming of Demetrios Poliorketes (307
B.C.) these statues were pulled down, sold, cast into the
sea, or turned into chamber pots. Aristotle on being asked
"What grows old quickly?" replied, "Gratitude."
Of Ptolemy I Soter we are fortunate in having some
magniQ.Fent portraits on coins. Here we are face to face
with a Churchill-like figure: a great warrior, national
leader and serious historian. Through the compatibility of
temperament between Ptolemy and Demetrios much of
the learning accumulated by the old Greek world was passed
on to the new, and the principal channel was the Library
of Alexandria. (Figure 7.)
The structures that housed both the Museum and the
Library were in all likelihood much more modest than
their fame would imply. In any case no structural remains
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
r
or in relief, and that copies of his writings were kept nearby
in a box or on a shelf. (Figure 8.)
Under the later Ptolemies the Library's holdings continued to be built up, and the pace of acquisition became
feverish when competition developed between Alexandria and Pergamon in the second century B.C. The channels of acquisition were both regular and irregular, and
the governing ethics were all too anticipatory of the modern commerce in rare books. Let me remind you of the
well known story told by Galen of how Ptolemy III Euergetes (246-221 B.C.) acquired a set of the works of the
Figure 10. Eumenes II; obverse of a unique silver coin,
British Museum.
5
�Figure ll. Pergamon: Sanctuary of Athena Nikephoros (view from the
southwest). The Sanctuary lies between the Theater (lower left) and one
of the Palaces (upper right). Model, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
F1gure 12. Pergamon: Sanctuary
of Athena Nikephoros (A); Library
(B); Palace (C);
Theater (D); Altar
::: : ·' =
=
-···-" =
:~~:::·:
of Zem (E). (H.
Kahler, Pergamon,
66).
three Attic tragedians: Aischylos, Sophokles, and Euripides. Learning that an official copy of these texts existed
in Athens, Ptolemy asked for their loan so that he might
have them copied for his Library. By way of security he
deposited with the Athenians fifteen talents, a truly enormous sum. The copies were made on exceptionally fine
papyrus. It was these copies that Ptolemy then sent to
Athens with instructions to the Athenians to keep both
the copies and the deposit. The originals remained in Alexandria, and the Athenians could do nothing but consent. The silver coin of Ptolemy Euergetes now in Boston
6
WINTER 1981
�Above, figure 14. Athena Parthenos, Varvakian copy, National Museum, Athens. Photo by Alison Frantz.
Left, figure 13. Athena from the Library in Pergamon, Pergamon Museum, Berlin.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
shows you with what manner of man the Athenians were
dealin&. (Figure 9.)
Another distinguished personality led to the formation
of the other most famous library of the Greek world, that
of Pergamon. There is a portrait of Eumenes II (197 -159
B.C.) on a unique silver coin now in the British Museum.
It was this ruler who was chiefly responsible for making
Pergamon one of the greatest artistic and intellectual centers of later Greek time. (Figure 10.) Here, as often in the
Greek and Roman world, the library was incorporated in a
sanctuary. Above the Theater and the Altar of Zeus and
just in front of the royal palace lay the Sanctuary of Athena
Nikephoros, the patron goddess of the city. This old sanctuary was modernized by Eumenes and enclosed on three
sides with two-storied colonnades or stoas. The south,
outer side was left open so that the temple could be seen
from the lower city and the countryside. (Figures 11, 12.)
The Library occupied a suite of four rooms that opened
on the upper floor of the north stoa. Excavated by German scholars in the late nineteenth century, the structure
figures in all serious publications regarding Greek libraries. Nevertheless some problems of interpretation remain
and the ruins need to be thoroughly re-examined in the
light of our present knowledge. Without going into the
technical evidence let me state my own view briefly. The
books, I believe, were stored in wooden containers of
some sort in the three smaller rooms. The large north
room was a splendid lobby for the users of the library, and
at the same time a veritable art gallery. A massive stone
pedestal that bordered the back and two side walls was not
intended, as commonly supposed, to support book cases,
but for the display of sculpture. A central place was occupied by a great marble figure of Athena that was found
in front of the Library. (Figure 13.) The goddess was flanked
by statues of famous literary figures of the past with emphasis on those who came from Asia Minor. Inscribed
bases bear the names of Homer, Alkaios, Herodotos,
Timotheos. Dowel holes high up in the walls of the room
may have held paintings done on wooden panels. The
broad two-a isled colonnade in front of the four rooms provided a promenade where scholars might take the air in a
characteristically Greek way while enjoying a magnificent
view over the city and countryside.
Plutarch reports that Mark Antony bestowed on Kleopatra the contents of the Pergamene. library, some
200,000 volumes (Antonius 58, 9), presumably to compensate her for the destruction caused in Alexandria by the
fire of 48 B.C. Even if this account be well founded, the
loss did not put an end to libraries in Pergamon. We now
know, thanks to the German excavations of the 1930s,
that a substantial library was erected , in the time of Hadrian, in the Sanctuary of Asklepios by a woman, Flavia
Melitine. By this time the center of intellectual life had
shifted from the splendid but arduous heights to this
more luxuriously appointed establishment in the plain.
As we leave Pergamon let us glance back at the figure of
Athena which once presided over the Hellenistic Library.
7
�Figure 15. Athenian Agora: the Metroon. Draw-
ing by John Travlos.
Figure 16. Athenian Agora in the 2nd century A.D. (view from northwest). Model by John Travlos.
Figure 16a.
Athenian Agora.
Standing 3.5 meters high the statue is clearly a free adaptation, at a scale of one to three, of the image of Athena
Parthenos made by Pheidias for the Parthenon. (Figure 14.)
Such a recall is symptomatic of the close sympathy, cultural as well as political, that existed between Pergamon
and Athens. In recognition of their debt to the older city
the rulers of Pergamon one after another made splendid
gifts to Athens: a park in the Academy, a group of sculpture on the Acropolis, a stoa beside the Theater at the
south foot of the Acropolis, another two-storied stoa on
the east side of the Agora. This last building, erected soon
after 150 B.C., was reconstructed in the 1950s to serve as
a museum for the finds from the excavation of the Agora.
In Athens about the same time, in the third quarter of
the second century B.C., another major building project
took place on the opposite, i.e. the western side of the
Agora. Here the Old Council House that we believe, as
noted above, to have housed the official archives of the city
since about 400 B.C. was demolished to make way for a
large new building, the Hellenistic Metroon. The remains
are slight, but sufficient to justify the restoration which
shows the Metroon in relation to the New Council House
and to the round Club House of the councillors, the
Tholos. The primary function of the Metroon as of its
predecessor was the safekeeping of the state archives. A
wide range of material is mentioned in inscriptions and
ancient literary testimonia: decrees, treaties, public accounts, even on occasion the will of a prominent citizen.
8
Some of the old original texts of decrees were regarded as
"collector's items," and in the first century B.C. one lot
was stolen by Apellikon, the notorious collector of librar·
ies whom I have mentioned above (Athenaeus V, 214d-e).
In plan the Metroon comprised four rooms of which
the northernmost was much the largest. All four rooms
faced eastward toward the open Agora through a broad
Ionic porch. The second room from the south has the
scheme of a temple; an altar stood in the open square in
front of this room. In this compartment, presumably, we
must place the famous seated statue of the Mother of the
Gods, the "M~r~p 8t0lv," who gave its name to the building. The statue was a work of Pheidias or, more probably,
of his pupil Agorakritos. The goddess is referred to by
Deinarchos (I, 86) as "guardian for the city of all the rights
recorded in the documents." The rooms that flanked the
shrine were presumably the repositories for the storage of
documents which would have consisted for the most part
of papyrus rolls. The north room contained a small courtyard open to the sky: this, we assume, served as a cloister
where users of the archives, including research scholars,
might work quietly, emerging occasionally for a stroll in
the outer colonnade. (Figure 15.)
The similarities between this Athenian building and
the only slightly earlier Library in Pergamon are so many
and so striking as to indicate some close relationship. I
venture to suggest that the construction of the Hellenistic
Metroon may indeed have been one more benefaction
from a Pergamene ruler to the venerable city of Athens.
The kings of Pergamon were not the only benefactors
of Athens in the Hellenistic period. At some as yet unknown point near the north foot of the Acropolis and to
the east of the Agora was a gymnasium called the Ptolemaion, so named after its founder. The earliest references
to the establishment date from the middle of the second
century B.C. Which Ptolemy was responsible remains
uncertain: Euregetes (246-221 B.C.) and Philometor
(180-145 B.C.) have been proposed. For our present purpose the interesting point is that the Ptolemaion certainly
contained a library. In the Hellenistic and early Roman
periods the Ptolemaion rivalled the famous old gymnasia
WINTER 1981
�as a center both of secondary education and of intellectual
life. One would like to think that the library was part of
the original foundation. That would certainly have been
appropriate in a Ptolemaic context, but our evidence con~
sists only of a number of inscriptions beginning in the
year ll7/6 B.C. which record an annual gift of one hundred books to the library in the Ptolemaion from the
graduating class of ephebes, that is the young men who
had completed their two-year course of training in the
gymnasium. These books were presumably for school use,
and the annual donation may have done little more than
compensate for wear and tear. But the Ptolemaion certainly became more than a secondary school: describing a
day in Athens in 45 B.C., Cicero tells of hearing a morning lecture by Antiochos, then head of the Academy, in
the Ptolemaion. The Ptolemaion remains to be found.
Libraries are known to have existed in gymnasia in
other Greek cities, but it is very difficult to identify specific library facilities even when a gymnasium has been
excavateo. All the more welcome, therefore, is a bit of evidence which came to light in the Sicilian city of Taormina
in 1969. In red paint on the white plastered wall of what
was evidently the library of a gymnasium were written
short biographical notices of various writers: Kallisthenes
of Olynthus, Philistos of Syracuse, and Fabius Pictor of
Rome. The transcription of the entry for Fabius will serve
as a sample: first the name, then a brief listing of the
author's principal works: the arrival of Herakles, Aeneas,
and Askanios in Italy, the story of Remus and Romulus. A
date for the inscription about 130 B.C. is proposed by Professor G. Manganaro who has published the new find in
the Romische Frilhgeschichte of Andreas Alfoldi (1976).
We may be sure that these notices were in convenient
proximity to the book containers, and we may suppose
that similar aids were a regular feature of school libraries.
We return to Athens to consider the oldest Athenian library of which actual remains have been found. It was a
modest establishment founded by one T. Flavius Pantainos ca. A.D. 100 at the southeast corner of the Agora.
Its excavation began in the 1930s and was completed in
the 1970s. The remains on the ground are slight, chiefly
because the building was demolished in the late third century after Christ to make way for a new fortification wall
in which was incorporated much of the stonework of the
Library. (Figures 16, 16a.)
_
The Library stood just to the south of the Stoa of Attalos. Between the two buildings passed a marble-paved
roadway that led from the old Agora eastward to the Marketplace of Caesar and Augustus. The principal room of
the Library was a spacious hall measuring about 9.75 x
10.75 meters. This room opened on a colonnaded courtyard which was bordered by ranges of small rooms to
north and west; these in turn were flanked by Ionic colonnades. The main, probably the only, entrance led through
the middle of the west side. Some surely, and perhaps all
of the small rooms had no direct connection with the
Library. Certainly the suite of two rooms to the south of
TIIE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Above, figure 17. Library of Pantainos (view from north), 1975.
Left foreground, the south pier of
arch between Library and the
Stoa of Attalos.
Right, figure 18. Southeast corner
of Agora in 2nd century A.D.
(north at top). Drawing by John
Travlos.
Below, figure 19. Library of Pantainos (view from the southwest).
Model by fohn Travlos.
the entrance had served as a sculptor's studio. We came
on quantities of his marble chips and on some pieces of
his very second-rate sculpture. Some of the other small
rooms may have been shops-the location at this busy
corner was suitable. (Figures 17, 18.)
With the construction of the Library this became, architecturally, one of the most attractive parts of the Agora.
The building faced westward across the Panathenaic way
toward a small plaza that was bordered on the south by a
9
�Figure 20. Odyssey and Iliad from the Library of Pantainos, Agora Museum in Stoa of Attalos.
temple and a large fountainhouse. The west colonnade of
the Library was continued southward by the porch of a
slightly later shop building. Northward, between the Library and the Stoa of Attalos, was another small and intimate plaza partially closed on the side toward the old
Agora by an earlier monument and defined on the east
side by a marble arch closely contemporary with the Library. (Figure 19.)
Although the walls of the Library were of coarse, rubble
masonry the marble work of its porches was of good quality. The floors of the great hall and of the courtyard had
both been paved with marble, and the lower part of the
walls faced with marble. Of this revetment only the imprints remain in the mortar.
One would dearly like to know how the books were
stored in the Library of Pantainos. The walls seem too
thin to have accommodated niches such as are commonly
found in libraries of the Roman period for book cupboards. We may therefore suppose that the books were
carried on wooden shelving set against the walls as was
certainly the case, for instance, in the Villa of the Papyri
at Herculaneum.
Figure 21.
Odyssey.
Figure 23. Iliad. The right
hand held a sword, the left
probably a spear.
10
WINTER 1981
�Figure 22. Odyssey: cmass. The central figure is Scylla; on the lappets: Aiolos, three Sirens, Polyphemos.
Ancient libraries whether private or public were normally adorned with works of art, above all with statues or
busts of famous authors. Our library was no exception. Its
most striking ornament was undoubtedly a marble group
comprising a seated figure of Homer flanked by standing
figures of the Iliad and Odyssey personified. Only the two
female figures have survived and they only as torsoes
which had been used as filling in the late Roman wall that
overlay the west front of the Library. They came to light
in 1869 near the northwest corner of the Library, and they
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
are now displayed nearby in the Stoa of Attalos: robust
figures clad in armor and slightly over life size. They were
conceived of as daughters of Homer. The Iliad, traditionally the older poem, is appropriately shown as larger than
her sister. The Odyssey is signed, on one of the lappets of
the cuirass, by Jason the Athenian. Since it is altogether
probable that the statues are contemporary with the Library (about A.D. 100), they are important in the history
of sculpture as among the few closely dateable Athenian
works of imperial times. (Figures 20-24.)
11
�Figure 24. Inscribed base of the Iliad, Agora Museum in Stoa of Attalos.
The figures were Identified long ago by Georg Treu,
who recognized on the cuirass of the smaller statue
motives appropriate to the Odyssey: Scylla with her dogheaded extremities, Aiolos, god of the winds, Sirens, and
Polyphemos. The identification of the Iliad followed
naturally, especially since there are traces of a sword, her
normal attribute, held at her right side. Both figures show
marked weathering on their upper parts, and both have
the rich honey color characteristic of Pentelic marble that
Figure 25, Marble relief commemorating a victory in a literary coniest
By Archelaos of Priene, 2nd century RC, British Museum.
Left, figure 26. Arch between
Library of Pantainos (right)
and Stoa of Attalos (left),
(view from west). Drawing by
W. B. Dinsmoor, Jr.
Right, figure 27. T. Flavius
Pantainos(?), marble head
found near Library of Pantainos, Agora Museum, Stoa of
Attalos.
12
WINTER 1981
�has long been exposed to the elements. We may be sure,
therefore, that the group stood out of doors, and indeed it
was long ago observed by Paul Graindor that the bold
treatment of both torsos and drapery favored an architectural setting. (Figure 22.)
In 1953 from the curbing of a well of the Byzantine
period just to the west of the Library the excavators
recovered the many fragments of the plinth of the Iliad.
The inscription is enigmatic, but nevertheless helpful: "I
the Iliad both before and after Homer stand by the side of
him who bore me while young." This text justifies therestoration which I have already proposed, i.e. a group of
Homer flanked by his "daughters." Several such groups
are known, the most familiar being that at the lower lefthand corner of a relief of late Hellenistic date now in the
British Museum. The sculptor, Arkelaos of Priene, has
obligingly labelled all the figures. Homer seated, staff in
hand, is flanked by the Iliad and Odyssey, here shown as
small kneeling figures. (Figure 25.)
The chief question still outstanding about our group is
its original location. The Library has now been completely
excavated, and no base suitable for such a monumental
group has come to light within the building. In any case,
as we have already seen, the group must have stood outdoors. Since there is no reason to question its association
with the Library, we must look for a location outside the
building but close enough to it so that the association
would be obvious.
As a possible location I believe we should consider the
top of the marble arch that spanned the roadway between
the Library and the Stoa of Attalos. Of this arch there remain the lower parts of the two lateral piers, the threshold
between the piers, and one block of the crowning course.
We do not have time to go into technicalities, but I do
wish to point out that neither the arch nor the adjacent
colonnade of the Library would have made architectural
sense without the other. Moreover, the care with which
the Library colonnade is fitted to the arch leaves little
doubt that they are parts of one building program. (In contrast, the colonnade bordering the south side of the street
leading eastward toward the Market of Caesar and Augustus is related to the arch very awkwardly. That colonnade,
however, belongs to a slightly later building program
which, as we know from an inscription, was financed by
the People of Athens.) An arch of this type would certainly
have carried sculpture. No other candidates have been
found apart from our Homer group, and that group, as we
have seen, cries out for such a location. (Figure 26.)
Portraits of other great literary figures of the past may
well have figured among the furnishings of the Library,
and such may someday be recognized among the fragmentary sculptures found on the site. Nor is the founder
of the Library likely to have gone unhonored. As a candidate for a portrait ofT. Flavius Pantainos, I should like to
propose a marble head, well over life size, that was found
near the northwest corner of the Library in 1933. The
piece is so fresh as to indicate that it had not travelled far.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Figure 28. Dedicatory inscription from the Library of Pantainos.
The haircut and the tooling point to the time of Trajan,
and an identification with that Emperor has indeed been
proposed. But it really doesn't look like Trajan. Moreover,
the head is crowned with a laurel wreath that would be
unusual on an emperor. I prefer to regard it as representing the actual wreath or crown which the people of Athens
would surely have bestowed on Pantainos as a benefactor.
It is identical for instance with the wreath worn by
Tiberius Julius Aquila, the builder of the beautiful Library
of Celsus in Ephesus. (Figure 27.)
You may wonder how I can speak with such assurance
about the donor and the date of our Library. My source is
the dedicatory inscription engraved on the lintel from
above the entrance to the building; it now forms part of
the late Roman fortification wall. (Figure 28.) The text in
translation reads:
To Athena Polias and to the Emperor Caesar Augustus Nerva
Trajan Germanicus and to the city of the Athenians, the priest
of the Muses who love wisdom, T. Flavius Pantainos, son of
Flavius Menander head of the school, dedicated _the outer stoas,
the peristyle, the library with the books, and all the embellishment of the building, from his own resources along with his
children, Flavius Menander and Flavia Secundilla.
Figure 29. Notice
from the Library of
Pantainos, ca. A.D.
100, Agora Museum,
Stoa of Attalos.
13
�The emperor's title points to a date close around A.D.
100. Pantainos was a man of some consequence in Athens.
He is known to have held the archonship (which at this
time implied wealth) probably in A.D. 115/6, and he had
been honored for some reason with a portrait Herm. Nor
is it impossible that he was the grandfather of the Pantainos who is known as the head of the first Christian
Figure 31. Library of
Hadrian, west facade.
Photo by Alison Frantz.
Figure 32. Library of Hadrian, model in Musco della Civilta Romana,
Rome. Photo by Alison Frantz.
Figure 30. Hadrian; in the Agora excavations.
school in Alexandria and the teacher of Clement, the early
church father whose writings betray a wide knowledge of
pagan Greek literature.
The books presented by Pantainos have· gone beyond
recall. The building and all its embellishments are sadly
ruinous. What does remain to us, and that in its pristine
state, is a library notice. The text was engraved at convenient height on the shaft of a Herm. It reads, "No book
14
shall be taken out, for we have sworn an oath. The building shall be open from the first hour till the sixth." Who
were the "we" who took the oath? The expression used
here, coupled with Pantainos' description of himself as
"priest of the wisdom-loving Muses", makes one suspect
the existence of some society, perhaps a local "Museum"
such as is attested for Athens and for some other Greek
cities, the forerunner of modern Athenaeums. (Figure 29.)
Pantainos' building, modest though it may seem, is important as representing the type of public library that
must have been a normal component of the community
center of many a city throughout the Roman Empire.
We tum, finally, to a library of a quite different stamp.
The Emperor Hadrian is well known as a great philhellene, and above all as a devoted friend of Athens. His attitude toward Athens is happily symbolized in a marble portrait statue found near the west side of the Agora in 1931,
the first season of excavation. Athena, patron goddess of
Athens, stands on the back of the Wolf of Rome. The
Wolf has her fosterlings, Romulus and Remus: Athens has
her owl and sacred snake; the goddess is being crowned by
two Victories. (Figure 30.) In all her long history Athens
never had a more generous benefactor than Hadrian. The
Emperor contributed to many departments of the city's
WINTER 1981
�""
lo • • •
- ·- - - · ·
''---"'
.di:o
Figure 34. Library of Hadrian; quatrefoil church of the 5th century appears in the middle of the court.
Figure 33. Library of Hadrian; inner face of back wall of principal room,
showing niches for book shelves. Photo archive, John Travlos.
life: he completed the colossal temple of Olympian Zeus,
erected a temple of Hera and Zeus, built a sanctuary of all
the gods, a gymnasium and an aqueduct. At the end of his
well-known list of Hadrians's benefactions, Pausanias (I,
18, 9) remarked, "Most splendid of all is (a structure) with
100 columns; walls and colonnade alike are made of Phrygian marble. Here too are rooms adorned with gilded ceilings and alabaster, and also with statues and paintings:
books are stored in the rooms." (trans.). G. Frazer).
The identification of this building, the Library of Hadrian, is now securely established. It stood in the middle of
the city, just to the north of the Market Place that had
been built with the aid of grants from julius Caesar and
the Emperor Augustus. It rose a stone's throw to the east
of the Classical Agora, and it represents the final increment to that centuries-old community center. The Library was also the last fine building to be erected in
Athens in Classical antiquity and the most splendid of all
ancient libraries known to us. Although the great building
has not yet been completely excavated, and much of its
area is still cluttered with modern buildings, its visible remains, rising in a slum district of the city, startle one with
their monumental quality. (Figure 31.)
Since a good publication of the building by the English
scholar M. A. Sisson is readily available I shall be brief.
The principal facade was enlivened by fourteen monolithic columns of green marble once crowned with
statues. Through a columnar propylon in the middle of
that facade one entered an enormous colonnaded courtyard with a long pool on its axis; the open area was un~
doubtedly planted. Pleasant alcoves opened out from the
lateral colonnades, three on each side. (Figure 32.)
The richly adorned rooms mentioned by Pausanias are
recognizable at the far end of the court. A great central
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
chamber was undoubtedly the principal repository of
books. Two corner rooms, as demonstrated recently by
john Travlos, were certainly lecture rooms with sloping
floors and elegant appointments. Smaller intermediate
rooms were perhaps intended for special collections of
rare books that required greater security. Whether the
bilateral symmetry implies a division between Greek and
Latin as in the Library of Trajan in Rome we cannot say.
Enough remains of the back wall of the central room to
show that here, as in the Library of Celsus at Ephesos, the
books were stored in cupboards set into the face of the
wall on three levels. (Figure 33.)
Despite the monumental scale of the building and the
dazzling wealth of the building materials, the basic plan is
beautifully clear and straightforward. What is more, we
find here the same elements that we have observed in earlier libraries from Pergamon onward: one room of im~
pressive scale, ample provision for strolling in colonnades,
and quiet areas for more peaceful study or discussion.
The design is undoubtedly the creation of some gifted
architect chosen by the Emperor, perhaps a man who had
assisted in designing the several libraries in Hadrian's own
villa at Tibur, and surely someone who was thoroughly
familiar with the great buildings in the capital, above all
the Templum Pacis ("Forum of Vespasian") and the
Forum of Trajan.
The Athenian building may be dated in the l30s. It appears to have suffered severely in the Herulian sack of
A.D. 267. Its subsequent history is intriguing but full of
major uncertainties. Some of the surviving bases of the
main colonnade are of crude workmanship and presumably belong to some post-Herulian reconstruction. In the
propylon, high on the wall to the left of the doorway, if
you arrive when the sun is right, you may just detect a
15
�British Museum, by permission of the Trustees: Figs. 7, 10, 25
Deutschcs Archiiologisches lnstitut: Fig. 12
Alison Frantz: Figs.14, 31,32
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna: Figs. 6, 8
Museum ofl"ine Arts, Boston: Fig. 9
Pergamon Museum, Berlin: Fig. 13
Staatliche Museen, Berlin: Fig. II
John_Travlos: Figs. 33-35
Short Bibliography
Figure 35. Quatrefoil church in the court of Library of Hadrian; second
period, 7th century {view from the southeast). Photo archive, John Travlos.
metrical inscfiption recording the dedication of a statue,
apparently a large one. The honoree was none other than
the high-ranking imperial official Herculius, Prefect of [].
lyricum from 408 to 412 A.D. The one who dedicated the
statue was Plutarch, founder of the Neo-Platonic School
and its head. In the epigram Plutarch describes himself as
"steward of letters", Hercu1ius as "steward of the laws."
My colleague, Alison Frantz, has argued persuasively that
Herculius may have been responsible for the repair of the
Library. The interest shown in the undertaking by the
famous philosopher Plutarch favors the view that at this
time the establishment still served the world of letters.
This is understandable, for even at this late period Athens
continued to be one of the most active intellectual centers
of the ancient world, attracting distinguished scholars
from near and far.
Later in the fifth century the pool on the axis of the library courtyard was filled in, and a church with an
unusual quatrefoil plan was erected in the middle of the
court. The church was rebuilt, with altered plan and inferior technique, in the seventh century. It may be assumed that the whole complex had suffered, like several
buildings in the area of the Agora, from the Slavic incursions of the 580s. There is no indication that the library
facilities survived this devastation. We know from our excavations in the Agora that by the seventh century lamps
had virtually ceased to be made in Athens. One may infer
that reading had declined to the point where neither
lamps nor libraries were needed. Here then our story
ends. (Figures 34, 35.)
Grateful acknowledgement for the use of illustrations is made as follows:
American School of Classical Studies at Athens (Agora Excavations):
Figs. 1-5, 15-24,26-30
16
General
Christian Callmer, "Antike Bibliotheken," Acta Instituti Romani
Regni Sueciae X (1944) 145-193
H. Kahler, "Biblioteca" in Enciclopedia dell' Arte Antica, vol. II (1959)
92-99
J. Platthy, Sources on the Earliest Greek Libraries with the Testimonia,
Amsterdam (1968)
Athens: Library of Aristotle
W. Jaeger, Aristotle, 2nd. ed. (1948) Ch. XIII: The Organization of Research
J.P. Lynch, Aristotle's School: a Study of a Greek Educational Institution (1972)
Athens: Metroon
H. A. Thompson, Hesperia 6 (1937) 115-217
H. A. Thompson and R. E. Wycherley, The Athenian Agora XIV
(1972) 25-38
Athens: Ptolemaion
R. K Wycherley~ The Athenian Agora III (1957) 142-144 (testimonia)
J. Delorme, Gymnasion (1960) 146f.
C. Pelekidis, Histoire de l'Ephebie Attique (1962) 263f., 266f.
M. Thompson, "Ptolemy Philometor and Athens," American Numismatic Society, Museum Notes XI (1964) 119-129
Athens: Library of Pantainos
Hesperia 4(1935) 330-332: IS (1949) 269-274; 15 (1946) 233; 42 (1973)
144-146, 384-389; 44 (1975) 332ff. (excavation reports); 15 (1946)
233 and Supplement VIII (1949) 268-272 (dedicatOry inscrlpti0r1)
J. Travlos, Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Athens (1971) 432-437
H. A. Thompson and R E. Wycherley, The Athenian Agora, XIV
(1972) 114-116
Athens: Library of Hadrian
M. A. Sisson, Papers of the British School at Rome 11 (1929) 58-66
A. Frantz, "Honors to a Librarian", Hesperia 35 (1966) 377-380
J. Travlos, Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Athens (1971) 244-252
Alexandria
R. Pfeiffer, A History of Classical Scholarship (1968) 95ff.
P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria (1972) Ch. 6: Ptolemaic Patronage:
the Mouseion and Library
Pergamon
R. Bohn, Altertilmer von Pergamon II (1885) 56-75
E. V. Hansen, The Attalids of Pergamon (1971) 272-274, 355f.
0. Deubner, Das Asklepieion von Pergamon (1938) 40-43
C. Habicht, Die Inschriften des Asklepieions (Altertilmer von Pergamon
Vlll, 3. 1969) 15-18, 84f.
Ephesos
W. Wilberge, M. Theuer, F. Eichler, J. Keil, Die Bibliothek (Forschungen in Ephesos V, I) (1945, 1953)
F. Hueber and V. M. Strocka, "Die Bibliothek des Celsus," Antike
Welt 6 (1975) 3-14: restoration of facade
W. Oberleitner eta\., Funde aus Ephesos und Samothrake (Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien) (1978) 113-115
Pompeii
L. Richardson, Jr., "The Libraries of Pompeii", Archaeology 30 (1977)
394-402
WINTER 1981
�Guardian Politics
The Deer Hunter (1978)
•
1n
Nelson Lund
I
NIVERSAL PICTURES' THE DEER HUNTER is not about the
Vietnam war. The film makes no statement about
the justice or prudence of our participation in that
conflict. Instead, it dares to remind us that most Americans-soldiers and civilians alike-gave little thought to
the great questions of foreign policy raised at the time.
And it dares to suggest that they are not to be damned for
that
This seeming indifference to large issues of political
morality probably accounts for much of the hostility that
critics have expressed towards the film. But if we refuse
either to disregard this indifference or to be prejudiced by
it, we can find our way through the film's deeper exploration of the grounds of political morality.
Though The Deer Hunter is. set in an era that most of us
remember vividly, we see in it almost nothing of what that
era recalls to us. The film begins by focusing on three
young Americans as they prepare to serve in the Army
during the late 1960s; it shows a few startling scenes from
their experiences in Vietnam; and it examines the aftermath of their service. But the fall of Saigon is the only historic event that plays a part in the film; no politicians appear or are mentioned; we hear nothing of the anti-war
protests or other civil disturbances of the time; and the
film's notorious Russian roulette sequences have no
known basis in fact.
The Deer Hunter makes us think about politics and war
and our country. But because it addresses these issues
only indirectly, and because of its odd juxtaposition of
U
Nelson Lund is a graduate student in the Department of Government
at Harvard University,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
wrenching violence and unfashionable sentiment, the
film is apt to leave the viewer shocked and disoriented. As
I hope to show, the film can lead us beyond this painful
confusion to an uncommonly true and useful view of ourselves and our society.
The film's protagonist, the deer hunter, is named for
the Archangel Michael, who guards the gates of hell,
brings to man the gift of prudence, and will in the final
judgment weigh the souls of the risen dead. The Archangel is the leader of the army of heaven, and is traditionally pictured bearing both sword and shield. As we
shall see, the deer hunter's name suits him welL
At many points in the film, Michael reminds us of the
most typically American hero, who is perhaps most familiar from the film Casablanca. The everyday manners of
this figure are cynical, independent, and somewhat disreputable. In fact, as we know, he lives by principles of
decency and is prepared in extraordinary circumstances
to sacrifice his own pursuits for the common good. Reluctant to become the hero of others, he always becomes the
guardian of decent people when they truly need him.
Most American art presents this character in his maturity and reveals enough of him to provoke our admiration
and respect. The Deer Hunter is unusual because it examines the difficulties of his genesis, and thus brings a special clarity to the complexities of his relations with the
people who rely on his virtues. Its most valuable effect is
This essay owes a great deal to my father, Horace N. Lund, who first
taught me much of what I learned again from The Deer Hunter. I am
a~so indebted to several friends who talked with me about the film, espeCially Leon Kass and Amy Kass. Larry Sonnenfeldt and Leo Raditsa read
early drafts of the essay and offered many sharp and generous criticisms;
all these suggestions were helpful, and the ones I accepted enabled me
to present my views more clearly and precisely-N.L.
17
�to help us add a new understanding to our old admiration
and respect.
about. The film's attention to this great question gives it
a significance beyond the obvious issues that are raised
by our country's experience in Vietnam or even in war
generally.
W
HEN WE FIRST MEET MICHAEL,
we are confronted
with a natural leader. He is more talented than
those around him, and more reckless. But the skill
and daring with which he drives his magnificent '59
Coupe de Ville show us that his talents and his inclina·
lions have few outlets better than those he can find at the
wheel of his automobile. He lives in a rather ordinary
working-class community in Clairton, Pennsylvania; most
of the men work in the steel mills, most of the women stay
in the background.
The mills themselves appear as a kind of earthly helL
The flames, the roaring noise, and the men's protective
garments convey a little of the sense of modern warfare.
But while war is the true earthly hell, life in the mills is
routine, depressing, and without the fascination that real
violence and sudden death can bring.
In the background, the steeple of the Russian Orthodox
Church soars above the residential part of town with cool,
distant grace. Early in the film, we enter the church to
watch a wedding that is truly majestic in its setting and
forms; but the magnificence of the ceremony appears
slightly comic because religion is so small a part of the
lives of the participants. The bride is pregnant, the
bridegroom's mother is distraught, the priest is a cipher.
Michael himself is openly amused by the rituals of piety,
and he appears truly interested only in the maid of honor,
Linda, who is also his best friend's girL
Young and restless, Michael is eager to escape the suf·
focating life that Clairton and the mills impose. But he
lacks the licentious and childish impatience for which so
many of his contemporaries of the 1960s are still
remembered. In the past he has lived for his occasional
hunting trips to the mountains, and now he has enlisted
in the Army. He wants adventure and challenge, but he
betrays no desire to rebel against Clairton or to cut his ties
with the town. The Army promises him a respectable way
out of his dreary and grimy home.
- Michael's maintenance of his ties with Clairton is emphasized by the fact that two of his friends have enlisted
with him for the war. Like him, they seem motivated by
restlessness. This desire for adventure is a private passion,
and to pursue it is to risk the protection and supports that
we find in social life. These men hope to reduce that risk
by leaving Clairton together and maintaining their friend·
ship in the Army. In this they are doing nothing unusual
or hard to explain; but they encounter unforeseen
troubles in the war.
Can men form friendships that allow them to pursue
their private passions while preserving the benefits of co·
operation and social dependence? The Deer Hunter shows
us difficulties that are easy to overlook; and it suggests
that the solution is hard to accept and harder yet to bring
18
II
on the wedding day of Stevie, one of
the enlistees. That morning, Michael proposes that
he and his friends go on one last deer hunt before the
departure for Vietnam; and he gives an odd reason for the
T
HE FILM OPENS
proposal. Upon noticing an atmospheric phenomenon in
which a kind of halo appears around the sun, he says:
"Holy shit! You know what that is? Those are sun dogs
.... It means a blessing on the hunter sent by the Great
Wolf to his children .... It's an old Indian thing." This
casual paganism is the first sign of how very different
Michael is from those around him.
That afternoon, Michael talks about the hunt with his
roommate Nick; Nick, who has also enlisted in the Army,
appears a little scandalized that they are discussing the
hunt just before Stevie's wedding. In the course of the
conversation, Michael makes a serious attempt to state
who he is. He firmly asserts his preference for the moun·
tains over the town; and he vehemently asserts the importance of killing a deer with one shot. According to
Michael, this is the right way to take a deer, and the fail·
ure to accept the principle indicates a lack of human
stature: "Two is pussy .... 'One shot' is what it's all about.
A deer has to be taken with one shot. I try to tell people
that, but they don't listen." Nick indicates that his own interest in the "one shot" ethic has declined and that he has
grown fonder of the natural beauties of the mountains.
Nevertheless, Michael insists that their other hunting
companions are defective: "They're all assholes. I mean, I
love 'em, they're great guys, but without you, I'd hunt
alone. Seriously, that's what I'd do." Nick calls Michael a
"control freak," without explaining how Michael's desire
for control is excessive; Michael responds by saying, "I
just don't like no surprises."
This scene foreshadows two of the major themes of the
film: the ambiguity of Michael's relationships to his friends
and the question of his own being. Quite clearly, he does
think of his hunting companions as friends, but it seems
that only his relationship with Nick makes his friendships
with the others possible. Michael treats Nick as an equal
because Nick has accepted the "one shot" ethic. And yet,
Nick is apparently not content that just the two of them
should hunt together, so Michael tolerates the presence
of the inferior hunters for Nick's sake. Though Michael
wishes to treat Nick as his equal, Nick is less committed
than Michael to the "one shot" ethic and more emotion·
ally dependent on those who do not accept it at all.
Michael seeks to overlook this difference between himself
and Nick; he apparently believes that they are or can be
WINTER 1981
�equals in friendship if they maintain their allegiance to a
common principle. Only later do we discover how crucial
the dissimilarity between them is; but we are enabled here
at the beginning of the film to see that it exists.
As Michael originally states the "one shot" principle, it
appears to be a statement of the right way to hunt; his
commitment to it appears as a striving for excellence, here
for the hunter's excellence. His vehement statement of
the principle suggests that only ignorance or self-indulgence could account for the failure to adhere to it. If this
is so, Nick's characterization of Michael as a "control
freak" is misleading because it tends to confound excellence with power, self-control with control over other beings. Nevertheless, Michael shows that he shares Nick's
confusion when he replies: HI just don't like no surprises."
Here Michael is obviously wrong about himself. One
who dislikes surprises does not find his greatest satisfac·
lions hunting wild game in the mountains; such activity is
anything but routine. And one who wants to avoid surprises surely does not volunteer for hunting's great
counterpart, war. Michael may believe that he wants to do
away with surprises, he may believe that he seeks power
or control in the broadest sense. But if what he is truly
seeking is excellence, he is a better man than he knows
and so should prove able to learn. Before the film ends,
Michael learns a great deal indeed.
During the subsequent hunting trip, Michael shows
that his commitment to a standard of excellence is no
mere private passion. A small base person named Stanley
has forgotten to bring some essential piece of gear; he
now expects to borrow Michael's spare. Stanley has a long
history of such irresponsibility, and Michael refuses to
lend him the gear. Stanley gets out a small revolver and insults Michael's manhood by commenting on his unaggressive behavior towards women. Michael, who happens to
be holding his rifle, takes a cartridge from his pocket and
very forcefully says: "Stanley, see this? This is this. This
ain't something else. This is this. From now on_you're on
your own." Michael slams the round into its chamber, and
the conflict continues until finally Nick intervenes; he
chides Michael for his stubbornness and gives Stanley
Michael's spare equipment. Michael angrily raises his rifle
and fires into the distance. Just before the argument,
Michael had noticed a deer running through the brush; no
one else was watching.
41
This is this" means first that weapons have purposes.
They have their proper uses, for example in hunting deer;
and they have their typical abuses, as Stanley's behavior
vividly illustrates. Michael must sense that this does not
apply only to weapons. Perhaps he sees it most clearly in
weapons because they are men's most necessary tools; the
way he drove his fancy Cadillac is enough to remind us
that an instrument's proper use is not always so easy to
see. Unlike most people, Michael insists on this standard
of what is proper when he can discern it and seeks it when
he cannot. The insistence is shown to us here at the be·
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ginning of the film; his seeking will be the spring of his
later education.
Michael's speech to Stanley has a further meaning implied in the conclusion, '(From now on you're on your
own." Those who are too ignorant or self-indulgent to
confront the world as it is become irresponsible. Like
Stanley, they tend to become derelict and apt to do unintended damage to themselves and others; as a result, such
people force others to take responsibility for them. Michael would refuse to tolerate Stanley's excess, but Nick
interferes: to prevent the group from breaking into factions, Nick has to deflect Michael from the natural course
of his principled intolerance. In frustration, Michael ap·
pears to violate his own principle by firing his rifle without a target. Were it not for his friendship with Nick,
Michael might become a solitary hunter; as we shall see, it
will be hard for him to become anything else.
.
URIN. c THE FILM, Michael becomes larger; by the end,
he would no longer insist so harshly on the "one
shot" ethic and he would not make such truthful
but difficult assertions as "this is this." But though he
does undergo an education, the film presents no educator:
nowhere in The Deer Hunter is there any man better than
Michael or any indication that such a man could exist. His
great triumph lies in his later mastery or education of himself, but the film leaves no doubt that he is superior to ordinary men from the beginning.
From the first, Michael is highly spirited; he is eager for
war, sure of his strength, and remarkably capable of doing
without the company of women. But in addition to this
raw virtue, Michael has a drive to understand what he
D
sees and hears.
An example of this drive occurs when Michael and the
other enlistees, fairly drunk and full of bravado, encounter
a Green Beret at the wedding reception. Michael inquires
about Vietnam and Nick expresses his eagerness for dan·
ger; Stevie echoes Nick's sentiments. When the soldier
snubs them by refusing to say anything but "Fuck it,"
Michael begins repeating the formulation in different
tones of voice, as though he is trying to discover what it
means: "Fuck it ... Fuck it." Finally, in a simultaneously
challenging and curious tone, he asks: "Fuck who?" While
Nick and Stevie seem surprised and worried, Michael
seems almost intrigued. He is sufficiently eager and indelicate to interrogate a veteran about his experiences, so he
must have some of the illusions common to spirited men
who have not seen combat. We would expect someone as
combative as Michael to respond to the man's rebuff with
mere anger or perhaps with awe. But Michael wonders
about the meaning of the man's behavior.
It is very rare to find a man as self-assertive as Michael
and also so ready to learn. The film offers no explanation
for the cause of this superiority and so encourages us to
infer that it has come about by nature. By calling atten-
19
�lion in this way to the natural inequalities among men,
the film commits a breach of the etiquette of our time.
Eventually the film suggests that these inequalities result
in a politically relevant hierarchy of human types; this
challenge to one of the deepest prejudices of our time has
probably caused much of the misinterpretation to which
the film has been subjected. That challenge, however, is
neither idle nor gratuitous. Events have made it necessary, and the film is careful to remind us of that fact.
Stevie, the boy who marries just before leaving for war,
is the most ordinary of the three main characters. l-Ie has
no great strengths or failings, no burning passions or re-
markable idiosyncracies. l-Ie is decent, but ineffectual-a
natural follower and indeed a natural loser. l-Ie loves his
fiancee and insists that she loves him. However sincere he
may be, his hopes seem preposterous since he has never
slept with this girl who he knows is pregnant. Stevie appears to be her dupe and perhaps also the dupe of the
child's father; later we learn that the father is almost certainly Nick. In war, Stevie proves incompetent, unlucky,
and weak. Michael repeatedly must save his life; and at
least once, he has to take a terrible risk with his own life in
order to rescue Stevie. Stevie loses an arm and both legs in
the war; and even after they return to America, Michael
has to carry him from the deadening comfort of the V.A.
hospital and force him to rejoin the town. Time after time
we are reminded that merely decent people cannot take
care of themselves.
Someone might protest against the harshness of this
view. But though the film does expose Stevie's shortcomings, it leads the viewer to see a problem rather than an
indictment. We might not have to emphasize Stevie's
weakness if his decency had sufficient support in the institutions of his community. The weakness of those institutions is the great problem raised by the film's treatment
of Stevie.
with a tanker-truck rolling into
Clairton at dawn, reminding us that the towns of
this country are connected to one another by close
ties of economic interdependence. But besides this, what
signs of a national community can we find in the film? We
see a football game on television and we hear popular
T
HE FiLM OPENS
music on jukeboxes; and there is a veterans' organization,
whose only role in the film is to provide the hall where the
wedding reception is held. These shared amusements
mark the people of Clairton as typically American; they
are typical, too, in their lack of curiosity about the nation's
public affairs. Working people, without much schooling,
they do not have much leisure or incentive to enlighten
themselves about the world beyond their city. Certainly
America's political institutions encourage this insularity.
With our complicated federal system and our traditions of
local independence, we have always inclined towards the
sort of provincialism that we see in Clairton. The fact that
20
this narrowness so often seems benign does not imply that
the nation as a whole is either unified or well-ordered.
Our own recollections of the late 1960s should be enough
to remind us that the strength of this country's social
fabric cannot be taken for granted.
Despite the lack of interest in public affairs, Clairton is
supplying three volunteers for the government's war. Obviously, then, the people here must feel that they belong
to the nation and that they owe her their allegiance. But
the United States has always been too large and too
diverse and too young to draw its greatest strength from
patriotic sentiment. At the wedding reception, the
bandleader introduces the three young men who are leaving "to proudly serve their country"; everyone listens in
respectful silence, and afterwards they cheer. But none of
the volunteers ever indicates that his enlistment has been
motivated by a sense of duty or political responsibility.
Patriotism lives in Clairton, but the people seem not to be
formed by it any more than by discussion of the affairs of
the day. And again, we can easily remind ourselves that
patriotism did not flourish during the 1960s in America's
more enlightened and vainly cosmopolitan cities.
Our political tradition, of course, has never sought the
sort of national enthusiasm to whose absence the film directs our attention. In this country, we have expected po-
litical liberty to bring the greatest possible freedom from
government intrusion into our private affairs and volun-
tary social activities. This proud tradition of individuality
and local independence has always acknowledged that direct national needs are the rightful concern of the central
government; accordingly, we hear of no draft-dodging in
Clairton. But the cultivation of citizens and decent human beings like Stevie has not been regarded as the necessary or proper concern of the government, except through
the local public schools. Moral education has been left
largely to the church and family; it is there that we must
look for the institutional underpinnings of the decency
that Stevie represents.
The looming presence of the Russian Church in Clairton reminds us that Christianity is a religion with univer-
sal claims. It addresses us from beyond all political
horizons and promises to provide a framework for human
decency that is both loftier and more solid than that provided by any merely political order. But the church in
Clairton fails miserably at its first task: helping its adherents to see the world as coherent and ultimately benign.
Stevie's mother is extemely distraught about the behavior
of her son, who is marrying a pregnant girl and volun-
teering for war. just before the wedding she approaches
her priest as he mechanically prepares the altar for the
service, and tearfully appeals to him: "I do not understand, Father. I understand nothing anymore. Nothing.
Can you explain? Can anyone explain?" The priest stiffly
embraces her but he has nothing to say. When priests can
no longer even attempt to answer the most pressing ques-
tions of an ordinary middle-aged woman, the church can
WINTER 1981
�hardly be thought to play a significant part in the moral
education of the young. A church that cannot even articulate a defense of Stevie's conduct can hardly provide
the basis for cultivating and protecting the kind of human
character that he displays. And one would have trouble
showing that any major church has recently been doing
better than this one does in Clairton.
What little family life we see in The Deer Hunter is a
mess. Stevie and his mother are without a common ground
of discourse, so they only quarrel; Nick's girlfriend is
beaten by her drunken father; Stevie's wife goes quietly
mad while he is away in the Army. Neither Nick nor
Michael seems to have any family at all.
Early in th~ film we see Stevie instinctively reaching for
the stability of family life: deprived of the psychological
protection that a strong home offers, he anxiously tries to
establish a family of his own. But his attempt is doomed.
He seems to believe that a ceremony is sufficient to establish a marriage, for he foolishly leaves for war a day or so
after the wedding. But even without this fantastic misjudgment, the prognosis for his marriage would be very
bleak. His bride's pregnancy directs our attention to the
disorder in the social institutions that surround and affect
the family. A leading purpose of the institution of marriage is to fix responsibility for the care of children. When
we see as decent a man as Stevie reduced to undertaking
responsibility for some otl1er man's child, we have to con-
clude that the private behavior of women has broken
loose from the restraints that are needed in any political
community. We might believe that he is just being generous if we were given any indication that he had much
chance of finding a more respectable wife. Since we are
not, we have to see his marriage as a pathetic, futile ges-
neither lust nor flirtation: he looks intently and thoughtfully at her, as though he is powerfully aware of some ignorance or other defect in himself. This expression comes
to his face again when he sees her at the reception. To
their surprise and embarrassment, Nick encourages them
to dance together. We see right afterwards that Nick did
this in order to free himself to pursue a sad and lonely
looking girl nearby; and then we see him repulse an earnest male friend in order to toy with this vulnerable girl.
While Michael is with Linda, he seems uneasy with himself in a way we have not seen before; he appears caught
between his attraction to her and his loyalty to Nick. He
has been drinking, and just as his attraction to Linda
seems about to win out, Nick interrupts them and she
hurries out of the room.
Unlike Michael, Nick treats Linda carelessly, as though
she is merely one of several goods that he wants but by
which he does not want to be confined. After the disturbing encounter with the Green Beret, he proposes mar-
riage to her; when she eagerly accepts, he qualifies the
proposal so severely that it becomes merely hypotheticaL
Disappointed, she remarks: "Anything that goes through
your mind comes out your mouth." After the reception,
Nick tells Michael of his attachment to Clairton and his
fear of not being able to return there from the war. We
can guess that his attitude towards Linda is similar. He
wants what she offers and he fears losing her forever, but
he desperately wants something more; and he senses that
Michael can lead him to a better life than Clairton and
Linda promise. Were it not for Michael, Nick might attempt, like Stevie, to arrange for a comfortable and regular existence; but in the presence of Michael, even Stevie
is drawn away from Clairton to the war.
ture against the social disintegration that began to be-
Though Nick's behavior towards women is more obvi-
come evident in the nation at large during the years when
ously blameworthy than Stevie's, Nick also senses more
clearly the real difficulties of doing well. We saw before
that Stevie's decency is bound up with his weakness and
blindness. Nick, on the contrary, is strongly aware of the
dangers of leaving Clairton and Linda. While alone with
Michael after the reception, he proclaims his love for
Clairton and asks Michael to promise not to leave him in
Vietnam. In order to permit Nick to keep his pride after
such a humbling request, Michael replies with a casual
formulation; but his tone of voice is quite solemn: "Hey
this story takes place. Because it points so clearly at the
weaknesses of the family, church, and government, the
film implies that those institutions are not likely sources of
the social re-integration that is so obviously desirable. And
the film certainly does not suggest that men like Stevie
are plausible agents of improvement.
NLIKE STEVIE, Nick is neither ineffectual nor very
decent. And unlike Stevie, he is quite handsome
and graceful. We have seen that he is not as emotionally self-sufficient as Michael. Neither is he as competent. Michael accomplishes feats with his car that Nick
did not think possible; Nick loses to Michael at pool; and
Michael takes the buck that we see them tracking together. But more important, and despite his admiration
for Michael, Nick is more irresponsible than his friend.
U
We can see this most clearly in their relations with Linda,
Nick's girl.
Nicky, you got it."
At this moment, Michael's dilemma becomes more
clear. As we know from Stanley's insults on the hunting
trip, Michael does not pursue women in the careless way
that Clairton's customs encourage. But his reluctance to
pursue Linda stems mainly from the conflicting claim of
his friendship with Nick. This suggests that Michael has a
normal male attraction to women, and that he restrains it
for the sake of his friendships with men. When we recall
that he would rather hunt alone than with men he dis-
As we observed earlier, Michael's attention at the wed-
dains, it appears that he is seeking in human relationships
ding is directed most forcefully at Linda. His face shows
primarily the equality that might foster sharing of the best
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
21
�experiences. The experiences that now seem most impor~
tant to him are hunting and its great brother, war.
Michael knows that his attraction to these pursuits is essentially male; hence he rather reasonably sets his attraction to women aside for the sake of his friendships with
men, and especially with Nick. And as his promise to Nick
reveals, Michael is ready to commit himself to those
friendships as firmly as one would commit oneself to marnage.
But Nick's need to hear Michael make the promise reveals the difficulty with Michael's reasoning. Nick shows
here that he is very dependent on Michael's strength, so it
is unlikely that they will prove equal in war or able truly to
share its experiences. In view of that, it might make sense
for Michael to reconsider the subordination of his interest
in women. By the end of the film, he does so. But it is a
mark of his nobility that he refuses to accept the implications of Nick's inferiority as easily as our argument sug~
gests that he might.
III
the men return to a
tavern that one of them owns. The hour is late, they
are tired and alone with each other. The tavern
owner, who sings in the church choir and regrets being too
unhealthy for military service, plays a Chopin nocturne at
the piano. The music soothes the men and provides a moment of peace between the hunt and the coming trip to
war. With an unforgettable rudeness, the film cuts suddenly to a deafening, fiery helicopter assault on a Vietnamese village. This transition vividly suggests the painful
and exhilirating shift that soldiers experience when they
truly leave civilized life by going into battle. Michael's
education begins here in Vietnam.
At the scene of the assault, we find Michael lying amid
the rubble and corpses; apparently there has been a firefight, he has been injured, and is just now regaining consciousness. As he comes to, he sees a solitary enemy soldier
hunting for survivors. Finding some civilians hiding in a
bunker, the soldier throws a grenade in among them. By
chance, one woman survives and emerges with a child in
her arms; the enemy coaly machine-guns her and the
child as she runs from the bunker. While this is happening, Michael grabs a flamethrower and charges him.
Though too late to save any of the civilians, Michael sets
the killer afire. And though the soldier has just signaled to
some other troops, Michael pays no attention to his own
safety; now in a frenzy he shoots the enemy again and
again, even after the monster is obviously dead. Michael's
anger and disgust seem to have taken control of his conduct; but though his act itself is neither moderate nor
beautiful, he is obviously moved by a deep revulsion at
the shamefully unnecessary violence.
As in the scene where he responds to Stanley's misuse
A
22
T THE END OF THE HUNTING TRIP,
of weapons, Michael loses some of his own self-control
when faced with an abysmally indecent man. But here the
goodness of Michael's anger is more clear. Michael is not
one of those eerie aficionados who are fascinated with
war, but neither does he seek to retain the equanimity
and outward dignity appropriate to most civilian situations. In this scene, Michael seems very disturbed-even
slightly deranged-but the cool efficiency of the enemy
soldier indicates the danger of carelessly importing moral
standards from one world to another.
with the murderer, more
American troops arrive by helicopter. The group
includes Nick and Stevie, and they are all taken
prisoner shortly thereafter. We now watch the VietCong
torture American and South Vietnamese P.O.W.s by forcing them to play Russian roulette against each other; the
captors amuse themselves by placing bets on the matches.
While waiting their turns, Stevie and Nick both lose their
composure. Stevie becomes hysterical and Michael tries
to calm him; Nick also needs Michael's help but he cannot
speak loudly enough to ask for it. When Michael and
Stevie are made to play against each other, Stevie flinches
and his cowardice saves him from destroying himself; but
the VietCong just throw him into a pit to die. Perceiving
the hopelessness of allowing the games to continue as
they have been arranged, Michael conceives a bold but
very dangerous scheme. He persuades Nick that they
should play against each other with extra cartridges in the
revolver; he hopes to clear two of the chambers, and then
use the gun against the captors. Quite against the odds,
the trick works. But Nick has to be coaxed and bullied
through the game: though it is his only chance of surviving, he does not have the strength to put his life so clearly
in the hands of an unfavorable chance. Michael is at least
as averse to dying as Stevie or Nick, but he can play if he
has to; and he can arrange an even more dangerous ver~
sian for the sake of overcoming the game.
Russian roulette will become the movie's most insistent
and memorable metaphor, and thr0 ugh it we can discover
some of what Michael learns. In an obvious way, the game
begins as an image of the experience of modern battle.
Nearly all articulate combat veterans speak of the terrible
disorientation caused by living where men die frequently,
violently, and with seeming total randomness. Some men
go mad, most become superstitious, and virtually all become cynical about the moral standards that regulate
peacetime life. The horror of this experience seems to
arise largely from the fact that other human beings are intentionally causing all this random death-and perhaps
too from the soldiers' awareness of their own active role in
maintaining the hostilities that make war what it is.
Russian roulette is an especially rich image because it emphasizes the participation of the victims in an activity that
makes little sense in terms of their most basic self-interest.
W
HILE MICHAEL IS ENGAGED
WINTER 1981
�Through this metaphor, the film turns our attention away
from the grand sweep of battle to the great psychological
demands of combat. Here we find the basis of the film's
statements about human excellence and its bearing on
our political life.
Since war cannot be done away with, there have to be
men who play that form of Russian roulette. The most
common way to play is probably Stevie's. Men like him
can be lured or pressed into the arena, and they can be
pressed and coaxed to participate up to a certain point.
But once they have to face what warfare brings, they in·
stinctively recoil and seek to escape it as quickly as possible. In the terrifying moments before he has to play,
Stevie screams: "I don't belong here .... I want to go
home." Though one's sense of natural justice grants his
proposition and makes one wish that his desire be satisfied, the conditions of battle usually allow very little scope
for acting on such sentiments. At least in part, Stevie's
manifest unfitness for war must account for the extraordi-
nary risks that Michael later takes for his sake; but after
Stevie has been thrown into the pit, Michael orders Nick
to forget about him and concentrate on the requirements
of his own survival. Nick thinks that Michael is playing
God, but his command has to be obeyed if Stevie himself
is to have any chance of survival.
Nick seems less weak than Stevie and he has a closer
friendship with Michael, so Michael chooses him to play
the more difficult form of the game. In order to enable
himself to go through with his plan, Michael deliberately
generates a terrific, concentrated hatred towards the captors. This hatred is not pretty, but it is necessary, as we
can see by contrasting it with Nick's paralysis. Though
Michael tries to bring out courage in his friend, Nick's attention is too focused on himself to allow him either to
hate or to respond calmly to the demands of the situation;
even with Michael's encouragement, he almost fails to
act. Michael's hatred gives him the detachment from himself that is needed to perform the unnatural act required
in Russian roulette.
As in the earlier combat scene, Michael's anger is the
engine of an appropriate though ugly action. Under
Michael's governance, Nick also manages to perform the
necessary act, but he is obviously acting beyond his own
capacities: without Michael and the inhuman ferocity
that he calls out of himself, Nick would be as helpless as
Stevie. Here Michael's spiritedness-his violent and even
savage self-assertion-is irrefutably justified. It should not
diminish our sense of that justification to point out that
Michael's hatred is not autonomous. His intelligence is responsible for the plan that he executes, and his savage
anger is therefore directed by a superior principle; but
only through his brute courage does Michael's intelligence come to rule him. Nick too can understand what
needs to be done; only Michael's stronger reserves of selfassertiveness and even brutality save him from falling into
Nick's confusion, self-absorption, and impotence. And
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
lest we think that Nick is somehow finer or more human,
the film shows him furiously beating one of the VietCong
corpses after the danger is past.
the three soldiers get separated. A
helicopter tries to pick them all up, but Stevie falls
into a river and Michael jumps off after him.
Stevie's legs are badly injured; Michael carries him out of
the jungle and turns him over to some South Vietnamese
troops who have a jeep. At this point we lose sight of
them, and the film shifts to Nick's experiences in Saigon.
Several scenes take place in which Nick shows signs of intense inner disturbance-he speaks only with difficulty,
A
FTER THEIR ESCAPE,
weeps easily, looks twice at Linda's picture, and imagines
once that he sees Michael in a Saigon bar. Finally an urbane Frenchman lures him into a house where people
amuse themselves by betting on Russian roulette matches
between men who play for money. Though Nick does not
see him, Michael is there watching the games. Unlike
most of the other people present, Michael seems neither
excited nor indifferent: his face reveals an intelligent, concentrated, absolutely serious-looking. At this moment we
know that he has been trying since we last saw him to
understand what he has been through. As soon as he sees
Nick, his concentration vanishes and he reaches towards
his friend.
When Nick sees the game, he frantically interrupts it;
after grabbing the revolver, he dry-fires at one of the players, dry-fires at himself, and rushes out of the building.
Michael chases after, only to see the Frenchman driving
Nick away in a car; with a gesture of final hopeless abandon, Nick throws a fistful of money into the air above the
crowded street.
After what Nick has gone through, the sight of men taking these risks without compulsion is too much to bear.
Nick's character has always been ambiguous or undefined: in Clairton he was discontented with the goods
within his reach, and yet unable to find principles or direction for himself. Like most people whose finest gift is a
longing for the good, Nick has tended to be dominated by
the most fascinating influence in his surroundings. So
long as that influence was Michael, Nick might safely
have sought the noble life; but once he faces Russian roulette without Michael's help, Nick cannot resist its gruesome magnetism. That magnetism is founded in war's
tantalizing suggestion that nothing good can stand up in
the violent onslaught of brute chance; when Nick sees
Russian roulette played voluntarily in the midst of civilization, he cannot resist the implication that human life is no
more than warfare, that everything is permitted, that
nothing is of enduring worth. The film later confirms this
scene's suggestion that Nick has just given himself over to
a career as a Russian roulette player; from now on he will
play for money and for love of the game. Like other men
who become enthralled by the spirit of war, Nick will live
23
�on for awhile, but only as a kind of ghost. He becomes indifferent to his own life and his own good; he moves in
our world but his eyes are open only to the incoherencies
that we all naturally resist. As a human being, Nick is now
dead.
Unlike Nick, who is captivated by Russian roulette,
Michael appears here as a student of the game. In its first
use in the film, Russian roulette was a metaphor for war as
experienced by ordinary men in battle. Most soldiers experience combat as something for which they are drafted
or for which they find that they have imprudently volunteered. The sight of war has its charms, but these are ac·
cessible chiefly to its observers, just as the pleasures of
Russian roulette are available to the spectators who bet on
the games. Seen from a distance, both follow fairly regular
patterns or rules and hence have a kind of coherence. But
these patterns so threaten the self-preservation of the participants that voluntary acceptance of life under them
appears to most men in combat as prima facie evidence of
insanity. This should not be surprising since the love of
living there is indeed conclusive evidence of insanity.
In Saigon, Michael returns to Russian roulette as a
spectator, but we do not see him betting on the outcome
and we see in him no love for the game he is watching.
Since he has not simply turned away from the game, he
must know that he may play again. Since he betrays no
desire to do so, he must also believe that playing can be
justified without reference to maxims of insanity. To sec
war as necessary and yet not as an end in itself is easy for
those who have little experience of it; it is not anticipating
too much to say that Michael's special excellence is to live
as a warrior without ceasing to govern himself. He differs
from enthusiastic mercenaries because he does not love
war; he differs from merely dutiful soldiers because he
does not take his bearings from the goals offered in civilian life. We saw Ivlichael exercising the warrior's courage
almost by nature in the first Russian roulette scene; his
looks in the Saigon scene indicate how difficult it is for
him to include such activity in his way of life; the madera·
tion he displays here enables him to appear in the film's
third and final section as the man whom justice would require to rule in Clairton.
W
he goes on a
hunting trip with his old friends; Stevie is too
crippled to come along and Nick is missing in
Vietnam. During the trip, Stanley begins stupidly
threatening another man with a revolver that he seems to
believe is unloaded. At the sight of this, Michael becomes
very angry; he takes the pistol away, discovers that it is
loaded, fires a bullet into the ceiling of the cabin, and removes the cartridges from the gun. He then chambers one
round, spins the cylinder, points the gun at Stanley's
24
rule. But in order to appreciate that conclusion, we need
to re-examine Michael himself.
Let us recall that the insanity of war is most evident
when one considers the threat war poses to the combatants' self-preservation. Any justification of war requires
IV
HEN MICHAEL RETURNS TO CLAIRTON,
head, and pulls the trigger. The gun does not discharge.
By our usual standards, Michael's conduct in this third
Russian roulette scene is unreasonable. For how could the
attempt to educate a person as vile as Stanley is be worth
the risk of committing murder? In part, Michael's action
may be an unthinking passionate objection to Stanley's
carelessness with human life; to the extent that this is so,
his conduct would resemble Nick's interruption of the
game in Saigon. But what Michael does is more measured
and purposeful. Unlike the players in the Saigon house,
Stanley is a danger primarily to innocent people; further,
Michael is tied to most of Stanley's potential victims, and
even to Stanley himself, by some ties of friendship; and
unlike Nick, Michael does not turn the gun on himself.
Above all, Michael's act is not a gesture, as Nick's is; it certainly is dramatic, but the drama points very clearly to a
simple and important lesson. After Stanley survives-and
the odds were quite high that he would-it is very unlikely that he will forget what Michael has taught. At least
he will probably stop playing with guns, and he may even
be moved to begin living in a generally more subdued and
responsible way. At the end of the film, his careful treatment of Stevie's wife suggests that he may be rising a little
from his habitual petty vanity and self-absorption.
To whatever extent Stanley is improved, we can attribute it to Michael's deliberate extra-legal coercion on the
hunting trip. Michael has stepped outside the law to exercise a rule that justly belongs to him; the film clearly and
correctly implies that unless men like Michael rule, there
will be no rest from the ills occasioned by the base and irresponsible. Since American institutions make little provision for such rule, private justice like Michael's can be
seen as a beneficial supplement to our officially political
life. But the unlawfulness and riskiness of Michael's open
assertion of rule over Stanley remind us not to expect that
such rule will ever play a powerful part in our government; and the dangers of trying to institute such domination should be obvious to us all. At the end of the film, we
shall be able to discover Michael's substitute for open
the introduction of considerations beyond the preservation of the combatants' lives. For them to accept such a
justification, they have to see their self-interest in broader
terms than those comprehended in self-preservation; and
rarely, if ever, can their motives for fighting be quite the
same as those of the army or nation as a whole. The same
difficulty arises in explaining Michael's participation in
the game of Russian roulette with Stanley. From the narrow perspective of self-interest his behavior is senseless,
even demented: he has very little to fear from Stanley, and
much to lose if Stanley dies by his hand. When we examine Michael's conduct in the light of the common interest
WINTER 1981
�Nick broke under the pressure of war. One might think
that this merely proves Nick's inferiority, and that
Michael should wait for friendship until he meets a man
truly like himself. His failure to do so indicates that he no
of Stanley and his potential victims, we can see the good
in what he does. But why should Michael risk himself for
these others? The fact that he displays such strong anger
in this scene suggests that something of his own is at
stake. In order to see what that might be, we have to look
once again at Michael as he is alone.
just before the Russian roulette scene with Stanley, we
watch Michael in solitary pursuit of a handsome buck. After some time, the animal stops at the edge of a clearing.
Michael draws a bead on it, and we expect to see his "one
activity that can be shared among equals.
Is friendship then impossible? Michael relaxes his "one
shot" ethic when he spares the deer, and he spends most
of the rest of the film caring for the people of Clairton.
His masculine virtue enables him to help them; but that
shot" virtue reconfirmed. But just as he seems about to
same virtue conflicts with his decision to care for them
take the shot, he jerks the rifle up, and shoots over the
deer. He appears agitated, and he asks in a strained vbice:
"Okay?" Though he seems to be talking to the deer, the
question must really be addressed to himself because we
then hear him answer in a long drawn-out shout: "Okay."
While the answer is being given, we do not see Michael
himself but look instead at the surrounding landscape. As
it sometimes happens in the mountains, the shout echoes
back: "Okay." This echo suggests that Michael finds himself in accord with nature.
rather than to despise or try to dominate them. The echo
in the hunting scene vaguely hints that nature supports
his decision, but the decision is also clearly a difficult one
for him to make. And we simply do not know why he
HROUGHOUT THE FIL", Michael has been a laconic
man. The fact of the film's title establishes the im·portance of this scene in which Michael chooses not
to slay his deer; but the one word he utters offers little indication of his motive for throwing away the shot. The
significance of the scene lies partly in its mystery. From
this point forward, Michael's motives are not explained to
the other characters and they have to remain somewhat
obscure to us, too. Fully to overcome this obscurity would
require knowing all that Michael knows, and perhaps
more; the film does not pretend to provide the viewer
with that knowledge, even for a moment. But we can attempt to see why this obscurity is necessary.
If we think back to the first section of the film, we can
see Michael has a kind of prisoner of his natural superi-
T
ority. His· dominant impulse was the masculine love of
hunting and war; his superiority emerged in his great com-
petence at those activities. Had he pursued his passion for
the development of his masculine superiority, he might
have become a solitary hunter or a mercenary soldier; had
he pursued this passion in his relations with his friends, he
would have tended to become a despot of one kind or
another. At times his speech suggested that masculine,
se1f-serving superiority is what he most desired: "Two is
pussy; 'one shot' is what it's all about_ ... This is this.
From now on you're on your own." But we never see him
live as though he completely accepts his own principles.
He is prevented from doing so by a different, and not specifically masculine, impulse: the desire for friendship, the
desire to share the best activities with other human beings.
Michael set aside his interest in women in order to pur-
sue that friendship with Nick in which he hoped to share
the most masculine activities. This project stopped when
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
longer thinks that the exercise of masculine virtue is an
makes it. From this point forward, we must confine our-
selves largely to examining the effects of Michael's activities in his new role as guardian-hero.
When Michael puts himself into a position to kill the
deer and then spares it, he enters into a peculiar relation-
ship with the animal. While it had previously been merely
a natural being, it now owes its freedom to Michael's
choice. Despite the deer's ignorance of Michael's responsibility for its future existence and activity, Michael now
rules it more nobly than he would have had he chosen to
destroy it. Similarly, Michael's rule over his decent
Clairton friends will be much less visible to them than his
direct but temporary domination over Stanley. For that
reason he will be able to begin establishing a community
rather than a mere reflection of the natural hierarchy
among human beings.
This change in Michael's relation to the people of
Clairton first emerges through the replacement of Nick
by Linda as the link between Michael and the others.
When Michael first returns to his hometown, he avoids a
party at his house arranged in his honor. Linda has been
living in the house, and he goes there after the others
have left in the morning. When the two meet, there are
moments of awkwardness, just as one would expect. Dur-
ing this first meeting, Linda brings out a sweater she has
made for Nick, and she tries to see whether it could fit
Michael; it is not the right size, but she is tearfully confident that she can alter it. Very clearly, Linda has little notion of the important and unalterable differences between
the two men; since she cannot truly appreciate what
Michael is, her present urge to give up Nick does not indicate that any great change has taken place in her since the
beginning of the film. When Michael offers to escort her
to her place of employment, she reveals both her appreciation of his outward appearance and her inability to understand what lies below his surface: "Mike, you're so
weird. You're always such a gentleman."
Like Nick, Michael has been attracted to Linda from
the start. Nick carried a picture of her to Vietnam, and we
saw him look at it twice just before his breakdown.
Michael carried the same picture, but we do not see him
25
�look at it until just before he returns to see her. With Nick
missing and probably dead, Michael now tentatively begins to reopen his own relationship with her. Though we
might have expected him to be offended by her confusion
in the scene with the sweater, he soon chooses to offer a
most generous and helpful interpretation of her ambivalence: "Linda, I just wanted to say how sorry I am about
Nick. I know how much you love him; I know it could
never been the same .... " We can be sure that if Nick
were to return, Michael would try gracefully to avoid standing between him and Linda. By paying such respect to the
prior claims of the old relationship between Nick and
Linda, Michael acts to preserve Linda's sense of the worth
of such claims. We know enough about Nick and Linda to
know that they are not the source of whatever strength
such claims might have; we saw before that Nick's commitment to her was less than wholehearted, and the film
hints that she has not been faithful during his absence.
But Michael knows enough about the fragility of the
bonds among human beings to be careful with those that
exist; he is opposed to overturning them for the sake of
what might be a specious improvement.
Because Linda is a woman and understands little about
Michael, she is impatient to feel the security that she
hopes he can offer: very soon, she desperately proposes
that they comfort each other by sleeping together. He
seems unoffended, but he only reluctantly allows her to
accompany him to his motel room; and we are permitted
to infer that he tries to comfort her without accepting her
offer of sex. Besides the problems that he must so clearly
recognize in establishing intimate ties with people who
cannot adequately understand him, Michael has just
learned that Stevie is alive and back in the United States.
just as Michael seeks to help Linda preserve a healthy respect for her past love, he must recognize the possibility
that she could undermine his loyalties to the friends who
followed him to war.
After the hunting trip and the encounter with the deer,
Michael returns to Linda and offers himself without his
previous reluctance; he now takes her for the first time to
his own bed at home. After she falls asleep, he looks at the
hunting trophies in his room and at the mills in the distance; now, finally, he goes out to visit Stevie. In war,
Michael was Stevie's protector. But in civilian life, friendships between men require that the natural distinctions
among them be very much obscured; this is what made
his relations with other men so difficult before he went to
war. Michael's new friendship with Linda, which is based
on the clear and acl!:nowledged natural distinction between the sexes, allows him to begin taking care of Stevie
in the artificial circumstances of civilized life. There is order in Michael's relationships with the people of Clairton,
an order made possible by his decision to relax his insistence on the primacy of his masculine, self-serving virtue.
When he visits Stevie in the hospital, Michael learns
that Stevie's wife has been receiving small carved ele-
26
phants and large amounts of cash from Saigon; she forwards the souvenirs and money to her crippled husband,
maliciously enclosing it all in socks. Michael immediately
knows that Nick must still be alive; though he does not tell
Stevie or anyone else, he also knows that Nick must be
getting the money by playing Russian roulette. Nick's sudden intrusion disrupts the order of Michael's relationships
in Clairton.
to the Communists and the
city is afire with the frenzy of America's final evacuation. Bombardment by enemy artillery provides the
flames that light the nights; the harsh light of day exposes
the desperate fever to escape among those who sense
what the victors from the north will bring. Somewhere in
this doomed city Nick, or what is left of him, continues to
pursue his private obsession. Michael is intent on finding
him, and by some miracle of cunning and daring, gets into
this earthly hell. He appears as resolute- almost as monomaniacal-as a man in Nick's occupation would have to
be.
In the course of tracking Nick, Michael encounters the
Frenchman who seduced him into his presenf career.
During their first conversation, Michael says that he
wants to find Nick in order to play Russian roulette
against him. Since we know that he has no such desire, we
have to wonder why he expresses it. He could as plausibly
have said that he wanted to see the famous American play
the game; in fact, one would think that the European
could more easily have understood such a motive. But
Michael must know more about Russian roulette than we
do. The first time he played, he not only won but he overcame the game itself. We have seen him studying its mercenary variety, and we have seen him use the game as a
tool of education in the United States. What began as a
metaphor for war has been subtly expanded so that it
points towards greater questions about the responsibilities
of human beings to themselves and one another. By so
mastering the game that he can play it usefully in civilian
life, Michael revealed that his own relation to it is one of
aversion and attachment. He never shows any love for this
purest form of exposing one's own well-being to dark and
uncontrollable forces. In this way he has shown that his
S
AlCON IS ABOUT TO FALL
early statement about his aversion to surprises has a core
of truth: in his heart, Michael has remained more a deer
hunter than a warrior. At the same time he appears to
have concluded that bravery and skill in Russian roulette
are conditions of the excellence he has always sought. He
plays it not only when it is obviously necessary, but
also-as with Stanley-when he judges that it can bring
some important good. In the last deer-hunting scene,
Michael appeared to turn away from the solitary pursuit
of his own excellence; he is a member of the Army's elite
Rangers, and the film gives no indication that he intends
to leave the military now that the war is over.
WINTER 1981
�Knowing so much about Russian roulette, or war
broadly conceived, Michael has to know that Nick's life
since he disappeared will have put a great deal of distance
between the two of them. We see him taking great risks to
find Nick; he must know that he will have to take greater
risks to bring Nick back. Michael has gone into hell after
his friend and he must somehow foresee that he is going
to have to play yet another round of Russian roulette
before he returns.
When Michael finds him, Nick shows no recognition.
He is intent on the present; except for the strange fact
that he sends elephants and his winnings to Stevie's wife,
he seems to have lost all touch with his past. In a desperate attempt to give Nick back his memory-to bring this
ghost back to human life-Michael arranges to play the
next game against him.
When he first came into the house where Nick plays,
Michael had been visibly distressed to see another player
kill himself. Now, at the table with Nick, Michael begins
urgently trying to talk him back to himself: "We don't
have much time .... Don't do it." When the spectators
have finished placing their bets, Nick still has not heard
Michael. Nick takes the first turn; the hammer drops on
an empty chamber. Since mere speech has failed, Michael
picks up the pistol and asks, "Is this what you want?"
After saying sadly, "I love you, Nick," Michael's face twists
up with a terrible dread that we have seen in no professional Russian roulette player. He puts the revolver to his
head and pulls the trigger; again, the weapon fails to discharge. But Nick remains oblivious to Michael's efforts to
reach him. As Nick picks up the gun again, Michael grabs
his wrist, sees track marks on his arm, and begins talking
urgently of home, of their friendship, of the mountains.
Now at last, what Nick would most remember about
Michael returns to him: he says, "One shot," laughs
softly, and blows his brains out. Screaming with grief,
Michael grabs the corpse and starts shaking it in an
instinctive effort to bring it back to life.
This scene invites us to interpret it in terms of
Michael's love for Nick. That love is surely what enables
him to risk himself in the game. But what is the basis and
framework of the love? Michael must know how small are
the chances that Nick could be retrieved from the living
death in which he finds him. By virtue of what principle
did he take upon himself with no visible hesitation this illicit 12,000-mile trip to hell in search of a man who is not
sane enough to return from there by his own will? And by
virtue of what principle does Michael risk Nick's life in the
round of Russian roulette they play?
In this scene, love is the passion that carries Michael
through the hardest part of the game, just as hatred or anger carried him through the previous games he played.
But in no case do these passions simply rule Michael's
conduct. In the other games, Michael was ruled by his insight into the justification for his participation. Here the
only visible justification for the risks he takes is the old
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
promise he made to Nick not to leave him in Vietnam. By
holding himself and Nick to that promise, Michael affirms
the gravity of a human relationship to which he has committed the word of his honor; he thus establishes the superiority of the relationship implied by a promise over
either of the human beings who participate in that relationship. We see in this last Russian roulette scene how
much Michael dislikes what he has to do; not once does
he seem tempted to protect his own human feelings with
callous notions about imperatives of abstract duty. Still,
he does set the authority of his promise above himself and
others, and he thereby brings that authority into being.
The Deer Hunter correctly teaches us that love and decency would not exist as goods were it not for this
harsh-and painful-insistence on self-respect.
As we saw before, Michael's earliest and highest hopes
have not been met: he has not found his equal and has not
found perfected friendship. Nor has his struggle against
the rule of chance in human affairs been wholly successful. It would be hard to imagine a man who takes firmer
responsibility for himself and for his own activity; because
of this he can be said to have done as much as one can do
to prevent chance from living within oneself. But in order
to achieve this victory, he has had to live where chance
does virtually rule: he has had to face enemies out beyond
the protecting conventions and institutions of civil society. In the film this is presented through his experience of
war; but the contrast between him and the other two soldiers shows that what truly distinguishes him is his understanding of what war reveals about himself and others. To
reach that just estimation of men, Michael has had to take
enormous risks and exercise great courage and moderation. Men with his natural talents and inclinations are rare
to begin with, and they are more likely than most others
to die in battle. The blessing of his survival will enable
him to help others more than they can fully appreciate.
After Nick's funeral, his
friends go to the old tavern to have breakfast alone
together. The scene is similiar to the one just before
the first transition to Vietnam. But this time it is day, now
there· are women present, and one of the group is very
conspicuous by his absence. While in the kitchen preparing the food, the tavern owner tries to choke back his tears
by humming and singing a little of "God Bless America."
In the earlier tavern scene, the orderly motion of his
music helped provide a brief but satisfying relief from
struggle; now, however, the pain that Nick's death has
brought seems as likely to break out in violent weeping as
in the reconciliation of song. Sensing that a critical moment is at hand, Linda begins to sing with a shaking voice:
"God bless America/Land that I love .... " Nick has lost
his life, Linda and the others have lost him; this prayer,
with its patriotism and its assumption about the cosmic
supports for patriotism, might allow those present to
T
HE STORY ENDS IN CLAIRTON.
27
�believe that these sacrifices were worthwhile. But their
hesitation to join in the singing betrays their doubts about
the song's credibility.
One man can ease those doubts. Michael once said that
these others were "assholes"; there is nothing to indicate
that they have changed much during the film. Michael
has always been skeptical of piety, adhering to a pagan
hunting religion if to any at all; nothing in the film indicates that he has found in the world the coherence that
could make this song even remotely plausible. Whatever
Michael may once have felt towards the others, and whatever he may now believe about the world, he joins in the
singing. As he is thereby ratifying their belief in the comforting words, his attention seems directed mainly at
Linda; but he performs the function of a priest for them
all. Michael has always had a natural air of authority, and
now his credentials are strengthened by the fact that he
has been with open eyes where none of them could go.
Without Michael's assent the singing would be ludicrous-by joining in, he protects the others from having
to admit how much reason there may be for despair. And
he protects them, too, from having to admit how dependent they are on him for protection from the horrors he
has survived. He bestows on them what freedom they are
28
capable of, much as he did for the deer he spared in the
mountains. The image of the deer should remind us that
one of the dangers he protects them from is his own urge
to dominate them by force.
At the last moment, Michael reminds his friends-and
us-that the reconciliation provided by the song is a little
too easy. The edifying words of "God Bless America"
could not be said to foster bad beliefs, but by themselves
they are empty. So at the conclusion of the singing,
Michael raises his glass and says: "Here's to Nick." By reminding the others of the importance of keeping the
memory of the friend who died, Michael tries to prevent
them from going too far into the refuge of comforting sentiment: he imposes on them at least a little of the difficult
work of cultivating the grounds in which a noble sense of
freedom and community can grow. They respond by repeating the toast in unison, and the film ends. Michael
knows how costly this communion has been, and how
fragile are the supports that make it possible; his work has
only begun, and may never be completed. But if we have
gained a greater understanding of the deer hunter and of
his place in our community, the film has achieved its principal purpose.
WINTER 1981
�The Scientific Background of
Descartes' Dualism
Arthur Collins
Dualism is the thesis that all the finite individual things
that exist in the universe are either minds or bodies.
Bodies are material things whose principle and defining
feature is extension or the filling of space, and minds are
nonmaterial things and their principle and defining
feature is thinking or being conscious. The most important aspect of Descartes' dualism is its characterization of
a human being as a composite entity. In an individual
man, mind and body are closely associated. In some sense
they are united. However, they cannot lose their distinctness as two separate substances, that is; as two entities
each of which endures through time, undergoes its own
changes, and thus accumulates its own history. Changes
the mind undergoes are changes in thought and consciousness, and the history of a mind is a sequence of
mental states, mental contents, and mental activities. The
body undergoes physical changes and has a physical history, the history of a material object. The crucial claim of
dualism is that the body is not the thing that thinks in a
man. The fundamental nature of body is being extended
and this contrasts with and excl!ldes being conscious.
Descartes' philosophical arguments for this dualism are
most fully rendered in his Meditations on First Philosophy.
It is worth reminding ourselves that this work bears the
subtitle, "In which the existence of God and the distinction between Mind and Body are demonstrated." 1 The
same arguments are prefigured briefly and partially in
Part Four of the Discourse on Method. They are recast in
Part One of the Principle of Philosophy, and they appear
elsewhere in Descartes' writings.
Although Cartesian dualism still exerts an immense influence in philosophy, Descartes' arguments for his dualism, from their earliest presentation, have been found
wholly inadequate by most readers. Even those who ac-
Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, Arthur Collins has published articles in numerous philosophical journals on epistemology, philosophical psychology, and the history of philosophy.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
cept or share his dualist convictions have found his
defense of them quite unsatisfactory. The inadequate
arguments represent an effort to frame definitive demonstrations for convictions that were deeply held by Descartes and that were understandably compelling to him.
But the thinking which actually led Descartes to these
convictions is remote from the matters that figure in the
official proofs of his late metaphysical works.
Descartes' Argument
The Meditations can be divided into two unequal parts
at the end of the second day's thinking. Under this division the first part contains the initial encouragement of
systematic and radical doubt, culminating in the two general skeptical hypotheses: the dream hypothesis, and the
deceiving demon hypothesis. This first part also contains
the cogito argument by which doubt is at last halted in the
unshakeable self-knowledge of the thinking subject. It
concludes with the recognition in the latter part of the
Second Meditation, that the immediate contents of consciousness, construed only as "ideas" in the mind, all
share the indubitability of the cogito. At this point, the existence of the thinking subject and the existence and content of all his ideas are guaranteed. Preparation has been
made for the survey and classification of ideas in the
Third Meditation. Everything but this sphere of consciousness remains in doubt. The existence of a material
order and of the thinking subject's own body remain to be
argued for. Even the simplest mathematical propositions
have yet to attain standing as truths.
To this day, every philosophical intelligence feels the
power of this representation of the subjective starting
point for philosophical thinking. Although modern philosophers owe so much to the phenomenological starting
point discovered in the first two Meditations, almost nothing in subsequent thought has been influenced by arguments and claims found in the second part of the work.
29
�But the whole of Descartes' official defense of dualism is
found in this second part.
In the Third Meditation Descartes turns to God in devising an escape from the threatening prison of solipsistic
consciousness. Few have followed him in his view that the
idea of God is the first for which we are able to know a
corresponding existence. Of empiricist philosophies, only
Berkeley's accords comparable prominence to theological
premises in moving from the flux of immediate
experi~
ence to a more stable independent reality. Empiricism has
generally rejected the uses of theology on which Descartes relies.
The function of Descartes' theology in the Third Meditation is precisely to prepare the ground for the proof of
the existence of material things. The causal argument,
there mounted, claims that the existence of God is implied as a needed causal antecedent both by the existence
of an idea of God and by the subject's possession of that
idea. This reasoning is supplemented in the Fifth Meditation by Descartes' version of the "ontological argument"
for God's existence. The intervening discUssion concerns
the nature of human error and establishes the compatibility of man's imperfection with the conclusion reached in
the Third Meditation: Man's creator is an infinite and perfect God. This is Descartes' highly intellectualized version
of the traditional problem of evil. His solution emphasizes
human freedom and places responsibility for human deficiencies on men themselves, while God is asserted to have
made men capable of correcting all the errors to which
they are susceptible;
This reconciliation of divine perfection and human inadequacy is not original. Saint Augustine presented much
the same argument, although he vigorously rejected optimistic attitudes concerning man's power to correct his
shortcomings. Augustine adverts to the freedom of man
in order to deny God's responsibility for human vices. In
his proof of the existence of a material world and its distinctness from the mental, Descartes exploits an aspect of
the argument never contemplated by Augustine: If God is
absolved from responsibility for human failings only because man is free and, thus, responsible for himself, then,
insofar as man is not free, it should follow that God is
responsible for him. As we shall see, it is just this contrapositive entailment of an earlier solution to the problem
of evil that Descartes invokes in moving from our ineluctable belief in the existence of a material world to the justification of that belief.
The very same pattern-exploitation of an old argument for new ends-recurs in the use of the ontological
argument in the Fifth Meditation. This argument is best
known in the eleventh-century formulation of Anselm of
Canterbury and in the framework of its later rejection by
Thomas Aquinas. Descartes has proved the existence of
God in the Third Meditation. Is another proof added as
reinforcement? No, in the Fifth Meditation, the material
world is Descartes' real objective. The ontological argument serves to focus the discussion on the concept of es-
30
sences that Descartes requires in his subsequent reasoning. The discussion consists in an extended comparison of
our idea of God and our ideas of material things. Both are
construed as formulations of essences. For our purposes,
we can think of an essence as a cluster of characteristics
that define an entity of a certain type. In the case of extended things such as triangles, the investigation of essence
provides answers to the question, What must an existing
thing outside the mind be like if it is to be a triangle?
Then theorems about triangles are said. to be entailments
of the essence of triangles. Such propositions, formulating
geometrical knowledge, do not assert the existence of
anything. In the example considered by Descartes, knowledge of essence yields only an entirely secure but hypothetical statement: If there is actually a triangle
somewhere, then it has an angle-sum of two right angles.
A parallel examination of the essence of God as indicated
by our idea of God reveals, according to Descartes, that
the proposition "God exists" is entailed by this idea, just
as the angle-sum theorem is entailed by the idea of a triangle. Descartes' interest in the ontological argument really
lies in the contrast it affords between the essence of God
that sustains an existence claim and the essence of matter
that does not.
In the last Meditation the existence of material things is
proved via complicated appeals to the known essence of
material things and the now-known existence and character of God. Because his power is infinite, God could have
given us the ideas that we have of material things in our
geometrical thinking and in perceptual experience even
though there were no such material things outside our
thought. He could have planted ideas of external things
directly in our consciousness, or he could have induced
them through some intermediate reality, sufficient for the
production of those ideas, but entirely unlike a material
world. Such possibilities, however, would be inconsistent
with God's infinite goodness. For we have an irresistible
disposition to refer our perceptual ideas to material things
outside us. If no such material things were in fact the
source of those ideas, our disposition would be a systematic misinterpretation of our experience that we could
never correct. Just here Descartes employs the optimistic
principle introduced in the Fourth Meditation: God enables us to correct any errors to which we are susceptible.
This justifies the proposition that there is a material world
which is the source of our perceptual experiences and
which is the nonmental subject matter of which geometrical truths are true.
The dualism which is the final objective of the Meditations now requires only the proposition that bodies and
minds, both of which are known to exist, are also distinct
existences. Descartes argues that, though it may be that
every mind is an embodied mind, minds could exist without bodies and God could have made our conscious minds
just as they are without equipping us with bodies at all.
He seems to regard this appeal to God's power as a
needed premise for the distinctness of minds and bodies.
WINTER 1981
�This is likely to be confusing to his readers. After all, if the
essence of triangles is to be three-sided, and of pentagons,
to be five-sided, then, obviously, existing triangles cannot
be existing pentagons. But Descartes writes as though he
takes seriously the possibility that the thing that is conscious might be a corporeal thing, even though its essence
is consciousness, while the essence of corporeal things is
extension, and even though these are distinct essences.
We notice that the essence: being conscious, does not obviously exclude the essence: being extended, on logical
grounds, as three-sidedness and five-sidedness exclude
one another. But this difference is not the only foundation for Descartes' conviction that further reasoning is
needed.
Prevailing scholastic-Aristotelian conceptions explicated the relationship between mind and body with the
help of a ubiquitous form-matter distinction. Applied to
human existence, the soul is taken by this tradition to be
the form of the body, so that the animated body is a single
substance, and not a composite of soul and body, each
possessing an independent substantial existence. In light
of this doctrine, the immortality of the soul and its survival of the dissolution of the body in death became special problems for scholastic philosophers.
In addition to this tradition, Descartes takes into
consideration common-sense intuitions which make it difficult to think of a person as a mere association of a
spiritual being and some inert clay. In the famous phrase,
he allows that "I am not present in my body merely as a
pilot is present in his ship," 2 and he draws attention to
pains, which are experienced and not merely observed as a
pilot might observe events damaging to his vessel. This intimacy with the corporeal nature of one's own body arises
"from the mind's being united to and, as it were, mixed
up with the body." In a letter to his sometime disciple
Regius, Descartes says that an angel inhabiting a body
would perceive impinging motions but would not feel sensations as we do 3 An angel would be like a pilot in a ship.
In this letter Descartes expresses a confusing vacillation
between the accepted scholastic view that a man is an ens
per se (a substantial unity) and the view that a man is an
ens per accidens (a composite being) which an angel inhabiting a body would be. Descartes' vacillation is partly due
to his desire not to offend other religious thinkers and
authorities needlessly. He recommends qualified endorsement of the prevailing view to Regius as a matter of prudence. But his intellectual uncertainty is also apparent.
Descartes never reaches a satisfactory understanding of
the "mixing" of mind and body in human existence.
Descartes' demonstration of dualism amounts to these
propositions: (1) We have indubitable knowledge of the
existence of ourselves as thinking beings, and of the content of our conscious thought and experience. (2) The
idea of an infinite, perfect, and independent being, which
is the idea of God, is found among our conscious
thoughts. (3) We know that God must exist as the required
cause of the idea of God. (4) Some of our ideas are clear
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
and distinct, and propositions involving clear and distinct
ideas can be known to be true. (The seeming mutual dependence of this and the previous proposition is the foundation of the common charge that Descartes' reasoning is
circular.) (5) Mathematical truths are prominent among
those certified by their clarity and distinctness. (6) Perceptual ideas of sensuous qualities are confused ideas of
things external to our minds. (7) Geometry is clear and distinct thinking about extended things, without the confused sensuous aspect, but with an essential imaginative
component that connects geometry with perception. (8)
The goodness of God assures us that there is an external
world corresponding to and causing our perceptual ideas,
and that this reality exemplifies the truths of mathematics
in the form in which they are imagined in geometry, but
not as represented in perceptual experience. (9) From our
ideas alone we know that the essence of mind is consciousness and the essence of body is extension, and that
these are distinct essences. (10) The power of God certifies the real distinctness of existing minds and bodies,
though the thinking subject's mind is intimately connected
with his body in a way that is not entirely intelligible. (ll)
The distinctness of minds and bodies is confirmed by the
reflection that a mind is an indivisible thing, for example,
there is no such thing as half a mind. Bodies are all essentially divisible.
The striking thing about reactions of Descartes' early
readers to this argument for dualism is that so much of it
is ignored. The standard response to Descartes, one might
say, has been to accept his dualism and to pay little attention to his demonstration of its correctness. The authors
of "Objections" published with the Meditations write as
though Descartes has based his dualism on the first two
Meditations alone. In criticisms addressed to the Second
Meditation, Hobbes and Gassendi, authors of the third
and fifth set of Objections, respectively, both complain
that Descartes has only assumed that the mind is not corporeal.4 In replying, Descartes points out that he did not
claim to have proved the incorporeal status of the mind
until the Sixth Meditation. In the earlier context, where
these materialists find an unsupported assumption of dualism, Descartes merely notes that he can imagine that
there are no material things at all, though he is at the
same time conscious of his own existence. He cannot
imagine that there are not minds for his own conscious~
ness is incompatible with that supposition. Then he says
1
But perhaps it is the case that these very things which I suppose to be nonentities [that is, bodies imagined not to existL
and which are not properly known to me, are yet in reality not
different from the "I" of which I am aware. I do not know and
will not dispute the point. 5
At this point he does not dispute the view that the thinking
thing may be corporeal. It may be the body that thinks.
It is not only the predictably critical materialists who
31
�respond as though Descartes had rested his dualism on
the first two Meditations. The preponderance of readers
incline to look for, and to find, in the first part of the text a
more direct, less ornate argument for the nonmaterial
status of the mind. Then they find this simpler argument
inadequate; but it is not an argument that Descartes has
presented. The "diverse theologians and philosophers"
whose views Mersenne assembled as the second set of
Objections say
ous but still skeptical. Her attention is quite properly
focused on the desperate problem of mind-body interac·
tion that is imposed by the acceptance of dualism. She
writes to Descartes
Up to this point [the Second Meditation] you know that you
These critical reactions are at least partly a conse·
quence of the order of the argument in the Meditations.
We start with assurances about the mind and mental contents. The question at the beginning of the Third Medita·
lion is: What else exists? What is there in addition to this
mental reality? And the answers: God and the material
world naturally seem to be an articulation of further
realities outside the mind. There is an awkward turn of
thought in the reflection that the mind itself might be a
constituent of this further material reality. Managing the
awkward turn of thought, readers come to imagine that it
has eluded Descartes and that he rests his dualism on the
natural presumption of the otherness of body that derives
simply from the skeptical subjective starting point. When
we correct this misinterpretation, however, we are left
only with Descartes' unconvincing theological arguments.
Descartes' demonstration of dualism is, then, inadequate. Empiricists have generally eschewed any religious
foundation for metaphysics, and even the firm believers
among Descartes' first readers and critics found little to
convince them in his theological premises. This is under·
standable. However great our faith, how could we pre·
sume to have so fine a grasp of the implications of the
goodness and power of God as to rest upon it our confi·
dence that outer reality does fit our spatial intuitions and
does not fit our perceptual experiences? The response to
Descartes' argument shows that his premises are less attractive than his conclusions. We cannot avoid asking, Are
there not other reasons for his acceptance of a dualism
that, in itself, has seemed correct to so many philosophers?
are a being that thinks; but you do not know what this thinking thing is. What if it were a body which by its various mo-
tions and encounters produces that which we call thought?
For granted that you rejected the claim of every sort of body,
you may have been deceived in this, because you did not rule
out yourself, who are a body. For how will you prove that a
body cannot think, or that its bodily motions are not thought
itself?6
Even the judicious Antoine Arnauld either ignores or re·
jects out of hand the whole elaborate argument we have
summarized. In his, the fourth set of Objections, Arnauld
says
I can discover no passage in the whole work capable of effecting this proof, save the proposition laid down at the outset: I
can deny that there is any body or that any extended thing exists, but yet it is certain that I exist so long as I make this denial, hence, I am a thing that thinks and not a body, and the
body does not pertain to the knowledge of myself. But the
only result I can see this to give, is that a certain knowledge of
myself be obtained without knowledge of the body. But it is
not yet quite clear to me that this knowledge is complete and
adequate, so as to make me sure that I am not in error in excluding the body from my essence.7
It is true that Descartes does not give any fuller reason
for his contention that the essences of mind and body are
distinct than the clear and distinct separability of these
ideas in our thought. We can suppose all bodies nonexis·
tent but we cannot suppose all minds nonexistent. How·
ever, this is not Descartes' argument for dualism. He
invokes theological premises three times in moving from
this thought-experiment to the conclusion that the mind
is not material. The existence of God is needed to assure
me of the truth of what I think clearly and distinctly, by
ruling out the deceiving-demon hypothesis. The goodness
of God is appealed to in assuring me that my propensity
to refer perceptual ideas to an outer material reality is jus·
tified. Finally, the power of God is cited to certify the dis·
tinction between minds and bodies, however intertwined
their real instances.
Even Descartes' friendliest critics such as Father
Gibieuf and Princess Elizabeth do not find his reason for
the distinction between mind and body satisfactory, and
in their hesitations they pay no attention to theological
niceties. Gibieuf thinks that the claim to have established
the real essence of mind may have been accomplished by
an illegitimate abstraction. 8 Elizabeth's response is gener-
32
The senses teach me that the soul moves the body but neither
they nor the imagination nor the intellect teaches me how.
Perhaps there are properties of the soul unknown to us which
will overturn the conviction of the soul's nonextension which
I acquired from the excellent arguments of your Meditations.9
The Scientific Background
In the Meditations, we are invited to consider the
securely known conscious mind and then to ask, Could
this consciousness turn out to be a corporeal thing? Could
it be the body that thinks? It is instructive to consider a
parallel question that is not represented in the Medita·
tions at all. Suppose that we could, somehow, start from a
secure knowledge of material things and then ask, could
these material things themselves manifest intellectual ac·
tivities and consciousness? Could it be minds that are extended? No such question can arise in the Meditations
because, following the skeptical method, "the mind is
more easily known than the body." 10 These unfamiliar
questions, however, would far better reflect the order of
WINTER 1981
�discovery in Descartes' own attainment of a dualist metaphysics than the artfully organized questions and answers
of the Meditations. He is convinced that matter cannot
possibly think long before he attempts to prove that mind
cannot be extended. It is his scientific thought about the
material world, unencumbered by systematic metaphysics, that is the source of Descartes' conviction that mind
and matter are distinct essences and distinct existences.
The metaphysical doctrines for which he is famous did
not receive any formulation in Descartes' writings and
played no part in his thought for many years after he had
begun systematic study of the physical world. It is easy to
read the philesophy of the Meditations and the Principles
of Philosophy back into Descartes' earlier thought as expressed in his youthful scientific writings, in Le Monde,
and in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind. Etienne
Gilson's studies of Descartes have done much to correct
this error. 11 In the Discourse on Method, Descartes tells us
that after he had resolved on a life of search for truth and
had begun to construct scientific explanations on the
model of mathematical understanding
... nine years elapsed before I had yet taken any position con·
ceming the difficulties commonly disputed among the
learned or begun to search for the principles of any philosophy more certain than the common variety [plus certaine que
la vulgaire.] 12
Descartes identifies the success of his physical researches with the gradual elimination from his own thinking of a prevailing tendency to ascribe intellectual functions to mere physical things and events. Aristotelian
physical explanations fail, in his opinion, just because
they confuse mental and physical things and they ascribe
mental powers and functions to matter. These are the
scholastic accounts in terms of substantial forms and real
qualities that Descartes attacks in letters to other thinkers.
Writing to de Launay he says
The earliest judgments which we made in our childhood and
the common philosophy later, have accustomed us to attribute to the body many things which belong only to the soul,
and to attribute to the soul many things which belong only to
the body. So people commonly mingle the two ideas of body
and soul when they construct the ideas of real qualities and
substantial forms which I think should be altogether
rejected. 13
And to Princess Elizabeth
... we have hitherto confounded the notion of the soul's
power to act on the body with the power one body has to act
on another. We attributed both powers not to the soul, whose
nature we did not yet know, but to the various qualities of the
body such as weight, heat, etc. We imagined these qualities to
be real, that is to say to have an existence distinct from that of
bodies, and so to be substances, although we called them
qualities. 14
Descartes overcame these confusions by developing a
conception of material things that excludes mind. In his
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
replies to the sixth Objections, offered by anonymous
theologians and philosophers, Descartes says that his own
reasons set out in the Meditations for the view "that the
human mind was really distinct from the body and was
more easily known than it," were not fully persuasive,
even to him, when he first thought of them. He was like
an astronomer who could not stop thinking of the earth as
larger than the sun after possessing demonstrations that it
is much smaller. Then Descartes says that, to reinforce his
assent he "proceeded further," 15 keeping his ideas straight
until
I observed that nothing at all belonged to the nature or
essence of body except that it was a thing with length, breadth
and depth, admitting of various shapes and various motions.
[Such shapes cannot exist apart from the bodies that have
them and, in contrast,] ... colors, odors, savors, and the rest of
such things, were merely sensations existing in my thought,
and differing no less from bodies than pain differs from the
shape and motion of the instrument which inflects it. Finally,
I saw that gravity, hardness, the power of heating, of attracting and of purging, and all other qualities which we experience in bodies consisted solely in motion or its absence,
and in the configuration and situation of their parts. 16
One aspect of dualism emerges here from the concept of
the subjectivity of the sensuous. Descartes reports his appreciation of the fact that a shape cannot exist separately
from the body shaped, while color does not exist in the
shaped body and, therefore, must exist in some other substance. So a nonmaterial mind is implied here as the locus
of secondary qualities which have some reality somewhere but cannot be referred to the physical world. It is
often said that the mind for Descartes is a receptacle for
sensuous characteristics which have been removed from
bodies. There is justice in this interpretation. The last
clause in the quoted passage, however, leads to a deeper
reason for the thesis that the mind is nonmaterial.
l(Gravity, hardness, the power of heating" and other
~~qualities" are prominent in Descartes' examples of spurious scholastic explanations that purport to know about
the substantial forms of things and the real qualities they
contain. Descartes thinks of his own attainment of a far
superior conception of physical objects and events as
conditioned by the rejection of these concepts. The scholastic explanations Descartes discards are those often ridiculed for their vacuousness by later critics: burning wood
heats because the wood contains the power of heating;
opium induces sleep because of its soporific virtue. This
charge of vacuousness is not all Descartes' objection. He
finds the scholastic explanations defective because they
import a psychological dimension into the physical order
where explanation should only be mechanical. Qualities
and substantial forms are psychologically intelligible determinants of change. They are like souls.
Writing to Mersenne in 1643, Descartes says that there
are two principles that need to be established:
33
�The first is that I do not believe that there are in nature any
real qualities, attached to substances and separable from them
by divine power like. so many little souls in their bodies.
[Claims involving such qualities make assertions that we do
not understand, and] . .. the philosophers invented these real
qualities only because they did not think they could otherwise
explain all the phenomena of nature; but I find on the contrary, that these phenomena are better explained without
them.
The second principle is that whatever is or exists remains always in the state in which it is, unless some ulterior cause
changes it. . .. 17
The first principle excludes the psychological from
physics. The second rejects intrinsic causality, and it is
the foundation of Descartes' law of inertia. 18
The two principles of physics Descartes expounds to
Mersenne are closely connected and both focus on the re·
pudiation of mental functions in accounts of physical
change. Real qualities and substantial forms were con·
ceived by the scholastics as self-contained causes of motion, in the general sense in which both qualitative
changes and movements were called motions. If every
change of state (and motion is itself a state for Descartes)
must have some ((ulterior" cause, that is, external cause,
as the second principle requires, then there will be no selfinduced motions to be ascribed to the real qualities and
forms that are rejected by the first principle. But we still
have to ask why it is that Descartes construed the prevailing explanations as psychological and why he says they
amount to projecting "little souls" into material things.
The concept of substantial forms rests on Aristotle's
distinction between form and matter. Any existing entity
must be composed of something and that matter of which
it is composed must have some organization or other making it the particular thing it is,for the same matter has the
potential to figure in the constitution of many different
particular objects. So Aristotle thinks of rna Iter as potentiality which is realized in a particular being by form or
actuality. This pair of metaphysical concepts reflects a
Platonic influence and it was much exploited by medieval
thinkers. Unlike Plato, Aristotle usually says that forms do
not exist by themselves, apart from any matter, any more
than matter exists by itself without being anything in par·
ticular, that is, without any form at all. 19 The real qualities
and substantial forms of scholastic science are derived
from this basic concept of form and matter. To under·
stand them we should appeal to a further Aristotelian distinction between natural objects and artificial colloca·
tions, and to the Aristotelian emphasis on organisms as
the paradigm illustration of existing substances.
A natural entity for Aristotle is precisely one that con·
tains within itself the causal initiative for its own motions
and changes. 20 It is the possession of such self-realizing
potential that makes something into a substantial unity in
the fullest sense. 21 For Aristotle, this concept is the faun·
dation of the difference between artifacts and self-repro·
34
clueing things that are made by men 22 The intrinsically
caused motion that is best illustrated by reproduction
marks an entity as a natural object. Reproduction leads us
immediately to the emphasis on organisms that is characteristic of Aristotle.
We should note, however, especially because it is directly relevant to Descartes' thinking, that natural objects
manifesting natural motions are not confined by Aristotle
nor the scholastic tradition to living things. The down·
ward motion of heavy things toward ·the center of the
universe is a natural motion according to Aristotle. This
coheres with common sense in that one does not have to
do anything to a heavy thing to induce its fall except
remove obstacles. 23 One does not have to remove obstacles and then push the heavy thing downward. It is,
then, as though the push comes from within as part of the
nature of the heavy thing which will be manifested in selfinduced changes when inhibiting forces are removed. In
the same way, light things recede from the center and,
generally, the four elements have their proper places in
the universe, which is where they tend to go. The empirically observed universe has a layered structure, earth
mostly at the center, water for the most part next closest,
and so on. This seems obvious confirmation of the conception of natural motion since it appears that things
have mostly gone where they belong. 24 And Aristotle has a
theory of the transmutation of elements from heavy to
light and from light to heavy, which could account intelligently for the fact that a permanent stasis is not reached 25
Within the setting of this theory of natural motion, to say
that a body is heavy is just to say that it contains within
itself a causal factor that originates motion toward the
center. As we shall see, Descartes' contention that scho·
lastic physical explanations psychologize inanimate material things is especially clearly articulated in connection
with weight and gravitational motion. 26
In Aristotelian thought, the motions and changes that a
thing can induce in itself in virtue of its formal nature are
all construed as realizing an innate potentiality or attaining an objective. Such objectives are ascribed to the ob·
jects that are able to move themselves. The power to initiate motion is thus an intrinsic directedness. The motions
which result from this in-dwelling causal initiative are,
therefore, susceptible to teleological explanations citing
final causes. The natural motion that the contained quality gravity induces is a directed motion toward the place
the heavy object seeks to occupy.
This finalism connects the inanimate physical world
with essentially biological understanding. Gravitational
motion is assimilated to the pattern of explanation that
seems so natural for motions, like those involved in respiration, which have a legible goal in the welfare of the
breathing animal. So the paradigm of a substance is a living organism. The Aristotelian doctrine articulating four
types of explanatory question, usually called the theory of
four causes, can be thought of as an implicit definition of
an individual substance. For a thing that is a true substan·
WINTER 1981
�tial unity, each of the four questions, including the question that calls for a purpose or objective, has an answer.
Physicists as well as biologists investigate final causes of
phenomena. Although in some cases the efficient, final
and material causes collapse into a single factor for Aristotle, finality is never absent from natureP
The various souls that Aristotle finds in plants, animals,
and men are among the forms capable of initiating motions with obvious natural objectives. The organization of
complex organisms is intelligible in terms of hierarchies of
such forms. In De Anima, the rational soul is the highest
form of the body making up a man. It is "the first actuality
of the body," a doctrine taken over by Thomas and other
scholastics." Aristotle considers the possible separate existence of souls, which seems to be excluded by his formmatter conception of individual things. "Suppose the eye
were an animal, sight would have been its soul . .. ". 29 A
sightless eye could exist as a material object with a lower
form, though not really as an eye, while sight could not exist at all without some material embodiment. In a passage
that has reverberations in the Meditations, Aristotle goes
These Aristotelian-scholastic views are the occasion for
Descartes' contention that forms and qualities are like
"little souls" in material objects. The conscious rational
soul of man, in this tradition, is the substantial form of
man. It accomplishes in a consciously articulated way the
initiation of movement toward ends just as substantial
forms and qualities in inanimate objects initiate directed
changes in phenomena like combustion and the fall of
heavy bodies. The heat generated in combustion, as Descartes reads scholastic accounts, is the realization of a con~
tained goal-like potential in the wood. For Descartes, the
production of heat is not the goal of a material object. Nor
is burning a self-caused action in which a piece of wood
can engage. Nothing happens but the turbulent motion of
minute particles, progressively disturbing the stabler
structure of the unburned wood. Heat is merely a subjective feature of our perception of these particle motions,
which are not directed from within the particles that
move. In "La Traite de la Lumiere," tactfully summing up
his rejection of scholastic explanations of combustion,
Descartes says:
on to say
Though another may imagine, if he wishes, that there is in
From this it indubitably follows that the soul is inseparable
from its body, or at any rate that certain parts of it are (if it has
parts)-for the actuality of some of them is nothing but the actuality of their bodily parts. Yet some may be separable because they are not the actualities of any bodies at all. Further
we have no light on the problem of whether the soul may not
be the actuality of the body in the sense in which the sailor is
the actuality of the ship.3o
I want to emphasize that, in Aristotle's thinking, souls
are like the qualities gravity, heat, and attraction in that
they are originative causes of motion and change. Intrinsic causal agency is found in gravitational fall, in the
growth of plants, in the locomotion of animals, and in consciously directed human actions. Behavior-directing factors which are mental by Descartes' criterion are, for Aris~
totle, sophisticated versions of the same inner determina~
tion of motion that is manifested by heavy objects.
The Aristotelian model of explanation, invoking forms
as causes of motion, was accepted by the scholastic thinkers to whom Descartes reacts. 31 In scholastic terminology,
forms are qualified as substantial not because they are
thought to be independent substances. Substantial form
contrasts with accidental form. The substantial form of a
thing comprises its essential nature. Accidental forms
have the same status as intrinsic causes of change, al~
though possession of them is inessential:
... [T]he substantial form differs from the accidental form in
this, that the accidental form does not make a thing to be absolutely, but to be such, as heat does not make a thing to be
absolutely but only to be hot. 32
An existing thing could lack an accidental form that it has
and yet remain what it is. Accidental forms include the
real qualities that Descartes repudiates.
1HE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
this wood the Form of fire, the Quality heat, and the Action
which burns it, as entirely distinct constituents, for my part,
since I am afraid of error if I posit anything more than what I
see must be there, I content myself with conceiving in it only
the movement of its parts. 33
The burning wood manifests only externally caused motions of particles. The realization of self-contained potentialities and the attainment of objectives, which do characterize actions of minds, are absent in combustion.
In the Fourth Meditation, Descartes says that he finds
"final causes to be wholly useless in physics," 34 for the reason that the purposes of an infinite Divinity are largely
opaque to men. But his scientific investigations have
given him a more fundamental reason for excluding finalism. He actually finds teleological explanations defective
even in cases where our assessment of purposes and ends
is quite correct.
This rule-that we should never argue from ends-should be
carefully heeded. For. .. the knowledge of a thing's purpose
never leads us to knowledge of the thing itself: its nature remains just as obscure to us. Indeed, this constant practice of
arguing from ends is Aristotle's greatest fault. 35
For example, when we rightly understand that the heart
beats in order to circulate the blood, we do not thereby
know anything at all about what makes it beat as it does.
We still need a causal explanation that purpose does not
provide or even suggest.
Descartes' most instructive criticisms of mental con~
cepts in physics concern weight and gravitational motion.
He portrays the evolution of his own thought about gravity as a gradual emancipation from a universal propensity
to mind-matter confusions traceable to childhood inter-.
pretations of experience:
35
�... I noticed that from infancy I had passed various judgements about physical things, for example, judgements which
contributed much to the preservation of the life I was then
entering; and I had afterwards retained the same opinions
which I had before conceived touching these things .... [And
although the mind was at the time] conscious of its own
nature and possessed of an idea of thought as well as extension, nevertheless, having no intellectual knowledge, though
at the same time it had an imagination of something, it took
them both to be one and the same and referred all its notions
of intellectual matters to the body. 16
The primitive theory of childhood springs from the intimate connection between phenomena and the conditions
for our survival as organisms. Sensations of pleasure and
pain succeed in the function of assuring survival precisely
through our inclination to identify pleasurable and painful sensations with the outer objects that stimulate them.
As a consequence of this biologically useful merging of
physical cause and mental effect we naturally develop a
mentalistic conception of physical reality.
Reconstructing his own intellectual biography, Descartes explains how the scholastic-Aristotelian explanation of the fall of heavy bodies springs from this childhood
imputation of "intellectual matters to the body." Gravity,
conceived as a real quality, is the self-contained cause of
motion in a heavy thing. This quality is a soul-like constituent, in the first instance, because it cannot be located inside the heavy thing as a part can be, just as the conscious
mind of a man initiates his movements but is not locatable
in some particular place within his body. The soul is able
to focus all its causal efficacy at a single point and so, too,
the formal quality "gravity" can exercise its causal force at
a point. In the case of the efficacy of the soul at a point,
Descartes means that, in the transition from intention to
behavior, a single part of the body can be moved in a particular way while the rest is unaffected. The heavy body
seems to mimic this in that, wherever a rope is attached,
all of the contained gravity acts at that one point "as if the
gravity resided in the part along which the rope touched
and was not diffused through the others." 37
Descartes' physics, however, rejects the concept of gravity as a space-filling quality of body that can act at a point.
Effectiveness at any selected point remains the right idea
when we are thinking about the operation of minds in
bodies that do have minds: "Indeed it is in no other way
that I now understand mind to be coextensive with body,
the whole in the whole and the whole in any of its
parts." 38
Descartes finds the most telling evidence of a confused
assignment of mental functions to matter in the alleged
directedness of gravitational movement.
The chief sign that my idea of gravity was derived from that
which I had of the mind, is that I thought that gravity carried
bodies toward the center of the earth as if it contained some
knowledge of this center within it. For it could not act as it did
without knowledge, nor can there be any knowledge except in
the mind. At the same time I attributed also to gravity certain
36
things which cannot be understood to apply to the mind in
the same sense; as, e.g., that it is divisible, measurable, etcYJ
In other words, the internal source of motion must be
understood within the scholastic explanation, not only as
an agency capable of inducing movements that express
the whole power of the inner cause at any one point in
the body, but also the inner agency must know where the
center is from the place the heavy body happens to occupy. Given a spherical universe, heavy bodies may reside
in any direction whatever from the center. It follows that
the same quality, gravity, is able to induce motions in one
body in any direction whatever. A body will move in a certain direction along a straight line through the center of
the universe, if it is on one side of the center, and it will
move in exactly the opposite direction along that same
line, if it is on the other side. How does this inner determinant manage to cause diametrically opposed motions?
The supposition that it does requires that the inner causal
factor be able to discriminate from one another the positions a body may occupy relative to the center. By analogy, a bird's nest is its natural place, and a bird is able to
and does move toward that nest, if the obstacles are not
too great. But this ability would be quite unintelligible if
we were not willing to ascribe to the bird something like
knowledge of the location of the nest. It would be unintelligible just because the ability imputed is a plastic disposition that issues in variously directed flight, depending on
the relative positions of bird and nest. It is not a brute tendency to move in some set way. Thus, the theory of
natural place and natural motion, widely accepted by such
prominent scholastic scientists as John Buridan and Albert of Saxony, does interpret gravity on a pattern suitable
for animal and human behavior that exhibits discrimination and intelligence. 4<l
In the last analysis, Descartes assigns even the intelligent performances of birds and all other nonrationalliving
things to the world of mindless mechanical interactions. A
man knows where his home is, and his knowledge together with his conscious control of his own movement
does indeed explain his homecomings at the end of the
day. The explanatory schema here, however, is grossly
misapplied, Descartes believes, in accounts of free fall,
and it is misapplied in accounts of the behavior of brutes
as well.
The uncompromising segregation of human actions
which do support psychological explanations and animal
behavior which does not is simply the consistent workingout of the implications of the rejection of mental factors
in elementary phenomena such as gravitational fall. The
essence of mind is consciousness. Where there is no consciousness, mind-like functions have no footing in scientific explanation. The deeply rooted inclination that we
possess to read psychological activities into nature is most
obvious in our thinking about animals that share so much
with us from the point of view of physiology. Even this almost irresistible psychologizing is the elaboration of the
WINTER 1981
�confused thinking of childhood wherein the inner conscious affective and sensuous representation is hopelessly
mixed up with the outer things that are both the causes
and the objects of the ideas that we have in perception.
Descartes adheres firmly to the view that physiology is
just mechanical physics applied to intricate structures and
elaborately organized functions that are found on a very
small scale in living things.
Contemporary materialist philosophers of mind rely on
the complexity of the brain and the nervous system to
lend plausibility to their hypothesis that neural events
may be identical with conscious experiences and thoughts.
No simple. working of levers and gears could produce a
feeling. But, perhaps, somehow, the billions of nerve cells,
each with its delicate electrical activity, interconnected in
hierarchical networks, containing a world of feedback
mechanisms, graspable as a maze of information chan~
nels, controls, dampers, and amplifiers-pei-haps mere
physical activity at this level, still dimly, partially, and provisionally understood, can amount to conscious thought.
Descartes is unattracted by this kind of speculation. He
was deeply impressed by physiology, and his visionary program for a physiological psychology in The Passions of the.
Soul is in the spirit of contemporary neurophysiology
even though the details of Descartes' neural science are
now but picturesque misconceptions. He is never tempted,
however, by the hypothesis of mind-brain identity. Complex physical events are only physical events.
This intuitive conviction that the intricacy of the physical cannot convert it into consciousness was well expressed
by Leibniz. In the Monadology, he suggests that the
microscopic size of things in the nervous system gives a
spurious aura of feasibility to materialism. But if the
mind-machine were enlarged to the size of a mill we could
enter it and would "find only parts which work upon one
another, and never anything by which to explain a perception [that is, a conscious experience.]" 41
Descartes' rejection of materialist conceptions of mind
rests on his conviction that his own gains in understand~
ing have been possible only because he has eliminated a
mental aspect from even the subtlest physical activities.
La Description du Corps Humain begins with the theme
of self-knowledge. Man's understanding of himself should
extend to anatomy and physiology and not only to the
moral dimensions of human existence. From this self-
study Descartes envisions unlimited practical results for
medicine in the cure and prevention of disease, and even
the retarding of old age. But these results will be forthcommg
... only if we have studied enough to understand the nature
of our own body and do not attribute in any way to the mind
the functions which depend only on the body and on the disposition of its organs. 42
Again Descartes cites patterns of thought developed in
childhood as an obstacle to understanding. We know we
have conscious control of some bodily movements and,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
therefore, we incline to ascribe a mental principle to all
the others. Ignorance of anatomical structure and the mechanics of physiology permits us to extend the psychological explanatory idiom to the motions of the heart, the
arteries, and digestive organs, ''though these, containing
no thought, are only bodily movements." 43 One body is
moved by another, not by anything non bodily. Where we
do not consciously experience the dependence of
move~
ment on the mind, we should not ascribe it to the mind.
... [A]nd even the movements that are called voluntary proceed principally from the disposition of the organs, since they
cannot be excited without those bodily dispositions, whatever
volitions we may have, even though it is the mind that determines thern. 44
The physiology of bodily movements, then, reveals that
even for movements under the control of the will, physical effects must have physical causes. Here the question
of a final reconciliation of a thoroughgoing mechanical
viewpoint with mental control is left open.
La Description will try to explain, Descartes says, "the
machine of our body" and to show that we have no more
reason to ascribe its physiological workings to a soul than
we have to impute a soul to a clock. 45 A clock plainly has
no soul, although its inner workings and outer behavior
are elaborately organized in ways that reflect the intelligence of its maker and the human objectives in its use.
These relationships to conscious mental activities are not,
in the case of a clock, the occasion for a confused imputa-
tion of thinking to the mechanism itself. But it is just this
confusion to which we are susceptible when we think
about the workings of an animal's body or our own.
Descartes' lifelong interest in automata, 46 clever prod-
ucts of engineers devised for the amusement of kings, provides him with another telling analogy with which to
expose the error of mentalistic explanations in physiology.
Automata seem to react to stimuli, to have goals, and,
generally, to move as though directed by a contained intellect. A naive spectator will actually believe that a mechanically operating automaton is guided by some kind of
conscious appreciation of the environment, and that it
manifests a will of its own and thought-out responses.
When we understand that such things are accomplished
by cleverly rigged magnets, or gears, or hydraulic valves
the illusion of mental control vanishes. 47 Descartes believes that the appearance of a mental element in the
natural machines that are animal and human bodies is just
as much an illusion, although it is much more difficult to
dispel.
The finest and most consistent expression of a mechanical conception of human physical existence extending to
all of the inner. and outer manifestations of mind appears
at the end of the posthumously published fragments of Le
Monde. Descartes has exploited throughout the book a
curious rhetorical device that is both prudential and intellectually liberating. He expressly offers, not an explanatory picture of our "world" and the human race to which
37
�we actually belong, but, instead, the complete science of
an imaginary world located somewhere in the reaches of
extension far from our skies.48 Suns and planets are
· formed by an evolutionary process commencing from an
initial chaos from which everything develops in strict obedience to permanent laws of motion. Living things and
the analogs of men, in this imagined world, come into existence in the same way. In the "Traite de L'homme",
these are "men of clay whom God has made to be as like
us as possible."49 Descartes does ascribe a mental constitution to these umen". Like US 1 they have ideas, appetites,
passions, and memories. The physical aspect of their existence is absolutely mechanical and wholly explicable
without any appeal to a mental constitution. Insofar as
Descartes believes that we are in fact such men, he
ascribes to us, here, a complete physiology without mindbody interaction.
I would like you to suppose that all the functions I have attributed to this machine, such as the digestion of food, the pulse
in the heart and arteries, the nourishment and growth of the
members, wakefulness and sleep; the reception of light, of
sounds, or odors, of heat and similar qualities, by the external
organs of sense; the impression of ideas from them on the
organ of common sense50 and of imagination, the retention or
engraving of these ideas in the memory; the interior movements of appetites and of passions; and finally the exterior
movements of all the members, which are so well suited both
to the action of objects presented to the senses and to iriner
passions, that they imitate as perfectly as possible those of a
true man: I say I would· like you to consider that these functions follow entirely naturally in this machine, from the mere
disposition of its organs, neither more nor less than the movements of a clock or other automatoh follow from the disposition of its counter weights and wheels; so that there can be no
reason at all to conceive in it any other vegetative soul, nor
sensitive soul, nor any other principle of movement and of life
than its blood and its spirits, excited by the heat of the fire
which burns continually in its heart, and which is of no other
nature than all the fires which burn in inanimate bodies. 51
Of course, Descartes does not mean that the workings
of the human body do not show any indisputable marks of
mind and intelligence at all. God is responsible for the
constitution of men and his workmanship manifests a
standard of creative intelligence that no engineer can approach. The human body reflects, therefore, the mind of
God, but in the creation of the body-machine God has utilized only extended particles interacting according to
fixed laws. From this point of view, all of the motions of
the human body, molar and microscopic, including all
those that go into voluntary actions, have their sufficient
physical causes. Only this exceptionless principle could
justify the corresponding claim that no motions of the
"men" of Le Monde require explanations that invoke a
mental function.
Descartes drew back from this wholly mechanical man.
He mars the consistency of his insight by allowing a
38
unique locus of mind-body interaction in the pineal
gland. In this tiny gland, the animal spirits, which are the
most rarefied blood-like constitutent of the nervous
system, are affected by the mind. Descartes invokes the
fragile support of the fact that the pineal gland is not double and is, to that extent, a plausible site for a central integration of the functions of the many dual parts of the
sensory system and brain. 52 The animal spirits are only
deflected by mental influence, according to Descartes' aC:
count, so that the total quantity of motion of physical
things can remain constant.
Had Descartes retained the rigorously consistent view
he formulated at the end of Le Monde, he might have been
led to abandon the concept of a substantial mind altogether. The idea of deflection of the animal spirits re·
quires a quasi-physical influence and leads at once to a
"paramechanical" conception of mind. 53 And the interac-
tion creates a fundamentally unintelligible leakage from
the self-sufficient sphere of physical activity. Mental deflection of particles, however subtle they may be, violates
a crucial feature of a mechanical system like that which
Descartes' physical universe is supposed to comprise.
This is expressed by later science as violation of the conservation of energy. If nonphysical agencies can cause any
movement or deflection at all, that movement or deflection could, for example, compress a spring or raise a
weight, thus causing an increase in total energy. Defects
in his understanding of force leave Descartes without an
appropriate concept of energy in terms of which he might
have grasped this criticism. However, his limitation of the
supposed influence of the mind to deflections that leave
"the quantity of motion" unchanged reveal Descartes'
own qualms concerning the compatibility of conservation
and mind-body interaction. His clear grasp of inertia, requiring uniform motion in a straight line, should have but
did not reinforce those qualms considerably.
But for the pineal gland Descartes' dualism would have
a very different force. The tendency of his total scientific
effort is the elimination of mental direction as a factor in
explanations of physical changes and motions. Beliefs,
acts of will, desires, and intentions do not move parts of
the body any more than an inner quality, gravity, moves a
heavy thing, or inner self-realizing heat creates changes in
a piece of wood. Of course, we are left with the fact that
men do act, execute their intentions, and gratify their
desires.
The uncompromised vision at the end of the "Traite de
L'homme" rejects the idea that the relationship between
psychological explanations of human behavior and physical explanations of the motion of bodily parts can be expressed as any kind of interaction between substances.
Beliefs, desires, and the like, figuring in psychological accounts, are not physical causes and only physical causes
can move material objects. All motions, even of "the
blood and the spirits" have sufficient physical causes
although we do not have a complete account of these
physiological events. "No other principle of movement" is
WINTER 1981
�required, not in the case of a man's body any more than in
the case of an automaton.
For myself, apart from the outmoded scientific details, I
think this view of bodily motions is correct. The right way
of capturing intellectually the relationship of mental concepts and physical events is at present the subject of
scientific investigation and of unsettled philosophical
reflection. At present, a materialist philosophy of mind
that identifies beliefs and desires with neural states and
processes is dominant. Like the theory of the pineal gland,
this contemporary materialism assigns a causal role to
mental things. For Descartes' paramechanical events materialism substitutes a frankly physicalist interpretation of
mental functioning. The theory gets undeserved support
from association with the sophisticated physiology and
anatomy that has replaced Descartes' curious conceptions
of the facts. As far as I can see, materialists have not offered anything at all to make it intelligible that a physical
occurrence in the brain can be a belief, or a desire, or a
thought. 54
There is a strange irony in the mechanical perspective
on the body expressed in Le Monde. It is as though we
start wanting to know how a certain miracle occurs the
miracle of mental control of movements in the physical
world. How does a desire and a belief move a hand? We
know that muscles, not thoughts, move hands. Nervous
impulses, not desires, move muscles. The ironic explanation of the miracle that Descartes reaches, at least on this
occasion, is that the miracle does not occur. Beliefs and
desires and other mental things simply cannot be attached
to motions as their causes. The same irony appears in
Descartes' account of the miracle of vision. How do we
manage to get a conscious picture of the external world
through the organs of sense? In the Optics Descartes explains what happens when we see, invoking as a helpful
analogy a blind man feeling his way with a stick! Descartes
particularly wants to reject the idea that "intentional
species," which scholastic philosophers took to be tiny images, leap into the eye and somehow migrate to an inner
center of conscious reception. He interprets the transmission of light as a kind of pressure which does not involve
the entrance of anything into the eye, 55 just as pressures
in the blind man's stick do not involve a flow of things
through the stick and then into the hand. This is the
thinking that lies behind the Second Meditation when
Descartes says
1
1
But it must be observed that perception of the wax is not
sight, not touch, not imagination; nor was it ever so though it
formerly seemed to be; it is a purely mental contemplation . ... 56
In other words the miracle of real contact with outer reality does not occur at all. So vision is like blindness and
mental control is really automatism.
These understandings would be grotesque but for their
profound appreciation of the idea that elements in our
discourse about conscious experience are not to be iden1HE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
tified with stages in physiological processes. The positive
thesis that Descartes adopts is unsatisfactory. Because he
thinks of the mind as a second substance with its own independent footing in reality, he is left with a "two-worlds"
view and the quagmire of unintelligible interaction that
leads to bizarre Occasionalism or idealist elimination of
the physical world altogether. Although he rightly rejects
confused interpretation of mental discourse that assigns it
physical referents, Descartes precipitates these difficulties because he posits an inevitably mysterious nonphysical mind.
The question remains, why did Descartes construct the
metaphysical proofs presented in the Meditations which
reflect the true foundations of his thinking so inadequately? There is a strand of reserve and secrecy in Descartes' writing. As a young man, Descartes described
himself with some aptness as entering on the stage of public life masked like an actor, so that his audience will not
see his true state of mind. 57 He intentionally published his
geometry in a form difficult to follow lest others, grasping
his discoveries too easily, claim to have possessed them already. He was always concerned about the reception of
his scientific innovations by religious authorities. He withheld the publication of Le Monde upon hearing of the
condemnation of Galileo by the Inquisition. He always organized his presentations as prudently as he could. His life
and letters show an exceptional desire for privacy and
avoidance of embroiling controversy. Leibniz and others
complain that he conceals the sources of his ideas which
often contain unacknowledged influence of the writings
of others. The first concern of Descartes as a writer is not
the artless expression of his personal thought.
Descartes, however, certainly did believe that the
many-sided insights of scientific works needed a coherent
metaphysical foundation to replace the discarded Aristotelianism. The theological turn of his arguments rests on
sincere religious commitment. Furthermore the metaphysical arguments do involve as their first stage the articulation of the subjective point of view, which has great
power and from which the metaphysical arguments are
mounted with a certain naturalness. It is worth emphasizing that this systematic subjectivism is not part of the context of scientific investigation for Descartes. Egocentric
skepticism is absent from the methodology of the Rules.
There is no hint of the method of doubt or of the phenomenological resolution of doubt by the cogito argument in
the scientific work presenting the findings that motivate
Descartes' dualism.
Finally, the metaphysical demonstrations constitute a
conservative and backward-looking project for Descartes,
relative to the progressive content of his scientific
thought. The crucial arguments are reconstructions and
new employments of ideas taken over from existing traditions. Starting from the cogito argument, the Meditations
are full of Saint Augustine. The ontological argument is
Anselm's. In discussing causes that contain the reality of
their effects ''eminently" versus "formally", Descartes is
1
39
�employing traditional scholastic distinctions. 58 The concepts of essence and existence, as Descartes employs
them, are taken over from Saint Thomas and Aristotle.
None of this battery of terms, concepts, and arguments
appear in the scientific contexts that really motivate Des·
cartes' dualism.
We can see the late metaphysical works as a restatement
in which Descartes tries to connect his radical conclusions
to existing traditions of thought. This understanding does
not confer any greater merit on the tortured theology of
the official proofs of dualism. I should say that the influence of dualism, which is certainly not due to these arguments, rests, first, on the appeal of the subjective starting
point of the Meditations and, second, on a rough, wide-
spread, frequently unstated appreciation of the tendency
of Descartes' scientific thinking which I have tried to describe here.
Conclusions
The philosophical issues to which Descartes' dualism is
addressed are still at the center of metaphysics and epistemology. In contrast, the relevance of Cartesian science
diminished rapidly following the appearance of Newton's
superior theories. Descartes has retained prestige as a
mathematician, although his mathematical work is read
chiefly by historians. But Descartes' metaphysical writings have always been studied, and they have exerted a
decisive influence on modern thought, especially through
Berkeley, Locke, and Hume. It is Cartesian metaphysics,
separated from the context of scientific thought, that has
influenced empiricism.
In assessing Descartes' dualism we should restore its sci-
entific setting. We should also ignore the deficiencies of
his outmoded conceptions. This does not mean only that
we should overlook Descartes' beliefs that a fire burns in
the heart and that animal spirits are a rarified form of
blood. More important, we have to ignore his limited conception of physical objects and his reduction of physical
events to motions and impacts among particles. Even his
idea of causality ill fits contemporary physics wherein
The seeming difficulty is clear. If mental things like
beliefs and desires are not physical causes, and if only
such causes can account for physical changes and motions, then what is the connection between beliefs and
desires and human actions to which beliefs and desires are
patently relevant? Under the pressure of this question,
Descartes allowed an exception to his otherwise rigorous
mechanism, a unique channel connecting two metaphys-
ically incommensurable worlds, namely, the pineal gland.
This is a mistake. The mistake is engendered by a
substance-conception of mind. Descartes patterns his
thinking about mental concepts on material things and
events, as though, by somehow subtracting materiality,
we arrive at nonmaterial things and events. This kind of
thinking is encouraged by the methodological outlook of
the Meditations. We are more or less forced to conceive of
the mental as a realm of things and events. The phenomenological perspective seems to certify the reality of mental goings-on, and then raises the question: What is all
this? By this we mean: What is the metaphysical status of
mental things, the existence of which is assured? When
the materialist identification is rejected, mental things
and events necessarily appear to be another kind of reality.
Then the problem of interaction is generated and Descartes' compromise, so destructive of his principle insight,
is motivated_
We have to ask: What is a conception of mentality that
does not generate a second realm of things and then lead
to the hopeless problem of interaction? This question
from Descartes' perspective is, What are we to make of
the phenomenology of the Second Meditation, if we
neither identify mental things with neural things nor posit
any substantial res cogitans. It is helpful here to focus on
truth where Descartes focuses on reality. The thinking
subject, tentatively repudiating all empirical knowledge,
finds that his own beliefs and desires, as such, are not
jeopardized. Though the outer world may all be illusion,
he believes, for example, that he is in a room with an open
fire, and he desires to warm himself. Belief and desire arc
thus insulated from empirical skepticism. Descartes reads
this, in the idiom of realities, as demonstrating the ex-
istence of certain things (ideas in the mind) or the occurrence of certain events (thinking). Though there may be
causal relations are expressed in equations that do not
break up reality into discrete consecutive events. Let us
no firelit room, my believing-that-there-is is something
just imagine all of Descartes' old-fashioned ideas replaced
by some up-to-date conception of the physical world. We
want a conception that is free of psychological and teleological ideas. We do use such a conception of physical
this mode of expression we can retain the insights of the
subjective point of view by saying that "I believe I am in a
reality in our thinking and it corresponds to, in fact it is
the heir of, Descartes' mechanical universe of extended
particles.
Given such a conception of the physical world, I believe
that Descartes is right to exclude explanations that introduce nonphysical factors as causes of physical events.
He is also right to refuse a materialist reduction of the
mind to the body. The joint assertion of mechanism and
rejection of mind-brain identity can appear paradoxical.
40
that does exist, and my desiring does occur. Abandoning
firelit room" and "I want to warm myself by the fire" are
true, and these truths are independent of the existence of
the room and the fire. Though these subjective reports
are true, what their truth implies about realities is not obvious. In particular, it is not obvious that believing and
desiring are things that are present in, or go on in men.
Elsewhere I have argued that any account of belief that
identifies believing with an inner something, whether material or nonmaterial, cannot be correct. 59 At the least, reflection on mental concepts creates serious questions
WINTER 1981
�about the unargued-for interpretation of these concepts
in terms of inner realities, that is, the inter¢retation that
Descartes shares with contemporary mind-brain materialism. If this interpretation is set aside, we can try to
overcome the illusion that mental states must be identified with brain states lest they be identified with states
of some unscientific and intrinsically mysterious nonmaterial mind. This illusion is one of the pillars of mindbrain materialism.
In the "Conversation with Burman," Descartes is close
to the kind of understanding I recommend here. Explanations that state the purpose for which things take place do
not give a causal account even if the claim about purpose
is correct 60 Applied to psychology, Descartes' insight
amounts to this: We ask a man why he has done something, fired a gun, for example. The answer tells us that he
desired something (to scare the birds away from his field)
and that he believed something (that firing the gun would
scare away the birds.) So a combination of a desire and a
belief explains the action by displaying the purpose of the
behavior explained. If Descartes is right, however, this
leaves untouched all physical questions of the form: What
caused this object to move? And is it not clear that Descartes is right? Assuming the correctness of the psychological explanation, we know the man's intention and
the point of his behavior. But none of this sheds light on
causes of the movement of his finger on the trigger, any
more than it sheds light on causes of the movement of tlie
·
bullet in the gun barrel.
There is something naive in the idea that a man's believings and wantings are states and events inside him that
are capable of moving parts of his body, as contracting
muscles can move fingers and expanding gases can move
bullets. It would be preposterous to say that "wanting to
scare birds" might directly cause the motion of a bullet.
Nor could wanting something directly cause the motion
of a finger. As Descartes puts it, motions of fingers depend on "the disposition of the organs", which means
that there are physical events and conditions in the nerves
and muscles which explain the motion of the finger.
These physical causes are certainly not what is referred to
as "wanting to scare birds." When we are subject to materialist inspiration, we are tempted to place the causal efficacy of mental things further along in remote neural
stretches of the sequence of physical events. "Wanting to
scare birds" then becomes a posited neural cause, the immediate effect of which also has to be posited. A vague
sense of the fabulous complexity of the brain helps us to
imagine that this transaction that would be preposterous
out in the open is easily accomplished in the nervous
system. But, in fact, "wanting to scare birds" does not
belong anywhere in a sequence of causally intelligible motions of things. Nor are wantings spiritual occurrences.
We must formulate the truth-conditions for "He wanted
to scare the birds" without making wanting into any occurrence at all.
The difference between the Cartesian theory of the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
pineal gland and the materialist theory is that the materialist asserts that the relevant mental things are
themselves physical states and events. He does this precisely to make them eligible as causes of motions while
saving the principle: physical motions must have physical
causes. That is the principle that Descartes adopts and
also compromises. But the trouble with mental things as
candidate causes is not just their vexed metaphysical
standing. From the point of view of physics "knowledge
of a thing's purpose never leads to knowledge of the thing
itself."" Here, knowledge of the thing itself means knowledge of the causes of physical changes. Beliefs and desires
explain actions in terms of purposes and goals. As Descartes believed, these explanations, even if they are correct, leave all questions of physics unanswered.
Translations are from the English"language versions cited in these
notes. Wherever there is no English reference the translations are mine.
No references are given for well-known themes of the Meditations except where passages are quoted. For my general understanding of Descartes I am much indebted to other writers and most indebted to
Etienne Gilson.
The following abbreviations are used in these notes:
AT I-XI C. Adam, and P. Tannery, Oeuvres de Descartes, Nouvelle
presentation, Paris 1964.
HR I-II E. S. Haldane, and G. R. T. Ross, The Philosophical Works of
Descartes, London 1911.
AG
E. Anscombe, and P. Geach, Descartes: Philosophical Writings, London 1964.
K
A. Kenny, Descartes' Philosophical Letters, London 1970.
*'*
l. This subtitle appears first in the second Latin edition, 1642; HR I,
144; AT VII, xxi.
2. AG 117. See also note 30.
3. January 1642, AT III, 491; K 127-8.
.
4. For Hobbes' view, HR II, 61; for Gassendi's, HR II, 142. Descartes'
replies: HR II, 63, and 211.
5. AG 69.
6. HR II, 25.
7. HR II, 83.
8. K 123: AT Ill, 474.
9. K 144.
10. The LJhrase is part of the title of the Second Meditation.
11. See Etudes sur le rOle de la pensee medievale dans la formation du
systeme Cartesien, esp. zeme pt., 1.
12. Discours, Ill, AT VI, 30; P. Olscamp, Discourse etc., Indianapolis
1965, 25.
13. July 22, 1641, K !09; AT III, 420.
14. May 21, 1643, K 139; AT III, 667.
15. "Postquam autem ulterius perrexi ... ,"AT VIII, 440; HR II, 253.
This suggests a temporal order in Descartes' thinking that cannot be
taken literally.
16. HR 11, 253-4.
17. April26, 1643, K 135-6; AT III, 648-49.
18. Compare Principles, pt. 2, art. 37: "The first law of nature: that each
thing as far as in it lies, continues always in the same state; and that
which is once moved always continues so to move." Art. 39 asserts that
"all motion is of itself in a straight line." HR I, 267. For an illuminating
account of Descartes' concept of inertia and its influence on Newton,
see A. Koyre, "Newton and Descartes," in his Newtonian Studies, Cambridge 1965,69-76.
19. Metaphysics, Z, 8, l033a-4a. But compare L, 4, 1070a. 'I'his passage
seems to allow a possible exception in the separate existence of the
41
�forms of natural beings and, in particular, of the rational soul of man.
The same kind of suggestion is made at H, 2, l043b, "Whether the substance of destructible things can exist apart is not yet at all clear; except
that obviously this is impossible in some cases; e.g., a house or a utensil.
Perhaps, indeed, neither of these things themselves, nor any of the
other things which are not formed by nature, are substances at all; for
one might say that the nature in natural objects is the only substance to
be found in destructible things," W. D. Ross, Oxford 1908. It must be
noted that Aristotle speaks here of forms by themselves as "substances."
On this confusing alternative usage he does not apply the term to composites of form and matter, although this is commonly his practice
elsewhere. 'At 1070b-la, Aristotle states flatly, "Some things can exist
apart and some cannot, and it is the former that are substances." These
passages very much conform to the conception of soul-like separable
constituents, capable of causing motions in things of which they are
forms, that is, the very conception that Descartes ascribes to the
scholastics and then rejects.
20. Metaphysics, H, 3, 1043a-b.
2l. Metaphysics, H, 6, 1045a-b.
22. Physics, I, A, 1, l93a.
23. On the Heavens, Bk. I, 1, 7-8, 276a-b; and Bk. 3, 2, 300a.
24. On the Heavens, Bk. 1, l, 8.
25. On the Heavens, Bk. 3, 7, 314b-6b, and On Generation and Corruption, Bk. 2, 4, 33la-2a.
26. Holders of the sort of view to which Descartes refers are not limited
to Aristotle and the Schoolmen of the thirteenth century and later who
were so deeply affected by the rediscovery of Aristotle's works. Even
Saint Augustine voices both the idea that heavy things are directed to
goal-like natural places by their weight, and the idea that this activity of
heavy bodies resembles human desire-guided behavior. Augustine says,
"Our body with its lumpishness [Augustine has merely 'corpus pondere']
strives towards its own place. Weight makes not downward only, but to
his own place also. All things pressed by their own weight go towards
their proper places ... Things a little out of their places become unquiet.
Put them in their order again and they are quieted. My weight is my
love. By that I am carried wheresoever I be carried." Confessions, Bk. 13,
Ch. 9; trans. W. Watts, London 1912, 391.
27. Physics, Bk. 2, 3_~nd 7.
28. Physics, Bk. 2, 1, 4l2a-b; and Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q 76, a 4.
29. De Anima, Bk. 2, 1, 412a-b; trans. J. A. Smith.
30. De Anima, 413 3 • I take this to be the precedent for Descartes' pilotship analogy in the Sixth Meditation.
31. Gilson shows that these doctrines are prominent in the manuals
from which Descartes was taught as a boy at La Fleche. See Etudes, 155
and 161 n. For a full survey of the Aristotelian concept of form and substantial form in patristic, scholastic, and Renaissance thought, see
"Form und Materie," in Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophie, ed. J.
Ritte<, Basell971, Vol. 2, 978-1015.
32. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q 76, a 4, Dominican trans.
33. Le Monde, AT XI, 7. See also Gilson's discussion of this passage,
Etudes, 152-53.
34. AG 94.
42
35. Descartes' Conversation with Burman, J. Cottingham, London 1976,
19.
36. HR II, 254. The view that self-preservation is the biological function
of our confused experience of pleasure and pain is also presented in the
Sixth Meditation, without reference to the inadequate theories that
Descartes thinks this confusion tends to promote. HR I, 197.
37. HR II, 255.
38. HR II, 255.
39. HR II, 255.
40. See Crombie, A.C., Medieval and Early Modern Science, New York
1959, Vol. 1, 128, and Vol. 2, 46 and 68ff. Crombie also reports medieval
theories involving natural place influenced by Plato's Timaeus and
incorporating the on-Aristotelian notion of multiple worlds (no one
center) such as that of Nicolas of Cusa. Such accounts are part of the
historical background of Descartes' vortex theory of planetary motion.
Insofar as these alternative medieval cosmologies accepted some version
of the idea of natural motion, they are simply further illustrations of
what Descartes took to be a universal error.
41. Art. 17, Latta, R., The Monadology etc., Oxford 1898,228. Latta also
quotes Leibniz's "Commentatio de Anima Brutorum," (1710): "Whence
it follows that, if it is inconceivable that perception arises in any coarse
"machine" whether it be made of fluids or solids, it is equally inconceivable how perception can arise in a finer 'machine' ... ," Gerhardt, ed.,
Phil. Schriften, Vol. 7, 328.
42. AT XI, 223-24.
43. AT XI, 224.
44. AT XI, 225.
45. ATXI,226.
46. For a survey of Descartes' discussions of automata and an interpretive investigation, see F. Alquie, La decouverte metaphysique de I' hom me
chez Descartes, Paris 1950, 52-54.
47. See Discourse, HR I, 116; and Principles, IV, art. 203-04, HR I,
299-300.
48. AT XI, 31.
49. AT XI, 120.
50. That is, the sensus communis, a hypothetical organ or faculty which
integrates the input of the several senses according to Thomas and
other scholastics.
51. AT XI, 201-02.
52. Passions, art. 32, HR I, 346.
53. This is Gilbert Ryle's penetrating epithet, from The Concept of
Mind, London 1949, 19.
54. See my, "Could Our Beliefs Be Representations in Our Brains?"
Journal of Philosophy, 76, 1979, 225-44.
55. Dioptrique, I, AT VI, 84.
56. AG 73.
57. Cogitationes Privatae, AT X, 213. See also H. Gouhier, Premieres
pensees de Descartes, Paris 1958, 67.
58. For example, Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q 4, a 2.
59. Summa Theologica, I, q 4, a 2.
60. Cottingham, 19.
61. Cottingham, 19.
WINTER 1981
�Family Pages, Little Facts: October
George Dennison
W
E LIVE AT THE NORTHERN EDGE
of the hardwoods
in central Maine, a region of hills and mountains,
ponds, lakes, streams, rivers. Most of the homes
lie scattered in the intervale below us, a flat, narrow valley
that IS freshened and sometimes flooded by a rocky
stream, but a few rest on the sides of hills, as does ours. It
is the second week of October. The slopes across from us
catch the morning sunlight and have become dazzling
banks of reds, oranges, and yellows, all the more intense
because of the shadowed evergreens around them. A
week ago delicate sheets of ice covered the puddles between our sheds, and the children lifted them entire and
looked at one another as through panes of glass, but now
the days are so warm that Patricia goes into the garden
without shoes. The insects are gone. Most of the birds are
gone. Long, gleaming filaments of airborne spiders drift
across the fields and over the ponds.
What a mood we are in! We are torporous, yet restless;
restless, yet free of discontent, as if walking through the
landscape of a dream. I drove to the lakeside mechanic's
this morning and saw a broad-backed, red-faced country·
woman emerge from her car and stand looking at that motionless water. "Oh God!" she called to me, though we
were strangers, HAin't it some weather!" An hour later I
saw her again, sleepwalking, as are the rest of us, staggermg past the bank and the grocery store.
I look out the window of my bedroom workroom and
see Patricia going slowly up the hill, deep in thought. She
the wood's edge, one
throws herself on the tall grass
ai
arm across her eyes.
I should be working.
Wherever I look one, two, or several leaves with
.
.
'
mg motions, fall to the ground.
rock~
The table is covered with yellow paper. On the topmost
sheet I read:
He is sleeping in the wheelchair, his small bald head hanging
all the way forward. . . .
·
-a description of my former neighbor, Dana Tomlin
who is in a nursing home now. But my eyes go again t~
the sunlit window, where flies that were dead last night
are buzzing violently. Their wings are twisted. Nothing
works. Theu flights are wild arcs ended by collisions.
It is impossible to sit here.
As I leave the room I hear a far-off barking and think of
yesterday's sight of the Canada geese, whose honking, in
the distance, had sounded like dogs, but we had heard it
agam, closer, and had realized what it was. They were
right above us, not in a V but an undulant long line, noisy
and rapid. How powerful and grand they are! Everything
about them is forceful and grand. They passed out of
sight qmckly, honking noisily and stroking like rowers
with their powerful wings, and I was surprised by the longing and sadness I felt.
Ida's class at school has been reading poems and she
had been asked to write some at home. She is ten. The
geese in flight, she had said that evening looked like the
fishermen's buoys we had seen at the ~cean. She was
right. The geese had drifted up and down in their formation as if long, gently heaving swells were passing under
them. She composed aloud, dictating, and I wrote the
words for her:
Geese, when they are flying south
look like strings of buoys
bobbing up and down
on the deep, wide ocean.
Geo:ge Dennison recently published Oilers and Sweepers and Other
Sto~ws {Random House 1979). In 1969 he published The Lives of
Chddren: The Story of the First Street School.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Liza, her .sister, who is two years younger than she,
began chantmg all kinds of things, and some of these too
we wrote as poems:
43
�When the days are orange
leaves are falling down.
As I come out of the house the geese, the poems, the
girls-and four-year-old jacob, who had sabotaged everything that evening-mingle in my thoughts with images
from long ago that have been coming into consciousness
of late: fields of brown grass, a yellow brick building in
which certain sisters lived, twelve and thirteen, with
brand-new breasts.
If I had thought that I was going somewhere, this stepping out of doors into the mild, bright sunlight turns out
to be an arrival, and I realize abruptly that I don't know
what to do. I stand there indecisively and look across the
yard at the three dogs, who are sprawled in the grass with
as deep a lassitude as my own, and who lift their heads to
look at me, but do not alter their positions.
The dirt road ends in our dooryard. Across the road are
the barn and the shed, and between them, nose to nose
and bathed in light, stand the two drowsy, half-wild ponies. They are a sight to see. They have been gorging for
weeks. Our crop of corn had ripened progressively and
had been husked in the grass near the cornfield, and the
ponies had attended every session. They had eaten all the
husks, all the silk, many unfilled tips of ears. They had
consumed whole bushels of cooked cobs. After that had
come the apples, a flood of them, and once a feast of
slightly rotten pears. The ponies are so fat now as to be
comical, yet they are handsomer and more vigorous than
ever, and are enchanting to watch when they sprint in the
evening, as they do without fail before dark, just as the
fork-tailed swallows, all summer long, had sped around
and around the house at sunset. They gallop madly, apparently with abandon. They toss up their heads and then
plunge downward, kicking both heels high. They whinny
and veer off through the small orchard and come drumming back again, their curved haunches bunching and
thrusting powerfully. Their winter coats are almost complete: richly colored, deep-piled hair that is almost fur, a
mixture of soft and coarse that will bring them through
nights of twenty below, and a few of forty. They lift their
heads as I approach, and move them from side to side
looking sharply at my hands, which are empty of apples. I
stand there a moment scratching the powerful jaw of the
chestnut male, and he drops all the weight of his head into
my hands, either playfully or simply for the enjoyment of
resting. Without quite realizing what I am doing I close
my eyes and breathe deeply his mild, clean, yet pungent
aroma. And then I become aware that this streaming of
heated odors from his mouth and barrelled sides is consoling and deeply reassuring. Only a few seconds have
elapsed, but the jealous dogs are trotting toward me and
the foremost, a golden retriever, is barking querulously.
Now ponies and dogs follow me into the orchard, the dogs
gamboling competitively around my feet and the ponies
ambling lazily, moving their bodies as if in sections.
Only eight apple trees are left. Once there were four
44
hundred and the orchard went uphill into what is now a
stand of maples and pines. A few apples still dangle from
their twigs, plump and generous, and wonderfully decorative against the blue of the sky. I throw a stick and three
come down, and the alert ponies draw near. While I feed
an apple to the chestnut gelding, I hear again-actually I
imitate it in my throat-the slurred, dense, attractive
voice of old Eddie Dubord, who ten days ago helped me
split wood with a rented hydraulic splitter. He had fed an
apple to the pony in just this way, scratching the working
great muscles at the base of its jaw, saying, "Yeah,
Starbright, you put your firewood inside you, don't you!
Yeah-uhhh .... "
The ponies stay, the dogs follow me to to the vegetable
garden which is just uphill of the house. I lean on a rail of
the crude fence and look thoughtfully at the surviving
greens.
meant something! My
thoughts are scattered like leaves. I am scarcely a
person. There in front of me are the late crops that
must be harvested, the broccoli, Swiss chard, collard
greens, Brussels sprouts, survivors of the first frosts, and I
do actually see them, but I see the children, too, made
quiet by the stillness and the mild sun, wearing puffy
orange vests, kneeling in the canoe while I move us glidingly over the reflections of clouds and colored trees. It
was only yesterday, but these are remembered things now
and are almost on a par with other memories; exciting Fall
weather and I'm running home past lighted windows,
tossing a football. Again now, as repeatedly in recent
weeks, I see my mother's exhausted brave face the day
before she died, almost four years ago. The disease had invaded all parts of her body. She had become too weak to
hold a spoon or lift a cup. Early that morning it had spread
again and she could no longer form words. A young nurse
had been coming to the house. She had just changed the
bedsheets and gently lowered my mother's head to the
mound of pillows. My mother spoke to her, but a blurred,
gutteral sound came from her mouth, shocking to hear.
Without expressing annoyance, my mother closed her
lips, raised her hand and stroked the young woman's head.
The nurse had grown fond of her and was weeping as she
left us. We heard the opening and closing of the front
door. My mother looked at me and held out her hand. I
went to her. She took my hand and laboriously drew it to
her lips, and with a steady, grave look held it there a long
while, kissing it. Three years later my father too was dead,
not on the anniversary of her death, as he had hoped.
Now that they are gone I hear my mother's voice in my
own, and notice outbreaks of my father's temper. There
are glimpses of his face in Liza's brow and chin, and in
Jacob's eyes. Ida resembles my mother. Several days ago,
in the afternoon, when already this motionless time had
begun, I gave up stalking partridge in the shaggy high
fields of a neighbor and lay down in the sun by a stone
A
S IF THIS PURPOSIVE GAZE
WINTER 1981
�wall that made me think of loaves from an oven, and was
pulled under instantly. I slept deeply and for a long time,
and then did not awaken at once but passed into a waking
dream in which I imagined that I was coming into the entranceway of our present house, making noise, and my fa-
ther leaned around through the inside doorway angrily.
He was talking on the phone. He covered the mouthpiece
and began to upbraid me, but I forestalled him by indicating my apologies with gestures. I noticed that I had set
aside false pride and had not responded to his anger with
anger of my own. I began to feel buoyant. The actions of
the dream took on the quality of revelation. I put my arm
around him and kissed his forehead, and he blushed and
smiled happily. I too was happy, and I felt the excitement
of liberation that comes with understanding. The dream
changed now entirely into insight, a train of thought, the
gist of which stirred me as deeply as had the images. I
understood that touching, affectionate touching would
ease our relationship of its angers and relieve his need for
tokens of esteem. I thought of the times he had responded to affection with just this melting surprise,
blushing and smiling.
But a terrible unease invaded all this reasoning. Something was wrong. I became aware that I was not awake,
then opened my eyes and sat up in the cooling shadows of
the wall and remembered that my father was dead. The
ground was damp. The sun was low and the sky was white
with clouds. The sadness I felt was a child's sadness. I remembered things I had forgotten for decades, and could
see the faces of my parents in their youth, good-looking
and far younger than I was now. The images were so nu-
merous that I could scarcely register them ... and in the
very instant that I became aware of their abundance, they
vanished. I wanted to stop their going but could not, and
when I tried to call them back I found that my mind was
blank. I set out through the woods, which soon began to
darken, and walked the long way home without thought
at all.
who had been lolling at my feet while
I gazed at the garden, suddenly leaped up and
whirled around, barking explosively. They ran to the
road, arrayed themselves across the brow of the hill, and
with legs braced and heads slightly raised, barked without
cease. The sound of a lightweight motor grew louder, and
then a battered blue Volkswagen parted the dogs, who
bounded stiff-legged beside it, barking obstreperously as it
rolled to a stop under the locust trees.
Justine was nursing her baby. She smiled at me and
waved and looked down at the inconspicuous head. Her
somewhat pretty husband waved too, and sat there
behind the steering wheel watching them. A few minutes
later the chortling infant was clinging to its mother's hip,
wet-lipped and bedazzled, and I bent over to admire it,
really to bask for a moment in Justine's heady aura.
She asked for Patricia. I said that she was sleeping and
T
HE THREE DOGS,
1BE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
offered to get her. "No, no," said Justine, stopping me
with her hand, "we're not going yet . ... "
We carried five sacks of apples into the barn. The huge
space was dim and cool and was striped gorgeously with
gleaming blades of sunlight between the boards, vertical
in the walls and horizontal in the gables. Other bulging,
lumpy sacks, smelling of apples and hempen fibers, leaned
against one another in the hayloft. Beneath the loft and to
one side of it stood the massive press of roughhewn
beams. In a week or two we would gather here, perhaps
twenty of us. The sacks would be lifted and the apples
dumped noisily into a narrow high trough, along which
they would be hurried by hand to the belt-driven grinder.
A worker with a wooden rake would shove the emerging
pulp down another trough, steeply pitched, onto the
square platform of the press. There it would be levelled in
layers and covered with strong cloths stained a rich sienna
from many years of pressing. When the layers were complete, still other friends, pushing three or four abreast at a
stout lever, like sailors at a capstan bar, would crank the
giant screw slowly tighter, and the sweet smell of apples
would grow more intense. There would be ten or a dozen
children and several unengaged adults standing around or
sitting on the edge of the hayloft, legs dangling. After the
first pale flowing into the wax-lined barrel everything
would stop. Cups and glasses and dippers of this finest,
purest juice would be passed around, and many voices
would comment on its quality.
Justine and Henry would be missing all this. They were
going home to Albany for the winter. Patricia had offered
to press their cider and send it down by a mutual friend.
Before they left they stopped in the high doorway of
the barn and glanced at each other.
"The weirdest thing happened that night we did the
lambs," Henry said. I had helped him butcher two ewes.
They owned a ram as well, but had let it live, intending to
board it for the winter.
"We were just ready to go to bed," he said, "when we
heard this knocking at the door. ... "
"It was a pounding," said Justine. "It was strong."
"I said, 'Who's there?' -but there wasn't any answer,"
said Henry, "only this pounding. I thought, wow, what is
it? I opened the door, and my God, I couldn't see
anything ... but I heard something, and then I felt
something rush past me .... "
"It was the ram," Justine said. "He was wild. He ran
through the whole house. He pushed open the hall door
and went to the woodshed and stood there butting the
door . ... "
''That's where the ewes were," said Henry, "they were
hanging from the rafters in the woodshed."
-which I knew, as I had helped him carry the carcasses, and had myself draped the skins over the neat
stacks of split wood.
After they had gone I went to my room and wrote the
story of the ram in a notebook, appending it to a description of the slaughtering and cleaning of the ewes.
45
�I
SAT THERE A WHILE
reading earlier entries in the note-
book-descriptions, ideas, quoted words. There are
many such notebooks in this room, and journals as well,
and diaries, saved letters, clippings, unfinished literary
projects ... so much of it, finally, that I can scarcely avoid
seeing that its real purpose all along has been to stop the
draining away of time.
My parents' photograph album is here, on a shelf
among books. It ends in their early adulthood. I was six
then, my sister five, my bwther four. I seldom open it.
Those ochre and ivory images are as if imprinted on my
mind, one especially, of my mother as a young woman,
just twenty-two, extremely pretty, with something innocent in her face, a leftover glow of childhood. She wears a
skirted bathing suit. Her legs are curled to the side and she
is leaning on one arm in shallow water, on a sandy beach.
She seems to be happy and is looking trustingly into the
camera. Her arms and legs are long, yet are handsomely
rounded. Her abdomen, too, is slightly curved, but I
myself, in embryo, am the cause of that. How strangely
this image affects me! Here is the woman herself, who
later vanished into that beloved invention called mother!
And here, invisibly, is the young man, the mere youth
holding the camera. What was he like, free of me? Here
also am I, before time has begun. This picture astonishes
me. It entices and baffles me ....
vigorous, brash and tender. The strap of her canteen
crosses her chest diagonally, and she wears a headband,
from which a large fern sweeps back rakishly, like a plume.
She looks adventurous and dashing. The leader of this
trio, however, is observant, bright-faced Ida, who moves
along so lightly that one might expect her to turn a cartwheel at any moment, or take leave of the ground
entirely.
The children's faces are intent and serious. Having
greeted the dogs, they are silent again. They cross the
yard ... and Jacob deserts his sisters. "Mommy! Mommy!"
he calls. They have not seen Patricia, who is standing in
the grass now and is fully dressed. I hear the opening of
the front door, and hear it slamming backwards, and hear
the voice again, "Mommy! Mommy!" suddenly babyish.
This summons, and the flood tide of demand held in
readiness behind it release me from the doting happiness
I had been feeling. I become defensive. I let him call
Mommy! Mommy! and though I haven't moved, the fact
is, I am hiding. I say to myself He'll reject me if I go down,
it's Patricia that he wants-but I know that this is not the
reason. The reason is that this present mood, in which the
feelings are so close to words and the words to feelings, is
precious to me and must be defended, especially against
Jacob, whose demands are innocent and boundless. And
so I sit at my table and take up my papers. From the window to my right I can see the roadside trees of the valley.
Most are not large, but spaced among them are the
stumps of elms that once were large indeed. How handsome that road must have been when the huge trees towered over it, and wagons and horses went along in their
I
of the dogs again, and go
to the window. They have not run to the road, but in
the opposite direction, to the woods. Now I hear the
HEAR THE CHALLENGE BARKING
children's voices, and in the same instant, with a shock of
embarrassment, I see Patricia, entirely naked, sit up in the
tall grass and with hasty, guilty movements shake out her
red blouse and blue skirt. After the embarrassment, I feel
affection, admiration, and compassion for her middleaged longings, her large and stately, slightly dumpy, oddly
childish middle-aged body.· Then small anxieties appear. ...
But now the children come into view, who have long
been the antidote to my own desperations, and such happiness leaps within me as is almost frightening. How could
I deserve these three? They come through the wagonbreak in the low stone wall, where years ago cattle came
and went. They step out of the shadows of the trail into
the open sunlight of the yard, bare-legged, as in the
depths of summer. All three, even four-year-old Jacob,
carry walking sticks picked up in the woods. I can see the
barbaric whorls and streaks-red and blue Magic
Marker-Jacob had applied to his arms and cheeks after
breakfast. His shorts are cut-off jeans. Someone-Ida,
probably-has placed the stems of ferns under his belt.
The ferns cross his chest and flutter as he strides along.
He goes beside Liza, his great love, who is stalwart and
46
shade! The past is everywhere. There are cellar holes deep
in the woods, inexplicable stone walls, farm roads that are
now deer trails, rows of grayed apple trunks crumbling
among maples and pines. The papers on my table are de·
scriptions of these things, and of some of the surviving
elders, whose rural graciousness and sweet modesty have
often astonished me. The topmost pages are of Dana
Tomlin, whom I have seen twice this week at the nursing
home, and who is ninety-eight now. Three years ago, late
in the summer, I saw him standing in line at the bank
looking shyly all around him and smiling continually. He is
the eldest of the town's elders, and his manner showed a
consciousness of his status, but his wrinkled face was as
shy and sweet as a child's. His look of grateful happiness
affected everyone. People came to him and greeted him,
and he returned their greetings, though it was clear that
he did not know who they were. He was well-knit, or had
been-of a middle size and workaday substantiality. He
wore an old gray suit, a gray fedora hat, and button-up
shoes of a soft black leather. When he came to the teller's
window, he tweaked open a pouch-like leather purse,
looked down into it soberly, and rummaged about with his
thumb and forefinger. He was walking well then and must
have weighed thirty pounds more than he does now. He is
confined to a wheelchair, and his thighs and shins have
become mere rods of bone.
WINTER 1981
�I
HAD WRITTENo
... He was asleep in the wheelchair-rather, there in the
chair was a heap of old clothes out of which a hairless speckled head hung forward alarmingly. The young woman shook
him gently and said, "Dana ... Dana .... " There were other
patients in the community room. Some had been studying me
from the moment I had come in. Now at the sound of her
voice most of the others turned their heads. "Dana .... "
There was a stirring amidst all that clothing, as when some
small, shy forest creature stirs under a covering of leaves. He
braced himself with his hands. The cords of his neck tightened, and his shoulders and back slowly straightened. At last
he was looking at us. His small speckled face was anxious.
"Dana," the young woman said, "your visitor is here. You're
going out in the car today. Have you forgotten? It's a beautiful
day, Dana."
His face relaxed and took on its characteristic sweetness,
and he said, "Yes," very faintly, but he was still confused.
She spoke to him once more, in the loud, clear voice of nurs·
ing homes. He blinked laboriously while he listened. The
doughy, almost liquid folds around his eyes merged so thoroughly that it was surprising to see them part again.
"You can take him to his room. Call me if you need help,"
the young woman said, adding quietly, "He can't turn the
wheels."
I guided the chair down the corridor. He was looking at the
hands in his. lap. Presently he raised his head and said whisperingly, "Oh ... it's funny ... you know ... I can't always
think of what I want to. Tell me again where you live."
"I live in the house your sister lived in. You brought her
over one day about five years ago."
I was not sure he had heard me. He lifted his hand to his
watery triangular blue eyes and patted it with a handkerchief
was shearing sheep, so dad said to me, 'Would you rather haul
milk, or shear?' and I said,"-here he turned to me, smiling
wittily and peering goodhumoredly out of that triangular blue
eye-"I said it didn't make no difference, they was both work.
So that's when I started. I was sixteen years old .... "
I heard footsteps, then a rapping of knuckles on my
door, at no great height. The door moved inward, and
there in the doorway stood strong, diminutive Jacob, grinning expectantly. I could see that he had been primed
with a speech. His eyes danced on mine and he shouted
happily, "Hurry up, daddy, we're starved t' death!" Before
I could answer, the smile faded from his face, and his fouryear-old eyes darted omnivorously about the room. "What
are you doing?" he said-a temporizing question. By the
time he had reached me his fingers had handled half-adozen things. Someone-Patricia or Ida-had washed his
face and hands. He leaned against me and said, "Can I
see ... daddy, can I see the hunting knife and the pistol?"
He went by himself to the drawer where these things were
kept, and opened the drawer slowly, looking back at me
over his shoulder. I stood behind him and watched him
unsheath the knife, and unwrap the soft cloth from the
-automatic. The pistol awed him. He had scarcely any idea
what it could do, nor was it a symbol of anything in his
eyes, though certainly its sequestered place had given it
status. It was the object itself that impressed him, so
weighty and handsome. He turned it in his small
hands ....
There came a pounding on the downstairs wall that was
obviously Patricia, Liza, and Ida pounding in unison, and
we put away the knife and gun and went down to supper.
that had been balled in his fist. The other eye, the left, is blind
with cataracts.
"I had four brothers ... two sisters ... and a mother and
father," he said falteringly, "now I'm all that's left."
He sat there just breathing for a moment, apparently recovering from the effort of talking; and then with cautious, trembling movements he extracted a handkerchief from the breast
pocket of his flannel shirt, unwrapped a set of dentures and
fixed them into place.
"They drop out very easily now," he said, "so I keep them
in my pocket." The lines across his forehead deepened and
his single good eye grew brighter. He was smiling. "I lost two
teeth out o' them," he said. ''I'm afraid o' losin' the whole
thing." His entire face brightened with shy humor, astonishing to see, and in this very moment of finding pleasure in his
own wit he remembered that we had planned to go out, and
that I was the one who was writing something about the early
days of the town. Fifteen minutes later we were driving in my
car along a hilltop road in the most delicious sunlight and air.
There were woods to the left of us, and long vistas of pastures,
woods, and distant hills to the right, and he was telling me of
the milk route he had serviced for sixty years. His melnories
were geographical. He could recall the time of a thing once he
had established the place of it.
"We got started because the old creamery failed," he said.
"My dad went around to the farmers and asked if they'd let us
haul their cream to the North Folsom creamery. They said
they would. It was March. My dad took ill, and my brother
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
with autumn colors. One would
think that by now they would be familiar, but they remained astonishing, and our eyes, as we ate, at least
Patricia's and mine, went back to them again and again.
Glowing, blazing, flaming . .. one uses fire words. No
others are accurate. It is not only that the colors are intense, but that the leaves are translucent, the light passes
through them, and the colors are lit from within. It is due
to this effect, too, and to the profuse scattering of the
leaves in space that one receives so little sense of discrete
surfaces, but sees instead a vibrating haze of color.
The dining-room door was open, and the doorway
framed three bands of color. The topmost, a narrow band,
was a soft, rich blue. Then came the wide band of the
saturated reds and ochres. And finally-the widest band
of all-the bronzed greens of the dying grass.
VERY WINDOW GLOWED
E
blood
cranberries
pomegranate
Morocco leather
red apples
dark roses
hot magentas
rose madders
47
�-these are the reds of the red or swamp maple, some of
whose leaves also turn orange. The clouds of saffron,
slightly rusted, are poplars and birches. Here and there
one sees the dull purples of white ash, and the buckskin
and tobacco shades of red oak. But the flaming oranges
and lighter reds, the saturated ochres and the deep, sal·
mon pinks are sugar maples, intensified in color by the
pine, spruce, fir, and hemlock that surround them.
We ate quickly, almost heedlessly, so drawn were we to
the lingering warmth and light at the open door. Jacob
was the first one out. And as often happens, he gave immediate, naive expression to impulses we others felt as
well as he but were too inhibited to act upon. He began to
leap and twirl and throw out his arms. He kept it up even
after we others came out. Ida and Liza joined him at once,
and so did the three dogs, who barked in high-pitched,
complaining voices and ran from one whirling child to another. Patricia glanced at me and laughed. She was still
barefoot. She pranced out into the midst of the capering
figures and began to swing her arms and lift her knees. I
followed behind her, in spite of my self-consciousness. By
now the dogs were barking hectically. They plunged
against one another, sideswiping and nipping. A rubber
ball was lying there in the grass, and I threw it toward the
front of the house. All three dogs sped after it. They centered on it, growling in strange, plaintive tones. The aging
retriever picked it up ... and here one must say Ia and
behold! for just as the dogs turned, the brown pony and
the black one emerged from beyond the house, and all
five animals, side by side, wheeled together in a momentarily perfect flank, and came prancing towards us abreast.
Ida shouted with delight. Liza turned to see what was hap·
pening, and she shouted too. I glanced at Jacob. He hadn't
noticed a thing. He was still dancing. He was chanting or
talking to himself, was whirling and jumping, and kept
throwing out his arms, first one and then the other, m
marvelous, mighty gestures . ...
woods to my left. Had there really been a melting sun that
afternoon? There was no illusion now: winter was coming.
All this landscape that had seemed to be an emanation of
one's own torporous dream was real again. There were
real chores to do, real wood to split, carry and stack, real
cabbages to hang in the root cellar, chard and collards to
be picked and frozen, screens to be taken down, storm
windows to be installed, hay to be covered in the barn so
that the cider-makers wouldn't wet it ....
Earlier in the year I had tried to follow the spring thaw
in daily notes, and had brought my notes through May,
having kept track, though certainly skimpily, of returning
birds and returning green, and of the sequence of the
wildflowers. On the last day of May I wrote:
... more rain. Lilacs everywhere. The locust leaves are wellestablished, but are not full size. Dandelions are going to seed,
though the yellow heads are still plentiful. A few lightning
bugs ...
-and there my journal ended. Which is to say that it was
at this moment that I was carried off in the flood of sum·
mer, aware only that everything was shooting upward,
was spreading outward, was beautiful, and that I myself
was spinning like a top. Now in the dwindling of the cold
it all becomes perceptible again. Within a week the lavish
colors were gone, and the last leaves, as usual, did not fall
of their weight, but were pulled away by the wind and
knocked down by rain. Soon the hills had darkened to the
shadowed greens that would last until spring. The coldness of the nights persists into the days, and there comes
an afternoon that "spits snow," followed by a morning of
whiteness, which the sun transforms into vapors and fat
drops of water at the eaves. In the woods I notice a small
moth beating this way and that, apparently haphazardly,
and I wonder where it is going and how it survived the
freeze of the night before. And then, driving in the dark·
ness over wet asphalt roads, I see in the headlight beams,
as always this time of year, every quarter-mile or so in the
intervale, a little frog, or several, hopping across the road.
WALKEDALONE after dark up the lumber road that passes
for a mile through woods and then emerges into fields.
It was cold and the wind was moving briskly through
the trees. I wore a sweater and a woolen jacket. There had
been stars, but now the ~ky was overcast. Two screech
owls were screaming back and forth in the dark stretch of
I
48
They are so purposive, so doomed, so pathetically ineffi·
cient, going up laboriously in high Gothic arches just to
move forward a foot or two! I laugh and shake my head at
the wretches, yet slow the car so as to avoid crushing
them. They had been sitting on the heat-retaining road,
fending off the cold. Soon enough that glistening black
surface will be white with snow and ice.
WINTER !981
�The Latin-American Neurosis
Carlos Rangel
The political ground of Latin-American society has not
yet gotten over the earthquake of the Cuban revolution;
for that matter, no recovery is possible. What happened in
Cuba since 1959 marks at least as much of an era as the
Wars of Independence in the first quarter of the nineteenth century and as the enunciation of the Monroe
Doctrine in 1823.
The Monroe Doctrine's Perverse Results
For about one hundred and thirty-three years, Latin
America, a mosaic of sovereign states, existed in an infantile way in the face of the complexities of international
politics. Only Bolivar and a few other statesmen of the
generation of the struggle for independence grasped the
differences between the imperialistic powers and the risks
run by the small and the weak in a world where power settles essential questions. European affairs directly involved
this handful of untypically clearsighted men born under
Spanish rule. They lived high international politics intensely, often at a distance, but sometimes, like Miranda
and Bolivar, on the scene of events. France between 1789
and 1815 fascinated them like everybody else. They came
to understand strategic power-above all the naval power
that had decided events in England's favour. They kept in
touch with England, sometimes at the highest level-contacts favored by Whitehall's early concern at the crumbling
of Spain's empire in America. Because with Napoleon's
downfall they immediately perceived the danger of a
A Venezuelan, partly educated in the United States {at New York University), Carlos Rangel wrote The Latin Americans: Their Love-Hate Relationship With the United States (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1977), a
book that has become something of a classic in France.
This article first appeared in 1980 in the spring issue of Commentaire.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
restoration of the ancien regzme in their America also,
these men greeted President Monroe's declaration enthusiastically. Only Bolivar, however, grasped that LatinAmerica was exchanging the certainty of subjection to a
North American protectorate for the "open" risk run by
the other weak regions exposed to conquest, intervention,
or colonization by the great powers of Europe.
The external protectorate suffered one noteworthy
breach. Absorbed in their Civil War, the North Americans
did not check France's violation of the Monroe doctrine
when it sent troops to support Maximilian, installed by
Napoleon the Third on the throne of Mexico. But this
was merely an episode. The higher ranks of Latin-American society soon forgot that in the world as it is, the sovereignty and security of weak countries run permanent
risks. They took Monroeism for a part of the landscape
without anyone noticing, for a long time, that it diminished sovereignty and encouraged irresponsibility. Here is
the deep, perhaps irreparable harm that the United States
did Latin America-not the grievances habitually listed
under "imperialism."
Political maturity, the realism necessary for reasonably
effective policy, springs from the recognition of the precarious character of all security and from the consequent
recognition that survival requires unremitting efforts to
increase a society's margin of safety with its available ways
and means. Real military power matters-not a comic
opera army-and a serious, consistent, not excessively inept foreign policy. A society that meets these minimal
conditions will probably find itself upon the way of modernization and economic development. For economic development and modernization are the consequences
rather than the causes of political maturity. But Monroeism deprived Latin America of the "natural selection"
that makes political maturity the necessary condition of
49
�survival. With Monroeism (except perhaps in Brazil,
which would explain a great deal) the creole class suddenly regressed to the state of irresponsibility it had lived
in before the North-American and French revolutions
brought the "abnormal" generation of Independence.
The combination of Monroeism with traditions of slavery,
of a feudal-mercantilist economy with parish-pump politics, the legacies of three centuries of Spanish rule, pro-
duces after 1830 widespread mediocrity, specifically, the
"political underdevelopment" thaf)ean-Fran9ois Revel
has rightly underscored. 1 To explain the deep frustration,
-of a sOciety othCrwise fortunate in its endowment -you
have to look, as Revel suggests, to this "political underdevelopment." With its predominantly western character
this body of human beings should not theoretically offer
major obstacles to modernization, to economic and social
development, or to stable democracy. Some of these
countries even enjoy an urban infrastructure and "modern" institutions, such as universities, that are older than
those in the United States. In addition, the region enjoys
exceptional advantages in natural resources; in a living
space ample for its population; in a varied climate (which
cannot, therefore, be held accountable); in navigable
rivers, in a supply of fresh water unequalled elsewhere
which affords considerable resources for hydroelectric
power, etc. These relative advantages distinguish LatinAmerica from the rest of what is called the "Third World."
After 1945 with the complete realization of the "interAmerican system" and with the United States' assumption not only of hemispheric but of world leadership, the
security guaranteed South America free of cost even
made wars between Latin-American countries inconceiv-
-able: The activation of the "system" could stop outbreaks
of hostilities within a matter of hours (for instance in Honduras and El Salvador in 1969). But with the new era inaugurated by the Cuban revolution and the coincident
Americans. With astounding reasoning the Mexican
philosopher, Leopolda Zea (whom Jean Fran9ois Revel
cites), takes not only Washington's former complicity with
Latin American dictatorships for a manifestation of
Yankee imperialism, a truism, but he also calls the Carter
administration's pressure on right-wing dictatorships that
torture, diabolical neo-imperialism. Wicked and powerful,
the United States can do anything. We can do nothing.
After twenty years the embargo and the malevolence of
the United States still serve to excuse Cuba's failure in
everything except its resolute and lasting defiance of
North American predominance in the hemisphere -a defiance that lends the Cuban revolution prestige and measureless importance.
The Latin-American Neurosis
On a visit to Argentina in March 1979, in all likelihood
on business for the Chase-Manhattan Bank, David Rockefeller had a curious exchange with an Argentinian journalist at a press conference:
Journalist: You say that you have come to Argentina for meetings with bankers, but I have here a list of ten business enterprises, ostensibly Argentinian, actually controlled by your
family. Were you ignorant of this fact?
Rockefeller: Perhaps, if you show me the list, I may be able
to reply.
): (Reads a list)
R: Well, the International Basic Economy Corporation
(IBEC) is a company founded by my brother Nelson, who
died recently, and now directed by his son. Other companies
on your list are subsidiaries of IBEC. So it's correct that my
family has connections with them. But what are you driving
at?
): The Rockefeller family controls the policies of the
world, serious conflicts like the barely avoided war between Chile and Argentina over the Beagle Channel
again became possible in Latin America. Prolonged and
United States whatever the party in power. I should like to
know if you also intend to control Argentinian and Latin
American politics thanks to the companies you own i:n our
country, and the several score of others that belong to you in
Latin-American, such as Exxon and others on this other list.
bloody civil wars like the recent one in Nicaragua occur.
(Reads it).
All this happens with only the most cautious involvement
of the United States and without the activation of the
R: Your question is somewhat absurd. My family owns
none of the companies you have just mentioned. We are dealing with joint-stock companies in which one or other of us
from time to time may hold one percent or less of the shares.
The only exception is Rockefeller Center, which belongs entirely to us. My grandfather founded E:X:xon a hundred years
ago, but today we have almost nothing invested in it. You are
mistaken in supposing that we strictly control the businesses
on your list
widespread erosion of North-American power in the
"inter~American
system."
·with the crisis in Monroeism, denied by Washington
for some years but today recognized even in Presidential
speeches, Latin American leaders have experienced, with
dread, the inherent precariousness of the internal make-up
of their states and even of their survivaL' The bankruptcy
of the alibi that attributed every disagreeable occurrence
in Latin-America to outside interference (North-American
imperialism or-the obverse of the same false coin-the
international Communist conspiracy) should finally be
evident. Latin America, however, continues to be the last
region of the globe where educated men, with access to all
the available information, continue to pretend to believe
·in the omniscience and all-powerfulness of the NI;>rth
50
In his subsequent article (from which I drew the previous quotation) our insightful journalist delighted in his
success in making David Rockefeller admit his family was
sole owner of Rockefeller Center. 3 For this "holding com,
pany" could be presumed to own in its turn one hundred
and thirty-two companies in Latin America, including the
Exxon subsidiaries. Obviously, this fairly influential jourWINTER 1981
�nalist does not know what Rockefeller Center is. But what
need is there to bother about details of this kind, when a
member of the clan leaves the fortresses of Wall Street to
descend upon defenceless Argentina:
These people don't travel to far-away countries like ours
merely to inspect a bank branch. They come to have conversations with the Minister of Finance (an actual reason, it appears, for l\!Ir. Rockefeller's trip) and to receive information,
confidential information, about our economy-information
not vouchsafed the people of Argentina.
In politics and economics paranoia serves to keep a cer-
tain number of Latin-American leaders at the level of the
most out-of-date and ill-informed of their colleagues, in
countries undeniably poor and just out of colonialism.
The Latin-American neurosis, in face of the United
States, corresponds less and less each day to the facts. For
the weakening and inconsistency of the country, so long
the guide and protector of Latin America, can no longer
go unrecognized. With the Cuban revolution, however,
the United States' interest in this region reached its highest point in an intense but short-lived blaze. An interest, I
should add, always faint in public opinion and even
among North-American leaders-with the exception of
certain statesmen from Henry Clay (Secretary of State to
Monroe) to John Kennedy, for whom Latin America was
not only a private preserve that the United States maintained in face of European lusts, but also a sister region
that came to independence in the same surge of history
as, and in the wake of, the United States; and that embraced republican and democratic government, at a moment when that innovation survived only in the Western
Hemisphere.
Monroeism had two components: first, without the
close guardianship of the United States and her intervention if necessary in Latin America, other powers outside
the Hemisphere would necessarily intervene-with serious strategic consequences and dangers unacceptable to
the United States. Secondly, the real though condescending sympathy that idealistic North Americans have always
held for peoples whom they see attempting to better their
lot by adopting political institutions which they regard as
virtuous, because inspired by the North American
republic. The weapons revolution with its ICBM's and
nuclear rocket submarines that, for instance, made possession of the Panama Canal strategically inconsequential,
have made it bluntly clear that the second component was
much less important than the first. American public opinion's resistance to President Carter's attempt to part with
the Canal, came not of any interest-almost non-existent-in Panama or in Latin America, but because of the
legendary exploits, taught to Americans in school, of the
engineers and doctors who dug the canal. For Americans
the canal is not the Panama Canal but a North American
canal that crosses Panama (as a Senator put it). A man
who knows what he is talking about described the actual
attitude of the United States toward Latin America:
THE ST. JOHNS REVffiW
One of the more conspicuous hypocrisies of the (North)
American way in foreign affairs is the combination ofritualistic solicitude about the inter-American system with visceral
indifference to the Latin American ordeal. On ceremonial occasions United States leaders talk lavishly about hemisphere
solidarity. When a United States company is nationalized or a
United States diplomat kidnapped, Latin America creates a
brief stir in the newspapers. But one cannot resist the conviction-certainly Latin Americans don't-that deep down most
North Americans do not give a damn about LatinAmerica. 4
The United States now plainly displays the lack of interest
in Latin America as a whole (for instance, President Carter's speech of April 14, 1977) that before was "at the bottom" of its attitudes. From now on the Americans will
deal with particular situations, like relations with their
neighbor, Mexico, illegal immigration, and other problems
directly connected with them, that they cannot help seeing. They want to continue to count in Latin Americabut without acknowledging, still less affirming, the special
responsibility and the fraternal bond that existed in the
past.
After 1966 (when Johnson in the last spasm of Monroeism sent the Marines to the Dominican Republic), the
countries of Latin America found themselves more and
more abandoned by the power that had for so long "overprotected" them. Abandoned, just in the years when they
had to struggle to come to terms with the vast upheaval
triggered by the Cuban revolution.
With the most firmly established and the most cunning
political system of Latin America, Mexico alone weathered the storm, relatively unscathed. Mexico alone stood
up to the United States in the economic and diplomatic
ostracism of Cuba and refused to sever relations with the
Castro regime. As a result, it preserved its "progressive"
image abroad and kept the extreme left at home isolated
and insignificant-at the same time that it mercilessly
crushed not only the occasional underground guerrillas
but also, in passing, dissenting students, massacred in
their hundreds in 1969, during a demonstration right in
the center of the capital. Only Venezuela, which came
out of a military dictatorship just before the fall of Batista
(1958), found leaders capable of founding and defending
undeniably democratic institutions in the face of the double challenge from the militarists of the right and from the
armed extreme left, inspired and actively encouraged by
Havana.
Elsewhere the rising wave of the Cuban revolution
made for enduring upheavals, without anywhere establishing a truly socialist regime, or even a "military socialism,"
since the ((Peruvian model" betrays a kind of perfection in
economic and political failure. Everywhere it provoked
tragic civil wars; undermined long-standing democracies
(in Uruguay and Chile); spurred a new right authoritarianism, based as in the past on military power, but more
implacable, because for the first time since the establishmenfof professional armies in Latin America the "military
party" faces the problem of survival, in a hemispheric and
51
�world-wide political context that, in Cuba, brought the
dissolution of the regular armed forces and the execution,
imprisonment, or exile of all their officers.
This new situation is nowhere more discouraging than
in Argentina, a country once indisputably (and still essentially) the most advanced in Latin America. Sunk in its
present nightmare, Argentina shows how hard it is for
Latin America, more specifically, for Spanish America
(for, although analogous, Brazil is too distinct for automatic inclusion in generalizations about Latin America) to
overcome its political underdevelopment. Quite comparable to a serious neurosis, this difficulty in overcom-ing
political underdevelopment comes, essentially, because it
is our lot to share the "New World" with the United
States and because up to the present (in our inner conviction) we remain the dark panel in the diptych of the great
American enterprise.
The Paradoxical Prestige of Castro
back for the Cuban people and even for Latin America as
a whole; his submission to the strategic plans of the So·
viets, like his only noteworthy contribution to the business of our time. To the Soviets he handed over the youth
of Cuba, first for an army of disproportionate size, afterwards for an expeditionary force-a project that the Soviet Union must have conceived and guided for quite
some time, at least since 1965. But Latin America counts
what strikes any non-Latin-American as a shameful business for the Cuban nation and a bloody hazing for its
young people, forced to play the "Senagalese of the Soviet empire," as an additional plus for Fidel. Pro-Soviet or,
more generally, "leftist" circles are not the only ones not
to find fault with Fidel in this regard. Social Democrats,
liberals, and even Latin-American conservatives (and
many military men including officers) take secret pridethe pride of "decolonized men" -in the fact that our
home-grown soldiers have, for the first time in history,
trodden the soil of Africa, the Maghreb, Arabia, Vietnam,
Afghanistan, and Cambodia.
Everyone acknowledges the bankruptcy of the Cuban
I do not dare expect that political evolution in the near
revolution-except ill Lclfh1-Amefica. No one dreams any
future will deliver our America from permanent crisis and
longer of denying that the Cuban jails hold a very large
number of political prisoners, who receive unspeakable illtreatment.5 But when Fidel paid an official visit to Mexico
in May 1979, President Lopez Portillo greeted him at the
airport as "one of the men of the century." At the same
time hypocritical and sincere, Lopez Portillo's hyperbole,
reportedly, did him enormous service with the public
opinion of his country. Over the past twenty years, four
from swinging between economically incompetent populist democratic regimes with suicidal tendencies, and
equally or more incompetent authoritarian regimes-with
exceptions like the '(Mexican system," and with eccentric
deviations like the totalitarian regime in Cuba. Almost
without exception, the most gifted and educated LatinAmerican intellectuals (almost all, since 1960, "of the left"
and admirers of Castro) carefully evade profound critical
reflection about our society, and ardently persist in the
contrary enterprise: they reinforce all about them the
paralysing idee fixe that external agencies cause all of
Latin America's problems and that The Revolution will
provide their solution-revenge. The economists of Latin
America have, for instance, made an inordinate contribu-
tion to the theory of economic dependence as a sufficient
explanation for political underdevelopment. They are not
at all bothered by the fact that countries like the United
States, first of all, but also Japan, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, and Spain, have each in their different ways
come through this ordeal, and that countries such as Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore are doing the same at
tliis very hour.
Not surprisingly, Fidel Castro and his revolution continue to enjoy measurelesS prestige and deep influence in
Latin America-prestige difficult for a European observer, even a Marxist sympathizer, to grasp. To such an
observer, Castro now looks like a pretty contemptible tyrant, unmasked; his revolution, like a fearfully costly set-
52
managers of the
44
Mexic'an system," quite different in
other respects (Presidents Lopez Mateos, Diaz Ordaz, Etcheverria and, now Lopez Portillo) have all sought to bolster their position and the dubious legitimacy of the only
Mexican party (Institutionalized Revolutionary Party) by
showing an unchanging desire to please Fidel Castro.
That makes one think.
Translated by Hugh P. McGrath and Leo Raditsa
l. Jean Franc;:ois Revel, "L' Amerique La tine et sa culture politique,"
Commentaire, Autumn 1978, 261-266: in English translation, "The
Trouble with Latin America," Commentary, February 1979.
2. For inStance, President Carter's speech berore the Organization of
American States on Aprill4, 1977.
3. Redaccion, Buenos Aires, 73, March 1979.
4. Arthur Schlesinger, "The Alli:mce for Progress: a Retrospective," in
Latin America: The Search for a New International Role, New York 1975,
58.
5. Of epochal importance in France: Pierre Golendorf, Sept ans d Cuba,
Paris, Belfond 1978; Armando Valladares, Prisonnier de Castro, trans·
lated, annotated and edited by P. Golendorf with an afterword by
Leonid Pliouchtch, Paris, Gmsset 1979.
WINTER !981
�On the Origins of Celestial Dynamics:
Kepler and Newton
Curtis Wilson
I wish to consider two moments in the emergence of
celestial dynamics, a Keplerian moment and a Newtonian
one, seeking to explore what the development of such a
dynamics meant to its authors. Before Kepler, astronomy
was a branch of applied mathematics, employing arithmetic and geometry, but having nothing to do with
physics or forces (in Greek, dynameis). It was Kepler who
introduced forces into the heavens, and thus founded
celestial dynamics. David Gregory, a follower of Newton,
writing in 1702, spoke of the new celestial physics that
"the most sagacious Kepler had got the scent of, but the
Prince of Geometers Sir Isaac Newton brought to such a
pitch as surprizes all the world." Actually, the Keplerian
dynamics and the Newtonian dynamics differ in important respects, but Gregory's singling out of Kepler- and
Newton makes sense. Kepler introduces a dynamics into
the heavens in the sense of hypothesizing a quantifiable
influence of one celestial body on the motion of another,
and Newton's universal gravitation does the same kind of
thing. Moreover, the mathematical results Kepler arrives
at by pursuing his hypothesis nearly coincide with
Newton's results, derived from a different dynamics.
Meanwhile, in the period intervening between the
appearance of Kepler's hypothesis in 1609, and the appearance of Newton's Principia in 1687, there were various attempts at proposing what may be called mechanical
causes for the celestial motions, but none of them allowed
of mathematical formulation, or led to an astronomical .
calculus, a way of predicting positions of planets. The
egregious Thomas Hobbes imagined that, as the southern
and northern hemispheres of the Earth differ with respect
A revised version of a lecture given at St. John's College in Annapolis in
May 1971. Curtis Wilson is at work on an article "Predictive Astronomy
in the Century after Kepler," to appear in Volume II of The General
History of Astronomy, Cambridge University Press.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
to the proportion of dry land and ocean, therefore the
aethereal vortex or whirlpool that moves about the Sun,
having now more solid land to press against and now more
of the yielding ocean, would drive the Earth in a path
differing from a circle, perhaps approaching an ellipse.
Descartes figured out a reason why the suns or stars are
off-center in their vortices, so that in the solar vortex the
planetary paths are eccentric to the sun, but as in
Hobbes's case, the hypothesis did not lend itself to mathematization; on the contrary, because Descartes believed
the universe to be packed with vortices inclined at various
angles to one another, vortices that fill all space and interact with one another by transference of matter and motion, any simple mathematical rule for the planetary orbits
and motions becomes implausible.
In Kepler's and Newton's cases, we can ask how the
dynamical hypothesis and its quantification come about,
what they presuppose, what they mean to their authors.
The first sprouts of Kepler's celestial dynamics make
their appearance in his first venture into print, his
Cosmo~
graphic Mystery of 1596, published when he was just turning twenty-five. Since April 1594, Kepler had been holding
the position of district mathematician in Graz, with the
task of teaching mathematics to the boys in a Protestant
school, and making up an annual astrological calendar for
the province. The calendar was to show when to plant
crops, and what to expect of the weather and the Turks.
He was, let me mention, marvelously successful with his
first calendar: the cold spell he had predicted was so
grievous that herdsmen in the mountains lost their lives
or their noses from frostbite, and the invasions of the
Turks he had predicted were also grievous; the provincial
magistrates therefore added a bonus to his stipend. But
Kepler was not satisfied with this kind of astrological
hackwork. Beginning on the Sunday of Pentecost in 1595,
we find him concerned with, and indeed thinking unceasingly about, three large cosmological questions.
53
�At the start of the Cosmographic Mystery, Kepler says,
"there were three things above all of which I sought the
causes why they were thus and not otherwise: the number, size, and motions of the planetary orbs. That I dared
this was brought about by that beautiful harmony of the
quiescent things, the Sun, fixed stars, and intervening
space, with God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost."
That is, Kepler sees the spherical layout of the cosmos,
with the Sun at the center, and the stars at the periphery,
as an image or signature of the triune God, the Creator,
His Being, Knowledge, and Love. And with this vision
in his head, he makes bold to seek the number, spacings,
and motions that the Creator gave to the mobile bodies,
the planets, occupying the intermediate space between
Sun and stars.
Obviously, Kepler is at this point a Copernican, a heliocentrist. But he does not have a thorough knowledge of
the details of Copernicus's planetary theory. As he begins
his speculations, he has not read and does not even possess
Copernicus's book; he does not even know Rheticus's
Narratio prima, the book in which, in 1540, three years
before the appearance of the De revolutionibus, Rheticus
had communicated to the world the major outlines of
Copernicus's theory and given an account of its superi~
ority over the Ptolemaic theory. Kepler says that he had
learned partly from his teacher Maestlin at Tubingen, and
partly from his own thinking, the mathematical advantages
that Copernicus has over Ptolemy. The Copernican
arrangement, simply by its layout, accounts for certain
phenomena that are left unaccounted for, are left as coincidences, in the Ptolemaic arrangement. Why do the
Sun and the Moon not retrograde, while the other planets
do? Why do Mercury and Venus always keep relatively
close to the Sun, while the other planets can be at any
angular distance? Why are the superior planets always
lowest in their epicycles, when in opposition to the Sun?
For these questions and a few more, the Copernican
arrangement provides an answer; the Ptolemaic does not.
By the time he had finished his Cosmographic Mystery,
Kepler had apparently read the famous tenth chapter of
Book I of the De revolutionibus, where Copernicus says,
in his brief commendation of the heliocentric arrangement, Hwe find in this arrangement a marvelous symmetry
of the world and a harmony in the relationship of the
motion and size of the orbits, such as one cannot find
elsewhere." But even before, Kepler was asking not
merely in what the symmetry and harmony consist, but
also: On what are they founded? How does man come
to recognize them? And already at the start, Kepler has
answers to which he will always adhere: The world carries in itself the features of the omnipotent creator and is
his copy, his signature. To man, God gave a rational soul,
thereby stamping him in His own image. It is with that
soul that man can recognize the symmetry and harmony
of the Copernican world. Seeing that spherical Copernican world in terms of an idea of Nicholas Cusanus, as a
54
kind of quantitative representation of the indissoluble
triune essence of God, Kepler is encouraged to raise and
pursue his bold, naive questions.
One of the questions was not new. If you were a
Copernican, there were six circumsolar planets, not seven
planets as with Ptolemy, since Copernicus leaves the
Moon as a satellite of the Earth. Rheticus in his Narratio
prima had explained this sixfold number by the sacredness
and perfection of the number six: six is the first perfect
number, i.e., equal to the sum of its factors, l, 2, and 3.
A little later in the sixteenth century, Zarlino will be
using this same idea to explain the role of the first six
numbers in musical consonances; he will be the first musical theorist to include thirds and sixths among the consonances, as they needed to be included for polyphony's
sake. Kepler will be the second such musical theorist, but
here as in the case of the number of the planets he will
reject the notion of particular numbers as causes. He rejects number-mysticism in that sense. Numbers for him
are only abstractions from the created things, and hence
posterior to Creation; they could not therefore be used
by God as archetypal forms for cosmopoiesis, the making
of the world. Not satisfied with Rheticus's answer, Kepler
has to face the question afresh: why are there just six
planets, no more and no less?
The second and third of Kepler's questions were new.
They had to do with the causes for the relation of the
Sun-planet distances to one another, and for the ratios
of the planetary periods. In August of 1595 Kepler wrote
to Maestlin, his former teacher at Tubingen, telling of his
investigations, and asking whether he had ever heard or
read of anyone who went into the reason of the disposition
of the planets, and the proportions of their motions. In
the margin, Maestlin wrote in answer: "No."
Let me remark here that no analogous questions are
likely to arise in what can be called, and indeed came to
be called, the Ptolemaic system, which was what Kepler
had been officially taught at the university. By this term
I mean not the set of planetary theories in Ptolemy's
Almagest, but rather the world picture, current in the
Middle Ages and Renaissance, according to which the
planetary spheres are nested to fill exactly without remainder the space between the highest sublunary element,
fire, and the fixed stars. There is no trace of this picture
in the Almagest, but in 1967 it was discovered that it is
given in Ptolemy's Hypotheses of the Planets, the relevant
passage having been omitted from Heiberg's standard
edition of Ptolemy, apparently from some confusion
among the translators; most of the work, including this
passage, exists only in Arabic MSS, of which Heiberg
gives only a German translation.* What I now say is based
on this recovered portion of the Hypotheses.
*The discoverer was Bernard R. Goldstein; see his "The Arabic Version of Ptolemy's Planetary Hypotheses", Transactions of the American
Philosophical Society vol. 57, Part 4 (1967).
WINTER 1981
�be made to fit in such a sequence of nested spheres, using
the Ptolemaic numbers. In further justification Ptolemy
adds that "this arrangement is most plausible, for it is not
conceivable that there be in Nature a vacuum, or any
meaningless and useless thing."
!
'
/
F'i'gure 1
The Ptolemaic system, Ptolemy freely admits, involves
conjecture, but he also insists on its plausibility, as did his
followers through the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Tycho Brahe was still accepting it in the 1570s. The piau·
sibility is as follows. Ptolemy ·gives certain arguments in
the Almagest, and again in amplified form in the Hypoth·
eses, for a certain order of the planets, beginning Moon,
Mercury, Venus, Sun, and going on to the superior
planets;) won't repeat the arguments here. (The Sun,
note, is the central one of the seven planets or wandering
stars.) He had a very good value for the maximum dis·
tance of the Moon from the Earth, determined from
observations, namely 64 Earth radii. Assume now that
the maximum distance of one planet from the Earth is
equal to the minimum distance of the planet next above
it; take from the Almagest the ratios of nearest approach
to farthest distance for each planet, and start constructing
outward, using the Ptolemaic order. After the Moon
comes Mercury and then Venus. The maximum distance
of Venus turns out to be 1,079 Earth-radii, and the Sun
is to come next. But there was an independent method
for determining the relative distances of the Sun and the
Moon, a way invented by Hipparchus, described in the
Almagest, using eclipses. The method is unreliable, but it
did not come to be distrusted till the seventeenth century.
The result of that method, reported in the Almagest, was
that at its closest approach to the Earth, the Sun was
1,160 Earth-radii distant, 81 Earth-radii beyond the high·
est point ofVenus's orb. Is this a big gap? Ptolemy shows
in the Hypotheses, that by a very slight change in the data
of this determination, a change within the limits of obser·
vational error, the Sun at nearest approach will be found
to use up the extra 81 Earth-radii, and everything fits.
Moreover, this is the only order in which the planets can
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
This Ptolemaic system was very well known during the
sixteenth century, owing to the description of it in
Peurbach's Theoricae planetarum, which went through
many editions. I suspect it was widely accepted as filling
out the heavens, and allowing for the strange motions of
these divine beings~motions which, according to
Ptolemy, follow from the essence of the planet and are
like the will and understanding in man. Copernicus, and
also Kepler in the Cosmographic Mystery, explicitly reject
this system, but I do not think any really forceful argu·
ment was made till Kepler showed, some years later, that
the Hipparchic method for the Sun's distance, based on
observation of lunar eclipses, and in particular of the
width of the Earth's shadow, was practically useless, a
small error in the observations leading to an enormous
error in the final result.
The question of the reason of the spacing of the plane·
tary orbs does not, then, arise in the Ptolemaic system,
because all the available space has been used up in the
placing of the orbs. In the Copernican theory, on the con·
trary, there are unused spaces, not only a huge one beyond
Saturn, separating the solar system from the stars, but
also unused spaces between the hoop-shaped regions of
space that the individual planets pass through in their
motions (Figure 1). That is the effect of the economy of
the Copernican system, the elimination of the large
epicycles. Copernicus speaks of planetary orbs and
spheres; whether he believed them to be real or imaginary,
solid bodies or merely geometrical figures, remains a subject
of scholarly debate. Kepler thought Copernicus believed
the spheres to be real and solid, but in the Cosmographic
Mystery he is already pointing out some of the difficulties
with this conception. By what chains or struts is the Earth
with its atmosphere held within the solid spherical shell to
which it belongs? We are already in the heavens, and they
aren't solid. But in either case, whether the spheres are
real or not, there have come to be apparently functionless
spaces, and the question can be raised as to the reason of
the spacing of the planetary orbs.
Copernicus does not raise this question. He is apparently
seeking to redo not the cosmography of Ptolemy's
Hypotheses of the Planets, an exercise in geometrical
arrangement or layout, but the mathematical, predictive
astronomy of Ptolemy's Almagest, and he wishes to do
this job in a manner consistent with the first principles
of the astronomical art. A primary principle is that there
must be only uniform circular motion; this is required if
there is to be strict periodicity, if the motions are not
sometimes to fail, owing to their dependence on a changing
and thus changeable motor virtue. The intellect abhors
such an idea, Copernicus says.
55
�The Copernican insistence on uniformity of circular
motion will be taken up by later astronomers-Tycho,
Longomontanus, Bullialdus, and others-and echoed for
a hundred years and more by both heliocentrists and nonheliocentrists. Not only had Ptolemy failed to keep to the
principle but new phenomena, discovered since Ptolemy's
time, showed that there was an inequality in the precession of the equinoxes that Ptolemy had not suspected.
This was called the trepidation, supposedly proved by
observations of the Arabs collated with those of Ptolemy
and Hipparchus. According to one scholar (). E. Ravetz),
it was this supposed phenomenon that pushed Copernicus
into setting the Earth in motion. For, argued Ravetz, if
the precession of the equinoxes is due to the motion of
the stars, if this motion is non-uniform, and if the standard of time by which equality is judged is provided by
the diurnal rotation of those very same stars, then the
standard of time has been vitiated, and the entire system
has become logically incoherent.
The Copernican revolution, Ravetz wanted to argue,
was a logical necessity, forced on Copernicus if he was to
avoid logical incoherence in the measurement of time.
But this is wrong. The truth is that the uniformity of the
diurnal rotation would be vitiated slightly whether one
assigned the trepidation to the Earth or to the stars; in
either case, one would have to calculate one's way back
to a uniform measure of time-something astronomers
had long been doing with respect to the apparent diurnal
motions of the Sun. Fortunately, the trepidation is unreal.
Sometime after 1588 Tycho Brahe convinced himself
that it is merely the effect of the large errors in the times
of the equinoxes that Ptolemy reports in Book III of the
Almagest; and this is the conclusion of modern astronomy.
As for Copernicus, it was not the supposed inequality
56
in the precession, or the problem of measuring time, that
led him to cast the Earth into motion.
No, Copernicus's original motive appears to have been
opposition to the Ptolemaic equant-that point, not the
center of the circle, about which Ptolemy assumes the
motion on the deferent circle to be uniform. This violated
the first principle of the astronomical art, the assumption
of only uniform circular motions. With this idea primarily
in mind, Copernicus redoes the Almagest. Year after year,
from the time he first sketched out his idea until his death,
he labored over the revision of numerical constants, trying
to obtain an astronomy that would be accurately predictive, fitting all the available, recorded observations.
One recent biographer (Arthur Koestler) has judged him
to be timorous and myopic. What is more certain is that
in his efforts he met with discouragement: he could not
get the numbers to come right. And in any case, he is not
primarily looking at the emergent system with the eye of
a cosmologist; and he is not, like the young enthusiast
Kepler in 1595 and 1596, asking for the archetypal, a priori
reasons in the mind of God that will account for the layout of the heliocentric world.
Between Copernicus's death in 1543 and 1596, the
date of Kepler's Cosmographic Mystery, there were very
few Copernicans who spoke. out. The ill-fated Bruno; a
poet or two in the entourage of Henry III of France; Benedetti, Galilee's precursor in mechanics; a mystically minded
Englishman named Thomas Digges-they were few.
An overwhelming chorus of denunciation opposed
them. Melanchton (1497-1560), Luther's lieutenant and a
professor at Wittenberg, referring in 1541 to the Copernican doctrine, said, Hreally, wise governments ought to repress impudence of mind." Maurolycus, a very competent
and indeed innovative mathematician of Messina, said
that Copernicus "deserves a whip or a scourge rather
than a refutation" (Opera Mathematica, Venice, 1575).
Pyrrhonist skeptics like Montaigne and his followers were
fond of citing Copernicus and Paracelsus to show that
there can be found people to deny even the most universally accepted principles. In these references they desired
to show that we are so ignorant that it is even excessive
to assert that we know that we know nothing. And Tycho
Brahe wrote: "What need is there without any justification to imagine the Earth, a dark, dense and inert mass,
to be a heavenly body undergoing even more numerous
revolutions than the others, that is to say, subject to a
triple motion, in violation not only of all physical truth
but also of the authority of Holy Scripture, which ought
to be paramount" (Progymnasmata, 1602). And the list of
denunciations could be greatly extended.
Kepler turns out to be one of the early Copernicans,
one of a handful, to speak out; he does so before Galileo
does, and before his own teacher Maestlin. Maestlin
praises Kepler for his first book, saying, " ... at last a learned
man has been found who dared to speak out in defense of
Copernicus, against the general chorus of obloquy." And
WINTER 1981
�Kepler's defense has a unique character, starting as it does
from the notion of the spherical, Sun-centered world as
symbol of God, a geometrical reflection of His triune
essence, a signature of the Creator in the created world.
It is this symbol, Kepler explicitly states, that encourages
him to seek the reasons of the number, spacings, and
ratio of motions of the planetary orbs. This symbol of God
remains central in Kepler's thought; every one of his
major undertakings and achievements can be related to it.
Let me mention in passing that, just as Kepler's question about the spacings is inappropriate to the Ptolemaic
system, so it is unlikely to arise for a follower of Tycho's
system, which resembles the Copernican except that the
Earth remains stationary, and the Sun with the remaining
planets moves about the Earth (Figure 2). In letters written
in the late 1580s, Tycho says that he was induced to give
up the Ptolemaic system by the discovery, from measurements of the parallax of Mars when it is in opposition to
the Sun, that it is closer to the Earth than the Sun is. This
is possible in the Copernican system, but not in the Ptolemaic; the Tychonic system accommodates the fact by preserving the Copernican spacings (see Figure 2). Actually,
Kepler found later that Tycho could not have determined,
from his observations, the parallax of Mars; it was too
small for observational discrimination by the means at his
disposal. And poring over Tycho's MSS, Kepler concluded
that some assistant of Tycho had misunderstood instructions and computed the parallax, not. from observation,
but from the numerical parameters of Copernicus's system. In any case, if you do accept the Tychonic system,
then the path of Mars cuts across the path of the Sunnot impossible, because Tycho knows by now from his
study of comets that there are no solid orbs, but still
inelegant. And the entire set-up lacks the centered symmetry that provoked the Keplerian inquiry.
The answer Kepler finds to the first two of his questions, concerning the number and spacing of the planets,
is well known (Figure 3); the discovery comes after he has
tried many different schemes, and it comes, he tells
Maestlin, accompanied by a flood of tears. It is based on
the five regular solids or polyhedra. That there are just
five polyhedra, with all faces consisting of equal, regular
polygons and with all solid angles convex and equal, was
one of the discoveries of Theaetetus, and the proof of it
forms the culmination of Euclid's Elements. A beautiful
paradigm, this, of completeness of understanding: we can
prove that there are these five, and we can see why there
are no more.
Kepler's answer as to why there are just six planets is
a structure in which the regular polyhedra are encased in
one another like Chinese boxes, but with spheres in between, and with a sphere circumscribing the largest polyhedron and another sphere inscribing the smallest
polyhedron, so that there are six spheres in all (Figure 4).
His arrangement is: sphere of Saturn-cube-sphere of
jupiter-tetrahedron-sphere of Mars-dodecahedronTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Figure 3
'
I', ___ r'lcosct.\..e.d,..0l'L - --------G.a.or+\,
------------
Vt..Y\\1.!)
Figure 4
sphere of Earth-icosahedron-sphere of Venus-octahedron- sphere of Mercury. Each solid is inscribed in a
sphere which passes through all its vertices, and at the
same time has inscribed within it a sphere which touches
the centers of all its faces. The structure is not built outward from the Sun: it is built inward and outward from
the Earth's sphere, which divides the five regular solids into
two groups. The cube, tetrahedron, and dodecahedron
Kepler calls primary; each has vertices formed by three
edges, each has its own special kind of face-square,
triangle, or pentagon. The other solids, called secondary
because built out of the primary, are the octahedron and
icosahedron; these have their vertices formed by four and
57
�five edges, respectively, and have triangular faces. The oc·
tahedron is formed from the cube by replacing square
faces by the points at their centers; the icosahedron is
similarly formed from the dodecahedron. A similar transformation performed on the tetrahedron yields only
another tetrahedron.
Kepler therefore speaks of the secondary bodies, octahedron and icosahedron, as offspring of the cube and
dodecahedron, respectively; and he calls the latter bodies
their fathers, as the chief determiners of their forms. But
he also calls the tetrahedron their mother, as the one from
whom they receive their triangular faces. The tetrahedron,
meanwhile, is hermaphroditic in its production of tetrahedra. Of the primary solids, the cube has to come first,
because, Kepler says, it is "the thing itself," meaning, I
believe, that it presents to us the very idea of corporification, the creation of body by the regular filling-out of space
in the three dimensions. The transformation of cube into
tetrahedron is carried out by subtraction, replacing each
square face by one of its diagonals; the transformation of
cube into dodecahedron is carried out by addition, roofing
over the cube, turning each edge into the diagonal of a
pentagon.
Out of the 120 possible orders of the five bodies,
Kepler can say that he has chosen the one that singles
out, as a starting point, the very notion of corporification
or the creation of body, that singles out the Earth's sphere
as the very special place it is, the home of the image of
God, and that, given these conditions, has the most complete symmetry. And it shows at once why the number of
the planets must be just six; there are only five regular
solids, as Euclid proves, hence only six circumscribing
and inscribing spheres; the number has been deduced from
the very idea of the creation of body, of the world, by
an ever geometrizing, and let me add, echoing Kepler,
a playful God. And man was meant to understand these
things. Kepler says:
As the eye was created for color, the ear for tone, so was the
intellect of humans created for the understanding not of just
any thing whatsoever but of quantities . .. It is the nature of
our intellect to bring to the study of divine matters concepts
which are built upon the category of quantity; if it is deprived
of these concepts, then it can define only by pure negations.
Thus the five regular solids, the being of which depends
on quantitative ratios, form the basis of the layout of the
world; and man, the contemplative creature, was meant to
see and appreciate this beautiful structure.
But is it true? To know that, we must know that the distances in the construction jibe with the distances determined by the astronomers, and moreover, jibe rather
exactly. Kepler at different times ~xpresses the thought
that the imposed forms might not fit the world quite
exactly, but in that case he hopes to find reasons even for
the deviations.
58
F
Figure 5: The squares in the ·octahedron are ABCD, BDEF, and AECF.
The problem Kepler faces in testing his hypothesis is,
first of all, to know which distances to take from the
Copernican theory. The sphere of each planet must be of
such a thickness as to accommodate the planet's approaches
to and recessions from the Sun; but should one, for instance, allow space for Copernicus's equatorial epicycle,
which sticks out beyond the planet's path at aphelion?
And can one trust Copernicus's theories for Venus and
Mercury, which involve some peculiar hypocyclic and
epicyclic motions that keep time with the Earth's motion?
Moreover, Kepler thinks it incongruous that Copernicus
computes the planetary distances from the center of the
Earth's orbit rather than from the Sun itself. It is with
such considerations that Kepler begins his critique of the
details of the Copernican theories. But in disallowing the
equatorial epicycles, and in shifting to the real Sun as
reference point, Kepler is able to make a preliminary comparison of distances. The ratios for the intervals between
Mars and Jupiter and between Venus and the Earth come
out with zero percent error; for the Earth-Mars interval
the error is 5 percent, for the Jupiter-Saturn interval about
9 percent For the Mercury-Venus interval, with Copernicus's numbers, the error is unfortunately 20 percent
Kepler persuades himself-on the ground of Mercury's
very unusual situation and motion-that for Mercury the
sphere to be used is that inscribed, not in the octahedron
itself, but in the three squares formed by the twelve edges
of the octahedron-the octahedron is the only regular
solid that can be sliced through along its edges in such a
WINTER 1981
�way as to yield regular polygons (Figure 5). With this
concession, the Mercury-Venus error is reduced to 2
percent; the largest error remains that for Saturn, whose
distance is the greatest and therefore most difficult to
measure; the next largest error involves the Earth, and
a
Figure 6
c
Kepler has reason to believe that Copernicus's theory of
the Earth is in need of a major revision; and the average
error for all the intervals is but 3.3 percent. Seeing how
closely the numbers derived from observation and those
derived from his model agree, Kepler has his initial moment of elation; later on, as he calculates, there are doubts,
and then again moments of elation. He writes to Maestlin
that he suspects a tremendous miracle of God. Older,
more cautious, Maestlin, widely known as a competent
astronomer, comes to agree with him, comes to suppose
that it will be possible to obtain the distances of the planets
a priori, from Kepler's model. He assists extensively in the
preparation and publication of the book, in which Kepler
calls upon all astronomers to help in working out the details of the hypothesis. Among the readers were those who,
like Johann Praetorius of Altdorf, said that even if the
numbers came out exactly, it would not mean a thing:
astronomy should go back to its practical business of predicting the planetary positions on the basis of observations.
Tycho's reaction was less hostile: of course there are harmonies, he said, but one must work out the planetary
theories on the basis of exact observations first, before
investigating the harmonies. Tycho understands here
that the theories must employ uniform circular motion,
in accordance with the Copernican insistence on that
principle; and in contrast to Kepler he assumes that the
Earth is at rest.
This brings me to another theory that is contained in
Kepler's book, one which Tycho will object to, and which
even Maestlin finds, he says, too subtle. From the very
beginning, Kepler had had a third question: he had wanted
to account not only for the number and spacing of the
planets, but for the proportion of their motions. From the
very beginning, he had noted that the periods of the planets increase more rapidly than the distances, so that the
period of the planet twice as far from the Sun is more than
twice as great. This observation had been one of Kepler's
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
encouragements in the investigation of the reason of the
distances, because, he says, if God adapted the motions to
the orbs according to some law of distances, then surely
He also accommodated the distances to some rule.
The first mathematical rule Kepler proposes for the
periods is given in a diagram (Figure 6). Note that the diagram is pretty. Sis the Sun, ACB the sphere of fixed stars.
AEC and BFC are quadrants of circles with radius equal
to the radius of the stellar sphere, SC. To a given distance
of a planet from the Sun, SP, Kepler imagines that there
would correspond a "vigor of motion" or speed, proportional to the line EF. In the Sun would be the moving
soul, and an infinite force of motion; at the periphery
are the motionless stars, providing by their distance the
space for the planetary motions, and by the non-unifonnity
of their distribution, a background against which the contemplative creature, man, can locate the planets.
The difficulty with the scheme is that Kepler has no
clue as to the radius of the cosmos, SC, and without a
value for that radius, there is no possibility of calculating
the consequences of the hypothesis, and so subjecting it
to empirical test. This hypothesis, for Kepler at this point,
has a status similar to that of the other one about the five
regular solids, in the sense that it arises from the same
thought, of the world as symbol of God. The five-regularsolid theory had the assumed fact of spacings to work
with; this hypothesis has the assumed fact of some kind
of inverse relation between distance and speed.
Kepler tries another hypothesis for the motions which
is more testable, and in a rough way correct, although it is
not the right one (the right one is the third law that he will
discover only in !618). I shall not describe it, but will only
remark that here again Kepler is looking for a pure mathematical form, graspable by the mind because mathematical. He is looking for a form which will somehow make
the action of the Sun on the planets a symbol of the creating and radiative activity of the Godhead. He will therefore speak of the decrease in motive vigor with increasing
distance from the Sun as suitable; it was fitting that God
should have arranged matters thus.
Kepler also begins to compare the spreading-out of the
motive virtue to the spreading out of light from a center;
light, as he will say later, is a kind of mediating thing, intermediate between bodies and souls. Kepler is the first to
quantify light's intensity, to say that it varies inversely as
the square of the distance. It is by a similar quantification
of the Sun's motive virtue that he will arrive at his celestial
dynamics. He is already onto an important clue to it, in
eliminating Copernicus's equatorial epicycle, which was
totally incompatible with the five-regular-solid theory, and
in thinking about the individual planet as slowing up at
aphelion, in some proportion that he is not sure of.
Between the time of completing the Cosmographic
Mystery in 1596, and going to Prague to work with Tycho
Brahe in 1600, Kepler became involved in the study of
musical harmony, and a word must be said about this
59
�investigation as it relates to his study of the planets. Kepler
loved polyphonic music, which he regarded as one of the
dence between the soul and the bodily, as for instance,
when the interval of a sixth following on certain disso-
most important discoveries of modern times, ranking with
nances triggers a particular perception of sweetness; but
the compass and printing. In his Harmonic of the World,
published in 1619, he will write:
the bodily, in Kepler's view, does not account for the
psychic in the sense of constituting its intelligible cause.
Kepler's explanation for the correspondence between
soul and body takes us back to the sphere, image of the
triune God. By creative radiation from the center, one
gets the straight line, the element of bodily form, the beginning from which all body comes to be. A straight line,
rotated about one of its points, describes a plane, representing in this image the bodily. When the sphere is cut
by the plane, the result is a circle, the true image of the
created mind, which is assigned to govern the body. As
the circle lies both on the sphere and in the plane, so is
the mind at the same time in the body, which it instructs,
and in God as a radiation which, so to speak, flows from
It is no longer a marvel that at last this way of singing in several
parts, unknown to the ancients, should have been invented by
Man, the Ape of his Creator; that, namely, he should, by the
artificial symphony of several voices, play out, in a brief portion of an hour, the perpetuity of the whole duration of the
world, and should to some degree taste of God the Creator's
satisfaction in His own works, with a most intensely sweet
pleasure gained from this Music that imitates God.
Kepler refers here to the potentially infinite structure of
the polyphonic music he was familiar with; the Missa
Papae Marcelli, for instance, like a rope of many intertwined strands, might be imagined as going on indefinitely;
nothing in the internal structure requires that it come to
an end at this point or that.
Now for the production of polyphony, one needs to be
aiming at thirds and sixths as consonances; and these
intervals involve the ratios 4:5, 5:6, 3:5, and 5:8. The ancient derivation of the consonances, as for instance in
Plato's Timaeus, does not treat these ratios as consonances.
The trouble with Plato and the rest, Kepler says, is that
they didn't listen carefully enough, before setting out to
make their theory. Kepler sets out to make a new theory,
without invoking the causal efficacy of numbers, or the
perfection of the number six (Zarlino, we recall, had
claimed to derive the consonances from just this perfection of the number six). Kepler's solution involves the regular polygons constructible with straight-edge and compass,
which divide the circumference of the circle into equal
parts. If one imagines the circle stretched out into a
straight line, and transformed into a monochord, one has
the divisions giving the consonances required for polyphony, including thirds and sixths, fundamentally because of the constructibility of the pentagon.
The pentagon depends for its construction on the division of a line in extreme and mean ratio, the golden section. If you are familiar with that division, and know how
it can be indefinitely reproduced by subtracting the
smaller from the greater segment, or by adding the greater
to the whole, you may understand why Kepler views this
division as imaging sexual generation, and you will thus
gain an explanation of the tender feelings that accompany
thirds and sixths in polyphonic music. Kepler did not
suppose, and I do not believe that any theorist before
him supposed, that the inquiry into the physical conditions for the production of certain intervals would account
for the shades of feeling that those intervals arouse in
consciousness. On the one side we have instruments like
the monochord, from which we can get numbers; on the
other, we have subtle perceptions of harmony, dissonance,
restoration of consonance. There is a strange correspon-
60
God's countenance. Since now Kepler conceives the cir-
cle as the bearer of pure harmonies, and believes these
harmonies to be based in the nature of the soul, he comes
to speak of the soul as a circle, supplied with the marks of
the constructible divisions, the divisions that can be concluded with ruler and compass. It is an infinitely small
circle, a point equipped with directions, a qualitative
point. This is no doubt a metaphor or symbol, but it is by
such means alone that we can understand (insofar as that
is possible) how body, soul, and God are related.
The harmonic divisions of the circle apply, of course, in
the heavens, as well as in music; it is from these divisions
that Kepler develops his astrological doctrine, and also
his harmonic theory for the planetary eccentricities. I cannot take time to describe these here. Kepler comes to see
the five-regular-solid theory as inexact, an archetypal form
used to determine the number of planets, but not thereafter used in its exact quantitative relations by the
Creator, but slightly modified in order to jibe with the harmonic theory of the eccentricities. A playful God, ruled
by the necessities of geometry, may be forced to such expedients.
All these parts of Kepler's work are omitted, to say the
least, from the corpus of scientific knowledge recognized
today. Meanwhile, his great achievement in remaking
planetary theory, accomplished first for Mars in the years
1600 to 1605, is praised, sometimes on the mistaken
grounds that it is purely empirical. It is not. It involves
assumptions that are rejected today. Alternative paths to
the so-called Keplerian laws are conceivable, but neither
could they have been purely empirical. The empirical
evidence is too inexact; some reasoned guesses are required.
Kepler's study first of optics and then of the motions of
Mars in the years 1600 to 1605 leads to the development
of a possibility already. present in his thought. He is the
first to quantify the intensity of light, in accordance with
the inverse square of the distance from the source. (This
is a purely a priori derivation, involving no experimentaWINTER !981
�tion.) He does not regard light as material or corpuscular;
that would have meant Epicurean philosophy, which
like most good Christians of the time he abhorred. Rather,
he says, light is quantified according to surface, not according to corporeality. It is one of a group of immaterial
emanations, whereby bodies, which are isolated from
each other by their bounding surfaces, are enabled to be
in communication with one another. The motive virtue
issuing from the Sun, Kepler finds, must be another such
emanation, distinct from light, for as Kepler discovers in
about 1602, its intensity varies inversely as the distance
from the Sun, not as the square of the distance. The empirical support consists in what is known as the bisection
of the eccentricity, which he had been able to verify from
Tycho's observations in the case of Mars and the Earth.
A further step is taken in 1605 when he discovers that
that component of the planet's motion whereby it approaches and recedes from the Sun, can be regarded as
simply a libration, or what we would today call a simple
harmonic motion: this, he says, smells of the balance, not
of mind. By this he means that it is a pattern not chosen
for its aesthetic or mathematical beauty but determined
by the law of the lever and the nature of matter. Here is
introduced something that one can perhaps call mechanism: matter turns out to have inertia in the sense of
being sluggish, and it turns out to be pushed by an immaterial something in an incomprehensible way. As
Kepler clearly realizes, the mechanism or quasi-mechanism
could not, in principle, account for everything. It accounts for the actions but it does not account for the
initial conditions, the sizes of the orbits and their eccentricities. These must be works of mind, harmonically determined.
Kepler's Harmonies of the World (Harmonice mundi) of
1619 will remain his final testament. And indeed it is
through the spherical symbol, ultimate source of the harmonies that he calls archetypal, that Kepler was first
enabled to accept Copernicanism, and then, developing
the emanative aspect of the symbol, to banish from the
sky the celestial intelligences, the planetary movers of
Aristotle and Ptolemy, ultimate relics of paganism (as he
calls them), and to regard the planets as material, subject
to quantifiable forces that man from his moving platform
can measure.
Kepler wanted to dedicate his Harmonice mundi to
James I of England. For years, very naively from a political
point of view, he had looked to this monarch as the hope
of Europe, the one who could bring a religious peace out
of the strife of Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
The relevance of the Harmonice mundi to this end was
that it was a work of the liberal arts, the arts of peace as
Kepler called them, setting forth the principles of the harmonies with which the world had been adorned by its
Creator. Kepler thought that, could these things but be
seen, men would be raised above the level of doctrinal
dispute. But it is doubtful that James I read far into the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
book. And indeed, no one in the seventeenth century
that I know of accepted either Kepler's dynamics as a
whole (Leibniz undertook to revamp it), or his harmonic
even in part. And as the book first appeared for sale in
the market stalls, the Thirty Years War had already begun
its terrible course.
Turning to Newton, we will probably not expect to find
effusions about the celestial harmonies in his writings.
True enough, in the second edition of the Principia, explaining his rules of reasoning in philosophy, Newton says
that Nature is ever consonant with itself; and so we might
imagine it as emitting some single, deep organ tone. But
this is from the second edition, 1713, and the first edition,
1687, does not contain the rules of reasoning, at least in
their final form, and such as it contains, it labels "hypotheses". We are thus led to suspect that Newton's understanding of his great discovery when he was in the midst
of making it, was rather different from the understanding
he later came to have of it, when he was defending it before the world.
Shortly after the publication of the first edition, Newton
began a series of revisions, pertaining particularly to the
early part of Book III. He wrote a series of scholia to accompany those propositions, 4-9, which lead to the establishment of universal gravitation. I wish to quote to you
from the proposed scholium to Proposition 8.
By what proportion gravity decreases in receding from the
Planets the ancients have not sufficiently explained. Yet they
appear to have adumbrated it by the harmony of the celestial
spheres, designating the Sun and the remaining six planets ...
by means of Apollo with the Lyre of seven strings, and measuring the intervals of the spheres by the intervals of the tones.
Thus they alleged that seven tones are brought into being ...
and that the Sun strikes the strings. Hence Macrobius says,
"Apollo's Lyre of seven strings provides understanding of the
motions of all the celestial spheres over which nature has set
the Sun as moderator." And Proclus (commenting) on Plato's
Timaeus, "The number seven they have dedicated to Apollo
as to him who embraces all symphonies whatsoever, and therefore they used to call him ... the Prince of the number seven."
Likewise in Eusebius' Preparation of the Gospel, the Sun is
called, by the oracle of Apollo, the king of the seven-sounding
harmony. But by this symbol they indicated that the Sun by
his own force acts upon the planets in that harmonic ratio of
distances by which the force of tension acts upon strings of
different lengths ...
The same tension upon a string half as long acts four times as
powerfully, for it generates the Octave, and the Octave is produced by a force four times as great. For if a string of given
length stretched by a given weight produced a given tone, the
same tension upon a string thrice as short acts nine times as
much. For it produces the twelfth [i.e. an octave plus a fifth],
and a string which stretched by a given weight produces a given
tone needs to be stretched by nine times as much weight so as
to produce the twelfth ...
Let me briefly review the mathematical relation here (Figure 7). Imagine a series of six strings with length propor-
61
�But he taught that the sounds were emitted by the motion and
attrition of the solid spheres, as though a great sphere emitted
a heavier tone as happens when iron hammers are smitten.
And from this, it seems, was born the Ptolemaic System of
orbs, when meanwhile Pythagoras beneath parables of this
sort was hiding his own system and the true harmony of the
heavens.
Figure 7
tiona! to the distances from the Sun to the six planets;
let equal weights be hung on the strings; we thus obtain
six different tones-very dissonant with one another, let
me add, but Newton does not mention the fact. These
tones betoken different forces, which can be measured by
taking strings of equal lengths and hanging on them different weights, so as to give the same tones. Any two of the
weights will be inversely as the squares of the corresponding
lengths. Newton continues:
Now this argument is subtle, yet became known to the ancients,
for Pythagoras, as Macrobius avows, stretched the intestine of
sheep or the sinews of oxen by attaching various weights, and
from this learned the ratio of the celestial harmony. Therefore,
by means of such experiments he ascertained that the weights
by which all tones on equal strings [were produced] ... were
reciprocally as the squares of the lengths of the strings by
which the musical instrument emits the same tones. But the
proportion discovered by these experiments, on the evidence
of Macrobius, he applied to the heavens and consequently by
comparing those weights with the weights of the Planets and
the lengths of the strings with the distances of the Planets,
he understood by means of the harmony of the heavens that
the weights of the Planets towards the Sun were reciprocally
as the squares of their distances from the Sun. But the Philos~
ophers loved so to mitigate their mystical discourses that in
the presence of the vulgar they foolishly propounded vulgar
matters for the sake of ridicule, and hid the truth beneath
discourses of this kind. In this sense Pythagoras numbered his
musical tones from the Earth, as though from here to the
Moon were a tone, and thence to Mercury a semitone, and
from thence to the rest of the planets other musical intervals.
62
I have to say: Newton's interpretation of the ancient
texts is not a little dubious. Contrary to what all seventeenth-century Copernicans believed, the early Pythagoreans were not heliocentrists; Philolaus, a contemporary
of Socrates and the first Pythagorean to write down doctrine (for which he is supposed to have been appropriately
punished), did not in fact know the Earth to be round,
and his Central Fire was not the Sun. Again, so far as
anyone knows today, the law relating weights and stringlengths for different musical intervals was first discovered
not by Pythagoras but in the late 1580s by Vincenzo
Galilei, the father of Galileo Galilei. Indeed, the discovery
of this law, which can be verified very precisely if one has
a good ear (and Vincenzo was a musician)-this discovery
may have been what set Galileo on his course of experimentation, seeking exact numerical ratios in nature; he
started with pendulums (again, weights hung on strings),
and proceeded to motion down inclined planes, in order
perhaps to analyze the motion of the pendulum.
But the incorrectness of Newton's interpretations is not
my concern here. The sheer volume of the manuscripts,
the many variants and revisions, in all of which Newton is
seeking to show that the ancient philosophers before
Aristotle understood the Newtonian system of the world,
demonstrates that these views were important to Newton.
Can we make that fact intelligible to ourselves or must we
conclude simply that it is one of the queernesses of genius?
I want to speak briefly about the discovery of universal
gravitation. I have recently changed my mind on this matter. My previous argument (which I unfortunately published) was that before !684 Newton did not have his
"proof' of universal gravitation, therefore was uncertain
about the universality. I now suspect that before !684
a good deal more was missing than just the "proof'; I
suspect that the idea itself, as a clear and cogent proposal,
was not yet present to his mind.
The idea of universal gravitation can seem more paradoxical than we perhaps realize. For a long time, since the
1720s, it was generally thought that Newton already in
1666 had all his principal ideas, and was held up from producing his masterpiece by the lack of a good value for the
Earth's radius, or according to a nineteenth-century suggestion, by the lack of a certain mathematical theorem.
That interpretation is supported by no solid evidence
whatsoever; there is no sign that Newton entertained the
idea of universal gravitation before 1684. And up to !679,
all of Newton's statements about planetary motion imply
either Descartes' theory of vortices, and/or an aethereal
theory to keep the planets from receding from the Sun.
WINTER 1981
�Newton uses Descartes 1 term1 conatus recedendi a centro 1
the term which Huygens in 1673 replaces by the term
centrifugal force. Newton's thought about planetary motion during these years, like that of Huygens, remains confined to Descartes' analogy of the stone in the sling.
There is no evidence that, before 1679, Newton ever conceptualizes the orbital process as the falling of the planet
out of the rectilinear path it would follow if left to itself,
a falling towards a central attracting body.
Now this does not mean that during these years Newton altogether rejected the possibility of attractions and
repulsions as possible physical causes. He was not a Cartesian; he did not believe space to be identical with matter, and all transfer of motion to be by contact. He was
familiar with Gassendi 1 s counter-argument1 according
to which not everything that is, is substance or accident;
thus time and space need not be the accidents of anything,
but may independently subsist, and so space need not be
the space of something (namely body). This argument
may not have satisfied Newton, but given Torricelli's experiment with the barometer, he was willing to grant the
vacuum. While this discovery does not in itself lead to the
granting of real attractions and repulsions, it opens up
the possibility and even the desirability of hypothesizing
them. If there are spaces free of matter between the smallest parts of bodies, or the corpuscles of which ordinary
bodies are composed, then in order that the parts of these
ordinary bodies should cohere and various substances
should have the various chemical and physical properties
they exhibit, we may well be led to postulate "intermolecular" forces. No doubt, to hypothesize such forces was to
depart from the accepted norm of natural philosophy
established by Descartes. But Robert Hooke was doing
it, and Newton began doing it, speaking of the sociability
and unsociability of bodies in chemical reactions and cohesions. The forces he considered seem to have been
forces acting over very small distances; his alchemical
experiments were probably meant to find out about them.
In 1679 comes the famous exchange of letters between
Hooke and Newton, a polite fencing between bitter enemies. Here Hooke explicitly proposes that Newton work
out the path of a body under an inverse-square attraction that pulls the body away from its rectilinear trajectory. So far as the evidence goes, this is the first time that
Newton faced the planetary problem in such a form. And
under this provocation, he makes the great discovery that
a force of attraction, directed toward a fixed center, implies the equable description of areas, Kepler's so-called
second law. He applies this law, which allows him to use
area to represent time, to the ellipse with center of attraction in the focus, and finds that the force follows an
inverse-square law.
At one point I thought that it was Hooke who first placed
in front of Newton the idea of universal gravitation, so
that if Newton had not grasped it before, he did so now,
and proceeded to look for a way to test it. But the fact is
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
that Hooke himself did not believe gravitation to be universal, that is, applicable to absolutely all matter. He had
generalized gravitation more than any previous author.
Earlier authors like Kepler had regarded attraction as belonging to cognate bodies, that is, closely related bodies
like jupiter and its satellites, or the Earth and its moon.
Thus Roberval could talk of a lunar gravity, a terrestrial
gravity1 a solar gravity 1 a jovial gravity 1 and so on.
Let me quote Hooke's view in 1678; he is here explaining
an hypothesis about comets:
I suppose the gravitating power of the Sun in the center of this
part of the Heaven in which we are, hath an attractive power
upon all the bodies of the Planets, and of the Earth that move
about it, and that each of those again have a respect answerable, whereby they may be said to attract the Sun in the same
manner as the Load-stone hath to Iron, and the Iron hath to
the Load-stone. I conceive also that this attractive virtue may
act likewise upon several bodies that come within the center
of its sphere of activity 1 though 'tis not improbable also but
that as on some bodies it may haVe no effect at all, no more
than the Load-stone which acts on Iron, hath upon a bar of
Tin, Lead, Glass, Wood, etc., so on other bodies, it may have
a clean contrary effect, that is of protrusion, thrusting off,
driving away ... ; whence it is, I conceive, that the parts of the
body of this Comet (being confounded or jumbled, as 'twere
together, and so the gravitating principle destroyed) become of
other natures than they were before, and so the body may
cease to maintain its place in the Universe, where it was first
placed.
Now Hooke is an inductivist of a sort, but induction is not
here leading to universal gravitation. That is, Hooke is not
concluding that every particle of matter attracts every
other in exactly the same way. In his correspondence with
Newton in the following year, Hooke suggests that Newton
may be able to think of a cause of the gravitating principle: now in Hooke's understanding-and I think in Newton's, too-to say that was to imply that gravitation is not
universal, for the material cause of gravitation could not
itself be subject to gravitation.
In view of the passages cited and others I shall refer to
later, I suspect that the idea of a truly universal gravitation became effectively present to Newton only after he
had discovered the "proof." Why propose a theory which,
by its very nature, precludes any mechanical explanation,
which seems to preclude being tested, and which, moreover, as Newton actually suggests once he has begun to
entertain it, would seem to put the calculation of a planetary orbit beyond the power of any human mind?
There is the problem, also, of explaining Newton's
delay for five more years after 1679. The best explanation,
I believe, is that Newton does not yet think he has discovered anything very important, and sees no direction in
which to pursue his discovery. Then Halley appears, probably in August of 1684, and persuades him that his discovery of the logical relation between the inverse-square
law and the Sun-focused elliptical orbit is important, and
63
�that he should publish it, to secure the invention to himself. Newton sets to work, and we have a series of MSS
which can be arranged in temporal order on the basis of
internal evidence.
In the first MS, there is no sign of the notion of universal
gravitation. Newton speaks of gravity as one species of
centripetal force-the term "centripetal force" making its
first appearance here (it is Newton's invention). There is
no hint of the problems of perturbation, the disturbance
of the orbit and motion of one planet by the attraction of
another planet. The inverse-square law is derived from
Kepler's third law as applied to the planets and to the
satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, that is, from the fact that,
for both the satellites and the circumsolar planets, the
squares of the periods are as the cubes of the mean distances from the central body. Newton shows that the revolving bodies must be subject to a centripetal force toward
the central body which varies inversely as the square of
the distance. The orbits are simply said to be elliptical.
The entire development, I believe, is up in the air, in the
sense that Newton does not know the cause of the attraction, does not know how exact Kepler's third law may be
(he had questioned its exactitude at an earlier date), and
is merely proceeding mathematically without knowing
what may underlie his derivation of the inverse square law;
it could be something that might lead to the results needing to be qualified.
To mention just one possible explanation, one that
Newton had thought up in the 1660s and proposed to the
Royal Society in 1675: the action of the Sun on the planets
might be due to the inrushing of a subtle aether, which
would serve as fuel for the Sun's burning. A similar but
different aether might be rushing into the Earth to produce terrestrial gravity; this aether might be transformed
chemically within the Earth, then issue forth as our atmosphere. The satellite systems of Jupiter and Saturn
might be sustained by similar circulations of aether.
These several centripetal forces would be explicable
mechanically, that is by impacts; gravitation would not
be universal, for the in-rushing aether would not itself
be subject to the forces it caused in other bodies.
In the second MS the notion of perturbation appears.
Newton is now assuming that all the bodies of the solar
system attract one another, just as Hooke had before.
Can the planetary orbits still be said to be elliptical? Hardly,
if the ellipses are drawn badly out of shape by the perturbations, the attractions of the different planets toward
one another. What must be done is to evaluate the relative magnitude of these perturbations. How is that going
to be possible?
Newton does it by considering the accelerations of the
satellites of Jupiter towards Jupiter, of the Moon towards
the Earth, of Venus towards the Sun_ Each satellite is
being accelerated towards the body round which it goes,
and that acceleration depends on the power of the central
body to attract, and so may be able to serve as a measure
64
of that power. Of course, to be comparable measures, all
three satellites ought to be at the same distance from
their central body, and they aren't. But we can shift them
in thought to the same distance, by using the inversesquare law. What we get, then, are the comparative attractive powers of Jupiter, the Earth, the Sun. That of the
Sun is overwhelmingly larger than the others.
But do we really have attractions here or not? Thus far
there has been no evidence that Newton's aethereal theory
for the planets is wrong. What then happens, I think, is
that Newton realizes a consequence of something he has
been assuming. In his derivation of the comparative attractive powers of Jupiter, the Earth, etc., he has been assuming that the quantity of matter of the satellite or test body
didn't (if you will forgive a pun) matter; it didn't matter
what mass it had, it was accelerated to the same degree
anyhow, the differences between the masses of the test
bodies could be ignored. Is that right?
Is it so on the Earth? Did Newton know the downward
acceleration of all bodies on the Earth, at a given place,
to be the same? Not at this moment. Earlier we know he
had assumed the rates to be slightly different for different
bodies, depending on their micro-structure, and the way
the downflowing aether affected them. Now, in the third
MS, Newton sets out to test the constancy, and this is
the most precise experiment reported in the Principia.
He takes equal weights of nine different materials; encloses each of them-gold, salt, wool, wood, and so onin boxes of equal size and shape, to make the air resistance
the same; and uses these boxes as the bobs for nine different pendulums, with very long but equal suspensions.
The pendulums, he says, played exactly together for a
very long time. The accelerations of these different materials, he concludes, cannot differ from one another by
more than one part in a thousand. Essentially the same
experiment, the EotvOs experiment, has been performed
in this century with a precision of one part in one billion.
Another way of stating the result, you may know, is that
inertial mass is proportional to weight.
At this point in the manuscript series, there appears
for the first time in history, so far as I know, a statement
of Newton's third law of motion, the equality of action
and reaction. Let me now put these two results together-Newton's Eotvos experiment, and his third law,
as they are put together in the Principia. The first implies
that bodies on the Earth are accelerated downward by a
force that is strictly proportional to what Newton now
calls their mass, by which he means their resistance to
being accelerated. (If the proportionality had not been
exact, the pendulums would not have played together,
would not have had the same periods.) If the same thing
holds with respect to Jupiter, with respect to Saturn, and
with respect to the Sun, then one can compare the
attracting powers of these different bodies in the way we
have already seen: by taking a test body, it doesn't matter
of what mass, placing it at a fixed distance from the attracWINTER 1981
�ting body, and seeing how much it is accelerated. Newton
couldn't do this physically, as we've said, but assummg
the inverse-square Jaw he could find from the actual acceleration of a body at one distance what the acceleration
would be if the satellite were placed at any stipulated
distance.
Now comes the final step. Since the mass of the test
body can be ignored, in the comparison of the attracting
forces of two bodies, one can use each as a test body for
the other. Then
A's power of attraction
B's power of attraction
acceleration of B
acceleration of A
By the third law of motion, these accelerations are inversely as the inertial masses:
acceleration of B
acceleration of A
mass of A
mass ofB
Putting the two results together,
A's power of attraction
B's power of attraction
mass of A
mass of B
All right, that's it. The gravitational force is proportional
to both the mass of the attracting and the mass of the
attracted body. Inertial mass belongs to bodies merely
because they are bodies. Therefore gravitational force
goes with all bodies; all bodies attract gravitationally.
Gravitational attraction is therefore inexplicable by any
mechanical model of matter in motion. The mechanical
philosophy, Newton concludes in the 1680s and 1690s,
is dead; he has rediscovered the ancient mystic Pythagorean truth of the harmony of the spheres. Gravitation,
he concludes, is the result simply of the immediate action
of God.
There was a tradition in seventeenth-century England,
pursued particularly by the so-called Cambridge Platonists
Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, having to do with the
prisci theologi or ancient theologians-Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Thales, Plato, and so on-whose
pagan wisdom, it was claimed, was really derivative from
that of the Hebrew prophets, especially Moses. More
and Cudworth· developed their interpretation of these
ancient doctrines into a justification for a new and revolu-
tionary natural philosophy, that is, for modern science
as it was coming to be in the works of Galileo and
Descartes. Newton, influenced by these men in earlier
years, now believes he has found the right interpretation
of the ancient wisdom precisely because he has found the
right natural philosophy. And so he writes:
Since all matter duly formed is attended with signs of life
and all things are framed with perfect art and wisdom and
nature does nothing in vain; if there be an universal life and
all space be the sensorium of a thinking being who by immediate presence perceives all things in it, as that which thinks
in us, perceives their pictures in the brain; those laws of motion
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
arising from life or will may be of universal extent. To some
such laws the ancient philosophers seem to have alluded when
they called God Harmony and signified his actuating matter
harmonically by the God Pan's playing upon a Pipe . .. To the
mystical philosophers Pan was the supreme divinity inspiring
this world with harmonic ratio like a musical instrument and
handling it with modulation according to that saying of
Orpheus "striking the harmony of the world in playful song".
But they said that the Planets move in their circuits by force
of their own souls, that is, by force of the gravity which takes
its origin from the action of the soul. From this, it seems, arose
the opinion of the peripatetics concerning Intelligences moving solid globes. But the souls of the sun and of all the planets
the more ancient Philosophers held for one and the same
divinity exercising its powers in al1 bodies whatsoever ... All
[their gods] are one thing, though there be many names.
And so Newton goes on to argue, using passages from
Plato and Lucretius and many other ancient writings, that
the philosophers of antiquity-Thales, Anaximander,
Pythagoras, Democritus, and so on-were really agreed
upon the atomicity of matter, the inverse-square law of
gravitation, the universality of gravitation, and further,
true mystics that they were, held the true cause of gravity
to be the direct action of God. The unity of physical,
moral, and theological wisdom is thus shown to have been
present in the beginnings of the world, transmitted from
Adam and Eve. That unity and that wisdom were gradually
lost, after the corruptions of the sons of Noah; but now
they have been recovered and restored by Newton, who
thus takes his place among the prisci theologi, the ancient
theologians. Newton is even able to find in the biblical
book of Daniel the prophecy of his, Newton's, rediscovery
of the truth.
So the first beginnings of a mathematized celestial
dynamics came, with Kepler, out of a trinitarian symbol,
the three-foldness of the Sun, spherical shell of stars and
intervening space in a Sun-centered world; Kepler had
his main idea from the beginning. With Newton it was
different, and the crucial justifying discovery came late,
with a precise experiment to test the exactness of the
constancy of the acceleration of gravity, and a new realization of the meaning of that constancy. And in a world that
has now lost its geometrical center, Newton accepts this.
discovery as a revelation of a mysterious, omnipresent,
unitarian God, to discourse of whom from the appearances,
as he will tell us in the General Scholium to the second
edition of the Principia, does certainly belong to Natural
Philosophy. But the most famous statement of the General Scholium, presented there as the outcome of inductivist caution, "f do not contrive hypotheses" (hypotheses,
that is, as to the cause of gravitation)-this statement
disguised rather than expressed the deeper ground of
Newton's original and I suspect persisting view, that gravi-
tation was indeed universal, and the result of the direct
action of God, so that no hypotheses for it could be successfully contrived.
65
�Recent Events In the West*
Er will mein Leben und mein Glueck; und fuehlt nicht,
dass der schon tot ist, der um seiner Sicherhett willen lebt.
Leo Raditsa
Introduction
After five years of evasion there is now something like
the beginning of awareness that in 1975 Soviet actions
changed fundamentally. In 1975 the Soviet Union began
to separate Europe from America by taking over countries, openly and through proxies, that border on trade
routes and have natural resources without which neither
Europe and the United States can survive. At the same
time the propaganda war, now carried on largely by countries of the so-called Third World, and the attack on international traditions (seizure of embassies, murder of
nations, murder of refugees, murder of political exiles,
and terrorism) intensified. The object of this apparently
chaotic and "spontaneous" second war is not only to distract attention from the strategic significance of recent
Soviet advances but also to destroy international public
opinion by making it complicit with murder-the public
opinion that Solzhenitsyn says has been destroyed in Russia and has left people helpless against themselves and
others. The Soviets aim to win control of Europe without
actually fighting a total war by exploiting the Free World's
fear of nuclear disaster and its present reluctance to fight
small wars-and even to defend itself by openly stating
the truth. But their success, if it can be called that, would
probably bring only bitterer wars.
'
.
This article is first in a series dealing with the United States in the
world-a series, in part, provoked by Raymond Aron's recent remark:
"Le peuple america in s'est toujours plus preoccupe de lui-m~me que du
monde exterieur." I write here in my own name, not as editor. My views
do not represent the editorial policy of The St. fohn's Review. L R.
66
In the United States and Europe the sense of crisis appears now widespread but mixed with resignation and bafflement. Both the bafflement and the resignation come,
probably, most of all from unacknowledged fear, but they
also come from lack of policy. The simple return to the
"containment" of the late forties and fifties does not
make sense, even if it were possible, for containment, especially the passivity and rigidity it tended to foster, has
had a lot to do with bringing us into the present danger.
Also, more importantly, containment focuses too much
on the future at the expense of the present struggle which
will decide the future. Policy must be more active, more
daring, more courageous, and what amounts to the same
thing, more modest. Above all, the government must not
be afraid to speak the truth.
In its further reaches the crisis we are now living started
in 1914. The struggle against totalitarianism is always in
part a struggle against ourselves, for totalitarianism sprang
from our thought and the distortions of our traditions. It
is not alien to us. We know it all too well-and until recently it has won widespread allegiance in the Free World.
What passes for totalitarianism's strength (actually, nothing more than force) comes from our weakness. Because
totalitarian regimes exist off our weakness, they are not
enemies which countries and in.dividuals can respect. As a
result, war with them is unceasing when it is not total and
self-destructive. Because we fear ourselves to some extent
in them, struggle with totalitarianism tends to undo reLeo Raditsa recently published Some Sense About Wilhelm Reich (Philosophical Library 1978). He writes frequently on current events in the
world for Midstream and other publications.
WINTER 1981
�spect for virtues otherwise selfevident, such as courage.
But it is from those who have lived under these regimes
and remained true to themselves that courage can be relearned. "Pygmies in power-the Mussolinis, Stalins, and
Hitlers-seem like giants; mediocrities like men of genius;
men of genius like madmen" (Lev Kopelev).
l. The Recent Background
Since 1975 seven countries have succumbed to commu~
nist aggression. In all instances the Soviets were involved.
Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, South Yemen, Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan. (The situation in Mozambique is not
clear.) In Angola and Afghanistan resistance, mostly ignored, continues. Until recently only Solzhenitsyn dared
keep count. The end of 1975 made it plain that defeat in
Vietnam was not an isolated instance but a general route,
especially a psychological route that involved the whole
free world, profoundly.
Abandoned to a three-sided civil war in the collapse of
Portuguese self-confidence, Angola was invaded in 1975
by Cuban troops with East German and Soviet advisorsa clear violation of the self-determination of nations, open
aggression. Kissinger resorted to covert aid to the Angolans fighting the Cubans, but at the same time forbade
Moynihan to bring the aggression against Angola before
the UN. Once exposed, Kissinger's secretiveness pro~
voked a congressional prohibition against aid to Angola.
Had the opposition to the Vietnam War been rational, disinterested and forthright, against one specific, miscon~
ceived war, it would have been able to distinguish
between Indochina and Angola, and it would have known
the danger to the free world, especially to its raw materials
and trade routes, in the attack on Angola and on the Horn
of Africa.
But behind 1975 and the fall of Saigon lies 1973, and
1968 and 1967. These mark even more fundamental turning points whose importance begins to be perceived, dimly,
only now.
In 1967 Israel won a war and it conquered territory. It
struck first (because its survival depended on it) when it
became clear that Nasser was about to attack. But victory
and, worse still, inadvertent conquest as a result of the
readiness to fight for one's life (a "right" whose assurance
in article 51 of the UN Charter only serves to hamper its
exercise) violates all contemporary sensibilities, which exist on their denial of the most obvious experience of the
past.
Nobody knew what to do with this victory and this
strength. Above all it embarrassed us, especially our government. Like our own victory in the Second World War
we could not cope with it, especially in its contrast to our
incapacity to face either victory or defeat in Indochina.
Our government (for instance in 1969), in accordance
with the unmistakably expressed desire of people and the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Congress, helped Israel with economic and military aid;
but on condition that it show "flexibility" and assume
something like sole responsibility for the war-that it appear to deny itself. That there was a place for courage and
heroism in our world, and that it could be effective, was
more than we could bear: At the same time we could not
deny it outright, for that would be too obvious a self-betrayal. As a result of this victory of 1967, even the UN in
resolution 242 had to acknowledge, grudgingly, Israel's
"right" to survival. The ambiguity, really the ambivalence,
that shows itself in this resolution's refusal to accept the
victory it had to acknowledge, provided the basis for the
continuance of the war of 1967.
Inspired by the PLO's example, the terrorism which
started in a big way after Israel's victory in the 1967 war
represents a continuation and extension of that war
throughout much of the free world in order to undo its
victory and prevent negotiations for peace. 1 The terrorists
sensed they could win in the great cities of the free world
and in the UN the victory the Arabs had been denied on
the battlefield. This violence has worked. People who
before 1967 had never heard of the "Palestinians" or the
PLO now speak dimly of their "right" to "self-determination".' This capacity to carry on a war throughout the
world in random violence-a war that has been lost in
open battle-tells something of the character of the war
we are involved in throughout the world. Our world allows courage on the battlefield to be undone by cowardly
murder.
Without Soviet support and training this war would not
have been carried out in such a highly professional and organized manner. To my knowledge no government in the
free world has spoken out openly about Soviet involvement in terrorism. Yet it has been known in the West at
least since 1973 that since 1967 the Soviet Union has
been training foreign terrorists in Moscow. President Carter in his State of the Union message after the Soviet attack on Afghanistan never mentioned it.
With some exceptions (Israel, Italy since the murder of
Mora, Germany at least once, Britain lately) Western governments have negotiated with terrorists. Because of their
unwillingness to make public the Soviet Union's involvement in terroriSm, these governments have acted as if
each nation's terrorism was its own "personal" problem
that had no relation to the common danger they feared to
identify. In fact the terrorists are often native sons. This
capacity to make nations turn in on themselves (as if they
were alone in the world), in the illusion of looking out for
themselves, has been one of the worst effects of terrorism.
With its demonstration of the West's weakness and lack of
cohesion, the effectiveness of terrorism has probably surprised the Soviet Union. Events since 1967 have shown
that we, at least our governments, will put up with international wars as long as those that fight them (for instance, the terrorists) do not show undeniable courage.
1968 brought the open Soviet crushing of Czechoslovakia, which, unlike Hungary in 1956, had neither defied the
67
�Soviet Union in the name of democracy nor taken to
arms. An event that hardly affected Europe's and the
United States' relations with the Soviet Union: 1969 was
the beginning of so-called detente in Europe. By their
readiness to negotiate with the Soviet Union as if nothing
had happened, the governments of Europe and, three
years later, the United States, showed the Soviet regime
that despite their mild protestations they were indifferent
to the breaking of Czechoslovakia.
1969 also brought johnson's refusal ·to run for reelection. Within six months of Nixon's accession to office at
the beginnng of 1969 the first troops were withdrawn
from Vietnam-a change in policy which despite Nixon's
and Kissinger's intentions to the contrary eventually led
to the abandonment of South Vietnam-the necessary
consequence, in Hanoi's view, of Nixon's and Kissinger's
desire to lessen American commitment.
The 1973 war in the Middle East, which began with a
surprise attack on Israel on all fronts, and which Israel
barely survived, by luck and extraordinary courage, marks
another turning point. Its consequences were obvious,
though they were denied even by a publication of the
courage and the intelligence of The Economist.
Perceived accurately as a renewed outbreak of the continuing war in the Middle East, the War of 1973 also intensified and extended the war that had continued almost
unnoticed outside of Israel since 1967. Its chief feature
was the Arab oil-producing nations' and Persia's extortion-
ary resort to the oil embargo and the formation of an oil
cartel that included Venezuela and Indonesia.
Such a cartel represented a direct attack on the Atlantic
Charter, which had laid the basis of the prosperity of the
world since 1945 by insisting on the freedom of trade between nations, including specifically trade in natural re-
sources. The oil embargo threatened the world free trade
had made, in which the fiercest competition exists between nations rather than within them. Suddenly, states
which had nationalized their oil industries, or at any rate
controlled them, resorted to monopoly and artificial price
fixng, with not a murmur of protest from the Western industrialized nations.
Because it undermined Western leadership by attacking its guarantee of free and unrestricted trade between
nations, this extortionary action helped the Soviets more
than they could help themselves. The Arabs, some of
whom said they hated communism, were in fact undermining "capitalism". Consciously or not, they acted in
accordance with Stalin's understanding that held that
"revolution" could be brought about not only within nations but between them, by putting the poor and undeveloped nations against the industrial nations.
By allowing the Arab nations and Persia (which was primarily responsible for the second doubling of prices in
1973) to get away with this extortion, the United States
and its allies were not only undoing themselves but help1
ing the oil producing countries to undo themselves. Barely
five years later, the collapse of Persia showed this self-de-
68
structiveness to a world baffled because it had too long
told itself its paralysis would have no consequence. The
collusion of the blackmailed with the blackmailers blinded
them both to obvious facts. Neither the Shah nor the government of the United States, even after they had been
warned by what was left of the CIA and by Israeli intelligence, faced the opposition to the Shah within Persia.
The passive acquiescence. to oil extortion also immedi-
ately allowed the gap between America and Europe to
widen. It encouraged Europe to make her own arrangements. With the exception of Portugal-which allowed
American planes flying to the aid of Israel to refuel-and
the Netherlands, Europe indulged in a display of cravenness. Italy, which had been deeply moved by Israel's courage in 1967 and strongly supported it, held its silence in
1973. Its once leading newspaper, the Carriere della Sera,
shifted to a pro-Arab line.
The Arab resort to the use of oil as a weapon intensified
the extension of the Middle East War, which the terrorists
had begun after 1967, to every individual in the free
world. Within less than two years the extortion succeeded
in winning the acceptance of the PLO, with observer
status and in some sessions with the attributes of full sovereignty, at the UN.
Nor did the United States help Europe, which is dependent on the Middle East for about seventy percent of its
oil and, therefore, for its riches. (A one percent increase in
production brings with it something like one percent increase in oil consumption.) Acting as if its relation to Eu-
rope was of little importance, it has increased the pressure
on Europe by allowing its oil imports to increase staggeringly-by about forty percent in the period of 1973-1978.
The evasiveness of the United States and Europe toward oil extortion has also weakened their relations with
their own citizens, for they dared not bring home the grim
realities of their citizens. By 1978 on the average only
twenty-two percent of the real rise of the price in oil had
shown up in the price of gas and heating fueJ.l The rise in
inflation in almost every major country in Europe to levels
not easily controlled comes in part from this evasion.
The evasiveness about oil brought with it an evasiveness about the Soviets. Few in office spoke openly of
growth in Soviet conventional and nuclear armaments.
Only Margaret Thatcher has spoken with anything approaching forthrightness and conviction about the danger
facing the West, both the economic danger and the threat
from the Soviet Union.
In these years (after 1969) of great and obvious danger
in which we acted as if there was no danger, Kissinger
managed to persuade us that the time had come to negotiate with the Soviets. He even managed to persuade us to
think that they would help us out of our difficulties in
Indochina, that they could be made to cooperate at a time
of our obvious weakness. This willingness, initiated by the
government, to think the Soviet regime would behave
"more reasonably", that "super-power" relations could
WINTER 1981
�improve in the midst of obvious Western weakness, is the
most striking feature of the period.
The last decade shows that the Soviet Union and its satellites, for instance, Hanoi, will play upon our fear of nu·
clear destruction, which we call our yearning for peace,
until we are weak enough to be overrun. By abolishing
conscription, our government appears no longer willing to
risk our lives in our defense.
In the instance of Europe this subjection may not re·
quire direct Soviet conquest but simply neutralization.
Giscard d'Estaing's and Schmidt's readiness to meet with
the Soviet leaders as if nothing had happened, a few
months after the Soviet attack on Afghanistan, show this
process to have started already. Strangely, the economi·
cally weaker of the larger nations of NATO, Italy and
Britain, have shown themselves our bravest allies. The
governments of France and Germany are rich enough to
risk betraying their countries-and the rest of Europe.
American confusion allows them such indulgence. Would
Giscard and Schmidt have dealt with the Soviet regime if
Muskie had not preceded them with his meeting with
Gromyko in Vienna?
2. 1979
Afghanistan in 1980 showed Soviet brutality unmistakably to men who had mistaken their forgetfulness of the
invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 for the illusions of
detente. 1979 had already told something of what the fu·
lure could hold. It was in 1979 that we began to understand the actual consequences of the war in Indochina in
the four years after the fall of Saigon.
For immediately after the fall of Saigon, Cambodia,
Laos, and Vietnam slipped off the map. First there was a
deadly silence, then dim suspicions of murder in Cam·
bodia, confirmed in hearings before a Congressional com-
mittee (July, 1977) and by Cambodian refugees in France.
The information was received numbly-there was nothing like a public outcry. It took Carter, as Paul Seabury
noticed, more than a year in office before he even mentioned, and then only meekly, the murder there.
The last we had seen was the bloody conquest of
Phnomph Penh in which patients were left to die on the
operating table. The New York Times reporter confessed
to a seizure of
~'double
vision": the butchery of conquest
and a whole population driven out into the countryside
was not at all what he had meant by "revolution". Faced
with slaughter before his eyes, he could tell the difference
between his aspirations and fantasies and murder: but he
had to see the slaughter. Knowledge, the experience of
the past, had not been enough. It must be this that drives
Solzhenitsyn to say that the West will not wake up until it
too has been through the camps.
The silence in the four years since the fall of Saigon
tells something about freedom and what free countries do
to the world. Without their presence there is no informaTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
tion. You only find out when it is too late and at the risk of
the lives of those who dare bear witness.
And the murder of those who bear witness goes on right
now. In Persia, a young woman of thirty dared speak in
her own name, in the spring of 1980, of the murders of socalled government troops in Kurdistan and call for French
intervention. She was murdered almost immediately after
publication of her testimony in L'Express-murdered by
those readers of the international press, the "holy revolutionaries" of Teheran.
In 1979, with the boat people in flight from the North
Vietnamese regime and hundreds of thousands of Cambodians trying to cross into Thailand, the murder of the
previous four years broke before our eyes. 1979 started,
really, at Christmas of 1978, with the Vietnamese attack
on Cambodia. Numbering an estimated six hundred thousand men, the Vietnamese army is one of the largest in
the world, battle-hardened and arrogant in a victory won
not on the battlefield but in the newspapers, radio, and
television of Europe and the United States. Vietnam's
attack on Cambodia occurred in the days of President
Carter's recognition of the regime in mainland China (an-
nounced December 16, 1978, for January I, 1979). On
February 17, a few days after the visit of the Chinese
Vice-Premier to Washington, China attacked Vietnam.
The American government's apparent surprise showed
the good faith that informed the new relationship.
Since notlii"ng much worse than Pol Pot could be imagined, the first reaction to_ the Vietnamese invasion of
Cambodia was bafflement, even involuntary relief. At last
somebody had done something about Cambodia-had
made it possible to speak, even perhaps to think of it
again. Even McGovern had advocated intervention the
summer before (August 21, 1978).
But after baffled involuntary relief came doubt. The
North Vietnamese attempt to conquer Cambodia not only
substituted one totalitarian regime for another but, as
Prince Sihanouk' s voice suddenly clear from Peking reminded, threatened the extinction of Cambodia forever.
In its self-righteous support of the invasion, the Soviet
regime implied that opposition to the Vietnamese con·
quest amounted to support for Pol Pot. They did not even
have to remind us that Pol Pot had murdered for three
and a half years without even a word of protest from
Western governments. Or from the people. Nothing-no
demonstrations, those fabled demonstrations that just a
few years before had been taken for the most important,
even the only exercise of genuine freedom.
The State Department expressed its displeasure at the
Vietnamese and at the same time attempted to keep its
distance from Pol Pot. He was, after all, supported by the
Chinese regime which we recognized. The so-called
movement of the non-aligned (despite Castro's maneuvers later in 1979) did not recognize the Vietnamese regime in Cambodia, thereby implying Pol Pot had some
claim to 14 legitimacy."
With the Chinese attack on Hanoi about six weeks later
69
�It was in the Red Army, from the lips of General Korotayev,
that I first heard the stupefying thought, not entirely alien to
me: when Communism is victorious the world over, then
wars will be fought with the ultimate bitterness. Hadn't I had
similar thoughts that night after our disaster on the Sutjeska
River? Hadn't I reflected that forces stronger than ideology
and interests had thrown us and the Germans into a death
struggle amid those wild ravines? And now a Russian who was
also a Communist, Korotayev, was entertaining the thought
that wars would be especially bitter under Communismthough under Communism, theoretically, there would be no
classes and no wars. What horrors gave rise to these thoughts
in Korotayev and myself? And how was it that he had the
boldness so late at night, after supper and a cordial conversation, to express his thoughts, and I to listen in mute remembrance of horrors and reflections of my own?4
we again faced a war in which it was impossible to take
sides. The Chinese regime had at least responded to
Hanoi"s attack, which meant they took it seriously when
the West ignored it. But the Chinese were not combatting
aggression for the sake of the self-determination of Cambodia. Conquerors first of all of themselves (and of Tibet),
they were simply contesting Soviet and Vietnamese domination of the area (a Soviet-Vietnamese "friendship" treaty
had brought Vietnam nearly to the status of an "East-European" satellite barely a month [December 3, 1978]
before the Vietnamese attack). Mainland China was quite
comfortable with Pol Pot and supported him. Like the
Soviet regime, it takes murder to be the stuff of history
when it is merely the stuff of civil wars, or "revolutions".
Milovan Djilas, associate and victim ofTito, asked himself
recently when reliving his wartime: "Killing is a function
of war and revolution. Or could it be the other way around?"
The State Department sought a quick end to hostilities
in which the Chinese regime appears not to have done
well, but did nothing about the continuing Vietnamese
conquest of Cambodia.
We did not count. We were effectively shut out. For
four years we and the world we lead had meekly put up
Against this background of wars in which the United
States could take neither side but only intervene against
both, the President recognized mainland China. The expected recognition came unexpectedly and without pub-
with not knowing what was going on in those nations, and
lic discussion. Congress was not in session, and only the
now that they did not hide their actions, we did nothing.
Another fact came clear. The war for Indochina would
continue; it had continued. Since the United States had
been assumed to be the cause of the fighting, people
imagined that with its withdrawal, the violence would
cease. There would be no freedom, no peace, but fighting,
at least, would cease. Instead the fighting continued with
briefest notice (something like twenty-four hours) was
given to the Republic of China (Taiwan). In evading the
Senate's criticism, Carter deprived himself of its moderating support, which might have told in his dealings with
China. The Senate might have given him the strength to
recognize China without breaking relations with Taiwan
and without suspending, unilaterally, the treaty of alliance
with a year's notice-legally correct but certainly not
within the spirit of alliance, which is not made of paper.
After a few weeks the Senate passed a motion that expressed its support of Taiwan without explicit mention of
the readiness to defend it. In response, mainland China
made it as dear as it makes anything, that it limited its
greater furor and brutality, with plain murderousness, be-
fore the whole world, a war now of conquest between
communists where free men could discern nothing at
stake except destruction for destruction's sake. And it
spread. It threatens Thailand. It intensified, almost unnoticed in its international dimension, in Europe, in terrorist
attacks in Italy, in Turkey, in Ireland, in Spain where
every step towards a constitution and freedom encountered terrorist violence. But men did not connect the increasing domestic violence in the countries of Europe
with their incapacity to bring the destruction of Indochina to an end.
When Djilas visited the front lines on a visit to Moscow
in 1944, a Soviet general shocked him with his remark
that the worst and most destructive wars would come
with the triumph of "socialism" throughout the world.
Then the murder would start in earnest. The murder in
Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge, the conquest of South
Vietnam by the regime in the North, the attempted conquest of Cambodia by North Vietnam, as well as China's
attack on Hanoi, all show the beginnings of that world of
bitter wars with no discernible object. The defense of
freedom in the world, which the totalitarian regimes call
unforgivabie aggression, gives the world its only stability.
Such a stability is not to be maintained without facing
danger frequently.
70
3. The Recognition of Mainland China
((commitment" not to attack Taiwan to a few years.
By repudiating Taiwan in shameless fashion at the moment he recognized China, Carter made it dear that the
United States took recognition of the regime in mainland
China for something like an affirmation of its "legitimacy."
Recognizing the regime in China a generation after it
seized power in civil war made sense, since it was about
time we looked that reality in the face; but making recognition amount to something like approval meant appearing to disown our previous thinking-our friends and
ourselves.
Our policy towards mainland China runs the risk of repeating all the mistakes of our war-time association with
Stalin and the Soviet Union-a policy that came from the
weakness of the democracies and has put us since 1945 in
a situation of fighting, and not knowing we are fighting, a
war, in Brian Crozier's phrase, called ({peace."
In their recent insistent coupling of the United States
and China, and their significant omission of Europe in
their propaganda about Afghanistan, the Soviets betray
WINTER 1981
�full awareness that association with China can compromise the United States and separate it from Europe and
NATO. They may not be as afraid of China as they
pretend-and we assume.
The worst part of the China policy is its motive. According to well-founded rumors it comes from a desire of
some high officials in the government to exploit this assumed Soviet fear of China. Instead of deluding ourselves
that we could exploit Soviet fear of China, we ought to
fear that such actions might provoke the Soviet Union to
irrational acts.
Any thought of using the Chinese to make up for our
government's lack of courage and forthrightness shows little common sense. The men in power (not office) in the
Soviet Union are accustomed to murder and imprisoning
without compunction. It is self-destructive to expect that
Western statesmen could manipulate these men. Especially American men in office, with their professors as advisors, who in most instances in the last fifteen years have
been incapable of addressing their own citizens effectively (and, therefore, of distinguishing their citizens'
capacity to think from the "public opinion" of the newspapers, television, and the polls).
Because in contrast to Hitler (who wanted to get back to
his drawing), the Communists in Russia and China are
not in such a hurry and appear, as an aide to Schmidt put
it (before Afghanistan), "predictable", there is a tendency
to assume they are not self-destructive, not at any rate as
self-destructive as the Nazis in Germany or the Fascists in
Italy. But events in Indochina especially since the fall of
Saigon in April 1975 have shown again that Communists
when left to themselves cannot control their self-destructiveness.
... The twentieth century has also shown us that evil has an
enormous urge to self-destruction. It inevitably ends in total
folly and suicide. Unfortunately, as we now understand, in
destroying itself, evil may destroy all life on earth as well.
However much we shout about these elementary truths, they
will only be heeded by people who themselves want no more
of evil. None of this, after all, is new: everything is always
repeated, though on an ever greater scale. Luckily, I shall not
see what the future holds in store.S
Nobody can tell whether the Communists in China and
Russia will continue to turn against each other or again
join together against the countries that manage to enjoy
the consent of the governed. An eventual rapprochement
between the Communists in China and in Russia may
well be more likely than continued name-calling-and in
any case rapprochement is compatible with some namecalling. In his interview in Time at the beginning of 1979,
Brezhnev winked more than once at the Communists in
China. 6 There are talks, probably insignificant, now going
on. Totalitarian regimes can neither distinguish between
friends and enemies nor between war and peace.
The worst of it has been the kind of euphoria that has
greeted opening relations with China. From hearing travTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ellers return you hardly dare remember that China is a totalitarian country that has criticized the Soviet Union for
the slight distance it has supposedly taken from Stalin and
for not using nuclear weapons.
There is hardly any real information coming out of
China. There are np real voices like those now speaking
for Russia throughout the whole length and breadth of
the world, and those coming out of what has come to be
called "Eastern Europe". We know little; and we should
never act and think as if we know much.
One of the two books I know of on the Chinese camps
(Prisoner of Mao) shows them to be more terrifying than
the Soviet camps, for unlike the Soviet camps they are intent on destroying the power to think.'
He (Pasqualini, one of the writers of Prisoner of Mao) confesses that after a few years in the labor camps, he came, if
not exactly to love the system which was methodically destroying his personality, at least to feel gratitude for the
patience and care with which the Authorities were trying to
re-educate worthless vermin like himself. 8
Instead of deluding ourselves that we could effectively
exploit Soviet fears of China, we ought to take the Soviet
regime's fears of China seriously: they may know what
they are talking about. And they are not only the fears of
the Soviet regime, but of Russians, of men who can teach
us a thing or two about freedom. In 1974 Vladimir Bukovsky in Vladimir Prison, met a Chinaman, Ma Hun, who
had fled death in China in 1968 during the so-called "cultural revolution". He had been arrested by the KGB.
They took him for a spy after their failure to turn him into
one, because they could not conceive of anybody fleeing
to the Soviet Union for refuge:
... The boys used to ask him:
"Well now, Ma Hun, how do you like it here?"
"Velly good," he would say. "Velly, velly good."
"What do you mean, good? This is prison, starvation."
"What starvation?" Ma Hun looked astonished and pointed
at the flies flying about the cell. As if to say, if there had been
real starvation, this wildlife would long since have disappeared. The boys got a fit of the shivers-what do the poor
sods call starvation back in China?
In time Ma Hun was able to tell us about the starvation in
China, when they ate all the leaves off the trees and all the
grass. For fifty miles around you couldn't find even a dung
beetle .
. . . The more he told us about China, the more it reminded
us of our own 1920s and 30s, under so-called "Stalinism". But
if anything, it was worse in China: more cruelty, cynicism,
and hypocrisy. They didn't need any concentration camps
there, they simply killed off their undesirables. For instance,
all the Chinese volunteers who had been captured in Korea
and returned by the Americans were simply wiped out, to the
last man. But they were far from being the only ones. There
were the "class aliens," the "wreckers" and the "opportunists." And above all, of course, the intelligentsia. The rest
were herded into stafe farms and communes to be reeducated by work.
71
�... Soviet life still seemed like paradise to him: you were
paid money for your work, which you could use to buy food
and clothing without restriction. Not like in China, where
you got nine yards of cloth per person per year. As for hypocrisy, he was used to it. Soviet hypocrisy struck him as child's
play compared with the Chinese variety. 9
Because our policy does not come of sliength it cannot
support such individuals who live in China, who understand and love government by law and democracy and
speak out. The new regime has arrested some of these
men, after a few months in which they spoke their mind;
there has been no notice, as far as I know, from the governments of the West. 10
4. The Murder of Peoples
You now have to go to the refugee camps in Thailand
or in Malaysia, among the dying or those about to be returned to their death, if you want to hear the words of
john F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address of 1961 ("Let every
nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall
pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and
the success of liberty") said with a straight face:
We got to know that the Thai govt have sent thousands of
refugees back to Cambodia. We feel very sorry and disappointed about the news.
We have tried all our best to escape from Communist Cambodia to look for freedom.
Dear sir (President Carter), your Anierican people have
fighted for liberty with tears and blood. You realize very well
about the worth and happiness of freedom. We will rather die
in a freedom country than being sent back to unhuman Communist Cambodia. . . 11
In june 1979 in Vienna when Carter brought up the
"problem" of the refugees of Indochina, he met Brezhnev's icy silence. That silence means: these people will die
like flies and you will do nothing about it; words do not
mean much and you can talk all you like-we know you
do not mean it. 12
Who got the governments of the West finally to pay a
semblance of attention to the refugees? Thailand and Malaysia and Singapore. How did they do it? By blackmail, by
declaring they would let the refugees perish, by threatening the United States and Europe with their own
ideals-by actually driving something like forty thousand
refugees back from Thailand into western Cambodia to almost certain death-before everybody's eyes. The once
great nations of Europe and the United States called an
international conference in july 1979 in Geneva. What
happened at this conference? They asked Vietnam to
stop the flow of refugees sent to death on the South
China Sea. They thus accorded the regime in Vietnam,
72
not recognized by the United States, a kind of recognition. Cambodia was not even represented, because the
"nations" could not agree on its representation. At the
conference only the Chinese spoke open words-the
Chinese, who had backed and still back the murderous regime of Pol Pot. From them we took lessons in interna·
tionallaw! The Soviet Union kept silence except when it
accused China of driving men into the sea and blaming
Hanoi for it. 13
In effect the large nations of the West indicated to Hanoi that it could do what it wanted with those it wished
away as long as it did not involve the West in their extermination by putting them on the seas. (In june 1979 the
immigration minister of Australia estimated that two hundred thousand Vietnamese had died at sea in the previous
four years. In Hong Kong offici;Jls estimated Hanoi might
finally extort several billion dollars in gold from the Chinese and Vietnamese whom it allowed to take to the uncertain mercies of the seas.jl"' And the flow of refugees
stopped-for a time. The newspapers could turn to easier
subjects.
When the freespoken President of Italy, Pertini, sent
three Italian ships, which together could hold one thousand refugees, to the South China Sea in july, 1979, Hanoi savagely accused Italy of aggression. In answer the
Italian commander spoke in what sounded like embarrass·
ment of "humanitarian" considerations. Ships of the
United States were also active at this time pulling men,
women, and children out of the South China Sea. In an
unaccountable callous misreading of British public opin·
ion, Margaret Thatcher, by declaring she would not honor
the custom of first refuge, encouraged British merchant
men, at considerable expense, to avoid waters where men
were drowning.
The United States took on about half the cost of caring
for the refugees who had survived, but the United States
did not speak out in defense of the traditions of refuge
that reach back at least to the Odyssey and the earliest
books of the Bible. This catastrophe is as serious, and will
haunt us deeply, as the murder of twelve million individuals by the Nazis. This time nobody will be able to say he
did not know.
Solzhenitsyn, especially in the third volume of Gulag
Archipelago, and Bruno Bettelheim, in a remarkable essay
on Linda Wertmuller's Seven Beauties printed several
years ago in The New Yorker, show over and over again
that the readiness to do anything to survive in concentration camps-which is called "appeasement" in international relations-invites murder because it makes individuals helpless 1 5 The war now waged on an international
scale not only in Southeast Asia but in much of Europe
through terrrorism, in the Middle East, in South America
and, especially at this moment, Central America, may well
instill this camp attitude everywhere, both in government
and individuals.
Meanwhile, the Afghans fight the Soviet army with almost their bare hands.
WINTER 1981
�5. The Recognition of Terrorists
In 1979 the terrorist war against the West which had in·
tensified since 1967 began to culminate in the world-wide
effort of the fedayeen to achieve diplomatic recognition
as the representative of the Arabs of Palestine, and in the
success of Persia in forcing the world to take its collapse
for a ('revolution". Khomeini showed the connection
between the two events immediately upon his arrival in
Teheran when he embraced Arafat for all the world to
see, put the PLO in the Israeli embassy in Teheran, and
stopped all oil shipments to South Africa and Israel,
thereby increasing Israel's isolation and dependence on
the United States.
The "official" recognition of terrorism now threatens
to become the subject of international negotiations both
in the instance of the PLO and of Persia. Terrorists are
acting as if they were governments.
Ordinary terrorists are trained in Libya, Algeria, Syria,
Czechoslovakia, Moscow, and God knows where else (often by Cuban and East German as well as Soviet instruc·
tors). The terrorists in Teheran, in contrast, besides taking
lessons from the fedayeen are in some sense self·
taught-on American campuses.
In its most recent phase this use of "revolution" to at·
tack nations from without by undoing international law
started with the subjection of the UN to PLO propaganda
and "Third World" ways of not-thinking. Here the guilt·
riddling superstition that the hard-working countries were
responsible for the poverty of the poor countries would,
but for the courage of Moynihan's intelligence, have gone
unnoticed.
Inconceivable without the resort to the sale of oil as a
political weapon, which touches all important nations,
this "revolutionary" attack on international traditions accompanies inflation, which, especially in Europe, comes
from the forced rise in oil prices. Lenin knew that the
quickest way to destroy societies that obey their laws is to
undermine their currency. Inflation makes men feel their
work does not count enough even to make for a fair exchange. This kind of inflation too is an attack from without.
Supplied and supported by the Soviet Union, the PLO
and the so-called radical states like Libya have attacked internationally, especially in Europe. They have realized
they could better get at the United States through Europe
than through Egypt and attacking IsraeL For the United
States, as Joseph Churba manfully stresses, provides the
link between the Arabs of Palestine, which the PLO
claims to represent, and the peace treaty between Egypt
and IsraeL 16 Not mentioned in the treaty itself, the Arabs
of Palestine (called "Palestinians") appear in the appended agreement which Carter negotiated at Camp
David.
The attempt to win diplomatic recognition for the PLO
is an attack not only on Israel but on all legitimate governments. For Israel has a government which enjoys the deep
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
consent of those it governs. It is also one of the few
governments in the world whose policy toward terrorists
has been unambiguous from the start, and fearless.
The fedayeen's recent successes are not to be taken
lightly. Their representatives have been received in Portugal, in Spain (by the King in the fond illusion, almost immediately undone, that the PLO would restrain its
murder). In defiance of the best opinions of his countrymen who wanted him to support the peace between
Egypt and Israel, Giscard d'Estaing on a trip to the Middle
East called for the independence of the Arabs of Palestine, and found something like support from the government of Germany. The Council of Foreign Ministers of
the Common Market, in a Europe which rarely speaks in
unison on foreign affairs, especially in regard to the Soviet
Union, has issued repeated declarations favouring the
fedayeen: In Turkey the PLO, through the violence of
another fedayeen terrorist organization, won something
approaching diplomatic recognition. In Brazil in the summer of 1979 the Vice President of Kuwait demanded recognition of the PLO under the threat of cutting off the oil
on which Brazil depends for all but ten percent of its
needs. In his threatening speeches in Brazil, the Vice
President called openly for the destruction of Israel and
praised Nazism. This praise appalled his audience, for the
war still counts in Brazil, the only country in South America whose soldiers fought and died with the Allies in the
war for freedom. Arafat, too, received in July 1979 in an
official manner and in public buildings in Vienna by
Kreitsky and Brandt-although he was a guest, not of the
government of Austria, but of the Socialist International-openly declared the readiness of the PLO to use
the "oil weapon". Throughout these attempts to win diplomatic recognition on the basis of its past violence, the
PLO has never repudiated its desire, openly stated in its
"charter", to destroy Israel.
All this fury of activity comes because the peace between Israel and Egypt of March 1979 threatens the PLO.
The peace has made things more dangerous, for it can
make things better or much worse.
A real peace would threaten all regimes that do not
obey their own laws. (The move towards peace has in fact
encouraged Sadat to undo some of the authoritarian character of the Egyptian regime-and the tensions that will
come to the surface in Egypt if the peace takes hold may
undo him.)
Peace in the Middle East would represent a major triumph over the totalitarian powers, who after all have
made peace impossible in Europe. The tendency, however, to put pressure on Israel rather than on Egypt and
the other more accessible Arab states runs the clear risk of
turning the peace into a more effective means of undoing
Israel than war. Unequivocal American support for
Israel's distinction between self-rule for the Arabs actually
living in the West Bank and Gaza and an independent
fedayeen state might have strengthened Sadat, by helping
him face down the rest of Arab "opinion." Such policy
73
�might bring some of the Arabs to the recognition that in
attacking Israel they are attacking themselves, for without
Israel they would be helpless before the Soviets. 17 Without
Arab support the fedayeen could not make such an impression on the West fearful for its oil. The turning point
will probably come when Israel gives up the irreplaceable
Sinai air bases in 1982.
6. "Revolution" in Persia
In its capacity to involve the world in its troubles, Khomeini's Persia outdoes even the fedayeen. Without the
participation and the extorted approval of "international
opinion," the collapse of authority in Persia might not
have occurred-and it certainly would not have been able
to pass itself off as a "revolution."
This capacity of Persia to involve the whole world in its
collapse comes not because events in Persia had anything
to say to the world, but because of the West's servility in
its dependence on oil and because of Persia's geographical
an accurate assessment, attention would have necessarily
turned also on the Communist Party and the Soviet
Union who are "professionals" in using the fantasy of
"revolution" to seize power.
Nor did it impress people that Khomeini immediately
took Soviet positions in foreign policy; that he attacked
the "imperialism" of the United States; that he showed an
unseeing world he thought like a Marxist, not like a Mohammedan, when he released the blacks and the women
among the American hostages-since when have Mohammedans shown sensitivity to blacks and to women; that he
took weeks to criticize the attempted Soviet conquest of
Afghanistan, and then attacked both the United States
and the Soviet Union as equally "evil."
Writing in L'Express about eight months after Khomeini's alightment in Teheran, jean Fran<;:ois Revel
showed that almost all of the points of the program of the
Communist Party of Persia, announced six months be-
fore, had found fulfillment: nationalization of the banks,
removal of "undesirable elements" from the police, the
judiciary, and the army. All except the formation of an
position.
open coalition regime including the Communists.
Except for the West's servility in its dependence on it,
the facts that count about Persis are old. The sights that
the precipitous oil riches brought recalled Herodotus, es-
The seizure of Americans in the United States embassy
in Teheran represents another development in the open
effort to destroy international opinion. The "leaders" of
pecially his sense of grandeur's violation of proportion
Persia, some of whom had studied at American universi-
and, therefore, of rationality. Two thousand trucks rusting on the side of a road because of the lack of trained
drivers who finally had to come from abroad, from Korea
and Taiwan; harbours with their approaches clogged by
six months of ships because Persian stevedores would not
work (again men came from Korea and Taiwan), soldiers
kissing the Shah's feet in an embarrassing misunderstand-
ties, sensed the American administration would put up
with any violence short of murder. With his frequent
boasts that no American in his time in the White House
had died in battle, Carter invited violence short of murder. Upon Cyrus Vance's resignation after the failure of
the long-delayed attempt to rescue the captives, the news-
ing of ancient Persian custom.
Invested on january 6, 1979, by the Shah, the Bakhtiar
government tested the illusion that there was an impulse
to liberty in ancient Persia, strong, and thereby rational
enough in the midst of chaos to find viable expression in a
constitution. A veteran of the French Resistance and of
the Shah's arrests, Bakhtiar made the mistake of getting
the Shah to leave the country on january 16, 1979. This
was the moment to make the transition to a constitutional
autocracy (not a constitutional monarchy, for the Shah
was no king in any European sense). It was also the moment for the United States to back openly the Shah and
his new Prime Minister-who faced crowds, sometimes
papers repeated his associates' characterizations of the
Secretary of State as a man who never said an angry word,
who never gave way to his actual feelings. Soon after the
seizure of the captives, an editorial writer for the Wall
Street Journal described the men in the White House as
worrying most about the reaction of the American people
as if the mob were not in Teheran, but here.
The seizure of the Americans in Teheran meant to
show the whole world that there was no difference between diplomats and anybody else; that there was no such
thing as a government capable of protecting its own officials and, therefore, its citizens; that nobody, whether rich
or poor, was safe; that passports were pieces of paper. The
attack on diplomatic custom, by '~students", unprece-
nary unwillingness of newspapers, radio, and television to
dented except as deliberate act of war, was taken as a
novelty.
But the attack is deadly serious. It undermines the
world's recognition that something underlies both war
and peace which allows nations to distinguish between
them and negotiate with each other even when at war. In
his second inaugural address (in the importantly different
pay attention to the Communist Party of Persia and So-
circumstances of civil war), Lincoln referred to this com-
viet involvement, even in the face of fairly reliable reports
mon underlying recognition of something fundamental
that transcends war and peace when he spoke of both
Northerners and Southerners reading the same Bible.
manipulated, everywhere and strikes in the oil-fields skillfully timed by the Communists, to undermine the new
government. 18 The United States did nothing. It did not
support Bakhtiar by opposing the return of Khomeini.
The readiness to accept "revolution" as a label for
events in Persia found its telling match in the extraordi-
of KGB involvement with the "students" who had seized
the American Embassy. For had "revolution" represented
74
WINTER 1981
�The attack had immediate consequences. The Soviets
showed the increase of their influence in Persia: they
warned the United States not to attempt rescue. American paralysis in Persia in the face of outrage probably also
encouraged Soviet effrontery in attacking Afghanistan a
few weeks after the seizure of the hostages.
In the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitzyn tells of local populations refusing succour to fugitives, in fear of reprisals. He remarks that the Soviet regime
had not only destroyed public opinion in Russia but also
undermined customs-the unwritten Jaws.
These people have everything-they have food and they have
water. Why don't we just knock on the door like beggars:
"Brothers! GOod people! Help us! We are convicts, escaped
prisoners!" Just like it Used to be in the nineteenth centurywhen people put pots of porridge, clothing, copper coins by
the paths through the taiga.
I had bread from the wives of the village
And the lads saw me right for makhorka.
Like hell we will! Times have changed. Nowadays they turn
you in. Either to salve their consciences, or to save their skins.
Because for aiding and abetting you can have a quarter slapped
on you. The nineteenth century failed to realize that a gift of
bread and water could be a political crime. 19
7. Nicaragua, Central America-and
the Americas
Unlike Persia, where collapse with much murder came
from crowds supported by world-wide opinion in their
hatred of the Shah, Nicaragua suffered full-scale civil war.
Announced several years before it occurred, civil war
came as if on schedule-with regular announcements
from guerrillas, otherwise in hiding, to the major newspapers.
Faced with a long-awaited civil war that afforded no
meaningful alternative in Nicaragua, and therefore required outside arbitration and intervention (like Henry L.
Stimson's arbitration upon request of the warring factions
in 1927 in Nicaragua), Brzezinski remarked to jean Franyois Revel, at the moment of the victory of the Sandinistas
in july, 1979, that nobody yet had found out how to
fashion democracies. 20
The truth, however, comes a little closer to home. In
announcing the "Alliance for Progress" on March 13,
1961, meant to face the threat of Castro's seizure of
power in Cuba to the rest of South America, Kennedy
connected economic aid to democracy and the rule of law.
Such an emphasis led to the public appreciation of democratic statesmen like Romulo Betancourt of Venezuela
and Alberto Lleras Camargo of Columbia 21 After a few
years the connection grew forgotten. A general neglect of
South America followed. Some years later Kissinger, without any embarrassment, disparaged its strategic "geopolitical" significance, even though Castro's destruction of the
Monroe doctrine had brought all of South America closer
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
to the civil war raging in the minds of men-and in many
places, not only in their minds.
In the absence of a forthright persistent American policy to support the constructive forces in South America,
confusion deepened the polarization Castro incited in
South America. Hatred of the United States drove much
of South America (with the important exception of Brazil)
to take itself, incredibly, for part of the "Third World".
The polarization that this hatred encouraged helped destroy freedom in Chile and Uruguay and further undermine Argentina, the Canada of South America at the
beginning of the century. In its turn the destruction of
freedom in Chile (which Kissinger had ignored along with
the rest of South America until a few months before
Allende won a plurality in September 1970) became a test
of conscience throughout the world second only to the
war in Indochina. It brought South America further into
the struggle for Europe which rages throughout the world
-while Europe (with the exception of France in Africa)
tends to local riches, and the United States yields to the
distraction of the "big" problems like mainland China and
negotiations to limit arms and the danger of "nuclear
holocaust".
Civil war broke out in Nicaragua after the passage of
the Panama Canal treaty. Despite the provisions of the
treaty that allow the United States control of the canalunti1 the end of the century, an increase in instability in the
entire Caribbean followed its approvaL
Panama, which benefited most from the treaty, made a
show of its efforts to train and supply fighters for Nicaragua. (In Costa Rica there was training also, but only because the government could not prevent what it would
not openly endorse: individuals of vacillating allegiance,
probably within the government, warned the training
camps when the police sought to move against them.)
Panama, in its open encouragement of civil war in Nicaragua, which violated South American traditions of not
taking sides in the civil wars of neighbors, took the place
of Cuba, which denied involvement-until victory 22 As in
Persia, the amateurs at "revolution" took the place in public of the professionals in the seizure of power.
The war for Nicaragua began the civil war for Central
America, the only region in South America where the
United States has intervened directly (and repeatedly) to
insure freedom of the seas in the access to the canal. Reporters told of youths, or teenagers, sometimes posing as
Nicaraguans, coming to Nicaragua from all over South
and Central America-most of all from Chile, Uruguay,
Colombia and Panama. They came because they wanted
to bring a war like the war for Nicaragua home.
Propaganda crosses frontiers more quickly in South
America than anywhere else in the West. So does fear.
For men there, especially capable and important people,
often do not harbour loyalty to the lands of their birthand they keep much of their money abroad. In January
1979, people in Guatemala, where property is more evenly
distributed than in Nicaragua, said nothing like Nicaragua
75
�could happen to them for fifteen or twenty years. By De·
cember 1979 they estimated two, at the outside, five
years. El Salvador is deeply at war. In 1980 there was violence from all sides in Guatemala-more or less unreported and ignored abroad. In the immediate region, the
prize is Costa Rica, the other democracy, besides Venezuela, left in South America. Law abiding and courageous,
for instance in its votes at the UN, it is a country that
astonishes sensitive travellers in its contrast with the rest
of the region.
Other prizes are of even more consequence than Costa
Rica. Totalitarian self-conquest (for totalitarianism spreads
with the, in appearance, uncontrollable self-destruction of
states) of Central America in civil war would isolate South
America from the United States even more than the
countries of South America and the United States have
isolated themselves from each other. Self-conquest of
Central America would also mean pressure on the canal,
on the surrounding waters-an freedom of the seas, hardpressed elsewhere: by means of the willful extension of
territorial waters, by the increasing presence of the Soviet
fleet on the oceans, by Kadafi's designs on Malta (for instance, his recent attempt to keep an Italian company
from exploring for oil off its coast). An inheritance from
the eighteenth century, freedom of the seas means not
only trade and the riches it brings, but the movement of
individuals and words. Like OPEC's attack on trade, the
threat to the freedom of the seas endangers freedom
within nations, for there cannot be much freedom within
at least some nations without free movement between
them.
As his situation worsened Somoza suddenly grew, like
the Shah, unbearable to people who had hardly thought
of him before. Nobody defended him (only a few men in
Congress, who still clung to the old phrase, "He's a son-ofa-bitch, but our son-of-a-bitch"). Nobody remembered
Somoza's loyalty at the UN: Nicaragua had voted in defense of Israel, when the Shah had not. The murder of the
courageous newspaper editor, Chamorro, was connected
with Somoza. When informed of the murder, Somoza, according to people close to events, expressed astonishment genuine in appearance. The murder may have been
the work of his henchmen who killed without his knowledge as danger increased.
Unlike the Shah, Somoza and his army fought in total
disregard of international opinion, and in spite of the
United States government's refusal to supply him with
arms and spare parts after the beginning of 1979 (February 8). He was a tyrant with a tyrant's courage, mixed in
with brutality and cowardice. Unlike his successors, however, he had set a date for elections in the near future.
In some sense the extent of Somoza's dominance over
Nicaragua brought the civil war, for it made it impossible
for another caudillo to replace him with a coup in the
fashion usual in much of South America. His predominance also helped turn opinion outside Nicaragua against
him. At a time when visitors to Nicaragua itself reported
76
numbing terror in which all who did not flee were compelled to choose sides, people elsewhere hoped destruction would bring democracy. The devastation in Nicaragua with forty thousand dead still has not left its imprint
on the world's senses.
There is no way in such a situation for the United
States not to influence events. The refusal of the American government to supply arms and spare parts to Somoza
and the later refusal to intervene without the support of
the OAS (June 21-23, 1979) helped bring Somoza down
and discouraged negotiations to stop the civil war. Refugees from Nicaragua received little attention except from
newspapers in Spain and Central and South America.
With Soviet backing, the victors called for the "extradition" of Somoza after he fled; as if he, like the Shah, were
an ordinary criminal. As in Persia, there were to be no visible exiles, for exiles mean there is another side. A civil war
in which no side was entirely right came to be taken for a
"revolution." And men abroad hoped for democracy and
the rule of law.
Within Nicaragua too, hopes for democracy sprang
from terror. Towards the end almost everybody who
would say anything was against Somoza-but not, in most
instances, for the Sandinistas. Trained and armed abroad,
the Sandinistas, however, did the fighting-until towards
the end when they were joined by volunteers, many of
them adolescents. The people who tried to tell themselves
the fall of Somoza would occasion democracy were not
doing the fighting. Those who fought did not want democracy. This division between those who fought and
those who did not persisted after the cessation of open
hostilities, for the victors did not disarm themselves.
Many young people in Sandinista uniforms (which are not
distinguishable from those of the police) are said to be on
the streets of Managua and, presumably, other cities in
Nicaragua. Rebelo, a non-Sandinista member of the
Junta, remarked upon his resignation in April 1979, "How
can you have genuine pluralism under a gun?"
The coalition (the Junta) of the guerrillas and the democratically-minded individuals amounts to a truce which
allows those who fought to hold something like the acquiescence of those who did not. The guerrillas need this
truce because their aim-the self-conquest of all of Central America-can only be achieved if the rest of Central
America and the world persuade themselves that their seizure of power is actually a "revolution for democracy".
The truce also helps win credits-which are coming from
Germany (Federal Republic).
At the formation of the coalition, the armed guerrillas
also went about the country organizing the same kind of
capillary neighbourhood and local organizations that
help'ed the Communists take over in East Germany. The
recent campaign against illiteracy probably reinforced this
local control. In the spring of 1980 the guerrillas increased
their representation in the Council of State. There are indications that they, not the coalition, have come to an
understanding with the Soviets. There have been execuWINTER 1981
�tions without trial and murders and disappearances; at
least sixty-five hundred men are in prison without due
process. Although reported, these facts receive little
attention.
Civil war in Central America intensifies not only because of Western, especially American, paralysis in Persia
and Afghanistan but also because of the instability in
Cuba. Within hours after the inadvertent removal of
Cuban guards from the Peruvian embassy in the spring of
1980, something like ten thousand men sought asylum.
The misery in Cuba was plain for the whole word, including South America, to see. Costa Rica with her usual cour·
age declared her readiness to receive them, until the other
South American nations agreed about who would take
how many. The refugees would have been living witnesses
to Castro's Cuba in South America, where, in contrast to
the United States, Castro still fascinates people in spite of
themselves. Desperate to keep the refugees in the Peruvian compound out of South America, Castro allowed
thousands of others to leave for the United States to distract attention from them. He managed to make it look,
not as if they were fleeing, but as if he were "dumping"
them on the United States. To discredit them he flung
among them in unabashed spite common criminals, undesirables, and the sick unto death.
In a few weeks something like a hundred and twentyfive thousand reached the United States. Castro had
turned a responsibility that touched each of the Americas
into an embarrassment in appearance forced upon the
United States. A fitting nemesis for a President who had
announced himself a patron of ''human rights" -and who
had withdrawn his support from Somoza in their namebut had discovered he did not have the guts for it. In this
at least Kissinger recognized his limitations-without,
however, acknowledging them.
War of subversion and self-conquest abroad-in this instance, in Central America-to face down instability at
home-in this instance, in Cuba-is that the future? In
the next ten and twenty years, Soviet-supported self-conquest through chaos abroad, especially outside of Europe,
could be matched by rational struggle for liberty in "Eastern Europe". For the courage of resistance and the love of
liberty in Russia and the other countries to the east can
only be publicly ignored-as it has been in Poland in recent days by the governments of the West-at the expense of Western self-knowledge and self· respect. "Inside
the country (Russia), these are times of ever greater
repression. '' 23
8. Europe-and Us
I have said little of Europe. Our-and Great Britain'sincapacity to bring the Second World War to an end in a
real peace with the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Europe has made the history of Europe our history.
But Europe, the Europe of the West, acts as if it does
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
not know that the war throughout the world is for Europe. Even when terrorists attack her innards, in Spain,
Turkey, Italy, Ireland, and Germany, her governments,
for fear of offending the Soviets and because of guilt at
previous weakness before violence, act not as if Europe is
under attack, but as if terrorism is their own domestic affair. Even a man of the intelligence and courage of Raymond Aron says that Soviet nuclear predominance is
"only" important because of its "political effects." As if
"political effects," in this instance the disintegration of
daily life and the death-like yielding up of the courage to
live, were not what is at stake in the struggle! Surrender
threatens to take place without struggle and, therefore, is
more likely to lead to self-destructive violence and the resignation which leads to total war.
Not recognizing the war now going on means expecting
that a brutal civil war, in which communist trained and
supplied forces brought down the tyrant, will bring de·
mocracy to Central America. It means taking it for
granted that totalitarian regimes can interfere in civil
wars, but not free governments.
The European civil war (for with no apparent limited
objectives the war that started in 1914 has turned into a
civil war-into a war to undo governments and even to
change "human" character) that came to a halt but not to
an end in 1945 has continued outside of Europe, first of
all in 1950 with the Soviet-supported attack on Korea. But
somehow because it was only Europe that really counted,
Europe that center of so much to love and so much to
hate, so obviously destroyed and wrecked, we and especially Europe, Western Europe, did not realize that the
European civil war, the World War in the twentieth century, continued-because it continued outside of Europe.
The war continued also in Eastern Europe with the Soviet slaughter of six hundred workers in Berlin in 1953 and
of unnumbered Hungarians in 1956 and with the tanks in
Prague in 1968. Yet Western Europe, at least its governments, forgot these events.
Without any reference to the rest of the world, NATO
centered on the defense of this Europe of the West, and
the United States' commitment to it. In the beginning
there was some pretence that NATO was directed against
Germany-the treaty names no enemy, for fear of offend·
ing the Soviet regime. In those very years the Soviet
Union sent many of its veterans from the Second World
war to the camps because Stalin feared the courage they
had learned in battle. He thus showed that he could not
bring the war to an end abroad, because he feared to end
it at home.
No matter what the Uriifed States did, Europe could no
longer hold its sway abroad. More than any country Britain showed the extent war had undone Europe. Had undone victors as well as defeated-the unmistakable mark
of a civil war-for, although she had stood alone and victorious, she suffered a loss of confidence similar to the defeated and conquered. With the intelligence that comes
of courage, she helped Greece save herself from herself
77
�until the beginnings of civil war, in the latter half of 1946.
Then she astonished Marshall, Acheson, and Truman at
the end of February 1947 with the announcement that
she would withdraw from Turkey as well as Greece in six
weeks. She no longer looked outward upon the world. She
turned herself on herself. Her political life threatened to
turn into an ideological struggle. This struggle eroded the
consensus that makes possible law-abiding opposition, in
which sides respect each other enough to criticize each
other. As in many countries in the rest of Europe, parties
in Britain threatened to turn into factions. They spoke
words incomprehensible to each other, and acted as if
only domestic strife counted, as if there were no world
elsewhere. This was especially true after Parliament's inability to get the truth out of the government after the
failure in the Suez 1956.
The withdrawal of Europe, encouraged by the United
States, freed the rest of the world to imitate the worst of
Europe, in the name of ridding itself of Europe, to continue the civil war and slaughter that had brought Europe
to exhausted dependence on the United States. The more
much of the rest of the world denied Europe, the more it
imitated Europe servilely. As everybody knows, huge portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin hang in the main
square of Peking. The world knows neither how to get
along with Europe or without it. Except for the United
States.
The United States showed an answer to the questions
that had been tearing Europe apart-a way of recovery
from the civil war that the French Revolution had
brought to Europe. This capacity to cope with Europe
because they could distinguish themselves meaningfully
from it drew Tocqueville. His book on Democracy in
America tells as much about Europe as about America.
Mindful of the security two oceans gave the Federation, Tocqueville wondered whether its open way of life
would withstand conflict with other nations once its success drew it into the world-into Europe. With a constitution centered on preserving men from themselves, could
it cope with others, especially with wars, which are the
stuff of history?
Tocqueville called the United States a democracy, not a
republic, at a time when egalitarian aspirations had not
yet overcome experience of Republican sobriety. This
emphasis on the egalitarian temptation in the American
way of living that Tocqueville took to be irresistible told of
his experience of Europe's levelling and the reaction
against it which appeared to force a choice between
equally outrageous alternatives. At the same time that he
saw the future in the United States, Tocqueville wondered whether they could remain free of the struggles
that were at Europe.' Egalitarianism and thirst for direct
participation might undo representative institutions
based on the recognition of differences in ability and character; The Federalist's distinction between ancient, direct
democracy and a federated, representative republic might
give way to the pressure of men's aspirations and words.
78
To some extent, especially in recent years, his doubts
have shown themselves in our life. But we remain a Republic in some sense in spite of ourselves.
The Europeanization of the politics of the United
States occurred, to an astonishing extent, during the Indochina war, which produced a kind of extremization, "politicization," and polarization of attitudes. There were
fearful analogies to the polarization that in many European countries prolongs the European Civil War brought
to a truce in Europe in 1945.
In some sense it was difficult to tell whether the United
States was being Europeanized or Europe Americanized.
In the United States there was the collapse of many in the
groups taken for the "Establishment" in the face of the
threat of disapproval of crowds (made up to some extent
of their sons and daughters and their friends) in the years
1968-69. A collapse Kissinger powerfully describes in his
memmrs.
The declarations against the war in Indochina often
took exaggeration for conviction. They often rang hollow,
because they served to deny, rather than to admit, individual responsibility and error. A few years later, in 1978, the
international show "trial" and murder of Aldo Mora with
his ambiguous forced confessions further emphasized the
relation of these testimonials to totalitarian self-accusations. Above all the "times" required you to bear witness
against yourself by attacking yourself in others.
... Special attention must be paid . .. to clandestine activities
since a person is inclined to forget something if it is not waved
in front of his eyes. The West and developing countries are
filled with citizens who by reason of their positions are able to
promote Soviet influence and expansionist goals.
Some of them are motivated by ideas that at least merit discussion. After all, in the Soviet Union, the ideological epicenter, and in China as well, Communist ideology is not a
complete fraud, not a total delusion. It arose from a striving
for truth and justice, like other religious, ethical and philosophical systems ...
There are others among such people who conduct themselves in a "progressive" manner because they consider it
profitable, prestigious or fashionable.
A third category consists of naive, poorly informed or indifferent people who close their eyes and ears to the bitter truth
and eagerly swallow any sweet lie.
Finally there is the fourth group-people who have been
"bought" in the most direct sense of the word, riot always
with money. These include some political figures, businessmen, a great many writers and journalists, government advisers, and heads of the press and television. Over all, they
make up quite a group of influential people. 24
Recently, one of the most courageous journalists of
Europe, Indro Montanelli, founder of the important
newspaper, II Giornale Nuovo, took the measure of the
confusion of American and European ''public" opinion
that passed itself off as agreement. In the midst of criticizing Carter for vacillatioll, hypocrisy, and weakness, he
suddenly asked himself: Whose president is this, anyhow?
WINTER 1981
�This is our president, he answered himself. We made him
with our demonstrations and protests against the war in
Vietnam. What did we have in Italy to do with that war?
Nobody asked us to fight and die in it.
Montanelfi' s observation helps us understand why the
confusion of America and Europe occurred. It came of
the United States' evasiveness towards its allies as well as
towards its own citizens. For who has ever heard of a socalled "imperial" power undertaking a war without the
help, without even the strong public support of almost all
its major allies? Kissinger writes in his memoirs of the em-
barrassed desire of European leaders to avoid Vietnam,
even in private conversation.
The present dangerous ambiguity in Europe is connected with the crisis in American leadership, that is, in
American self-knowledge and capacity to remember and
to distinguish its responsibilities from those of others. To
my knowledge some of the Israeli leaders are the only men
in office who can reason coherently in public with reference to what actually happened in the past, with a living
grasp of international law and the distinction between war
and peace. Kissinger in his memoirs attributes occasional
examples of admirable lucidity to Nixon, but they are always private words-not even words for his cabinet.
Since 1945 it has become clear that it takes much
longer than a generation for countries and governments
destroyed in war, to rebuild confidence, good sense, and
readiness to take responsibility for themselves and their
defense. Expectations in 1945-1948 overestimated the
difficulties of economic recovery and underestimated the
difficulties of political recovery. Individuals were too
stunned by the slaughter and destruction to take in its
political consequences.
There was even a tendency to take economic recoverywhich has turned out to be much more than recoveryfor political recovery instead of as the necessary but not
the sufficient condition for political recovery. In fact
Europe's prosperity has made Europe's lack of political
self-confidence and fear of self all the more brutally apparent. This contrast between well-being and lack of confidence in government and politics had much to do with
the crisis in Europe in the seventies. A similar terror of
self took hold in the United States.
There are dramatic signs that things are changing deeply
in Europe-or could change-if leaders in the United
States woke up and exercised leadership (like the leadership General Haig exercised at the risk of his life when he
led NATO). Europe in the last years appears to have admitted to itself that its grasp of events at home and abroad
is weak. This is most obvious in France (which still counts
in matters of intellectual leadership) but it appears to be
happening also in Italy and elsewhere. We see a readiness
to drop Marxist ideology and to admit that it has served
largely as an evasion of reality and of hard study for something like a generation. We see also a refusal, after the
euphoria of the past, to entertain illusions about the Communist parties in the West. This readiness to drop pretenTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
sions means there is less shouting, and a good deal of
emptiness. But it is an emptiness in which fundamental
facts stand out in their isolation.
It is time to return to the less pretentious authors;
Cavour, Tocqueville, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, The
Federalist, Mirabeau:_and the road to them, oddly, leads
through the Russian writers. For we have had to learn
common sense in blood, other people's blood.
In Italy individuals in their late teens appear more lithe
and resilient than people of the same age twenty years
ago. About ten years ago teenage couples openly holding
hands appeared on the streets of Rome. These young people seem more pragmatic, much less, if at all, given to the
self-immolation in ideology which characterized many of
those fifteen and twenty years older. But they need to
hear common sense. The man and woman in their early
twenties who wrote the remarkable pornographic novel
that is also a love story, Porci con le Ali (Pigs with Wings),
show more clearheaded understanding of life in Italy in
the last fifteen years than most of the men now in their
late thirties or early forties who are coming into the center
of Italian politics. The generation that went through the
war and the destruction of freedom in the twenties and
thirties, which had in some sense neither fathers nor sons,
also appears finally on the verge of coming to terms with
itself. Those in most trouble are those in between, those
in their late thirties and forties who wish to belong to the
new world but refuse to admit they are caught in the
breakdown of the old.
France has awakened to the realization that she has become a serious contemporary nation, ready to work and
compete in international markets. In the face of an organized attempt to destroy her government in terrorism,
Italy shows remarkable courage and unanimity. Many of
her public men and her journalists do not flinch before
death or disablement in the streets. This war has cleared
heads: the Socialists have distinguished themselves to
some extent from the Communists, and the Christian
Democrats, in response to the electorate and with continuing internal struggle, are facing the Communists instead
of entertaining coalition with them.
The debate in the fall and winter of 1979 about receiving Pershing and Cruise missiles was fierce throughout
Europe, even in France which, with its forces not directly
under NATO command, had nothing to decide. In Italy,
Cossiga's government openly braved Communist opposition to win acceptance of the missiles in a debate comparable in intensity to the decision to join NATO and the
West in 1949. During the debate, Gromyko visited Bonn,
and Ponomarev, in charge of subversion abroad, appeared
before an Italian Parliamentary committee. Such interferences in "internal affairs" were unthinkable ten years ago.
The first direct elections to the Parliament of Europe in
June 1979 showed something like sixty percent participation (thirty percent in England). Despite the presentation
of issues, in many countries, in terms of domestic politics,
people knew the vote was for Europe. It was not clear,
79
�however, whether Europe meant also Europe to the east.
By his visit to Poland at the time of the election, Pope
John Paul II reminded western Europe of Europe's larger
disaster-especially in his distinction between nation and
regime.
There is also a darker possibility. Under threat of Soviet
SS 20 missiles, already pointed at every major city in Eu·
rope, and new installations every week, Europe, despite
its denials, threatens to take its distance from the United
States. It is an open secret that relations between the
United States and Germany have been troubled.
In the face of the courage and responsibility of Poland,
western governments did little. Perhaps necessarily, but
not wisely, for weakness does not amount to the prudence
of restraint. And Poland's renewed struggle is only in its
beginnings. Taken more or less for granted, Soviet domi·
nance of Poland violates both the Yalta agreements,
which centered on Poland, and the more recent Helsinki
agreements. The response of the governments of Europe,
with the exception of Britain, to the Soviet attack on
Afghanistan was weak. It did not lead to economic sane·
lions to match those of the United States. (Australian, Argentinian, Canadian, and Western European surpluses
largely undid the American refusal to sell seventeen million tons of grain to the Soviet Union). It did not even lead
to a boycott of the Olympics-with the exception of Ger·
many and Japan. (The governments of Great Britain and
Italy could not persuade their Olympic committees to
withdraw.) There was more resistance to Persia's under-
mining of international custom. The readiness of the governments of Europe to let things drift in indecision shows
itself in their slowness in admitting Spain and Portugal
into the common market and Spain into NATO (while
the Soviet Union hints that Basque terrorism will cease if
Spain stays out of NATO).
The drift of some of the governments of Europe towards unacknowledged accommodation undermines the
confidence of their best citizens. Except for the Commu·
nists the whole French press criticized Giscard's readiness
to meet Brezhnev in Warsaw soon after the Soviet attack
on Afghanistan.
At a moment when there are indications of the political
recovery of Europe from the devastation of the World
War, Europe is most threatened. Its life defies Soviet policy, which since 1945 has assumed that the political recovery of Europe could not take place. With the brutality that
he took for realism Stalin said at Yalta that after such a
war there had to be an intermission for something like
fifty years. He did not think the destruction could be done
away with, that there could be a real settlement; only a
pause before the next round. Such a Soviet attitude as·
sumes that the West, especially the United States, is not
in earnest about freedom but needs to talk of it for the
purpose of its vanity. It also assumes that the defeat, dev·
astation and humiliation of Europe divide it irrevocably
frojil the United States, despite the disguise of a genera·
tioil of enterprise, hard work, and riches. The constant re-
80
call in Soviet propaganda of the destruction of the World
War, which makes visitors to Moscow think time has
stood still, testifies to the grim, but in some ways realistic
assumption, that Europe and the United States-but es·
pecially Europe-cannot recover politically from its selfdevastation.
Such an attitude amounts to holding that there is no
way of avoiding the consequences of "history" or stopping its drift, that the destruction of one generation continues after it. Just such an attitude informs Soviet refusal
to do anything about the murder in Indochina, its determination to "let it work". Sakharov writes:
A nation that has suffered the horrible losses, cruelties and
destruction of war, yearns above all for peace. This is a broad,
profound, powerful, and honest feeling. Today, the leaders of
the country do not, and cannot, go against this dominant desire of the people. I want to believe that in this regard, the Soviet leaders are sincere, that when peace is involved they are
transformed from robots into people.
But even the people's deep wish for peace is exploited, and
this is perhaps the cruelest deception of alL The deep yearning for peace is used to justify all the most negative features in
our country~economic disorder, excessive militarization,
purportedly "defensive" foreign policy measures (whether in
Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan) and lack of freedom in our
closed society ... 25
But a little later:
... The dogmatic bureaucrats and the new people replacing
them-anonymous and shrewd cynics, moving in the many
"corridors of power" of the departments of the Central Committee, the K.G.B., the ministries, and the provincial and regional party committees-are pushing the country toward
what they consider to be the safest path but that is in reality a
path to suicide.
Everything is as is was under the system of power and economy created by Stalin. The leaders carry on the arms race,
concealing it behind talk of their love of peace. 26
And elsewhere:
But the world is facing very difficult times and cruel cataclysms if the West and the developing countries trying to find
their place in the world do not now show the required firmness, unity, and consistency in resisting the totalitarian challenge.
. Europe must fight shoulder to shoulder with the transoceanic democracy, which is Europe's creation and Europe's
main hope. A certain lack of unity, of course, is the reverse
side of the coin of democratic pluralism, the West's major
strength. But this disunity is also caused by the systematic Soviet policy of driving "wedges", a policy that the West has not
resisted adequately because of carelessness and blindness ...
Western unity is one of the main conditions for international security, unity that will promote resistance and ultimately lead to rapprochement and the convergence of world
systems, averting thermonuclear catastrophe. 27
More serious than any crisis since the thirties, the present crisis comes not only because of Europe's weakness
WINTER 1981
�but also because Europe threatens to grow stronger. It
comes also because the United States has for something
like ten years been unable to exercise effective leadership.
Europe's strength still depends on our leadership.
also betrays remarkable grasp of the functioning of democracies, for instance, for the significance of Nixon's resignation in 1974 and of De
Gaulle's withdrawal in 1969.
II. From a letter addressed to President Carter from one of 40,000
Cambodians forced back into Cambodia at gunpoint after they had
sought asylum in Thailand. Henry Kamm, Internl1tional Herald Tribune,
june 16-17, 1979.
12. Neue Zuercher Zeitung, June 18, 19, 1979. At this meeting Brezhnev
said:
l. For the connection of the rise in terrori~m with an international dimension throughout the West with the 1967 war, Paul Wilkinson, "Terrorism: International Dimensions", Conflict Studies, 113, November
1979. For Soviet and East European involvement in terrorism since
1967, Brian Crozier, Strategy of Survival, London 1978. Between 1968
and 1977 more than two hundred American diplomats and more than
five hundred simple citizens and businessmen suffered at the hands of
terrorists. Fifty were murdered. Israeli intelligence found three maps of
an East German training camp with one of the terrorist's names written
on the back after a PLO attack near Tel Aviv on March II, 1978 in
which thirty four Israelis were murdered. In October 1971 Dutch authorities at Schipol airport seized four tons of Czech anns destined for
the Provisional IRA.
See now Robert Moss, "Terrorism," The New York Times Magazine,
Sunday, November 2, 1980. Claire Sterling's book on terrorism in its international dimension will appear in the spring (Holt Rinehart &
Winston). International Terrorism-the Communist Connection, Washington, 1978. See also, Stefan T. Possony and L. Francis Bouchey.
2. The Security Resolution (242, November 22, 1967) does not mention the fedayeen but speaks simply of "achieving a just settlement of
the refugee problem."
3. The Economist, December 22-28, 1979, 7-8 and 49-50. In 1979 imports of foreign oil were thirty percent above 1973.
4. Milovan Djilas, Wartime, New York 1977, 384-385.
5. Nadezha Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, New York 1970, 289.
6. Time, January 22, 1979.
7. Baa Ruo-Wang (Jean Pasqualini) and Rudolph Chelminski, Prisoner
of Mao, New York 1973 (Penguin Books 1979); see also Lai Ying, The
Thirty-Sixth Way, New York 1969.
8. This is Simon Ley's {"Human Rights in China", National Review,
December 8, 1978, 1537-1545 and 1559) characterization of Prisoner of
Mao.
9. Vladimir Bukovsky, TO Build A Castle-My Life as a Dissenter, New
York 1979,414-416.
10. See the statement of Wei Jingsheng, introduced by Simon Ley, "La
lutte pour Ia liberte en Chine", Commentaire 7, 353-360. Imprisoned
recently, Wei Jingsheng shows similarities between Teng Hsiao-p'ing's
way of dealing with the past and Mao Zedong's way of operating. He
The Soviet Union opposes any interference in the internal
affairs of any other country. We are persuaded of the principle that every people has a right to determine its own destiny.
What is the point of the attempts to make the Soviet Union
responsible for the objective course of history and to use
them as pretexts for worsening relations?
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
13. NZZ, july 24, 1979.
14. NZZ, June 19, 1979; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 19,1979.
For the Vietnamese among the boat people, NZZ July 25, 1979, 3.
15. Bruno Bettelheim, "Reflections", The New Yorker 52, August 2,
1976, 31-36.
16. Joseph Churba, The Politics of Defeat, America's Decline in the Middle East, New York 1977.
17. Sec Paul Eidelberg, "Can Israel Save the U.S.?", Midstream, December, 1978, 3-9.
18. See Robert Moss, "The Campaign to Destabilise Iran," Conflict
Studies 101, November 1978. In the summer of 1978, Navid, a weekly
published in Persia with the covert sponsorship of the KGB, called for
an "anti-dictatorial broad front" with the mullahs playing an important
role:
We are ready to put at the disposal of our friends from other
political groups all our political, propaganda and technical resources for the campaign against the Shah.
19. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gult1g Archipelago 1918-1956, 3,
New York 1978, 161.
20. Henry L. Stimson, American Policy in Nicaragua, New York 1927.
21. See President Kennedy's Message to Congress of March 22, 1961.
Also Carlos Rangel, The Latin Americans, New York 1977, 55-57.
22. For the Cuban and Nicaraguan admission of Cuba's role in Nicaragua, NZZ july 28, 1979, 3.
23. Andrei D. Sakharov, "A Letter from Exile", The New Yorl< Times
Magazine, June 8, 1980.
24. Sakharov, "Letter", The New York Times Magazine, June 8, 1980.
25. Sakharov, "Letter", The New York Times Magazine, June 8, 1980.
26. Sakharov, "Letter", The New York Times Magazine, June 8, 1980.
27. Sakharov, "Letter", The New York Times Magazine, June 8, 1980.
81
�The Streets on Which
Hertnan Melville Was Born and Died
Meyer Liben
Suddenly a file card showed up among my papers, and
on it was written:
Herman Melville
Born-6 Pearl St., NYC
Died-104 East 26th St., NYC
I live midway between these two streets, each is within
walking distance, and it struck me as proper (walk or no) to
visit both these locations.
Very few of our classic American authors were born in
New York City, and Melville is the only one I can think of
who was born and died in New York City, on Manhattan
Island (which I unfairly equate with New York City).
Henry James was born in New York City and died in
London.
I know that Pearl Street is close to the Battery, and I
had no particular difficulty in finding it. Walking east on
the street, the numbers were growing (!) higher, so I
turned around, walked west, and found 6 Pearl Street. It is
on the south side of the street, Pearl Street lying between
State Street on the west and Whitehall Street on the east.
Six Pearl Street is now a rather handsome modern building, the Seaman's Church Institute of New York, which is
located at 15 State Street but swings around the corner
onto Pearl. On the side of the Institute building, next to a
garage entrance (one leading down) is a plaque with the
following inscription:
Meyer Liben (1911-1975) was a New York writer much of whose work
remains unpublished. (See "From Our Readers")
82
"Heritage of New York"
A house on this site was the birthplace
of the novelist and poet
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
"Moby Dick," among his numerous sea-tales
attained enduring recognition
in American literature
Plaque erected 1968 by the New York Community Trust
Two things struck me particularly. One was the transposition of his birth and death dates (first wrote birth and
life dates), and I wondered what were the statistical possibilities for such a transposition, and whether among the
Pythagoreans or the Kabbalists, whose emphasis on numbers is so well known, such a transposition has a special
meaning. It is a kind of reverse symmetry, adds an eccen-
tric or mysterious dimension to the fixity, the unalterableness, of the dates of birth and death.
The other thing that struck me was the emphasis on
Melville as a teller of sea-tales. Although so much of his
writing is about the sea (Pierre and Bartleby are two notable exceptions that come to mind) I don't think of him as a
writer about the sea, because, I guess, of the power of his
psychological and· metaphysical ruminations, or maybe
because so many of his great works are not exactly "sea
yarns," though a deep and intricate narrative pulses
through them.
The place of Melville's birth is now surrounded by skyscrapers. A huge office building takes up all of the other,
WINTER 1981
�the northern side of the street. It is I Battery Park Plaza,
as well as 24 State Street.
Next door to the birthplace is a fairly new restaurant
building with some offices in it, and then a huge office
skyscraper, almost completed, extends to Whitehall, and
goes back to State, kind of surrounding the Church
Institute.
Pearl Street is fairly narrow. It is just off Battery Park, a
few blocks away from the Battery itself. One can see the
Bay (if that's what it is at this point) and smell the sea.
To get the feel of the street (on which Melville lived for
the first five years of his life and which, according to
William Earl Dodge, in a speech delivered on April 27,
1880, entitled "A Great Merchant's Recollections of Old
New York," and reprinted in Valentine's Manual, 1921,
was the wholesale dry goods center of the city in 1818
when he, Dodge, worked there as a boy, at a time when
the city's population was less than 120,000, and the
Battery a favorite promenade), I walked east, past the U.S.
Army building on Whitehall Street (now the city's main
induction center, and the scene of many disturbances
against the Vietnam War). A short distance from
Whitehall is Moore Street. There are a number of old
buildings on the north side of Pearl, though it is difficult
to guess their age, and I saw none dated. One of the old
row of buildings is:
E. Bergendahl Co.
Ship Chandlers
Down to Broad Street the buildings are quite modern.
On the corner of Broad and Pearl is the Fraunces Tavern,
scene of Washington's Farewell to his officers (is this another famous farewell address?).
Still heading east on Pearl Street, there is a row of quite
old buildings between Broad and Coenties Slip, which
buildings seem to be coming down, and on the corner of
Pearl and Coenties Slip is
Carroll's Bar & Grill
Est. 1856
the bar closed and padlocked.
(Melville mentions Coenties Slip in Redburn:
"Coenties Slip must be somewheres near ranges of
grimlooking warehouses, with rusty iron doors and shutters, and tiled roofs; and old anchors and chain-cable piled
on the walk. Old-fashioned coffee houses, also, much
abound in that neighborhood, with sun-burnt sea captains
going in and out, smoking cigars, and talking about
Havana, London, and Calcutta."
Curious in the above paragraph is Melville's change
from umust," as though he were writing about a place he
had heard about, to an actual description of the neighborhood in which he was born.)
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Continuing east, close to Hanover Square (that's a
name you'd think would have been changed during the
Revolution), at 93 Pearl, is an old building with the sign
The Hamilton Press, then a street unnamed, going north
(the car traffic, that is) which a passerby told me was Wall
Street, then Pine, Maiden Lane, John, mostly full of huge
office buildings ....
I walked back on the north side of Pearl, but saw nothing new from this perspective, and sat down on a bench in
Battery Park.
So this was Melville's block as a kid. The stones tell you
nothing. Why should they? They're not even his stones.
And if they were his stones? Knocking your head against a
stone street.
I wondered if Hawthorne's choice of the name Pearl for
the ethereal illegitimate girl in The Scarlet Letter had anything to do with the name of the street on which his
friend was born.
So much social and physical change in this century and
a half, but Pearl Street probably winds as ever, with the
s.rme contours.
I heard the cries of boys playing ball in the park, glad-some cries winning me away from this search for spirit in
stone.
(Still wondering what the neighborhood was like then, I
later looked into the New York City Guide-seeking spirit
in paper-put out in 1939 by the Federal Writers Project.
There is no mention of Melville being born on Pearl
Street. The origin of the street name is given thus: " ... so
named because of the sea shells found there in the days
when the East River almost reached this street."
So Pearl Street goes right across Manhattan Island.
The Guide notes that Melville is buried in the
Woodlawn Cemetery, 233rd Street and Webster Avenue,
in the Bronx. But there are hardly any cemeteries in
Manhattan.)
104 East 26th Street is between Park Avenue South
(4th Avenue) and Lexington Avenue. I often pass the
street on my way to the Belmore Cafeteria, a few blocks
away on 4th Avenue, a favorite haunt of taxicab drivers.
104 is at the end of the Armory which fronts on Lexington
Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets and then swings
around toward 4th Avenue. The site of the house in
which Melville died is about the same distance from the
corner of 4th Avenue as the house on Pearl Street in
which he was born is from State Street.
I walked the block, whose buildings are mostly fairly
new, except for the Elton Hotel, at 101 East 26th Street,
right across the street from 104, and this hotel could easily
have been there when Melville was alive. It looks kind of
run-down now. The street is a stony one, a block of unrelieved stone. Spirit is buried in stone, the way spirit and
heart are buried in a body. I looked at the stones on East
26th Street, as though for a sign from the household gods.
Shall these stones live?
83
�Walking back toward 4th Avenue and the Belmore Cafeteria (after looking at the front of the Armory), I noticed,
next to the number 104 on the Armory wall, that someone
had scrawled, in black crayon on a whitewashed section of
the wall:
Herman Melville lived here
which Melville was born had come down. Stones come
down, cities of stone come down, countries disappear
'from sight (the way Atlantis sank to the bottom of the
sea), books and papers turn to dust, we have memories
and die with them. Such was the conventional nature of
the melancholia, gloom, which passed over and through
me at thought of the dissolution of our human-made objects by the combined presence and labor of time, air, water, fire, and man.
not
Herman Melville died here
What will outlast stone, paper, and the memory of
man? Spirit, we hope, and the spirit, for one, of Herman
Melville Lives!
Had I a black crayon in my pocket, I could have scrawled
that on the wall, knowing full well that it would have been
rubbed off one day, sooner or later, or might conceivably
last as long as the building (for why would anyone want to
erase from an armory wall the. notation that Herman
Melville lived here, that he lives?), disappear when these
stones came down, the way the stones of the building in
84
Melville, whose books, the paper on which they are written and printed, will surely dissolve, the memory of
Melville and his works maybe disappear, but the word (we
hope) which was in the beginning, lives through to the
end (of some new beginning), maybe (I imagine) in some
flaming scroll that neither time nor the elements can destroy, and so back to the imagination and memory of man.
But who knows where or if it is, and it is not our business
to seek (doesn't seem to be here on 26th Street between
4th and Lexington Avenues), likely not even to think
about it (much).
WINTER 1981
�De Gaulle's Le fil de /'epee (1932)
Will Morrisey
N !927, optimism pervaded the world. The international
Left admired Stalin; the Right applauded Mussolini;
centrists remembered Wilson fondly and put their faith
in the League of Nations. Non-ideologues could afford to
ignore the political enthusiasts, for there was money to be
made and Lindbergh's exploits to celebrate.
The French shared the fashionable sentiment of the
day, but contrived a unique expression of it: the Maginot
Line, a series of fortifications built along the German
border in hope of suppressing whatever ambitions their
former enemies might still harbor. The French government, including its military leaders, believed that a defensive strategy was more prudent than one of counter-attack; in the Great War they had learned (too well) that the
strategy of attack-at-any-cost brought exhaustion and
stalemate. Thus pacifism, another aspect of optimism,
provided buttressing for this sentiment, a place for humanitarian worship.
But the country was not free of heretics. Marshall
Henri Petain dissented, albeit with discretion; he was fortunate to have a less cautious protege who could be sent
out for the riskier acts of sacrilege. Major Charles de
Gaulle, at Petain's insistence, was allowed to read three
lectures to higher-ups at the Ecole Superieure. Being
higher-ups, they doubtless found the young officer's subject provocative:
I
The more he spoke, the more uncomfortable and angry the
professors in the front row became. For de Gaulle's theme was
the vital role of leadership, and the picture he painted of the
leader was at once a criticism of his superiors, a justification of
himself and a veiled but unmistakable tribute to the Marshall. I
A freelance political writer, Will Morrisey is an associate editor of
Interpretation-A Journal of Political Philosophy. This article comes
from om unpublished book, De Gaulle/Malraux: Reflections.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Petain, who introduced each lecture, must have enjoyed
himself. De Gaulle's career was not advanced, however,
and a repeat performance at the Sorbonne later that year
did not even cause resentment-only indifference. The
lectures were, to use Nietzsche's word, untimely.
Later, de Gaulle revised them, added a 1925 article on
military doctrine and a new essay on the relationship of
the military to politics, and published them in 1932 under
the title Le fil de I'epee. At the time, few cared to read this
apologia of an obscure man. But twelve years later the
man was no longer obscure, and the second edition sold
well. The book had turned out to be not only an apologia
but, as Stanley Hoffman has written, "a self-portrait in anticipation."' De Gaulle would become the leader he had
imagined.
*
*
*
HE FORWARD'S EPIGRAPH IS: "Etre grand, c'est soutenif
une grand querelle," *a line taken from Hamlet. But
the epigraph omits the second half of Hamlet's original sentence:
T
Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw,
When honor's at the stake.
For de Gaulle, the object of contention-France-is not
at all trivial, but honor is indeed at the stake, along with
survival.
He begins:
*All quotations from Le fil de !'epee (Paris 1944), "Le Livre de Poche"
edition (Paris 1973). All translations are the author's.
85
�Incertitude marks our epoch [as it marks Hamlet]. So many
denials ["dementis"; also "disappointments" or "contradictions"] of conventions, -previsiOns, doctrines, so many trials,
losses, deceptions, so many scandals, shocks, surprises have
shaken the established order.
The military, being part of that order, suffers from
"melancholy"; de Gaulle notes that this is usual after a
period of effort. But this usualness consoles no one;
everything in "the ambiance of the times appears to trouble the conscience of the professionals". The masses, having endured the cruelties of force, "react with passion"
against it. A "mystique" arises, which not only causes men
to curse war but "inclines [them] to believe it out-of-date
[perimee: also, "no longer valid"], to such a degree as they
wish that it were." Men try to exorcise this "evil genie";
"to inspire the horror of sin, a thousand painters apply
themselves to representing [war's] ravages." They evoke
"only the blood, the tears, tombs, not the glory with
which people consoled their sorrows." They deface "History's" traits "under the pretext of effacing war," thus attacking the military order "at its root." In his first book, La
discorde chez l' ennemi, de Gaulle showed how immoderation and imbalance undermined the legitimacy of the
German rulers during the Great War. In Le fil de ['epee he
warns that immoderate fear of war threatens the
legitimacy of the French military and, ultimately, that of
the state.
De Gaulle finds this ambiance "only too easily explicable"; it is
... the instinct of preservation of enfeebled Europe, which
senses the risks of a new conflict. The spectacle of a sick man
who shakes his fist at death can leave no person unfeeling.
He also discerns a rhetorical strategy. Those who would
establish an "international order"-obviously, he refers to
the League of Nations and its publicists-in the name of
the people (who are, de Gaulle remarks tartly, "temporarily
made wiser"), need "a vast collective emotion" to do it.
"Now one does not rouse crowds other than by elementary sentiments, violent images, brutal invocations."
Clearly de Gaulle does not lack rhetorical skill either; here
he accuses the internationalists of the same sort of
rhetoric that they decry. He also reminds them of other
sentiments:
Without disavowing any hope, where do we see that the
passions and the interests that cause armed conflict silence
their demands? that anyone renounces willingly what he has
and what he desires? that men, finally, cease to be men?
Given human nature, internationalists cannot depend on
voluntary consent when building a peaceful world order.
If such an order appears, it will appear because it was imposed. And one cannot impose anything so ambitious
without the aid of the very military force that internationalists decry. "Whatever direction the world takes, it will
not dispense with arms."
86
Indeed, de Gaulle goes beyond the negative, force-asnecessary-evil argument: "Without force, in fact, can one
conceive of life?" Only in an "immobile world." Force is
the "resource of thought, instrument of action, condition
of movement."
Shield of masters, bulwark of thrones, battering-ram of
revolutions, one owes to it, turn by turn, order and liberty.
Cradle of cities, scepter of empires, gravedigger of decadences, force gives the law to the people and regulates their
destiny.
Like Nietzsche, de Gaulle sees force as that which,
through its role in causation, pervades and unifies the
world. He may not see it as the only such entity. Force
underlies both order and liberty, for example, because it
can serve masters and revolutionaries alike. But, obviously, order and liberty are distinguishable states; they imply certain ends, not merely means. De Gaulle does not
present force as an end. It is a resource, shield, and battering-ram; it enables and regulates-but does not prescribe.
What does, then?
In truth, the military spirit, the art of soldiers, their virtues
are an integral part of the capital of humans. One sees them
incorporated in all phases of History .... For finally, can one
understand Greece without Salamis, Rome without the
legions, Christianity without the sword, Islam without the
scimitar, the Revolution without Valmy, the League of Nations without the victory of France? And then, this abnegation of individuals to the profit of the ensemble, this glorified
suffering-the mental stuff of which one makes soldierscorresponds par excellence to our esthetic and moral concepts:
the highest philosophical and religious doctrines have not
chosen another ideal.
Actually, some have-as de Gaulle knows very well. Of
the two religions mentioned here (coincidentally, he places
them in the middle of the list,- paired as if equivalent),
Christianity does not teach self-abnegation for the glory
of the ensemble, so much as it does self-abnegation for the
glory of God-and force is not the way one goes about it.
But de Gaulle will come back to this point later.
Returning to the contemporary world, de Gaulle contends that if French military strength declines, that decline would imperil/a patrie and "the general harmony" as
well. Whether it is thought to be good or bad, if military
and political power "escapes the wise, what fools will seize
it, or what madmen?" In the end, responsibility involves
power. "It is time that the military retake the consciousness of its preeminent role, that it concentrate on its object, which is, simply, war." To do this, "to restore the
edge to the sword," it must "restore the philosophy proper
to its state"; for de Gaulle, a "philosophy" both energizes
and provides the ends which energy, force, and power
serve.
Le fil de !'epee, then, contains a military philosophy, not
a "philosophy of life" -although the one implies the
WINTER 1981
�other. The book has five chapters, of two, three, three,
three, and four sections, respectively; fifteen in all.
•
•
HE FIRST CHAPTER'S TITLE- "The
T
*
Action of War" -de·
picts war as a thing one engages in, and suggests de
Gaulle's thesis that war is essentially active, not sus·
ceptible to what he calls "a priori" planning. Consonant
with this, he uses a Faustian epigraph: "In the beginning
was the Word? No! In the beginning was the Action."
Faust, like Machiavelli and Bacon, aspired to the domina·
tion of things, and this chapter studies the opposition be·
tween the autonomous flow of events, and those men
who would dominate that flow-Heraclitus versus Machi·
avelli, if you will.
"The action of war essentially comes to the character of
contingency": the enemy's strength and intentions, the
terrain, events, the direction, speed, and manner of one's
strike, men and materiel, atmospheric conditions. "In war
as in life one can apply the ["everything flows"] of the
Greek philosopher; what has taken place will no longer
take place, ever, and the action, whatever it may be, might
well not have been or been different." He quotes Bergson
(a friend of de Gaulle's family), who revived and metamorphosed Heraclitean metaphysics twenty years earlier, on
the intelligence's discomfort when it attempts to grasp
what is not constant, fixed, and definite, but is instead
mobile, unstable, and diverse. Logic doesn't work there; it
is, de Gaulle writes, like trying to catch water in a fishnet.
Intelligence does have its function: "elaborating in advance the givens of the conception, it clarifies them,
makes them precise, and reduces the chance of error". It
defines the problem, and formulates hypotheses on how
to deal with it. But the faculty that gives us "a direct con·
tact" with Hthe realities" is intuition, "the faculty which
links us most closely to nature." Intuition gives us not only
"profound perception" but the "creative impulse"; for
life (inconceivable without force) produces, and the intui·
tion, by linking us to life, enables us to be productive.
We participate in what it is possible to find there of obscure
harmony. It is by instinct [de Gaulle uses "instinct" and "intu-
ition" interchangeably] that man perceives the realitY of
conditions which surround him and that he experiences the
corresponding impulsion.
Military inspiration is analogous to that of the artist; in
either case, as de Gaulle quotes Bacon, "It is man adding
to nature." De Gaulle apparently means that man adds to
external nature by linking himself with it. He then draws
upon its productive force, which expresses an obscure in-
herent harmony; this force, filtered through man, re·
emerges in the world in order to master it. Alexander's
"hope," Caesar's "fortune," and Napoleon's "star" were
"simply the certitude of a particular gift putting them in a
strict enough relation to realities to dominate them
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
always." One might recall Bacon's observation that to
master nature one must know and use nature's laws. But
de Gaulle, unlike Bacon, promises no utopias brought by
the advancement of learning. Human nature has limits,
and de Gaulle recognizes that fact more clearly than
Bacon does. The most J:!e asserts is that such great men
give others "the impression of a natural force which will
command events"; they possess, as Flaubert said of Han-
nibal (in Salammb6), "the indefinable splendor of those
destined for great enterprises." (Nevertheless, despite his
assertion that such men can dominate realities, the ex-
amples he chooses are of men who could not dominate
them "always," as he surely realizes.)
· The intelligence takes what instinct gives it and makes
those "givens" coherent, definite.* This enables the
military leader to set goals and priorities, decide timing,
and placement, coordinate the various operations and
their phases-in a word, to synthesize.
It is why all the great men of action have been meditative.
All possessed to the highest degree the faculty to retreat into
themselves, to deliberate inwardly.
Some critics exalt instinct, claiming that there is no true
art of war because chance alone determines battles. De
Gaulle cites Socrates, who, he claims, told Nichomachides
that the popular assembly's choice of a leader was unim·
portant because a dishonest and incapable citizen would
lead the army no worse than a skillful and conscientious
general. But that is not what Socrates says in the pass~ge
de Gaulle alludes to. In Xenophon's Memorabilia, Book
III, chapter 4, Nichomachides complains that the assembly elected Antisthenes, a man without Nichomachides'
military experience to be a general. What Socrates con·
tends is not that the choice of commanders doesn't matter, but that military experience doesn't matter. He claims
instead that what matters is the ability to rule. Antisthenes
had managed a chorus well, even though he had no musi·
cal skill, because he found the best masters to do his work
for him.
Xenophon's words could not be innocently misread as
de Gaulle misreads them. A slip of memory is just as
unlikely, for de Gaulle's memory, which he trained since
childhood, was nearly infallible when he wanted it to be.
As if to prove it, de Gaulle next correctly recalls Socrates'
remarks to Pericles (son of the famous Pericles), which oc·
cur in the following chapter of the Memorabilia. "It is
true," .de Gaulle writes, "that the same Socrates, inter-
rogated by Pericles on the cause of the indiscipline of the
Athenian troops, held responsible their leaders, who were
incapable of commanding them." De Gaulle has good
reason to be "forgetful" concerning the Socratic defense
*Although de Gaulle writes that the iritelligence attributes form to the
"givens" instinct provides, it's important to recall that the givens are not
inchoate, but possess "an obscure harmony" of their own. To what extent that harmony must match the form attributed to the givens by intelligence is not clear; obviously, there must be some relationship, or the
battle-plan wouldn't work.
87
�of amateurism in war; as we've seen, de Gaulle wants
France to have a professional army. De Gaulle prizes
military experience. His book is an attack on the notion
that anyone who can rule well can also rule an army. The
last chapter, "Politics and the Soldier," gives a more subtle view of the relationship between politicians and
soldiers than Xenophon's teaching. Perhaps de Gaulle
cites Xenophon falsely-as Bacon, in his Essays, cites the
execution of Socrates under the oligarchy-to seem
authoritative to the ignorant and to stimulate those who
are not ignorant.
De Gaulle's mention of Socrates' teaching to Pericles'
son also has a point for those who know that passage. In
their conversation, Socrates and young Pericles consider
how one may lead the Athenians so as to enhance the city's
fame and to defeat its enemies. Notable among these ene·
mies are the Boeotians, "who formerly did not dare, even
on their own soil, to meet the Athenians in the field
without the aid of the Spartans and the other Peloponnesians"; the Boeotians now "threaten to invade Attica
single-handed."' They can do so because Athenian
military affairs are commanded by "men who are greatly
deficient in knowledge." To counter this threat, Socrates
suggests that the Athenians, "if equipped with light
arms," could "do great mischief to our enemies, and form
a strong bulwark for the inhabitants of our country" by oc·
cupying the mountains on the frontiers of Attica,
especially those bordering on Boeotia.
The parallel between democratic France, threatened
(according to de Gaulle and Petain) by Germany, and ancient democratic Athens, threatened by Boeotia, is suggestive. France, it is true, has no mountains on the German
border; but in a 1928 essay called "The Historical Role of
French Places," de Gaulle described the military uses that
French terrain had and could be put to. He praised the
use of fortifications, but also insisted on the need for
mobility-precisely the combination of a strong defensive
bulwark and a maneuverable attack force that Socrates
recommends to Pericles.
De Gaulle ends this "epistemological" essay by noting
that military men sometimes neglect the cultivation of intelligence, especially when afflicted by the "depression of
spirits" which follows a "great victorious effort." But
more frequently they make the opposite error, longing to
''deduce the conception of known constants in advance"
-what de Gaulle calls "a priorism" -an activity which
''exercises a singular attraction over the French mind."
The "speculative and absolute character" of such dogmas
"render them seductive and perilous."
In section ii de Gaulle turns to the non-intellectual
faculties of the leader. Petain, he tells us, said that giving
orders calls for the greatest effort of any part of an action.
"In fact," de Gaulle continues, "the intervention of the
human will in the chain of events has something ir·
revocable about it"; from this derives the military leader's
responsibility, one of "such weight that few men are
capable of supporting it entirely."
88
It is why the highest qualities of mind do not suffice.
Without doubt, the intelligence aids, without doubt, instinct
pushes, but, in the last resort, the decision is of the moral
order.
An officer must act, and not conceal his incapacity by
claiming that he has no specific orders, or by looking after
details only, as certain French generals did during the
Franco-Prussian War. The other extreme, the exaggeration of initiative "to the point of violating discipline and
smashing the convergence of efforts," was exemplified by
the German general, Alexander von Kluck, during the
Battle of the Marne; such indiscipline usually occurs in
"the absence or the softness of the decisions of the
superior echelon." (De Gaulle studies the von Kluck inci·
dent in his 1924 book, La discorde chez l'ennemi and later
discusses the Franco-Prussian war in La France et son
armee, published in 1938.)
The mean between these two extremes is "the spirit of
enterprise," necessary if the leader will "win over the
others." He must do so, for he needs not only to know
what he wants to do and to order it done, but to have the
authority that ensures his men's obedience. Army discipline helps-it is a sort of contract wherein subordinates
pledge their obedience-"but it does not suffice for the
leader to bind the executants by an impersonal
obedience.''
It is in their souls that he must imprint his living mark. To
move their wills, to seize, to animate them to turn themselves
toward the purpose that he has assigned them; to make grow
and to multiply the effects of discipline by a moral suggestion
which surpasses reasoning; to crystallize around himself all
that there is in their souls of faith, of hope, of latent devotion
(but not, apparently, of charily)-such is [the nature of] his
domination.
Training of leaders is part of the preparation for war;
such preparation can occur during a war or during
peacetime. But peacetime is a poor time to prepare for
war (although obviously, one should not wait until the
enemy attacks), because it produces second-rate leaders.
Good leaders are hard to recruit in peacetime: "the pro·
found motive of the activity of the best and the strongest
is the desire to acquire power," and the peacetime army
offers ambitious men no place to command, and slow advancement. De Gaulle, again echoing Nietzsche, defines
"power" broadly. After 1815, when the French saw many
years of peace ahead of them, those men desirous of
power-Thiers, Lamennais, Comte, Pasteur-went into
politics, law, speculation, and the arts. They did not go into
the army. A Pasteur does not desire power in the vulgar
sense; he desires power in that he wishes to accomplish
something worthwhile. If power is what the best men
want, it would seem that they are inspired by that
"Bergsonian" intuition mentioned earlier, which 1inks
them with the forces of life. They have what Bergson called
''l'energie spirituelle.''
WINTER 1981
�Today, it is toward affairs that ambitions turn; money is, for
the moment, the apparent sign of power and the French
nourish willingly the conviction that international laws and
ententes will succeed in preventing war.
De Gaulle does not camouflage his skepticism about this
"conviction," and the desire for money that underlies it.
Not only do ambitious men shun the peacetime
military, but peacetime military leaders tend to promote
the least-gifted men in their ranks. They select their successors by observing field exercises, which test superficial
cleverness, the ability to grasp the immediate features of a
circumstance, and flexibility of mind-rather than real ap·
titude, the power of seeing the essentials of a circumstance, ahd genuine understanding.
Finally, "powerful personalities" often lack "that superficial seductiveness which pleases in the course of ordinary life." The mass may admit their superiority, but
does not love them, and they are not chosen for advancement at times when no danger seems near. Of all the
young major's statements, this may have angered his
superiors most. Not only was de Gaulle just such a "personality," criticized for his supposed arrogance, but he
dared to suggest that his superiors are of the mass, men
who recognize his excellence but will not reward it.
De Gaulle's conclusion: "Our times are little propitious
to the formation and selection of military leaders"
because the intensity of the Great War led to "a relaxation
of wills, a depression of character," which led to "moral
lassitude." War and soldiers are held in little esteem.
*
C
*
*
"Of Character," concerns Gaullist
ethics. De Gaulle's epigraph-"The smell of the
world has changed" -comes from Georges Du-
HAPTER TWO.
hamel; to choose a sentence from one of the era's best-
known pacifists probably amused de Gaulle, especially in
writing on the "spirit of his age."
The French army has had "powerful life only by the effect of an ideal, issuing from the dominant sentiments of
the epoch and drawing from that harmony its virtue and
radiance." Ethics, it would seem, derive from sentiment,
not reason-and fashionable sentiment, at that.
As de Gaulle rehearses his examples, this "spirit of the
age" explanation of ethics seems accurate. In the seventeenth century, Louvois's reforms unified the military so
as to serve the interests of the sovereign, who was en-
gaged in unifying the country. The Republican army of
Hache was possessed of a "rather ostentatious contempt
for honors and rewards," an affectation that "went well
with glory."
When de Gaulle comes to the contemporary state of
things, we detect a tone of irony, for de Gaulle has already
noted that today's ambiance is anti-militaristic. Presumably, the army most consonant with "the times" would be
the army the French have now: torpid, defensive, hard for
de Gaulle to get promoted in. There have been improveTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ments in institutions, equipment, and, he admits, in
military thinking, but these aren't sufficient. To achieve
"efficacity" the French army needs "a moral renaissance."
The "rejuvenating ideal" of this epoch is "character,"
"the virtue of difficult times." The second chapter studies
the opposition between the ambiance of the times as seen
by most people and the ambiance de Gaulle presents,
which excludes those aspects of fashionable thought and
sentiment which tend to undermine the security and the
grandeur of France.
"The man of character," the Gaullist leader, has recourse
~'to
himself." "His impulse is to impose on action
his mark ... to make it his affair." "He has the passion to
will, he is jealous to decide." Uninterested in profit, this
"gambler. .. searches less for gain than to succeed, and
pays his debts in his own money." If he loses he reacts not
with sorrow bUt with "some bitter satisfaction." The man
of character "confers nobility to action; without him [action would be] the dismal blemish of the slave, thanks to
him, [it is] the divine sport of heroes."
He doesn't act alone. Subordinates assist him; their virtues are self-sacrifice and obedience. Counsellors and
theorists help him plan. But his "character" is "the supreme element, the creative part, the divine point." We
recall that intuition perceives the creative and forceful
realities; character, too, links a man to that in life which is
creative and forceful~ more, it is itself creative and force-
ful. On the level of ethics, of human action, it corresponds
to the "obscure harmony" of nature.
This property of vivifying the enterprise implies the energy
to assume the consequences [he may be thinking of Bergson's
"energie spirituelle"]. Difficulty attracts the man of character,
for it is in gripping [the difficulty] that he realizes himself.
But whether or not he vanquishes, it is an affair between it
and him. Jealous lover, he never shares what it gives him, or
what it costs him.
What it gives him is "the austere [or harsh: apre] joy of being responsible." This paradoxical phrase epitomizes the
Gaullist balancing of opposites in the domain of ethics.
De Gaulle is now far from Machiavellian success-philosophy; the telos of Machiavellian virtu has little to do with
true austerity. De Gaulle combines the individualism of
such
~·moderns"
as Machiavelli and Bacon with the au-
sterity of the "ancients." Self-realization in struggle and
the austere joy of being responsible: one thinks of Nietzsche, or, perhaps, of Aristotle's great-souled man.
In peacetime the man of character has detractors, "but
in action, enough of criticism!" And in a passage reminis-
cent of Aristotle (Nichomachean Ethics, Book IV, Chapter 3), de Gaulle writes:
Reciprocally, the confidence of the small exalts the man of
character. He feels himself obliged by this humble justice rendered to him. His firmness increases in measure, but also his
benevolence, for he was born a protector. If the affair sue-
89
�ceeds, he distributes advantage generously, and, in the case of
a reverse, he does not allow reproach to descend on any but
himself.
Esteem and loyalty exchanged for security: to "ancient"
and "modern" themes, de Gaulle adds a "medieval" one:
the ideal relationship of the vassal and his lord. With intuition, de Gaulle wrote, one "participates" in reality's ere~
ative force; with character, he might have added, one
participates in the reality of other men, calling up their
creative force, as well as one's own.
In ordinary times, the man of character's superiors
often dislike him, calling him "arrogant and undisciplined." De Gaulle writes from experience. "But when
events become grave" he receives justice; "a sort of
ground swell pushes to the first level the man of character." He "does not abuse" his moment, scarcely tasting
"the savor of revenge, for the action absorbs everything."
Not quite Aristotelian magnanimity-which eschews revenge because revenge is small and it is large, rather than
because action preoccupies it-but de Gaulle's man of
character comes nearer to achieving it than do most of the
men of his time.
De Gaulle shows that "character" is not an exclusively
military virtue, any more than intuition is. He finds it in
Alexander, Richelieu, Napoleon, Bismarck, and Clemen<;eau, but also in Galilee, Columbus, Boileau, and Lesseps.
He fails to list a religious leader (unless one would so
characterize Cardinal Richelieu).
. . . the success of great men implies multiple faculties.
Character, if accompanied by nothing, only gives daredevils
and stubborn personalities. But inversely, the highest qualities
of mind (alone) cannot suffice.
Sieycs and Talleyrand were notable for their qualities of
mind, de Gaulle contends, but they were not great men.
De Gaulle writes more against the ambiance of his
"time" than with it. In the third section of this chapter he
"reconciles" this ambiance with his notion of "character."
The pre-1914 world, he observes, was an era of stability,
economy, and prudence. It is gone. "Competition, aided
by technique," comprise the "allegorical group which
symbolizes the new age." The postwar generation, adventurous and money-conscious, take initiative and self
reliance as their virtues. The army should "reflect" these
virtues, but obviously de Gaulle would have it "reflect" a
judiciously modified version of them; he does not advocate money-consciousness in soldiers and, as he has
already written, these are bad times for the military. The
"dominant sentiments" of an epoch, in de Gaulle's view,
are really those among the popular sentiments which the
man who would dominate his epoch selects-because
they most nearly resemble his own virtues. There are
epochs in which such a man cannot advance, and undominating men predominate. De Gaulle waits, writing books.
While the army waits, it will be paralyzed if its leaders
smother initiative, along with "the taste to be responsible and
90
the courage to speak plainly." De Gaulle wants "character" respected. Each individual should have responsibility
on his own level. (This idea anticipates the "participation"
that de Gaulle advocated in 1969, wherein capital, labor,
and technocrats would share power on the governing
boards of industry, and whereby local governments would
have more responsibility.) If "character" is respected, the
army will have fewer regulations, get better results. Better
men will adopt the military career, and continue in it, because the army will allow them to exercise"their capacity
to act," which is what such men want.
' '0
*
*
*
the central chapter of Le fil de
l'epee, consists of de Gaulle's final diagnosis
F PRESTIGE;·
of, and prescription for, the epoch's disease.
Prestige is usually a matter of appearance only, but de Gaulle
chooses as this chapter's epigraph a phrase from Villiers de
L'Isle Adam-"In his breast, to carry his own glory" -a phrase
which links prestige to character.
Authority has decayed in the postwar era. Men are either
reticent and unsure, or overconfident and obsessed with
forms.
This decadence follows the decline of the moral, social, political order which, for centuries, held sway in our old nations.
By conviction and by calculation, one has for a long time at·
tributed to power an origin, to the elite rights which justify
hierarchies. The edifice of these conventions has collapsed .
Deference fades; perhaps this is the other, negative, side
of the taste for initiative de Gaulle cited before.
But the crisis can't last.
Men cannot, fundamentally, do without being directed.
These political animals have need of organization, that is to
say of order and of leaders.
Ancient sources of authority no longer exist, but "the
natural equilibrium of things will bring others, sooner or
later, better or less good, proper in all cases to the establishment of a new discipline." Even as he dismisses the
old, de Gaulle affirms something ancient: the idea, discarded by Machiavelli and Hobbes, that man is a political
animal, by nature and not by convention. The "new discipline," of course, will be in large part conventional; still, it
responds to a natural requirement, and will be "better or
less good" than its predecessors-not merely "historically
relative."
De Gaulle sees the beginnings of the new discipline in
"the individual value and ascendence" of certain "new
men." Once, the mass accorded credit to a man's function
in society, or to his birthright. Now it respects "those here
who know [how] to impose themselves"-dictators, technicians, athletes-men who owe success to their own efforts. In the army today, rank has some importance, but
upersonal prestige" has more.
WINTER 1981
�In section ii, the central section of the central chapter,
de Gaulle writes frankly of prestige. Prestige is "a sort of
sympathy inspired in others," comprised of affection, sug·
One can observe, in fact, that the leaders of men-politicians, prophets, soldier-who obtain the most from others,
identify themselves with high ideas . ...
gestion, and impression, which depends on ((an elemen-
tary gift, a natural aptitude that escapes analysis." Not
dependent on intelligence, it is undefinable, although one
can isolate "some constant and necessary elements" of it.
Mystery is one of them; "one reverses little what one
knows well." Mystery doesn't come from isolation~the
most isolated man is unknown, not mysterious-but from
reserve, which contributes to the sense that the man
The prophets' centrality on the lisi suggests that they do
not differ from secular leaders, at least in their self-identification with "high ideas." In view of the assertion that
this is a selfidentification, one may wonder if such men
are models of evangelical perfection, but at the least we
can say that all of them embody ideas rather than argue
possesses a "secret," or a "surprise" with which he can in-
for they are "renowned less for utility than for the extent
of their work" ~sentiment glorifies them. Useful men appeal to our rationality, but great men do not strive for
tervene at any time. "The latent faith of the masses does
the rest."
for them. "Whereas, sometimes, reason blames
them"~
Prestige also involves an outer reserve, one of words
and of gestures-"appearances, perhaps, but according to
usefulness.
which the multitude establishes its opinion." Great sol-
even so, he shows an ethical seriousness, an elevation,
diers have always taken care to appear in a certain way; de
that Machiavelli lacks. De Gaulle's exemplary leader does
not "enjoy himself." Indeed, the suffering that comes of
his solitude-among-men partly explains why some leaders
"suddenly reject the burden." Years later Andre Malraux
·would remember this passage as he considered de Gaulle's
final retirement. De Gaulle completes this section with an
anecdote: Bonaparte (he usually calls him Napoleon, but
Gaulle reminds us of Hamilcar in Flaubert's Salammb6,
Caesar in his Commentaries, Napoleon. "Nothing enhances authority more than silence"; for action demands
concentration, and speech dissipates strength. There is a
necessary correspondence between "silence and order,"
and de Gaulle quotes the Roman phrase, Imperatoria brevitas. Aristotle's human animals are political due to their
capacity of reasoned speech or logos. De Gaulle, with his
intuitionism (a distrust of verbal depictions of reality), apparently does not believe that the natural order, including
human nature and the politics it necessitates, can be comprehended through the use of language. Politics becomes
as much the art of silence as the art of speaking, and Gaullist rhetoric emphasizes brevity and symbolism instead of
elaboration and argument.
There is liberated from such personages a magnetism of
confidence and even illusion. For those who follow them, they
personify purpose, incarnate aspiration.
This is de Gaulle's most Machiavellian chapter. But
here, in a personal moment, his given name seems more
appropriate), regarding "an ancient and noble monu-
ment," agreed with a companion who thought it
sad~
"comme la grandeur!" he added.
The third section of "Of Prestige" is the eighth of the
book's fifteen sections, the central one. It extends the previous treatment of individual authority to the army. The
ambiance of the time damages corporate as well as individual authority. "For recovering (prestige), the army has
little need of laws, demands for money, prayers, only a
vast internal effort." "The military spirit" needs distance
and reserve, as does the great man; such partial isolation
contributes to prestige, because military rigor and cohesion have always impressed men.
To become such a personification or incarnation, the
leader responds to "the obscure wish of men" who are imperfect, who therefore "accept collective action with a
view that it tends toward something great." Whereas the
great man realizes himself by participating in a difficult
action, lesser men complete themselves by participating
in a collective action, under the direction of a great man.
The leader needs "the character of elevation," but leader·
ship
... is no affair of virtue, and evangelical perfection does not
conduct the empire. The man of action scarcely conceives of
himself without a strong dose of egoism, pride, hardness, ruse.
This chapter thus examines the opposition between
means and ends. In de Gaulle's view, it is ends, results,
that count; if the leader uses the means of realpolitik for
"realizing great things," those means will be forgotten because he satisfies "the secret desires of all."
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Some current trends favor the development of military
spirit. "Individualism is in the wrong" today: trades unionize, political parties and sports are mass-oriented, as well;
Ia machinisme has increased and the division of labor intensifies, leading to less eclecticism and fantasy; labor and
leisure are equalized; standardization exists in education,
housing, and fashions. (Earlier, de Gaulle wrote that individual initiatives were fashionable; but the contradiction
is less de Gaulle's than that of his "time." Again, we notice de Gaulle's selectiveness.)
As important as these current trends may be, the army's
self-esteem matters more. The military must not only appear firm; it must feel "confidence in itself and in its des·
tiny." "The day when the French nobility consecrated its
ardor to defending its privileges rather than to conducting
the State, the victory of the Third Estate was already certain." The military should therefore avoid reacting to the
public's anti-militarism by a selfish defense of its privileges. This won't happen if the military reminds itself, and
91
�the public, that anti-militarism is understandable, even
good-(for men should not want to destroy each other)but nevertheless inadequate. Foreigners envy French
prosperity, and France's geography renders her vulnerable to invasion; therefore the French need a shield. The
military serves the French, not only itself.
And war is not purely evil. "The desires of conquerors"
have brought riches, advances in science and art, "marvel~
lous sources of wisdom and inspiration." "With what vir-
tues [arms] have enriched the moral capital of men!"
Courage, devotion and "greatness of soul" are among
them. Armies have transported ideas, reforms and religions; Hthere would have been no Hellenism, no Roman
order, Christianity [the central item on the list], Rights of
Man, modern civilization but for their bloody effort."
Pacifists and bellecists are both right:
the age of Descartes' Discours de Ia. Methode, Bossuet's
Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle, Richelieu's "realistic
politique," the "practical administration" of Colbert, and
the "objective strategy" of Turenne. The French mind
then "constrained itself by the rule of mesure and of the
concrete." At his best Napoleon shared this sense of
mesure and the ability to adapt strategy to circumstances;
but more often in French history-especially in the eighteenth century and in the generation that fought Germany in 1870- "a priorism" dominated. And failed.
Although military strategy and ethics are not the same,
de Gaulle sees a relationship between them. "A priorism"
in strategy habituates leaders to disregard circumstance;
this makes them intellectually and ethically weak, for "a
doctrine constructed in the abstract" has often "rendered
blind and passive a leader who, in other times, had made
proof of experience and audacity."
Arms have tortured but also fashioned the world. They
have accomplished the best and the worst, begetting infamy
as well as the most great, by turns groveling in horror or radia ting in glory. Shameful and glorious, their history is the history
of men.
The central section in "Of Doctrine" is an analysis of
the doctrine employed by French leaders in the Great
War.
Military thought turned toward the offensive. This orientation was salutary . ... But the strategy went too far.
The history of men is not a tale of evangelical perfection.
And de Gaulle repeats: if an international order comes, a
military force will "establish and assure it."
It is not merely a "pragmatic" argument. The army's
greatness, like that of individuals, depends on virtue-if
not evangelical virtue. This military virtue can be described with a paradox: the army's pride would be worthless were it not accompanied by self-sacrifice. There is "a
French strategists propounded "an absolute metaphysic
of action" modeled on Prussia's offensive drives in 1870.
That strategy worked against an inactive opponent; but
the Great War demonstrated that a mobile and resolute
opponent can resist such an attack-strategy.
Colonel Petain had objected to this doctrine of attack,
curious relationship, but incontestable, between the re-
arguing for the importance of circumstances and the need
nunciation of individuals and the splendor of all."
Most Frenchmen give their energies to profit-making,
and it's difficult to find soldiers who don't imitate civil-
for maximum obtainable fire support at the time and
ians. Here also, however, balance will assert itself; "in a
fracas of bankruptcies, scandals and judicial prosecutions"
the forgotten "moral values" will return to "the great daylight of public respect." With this return, and a natural
pulling-back from extreme corruption, the army's prestige
will return also. For its prestige rests on such virtues.
' 'I
*
*
*
N WAR, there are principles, but they are few,"
wrote Bugeaud, the unsuccessful defender of
Paris in 1848. De Gaulle uses this remark as the
epigraph for "Of Doctrine," the simplest, if not the shortest,
chapter of Le {il de I'epee. De Gaulle here outlines a stra-
tegic doctrine, not an ethical one, because war is not ex-
clusively a problem of ethics. Battle plans count, too.
Once more, de Gau1le insists on the importance of circumstances. A statesman will fail, despite will, hardness,
national resources and alliances, if he "does not discern
the character of his times." The French military tends to
ignore war's empirical character, he claims. But in the sev-
enteenth century it did not; that was, de Gaulle observes,
92
place of attack ("concentration of means" forms Hthe
basis of execution"). He proved the validity of his thesis in
the Battle of the Marne. But his superiors persisted in advocating, and practicing, an attack-strategy; only after the
failure of their "systematic audacity" during the April
1917 offensive did they relent. As we know, de Gaulle
thinks the present French military stance is too defensive.
He has praised a military strategy of action and leadership.
Nevertheless, he is careful to warn against any "a priorism "-of attack, or of defense.
De Gaulle turns to the defense-strategy in the third section. The new doctrine may end in "abstract deductions
and foreclosing conclusions." Obviously an extension of
Petain's teaching on firepower, it involves the concentra-
tion of firepower, coupled with the siting of offensives
only in those places where the terrain is best suited. Unfortunately, this strategy neglects other variables-most
notably, the enemy, who may not decide to occupy the
sites that French guns can most easily fire upon. "May
French military thinking resist the age-old attraction of
the a priori, of the absolute, and of dogmatism!" It should
instead "fix itself in the classical order," the "taste for the
concrete," the "gift of mesure" and the "sense of realities."
*
*
*
WINTER 1981
�studies the opposition expressed in
its title, "Politics and the Soldier" ~specifically, the
tension between politicians and soldiers. Like the
fourth chapter, it addresses the practical question: What
should leaders think and do?
Politicians and soldiers may, as the epigraph from Musset claims, "go two by two/Until the world ends, step by
step, side by side." But they'll rarely go amicably. In
peacetime the politician has the dominant role; in wartime he shares it with the military leader, and interdependence is not conducive to friendship. Politicians and
soldiers are different men, and not especially compatible
T
HE FIFTH CHAPTER
ones.
The politician attempts to udominate opinion"-
whether it be that of the monarch, the council or the people (the one, the few, or the many)~because he can do
nothing except insofar as he acts in the name of the sovereign. Pleasing and promising, not opposing and arguing,
lead to advancement; "to become the master he poses as
servant. ... " After acquiring power he must defend it~
convincing prince or parliament, flattering passions, aid~
ing special interests. It is a precarious career in an unstable world.
Unlike that of the soldier, whose world is built on hierarchy, discipline, and regulations, he advances slowly, but
with slight worry of demotion. As de Gaulle knew only too
well, the off-battlefield danger for a military man is stagnation, being "posted" to nowhere and forgotten.
The two men act differently. The politician reaches his
goals by governing himself; the soldier is direct. The politician's eyes are far-sighted (and beclouded) because for
him reality is complex, mastered only by calculation and
ruse. The soldier short-sighted (but also clear-sighted) because for him reality is simple, controlled by resoluteness.
The politician asks, "What will people say?" The soldier
asks, "What are the principles?" That such men find one
another distasteful seems predictable.
Nor is it entirely bad. Soldiers who make laws alarm
1
neighboring countries, and politicians who intrude into
the army corrupt it with partisan doctrines and passions.
The public interest is best served by their collaboration in
defense of the country from external dangers~and their
separation in defense of the country from internal
dangers.
Before elaborating on that suggestion, de Gaulle devotes two sections to the difficulties of enacting it. In
peacetime the two "sides" bicker (especially in those
regimes where public opinion has influence). Arms are expensive, and are therefore unpopular except among soldiers, who are "only too ready" to believe war will come,
because wartime brings their chance for glory and advancement. Civilians, who have no reason to want war,
who fear it, refuse to believe that another war approaches.
When war comes, soldiers and politicians unite, ini-
tially. Later, if the war lingers on, the civil government
feels its own impotence, becomes frustrated. The public
also becomes irritable. Reverses of fortune excite recrimiTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
nations. Soldiers and politicians are men who want power,
and do not want to share it. If one group succeeds in subordinating the other, the destruction of the balance may
ruin the country~as it did in 1793 and 1870, when the
French politicians dominated the military and caused battlefield defeats, and in 1917 when the military undermined
civilian authority in Germany.
A country avoids that predicament, not by hiring pleasant fellows to run the government and the army, but by
finding leaders who are not pliable or docile. "It is
necessary that les maitres have the souls of maitres, and it
is a very bad calculation that excludes from power
characters accused on the pretext that they are difficult."
Nor can the two groups of men separate entirely. As
always, circumstances differ, sometimes from day to
day~personalities, the phase of the war, and so forth. No
a priori compartmentalization works. But their purposes
are separable. "The most just glory" that a statesman can
win comes from his success in maintaining the "national
will" during war. Soldiers, however, should deal with the
fighting.
In the fourth and last section de Gaulle explains the
ethical and institutional bases for the balance and partial
separation of power between civil and military authorities. Although fluid, changing with circumstance, the relationship between the two does not depend on "chance"
to "inspire" leaders. It depends on the institution of a
system that educates men of character to lead well.
"Other epochs assured [this] by a social and political
regime which mingled in the families and in the councils
all the sorts of servants of the State": Roman patricians
and Prussian nobles held both civilian and military posts;
French nobles served in one branch or the other, but understood the problems of both. Too, the sovereign "personified all the powers, symbolizing their harmony."
"Resulting from this perpetual osmosis was a reciprocal
understanding between toga and arms which is no longer
in the spirit of the times" ~although de Gaulle would like
to revive it. De Gaulle implies that parliamentarism lacks
the unifying sovereign who would compel politicians and
soldiers to think of shared ends, if only by symbolizing the
harmony of all state powers.
Nonetheless, today's military leaders retain "the secret
esteem of the strong for the strong." The "man of character" wants things his way and remains alone among subor-
dinates. But as he protects helpful inferiors and attacks
his enemies, he also esteems others of his kind; he may
conceal this esteem, but he acts in accordance with it.
Relations between great-souled equals are productively,
not injuriously, tense. With classical moderation, unmen-
tioned in this section but presumed by it, the secret
esteem of the strong for the strong prevents the selfdefeat brought on by petty squabbling that de Gaulle
found in the German leaders during the Great War, as
described in La discorde chez l' ennemi.
De Gaulle now proposes an institutional basis for this
concordia discors. He does not as yet propose a political
93
�revision for France, although he has hinted that one may
be needed. He suggests an educational reform:
One could conceive, it is true, of a providential State
wishing to prepare a political, administrative, and military
elite, by studies done in common, to direct, if such should be
the case, the wartime effort of a nation.
De Gaulle's civic education would increase the accord
between the two domains in wartime and clarify discussions and laws concerning military power in peacetime. It
would not "solve" the problem because the problem isn't
susceptible to rules. But it would help.
Intuition and character aren't teachable assets. "One
does nothing great without great men," the "ambitieux of
the first rank ... who want nothing in life but to imprint
their mark on events and who, on the shore where they
spend their ordinary days, dream only of the surge of
History!" These are men who know that an illustrious
military career must serve "a vast policy," that a states~
man "of great glory" defends his country.
*
*
•
of his time's "incertitude" and the
"melancholy" of the army, de Gaulle attempts to
restore the mental balance of his contemporaries by a
defense of power. Many writers who lament the disappearance of authority in the modern West prefer to avoid
discussing power. Not de Gaulle.
In the first three chapters he begins with epistemology,
and therefore metaphysics, moves to ethics, then to
politics. In the fourth and fifth chapters he discusses more
immediate concerns: military doctrine and educational
reform. One may say that he moves from the theoretical
and timeless to the practical and immediate.
Gaullist epistemology reconciles, without blending, the
"flow of events" -and the need to adjust to them-with
the attempt to dominate events. The leader intuitively
perceives the nature of things (which is creative, forceful
and possesses an "obscure harmony"), using his "intelligence" to translate these perceptions into effective actions. This intellectual process complements the ethical,
decision-making faculty, the "spirit of enterprise" which
balances the extremes of passivity and rashness.
I
N THE FACE
Gaullist ethics reconciles, without blending, the "spirit
of the age" with "character," under the aegis of the will to
power (broadly defined), which animates the best men. In
94
selecting, ordering, and directing certain aspects of "the
ambiance of the times," the leader realizes himself, feeling "the austere joy of being responsible" -the joy of the
great-souled or magnanimous man. Intuition and intelligence, plus character, yield grandeur.
Gaullist politics reconciles, without blending, the
means and the end. Authority's present disrepute can't
persist for long, because men are by nature political
animals, by which de Gaulle means that they need leaders
and an ordered life. Prestige is that which enables the
leader to lead. De Gaulle associates it with the use of
words, with actions, and with the personification of
aspirations and purposes. The end of politics is grandeur,
and the means are not those of evangelical perfection.
Such means are forgiven, however, because they serve
"the secret desires of all." War, which is not politics but
shares some of its characteristics, embodies the tension of
means and ends in the extreme, having both tortured and
fashioned the world. As with all products of human
nature, perhaps as with human nature itself, it is both
shameful and glorious.
Gaullist military strategy depends on balance, mesure. It
is anti-dogmatic because dogmatism encourages leaders to
be passive, complacent, and blind to circumstances.
Gaullist civic education reconciles, without blending, the
politician and the soldier. Though the two are by nature
different-the one speaks in order to gain power, the
other acts in order to gain power-their mutual will to
power and consequent attempts to achieve it cause
discord. But their natural similarity can make possible the
concordia discors that is Gaullist reconciliation. That similarity is the secret esteem of the strong for the strong.
Both serve the country, realizing themselves by selfsacrificing patriotism. If its members participate in common studies, this elite will suffer less discord.
De Gaulle concerns himself, on each "level" of human
life, with the problem of establishing a concordia discors
which does not sacrifice, but rather enhances, the integrity of the participating elements. He thus avoids the extremes of totalitarianism and egalitarianism and provides
a basis for republicanism, in a century wherein republicanism has declined.
l. Aidan Crawley, De Gaulle, Indianapolis and New York 1969, 53.
2. Stanley Hoffman, Decline or Renewal? France Since the 1930s, New
York 1974, 217.
3. Xenophon, Memorabilia, Book 3, Chapter 5.
WINTER 1981
�FIRST READINGS
Plato's Moral Theory: The Early and
Middle Dialogues, by Terence Irwin, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977.
Terence Irwin's book is an attempt at a
critical exposition of the moral theory in
Plato's early and middle dialogues. It is intended to show that Plato's questions concerning morality are "legitimate moral
questions" (285; cf. 266), and that his
"questions and answers, right and wrong,
are not of purely historical interest. ...
that they raise issues which justify the effort to decide for or against his views" (4).
Some readers might regard the continuing
significance of Plato's moral thought as being so obvious as to need no discussion.
But anyone familiar with the neglect of the
ancients among contemporary academic
philosophers must welcome Professor Irwin's efforts. Moreover, Plato's admirers
and followers themselves might profit from
a careful, yet critical, discussion of his
moral teachings. Indeed, even the legiti~
macy of Plato's questions, let alone the
truth of his answers, is not so obvious as it
may seem. It is not self-evidently legitimate
to ask-as Irwin rightly emphasizes that
Plato does ask- "whether it is worthwhile
to do what morality is normally supposed
to require", e.g. to benefit other people
(251, italics mine; cf. 249-50 and 265-66).
According to Professor Irwin, Plato's
moral thought centers around three Socratic questions: What is morality (i.e., virtue)? What sort of morality is worthwhile
for a rational man? What is the right
method for reaching knowledge about
morality? Socrates and Plato both assume,
acCording to Irwin, that a genuinely moral
man will be able to understand his own
morality, to defend it against criticism, and
in particular to justify it as being ultimately
worthwhile for him. Because of these demands, Socrates and Plato agree that any
genuine virtue must be in the virtuous
man's self-interest, and must be understood by him to be so (5). Socrates and
Plato disagree, however, in their further
thoughts about the character of virtue and
about the correct method of justifying it.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Irwin distinguishes between Socrates and
Plato on the basis of the difference between those dialogues thought to have
been written first and those thought to
have come later. He accepts the conventional scholarly opinion that we can trace a
development from Plato's early dialogues,
which present the thought of Socrates, to
the middle (and late) ones, in which Socrates becomes a spokesman for Plato himself.
What is most noteworthy about Irwin's
argument, and what has aroused most controversy, is his interpretation of Socrates.
According to Irwin, Socrates held that vir~
tue is a kind of knowledge, a knowledge
that is first glimpsed as the result of crossquestioning, but which is also a teachable
expertise or craft (159). Irwin's boldness
shows itself above all in the latter claim,
namely that Socrates thought of virtue as a
teachable craft.
As for cross-questioning, or the Socratic
elenchus, Irwin gives an illuminating outline of its typical features. Socrates tests
some rule of conventional virtue in terms
of our beliefs about examples (i.e. whether
this or that kind of action would be virtuous), and especially in terms of our general
assumptions that virtue is always admirable, and worthwhile for the virtuous man.
"The elenchus," says Irwin, "adjusts our
conceptions of the virtues to our view of
what is worthwhile over all" (6, cf. 39, 47).
Thus, the method of cross-questioning is
not merely negative or critical, but is intended to yield positive results.
As Irwin points out, however, there are
shortcomings in this elenctic approach to
moral knowledge, Although the elenchus
yields valuable positive insights (40), it
must rely on the interlocutor's own convictions about disputable moral questions. Is
it clear, for instance, that admirable or noble action is always good, in the sense of being worthwhile for the agent (49, 117)? The
elenchus, with its demand that we try to
justify our moral beliefs, helps bring our
deepest moral beliefs to light (40, 70; Compare Kant, Critique of Practical Reason,
Part One, Book Two-especially Chapter
Two, Section Five, "On the Existence of
God as a Postulate of Pure Practical Reason"). But a clearer awareness of our deepest moral beliefs is not yet knowledge that
they are true. And there are radical critics,
like Thrasymachus, who seem to reject all
morality, or at least all recognized morality,
on the grounds of its not being worthwhile
for the moral man himself. "Socrates
notices that moral questions raise disputes
with no acknowledged arbitrator, and may
cause skepticism about whether there is an
authoritative answer to be found" (75).
And the method of cross~questioning does
not go far enough to remove such skepticism.
According to Irwin, Socrates tries to
answer this skepticism by pointing to the
contrast between our many differences
over moral questions and our universal
agreement about the arts and crafts. "If
Socrates could show that virtue is a craft,
these doubts [about the possibility of moral
knowledge] would be silenced" (75). Now a
craft, as Irwin understands it, is knowledge
of the means to produce some product-a
product distinguishable from the productive activity itself, and for which we have a
previously recognized desire. There is little
controversy among craftsmen, or between
craftsmen and other men, since the craftsmen accept the ends of their craft as previously given, as goods that the non-craftsmen
already desire. Accordingly, if virtue, or
true morality, were merely a knowledge of
the means to produce some further good
that everyone already desires, it would no
longer be a matter of irresolvable dispute.
(There need be no dispute, at any rate,
about what it is.) In particular, if true
morality were a knowledge of the means to
produce some definite kind of happinessdistinct from moral action itself-that all
men necessarily desire, then even the radically nonmoral man could be taught to become moral. He could be taught to choose
true morality as the most efficient means
to achieve the same nonmoral good he had
previously been pursuing without it (84).
And as a consequence, the skeptic, if he is
to be distinguished from the nonmoral
man, would be compelled to acknowledge
95
�that moral questions admit of rational solutions.
Irwin elaborates at length the implications of treating virtue as a craft-above
all, the implication that virtue {i.e., moral
knowledge) is of merely instrumental
value. Though Socrates never says so explicitly, Irwin offers indirect textual evidence, and he argues at length that the
need for consistency with the craft-analogy
must have led Socrates to accept this implication. And yet the overwhelming impression one gains from Socrates' life, and
especially from his death, seems to oppose
Professor Irwin's suggestion. This evidence
suggests instead that Socrates must have
regarded virtuous activity as its own (highest) reward. Irwin himself points to Socrates' emphatic assertion that one should
always prefer justice to injustice, no matter
what the future consequences (58; cf. 240).
And Socrates even contends, according to
Irwin, that virtue is in itself sufficient to
ensure happiness for the virtuous man
(100; Compare Ap. Soc. 4lc8-d2, and cf.
Chapter VII, Note ll, page 326). Now it
may be logically possible for a merely instrumental good to be of such boundless
worth. Yet how could a man in his senses
have absolute confidence in the goodness
of any state of soul that wasn't somehow
good in itself? (cf. M. F. Burnyeat's review,
in the New York Review of Books, September 27, 1979) Irwin himself draws attention
to this great difficulty (!00-01, 26!, 28182), and he later speaks of the identifica·
tion of morality with some craft-knowledge
as being "intolerably over-simplified" (17576). Why then, without the compulsion of
unambiguous evidence (cf. Chapter VI,
Note 63, page 323), does he claim that Soc·
rates made this identification?
According to Irwin, Socrates identified
virtue with craft-knowledge in order to provide "objective" justification for his moral
doctrine (73-75). Now it is true that Soc·
rates often contrasts his interlocutor's inability to teach his "virtue", or even to
show its worth, with the craftsman's ability
to teach an obviously useful trade. Moreover, Irwin quite rightly insists that Socrates is serious about the superiority of
craft-knowledge, as knowledge, to our socalled knowledge of what virtue is. But it
does not follow that Socrates believed that
"real virtue-not fully embodied in anyone
96
at the moment-will be a craft" (75).
Socrates had no illusions that moral controversy could ever be laid to rest by an authoritative craftsman, or with the discovery
of some new craft (see ·especially Crito
49cl0-d5). To be sure, he sometimes pretended otherwise (Charmides 165c4-e2;
Laches !84c4-!85d2). But Socrates' inten·
tion, in pretending to seek a teachable
craft-knowledge of virtue, was to awaken
some of his listeners to genuine awareness
of their own ignorance. Here, as elsewhere
(notably in Chapter IV on the l'rotagoras),
Irwin fails to appreciate Socratic irony.
This failure may stem in part from his belief that the non-moral man, or the radical
critic of conventional morality, raises legitimate questions, and makes demands that
Socrates must have hoped to satisfy (35-36,
73, 175). But Irwin's disregard of Socratic
irony stems also from his failure to see the
need for it, to see the serious obstacles that
hinder any attempt to share one's knowledge of ignorance with others (cf. Ap. Soc.
2lc7-e2 and Republic 492a5-c2. Consider
also Irwin's apparently unquestioned claim
to know that "the common [unplatonic]
conception of justice", or at least one of its
key elements, is truly "justice", or the "virtue" that is "real justice" [246-47, 2!!-12;
cf. 67-68, 98, !63, 253).) According to lr·
win's interpretation, Socrates' moral theory contains a deep conflict-between the
very great good he expected a virtue to be,
on the one hand, and his attempt to transform his moral beliefs into knowledge, on
the other. But what Irwin calls a conflict
within Socrates' moral theory is instead
Socrates' way of raising a fundamental
question about morality, or the moral
world-view, itself.
According to Irwin, it was Plato (i.e. the
Socrates of the "middle" dialogues) who fi·
nally concluded that the attempt to treat
virtue as a craft could not succeed. Instead
of regarding morality as a merely instrumental good, he saw that it must be viewed
as a good in itself, and as a necessary component, if not the whole, of human happiness. But how could he justify morality, so
understood, against its radical critics? Plato
seems to have decided-and rightly, according to Irwin (175-76; cf. I)-that the
demand for a defense of morality in terms
of some nonmoral final good "cannot plausibly be met" (Compare Aristotle, Eudemian
Ethics l248b9-!249al7). As an alternate
justification, Plato developed his own most
characteristic, and paradoxical, doctrines.
His Theory of Forms, his Theory of Recollection, and his teaching about the ascent
of "rational desires" are all intended, in
part, to explain how we can acquire knowledge of the highest moral good as being
good.
Irwin's interpretation of the middle
dialogues contains quite a few valuable
insights. He is right to emphasize the continuing relevance of Socrates' moral questions in the later dialogues, even in some of
their seemingly most metaphysical passages. And he discusses clearly and cogently some important difficulties {e.g.
about the separation of the Forms from the
particulars, and about the Republic's seemingly equivocal use of the term "justice")
that enthusiastic Platonists tend to ignore
or else slough over. But his horizon is severely limited by inadequate attention to
the drama of the dialogues, to what happens as distinct from what is said {3). And
partly because of this, Irwin is far too ready
to assume that Plato failed to see certain
major, and rather obvious, problems in his
own arguments (cf. 3-4, !0, 155, 163-64,
233, 242, 258). He thus never considers
that Plato might have chosen, or felt compelled, to leave these problems as questions
for his readers. As a result, he fails to recognize some of the most important questions
that Plato intended his readers to ask.
To illustrate this claim, I limit myself to
what Irwin says about philosophy and the
philosopher-king. Irwin contends that Plato
was mistaken, even in terms of his own argument, to suggest that "the philosopher
in the Republic will want to stay contemplating the Forms and will not voluntarily
undertake public service" (242). Now the
philosopher in the Republic is indeed a
public servant, but not because he wants to
be one, but rather because he is compelled
to, out of necessity. And yet Plato's overall
argument, as Irwin interprets it, requires
instead that the contemplative philosopher
also value virtuous action, including public
service, as a good in itself (243). According
to Irwin, Plato was inconsistent on this key
point, and he never faced the problems
that his attraction to a "solipsist [i.e.,
selfish] contemplative ideal" creates for
the rest of his moral theory (257-58; cf.
WINTER 1981
�255). This criticism presupposes, of course,
training
that Irwin has correctly understood Plato's
moral theory as a whole. But Plato's moral
theory, as Irwin presents it, culminates in a
vague and obscure teaching-about the
virtuous man's "rational desires"- that Irwin himself seems to regard as just barely
defensible (246-48; Compare 278-79 and
285-86). And there is no reason to think
that Plato could ever have been satisfied
with this theory that Irwin attributes to
him. Perhaps, then, Plato was not being
inconsistent when he acknowledged the
power of the "contemplative ideal".
Wouldn't it have been better for Irwin, instead of dismissing that ideal as an aberration, to admit that he couldn't yet make
sense of the whole of Plato's thought?
According to Irwin, Plato's conception
of the philosopher also contains a more
serious flaw than the mere one-sidedness
with which it stresses his contemplative
nature. This other flaw, which Irwin regards as part of the deepest weakness in
Plato's moral theory, is the "bizarre" conclusion that only philosophers-indeed
only those wise men who have beheld the
Forms (Republic 517b7-519a)-possess genuine virtue (283-84). As Irwin sees it, Phito
was led to this conclusion in the following
manner. Plato agrees with Socrates' "basic
demand" that a genuinely virtuous man
must be able to justify his way of life with
good reasons, and not merely with the "sec·
ond-hand support" of "custom, authority,
training, and the rest" (284). And he "rightly
insists", as Irwin interprets him, "that it is
worthwhile in itself, and can fairly be expected of a virtuous man, to try to defend
and justify moral beliefs rationally" (284).
But he then makes what Irwin calls the
"mistake" of thinking that "this kind of justification [sic] requires the capacities and
Republic" (284).
(284, italics mine) is not necessarily "worth-
Irwin argues as follows to try to show
that Plato was mistaken in limiting genuine
virtue to successful philosophers. He
claims that "the most plausible defense" of
Plato's basic demand [for justification of
one's moral beliefs] presupposes a respect
for persons as "autonomous agents" (274).
It requires us to regard "an individual's efforts to find a rational justification for his
own beliefs" as being intrinsically worthwhile. Accordingly, a man's attempt "to ex·
amine, understand, and justify his beliefs
as far as he can" -even though he may
possibly find "the wrong an~wers" and
have "the wrong beliefs" -is sufficient to
make him "more virtuous" and even "virtuous" (284-85). Plato "does not notice",
however, that his demand for knowledge,
or at least "the most plausible defense" of
its legitimacy (284-85), requires such great
respect for the very attempt to understand.
Instead, he mistakenly limits true virtue to
successful philosophers, or to the wise.
In fact, however, Plato's conclusion
about true virtue is not a result of any such
oversight (cf. also 164). Plato could never
have remained satisfied with Irwin's "de·
fense" of the "demand for knowledge and
justification," or with Irwin's implicit assumption that virtue requires little more
than the loss of innocence. Plato was well
aware that he was saying something surprising when he limited genuine virtue to
the wise. But once a man has asked, with
Glaucon and Socrates, why virtue (or justice) is worthwhile or good for him, it is no
longer so easy to dismiss Plato's conclusions about it. Plato's strict teaching about
virtue follows from his awareness that a
man's attempt to justify his moral beliefs
might indeed not be good. Merely "to try to
while in itself', nor even useful. Attempts
that fail to lead to insight, or at least to
right opinion, could easily be worse and
less worthy of esteem than the morality
that relies on the "second-hand support"
of "custom, authority, training, and the
rest".
We can be grateful for Irwin's straightforward attempt to distinguish the true
from the false in Plato's moral thought. Irwin's posture toward Plato's thought is
more fruitful than either the patronizing
"veneration", or the open contempt, of
those who treat it merely as a part of theirrevocable past. And Irwin clearly brings a
superior intelligence to his work. But his efforts to be open to Plato's thought are
thwarted from the beginning by his own
patronizing, for instance by his thoughtless
belief that Plato is "more concerned to present and recommend his views ... than to
argue for them or explore their consequences in any detail" (3). Because he accepts this caricature of Plato as primarilyat least in his writings-a mere spokesman
for certain opinions, Irwin fails even to
glimpse the full beauty of Plato's writing or
the full range of his thinking. The failure of
Irwin's interpretation stems from his inability to accept the guidance that the dialogues can offer if one begins by looking up
to them, as to a possibly competent
teacher.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
of the
philosopher in
the
defend and justify moral beliefs rationally''
David Bolotin
David Bolotin recently published Plato's Dialogue on Friendship: an Interpretation of the
''Lysis'' (Cornell University Press 1979)
97
�AT
HOME AND
ABROAD
Letter from Nicaragua and Guatemala
At the airport, customs and immigration
officials wear green fatigues and shiny
black boots. Guards in the same uniform
carry rifles. A sign on the wall reads "Welcome to Free Nicaragua." The capital,
Managua, bears traces of the war alongside
other older ruins. Empty and barren except
for tall grass and a few inhabited ruins,
central Managua still shows the devastation
of the 1972 earthquake. Despite all the
reconstruction money from abroad, Somoza
appeared not to rebuild, to the anger of
many before his fall. Instead, Managua
spread out with new construction on the
perimeter of this area.
Everywhere there are reminders of the
war: damaged buildings, cars with bullet
holes and broken windows, shelled-out
factories. Each neighborhood tells its own
story. In the poorer areas younger residents
recount battles in graphic details that
sound a bit exaggerated. People speak of
Nicaragua's sufferings under Somoza, the
"inhuman tyrant": he bombed the poorer
neighborhoods of Managua, killing many
more civilians than Sandinistas; he ordered
doctors in city hospitals not to let wounded
Sandinistas survive.
But the victory of the Sandinistas in
July 1979 now overshadows the memory of
the war's suffering. The names of streets,
schools, hospitals-entire neighborhoodshave been changed to commemorate
victory: the A. C. Sandino Airport, the
Lenin-Fonseca Hospital, the Highway of
the Resistance, and more. Monuments to
Somoza or his family have been destroyed
or defaced. New ones have been erected
to commemorate the Sandinista war heroes
and civilians who gave their lives. The red
and black flag of the FSLN (Sandinista
Front of National Liberation) is everywhere.
People praise the Sandinistas for "making
the revolution possible" and for "giving
the victory to the people." They mean not
just victory, a year ago, but all that has
happened since. When an American-type
grocery re-opened, selling basic foodstuffs
98
instead of luxury goods, housewives praised
the "revolution" and the Sandinistas for
making it possible for everyone, not just
the rich, to shop there. This praise was
typical; hardly anyone I met had any criticism of the Sandinistas after their first year
in power. Most Nicaraguans I met seemed
to be in a kind of euphoria which came
of surviving a brutal war in which so many
died for the "liberation" of their country.
They appeared willing to work hard to
reconstruct their country and "continue
the revolution."
The remains of July's anniversary celebration of victory were still in evidence on
the streets of Managua in early August.
Banners proclaimed that "In NicaragUa, it
will always be the 19th of July." Billboards
and posters all over the city repeated a few
key slogans: "Sandino yesterday, Sandino
today, Sandino forever"; "An armed people
is the guarantee of victory"; "People,
Army, ... unity guarantees the Peace";
"Cuba yesterday, Nicaragua today, El
Salvador tomorrow." Others advertise new
government programs. The faces of Cesar
Agosto Sandino, the legendary rebel hero
of the 1920's and 30's (from whom the
FSLN took its name) and of the late Carlos
Amador Fonseca, Cuban-trained guerrilla
and founder of the FSLN, appear in all
shapes and sizes. The most dramatic are
their portraits in lights on Managua's two
tallest buildings, the Bank of America and
the Intercontinental Hotel.
Many songs that are popular now grew
out of the war; they are also heard in other
Central American countries, though only
in homes, not on the radio. For Nicaraguans, they are now for entertainment, but
perhaps for other Central Americans, they
serve a more serious purpose. Many are
about guns and other weapons. "The
Garand", for instance, is about how to
load, aim, shoot, and disarm the Garand
M-1 rifle; it lists its specifications and praises
its accuracy. There are also hand grenade
songs and homemade bomb songs. Other
songs tell of the heroic deeds and sometimes tragic ends of Sandinista guerrillas.
With catchy slogans, the songs are sometimes moving in their revelation of the
passion and hope of the Sandinistas' long
struggle. A song commemorating Carlos
Fonseca begins "When we were in jail, a
member of the National Guard. full of joy,
came and told us that Carlos Fonseca had
died. And we replied, 'Carlos Fonesca is of
the dead that never die!' ... "
Carlos Fonseca had promised that when
the Sandinistas took power, all Nicaraguans
would have the opportunity to learn to
read and write. The Sandinistas claimed
that there were 669,000 illiterate adults
(forty percent of the population), of whom
ten percent were considered "unteachable."
So, the Sandinistas formed the "Popular
Army of Literacy" (EPA). According to the
newspapers, 50,000 young people from all
over the country left their homes and
families to teach their "comrades" to read
and write. Members of the Sandino Army,
students, even some volunteers from
abroad made up many of the literacy
"brigades"; all the "brigadistas" that I met
were under thirty. In exchange for their
services, they received room and board.
Classes were held in homes, factories,
farms, whenever the students had time. By
August, newspapers claimed that 464,500
people had learned to read and write, 70%
of their goal.
The crusade received an enormous
amount of publicity. In the official Sandinista newspaper, headlines declared towns
and districts "liberated" and "victorious
over ignorance" as more and more areas
reached their goal. A billboard-sized chart
set up in front of the Palace of the Revolution showed the progress of each region.
The media called the brigadistas "sons of
Sandino''. They claimed service in the
EPA amounted to fighting for the FSLN in
the war, because the EPA was "fighting"
the "next phase of the revolution." They
published simple handwritten letters from
WINTER 1981
�the newly literate that thanked the brigadistas and praised the Sandinistas and
the "revolution" for bringing them "out of
the darkness and ignorance." The two
television stations (now controlled by the
"Sandinista System of Television") showed
people who had just learned to read and
write, reading newspapers and talking
about how it felt to be able to read. When
only a little short of their goal, the government planned a "victory" celebration in
Managua, in honor of EPA's workers.
Independent and openly critical of the
Somoza regime, La Prensa for decades
stood for political life in Nicaragua. The
murder in 1978 of editor Pedro Chamorro,
allegedly on Somoza's orders, set off the
public protest and wide-spread strikes that
led to full scale civil war. Fifteen months
later, Somoza had La Prensa-which had
kept printing after Chamorro's murderbombed and burned. A month later, shortly
after the Sandinista victory, La Prensa, using another newspaper's facilities in nearby
Leon, was back on the streets. Chamorro's
widow was named to the five-member ruling junta (resigning less than a year later to
go back to La Prensa). Left in the hands of
another family member, Xavier Chamorro,
the newspaper all but lost its independence. Editorial comments suggesting that
reporters distorted facts in the service of
"imperialism" prefaced articles critical of
the Sandinistas or communist countries. In
the end, under pressure from the board of
directors, Xavier resigned-to start his own
newspaper with workers who had struck to
preserve La Prensa's pro-Sandinista line.
Members of the Chamorro family now
run all three major newspapers in Nicaragua: La Prensa is run by Jaime Chamorro,
El Nuevo Diario by Xavier, and the official
FSLN paper, La Barricada by Carlos
Chamorro. La Barricada, named for the
way battles were fought behind barricades
in the streets, features Sandinista propaganda above all. Much of the content of
El Nuevo Diario, while not strictly propaganda, is nevertheless pro-Sandinista and
against the U. S. Only La Prensa-which
prints much of the same news as the
others-also prints letters from readers
which question Sandinistas about friends
or family members who have disappeared
from jail or from the streets. The other
newspapers refer to La Prensa as the
"bourgeois" paper. All three comment on
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
each other's "inaccuracies" and "misrepresentations". When an article head·
lined, "Elections? The People have not
asked for them!" appeared in La Barricada,
La Prensa responded the next day with the
results of its own poll that showed that
roughly eighty percent of the people questioned wanted elections. Most of the criticism now centers on La Prensa for its
articles mildly critical of the Sandinista
regime.
All three newspapers print the regime's
column, "Our New Trench-Lecture for
the Literate". Printed in extra large type
with only a few lines to an installment, it
tells the story of A. C. Sandino and the
beginnings of the rebel movement in a
simple kindergarten style especially tailored
to the reading ability of the newly literate.
This column claims that the peasants were
Sandinistas too because they served as the
"ears" of Sandino and his men. According
to the column, even the children helped
the "revolution". With their noise, they
prompted the "traitor" (Somoza's father)
and the "invaders' (the U. S. Marines) to
overestimate the number of rebels.
The victory of the Sandinistas is told
everywhere in Central America. In tiny,
overpopulated El Salvador, the violence
has become unpredictable; some call it
open civil war. I found the situation too
dangerous and continued north to Guatemala. Guatemala, too, has seen a great
increase in political violence in the last
year, but the situation is not yet as bad as
in El Salvador. Still, when I think of Guate·
mala, I am afraid-afraid of what is
happening now and what is likely to
happen soon. As one U.S. congressman
put it, Guatemala is a bloodbath waiting to
happen.
In Guatemala, what there is of a middle
ground, a moderate side, is shrinking
rapidly. There are many factors involved in
the situation, but it is the extremist violence
from all sides that polarizes the country.
While the government may in fact be on
the middle ground, opposition groups feel
that it arid any groups that support it also
support-or at least condone-extremist
violence. Although the government at least
outwardly condemns violence, some of
their methods~i.e. killing Indians suspected of collaborating with the guerrillas-tend to have fhe opposite effect. The
Indians, alienated from the government by
these acts, turn to the guerrillas. The government seems to be doing itself in. Conservative groups, on the other hand, see
the opposition-i.e. any group that does
not support the government-as supporting the Marxist guerrillas and therefore opposed to peaceful means of reform or
change. The extreme conservatives take
matters into their own hands, as they hold
the government to be ineffective. There is
an all-pervasive attitude of being anti-anticommunist, anti-fascist, anti-government.
Although the terms "left" and "right" are
used by the different groups to label their
opposition, it is not that simple, since
different groups on the same "sides" have
different ideologies.
Extremist violence takes standard forms:
assassination, murder, and kidnappingsometimes for ransom, but more usually
the victims' bodies are discovered days
later. There are many groups, each with its
own targets. Some, particularly the Marxist
guerrilla organizations, claim public responsibility for their acts-especially kid·
napping, since the guerrillas usually ask for
ransom. Most terrorism, however, is face·
less, with perpetrators identified in the
newspapers as "unknown men". These
"unknown men" murder labor leaders and
organizers, student leaders and professors,
opposition party officials, journalists, and
priests-anyone suspected of "leftist"
sympathies. That these "unknown men"
operate as groups is apparent from their
methods; that they are radically "rightwing" is clear from their choice of victims.
It is widely believed that they are govern·
ment supported. The arguments for this
are compelling, though not conclusive.
First, in the late sixties-another peak in
guerrilla activity in Guatemala-the Army
and other government security forces
openly killed and terrorized the same
people in the same way. Many believe that
the government now operates underground
to protect itself from being accused of
resorting to terrorism. In several incidents
some connection with the government has
been established. In June, an unsuccessful
murder attempt took place on the national
university campus, which has seen much
terrorism. Two snipers shot at a student,
wounding him seriously. The two men did
not have time to make their getaway, however, and other students saw them and
chased them down. The students burned
99
�one alive and then lynched them both.
The wounded student was rushed to a
government hospital, but his family, fearing
for his safety, removed him to a private one.
Within 24 hours, more "unknown men"
tried unsuccessfully to gain entrance to
the hospital, shooting up windows and
doors with machine guns. As soon as his
health permitted, the student sought asylum in Costa Rica. The two snipers were
said by the newspapers to have been "confidential agents" of the Army. The Army
acknowledged this but denied any connection with their actions. In other
incidents, vehicles used have been traced
to branches of the government, such as the
judicial department. That some members
of these groups have been members of
government security forces does not prove
that they were acting on orders from the
government. The government, however,
raises suspicions, because it appears to do
little to prevent or investigate these incidents. The vice president, Villagran
Kramer, protested the continuing violence
by threatening to resign, but was reportedly
silenced by threats on his life. Eventually,
however, he did resign and went to the
u.s.
There are four main Marxist guerril1a
organizations now operating in the country.
Mainly involved in shoot-outs with the
Army in the mountains and in urban
terrorism, they say they aim at total ''revolution". These groups are underground:
your next door neighbor could be a member
and you'd never know. I was taken into the
confidence of some people who claimed
membership in one of these organizations.
Cautious and not ready to answer many of
my questions, they did, however, tell me
a great deal. Comparatively successful in
their everyday working lives, these people
still lived in the poor neighborhoods they
grew up in. They say they want someday
to "liberate" the people of Guatemala, the
poor and the Indians, from the "oppression" of the government. And when they
say this, their dedication to- the cause
becomes apparent. They are willing to die
for it like heroes, knowing that it may be
without glory, in anonymity.
The guerrilla group of the men I talked
to is separated into two main divisions. The
larger is the guerrilla army-in-training hiding
in the mountains. These men claim that
Indians make up thirty percent of the army.
100
(Even a few Indian enlistments would
terrify conservative Guatemalans, who
have up to now taken Indian passivity for
granted.) Smaller, and up until recently,
more active, the second division is made
up of independent units, each with a
specific mission: procuring arms, making
explosives, trailing prospective targets,
gathering information, stealing vehicles,
etc. Their arms and money come from
ransoms and bank robberies-and other
less easily identifiable sources. Guns and
ammunition are stolen from Army depots
and outposts. They receive, they told me,
arms, money, and training from Nicaragua-one of them received instruction
in the use of new weapons at a Sandinista
training session in southern El Salvador a
few months ago. (Aid from Cuba and from
the P.L.O. is also suspected. See Robert
Moss, "Terror: A Soviet Export," New York
Times Magazine, 8 November 1980.) They
have an overall plan which is known by all
members, but its specifics are revealed only
little by little. Unlike the Sandinistas, the
leaders of the organizations have not yet
made themselves known publicly. Members
of units, I suspect, know only their immediate superiors. Although they call themselves Marxists, they are much better at
saying what's wrong with the current
government and what it stands for than at
explaining their own political ideas and
their plans. What is important to them now
is "bringing the revolution," without imposing their ideology. They believe that, as
in Nicaragua, those who do the fighting
will end up in power.
To prevent further polarization of the
country, the government has launched an
expensive advertising campaign. There are
radio, newspaper, and television ads with
the theme "Let us maintain the peace in
Guatemala." One ad tells Guatemalans
that their brothers, the soldiers of the
Army, protect them from "foreigners" and
"traitorous" Guatemalans who want to
steal their land. Another ca11s upon "citizens" to stand up against terrorism for the
sake of their and their children's future.
Another shows Cubans upon their arrival
in the U. S. speaking of the hardships of
life under communism. To my surprise,
many Guatemalans doubted that the
Mariel boatlift brought more than a few
hundred refugees to the U. S. They dismissed accurate reports in the newspapers
of more than 100,000 refugees as propaganda of the government and the rich.
There is also a big campaign to promote
the government of General Lucas Garcia
as "progressive" and humanitarian. Ads
show hospitals, roads, and public housing,
some already built, and some under construction, other planned-but too few, too
late, in the opinion of many Guatemalans.
In August, the guerrillas succeeded in
sharply cutting down public attendance at
an important rally in support of the government and against terrorism. A few days
before the rally, bombs exploded all over
Guatemala city. The biggest one, which
killed eight persons and wounded many
others, went off in the park in front of the
National Palace, where the rally was to
take place. Guerrilla groups publicly
claimed responsibility for the bombs, and
the turnout (forty thousand in a country
where twice the number is not unusual)
was not nearly what had been expected.
The country's wealthy elite seem determined to fight the "communist threat,"
in the government's phrase. These people
do not believe that the "leftist movement",
as they can it, is popular and spontaneous.
They claim rather that it is directed and
financed by outside parties, namely Cuba
and Nicaragua. A rancher on the Caribbean
coast explained that he let the Army maintain and train several hundred soldiers on
his property in order that they might guard
the coast. He claims that boats carrying
arms from Cuba have been intercepted.
People like this rancher feel that they've
got their backs against the wall, and that
they must-and will-fight to preserve
what they feel is theirs.
In the face of such violent conditions,
life goes on, but there is more and more an
atmosphere of fear, and a feeling of
impending disaster. Killings by extremists
leave no one untouched. While each side
has its own targets, innocent people who
are in the wrong place at the wrong time
lose their lives. People who have reason
to believe that they are on somebody's
"list" try to insure their safety. Dealing
with these threats alters everday life-as
Salvadoreans who have fled to Guatemala
because of death threats can attest. In some
instances, it means having bodyguards,
although this is not always very effective.
For most, it means never keeping a regular
schedule. It means never taking the same
WINTER 1981
�route to work, using different cars, coming
and going at irregular hours. It means not
always spending the night at home but
going to the homes of friends and family
to keep from establishing a predictable
pattern. For many, many Guatemalans, it
means carrying a gun-especially at night.
A woman who fears for her husband, an
economics professor at the university, says
he's being watched and followed. She says
she knows what happens to professors
suspected of "leftist sympathies"-if they
do not flee to Mexico, or "join the guerrillas in the mountains," they are murdered
or they disappear.
When I left Guatemala in August, friends
on all sides felt that the situation would
wait for the outcome of the U. S. elections
in November. Even large business deals
were pending the results of the elections.
More conservative Guatemalans have
been infuriated with the Carter administration and its human rights policy. They
feel that the State Department and the
administration have supported the "leftist
movement", if only by not unequivocally
supporting the current government. From
the way they talked about the U.S. election,
one would think they could vote. The
guerrillas I spoke with hinted that if Carter
were reelected they could take their time,
but if Reagan won, they might have to
speed up the implementation of their plan.
The elections are sure to be front page
news, just as the conventions were, reflecting their importance in Guatemala's
affairs. Among the conservatives, although
there is an anti-Carter attitude, they are
not anti-American. Some people even believe that if anything drastic happens, the
U. S. will step in. The only strong antiAmerican attitudes I encountered were
among students and guerrillas. On the
whole, Guatemalans are still fairly friendly
to the U.S. This may change in the future.
In Nicaragua before the war, there was not
nearly the widespread anti-Americanism
that one encounters there now. For while
Washington and the Sandinistas deal with
each other, the Nicaraguans do not forget
the verse of the FSLN hymn that replaced
their national anthem: "The sons of
Sandino/Not to be sold nor surrendered~
Ever!/We fight against the Yankee/Enemy
of humanity."
HONOR BULKLEY
A student at St. John's College, Annapolis,
Honor Bulkley has made three extended visits
to Central America in the last three years, most
recently for three months in the summer of 1980.
FRoM OuR READERS
To the Editor:
Thank you for publishing the marvelous
"Three by Meyer Liben" in the July The
College/The St. John's Review.
In your note on the stories, you quote
George Dennison's description (1976) to
the effect that he [Liben] was "an unknown
first-rate writer." In my book, The Ordeal
of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss and
the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (Basic
Books 1974) on page 208, you will find an
attempt to appraise the greatness.
july 18, 1980
jOHN M. CUDDIHY
The passage Mr. Cuddihy refers to reads:
All these considerations come to mind
when we reflect on Malamud's most
recent novel, The Tenants (1971). Why
the vogue for Malamud's stories, rather
than those incomparably better stories
of Meyer Liben, for example? Liben's
characters are precisely observed; they
resist, with the stubbornness of stones,
being blown up into Malamudian emblems. They are thus culturally unavailable; obviously, this is "minor fiction."
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
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Radista, Leo
Parran, Jr., Thomas
Sisson, Barbara J.
von Oppen, Beate Ruhm
Wilson, Curtis A.
Thompson, Homer A.
Lund, Nelson
Collins, Arthur
Dennison, George
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Radista, Leo
Liben, Meyer
Morrisey, Will
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Brann, Eva T. H.
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 53, number 1 (Fall 2011)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Deziree Arnaiz
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President;
Pamela Kraus, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review.
Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s
College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800.
©2011 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing
The St. John’s Communications Office
Current and back issues of The St. John’s Review are available online
at www.stjohnscollege.edu/news/pubs/review.shtml.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Contents
Essays
Reading the Constitution as a Great Book............................1
William Braithwaite
Platonic and Jewish Antecedents to ...................................33
Johannes de Silentio’s Knight of Faith
Jacob Howland
Kant’s Rational Being as Moral Being ...............................47
Joseph Smith
Reflections
What Did You Learn? .........................................................73
Lise van Boxel
Poem
To the New Recruits............................................................81
Elliott Zuckerman
Reviews
Delphic Examinations
A Review of David Leibowitz’s The Ironic Defense of
Socrates: Plato’s Apology ............................................83
David Bolotin
Toleration
A Review of Eva Brann’s Homage to Americans.............101
Janet Doughterty
�4
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
1
Reading the Constitution as a
Great Book
William Braithwaite
Our national political conversation is just now being much
exercised in a deliberation about the Law and the Divine:1 on
one side, those who hold sacred a certain place in New York
City, because of those who died there; on the other, those who
plead the cause of religious freedom. Jews, Christians, and
Muslims have spoken on both sides. These circumstances can
remind us that the horrific brutalities we human beings
continue to inflict upon one another often arise somehow from
what we believe about the Divine: either that it is, and the
disputes over what it is, or that it is not, and the disputes over
what, in this event, we should look up to, if anything. These
questions are so ancient, universal, and persistent that they
appear rooted in some primal dividedness of the soul. Politics
and law cannot, it seems, escape the Divine; nor we, our own
double nature.
In Book I, Chapter 1 of the Physics, Aristotle observes the
most natural path of inquiry starts from what is familiar.
Especially to those Americans who have grown up with it, the
Constitution is familiar. But if this makes us think we already
know what it says, we might fail to read it with the care that a
great book deserves. We can study the Constitution with this
kind of care even while suspending judgment on whether it
truly is a great book. We then avoid the error that is committed
when, for example, one reads Euclid while assuming he has
been made obsolete by Algebra—looking down, from a place
of assumed superiority. We cannot know a priori whether
William Braithwaite is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This article was
originally a lecture delivered at the College in Annapolis on Constitution Day,
September 17, 2010.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
2
Euclid’s Elements, Aristotle’s Physics, or the Constitution, is
outdated, and we disable our judgment if we begin by looking
down on what we may come to learn we should look up to.
Diminishing its magnitude in relation to ourselves, we distort
what it presents to us. We will not see it for what it is.
Other obstacles besides familiarity can get in the way of
reading the Constitution well. It is short; so we may suppose,
mistaking its brevity for lightness, that it doesn’t need much
time. It can be taken to belong to a special discipline, the law;
lacking expertise, we read it without confidence that we can
understand very much. It’s political; since it touches issues we
may care passionately about, we search it for what we want it
to say, and can fail to notice that what it does say might not
agree with our partisan inclinations, or even when it does
agree, that its grounds may be different from our presuppositions.
This essay has five parts. In the first, I will suggest why I
think the Constitution can usefully be read as the preeminent
chapter, one of four, in what we might call the Book of the
Constitution. The second and third parts deal, from two
different points of view, with the distinctively American
experience of trying to form a political union based on an idea,
rather than on blood ties or religious beliefs. In the fourth part,
I will propose a way of thinking about the Constitution’s
Article VI, which contains the well-known “Supremacy
Clause,” providing that the Constitution “shall be the supreme
law of the Land.” In Part V, to conclude, I will suggest brief
and tentative answers to two questions: Is the Constitution
really a great book? Who can understand it best?
I
The Constitution is arranged into a Preamble, seven Articles,
and at the very end, formulaic legal words attesting authenticity. Some Articles are divided into numbered Sections. Parts
of Sections, or of Articles with parts not separately numbered,
BRAITHWAITE
3
are called Clauses. These are either paragraphs, sentences, or
parts of sentences.
The Preamble: “We the People of the United States, in
Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure
domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,
promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessing of
Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish
this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The grammatical skeleton is: “We the People . . . ordain
and establish this Constitution”—a subject, two transitive
verbs, and one direct object. “We” is plural; “the People” can
signify one or many. If we wanted to translate this sentence
into Ancient Greek, should the verbs be singular or plural?
Should the aspect of the verbs be aorist, to signify something
completed? Was the American Founding over and done with,
once and for all, when the Constitution was ratified, in 1789?
A verb of progressive aspect would signify that the ordaining
and establishing are continuous; they may still be going on.
Would the verbs be active voice, middle voice, or passive
voice? It makes a difference—doesn’t it?—whether the lawmaker says (active voice): I ordain and establish a constitution,
a regime of laws, and you choose to accept it? Or (middle
voice): I choose to obey, for my own reasons, only the laws I
make for myself? Or (passive voice): I make the laws, and you
have to accept them, like it or not?
“The People” are “of the United States.” A State is more
than a geographical place—land and water. The New York
mosque controversy reminds us that there are sacred and nonsacred places, garbage dumps and burial grounds. What kind
of place is a State of the United States—Maryland, for
example? What does it mean to say that places are “united”?
We all know that churches, temples, and mosques are sacred
places. Do legislatures and courts partake of the sacred also?
Those who serve there do take an oath, to uphold the law
(Article VI, last Clause). Why do we require this?
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The Preamble says that “the People” “ordain and establish”
the Constitution. “Ordain” means put in order; “establish”
means make firm. But political things seem to be disorderly
and always in flux. How is it possible that what is always
changing can be arranged so that it is stabilized?
In the Physics, Aristotle leads us through a long inquiry
into this question. Among his elemental ideas are place, form,
and material. What material do “the People” work on when
they “ordain and establish” a Constitution? And what is the
form of a constitution? Is it found in the words? If the Constitution has a place, where is it? In the national and State
capitals, and halls of city government? In ourselves? When
people speak of a “living Constitution,” where do they think
the Constitution lives?
The Preamble states six aims: union, justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and securing the
blessings of liberty. What is the principle of order here? Did
the men who wrote the Constitution believe, for example, that
without union, justice would be harder to achieve? That without tranquility at home, Americans would be less well prepared
for common defense against threats from abroad? That
liberty’s blessings are secure in proportion to the general welfare of all Americans?
The Preamble speaks of a “more perfect” union. Some
kind of union already existed, and it was deficient, less perfect.
It is named, in Article VI, “the Confederation.” This was the
union ratified in 1781, though first proposed in the Continental
Congress in 1777, ten years before the Philadelphia Convention proposed the Constitution we now have. The predecessor
constitution we know as the Articles of Confederation. If the
Constitution was a maturation, then it matters to know what it
grew out of, just as it matters, if you want to know a tree or
fish, to know how and from what it came to be what it is when
it is full-grown. To read the Constitution well, we must read
also the Articles of Confederation. I will say more about the
Articles later.
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The Preamble may be the best-known part of the Constitution. We turn now to the least-known part, at the very end,
the Attestation Clause. It says: “done in Convention by the
Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day
of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven
hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the
United States of America the Twelfth In witness whereof We
have hereunto subscribed our Names.” Thirty-nine signatures
follow.
Constitution Day is September 17 because this is the day
the Delegates signed it, attesting what they had done; it is the
Constitution’s “birthday.” But why should its birthday be the
day it was written, rather than the day it became legally
effective? The 39 men who signed were the ones who proposed
it, but under Article VII, only “the People” could make it law,
by ratifying it in State Conventions. Is the Constitution’s
birthday the date of publication, rather than the date of ratification, because publishing the words was more its coming into
being than the actions of ratification which made it law?
The Attestation Clause dates the Constitution from two
beginnings: the beginning of the Christian religion and
calendar (“Year of Our Lord”), and the beginning of the
Americans as a separate people (“of the independence of the
United States of America the Twelfth”). As the beginning of
the Constitution implicates the Articles of Confederation, its
end implicates the Declaration. To read the Constitution well,
we must also read the Declaration, out of which it somehow
grew.
The words of the Declaration came into effect on October
19, 1781, when the commander of the main British army, General Cornwallis, acknowledged military defeat by his surrender
at Yorktown, Virginia. But Americans celebrate their independence on July 4, the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration in 1776. Were the words more the beginning of the
United States than the deeds of war necessary to make them
effective?
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The Constitution is a plan of government. The Articles of
Confederation were a treaty, agreeing to a “league” among
thirteen independent, sovereign States. The Declaration of
Independence is neither of these. It is an argument. Its aim is
to justify the action of Great Britain’s American Colonists in
separating themselves from the Mother Country. It has an
argument’s five-part formal structure: Introduction, Statement,
Proof, Refutation, and Conclusion.
An introduction is what leads us into. Here is the Declaration’s: “When in the course of human events, it becomes
necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which
have connected them to another, and to assume among the
Powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the
Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent
respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should
declare the causes that impel them to the separation.”
The Colonists appeal to Law, from three sources. Two are
mentioned here; the third we will get to shortly. “Laws of
Nature” points us back toward Aristotle’s Physics, the first
sustained inquiry into the regularities and patterns we can see
in the world around us. He shows that the phenomena of the
natural world are not chaotic and jumbled, but on the contrary,
have characteristic regularities and patterns, ways of being and
working. Nowadays we would say they change, grow, and
move according to laws—for example, the laws of force,
which, as Newton demonstrates, govern the motions of the
planets. If “Nature’s God” refers to the God of the divinely
created order of the world described in the Book of Genesis,
then this phrase points us back toward the Bible. In the
Declaration, law comes ultimately from the Divine, by way of
Nature, or from Nature as a manifestation, a showing forth, of
the Divine.
The Declaration does not “dissolve” all ties with Great
Britain—only the political ones. Ties of blood, language, religion, and law, along with common culture, history, and habits
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remain. In the Refutation, the Americans call those in England
“our British brethren.” The American War of Independence
was in some sense a war within the family, a war of brothers.
It thus recalls stories of other, more ancient animosities among
kindred: Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau; Polyneices and Eteocles, the sons of Oedipus; Romulus and Remus. How do we
reconcile the apparent inevitability of war with the shedding of
kindred blood, which seems to be one of the most unnatural of
human actions?
Thucydides claims that his History of the Peloponnesian
War is the only book we need to read about war. It recounts the
war of the Athenians and the Spartans, both of them Greek
peoples, who once were united in resisting invasion by the
Persians, an earlier war recounted by Herodotus. In the later
war, they turn against each other. The paradigm of war,
according to Thucydides, is the killing of kindred, the people
of one’s own kind.
In their War of Independence, 1776-81, the thirteen
American States united against their “British brethren.” Three
generations later, the Americans fought another war, also
against kindred—our Civil War of 1861-65. Both wars were
between people related by blood, or “consanguinity,” as the
Declaration puts it. Both were wars about the words of the law:
the earlier war was about who may speak words of law (only
those who speak with “the consent of the governed”); the later,
about what the words of the law meant (are all men created
equal, and if so, in what politically relevant ways are they
equal?).
Both wars were also about Equality and Liberty: the
American Colonists wanted to free themselves from a lawmaking power in which they had no equal voice; the American
South, calling itself “the Confederacy,” wanted to be free to
tell the negro slave and his descendants that they would never
have any voice in making the laws to which they were
subjected.
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The proposition to be proved in the Declaration’s Proof
section is that “the present King of Great Britain” (he is
nowhere named) is a tyrant. This Section begins: “To prove
this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World.” Eighteen
complaints follow, and more than half deal specifically with
the power to make laws. Throughout this 18-count
“indictment” of the King, the Americans speak as if claiming
no more than their rights under established English law. This is
the third source of law they appeal to—not new rights, but
traditional ones, belonging to them as Englishmen. The King is
a tyrant because he has abused these traditional rights. Exercise
of the powers of government without the consent of the
governed is tyranny, the Americans argue. This is the startingpoint of their argument; it is found in the Declaration’s second
part, which begins with the famous “self-evident truths.” There
it is asserted that the only just powers a government has are
those “derived from the consent of the governed.”
That a government’s just powers derive from consent of
the governed depends on prior premises. The first of these is
asserted in the Declaration’s most famous words—“That all
men are created equal.” This is the philosophical source of the
American people’s claim that to be ruled rightly, they must be
ruled by their own consent, by laws they themselves have
made. “All men are created equal” are the words under contention during the Civil War, in which my own ancestors were on
opposite sides. Whom did the Declaration’s authors intend to
exclude, if anyone, from the words “all men”? Did they mean
to exclude negro slaves and their descendants? In 1857, the
Supreme Court of the United States, in Dred Scott v. Sanford,
said Yes. Did the Court read the Declaration rightly and well?
Do the Declaration and the Constitution exclude negroes from
citizenship? I will say more about this question later. Many
people seem to believe that the Constitution is about rights,
mainly. It isn’t. What they are probably thinking of is the first
ten Amendments, which we now call, collectively, the Bill of
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Rights. These were added later, in 1791, after the original
Constitution was ratified. The Articles of Confederation and
the Constitution are about powers; the Declaration and the first
ten Amendments are about rights. According to the Declaration, the powers are derived from the rights, and the rights are
derived from “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”
Rights are primary, because they are the source; powers are
derivative, because they pre-suppose rights. Thus the soul of
American law is the Declaration, for it is there that the organic
bond between powers and rights, or between government and
nature, is made explicit. As the beginning and end of the
Constitution implicate the Articles of Confederation and the
Declaration of Independence, the powers in the Constitution
implicate the rights asserted in the Declaration and the Bill of
Rights. To read the Constitution well, we must also read the
Bill of Rights.
With the Bill of Rights in mind, we have become accustomed to speaking of “individual” rights. The Constitution
never does. Throughout the Constitution proper and the Bill of
Rights, the standard language is “person,” “persons,” or “the
people.” The Third Amendment does refer to “the Owner”; the
Sixth, to “the accused”; but these terms are used nowhere else,
I believe. The Sixth also uses three masculine pronouns, but
for reasons that I will spell out later, with respect to the
Rendition Clause, I believe it doubtful that these refer only to
males. What is the difference, if any, between “individual”
rights and rights of “persons,” or “personal” rights? Does the
difference matter?
“Person” comes from Latin persona, meaning mask, especially one worn by an actor. Our persona is our public face, the
one we put on, for example, when we mask our private feelings
from strangers or acquaintances we don’t know very well.
Good manners require that we sometimes do this. Does politics
require it too? What do people mean when they say “All politics is personal,” or “The personal is the political”? “Personal”
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seems nowadays sometimes to mean “private.” What are the
real differences, the ones that matter, between our public or
political lives and our private lives? Does the Constitution
suggest which things belong to which? Should it?
The use of “person” in the Constitution was not motivated
by an effort to find what some call today “non-sexist”
language. “Person” is a technical term in law; it means human
beings in their public, or political, capacity. This usage came
into English law from Roman law, and is directly traceable to
the codification of twelve centuries of Roman law that was
ordered by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century. The
language of “individual” rights began, I believe, to be more
common and customary in American law during the middle of
the twentieth century, when the now-extensive body of court
opinions on the Bill of Rights was developing. “Individual,”
like “persona,” is also Latin in origin, but its meaning and
connotations are quite different. It is cognate with “indivisible,” that is, with the unit, the monad, the atom. This carries
implications of the uniquely private—that which makes each
of us, as each snowflake is said to be, absolutely different from
every other of the same kind. Has the elemental language of
mathematical physics crept unawares into our understanding of
the law? Our vanity, pride, and ego certainly prefer “individual” rights. We cannot help wishing to be special; most of us
do seem to have a deep longing to be loved for no other reason
than that we are who we are. But what the Constitution secures, in law, is “personal” rights, not “individual” rights. In
exchanging the former for the latter, what have we gained, and
what have we lost?
We now have a book of four parts: the Declaration of
Independence of 1776, the Articles of Confederation of 1781,
the Constitution of 1787, and the Bill of Rights of 1791. This
is the Book of the Law for a self-governing people. To read
well its pre-eminent “chapter,” the Constitution, we must read
the whole of which it is a part. The theoretical first principles
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BRAITHWAITE
of this people are Equality and Liberty; these are mediated by
Justice. The practical first principles are Prudence and
Tolerance; these are mediated by Law.
Among this self-governing people, all persons are politically equal. Each has equal right to speak freely in public
places about all that relates to the common good. Each has,
also, equal right to worship freely in his own church, temple,
or mosque. It is the work of the law (among other things)
constantly to mediate, heedful of prudence and tolerance,
claims to these fundamental rights and to other rights derivative from them. Which, if either, is primary—the right of
freedom of religion, or the right of freedom of speech? Both
are mentioned in the First Amendment, ratified in 1791, and
both are in the foreground of our national political conversation today. How are these two rights related?
II
To be one and whole is a human yearning. When our heart says
yes, and our head says no, we say we are conflicted. We are at
war with ourselves. We are not one and whole. In friendships,
the things of each are common to both, says Phaedrus in
Plato’s dialogue of that name (279c). In marriage, the Hebrew
Bible’s teaching (Genesis 2:24), inherited by the Greek Bible
(Mark 10:7-8), is that a man and woman become “one flesh.”
Modern biology and genetics confirm this. So does Aristophanes, in Plato’s Symposium (189c-193e). What would a
community that is one and whole look like? Might much of its
law not need to be written? This would be the law of custom.
In English legal history, unwritten or customary law was called
the common law. The American Colonists inherited this law,
and, consonant with its animating spirit, they reshaped it to
their own circumstances. We learn the common law by living
in it. We abide by the law, and it abides in us. It becomes a
second nature, and eventually we may feel as if it were natural
simply. At home in our community, we feel one and whole,
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both in ourselves and in relations with others. We have a place.
We know who we are. To be one nation and whole, a true political union, has been what Americans have aimed at since the
beginning. It has therefore been our greatest political problem
as well. Is it also the greatest political good and the greatest
political problem simply?
After their War of Independence, from 1775 to 1781, the
Americans, recently united against a common foe, tried to
establish a political union among themselves. Their first
attempt, the Articles of Confederation, failed. Their second attempt, the Constitution, has stood the tests of 225 years. What
made the American Union under the Articles “less perfect”?
Both the Articles and the Constitution aimed at union. The plan
of government each designed toward this end was different,
however. This difference is apparent on the face of the two
documents. The Articles are wordy and legalistic. Their substance is marred by excessive precision through avoidable
repetition, the spelling-out in detail of cumbersome procedures
for resolving differences among the States, and the political
asymmetry of imposing obligations on the States without giving the national government powers to enforce them. Article
IX (of thirteen Articles) spells out the powers of the Confederation Congress. It is over 1,400 words, in nine lengthy, unnumbered paragraphs. It would take over ten minutes to read it
aloud, at a brisk pace.
About two-thirds of Article IX deals with two subjects,
boundary disputes and raising “land forces,” that is, an army.
The complicated procedure for settling boundary disputes between States is set out in a single sentence of about 400 words.
This sentence piles one dependent clause on top of another:
three clauses begin with “if,” or “but if”; two others, with
“provided that.” It is a labor to read and understand it. The
provision for raising land forces gives the Confederation Congress power to request a proportionate quota of soldiers from
each State. These requisitions “shall be binding,” but the Arti-
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13
cles give Congress no legal power to enforce them. This is true
also of Congress’s power to collect contributions from the
States to “a common treasury” and to pay expenses for “the
common defence or general welfare.” Consequently, there was
no national army and no national treasury, except insofar as the
States chose voluntarily to comply with Congress’s quotas and
requisitions.
The different aims of the Articles and the Constitution are
revealing. The Constitution’s Preamble, we recall, states six:
union, justice, domestic tranquility, defense, general welfare,
and securing the blessings of liberty. The Articles, in Article
III, state three: defense, security, and general welfare. Notably
absent are justice and domestic tranquility. That the Articles’
primary object was defense against foreign enemies is
indicated by that part of Article III in which the States agree “to
assist each other, against all force offered to, or attacks made
upon them, or any of them.” The vulnerability felt by the
American States in 1781 is understandable. They were militarily weak, having just fought an exhausting five-year war.
They had won only with the help of the French and good luck.
England, Spain, and others still coveted further possessions in
the New World. The Americans had won their independence;
now they had to keep it.
The Confederation’s “union” was “less perfect” in being
more for defense against attack from outside than for political
union within, and in being more detailed on paper than feasible
in practice. The States agreed to a mutual defense treaty, but
did not empower Congress to raise a national army through
legally enforceable quotas of soldiers from each State. The fear
of foreign enemies was counterbalanced by an equally
powerful fear of yielding local powers to that genuinely
national government which some thought necessary for true
political union. Fear breeds, and is bred by, distrust. A sign of
the States’ fear and mutual distrust was their uncertainty about
what to call their relationship. In the Articles of Confederation,
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the introductory “Whereas” Clause and the Attestation Clause
at the end call it “a perpetual union.” Article I calls it a
“confederacy,” Article II a “confederation,” Article III, “a firm
league of friendship.” Perhaps they could not find the right
name because they were not yet sure what they wanted to
name. “League” may have been closest to the truth, in its sense
of coming together for a common purpose. History has
decided, however, to call our first, “less perfect” Union “the
Confederation.” This fits, because “to federate” means to come
together in a league. In another way, it does not fit. The Latin
root of “federate” and “federal” is related to fides, meaning
faith or trust. What is missing from the spirit of the Articles of
Confederation trust is mutual trust. A coming together for a
common purpose is not yet a union.
III
What drives us apart, makes us decide to separate? What are
the differences that get in the way of forming a real and lasting
union? Are there natural kinds, natural differences that inevitably have political consequences? Male and female seem to be
different kinds by nature. Aristotle argues in Book I of the Politics that some men are naturally slaves, or slavish. Linguistic
and cultural differences can feel almost natural. Whatever the
source of whatever differences there are, political arrangments,
if they are to be decent and sensible, will have to take account
of them. Which differences matter most, politically? How do
they matter, and to what extent? We now consider some differences of kind that are implicated in the Constitution.
In 1972, it was proposed to amend the Constitution to
provide that “Equality of rights under law shall not be denied
or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of
sex.” The intent of the Equal Rights Amendment was to prohibit, with the force of written law, discrimination against women. The main argument for it was the claim that the Constitution “excluded” women, because the only sex-specific pro-
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15
nouns in it are masculine. It is true that the Constitution’s text
does not anywhere use feminine pronouns. Does this signify
intent to exclude women from the rights of citizenship and the
holding of public offices?
Article II vests the Executive Power of the National
Government in a President and specifies requirements of age,
citizenship, and residency. It says, “No Person” shall be eligible to the office without these requirements. “Person” is neuter in grammatical gender, and does not exclude women. This
Section further provides, with respect to the President, “Before
he enter on the Execution of his office, he shall take the
following oath or affirmation” (emphasis added). Do these
masculine pronouns exclude women? The conventions of
English grammar, both in 1787 and in 1972, allowed masculine
pronouns to refer to the female sex. Whether a particular
masculine pronoun was presumed to include females, or
intended to exclude them, was to be determined by context.
Supposing that the Constitution as a whole is the proper
context, let us look at other uses of masculine pronouns to see
if they exclude women.
An example is in Article IV. Its Section 2 includes what is
called the Rendition Clause. It says that a criminal fugitive
who flees from the State where he committed a crime “shall on
Demand of the Executive Authority of the State from which he
fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having jurisdiction of the Crime.” If we read the “he” in the phrase “the
State from which he fled,” to refer only to men, here is the
result: A man who robs a grocery store in Maryland and is later
discovered by Maryland authorities to be in police custody in
Virginia, is constitutionally required, by the Rendition Clause,
to be “delivered up” to Maryland police. But his female
accomplice is not, because she is not a “he.” It seems to me
unlikely that the authors of the Constitution intended this
result.
The Equal Rights Amendment came close to being ratified
before the time to do so ran out in 1982. How should we under-
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stand the American people’s declining to ratify it, after more
than ten years of public deliberation about it? No serious
argument seems to have been raised, during the Democratic
primary-election campaigns of 2008, that then-Senator Hilary
Clinton was constitutionally ineligible for the Presidency because the ERA had not been ratified. The question remains,
nevertheless, whether there are differences between men and
women of such a kind that the law can properly make distinctions between them for some purposes, such as combat duty in
military service.
We turn now to another common misreading of the
Constitution. Among some Americans, both black and white,
an opinion persists that it favors, or supports, slavery. Three
specific provisions deal with this subject directly, two others
indirectly. None uses the words “slave” or “slavery.” Used
instead is “Person” or “Persons.” It should seem odd that a law
said to approve of slavery fails to name its subject plainly and
correctly. What could account for such reticence? Article II
vests the National legislative power in a Congress consisting of
a Senate and House of Representatives. Section 2 provides that
each State shall have not more than one Representative in the
House for every 30,000 of its population. With exceptions not
relevant here, population includes “the whole Number of free
Persons, . . . [and] three fifths of all Other Persons.” No one
disputes that by “Other Persons,” the Constitution’s authors
meant slaves.
Does the phrase “three fifths of all Other Persons” mean,
then, as some people continue to believe, and to say publicly,
that according to the Constitution, the negro is three fifths of a
Person? Such an opinion would be consistent with the opinion
that the phrase “All men are created equal” in the Declaration
of Independence was intended to mean “All white men,” and
therefore to exclude negro slaves and their descendants (this is
the reading of the Declaration by the Supreme Court in the
Dred Scott case). Often not noticed by those who say these
things is that the Three-fifths Clause deals not only with repre-
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sentation in the House, but also with taxation. The relevant
language says, “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States” according to population,
counted according to the formula just noticed.
From each State’s point of view, representation in the
House and direct taxation have opposed incentives. To get
more seats in the House, the Slave States wished to count all
their slaves; to pay less taxes to the National Government, they
wished to count none of them. The Free States, on the
contrary—those in which slavery was forbidden—wished to
have the Constitution count no slaves for representation in the
House. This would give the Free States greater power there,
increasing the prospect that Congress could eventually abolish
slavery. But for taxation, the Free States would have been glad
to agree to count all slaves. This would increase the tax contributions required from Slave States to the National Treasury. In
this controversy over representation in the House, what the
Free States wanted was that the Constitution not prohibit or
impede the eventual abolition of slavery; what the Slave States
wanted was its constitutional preservation. These opposed
interests were compromised by joining the opposed incentives
of gaining political power and reducing taxation. More House
seats meant more taxes; paying less tax meant fewer House
seats, and less political power.
In Mathematics, three one-fifth parts of 100 is the same as
100 three-fifths of each unit. But the dispute in the Constitutional Convention addressed by the Three-fifths Clause was
not about counting parts of slaves. It was about whether to
count all slaves as whole Persons, or some of them, or none.
Has the Three-fifths Clause been read in the mode of mathematics, rather than with a proper understanding of the language
of the law? Reading the Constitution in the mode of mathematics is consistent with thinking of individuals, of ones or
monads; but as we noticed earlier, the Constitution speaks of
“persons,” not of “individuals.” Ones can be fractionally
divided; “persons” cannot. What the Constitution says is that
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three-fifths of the total slave population were to be counted as
“Persons” and two-fifths were not to be counted at all. Did the
authors of the Constitution mean to say, by these words, that
out of every 100 slaves, sixty were Persons, and forty were
property? Which ones were which?
If the text obliges us to acknowledge that the Constitution
acquiesces in counting two-fifths of the slave population as
property, then we must concede that it also counts three-fifths
of that population as Persons. More slaves are constitutionally
recognized as human beings than are not so recognized. Is this
pro-slavery or anti-slavery? It seems more just to the text to
say that the Constitution looks up to the ultimate good aimed
at—placing slavery “in the course of ultimate extinction,” as
Lincoln was to put it—more than it looks down at the political
constraints that made this good temporarily unachievable in
1787. Would negro slaves have been better off in 1787—would
we be better off today—if the opponents of slavery in the
Convention, acting on high-minded principle, had simply
refused to consider any compromise whatever with the slave
interests? (This was the stance, later on, of the Radical
Abolitionists.)
We have taken note of two differences that American
Constitutional Law has had to deal with: man and woman,
master and slave. The first difference is natural. Slavery,
according to Aristotle’s Politics, has two forms, one natural,
the other conventional. In American law, slavery is against
natural law, or natural right. “All men are created equal.”
Slavery existed here, legally, only by convention, by positive,
written law. It could therefore be abolished, without injustice,
if the lawmaker changed the law. The Slave States saw, and
feared, that Congress would do exactly that. They were
willing, in consequence, to fight a Civil War to keep what they
claimed as their freedom, or “natural” right, to hold the Negro
in bondage. In the decades leading to that war, the Southern
legal arguments turned more and more to the assertion that “the
Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” made Negro slavery
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lawful because it was both natural and consistent with the
Bible. The slave interests felt these claims to be vindicated
when the Supreme Court decided the Dred Scott case in 1857.
So the war came.
It can be tempting to view the Union victory in the Civil
War as a victory for the jurisprudence of natural rights, on
which the Constitution is founded. With different political
leadership, and if President Lincoln had not been assassinated,
perhaps the victory might have had some chance to become
that. But it didn’t. What the South lost on the battlefield, it won
in politics and the law. One visible sign of the South’s triumph
was racial segregation—that vestigial remnant of slavery
which the most unregenerable elements in the South clung to,
in defeated rage, dragging down with them their decent and
moderate, but timid, compatriots. This was the South in which
I grew up, in Virginia, during the 1940s and 1950s.
The triumph of Southern jurisprudence involves, and is
involved with, the story of what we today call “judicial
review,” and this story belongs to a third difference for our
examination—the different aspects of sovereignty. The specific
question is this: what distinguishes the making of law,
legislative power, from the interpretation and application of it
in particular cases, judicial power?
The Constitution, in Article I, vests the law-making power
in Congress. The power to decide “Cases and Controversies” is
by Article III vested in “a Supreme Court and such inferior
courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and
establish.” What we seek is to discern how these two powers,
aspects of sovereignty, differ. We cannot, on this occasion,
make an adequate inquiry into this question. I offer, instead,
some observations we might draw upon, in order to begin
thinking about how a judge differs from a legislator.
“Judicial review” refers to the Supreme Court’s power to
act as a kind of super-legislature by declaring Acts of Congress
“unconstitutional,” which is taken to mean, “not lawful,” or
not law. Is judicial review consonant with the spirit of the
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Constitution? What is the source of the Supreme Court’s power
to overrule the deliberate will of “the People,” expressed in
laws passed by Congress? What is at stake here, in the words
of the Declaration, is the “consent of the governed.” The
Declaration accused the British King of the arbitrary exercise
of power. What are the differences, with respect to “consent of
the governed,” between an arbitrary king, an arbitrary Congress, and an arbitrary Supreme Court? If “arbitrary” means
unreasonable and willful, then all three are forms of unjust
rule, even if different in formal appearance and practical
consequences. Are an arbitrary Congress and an arbitrary
Supreme Court dangerous in equal degree? This may depend
upon the remedies available to the People, and on the kind of
harm either branch might do by its willfulness. Senators’ terms
are six years; House Members’ terms, two; the constitutional
power to remove them belong to the People, and can be
exercised at the ballot box. Supreme Court judges serve,
constitutionally, “during good behavior”; they seldom resign
voluntarily. With good health, most serve as long as physically
and mentally able. The most recent retiree was ninety years
old. The Chief Justice and the newest Associate Justice are
both about 50; they are likely to serve for several decades.
Bad or questionable laws enacted by Congress may be
more accessible to correction, both constitutionally and in
practice, than abuses of power by the Supreme Court. The
Court decided Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, holding
that racial segregation of negroes and whites in public schools
was unconstitutional. To reach this result, the Court had to
overrule its own prior decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy
was decided in l895. Both Brown and Plessy involved state
legislation, not an Act of Congress, so these two decisions
were not, technically, exercises of the power of judicial review.
But the jurisprudential progenitor of Plessy, insofar as it addressed racial segregation, the remnant of slavery, from the
perspective of positive law rather than of natural law, or natural
right, as affirmed in the Declaration, was the Court’s decision
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in Dred Scott v. Sanford, which did involve an Act of Congress.
Dred Scott was decided in 1857. There Mr. Chief Justice
Taney held that Congress had no power to exclude slavery
from United States Territories not yet admitted to the Union as
States. On the way to this conclusion, Taney opined that the
words, “All men are created equal” were intended by the
Declaration’s signers to mean only white men. “The Negro has
no rights a white man is bound to respect,” he said. I believe
this to be a misreading of the Declaration; if it is, Taney’s opinion “de-natures” the Constitution by poisoning its seminal
source in the Declaration’s doctrine of natural right, tranforming its vital principle from the sovereignty of reason into the
will of the sovereign. Beginning with the Dred Scott decision,
and its repudiation of the political principle that “All men are
created equal,” the Supreme Court’s prestige and authority
stood behind the legally sanctioned and publicly tolerated policy of racial segregation for a hundred years, until the Brown
decision in 1954.
By contrast, efforts to change legislation enacted by
Congress can begin, if the People choose, after the next
election. The Civil Rights Movement of the l960s can be seen
as a “bottom-up” citizens’ effort (assisted by a better-instructed
Supreme Court) to make this ballot-box power effective
against those Members of Congress who held influential
committee chairmanships that made it possible for them to
impede, stall, or stop civil rights legislation in the National
legislature. A bad law is sooner corrected than a corrupted
understanding of the law itself. In the most important moral
controversy ever to divide this country, the Supreme Court was
on the wrong side for a century. Dred Scott was the first time
the Court effectually exercised the power of judicial review. In
doing so, the Court abandoned, in order to assert the political
power of a “super-legislature,” what might have been its
proper role as law teacher to the nation.2 It also prepared the
groundwork for suffocating the natural-right source of
American law in the Declaration of Independence. Without
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22
natural law, or natural right, the highest thing in American law
is the power of the sovereign. By asserting the power of
judicial review, the power of exercising a veto over Congress,
the Supreme Court declared itself first sovereign. We are under
a Constitution, a Chief Justice of the Court said in 1907 (and
repeated in 1908), but the Constitution means what the Court
says it means.3 This understanding of law seems to take as its
essence the political (and sometimes military) force that is
certainly necessary to make law effective in practice, rather
than that ultimate good which law looks up to, aims at, and
constantly strives toward. This good, according to the
Preamble, is to “establish Justice.”
IV
What is law for us? This is Socrates’ opening question in
Plato’s short dialogue Minos. The Constitution, I suggest,
answers Socrates’ question for Americans in the way I shall
now crudely sketch out; for a fuller answer, we would need of
course to read Plato’s Laws, to which the Minos is propaedeutic, and some other books as well.
Article VI in the Constitution has three unnumbered
Clauses. The first requires that the National Government honor
“Debts and Engagements” made under the Articles of Confederation. The obligation to perform contracts continues, notwithstanding a change in the external form of government.
This first Clause gives constitutional recognition and stature to
the principle of keeping your promises. This is a moral
principle, because a promise invites reliance, and to ask
reliance is to accept moral responsibility. Promise-keeping
nurtures trust. When our words invite others to rely firmly on
what we say, we vitalize our personal, social, and commercial
relations. Our expectation that most people, most of the time,
will generally do what they promise, governs such commitments as “I’ll meet you at the Dining Hall at 11:45” and my
marriage vows, as well as our commitments to friends and all
the buying and selling we do everyday, including the commer-
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23
cial contracts we enter into by e-mail and telephone with
people we have not met, don’t know, and will never see. The
law of promise-keeping is very ancient, its origins obscure.
Abraham relies on it when he buys a burial place for Sarah;
Jacob relies on it when Esau sells him his birthright. This law
was for a long time unwritten, residing in the habits and
customs of people’s ways of dealing with one another. In
England, it was one element in the nurturant soil of what came
to be called the common law.
The second Clause of Article VI is the famous Supremacy
Clause. It provides that the Constitution, laws enacted pursuant
to it, and treaties made by the United States, “shall be the
supreme Law of the Land.” This Clause makes the Constitution the highest written, or positive, law for the American
people. Unlike the law of promise-keeping, the Constitution
and its Supremacy Clause are recent in time, and its authors are
known by name. All peoples have laws of promise-keeping.
But only the Americans have “this Constitution,” ordained and
established by themselves.
The third Clause of Article VI requires all members of
Congress and the State legislatures, and “all executive and
judicial officers” of the United States and of the several States,
to bind themselves “by Oath or Affirmation” to support the
Constitution. This requirement resonates with the tones of the
closing lines of the Declaration of Independence: “And for the
support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the
Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each
other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” These
closing lines recall, in turn, the Declaration’s beginning, with
its reference to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”
The three Clauses of Article VI ascend hierarchically. They
move from the law of promise-keeping that has grown up
spontaneously and been preserved among all peoples by
custom, to the highest law of a particular people, to the laws
that are highest simply, the Laws of Nature and the Laws of the
Divine, however understood. The written Constitution referred
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to in the Supremacy Clause is in the middle of Article VI,
placed between the unwritten laws of custom and the unwritten
laws of the Natural and Divine orders.
Is the being of the Law to be found more in its stability,
which may be most manifest in its written and unchanging
words, or more in what the Law is grounded upon and in what
it looks up to? The structure of Article VI suggests that what
we hold, or ought to hold, most solidly to be Law is the ways
and usages, of unremembered origin, that give identifying
character to us as a particular people. This, according to the
Declaration of Independence, is the English common law (with
its reliance on natural right), as we have adapted it to American
circumstances. The structure of Article VI suggests, as well,
that what American Law looks up to is the relation between
Nature and the Divine. The Divine is referred to in the
Declaration four times: as “Nature’s God” and the “Creator,”
the source of “unalienable rights,” and hence of the just powers
of government, and of law; as “divine Providence”; and as
“Supreme Judge of the World.” As presented in the Declaration, the Divine could appear to be the transcendent original
form of which the National Government’s three branches—
legislative, executive, and judicial—are the earthly image and
shadow.4 Such a view seems consistent with the Biblical
testimony that Man is created in God’s image (Genesis 1:27).
What does this way of reading Article VI suggest about
reading the Constitution as a great book?
Reading the Constitution as a great book entails trying to
see what is in it, not only expressly, but also implicitly. I have
suggested that both women and blacks are “in” the Constitution, as potential citizens—human beings who were not
citizens in 1787, but whom the Constitution did not legally bar
from becoming citizens. Women are “in” because they are
“Persons,” and the men who chose the Constitution’s masculine pronouns knew these pronouns could be understood as
including women. Women are in the Constitution because they
are not out—they are nowhere excluded, expressly or by impli-
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25
cation. Blacks are “in” because even if the Constitution grudgingly acquiesces in treating 40% of negro slaves as not
countable in the population, it affirmatively treats 60% of them
as countable “Persons,” that is, as potential citizens, as “men”
politically within the meaning of “All men are created equal.”
It is best to interpret the words and intentions of the
Constitution and the law in the same way we want our own
actions interpreted, that is, in the way we should try to interpret
the actions of others—by the good that is aimed at, rather than
by the necessities, circumstances, and human weaknesses that
impede or hobble the practical realization of our better hopes
and dreams.
Reading the Constitution as a great book entails trying to
see, also, what lies under it—a Western tradition of over two
thousand years, accessible to us in a few hundred surviving
books. But much of what underlies the Constitution and the
law is not in books. It was, and is, unwritten. No express words
in the Constitution command us to be just, prudent, and
tolerant. We learn such things, to the extent we do learn them,
by living with, and among, others.
Reading the Constitution as a great book also entails trying
to see what is above it, what it appeals and aspires to—Nature
infused with the Divine, the Divine as the First and the Final
Cause of Nature. To read the Constitution most deeply, we
have to read the Bible and Plato’s Laws, Aristotle’s Physics
and Metaphysics, Aquinas’s Summa, and much more.
Reading the Constitution as a great book entails, finally,
trying to see what is behind it, the background out of which its
thought emerges. This background begins to reveal itself when
we ask the questions, Does it make a difference that the
Constitution was written in English? Could its meaning be
expressed in German, or French, or Chinese? Perhaps what is
particular in it could not be. But what about the things in it that
are universal? Which things are these? If it makes a difference
that the Constitution was written in English, then, for the same
reason that reading Homer illuminates the background neces-
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26
sary for reading Plato, reading Shakespeare illuminates the
background for reading the Constitution.
To begin to know what the Constitution and the law are—
this is the work of a lifetime.
V
A great book, for me, is one that speaks with the authority
of depth and weight about serious questions that really matter
to me. Friendship is such a question. Who are my best friends?
Surely those who want for me the highest good I am capable
of. How do I know who these are? Aristotle’s Ethics might help
me to know. Whom can I love? Whom can I trust with the
innermost thoughts and secrets of my heart? Who, or what,
should I love and trust the most? Plato and the Bible, Jane
Austen and George Eliot, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky have a lot to
say about these questions.
A great book, for others as well as for me, is one that
speaks with coherence and insight about questions that will
matter a lot to most of us throughout our lifetimes. Work is
such a question: What should I do with my life? What work am
I most fit for?
Aristotle’s Politics and Tocqueville’s Democracy in
America can help us think about how to find a place in the
American polis where we, all and each of us, may thrive with
the talents we have by nature and the good habits we can
acquire by care and self-discipline.
A great book simply, for all human beings, speaks with
clarity, harmony, and proportion about questions that stay with
mankind always. What is Law? Does God exist? If God is not,
where are we? What is the soul? Is it immortal?
The Constitution was not a great book for me when I was
in law school, or during the 25 years of law practice and law
teaching that followed. Nor was it a great book for me when I
came to St. John’s College in 1995. But, for me, it is now.
Whether or not it is in itself a great book, I have found that it
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27
has always been a doorway and a path for me to the questions
in the greatest books. What I had not known before was how to
read it. Can the Constitution be a great book for you? Yes, if
you choose to let it. But no book can matter very much for any
reader who is not ready, or able, to accept as a genuine possibility that he may always have to be stretching upward in order
to approach its meaning.
Who can read the Constitution? Anybody willing to make
the effort. But as with all other difficult and worthy activities,
some people are likely to be able to do this better than others.
A book published fifty years ago has something to say on this
point. Its title is The People Shall Judge. The Preface begins
this way:
This book expresses the faith of one American
college in the usefulness of liberal education to
American democracy. If the United States is to be a
democracy, its citizens must be free. If citizens are
to be free, they must be their own judges. If they are
to judge well, they must be wise. Citizens may be
born free; they are not born wise. Therefore, the
business of liberal education in a democracy is to
make free men wise. Democracy declares that “the
people shall judge.” Liberal education must help
the people judge well.5
If a liberal education helps us read the Constitution better, then
those with such an education have an advantage over those
who lack it. It is unhappily the fact that most lawyers and
judges today lack a liberal education, since one is to be had in
only a very few colleges.
Perhaps the most discerning readers of all will be those
with much leisure who are able to use it well in reading the
greatest books. Probably it would help to have had some direct
experience of politics or war. The opportunities for such a life
are infrequent, however, and the men and women few who can
make the most of such opportunities when they are available.
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BRAITHWAITE
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The rest of us must do the best we can with whatever gifts we
have, trusting in the indemonstrable premise that one evanescent glimpse of something high, even from a great distance,
may be worth more than the solid worldly goods always
tempting our grasp from nearby.6
EPILOGUE
The artist of the work depicted in these four images is Albin
Polasek. He was born in 1879, in Moravia, now the Czech
Republic, and apprenticed as a wood-carver in Vienna before
emigrating to the United States at age 22, later becoming an
American citizen. He was head of the Sculpture Department of
the Art Institute of Chicago for nearly 30 years.
At age 28, while still a student in sculpture at the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, he made
the work shown here. It is one of his most famous. Its title is
Man Carving Out His Destiny. (Later he made the following
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female companion piece called Unfettered, an exquisite nude
in bronze, with blue-green finish:
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NOTES
1. At the time of this lecture, public debate was raging over whether
a community center proposed by a Muslim organization should be
built near the site of the attack on the World Trade Center in New
York City.
2. See George Anastaplo, The Constitution of 1787: A Commentary
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 135.
Unlike Milton’s Eve in Paradise Lost, Polasek’s Woman directs her gaze exuberantly upward.)
The first two views of Man Carving Out His Destiny show
the work in progress, initially as a small-scale plaster model,
then in full size, in stone, in a version that very likely was
preliminary—compare the positions of the right arm in the
studio and outdoor versions. The last two views show two perspectives of the finished work.
As you see, the work of the Man whom the sculpture depicts is not finished. If we take this statute to represent a selfgoverning people shaping themselves by means of the law,
then the verbs in our Greek translation of the Preamble should
be progressive in aspect, not aorist: self-government is never
over and done with, because our own lives are always a work
in progress. So far as “the living Constitution” dwells within,
to “ordain and establish” it is up to us.
3. “We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the
judges say it is, and the judiciary is the safeguard of our liberty and
of our property under the Constitution.” Charles Evans Hughes,
“Speech before the Elmira Chamber of Commerce, May 3, 1907,” in
Addresses of Charles Evans Hughes, 1906-1916, 2nd ed. (New York:
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), 185. “Congress may pass laws, but the
Supreme Court interprets and construes them, and determines their
validity. The Constitution, with its guarantees of liberty and its grants
of Federal power, is finally what the Supreme Court determines it to
mean.” Charles Evans Hughes, “Address Delivered at Youngstown,
Ohio, September 5, 1908,” ibid., 307.
4. Cf. Anastaplo, The Constitution of 1787, 26.
5. The People Shall Judge: Readings in the Formation of American
Policy, Vol. I, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), vii.
6. Cf. Plato, Phaedrus 279c.
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Platonic and Jewish Antecedents
to Johannes de Silentio’s
1
Knight of Faith
Jacob Howland
As very young children, we tend to engage the world with the
joyful expectancy and unimpeded capacity for delight that
spring from a trust as yet unbroken. But repeated experiences
of loss and disappointment almost inevitably cool our enthusiasm for life, and teach us the usefulness of detaching
ourselves from what Kierkegaard in Either/Or calls “the fair
wind of hope.”2 According to Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling, Abraham was an
exception to this rule: through “the wonder of faith,” Abraham
remains “young enough to wish” and “preserve an eternal
youth.”3 Fear and Trembling begins with the story of a man
whose ever-increasing admiration for Abraham was proportionate to the degree to which “life had separated what had
been united in the child’s pious simplicity.”4 Silentio thus
announces the central question of his book: how can a mature
understanding of the ways of the world coexist with a childlike
love of life?
Silentio is neither the first nor the last to pose this question.
The associate between wisdom and resignation is something of
a commonplace. In the Greek tradition, it appears as early as
Aristophanes’ Clouds, in which Socrates, who is portrayed as
the ascetic head of a school into which men have withdrawn
from the city in order to devote themselves to philosophical
studies, is called “miserably unhappy” by Pheidippides.5 In the
Hebrew Bible, the same sentiment occurs in the Book of
Ecclesiastes: “I set my mind to study and probe with wisdom
Jacob Howland is McFarlin Professor of Philosophy and past Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Tulsa.
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all that happens under the sun.—An unhappy business, that,
which God gave to men to be concerned with! I observed all
the happenings beneath the sun, and I found that all is futile
and pursuit of wind.”6 In modern literature, this theme is
expressed by Goethe’s Faust:
True, I am more clever than all the vain creatures,
The Doctors and Masters, Writers and Preachers;
No doubts plague me, nor scruples as well.
I’m not afraid of devil or hell.
To offset that, all joy is rent from me.
*****
Hemmed in by all this heap of books,
Their gnawing worms, amid their dust,
While to the arches, in all the nooks
Are smoke-stained papers midst them thrust,
Boxes and glasses round me crammed,
And instruments in cases hurled,
Ancestral stuff around me jammed—
That is your world! That’s called a world!
And still you question why your heart
Is cramped and anxious in your breast?
Why each impulse to live has been repressed
In you by some vague, unexplainèd smart?7
Three decades after the publication of Fear and Trembling,
Friedrich Nietzsche would argue that loving life is inconsistent
with understanding it; wisdom produces nausea, while the
appetite for life can take root and grow only within an atmosphere of illusion.8 For his part, Silentio insists that there is a
solution to the problem of the unity of youthful enthusiasm and
adult knowledge, the name of which is “faith.” But while
Silentio does not doubt the actuality of faith—particularly as
exemplified in Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice Isaac—he
cannot satisfactorily explain its possibility, much less
reproduce its movements in his own life.
The subtitle “A Dialectical Lyric” announces that Fear and
Trembling is simultaneously a philosophical and a poetic
HOWLAND
35
work—one that employs intellect and imagination to
illuminate its subject. Yet Silentio is unwilling to accept without qualification the title of “poet” or “philosopher.” More
precisely, in denying that he is a philosopher, he affirms that he
is a poet, and in denying that he is a poet, he affirms that he is
a philosopher.9 If, as this contradiction seems to imply, he both
is and is not a poet and a philosopher, we might be entitled to
assume that he both does and does not know what he is talking
about. We are thus invited us to identify and ponder the potentially fruitful inconsistencies in Silentio’s discussion of faith.10
Here is one such inconsistency. Silentio states: “I can very
well describe the movements of faith, but I cannot make
them.”11 But if the movements of faith are wholly internal, and
so invisible to others, how could Silentio know them without
having experienced them? Caveat lector: Silentio’s explanation of the internal structure of faith—in particular, his
assertion that faith involves a movement of finitude that
follows a movement of infinite resignation12—deserves critical
scrutiny.
I. Silentio’s Flat-Footed Knight
The clearest description of the phenomenon that Silentio is
trying to understand in Fear and Trembling is contained in his
imaginative description of what he calls the “knight of faith.”
Silentio’s first encounter with this knight is inauspicious.
“Dear me!” he exclaims, “Is this the person, is it actually him?
He looks just like a tax collector.”13 In Silentio’s imagination,
the knight of faith is literally and figuratively “pedestrian.”14
We watch him as he strolls around the city and makes his way
through the week. At work, he labors with the precision of an
“Italian bookkeeper”; at church, he is “impossible to distinguish from the rest of the crowd”; at leisure, he resembles a
“mercenary soul.” He walks like a “postman,” talks of food
like a “restaurateur,” plans construction projects like a
“capitalist,” and relaxes with his pipe like “the local tradesman . . . vegetating in the twilight.” In brief, Silentio detects in
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the knight of faith not the slightest “crack” through which one
might catch sight of the infinite: “He is solid through and
through. . . . He belongs entirely to the world; no bourgeois
philistine could belong to it more.”15
But Silentio’s imagination goes beyond appearances, for
he also tells us what the knight of faith thinks and feels. From
this perspective, it is clear that he is free of the bourgeois
philistine’s social ambition, restless anxiety, and slavish
adherence to convention. Although he is poor, he “thinks about
an appetizing little dish of warm food his wife surely has for
him when he comes home.” Indeed, he “firmly believes that
his wife has that delectable dish for him,” and to see him eat
this meal would be an “enviable” and “inspiring” sight. But if
she doesn’t have it, “oddly enough—it is all the same to him”;
whatever he may find on his plate, so to speak, leaves him
deeply satisfied. He runs into a stranger at a building site; “in
no time he erects a building, having at his disposal all the
resources required for that purpose.” For “if it came to that,” he
thinks, “I could easily get it.” The knight of faith evidently has
an active imagination—for how can a man who “does not have
four beans” afford delicious delicacies, much less finance a
building project? What is more, “he enjoys and takes part in
everything”; “everything that happens—a rat scurrying under a
gutter plank, children playing—everything engages him with a
composure in existence as if he were a girl of sixteen.” In a
word, “he lets things take their course with a freedom from
care as if he were a reckless good-for-nothing.”16
Silentio remarks in passing that the knight’s appetite is
“heartier than Esau’s.”17 This statement cuts two ways. Jacob
purchases Esau’s birthright for a bowl of stew, and later steals
his brother’s paternal blessing. Like Esau, the knight of faith,
in his simple contentment and guileless freedom from care,
must be an easy mark for more cunning men. But unlike Esau,
the knight of faith is always blessed in life, because he receives
everything as a blessing. And this is the main point. To the man
for whom “life had separated what had been united in the
HOWLAND
37
child’s pious simplicity,”18 Abraham presents a paradox. Just
so, the knight of faith presents a paradox to Silentio, for whom
“God’s love, both in a direct and inverse sense, is incommensurable with the whole of actuality.”19 Silentio supposes that
the movement of faith comes after that of infinite resignation;
faith makes whole what life has fractured. But his imaginative
description of the knight of faith tells a different story. While
this knight knows the difference between actuality and possibility, reason and imagination, he combines them in his day-today existence in such a way that each augments the other: he
enjoys the products of his imagination as if they were actual,
and the actual conditions of his existence as if they were what
one could wish for in imagination. Silentio claims that the
knight of faith is “not a poet,”20 yet we see that his love of life
is essentially poetic and authorial.21 Inasmuch as he “enjoys
and takes part in everything,”22 God’s love has furthermore
never appeared to him to be “incommensurable with the whole
of actuality.”23 The knight of faith is thus no more familiar with
Silentio’s conception of resignation than he is with his Godforsaken conception of actuality, because the former is
dependent on the latter. The knight of faith, to repeat, is “solid
through and through”;24 there are no cracks, because he has
never been broken.
Let me put this point another way. Although Silentio does
not explain why he thinks that God’s love is incommensurable
with the whole of actuality, this is evidently a general
conclusion that he has drawn from experience. On the whole,
and setting aside particular exceptions, men act as if they did
not love God, and events proceed as if God did not love man.
Now this conclusion rests on the inherently uncertain presupposition that inductive reasoning gives one access to the nature
of actuality as a whole. Silentio accordingly envisions faith as
the solution to a problem that his intellect has posed.25 This
problem, however, is entirely foreign to the knight of faith.
Like Alyosha Karamazov, and unlike Alyosha’s brother Ivan,
he has always loved life “before everything else,” and in
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particular, before its “meaning” and “logic.”26 And because
love has always come first for him, he has never felt the weight
of the incommensurability that comes to light when one is
guided primarily by the mind rather than the heart. Unlike
Silentio, the knight of faith never renounced the world, so he
does not need faith to get it back.
II. Philosophers and Fools
The differences between Silentio and the knight of faith can be
delineated more clearly by looking at two antecedents to the
latter—one from Athens, the other from Jerusalem. The first
suggests that there may be more than one way to combine a
youthful passion for life with a mature understanding of it,
while the second suggests that the problem as Silentio understands it—namely, how to make the movement of faith after
the movement of infinite resignation—may be insoluble.
Plato’s Socrates resembles the knight of faith both externally and internally. Like Silentio’s knight, Socrates is poor; if
anything, he is even more carefree in his poverty inasmuch as
he does not work at all.27 Like Silentio’s knight, he is just as
satisfied in times of scarcity as in times of plenty. Alcibiades
explains in the Symposium that, during military campaigns,
Socrates put up with hunger better than anyone, yet he alone
was able to enjoy his meals when food was abundant.28 This
last detail suggests Socrates’ equanimity in the face of death,
something he amply demonstrates during his trial and execution.29 Like Silentio’s knight, Socrates is superficially pedestrian, and not just because he lacks the financial resources to
attain any higher rank than ordinary foot-soldier. “He speaks of
pack-asses and blacksmiths and cobblers and tanners, and
seems always to say the same things in the same ways,” Alcibiades observes.30 But as with the knight of faith, the inner is
not the outer: anyone who opens up his speeches or is vouchsafed a glimpse of his soul finds a sublime beauty beneath his
quotidian exterior.31 Like the knight of faith, Socrates’ appar-
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ent simplicity exposes him to the schemes of more cunning
men. Callicles accordingly warns him that he runs the risk of
being put to death by his enemies.32 But again, Socrates simply
is not afraid of death—a fact that has caused some commentators to infer that Socrates hates life, or, in Silentio’s terms,
that he embraces death with a kind of infinite resignation.33
This inference, however, flies in the face of his earnest and
energetic engagement with the essential tasks and opportunities of a human life. As Socrates makes clear in the Apology,
his watchword is wakefulness, not sleep.34 And yet, he takes
leave of life without apprehension and without regret.35
Socrates’ relationship to the world could be described as
one of engaged detachment. He approaches life in a manner
analogous to an athlete who “leaves everything on the field,”
but who nevertheless immediately forgets the result and is
utterly gracious in defeat as well as victory. In my view, it is
philosophical eros—which Socrates regards as even more
essential to the philosopher than intellectual capability36—that
sustains his attitude of engaged detachment. Socrates’ philosophical eros relates to a conception of actuality that differs
both from Silentio’s inductive disappointment and from the
poetically augmented conception of the knight of faith. Silentio describes a youth whose love for an unattainable princess is
“transfigured into a love of the eternal being.”37 Here we have
something like Socrates’ philosophical love of the Ideas or
Forms, except that Silentio associates this love with a movement of resignation that springs from an intellec-tual acknowledgment of the disappointing character of actu-ality. But
Socrates’ longing for wisdom is not a consequence of his
understanding of the world, and is not born of frustration.
Rather, it is nothing less than the most dedicated and persistent
love of the whole of actuality—and here actuality must be
understood not as the dispiriting way of the world or the
tedious limitations of human life (whether real or imagined),
but as that which most fully is, in the distinctive integrity of its
being.38
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The second antecedent of Silentio’s knight of faith that I
would like to consider is the Hasidic fool in Rabbi Nachman of
Bretslav’s influential story “The Clever Man and the Simple
Man.”39 Nachman’s tale is a religious allegory about two childhood friends who follow separate paths in life. “Determined to
conquer the world,”40 the clever man travels extensively,
becomes an expert in “every artistic achievement,”41 and
ultimately “penetrates the heart of everything in nature and in
the soul of man.”42 He becomes “enormously rich and wise,”43
yet his wisdom serves only to make him miserable: “a violent
disgust at the imperfection of life drove him from place to
place, and he nowhere found rest.”44 This is consistent with
Silentio’s assertion that God’s love is incommensurable with
actuality. But the clever man goes further than Silentio, for
when he is summoned by the king, he reasons—and tries to
convince others as well—that the king does not exist.
The simple man remains at home and learns the humble
trade of shoemaking. He is a clumsy craftsman and lives in
great poverty, yet he does not suffer from the spiritual anorexia
that afflicts his clever friend. Indeed, he is “joyous and in good
spirits from morning till evening.”45 Like the knight of faith, he
uses his imagination to enhance his experience, and so savors
everything that life sets before him. His wife gives him bread
and water, but he delights in these as if they were the finest
meat and wine: “Thus he seasoned the scanty bites with gay
fancies . . . and while he ate he really tasted all the choice
dainties of which he spoke.”46 He rejoices in his “shabby
sheepskin” as if there were no “nobler garment.”47 People
often make fun of him and attempt to dupe him, but their
insults and tricks have no effect on his good humor. “Ay,
friend,” he is accustomed to answer, “just see how foolish I
am! You can be a good deal cleverer than I and still be a proper
fool.”48 And when the king calls for him, he answers immediately, responding to this unexpected bit of good fortune estatically: “the joy of the simple man was overpowering.”49
It is significant that the simple man’s happiness is not
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41
purchased at the price of ignorance. Because the simple man
“had passed his life without intrigues, he knew how to see into
the heart of right and wrong.”50 In the person of the simple
man, this essential moral knowledge is inseparable from the
knowledge of how to live joyfully, come what may. In
Nachman’s story, it also pays off by conventional standards.
Valued by the king for his “virtue and simple understanding,”51
the simple man becomes the governor of his province and
finally the king’s prime minister. Meanwhile, the clever man
becomes impoverished due to his unwavering devotion to
exposing the “madness and delusion” of those who continue to
believe in the king’s existence.52 One day he meets the simple
man, and tries to prove to him that he, too, has been fooled
about this fundamental matter. The simple man cannot counter
his arguments, and does not even attempt to do so. Rather, the
story ends with the simple man declaring to his friend, “You
will never receive the grace of simplicity!”53
Rabbi Nachman’s tale recapitulates the main themes of
Silentio’s imaginative encounter with the knight of faith. Both
narratives trace the practical and theoretical problem of resignation to the sovereignty of the intellect in the soul.
Conversely, both teach that equanimity, together with the
ability to live joyously, springs from the poetically productive
love of a trusting and grateful heart. But Nachman’s story does
not merely confirm that Silentio’s problem of how to repair
what life has fractured is foreign to the knight of faith, for it
also warns that there may be a point beyond which what the
intellect has broken cannot be made whole. Measured by the
exacting standards of the intellect, the world manifests an
ineluctable imperfection. The “violent disgust” elicited from
the clever man by this imperfection convinces him,
furthermore, that there is no king—and such a repugnant world
is utterly inconsistent with the hypothesis of intelligent rule.
The simple man rightly refuses to challenge this inference,
because logical argumentation cannot address the deeper issue
of the clever man’s profound spiritual and emotional
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incapacity. How could one who regards every blessing as a
curse learn to feel joy? By the “grace of simplicity,” on the
other hand, the simple man is able to experience life as a
blessing, and it is this experience that leads him thankfully to
acknowledge God—the melech ha’olam, or “King of the
Whole,” who is the ultimate source of all blessings.
III. A Very Brief Conclusion
Rabbi Nachman’s simple man is wiser in his foolishness than
the clever man is in his wisdom, for only the simple man has
attained knowledge of himself and others. In this respect, the
simple man resembles Plato’s Socrates, who is also wrongly
considered by more cunning and worldly men to be deluded.
Like the knight of faith, Socrates and the simple man understand intuitively that love precedes cognition in the wellordered soul. This is a secret that Silentio makes available to
his readers, even if he himself fails to grasp it. But unless we
readers either love the whole or can learn to do so, our
knowledge will be of no more value than Silentio’s ignorance.
NOTES
1. This article was originally presented at the Sixth International
Kierkegaard Conference at St. Olaf College in June of 2010. I would
like to thank David Possen for his critical comments, and Ed Mooney
for his encouragement.
2. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I, ed. Howard V. Hong and
Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 292.
3. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, ed. C. Stephen Evans and
Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 15.
4. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 7.
5. Aristophanes, Clouds, l. 104 in Four Texts on Socrates, trans.
Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West (New York: Cornell
University Press, 1998), 120.
6. Ecclesiastes 1:13-14. JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh, 2nd ed.
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1999), 1766.
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43
7. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, trans. George Madison
Priest in Great Books of the Western World, ed. Robert Maynard
Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, vol. 47 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1952), Part I, ll. 366-370 and 402-413.
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of
History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 814.
9. “The present writer is not at all a philosopher; he is, poetically and
tastefully expressed, a free-lancer” and “I am not a poet and go about
things only dialectically.” Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 5 and
79.
10. This is not the only indication that Fear and Trembling presents
us with a partial and incomplete understanding of its subject, yet one
that nevertheless enables a discerning reader to glimpse more than its
author has seen, and thus to begin to correct his mistakes. As Stephen
Evans observes in his Introduction to Fear and Trembling, the book’s
epigram—“What Tarquin the Proud communicated in his garden
with the beheaded poppies was understood by the son but not by the
messenger”— invites us to see Silentio as a messenger who is
unaware of the deeper significance of his own message
(Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, x). But because we do not know
whether this is the point of the epigram as Silentio understood it, we
also cannot know whether Silentio himself understands that he says
more in Fear and Trembling than he knows.
11. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 31.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 32.
14. Ibid., 34. The Danish word is Pedestre.
15. Ibid., 32-33.
16. Ibid., 33-34.
17. Ibid., 33.
18. Ibid., 7.
19. Ibid., 28.
20. Ibid., 33.
21. The word poet comes from the Greek poiētēs, which derives from
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the verb poiein, meaning to make or to produce—clearly apposite in
reference to the knight of faith. The word author comes from the
Latin auctor, which, among other things, signifies an authority, a
creator, a principal cause, a founder of a people. Note, too, that
Silentio consistently emphasizes the fruitfulness of faith as
exemplified in “father” Abraham, the auctor generis or progenitor of
the people.
22. Ibid., 32.
23. Ibid., 28.
24. Ibid., 32.
25. His relationship with God is mediated by his intellect: it is not
God’s love that makes him “unspeakably happy,” but the “thought”
that God is love. Ibid., 28.
26. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard
Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco: North Point Press,
1990), 231.
27. Plato, Apology, 23b-c.
28. Plato, Symposium, 220a.
29. See Alcibiades’ description of his exemplary composure in battle
in Symosium. 220d-221c. Alcibiades also makes it clear that Socrates
has no desire for conventional honors, which others pursue as a
means of overcoming the oblivion associated with death—cf. 220de and 208c-d.
30. Plato, Symposium, 221e-222a.
31. Plato, Symposium, 216e-217a.
32. Plato, Gorgias, 486a-b.
33. See “The Problem of Socrates” in Friedrich Nietzsche, The AntiChrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed.
Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 162.
34. Plato, Apology, 30e-31a; cf. Republic, 476d.
35. Plato, Phaedo, 117-118.
36. In explaining who the philosopher is, Socrates accordingly begins
not with the philosopher’s intellect but with his desire: he is a lover
of the whole of wisdom. See Republic, 475b).
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37. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 36.
38. See especially Republic, 476a-d.
39. Martin Buber, The Tales of Rabbi Nachman, trans. Maurice
Friedman (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999), 71-94. On the
significance of this story within the context of Yiddish literature, see
Ruth R. Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
40. Buber, Tales, 72.
41. Ibid., 74.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 78.
44. Ibid., 74-75.
45. Ibid., 75.
46. Ibid., 76.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 78.
49. Ibid., 85.
50. Ibid., 86.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 90.
53. Ibid., 94.
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47
Kant’s Rational Being
as Moral Being
Jay Smith
In the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure
Reason Kant writes:
This discussion as to the positive advantage of critical
principles of pure reason can be similarly developed in
regard to the concept of God and of the simple nature of
our soul. . . . Even the assumption—as made on behalf of
the necessary practical employment of my reason—of
God, freedom, and immortality is not permissible unless at
the same time speculative reason be deprived of its pretensions to transcendent insight. . . . I have therefore found it
necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for
faith. The dogmatism of metaphysics, that is, the preconception that it is possible to make headway in metaphysics
without a previous criticism of pure reason, is the source
of all that unbelief, always very dogmatic, which wars
against morality.1
As evidenced by the Critique of Practical Reason and other
works such as Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, the
simple act of limiting the excessive and dogmatic claims of
speculative metaphysics in order to secure morality proved
more contentious, difficult, and complex than the passage
above suggests. The situation of practical reason changes in
radical and complicated ways as it emerges out of the shadows
of speculative reason to become the primary faculty that determines our rational being. I will first discuss the context established for practical reason and morality in the Critique of Pure
Jay Smith is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe. This article was first delivered
as a lecture at St. John’s College in Santa Fe on April 10, 2009.
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Reason. Then I will try to show how pure practical reason is
connected to rational faith in the Critique of Practical Reason.
This examination will uncover the uncanniness of pure practical reason, an uncanniness hidden in part by Kant’s commitment to, and transformation of, a traditional view of pure
reason. The uncanniness is caused by the operation of a power
that is beyond, or out of, the normal course of nature—a power
that differs from natural powers. This essay tries to show that
Rational Being, for Kant, is Moral Being, and that this equivalence preserves a higher dignity for human beings than is
compatible with the mere pursuit of secure and comfortable
living.
I. Practical Reason and Rational Faith in the Critique of
Pure Reason
Kant connects a concept of knowledge with a synthesis made
possible by the reception of givens under the forms of sensibility, namely, space and time. By synthesis, Kant means an
activity that produces a unity. These sensible givens are made
ready for further synthesis by the productive imagination. Finally, by the exercise of synthetic judgments, the worked-up
impressions are brought under the unity of the categories of
the understanding, so that an object of experience is constituted. This constitution is possible only because these spatiotemporal givens worked up as presentations or representations
are accompanied by the formal ‘I think’—they are prehended
and apprehended by the same mind. It is this assertion of the
necessity of an overarching unity, a transcendental unity of
apperception, that is Kant’s response to Hume’s claim that the
mind is only a bundle of impressions. Without this ‘I think’
belonging to a persistently identical self-consciousness, the
subject would not recognize all these presentations as its own,
and, immersed in the stream of lived happenings, would
simply forget itself.
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49
Let me give an example as a way to explain this process
without getting too bogged down in Kant’s technical details. I
am standing in the kitchen, I hear a loud noise, I turn, look out
the window, and see a motorcycle going by. These impressions—hearing the loud noise and seeing the motorcycle—
arise in a temporal sequence and are spatially arranged: I was
standing by the refrigerator when I heard the noise, and then I
turned my head to look out the window and see a motorcycle
going by. These happenings, even given in a spatial and
temporal arrangement, are not yet an experience in the Kantian
sense. There is as of yet no constituted object of experience. To
have an experience it is necessary that these two happenings be
brought into unity—in this case, under the category of cause
and effect: the loud noise is the backfire of the motorcycle.
To be able to constitute an experience out of these happenings, I must be able to temporally and spatially rearrange these
happenings, cutting their ties to the way I happened to notice
them while standing in the kitchen. This rearrangement, which
prepares them to be taken up into the categories of the understanding, is the work of the productive imagination. The sound
I heard before I saw the motorcycle is not the cause of the
motorcycle but vice versa. Our mind in this way rearranges
these happenings to give us an objective experience, an experience in which the subject who has the experience—namely the
transcendental subject who spontaneously produces the ‘I
think’ that marks these happenings as happenings of the same,
constant mind—also posits a correlative transcendental object
of experience, a bare x, a placeholder as it were. The happenings become an experience, are constituted into an object of
experience, when the reference point shifts from the subject of
the happenings to the posited placeholder, so that the
happenings are experienced as centered on an object over and
against the subject. “Oh, that loud noise was the backfire from
the motorcycle.”
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This concept of knowledge and this description of how our
experience is constituted—that is, how we shape experience
and give it unity—are easily grasped by us and, for the most
part, accepted. For instance, here is a common puzzle: we
present someone with a series of, say, six pictures—six different stages of a person chopping down a tree. These pictures
are presented in a random order with the expectation that
everyone will reorder them in the same way. In Kantian terms,
we would say that each person can synthesize these
happenings into an objective experience valid for everyone.
Why is this concept of knowledge important for a
discussion of Kantian morality? First, because all objective
experience is constituted in this way, even what we take to be
our internal experience is given under a form of sensibility,
namely time, worked up by the productive imagination and
subsumed under the categories of the understanding. What we
take to be our inner experience, our inner selves, our deepest
and truest desires, are constituted and conditioned in this
manner. Kant calls this inner self the empirical or phenomenal
self. We have no speculative access, no intellectual intuition
either into the thing-in-itself that is the self or into a putative
“real” or “authentic” self—which Kant labels the noumenal
self. This lack of speculative access into the self has significant
repercussions on our discussion of morality and on what is
demanded from practical reason.
Kant’s concept of knowledge also produces a second, more
complicated consequence for our discussion of morality. Kant
seeks to reject the sort of speculative thought that emerged
from mythical thinking when we began to claim access to a
universal unity, a One. This One could be seen as the cause and
the ground of the Many; in the light of this One, the Many
could be conceived as a whole, a totality.
In striving for such a conception, the human mind marks
out for itself an extramundane point of reference in which the
flow and jostle of concrete events and phenomena are joined
together in a stable whole. In this distancing view, one is able
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51
to differentiate between the totality of what is and individual
entities, between the world and what occurs within it. Things
are understood not in their particularity but in what underlies
them. They are understood as ideas, as essences, as forms or
substances; that is to say, they are understood in regard to what
connects them back to the One. As part of this cognitive stance,
of this bios theōrētikos, the soul, in striving for an intellectual
intuition of the cosmos, forms itself as it becomes conscious of
itself in the recollective and reflexive intuition of the One. The
uniting of the knower with the One is both an ecstatic selftranscendence and a reflexive self-assurance that enables one
to see and live his or her life from this extramundane point of
reference. Within this self-assurance, fears of death, of
isolation, of frailty, of contradiction, of surprise, and of novelty
can be faced.
Kant provides a universal unity as well, but of an entirely
different stripe. He begins with the transcendental unity of the
knowing subject which, in relating itself to itself, requires, as a
posited correlate, a symmetrical concept of everything that
stands over and against the subject—that is, a transcendental
concept of the world as the totality of all appearances. Kant
calls this correlate a Cosmological Idea, which aims at the
whole of possible experience and the unconditioned. The
unconditioned is the ground of appearance and occupies what
would have been the place of the One. Perhaps an example
from Aristotle might be helpful here. At the end of the
Metaphysics Aristotle talks of an unmoved mover whose
activity is thought thinking on thought. The experience that he
wishes to ground is a theoretically worked-up experience that
has its roots in our sense-experiences of an ordered whole, an
eternal cosmos of ordered motions. Given that we can have
such an experience, how is it possible? To understand Aristotle’s unmoved mover, I am often tempted to make a transcendental move of positing the unmoved mover as a necessary
logical construct that lays out the conditions for the possibility
of this eternal and ordered motion while unifying everything in
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light of an overarching end. Aristotle, however, does not make
this move. Instead, he makes the puzzling assertions that such
an unmoved mover is alive, and that, in its activity of thought
thinking on thought, it exhibits the best kind of life there is, the
bios theōrētikos—which is a real possibility only for some of
us and only for short periods of time. In whatever way we are
to understand this exhibited life, we can point to it as
something transcendent, as a One that is the ground of the
order of the cosmos, a One of which we can say that it is not
merely a logical construct. Dante, in the context of a religious
journey, also calls upon this One at the beginning of his
Paradiso: “The glory of Him who moves all things pervades
the universe and shines in one part more and in another less.”2
Kant recognizes that this orientation toward the One, in the
philosophical context, is motivated by the needs of reason.
Reason is marked by universality and necessity as it strives for
systematic completeness and perfection. Speculative reason
seeks this One, this universal unity, as it attempts to bring
together in one synthetic act the conditioned—that is, the
whole of possible experience—and the unconditioned—that is,
the ground or end of such a whole. The results unfortunately
are the antinomies, the contradictions that reason inevitably
falls into when it seeks to know, to speculatively point at, the
overarching unity, the One. As Kant explains: “Either,
therefore, reason through its demand for the unconditioned
must remain in conflict with itself, or this unconditioned must
be posited outside the series, in the intelligible.”3 The positing
of something outside the series of appearances is needed in
order to point to a ground for appearances that makes the
possibility of appearances conceivable. This positing is also
needed in order to give a fuller account of us than are provided
by references to an empirical ego and to a transcendental unity
of apperception. But why take the trouble to label this positing
the intelligible world, especially since Kant has denied us any
intellectual intuition, and since his concept of knowledge en-
SMITH
53
sures that an intelligible world could never be a possible object
either of experience or of knowledge?
As a way to begin, let us look at what Kant accomplishes
in resolving the antinomies of pure reason by the positing of an
intelligible world. First, Kant preserves an idealizing synthesis,
a world-constituting synthesis that allows the distinction to be
made between the world as a whole and what is in the world.
This distinction helps to guide understanding in its work of
knowing objects in the world. In preserving the synthesis,
however, Kant downgrades the cosmos into the object-domain
of the natural sciences, into a kingdom of nature, a kingdom
whose only unity is a unity under a certain set of laws. This
unity is not a unity that could become an object of knowledge,
much less exhibit the highest form of life. It is not the One that
holds together the Many. This regulative unity merely assures
us that for any set of conditions a previous set of conditions
can be found from which the latter can be understood and so
on, ad infinitum. This world of nature, of appearances, is no
longer a whole organized according to ends; because its unity
is merely regulative, it has the heuristic goal of advancing
theory-construction. The regulative unity of the Cosmological
Idea does not provide an extramundane point of reference, nor
can it satisfy reason’s demand—or our need—for a whole that
contains contingencies, neutralizes negations, and calms the
fears of death and isolation.
Second, Kant preserves a space outside of nature that does
not conflict with the regulative unity needed for the
functioning of the understanding, as he states in the section that
discusses the Antinomy of Pure Reason:
The sensible world contains nothing but appearances, and
these are mere representations which are always sensibly
conditioned; in this field things in themselves are never
objects to us. It is not surprising that in dealing with a
member of the empirical series, no matter what member it
may be, we are never justified in making a leap out
beyond the context of sensibility. . . . On the other hand,
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to think an intelligible ground of appearances, that is, of
the sensible world, and to think it free from the contingency of appearances, does not conflict with the unlimited
empirical regress.4
As we said above, this intelligible world cannot be known
by us. The resolution of the antinomies of pure reason
therefore evokes resignation, which Kant expresses in this
way:
The greatest and perhaps the sole use of all philosophy of
pure reason is therefore only negative; since it serves not
as an organon for the extension of knowledge but as a
discipline for the limitation of pure reason, and, instead of
discovering truth, has only the modest merit of guarding
against error.5
If there is to be a positive use of pure reason, it will not be in
its speculative use but in its practical use. Furthermore, Kant’s
assertion that he found it necessary to deny knowledge6
suggests that it is not in the search for truth that we find our
dignity; it is rather in guarding against error that some other
possibility is preserved for us.
To conclude this first section, let us consider why this
space is labeled “the intelligible world.” Our metaphysical
desire, the desire for a One that can satisfy reason, cannot be
satisfied speculatively; moreover, as Kant has shown, attempts
to do so propel us into a land of illusion and deception. Unlike
David Hume, who claims that this desire will disappear once
we see that it cannot be satisfied, Kant rightly asserts that this
metaphysical desire will not wither. The needs of reason are
always pressing, and it is these needs that provide the context
for Kant’s exploration of practical reason. The burden that
speculative reason attempted to carry in response to the
demands of reason and the needs of our metaphysical desire
can only be carried by practical reason—and in particular, by
practical reason intimately bound up with morality. This is why
Kant says,
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The idea of a moral world has, therefore, objective reality,
not as referring to an object of an intelligible intuition (we
are quite unable to think any such object), but as referring
to the sensible world, viewed, however, as being an object
of pure reason in its practical employment, that is, as a
corpus mysticum of the rational beings in it, as far as the
free will of each being is, under moral laws, in complete
systematic unity with itself and with the freedom of every
other.7
Kant strives to preserve for us a rational core, a moral world
whose objective reality is affirmed by the fact of the ought. An
ought requires an I beyond the empirical ego, an I not reducible
to the kingdom of nature, an I somehow connected to considerations of freedom. Kant tries to preserve rationality by relying on pure practical reason, and on its affiliated concept of a
world of rational beings, each of which acts at all times as if,
through his maxims, he were a legislator in the universal kingdom of ends. Reason, which requires universality, necessity,
and ends, must be at play in this moral world that is also intelligible. Comprehending such a world would be an exalted and
stirring project; but Kant’s articulation of the project at the end
of the Critique of Pure Reason—as was pointed out by Kant’s
critics—lacked both clarity and content. Let us turn now to the
work that tried to respond to such concerns, Kant’s second
Critique, The Critique of Practical Reason.
II. Kantian Moral Being
Here is how Kant introduces his Critique of Practical Reason:
The theoretical use of reason was concerned with the
objects of the cognitive faculty only, and a critique of it
with regard to this use really dealt only with the pure
cognitive faculty, since this raised the suspicion, which
was afterwards confirmed, that it might easily lose itself
beyond its boundaries, among unattainable objects or
even among contradictory concepts. It is quite different
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with the practical use of reason. In this, reason is
concerned with the determining grounds of the will,
which is a faculty either of producing objects corresponding to representations or of determining itself to
effect such objects (whether the physical power is
sufficient or not), that is, of determining its causality. For,
in that, reason can at least suffice to determine the will and
always has objective reality insofar as volition is at issue.
The first question here, then, is whether pure reason of
itself alone suffices to determine the will or whether it can
be a determining ground of the will only as empirically
conditioned. Now there enters here a concept of causality
justified by the Critique of Pure Reason although not
capable of being presented empirically, namely that of
freedom; and if we can discover grounds for proving that
this property does in fact belong to the human will (and so
to the will of all rational beings as well), then it will not
only be shown that pure reason can be practical but that it
alone, and not reason empirically limited, is unconditionally practical. Consequently, we shall not have to do a
critique of pure practical reason but only of practical
reason as such. For, pure reason, once it is shown to exist,
needs no critique. It is pure reason that itself contains the
standard of critical examination of every use of it. It is
therefore incumbent upon the Critique of Practical
Reason as such to prevent empirically conditioned reason
from presuming that it, alone and exclusively, furnished
the determining ground of the will. If it is proved that
there is pure reason, its use is alone immanent; and the
empirically conditioned use, which lays claim to absolute
rule, is on the contrary transcendent and expresses itself in
demands and commands that go quite beyond its sphere—
precisely the opposite from what could be said of pure
reason in its speculative use.8
A mouthful to be sure! Let us try and bring some clarity to this
passage. First, Kant refers to pure reason as a unified faculty
that can be talked about either in its speculative or practical
use. Next, pure reason is concerned with the questions of
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freedom, God, and immortality, as is made clear by Kant’s
insistence upon universality and necessity. Finally, pure reason
bears within itself the “standard of critical examination of
every use of it.” Pure reason does not look to a higher authority
for its standards, nor does it see its finiteness as marked and
determined by reference to an infinite, divine reason. The unity
of pure reason is preserved over the difference between its
speculative and practical use by promoting pure practical
reason to a place of primacy, while at the same time demoting
speculative reason to secondary status. This reversal of priority
is quite striking when compared to theological explorations of
the relation between human and divine reason. A look to
theology’s distinguishing of divine and human reason puts this
reversal of priority in an interesting light. For some theologians, human reason is intimately connected to divine reason,
because the former takes its standards and orientation from the
latter. Thus, as regards human reason, the primary faculty is
speculative and the supporting faculty is practical. In speculative reason man looks up to an order of higher ontological
status than himself—God and his created order—while
practical reason guides man’s actions within this order of ends.
God, however, cannot have speculative reason as primary,
since there is no order of higher ontological status for him to
look up to. If there were such a higher order, he would not be
the creator, but the divine craftsman. So for God it is his reason
in its practical aspect that is primary. He creates by his word—
Let there be light!—and then he beholds that it is good.
By reversing the primacy of the two faculties of reason,
Kant makes human reason resemble divine reason: pure
practical reason, or reason in its moral activity, comes first;
then speculative reason follows—creating, then beholding.
There is no ontologically higher order that is open to man’s
speculative view, and thus the traditional metaphysical claim
that actuality anchored in this higher ontological order is prior
to potentiality becomes suspect as well. This rejection of the
priority of actuality is part of what is at stake in Kant’s
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rejection of the ontological and cosmological arguments for
the existence of God. For Kant, possibility—a possibility not
tied to an already existing actuality, but a possibility tied to
freedom—will be central. Since there is no existing order of
the Good that is open to our view, and thus no way to measure
our actions by reference to such an order, this reorientation is
a significant break from traditional ethics with its concerns
about such things as the distribution of goods, and with its
grounding of obligation in the demand that we bring to
fulfillment our potentialities as human beings.
Let us now turn more directly to the passage quoted above.
Kant seems to assert that practical reason determines the
faculty of the will, but that the will can be determined in two
different ways: it can produce objects corresponding to representations, or it can bring about such objects. To understand the
first alternative, we must see how something can be a cause of
our actions. In the Preface to the Critique of Practical Reason,
Kant says, “Life is the faculty of a being to act in accordance
with the laws of the faculty of desire. The faculty of desire is a
being’s faculty to be by means of its representations the cause
of the reality of the objects of these representations.”9 In other
words, this faculty of desire requires representations of certain
objects, from the very concrete (such as desiring an ice cream
cone) to the more abstract (such as honor or shame). The
subject is affected by a certain representation of a desired state
of affairs, and then practical reason goes to work to determine
how to attain or bring about such a state of affairs. The content
of this representation and the attendant evoking of pleasure or
pain is determined by our experience. Kant claims that we do
not innately know what we desire and what will bring us
pleasure or pain; and furthermore, he claims that these will
vary from person to person. We find what it is that makes us
happy through experience. When practical reason determines
the will through representation, it is operating as empirical
practical reason. Under various descriptions it should be
familiar to all of us.
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When we strive toward a desired end—usually happiness—empirical practical reason is at work as the overall endin-itself that needs no reference to another end. Maxims and
rules of conduct formed in consideration of this end Kant calls
hypothetical imperatives: if you want this, then you must act in
this way. A way of life organized around such imperatives is a
prudential life. Kant indicates this dependency upon experience by the word empirical. This dependency on experience
motivates most of our actions, and that is why Kant sees those
actions as pathological—because they are determined heteronomously rather than autonomously.
Kant thinks that heteronomous determination is natural to
us, since he believes that we are inwardly determined in the
same way as the course of nature is determined. Our inmost,
authentic desires, which we believe both determine and
express who we really are, have been shaped by our education,
by our experience, and by our society—that is, from without.
Hence to be determined by these inclinations is not to be free,
but to be determined heteronomously. Kant regards everything
we think of as deeply, inwardly human—our desires, our social
roles, our insights, our feelings of love, care, and devotion—as
heteronomously determined, which is to say, conditioned from
a moral perspective, and radically pathological. Kant considers
all desire-driven action to be pathological because it arises in
us as a pathos, as a suffering of a determination that arises
outside of us. In this sense, therefore, pathological activity is
not contrasted with normal activity—since it is precisely
normal activity that is pathological—but with autonomous
activity, that is, with freedom and the formal determination by
one’s own will.
This other possibility of determining the will, in which we
are not determined heteronomously, is to have the will effect
the object by the exercise of the faculty of pure practical reason
that is not grounded in our experiences. This way of determining the will may be rather puzzling, but we can at least
understand that it would eliminate the mediation caused by
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representing to ourselves objects of experience that then activate the faculty of desire, thereby bypassing our dependence
on experience. To be subject to representation and desire is in
fact to be determined pathologically; moreover, to be motivated by concerns for happiness is to be determined heteronomously. Kant frames this option in the form of a question:
“The first question here, then, is whether pure reason of itself
alone suffices to determine the will or whether it can be a determining ground of the will only as empirically conditioned.”10
Kant claims that what is at stake here is freedom and the possibility of autonomy in the sense of self-determination. Our
freedom might well be at stake, but it is hard to accept the
claim that pure reason alone, pure practical reason, can be
sufficient in itself to determine the will. The common view,
which is easier to accept, was expressed by Hume in his
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals: “Reason being
cool and disengaged, is no motive to action, and directs only
the impulse received from appetite or inclination, by showing
us the means of attaining happiness or avoiding misery.”11
There are, of course, actions that we perform under the guidance of reason for which we have no immediate inclination—
for example, submitting to a painful and risky surgery, or dragging oneself out of bed early to work at a job one dislikes. But
the motivations for these actions are also tied to inclinations—
to the desire for health or the desire for food and shelter. In
other words, reason in its practical work can only direct inclination—that is, in Kantian terms, it can function only as conditioned or empirical practical reason.
Kant is aware of this limitation, of course, and so he asserts
that it is “incumbent upon the Critique of Practical Reason as
such to prevent empirically conditioned reason from presuming that it, alone and exclusively, furnishes the determining
ground of the will.”12 If we stand aside from our mode of
representation, if we leave aside our faculty of desire—which
is, after all, the defining faculty of life—we are certainly in an
uncanny place. Is it possible that there could be an ethics or a
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morality that is not the fulfillment of desire in some form, a
fulfillment guided by the representation of the way the world
is? Kant proposes that such an ethics or morality is possible,
and that it is made possible by the operation of pure practical
reason, a practical reason that is not dependent upon the representation of a desired object or state of affairs, not dependent
on ends that are given to it. This claim about a will that can
determine itself apart from representation sets the stage for the
prominence of will as a basic metaphysical category for many
thinkers following Kant.
Kant pushes us very hard here. In effect, he says that we
are less free than we believe. There is no internal sanctuary in
which we can discover our true selves, and if we respond to
divine commands or act on promises of an afterlife we are
being determined heteronomously. Morality for Kant will not
consist of a set of norms for bridling desire in order to keep our
conduct free of excess. In relation to the smooth, normal
course of events—now seen as pathological—morality is always an interruption, a going beyond the way the world is, a
going beyond even the pleasure principle. Kant, in fact, rejects
the distinction between higher and lower desires, between
higher and lower pleasures, a distinction based on whether the
desire originates in the intellect or in the senses. Such a
distinction lies at the center of much moral reasoning and
education, and is implicit in all appeals to moderation. The aim
of such a morality is to refine our desires by reflection and to
redirect them toward objects of higher ontological status, that
is, objects that are visible to the mind only. By lifting our eyes
to the intelligible heavens, as it were, we lift our desires as
well. A simple example: Pleasures of the senses have a limit—
sound, for example, can become so loud that it can destroy the
sense organ; pleasures of the mind, on the contrary, can be
unlimited—learning simply prepares the mind for more
learning. Kant flatly states that all desires are on the same
level; this is indicated, for instance, by the fact that we can and
do leave a poetry reading because we want to go running and
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vice versa. His contention is supported further by the fact that
there is no intelligible heaven open to our view, and by the fact
that we are determined in what we desire, we are fully conditioned beings. Because we are fully conditioned beings, we are
less free than we believe, and everything we take as proper to
our humanity stands on one side of the ledger, while only an
invisible marker stands on the other side, pointing toward an
empty dimension into which we can think ourselves, and in
which we can imagine that it is possible to determine our moral
being rationally, that is, universally and necessarily.
If, however, on the one hand we are less free than we believe, Kant nevertheless also indicates that we are freer than we
know. In his critique of practical reason, Kant often refers to
the experience of moral necessitation, the experience of the
ought—I ought to perform this action, I ought not to have done
this, this ought not to have happened—and he gives us an interpretation of this experience that indicates that we are freer than
we know:
Lest anyone suppose that he finds an inconsistency when
I now call freedom the condition of the moral law and
afterwards . . . maintain that the moral law is the condition
under which we can first become aware of freedom, I want
only to remark that whereas freedom is indeed the ratio
essendi of the moral law, the moral law is the ratio
cognoscendi of free-dom. For, had not the moral law
already been distinctly thought in our reason, we should
never consider ourselves justified in assuming such a
thing as freedom (even though it is not self-contradictory).
But were there no freedom, the moral law would not be
encountered at all in ourselves.13
The positing of freedom is bound up with the moral law as a
condition of its possibility, and this interpretation shores up the
experience of the ought, making it a necessary, rather than a
contingent, element in human cognition. In order, then, for the
moral law to be encountered as the moral law—and for Kant
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that means it must be encountered in its universal and necessary character—it is necessary to posit freedom. In this way,
we are freer than we can know, since the moral law necessarily
calls forth the postulate of freedom: even though freedom is
not a possible object of knowledge for us, we must postulate it.
This rational necessity of positing freedom is, for Kant, the
first tenet of a rational faith.
Of course it is critical for Kant that this positing of freedom
should not contradict the doctrine of freedom found in the
Critique of Pure Reason—namely, that freedom, though
incapable of being an object of experience, is thinkable and
conceivable as a transcendental connected with our noumenal
selves, as part of the intelligible world needed to resolve the
antinomies. This theoretical conceivability does not ground the
concept of freedom, does not give it objective reality, but it
does leave open the possibility of freedom. In the Groundwork
of The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant says:
The intelligible world signifies only a “something” that is
left over when I have excluded from the determining
grounds of my will everything belonging to the world of
sense, merely in order to limit the principle of motives
from the field of sensibility by circumscribing this field
and showing that it does not include everything within
itself but that there is still more beyond it; but of this
something more I have no further cognizance.14
The only cognizance of the freedom proper to our intelligible,
noumenal self, is an indirect one, a posited one. Only through
the experience of the moral law, as interpreted in a certain way,
can I become aware that I must be free.
Of course this experience of the ought, of the moral law as
universally and necessarily binding, can be interpreted otherwise. For example, following Freud, we could see the categorical imperative as an internalization of the strictures of our
parents and society, resulting in the formation of the superego;
or, following Freud’s contemporaries, we could see it as no-
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thing more than the consequence either of long-settled custom
or of the necessities dictated by prudence. Kant, however, is
strongly drawn to this interpretation of the moral law because
it solidifies many aspects of his thought. In the Preface to the
Critique of Practical Reason he says,
The union of causality as freedom with causality as
natural mechanism, the first of which is established by the
moral law, the second by the law of nature, and indeed in
one and the same subject, the human being, is impossible
without representing him with regard to the first as a being
in itself but with regard to the second as an appearance,
the former in pure, the latter in empirical consciousness.15
This positing of freedom fills out a possibility foreshadowed in
the Critique of Pure Reason, allows for some kind of unity of
the human being, and supports a view of reason that is not
unavoidably in contradiction with itself. Our noumenal self in
its freedom prescribes universal and necessary laws to our
empirical and conditioned self, which experiences itself as
necessitated by these prescriptions, not heteronomously, but
autonomously, as self-determining. The preservation of the
universal and necessary character of these prescriptions allows
Kant to see this experience as rational. Only in this way do we
gain some purchase on the intelligible world. We will take up
this rationality again at the end of this essay.
But why talk of this purchase on the intelligible world in
terms of a rational faith? We see a similar move on the part of
Maimonides in his recognition and resolution of a question that
I am going to frame as an antinomy: Is the world eternal or
does it have a beginning in time? Maimonides is concerned
about the claim that Aristotle has demonstrated the eternality
of the world. To hold onto the belief that God created and
governs the world in the face of such a demonstrated claim is,
for Maimonides, to be placed in an impossible situation.
Neither he nor Kant could tolerate the proposition that we must
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sacrifice reason for faith—that we should believe precisely
because it is absurd. Maimonides spends a great deal of time
showing that Aristotle did not claim to demonstrate that the
world is eternal; and, in fact, he tries to show that it is not
possible to demonstrate either that the world is eternal or that
it has a beginning in time.16 We do not have a coherent,
scientific account of our world to base such a demonstration on
because our best physics (an Aristotelian one) and our best
astronomy (a Ptolemaic one) are in contradiction. Thus, we are
at liberty to decide this issue on other terms. Aristotle can hold
a considered opinion that the world is eternal because it
concurs with and supports his other metaphysical concerns. Of
course, Maimonides is also at liberty to base his considered
opinion on considerations of compatibility with his traditional
faith. Kant goes a bit further than this compatibility, because he
sees the moral law as universal and necessary: he holds that in
determining the moral law we act as legislative members of a
kingdom of ends. The underpinning of such universal,
necessary, and teleological action must likewise have this rational character. Thus, for Kant, freedom is a tenet of a rational,
not a traditional, faith.
Let me now address the other two tenets of this rational
faith. As mentioned above, somehow the will, quite apart from
representation and desire, brings about an object. This object,
for Kant, is the highest good, in which happiness ought to be
distributed according to how much one deserves to be happy.
Kant tells the painful truth: that in this world, those who
deserve happiness often do not attain happiness—the wicked
do indeed often prosper, and the good often suffer. Virtue is not
its own reward; moreover, happiness does not constitute a
coherent system: the things that make us happy often work
against each other. In addition, it is not in our power to bring
about this highest good. We can act individually as if we are
legislating members of a Kingdom of ends, but to bring the
highest good into being requires that others act with us—thus,
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to do so is not in our power. God is posited as a necessary
condition for the possibility of such a highest Good, inasmuch
as He can somehow harmonize our actions with those of
others. Furthermore, the human will is not good, as we can see
through the experience of being morally determined: we must
struggle against our sensual nature as we strive to be virtuous.
Now although we can strive to perfect our will, it is an impossible task, which Kant must reframe as an infinite task in order
to make the completion of our striving at least conceivable.
The condition for the possibility of such an infinite task is the
immortality of the soul. Thus in order for the will to bring
about the highest good, and thereby to have a rational hope that
our actions are not completely futile, the rational postulates of
God and immorality are required. The postulate of freedom
grounds the moral law while the other two postulates, God and
immortality, transform our moral actions (namely, making the
world into what it ought to be and perfecting our will) into an
infinite task. It is important to see that these rational postulates
give us neither any knowledge of what God is in himself nor
any knowledge of what life after death may be like. All I know
is that it is necessary to assert these tenets in order to make it
conceivable that we can bring about the highest good as an
object of our will. In this way, our metaphysical desire is
addressed and met by a rational faith; and this is the only way
that these desires can be met, since Kant has demonstrated that
they cannot be met by striving for a speculative vision.
Let us now marshal further support for Kant’s assertion
that we are freer than we know. We have already seen that in
claiming to be the sole power that can determine the will,
empirical practical reason oversteps its boundaries and closes
off the uncanny space of freedom. This space is preserved by
pure practical reason. But is there other evidence of our
freedom?
Kant presents several examples that show situations in
which our freedom is made manifest. In the Critique of
Practical Reason, he rebuts the claim that we are impotent in
the face of our desires—that, for instance, those of us who lust
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are controlled by our lust. Kant responds that a lustful person
about to enter a brothel would soon learn to control his lust if
he encountered a gallows in front of the door together with an
official proclamation that anyone frequenting the establishment would be hanged. We can certainly conceive of controlling our lust under such a threat, but if we do exert control,
it is for the sake of self-love and self-preservation. Kant then
extends this rebuttal with a slightly different example: A prince
pressures someone to bear false witness against an innocent
man whom the prince wants eliminated. Kant claims not only
that everyone knows what ought to be done in such a situation,
but also that it is quite conceivable that someone in that
situation would refuse to bear false witness even despite the
threat of the gallows. The first example shows that we can
exert control over our desires if something serious, like our
life, is as stake; the second example shows that we can refuse
to perform an action even if our life is as stake. These
examples show that our relation to moral activity takes place
on two planes; in one we appear to be determined by the
situation, while in the other we appear to be free.17
A few pages later in the same book, Kant provides another
bit of evidence for our being freer than we know—what might
be called a phenomenological description of the difference in
self-critical response between losing at a game and cheating at
a game. He who loses a game (or, by extension, loses the game
of life by not becoming as successful or respected as he might
have desired), might be angry with himself or at his unskillful
play; but if he knows himself to have cheated at the game, he
must despise himself as soon as he compares his action with
the moral law. These two failures are different; the second
clearly lies in the moral realm and is connected to freedom.18
In this second response, we see again that there is a plane of
moral action that points to an independence from external
determination.
Finally, let us look at one last piece of evidence for our
freedom: the categorical imperative. Both our own inclinations
and sometimes the blandishments of others, including our
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friends and family, try to persuade us that we are a special case,
that a normally prescribed action is necessary just this once,
and that to take the action is really, in this situation, better for
all concerned. We may be told that this action is what God, or
our church, or our family, or our country demands of us if we
are to fulfill our responsibilities. These persuasions of sentiment, reason, and authority are effective because they touch on
our foremost moral weakness—the temptation to make a specific exemption for ourselves in a special case. The tendency
toward self-favoritism or particularism is a commonplace both
in philosophical systems of morality, where judgment of
actions typically must be made by an impartial spectator, and
in everyday legal practice, where we may not sit in judgment
in our own case. The Categorical Imperative is a rational procedure that makes this common and pervasive temptation
explicit, because it demands that actions be judged by universal and necessary laws: we must act so that the maxim of
our action can serve as a law for all rational beings—including,
quite pointedly, the law-determiner himself or herself.
Now it may seem that following commands, doing as one
is told, has the same form as Kantian duty. But this is problematic for several reasons. First and foremost is the sacrifice of
freedom in following a command that is not the product of
one’s own self-determination. In a bold move, Kant places
following commands together with following inclinations (two
functions that are kept strictly separate in most moral systems)
under the same heading, namely, being determined heteronomously. It is at this point that Kant introduces his famous
distinction distinguishing actions that are merely in conformity
with duty from actions that are in conformity with duty and
done for duty’s sake. Kant places actions that merely conform
with duty in the category of legality, which is, strictly speaking, an empty formalism, since it is independent of intentions
and motivations. Actions that are both in conformity with duty
and done for the sake of duty bring into play the pure practical
reason as well as a will that can determine itself, apart from
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desire and representation, by means of the universal form of
the categorical imperative. The pressing question here is: How
can a form, namely the form of universality, serve as a material
incentive?
Kant’s answer to this question takes us to a strange place.
In his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant asserts
that we are free to decide, after a certain age, which of our
inclinations we will we allow to influence us. He does not
mean that we cease to feel these inclinations; he is asserting,
rather, that in feeling them we are not necessitated to act. Or,
to put it more broadly: we can choose our character by deciding which of our inclinations to emphasize. It is in this freedom
of choice that we can decide to have the universal form be the
principle of the maxims by which we act. This decision
happens in the twinkling of an eye. Kant describes it in this
way:
[I]f a man is to become not merely legally, but morally, a
good man . . . this cannot be brought about through a
gradual reformation, so long as the basis of the maxims
remain impure, but must be effected through a revolution
in man’s disposition. . . . He can become a new man only
by a kind of rebirth, as it were a new creation.19
Strictly speaking, this does not constitute evidence of Kant’s
uncanny space of freedom. But he is not the only thinker to
claim that our freedom to decide what will influence us determines what character we will have. In the myth of Er near the
end of the Republic, Plato depicts our souls in a place outside
of time, having to choose a life, a character that they will fall
into.20 Kant suggests something similar: a place of freedom, a
place outside of time, in which we can actually exercise the
faculty of choice.
III. Conclusion
Kant’s step of setting our humanity aside, of asking us to be indifferent to our desires, has evoked passionate criticism. Some
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are upset by his refusal to allow our inclinations—especially
our positive inclinations such as care and sympathy—to serve
as a ground for obligation; others complain that he ignores the
consequences of our actions; yet others are genuinely puzzled
by what in the world (or out of it, for that matter) Kant could
possibly mean by designating humans as “finite rational
beings.” For the most part, these criticisms come from critics
of single-principle moralities such as Kant’s that place a
premium on conformance to duty and obligation; such moralities tend to denigrate concerns for life-fulfillment or happiness,
that is, questions about what is good to love or good to be, both
for ourselves and for others. The great benefit of Kant’s moral
system is that it can resolve complicated situations in which
there are competing goods, and cut short the angst of moral
remorse. But the critics of single-principle moralities ask, At
what cost do we purchase this benefit? And for them, the
answer seems unacceptably high: At the cost of our humanity.
All of these are understandable concerns, but behind most
of these criticisms is the fear that if we become indifferent to
our desires, to our humanity, we will lose what makes us most
truly who we are. This self is our personal self—not personal
in the Kantian sense of having standing in a court of law as a
bearer of rights, but personal in the sense of a personal touch
or personality. In creating the moral world by acting as if we
are members of a possible kingdom of ends (a creation ex
nihilo, since we are not guided by a pre-existing good nor tied
to our existing potentialities), we are acting impersonally. Kant
is asserting that at the very core of our being exists an impersonal space. It is this space that Kant seeks to preserve,
because he sees it as the guarantee for whatever dignity we
have. As he says in the Groundwork of The Metaphysics of
Morals:
There is a sublimity and dignity in the person who fulfills
all his duties. For there is indeed no sublimity in him
insofar as he is subject to the moral law, but there is
insofar as he is at the same time lawgiving with respect to
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it and only for that reason subordinated to it.21
Our dignity demands that happiness is not a blessing to be
bestowed on us by a higher power as a reward for obedience or
service; rather, it is a right belonging to reason, and it ought to
be distributed in proportion to the worthiness of being happy.
If we insist that a personal self lies at our core as the
foundation for our dignity, we abandon the possibility of being
a lawgiver in a possible kingdom of ends; in effect, we
abandon reason. If we replace Kant’s pure reason with a reason
that is socially and historically mediated, we relinquish the
possibility that reason can access the space of freedom. For
Kant, it is this lawgiving self, a universal, necessary, and enddetermining rational power, which is admittedly impersonal
and uncanny, that is at the center of our being. This rational
power, this pure practical reason, determines its own ends, and
therefore it should be respected as an end-in-itself—that is, as
a moral being. In Kant’s view, as expressed in the passage from
the Introduction of the Critique of Practical Reason quoted
earlier,22 pure practical reason allows us to attain a threefold
end that other moral systems cannot match: the requirements
of reason are satisfied by rational faith; the supremacy of our
faculty of pure reason (which defines who we are) is preserved
as practical; and our dignity remains intact—not as knowers of
eternal truth, but as autonomous moral beings.
NOTES
1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp
Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929), 29 (Bxxix-xxx).
2. Dante, Paradiso, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander
(New York: Anchor Books, 2007), 3.
3. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 482 (B592).
4. Ibid., 482 (B591).
5. Ibid., 629 (B823).
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6. Ibid., 29 (Bxxix-xxx).
7. Ibid., 637-38 (B836).
8. Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason” in Practical
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 148-49.
9. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, 144n.
10. Ibid., 148.
11. David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals,”
in Moral Philosophy, ed. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing, 2006), 274.
12. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, 148.
13. Ibid., 140.
14. Kant, “Groundwork of The Metaphysics of Morals,” in Practical
Philosophy, 107.
15. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, 141.
16. Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, Part II, Chapters XV-XIX.
17. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, 163.
18. Ibid., 170.
19. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans.
Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson, ed. John Silber (New York:
Harper and Row, 1960), 42-3.
20. Plato, Republic 614b-621d.
21. Kant, “Groundwork,” in Practical Philosophy, 88.
22. See above, pp. 00-00 and note 8.
REFLECTIONS
73
What Did You Learn?
Lise van Boxel
Congratulations on successfully completing the Master’s
Program in Liberal Arts.
Now that you have your M.A., it is a good time to reflect
upon what you have learned and the reasons why you began
the journey that led you to your degree. What knowledge have
you acquired at St. John’s College? Have you gained any
practical skills here? Your employers or potential clients, your
friends and your family will certainly ask such questions. What
will you say to them? What do you say to yourself?
Before turning to a consideration of possible answers to
such questions, consider briefly some of the presuppositions
that often underlie them. Frequently, the real meaning of
“What did you learn?” is, “In what way has this education contributed to your value as a worker or to your ability to earn a
living?”
These questions are not ridiculous. Unless you are lucky
enough to be independently wealthy or to have a patron, you
have to think about how to support yourself. On the other hand,
it is wrong-headed to think of education simply or primarily in
these terms, as if employability and income were the highest,
most important considerations for a human being.
Friedrich Nietzsche offers a vivid description of this
impoverished and narrow understanding of education—an
understanding that characterizes the modern era. In sum, he
argues that an education that looks solely or primarily to the
marketplace deforms the souls of its students because it is
Commencement Address to the Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, August 12,
2011. Lise van Boxel is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
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ignorant of, or denies, the proper fullness and activity of the
human soul:
[T]he present age is . . . supposed to be an age, not of whole,
mature and harmonious personalities, but of labour of the
greatest possible common utility. That means, however, that
men have to be adjusted to the purposes of the age so as to
be ready for employment as soon as possible: they must
labour in the factories of the general good before they are
mature, indeed so that they shall not become mature—for
this would be a luxury which would deprive the ‘labour
market’ of a great deal of its workforce. Some birds are
blinded so that they may sing more beautifully; I do not think
the men of today sing more beautifully than their grandfathers, but I know they have been blinded.1
Nietzsche grants that the emphasis on science, and more
specifically on science directed by the marketplace, will indeed
produce economic success, at least in the short term. However,
he adds that this kind of science is a desiccated version of the
comprehensive understanding that is the proper goal of science
or higher learning more generally—a goal that the modern
world has largely abandoned:
I regret the need to make use of the of the slave-owner and
the employer of labour to describe things that in themselves
ought to be thought of as free of utility and raised above the
necessities of life; but the words ‘factory’, ‘labour market’,
‘supply’, ‘making profitable’, and whatever auxiliary verbs
egoism now employs, come unbidden to the lips when one
wishes to describe the most recent generation of men of
learning. Sterling mediocrity grows even more mediocre,
science ever more profitable in the economic sense. . . .
Those who unwearyingly repeat the modern call to battle and
sacrifice—‘Division of labour! Fall in!’—must for once be
told in round and plain terms: if you want to push science
forward as quickly as possible you will succeed in destroying
it as quickly as possible; just as a hen perishes if it is
compelled to lay eggs too quickly.2
REFLECTIONS | VAN BOXEL
75
If Nietzsche’s account of the trend in modern education
aptly describes the kind of education you did not receive and
to which, I think, St. John’s is opposed, how might you describe what you did learn here?
While denouncing an overly narrow view of education,
Nietzsche alludes to the effect of a complete education: it
would create “whole, mature and harmonious personalities.”
Neither you nor I can honestly claim that you acquired a complete and harmonious soul as a result of several years of education at St. John’s. This is not to say that I reject the idea that the
truly authoritative education aims at, and can produce, a harmonious soul. Rather, I think this education is the ongoing
activity of a lifetime. Nonetheless, I do believe that the liberal
education you received here can contribute greatly to the
attainment of this goal. However, I will put aside these ideas
for the moment, and I will turn instead to a more modest articulation of what a liberal education is and what skills may be
acquired as a result of it.
To do so, I will replace Nietzsche’s high-flying, though
accurate, description of a complete education with Aristotle’s
sensible, though still ambitious, account of a liberal education.
In distinguishing a specialist from someone who, like you, has
been generally educated, he says:
With regard to every [kind of] contemplation and inquiry,
both lowlier and more esteemed alike, there appear to be two
ways of being skilled, one of which it is well to call the
science of the thing, and the other as it were a kind of educatedness. For it is characteristic of an educated man to be able
to hit the mark and judge appropriately what the speaker sets
forth finely and what he doesn’t. For something like this is in
fact what we suppose the generally educated man to be, and
that to be educated is to be capable of doing this very thing—
except that we believe that this one, the generally educated
man, is able to judge about virtually all things, though being
one man, but that the other one is able to judge [only] about
some limited nature.3
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I do not recommend launching yourself into this quotation
when asked what practical skills you acquired at St. John’s
College, though if you decide to do so, take a deep breath, and
deliver it with panache. You can, however, capture the essence
of what Aristotle says in your own words.
In my own words, I say that, as a result of your liberal
education, you are better able to judge when an argument or
account is adequate and when it is not. When it is inadequate,
you are more capable of seeing how it is deficient and what
would need to be addressed to alleviate this shortcoming. Such
judgment can be brought to bear on any argument, regardless
of the field. If the argument includes technical language, all
you need is the time to look up the definitions of these words
before you are able to proceed as you would with any other
account. At bottom, such an argument is no different from any
other.
To Aristotle’s description, I would add that, as a result of
your education, you are now better able to admit when you do
not know something, and to do so without embarrassment. Do
not underestimate the value of this intellectual honesty. It will
help you to continue to learn. In addition, it will be greatly
appreciated by other people, most of whom are anxious about
their own ignorance, but are afraid to admit that they do not
know. It can be a tremendous relief to encounter someone who
can say without shame that he does not know, but that he wants
to learn.
This training in judgment—in clear thinking—is an
essential part of a liberal education. And it can indeed help you
to advance your career. I advise you, therefore, to consider how
you can describe this skill to others so that you can represent it
with the full strength that it deserves and in a manner that is
readily apparent to others. If you do this, you will be well
equipped to respond to those who want to know how you can
apply what you learned to the workplace.
This account of your education, however, is neither
complete nor does it capture the most important element of
VAN BOXEL
77
education. Aristotle would say that, in order truly to judge well,
one must have a satisfactory understanding of the ultimate end
at which one aims. It is not enough to have an idea of the
proximate goal that one seeks to fulfill. One must have
adequate knowledge of whether and how this proximate goal
accords with the highest and most comprehensive goal at
which human beings can and should aim. Without a sufficient
account of this authoritative, supreme good—the Good—no
judgment is adequate, strictly speaking, and consequently one
cannot truly be said to know. Thus, any education can and must
be considered in terms of whether and how it can contribute to
the Good. Regarding questions about whether your education
here was practical, therefore, the real issue is not whether this
education will contribute to your employment opportunities,
but whether it contributes to your knowledge of the Good. And
the real question about your job is not whether your education
has made you suitable for it, but whether it can contribute to
your ability to lead a good life.
No, I will not let go of the highest account of education to
which Nietzsche alludes and which, I dare say, all great
thinkers share. Moreover, I expect that you empathize with me
in my refusal to forgo these highest goals.
While some of you came to St. John’s partly in order to
advance your career, I doubt that any of you came here
primarily for this reason. You came because you had
questions—questions that perhaps you could not quite articulate, even to yourself, but that you could not put aside. As you
made your way through the works of our Program, I suspect
many of you began to recognize your questions reflected back
to you in the Great Books: “What is justice?” “What is love or
friendship?” “What kind of beings are we, and what is our
place in this world?”
Many and perhaps all of these questions arise from a
common origin: the yearning to have a good life, combined
with the realization that you do not know clearly enough what
this is. I suspect, in other words, that the fundamental reason
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why you came here was because you thought this education
might help you to understand the Good.
Since our human life is limited, and since the clock is
already ticking on the time that we have, this question of the
Good is urgent. No one wants to realize at the end of his life
that he misused or wasted his time. And since none of us know
how much time we have, it is foolish for any of us to postpone
the question of the Good indefinitely.
Such talk of mortality and the Good sounds very serious.
Well, what did you expect? Has anything valuable that you
have read or discussed here been unserious? Thankfully,
seriousness does not have to be grave. You need only recall the
company you have kept as you have pursued your questions,
and you will feel, not weighted down, but elevated by the
astounding souls who have walked alongside you.
Here is Plato, on the same journey as you, speaking with a
voice as nuanced and relevant as it was some 2,400 years ago.
With a touch of mischief, he doubles himself, adopting the
voice of Socrates, who recollects taking this same path, just a
day earlier: “I went down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon, son of Ariston.”4
Another man introduces himself with the words: “Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the
Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment
that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war.”5
He hands you his book, which contains his thoughts about your
shared questions, saying as he does so: “I have written my
work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the
moment, but as a possession for all time.”6
Homer turns his blind eyes upon you and points to Achilles
and Odysseus, each of whom tackles the questions of the good
life and what it means to be a good human being. Shakespeare
speaks to you with a profundity that is surely expressed in
some of the most beautiful language ever heard. Nietzsche
reaffirms life with a cry from his electric soul: “We still feel it,
the whole need of the spirit and the whole tension of its bow.”7
REFLECTIONS | VAN BOXEL
79
These souls are among the best students and teachers ever
to have lived. Their greatness consists largely in the fact that
they investigated the most serious eternal questions with
unmatched comprehensiveness and depth. What have you
learned from them about the Good?
If you have learned anything, it is that, when speaking to
one who does not already know the answer, you cannot
respond meaningfully to this question in a single sentence or
two. You might say, for example, that they taught you that the
good life is the philosophic life or the life devoted to the
Divine, but then you would have to explain what philosophy or
the Divine is and what it would mean to dedicate your life to
such things.
While there are answers to these questions, each answer
leads to a new question—and this is not the occasion for a long
conversation. It is the occasion, however, to remind you that all
of these great students and teachers spent their lives engaged
with such questions. Inquiry is thereby shown to be central to,
if not the essence of, a good human life. Furthermore—and this
is worth emphasizing, since you are have now exited the
Master’s Program—these students were able to learn from virtually everything and everyone, if not directly, then indirectly.
Life after your M.A. may not be as leisurely as it was when you
were a student, but you can and will find opportunities to learn,
if only you come to embrace life itself as a learning opportunity.
I hope and expect that something of this way of life has
become a part of you and that, if you look around now at the
faces of your fellow students, you will see in their eyes something of the souls of those great human beings who are your
models.
Continue to be thoughtful. Be open-minded. Retain the
flexibility of soul that is necessary for continued learning. In
sum, keep the goal of a good life always before you. Use the
Good as your North Star to guide every significant action and
decision you make. Doing this will not guarantee that you
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always make the right decision, but it will mean that you will
have done the best that you could do, and that, whatever contingencies you may face, you will have led the best life that is
possible for you.
Let me conclude with one of Plato’s favorite valedictions:
“Have success in action, and do what is good.”8
NOTES
1. Friedrich Neitzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for
Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 97-98.
2. Ibid., 99.
3. Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, 639a2-15, trans. David Bolotin.
4. Plato, Republic, trans. Allen Bloom, 2nd ed., (New York: Basic
Books, 1991), 3.
5. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, in The Landmark
Thucydides, ed. Robert B.Strassler (New York: Free Press, 2008), 3.
6. Ibid., 16.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kauffmann
(New York: Vintage, 1989), 3.
8. Plato, Republic, 303 and 472.
POETRY | ZUCKERMAN
To the New Recruits
Elliott Zuckerman
From now on I’ll refer to you as waiters,
even those whose ears do not resemble
the picture in the magazine.
You will be issued the standard bill of fare
including a list of all the famous sauces
and all the substitutions we allow.
You’ll wear the studded cuff
the collar and the pied cravat
and those who can will wear the earrings
that fascinate the men who dine here,
whether they arrive by pre-arrangement
or enter dazed directly from the street.
I ask you not to fall in love.
When two of you collide, just smile,
stand up again and go about your business.
The moppers will come running.
Ignore the murmuring of the clients who
deplore the loss of sequence in the dance.
After a month or two you’ll get the steps
and grow to like the music.
Then we can film the service.
We’ll play it back at half the pace of life
And next we’ll show it speeded up.
The comic rondo will delight us all.
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REVIEWS
83
DELPHIC EXAMINATIONS
David Leibowitz, The Ironic Defense of
Socrates: Plato’s Apology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010.
204 pages, $80.
Book Review by David Bolotin
David Leibowitz’s book on Plato’s Apology of Socrates is in the
first place a thorough and penetrating interpretation of the dialogue. It also claims, however, and attempts to show, that the
Apology is the key to the entire Platonic corpus, and to this end it
includes thoughtful interpretations of various aspects of other
dialogues. Yet the book’s ultimate ambition goes much further
even than this. For its chief aim is to show, in Leibowitz’s words,
“that Plato’s Socrates is not just a colorful and quirky figure from
the distant past, but an unrivaled guide to the good life—the
thoughtful life—who is as relevant today as he was in ancient
Athens” (1).* Thus, Leibowitz combines his interpretations with
arguments for the truth of the Socratic positions that he has
brought to light. The book even includes arguments in Leibowitz’s own name that reply to objections a reader might make to
Socratic views. Now it is likely to be younger readers who are
most open to the question of whether Plato’s Socrates is an
unrivaled guide to the good life, and thus the book’s primary
audience is not other scholars but these younger readers. But
Leibowitz asks of his readers that they follow him in his
scholarly, and even more than scholarly, attention to the details of
Plato’s text (24-25). And his reason for doing so is indicated in his
book’s title. Socrates was ready and even wanted, on Leibowitz’s
* Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in The Ironic Defense of Socrates:
Plato’s Apology.
David Bolotin is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe.
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view, to be convicted at his trial and executed, out of a wish to
promote the cause of philosophy by becoming a martyr for it. But
this wish required him to explain to potential philosophers what
philosophy is while concealing from the other citizens—even as
he was courting death—those aspects of it that, as he thought,
could never become publicly acceptable (59-60, 154-160). And in
order to achieve all this in a single address, Socrates had to speak
ironically, a term that Leibowitz well explains to mean speaking
“in a ‘double’ fashion so as to be understood differently by
different listeners” (18). But this implies that Socrates’ deepest
thoughts could be revealed only in hints, whose intended meaning
could come to light only though careful attention to his words. We
who have the good fortune to be able to study these words as
Plato presented them must therefore pay great attention to subtle
details of Plato’s text. Leibowitz himself has surely done this, and
though his account of the philosophic life and his argument for its
being the good life are ultimately stated with great directness, he
develops them in stages, following Socrates’ own guidance,
through an almost line-by-line reading of the Apology.
It would be too large a task for me to comment on Leibowitz’s work in its entirety. So I shall limit myself instead to what
he himself presents as the core of his account, his interpretation
of Socrates’ story of the Delphic oracle. According to Leibowitz,
this story is a fiction, whose purpose is to call attention, as
inoffensively as possible, to the central theoretical crisis in
Socrates’ life. As we know from the Phaedo and from Aristophanes’ Clouds, Socrates in his youth was a student of natural
philosophy. But the Phaedo also teaches us that Socrates’ study of
nature led him to an impasse, since he realized that he could not
be certain of the causes, i.e., the necessary causes, why things
come into being, are as they are, and perish. Recognizing the
limits of his knowledge of nature, Socrates also came to recognize
that he could not even be certain that there is nature, which he
understood as a necessity that limits what a being or class of
beings can do or suffer. The implications of this awareness of
ignorance were made more acute by his recognition that many
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85
people at least implicitly deny that there is nature, since they
believe in gods with unlimited power to intervene in the world.
Moreover, at least some of these believers claim to have had
evidence of there being such gods from their own experience of
them. Thus, Socrates had to admit that, for all he knew, the study
of “nature” was a pseudo-science based on a false premise, and
also a turning away from the deepest human evidence of truth.
According to Leibowitz, it was this crisis resulting from Socrates’
youthful pursuit of natural philosophy that led him to the crossexaminations that he pretended to undertake at the instigation of
the Delphic oracle. In keeping with this suggestion, Leibowitz
presents these examinations primarily as attempts by Socrates to
learn that his interlocutors lacked the evidence of omnipotent
gods that they thought they possessed—or in other words, that
what they had thought of as evidence was illusory. For if he could
know this about his interlocutors, then even though he lacked
certainty that natural necessities are at the root of things, he could
at least know that he knew no one else with a firmer hypothesis
(63-69). Leibowitz also argues that there was a second reason for
Socrates’ “Delphic” examinations, even on the assumption that he
could successfully refute his interlocutors’ claims to superhuman
wisdom. For he says that Socrates came to doubt, even on the
assumption that there is no such wisdom, whether the life of
philosophy is the best or happiest life, and he interprets the crossexaminations as having the subordinate aim of confirming that it
is (72-73).
In discussing Leibowitz’s interpretation of Socrates’
“Delphic” activity, I will stress what I see as difficulties with his
account rather than its merits. This is not because I am blind to
these merits—which seem to me to be quite considerable—or that
I disagree with Leibowitz about what is primarily at stake in
Socrates’ examinations—which I do not. But since I believe that
he does not give an adequate account of this central aspect of
Socrates’ life, I feel compelled to say why.
Let me begin with the second of the two reasons that Leibowitz gives for Socrates’ Delphic examinations, since it is the one
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he focuses on first in his own elaboration. To repeat, Leibowitz
claims that Socrates had to examine the various classes of nonphilosophers in order “to confirm that the life of philosophy or
science, or to speak more cautiously, the life based on human
wisdom, is the best or happiest life if indeed there is no ‘superhuman wisdom’ to guide us” (72). And the first thing I would say
about this suggestion is that I can see little if any evidence for it
in Plato’s text. The only time that Socrates even mentions the
question of whether his life is preferable to those of his interlocutors, as distinct from the question of whether he is wiser than
they—though even here it is not simply distinct from it—is in the
context of his examination of the craftsmen. And the reason he
asks it seems to be that he had to grant to the craftsmen a superiority of sorts in wisdom, since they were wise in their crafts, even
though, like his other interlocutors, they turned out to suppose
falsely that they were wise with regard to the greatest things. For
that reason he asked himself whether he would prefer to be as he
was, neither wise in their wisdom nor ignorant in their ignorance,
or to be as they were; and he replied that it was better for him to
be as he was. But apart from this, Socrates’ account of his examinations deals only with the question of whether he was wiser than
his interlocutors. It is true, of course, that he will later claim that
his own way of life is “the greatest good” (or, perhaps more
precisely, “a very great good”) for a human being, and that “the
unexamined life is not livable for a human being” (Apology of
Socrates 38a1-7). But he never suggests that these conclusions
relied on any fruits of his examinations other than the knowledge
he gained of his interlocutors’ inferiority in wisdom.
Further difficulties with this suggestion of Leibowitz’s
emerge when we consider his discussion of it in more detail.
Leibowitz stresses, and rightly, that after coming to the conclusion that the first political man he examined was not wise,
Socrates “did not leave it at that. Instead, he tried to show him
both that he thought he was wise and that he was not. . . . In short,
Socrates exposed him as a fraud” (75). Not surprisingly, this
caused Socrates to be hated, both by the politician and by many
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87
of the bystanders, and Leibowitz asks what Socrates’ reason could
have been for “the seeming malice of his procedure. Why did he
rub the man’s nose in his foolishness” (75)? Dismissing what I
agree is the implausible suggestion that Socrates hoped to steer
the politician toward philosophy, Leibowitz proposes an answer
to his question in terms of Socrates’ eagerness to establish—even
assuming “that he is already confident that no superhuman
wisdom (divine guidance) exists”—that “philosophy is the best
way of life for any human being capable of living it” (77-78). And
he suggests that Socrates hoped to confirm this belief by prompting his interlocutors, once they saw that they lacked wisdom
about the noble and good, about which he questioned them, to
acknowledge that their lives appeared “fundamentally defective
or unsatisfying” (78). In other words, Socrates confirms that
philosophy is the best way of life by showing that everyone can
in principle be brought to agree with him that their alternative
ways of life are unsatisfying. Ultimately, then, there is no dispute,
since the philosopher is the only one whose belief in the goodness
of his life can be maintained in the face of scrutiny. According to
Leibowitz, Socrates’ interlocutor will come to feel dissatisfied
with his life because the beliefs that Socrates shows to be false or
inconsistent are central to his way of life. But how will Socrates’
interlocutor reveal his dissatisfaction with his life? Leibowitz
says that he will do so by “getting angry at Socrates. . . , blaming
him for his distress, perhaps even coming to hate him” (79). This
anger and hatred will reveal the pain he feels once he sees not
only that Socrates’ refutation is sound, but also that it destroys a
prop on which his satisfaction with life has depended. And
accordingly, “anger and possibly even hatred are part of the
confirmation that Socrates seeks, not unintended, or altogether
unintended, byproducts of his examinations. In many cases, they
may be the only confirmation available” (79).
But as I said, there are difficulties with this account. In the
first place, it assumes that Socrates is successful in showing his
interlocutors that they are unwise, or that their fundamental
beliefs are false. But Socrates says explicitly, in the only case
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where he describes at length this aspect of his examinations, that
his (first) interlocutor did not see this, but that in Socrates’ view
he continued to suppose that he was wise (Apology of Socrates
21d4-5). According to Leibowitz, however, this continuance of
his false belief, and therefore also his continuing sense of satisfaction with his life, was the result of “powerful defenses,” which
allow people to “bury this awareness [viz., that their lives are
unsatisfactory] by the next day or even the next minute” (79-80).
“But this changes nothing,” he continues. “For in their one
moment of clarity, they themselves have judged their lives to be
defective” (80). Socrates’ first interlocutor has revealed this judgment by his anger, or more precisely, “the disturbing insight that
leads to his anger is clouded by or in the anger itself,” so that
Socrates’ attempt to show him that he was not wise “both did and
did not succeed” and “its success was partial and unenduring”
(80-81). This is how Leibowitz can square his account with Socrates’ unambiguous statement that he thought he had not succeeded in his attempt to show this interlocutor that he was not
wise.
But in fact Leibowitz’s suggestion is unsupported by the text
of the Apology. On the basis of the dialogue, it makes more sense
to say that Socrates’ interlocutors, or at least those among them
who became angry at him, never stopped believing that they knew
what the noble and good (or virtue) was, even when their assertions about it were refuted. They may have recognized that they
were unable to give an adequate account of it in the face of
Socrates’ questions, but this meant only in their view that they
were unable to give adequate expression to what they knew (cf.
Meno 79e7-80b4; Laches 194a7-b4, 200b2-4). And so their anger
at Socrates must not have stemmed from the pain of becoming
aware of their ignorance, and thus dissatisfied with their lives, but
rather from the more common pain of being insulted (cf. Meno
94e3-95a3). Indeed, an additional difficulty with Leibowitz’s
suggestion is that an interlocutor’s anger could never reveal
clearly that its source was anything other than this more obvious
one. Leibowitz acknowledges the difficulty of interpreting an
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89
interlocutor’s anger, but he dismisses it on inadequate grounds,
with a mere assertion that in practice it “may not be very difficult”
to distinguish the anger that he says Socrates is looking for from
other kinds (79).1
But if Socrates’ attempt to make his (older) interlocutors
aware of their ignorance was not aimed at eliciting the kind of
anger and hatred that Leibowitz suggests it was, what was its
purpose? I am not certain of the ultimate answer to this question,
but the most plausible beginning point is that Socrates must have
wanted to confirm what he in fact discovered, that he would be
unable to show them their ignorance of virtue, or in other words
that their confusion about it was ineradicably deep-seated or that
they had a stake in holding on to this confusion. This discovery
must have been important enough to Socrates that he was willing
to incur the anger and hatred that he knew he would arouse in the
course of coming to it. But he was not looking for the anger itself.
Leibowitz has given a surprising amount of weight to what he
regards as Socrates’ attempt to discover through conversation that
his interlocutors, in addition to being his inferiors in wisdom,
lived less satisfying lives than his own. His Socrates does not
assume that his discovery of their lack of wisdom, or their
confusion about virtue, is sufficient to confirm the superiority of
his life to theirs. They themselves must be made to see, if only
partially and only for a moment, that their lives are unsatisfying.
Leibowitz argues for the significance of such a moment by
reminding his readers that we human beings want more than
illusory happiness, such as the “happiness” of a deceived cuckold,
but a contentment rooted in truth (82-84). But what if it turned out
that some human beings were satisfied with illusory happiness, or
that their contentment with their lives was not affected, even for
a moment, by the discovery that they were based on falsehood?
How could this imagined state of affairs have been of any concern
to a man like Socrates? Would it have made him doubt the superiority of his life to theirs? Hardly. And more generally, in order to
be convinced of the choiceworthiness of the philosophic life,
Socrates did not need to burst other people’s bubbles.
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Leibowitz’s belief that Socrates deliberately sought to
provoke anger and even hatred in his interlocutors has an unfortunate bearing, it seems to me, on the tone of his own writing. For
too often he expresses his unavoidably challenging views with
unnecessary and un-Socratic harshness, a harshness that could
well provoke anger and hatred, especially in older readers. I have
already cited his claim that Socrates exposed the first of his
examinees “as a fraud,” and that he rubbed his nose “in his
foolishness.” Along the same lines, he claims later in the book
that those refuted by Socrates’ youthful imitators—their fathers,
or at least men of their fathers’ generation—act “as if Socrates
were to blame for their own stupidity.” And he adds that when
they are asked how Socrates corrupts the youth, as they accuse
him of doing, they are “of course not about to reply, ‘by teaching
the young to expose men like me for the fools and frauds we
really are!’” (105). Such language on Leibowitz’s part seems to
me to show a failure to appreciate the respect—even intellectual
respect—that Socrates, like any sane man, would naturally feel
for at least some of those who turn out to be confused about the
questions he raises. Another example of Leibowitz’s harshness is
his suggestion that “ordinary decency” (which he here distinguishes from the “deeper and more solid decency” of the
philosopher) is “perhaps the chief enemy” of philosophy (109).
Or consider his claim that Socrates is confident, even before
conversing with his typical interlocutor, that “his moral beliefs are
always false. . . , in the first place because they are sure to
presume the existence of ‘high’ things. . . , yet Socrates knows
through his own reflection that highness in the relevant sense is
literally inconceivable” (96). A footnote makes clear that by
“highness in the relevant sense” Leibowitz means “intrinsic worth
or goodness” (97). And later in this footnote he adds, “Given the
unintelligibility of the notion [viz., of intrinsic worth or
goodness], it is a cause for wonder, then, that belief in high things
has such extraordinary vitality in people’s lives” (97). Now in
company with Kant, as well as most ordinary people, I disagree
with Leibowitz’s assertion that intrinsic worth or goodness is an
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unintelligible notion (whether or not it is as fundamental a
concern for us as Kant thinks it is). But even apart from this, why
does Leibowitz choose to assign the word “high”—even if
slightly qualified at first—to a notion that he rejects as unintelligible? Later in this footnote he admits, “[T]o deny that there are
high things is not, of course, to deny that there are admirable or
beautiful ones” (97). But this admission rings hollow in the wake
of his initial rejection of the very notion of highness. And readers
of what he calls ordinary decency, who are likely to be deeply
attached to the notion of highness, whether or not they understand
it adequately, are therefore also likely to feel anger and hatred
toward a way of life that is said to reject it out of hand. Under less
liberal conditions than those which prevail now in the West, such
feelings could lead to a renewal of the persecution of philosophy.
Even now, they are likely to stand in the way of Leibowitz’s
attempt to guide the most promising young people toward the
philosophic life (cf. 174). And I fear that Leibowitz’s apparent
indifference to these concerns—in practice, if not in principle (cf.
59-60)—is at least partly rooted in his view of Socrates as a man
who deliberately sought to provoke anger and hatred.
But let me turn now to the primary reason that Leibowitz
gives for Socrates’ Delphic examinations, namely, his concern to
meet the theoretical challenge to philosophy posed by those who
claim to have evidence of an omnipotent god or gods. For, to
repeat, this claim directly calls into question the presupposition of
philosophy that there are natural or necessary limits to all possible
change. Now it is not immediately apparent, to say the least, to
the reader of Plato that Socrates’ Delphic examinations had this
anti-theological motive. But Leibowitz’s excellent interpretation
of many large and small details of the Apology (and of other
dialogues) might well convince even a reader who, unlike me,
was not already persuaded of it that this view was sound.
However, Leibowitz’s account of the precise manner in which
Socrates’ refutations aim to meet this challenge to philosophy
seems to me to be problematic, both in itself and in terms of the
textual evidence that he claims for it. According to Leibowitz,
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Socrates thought that his Delphic conversations, which were
primarily about virtue, “are somehow the key to answering the
question of whether or not there are gods, and hence whether or
not philosophy in the full sense is possible” (71). More precisely,
I would say, and in keeping with the bulk of Leibowitz’s argument
(e.g., 67-68, 72), Socrates thought that they were somehow the
key to answering the question of whether or not human beings
have genuine evidence of there being gods. In Leibowitz’s view,
Socrates suspected that the belief that one has experienced the
presence of a god, a belief whose soundness—or, as I would say,
the alleged evidence for which—he could not dispute directly,
“rests on other false beliefs” (88), about virtue or morality, whose
falsity he thought he could show. Accordingly, his refutations are
intended to lead his pious interlocutors, once they have seen the
falsity of their own beliefs about virtue, to come to understand, if
only for a moment, that what they previously may have interpreted as experience of the supernatural was no such thing.
Leibowitz suggests that these interlocutors would perhaps reveal
their loss of faith in what they had taken to be their experience of
a god “by getting angry,” and he adds that “their reaction to what
he showed them must have been a crucial part of his confirmation
of the possibility of philosophy” (88, cf. 96).
I have the same doubts about this last suggestion as I do about
Leibowitz’s earlier suggestion that Socrates intended to provoke
in his interlocutors a momentary awareness of ignorance about
virtue and an angry response to it. But leaving this aside, let us see
how he supports his more fundamental claim—that according to
Socrates, belief that one has experienced the presence of a god
rests on one’s beliefs about virtue or morality. He leads up to this
suggestion through his account of Socrates’ examinations of the
poets, which he begins by quoting from Socrates’ own report of
these examinations. What Socrates says, in Leibowitz’s translation, is that he “soon came to know . . . that the poets do not
make what they make by wisdom, but by some sort of nature and
by divine inspiration, like the prophets and those who deliver
oracles. For they too say many noble things, but they know
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nothing of what they speak. And it was evident to me that the
poets also are affected in the same sort of way (22b8-c4)” (86).
According to Leibowitz, this passage means more than what it
says clearly, which is that the poets, like the prophets and those
who deliver oracles, do not speak as they do by wisdom or with
knowledge of what they are speaking about. Leibowitz thinks it
also means that these three classes are all “consciously or unconsciously . . . makers [not merely of poems and other verses, but]
of gods and of reports of seeming evidence of gods,” and that they
make these gods and these reports about gods by nature and not
by divine inspiration (87-88). Now I do not accept this interpretation of the text or the argument leading up to it, but rather than
going into tedious and I think unnecessary detail, let me say only
what seems to me most important: by presenting Socrates as
denying that his interlocutors were divinely inspired—though
Socrates explicitly asserts that they were, whether or not he meant
it literally (cf. Philebus 15e1)—Leibowitz weakens the focus of
Socrates’ concern, which was not to learn what cannot be learned,
namely, that there are no gods and no divine inspiration, but rather
to learn that the poets and the others do not possess knowledge of
what they speak about (which would of course include the gods).
But to continue with Leibowitz’s account, he goes on to ask,
“How has Socrates confirmed . . . that all three classes make what
they make by nature and not by wisdom or divine inspiration?
How has he to this extent settled the question of the gods? He
explains briefly with the words, ‘for (γάρ) they too’—the prophets
and those who deliver oracles as well as the poets—‘say many
noble things’—he does not say true things—of which they know
nothing. In other words, he implies that the belief that one has
been inspired by a god rests on other false beliefs about the
noble” (88). But these words of Socrates, which are presented by
Leibowitz as an answer to his question of how Socrates has
settled the question of the gods (to the extent at least of ruling out
that poets or prophets are divinely inspired), are clearly intended
rather by Socrates to explain why he has just likened the prophets
and those who deliver oracles to the poets. And from all that I can
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see, Socrates is not concerned here to settle the question of the
gods, except to the extent that his interlocutors’ claim to knowledge of them can be successfully challenged through the discovery that they say the many beautiful things they do—primarily, as
I agree, about virtue and about the noble, rather than the gods (cf.
Republic 598d7-e4, 599c6-e1, 600e5-6; Ion 531c2-d2)—without
knowledge of what they are speaking about.
But precisely how could the discovery of such ignorance on
the part of his interlocutors help Socrates make any progress at all
with respect to his question about the gods? Leibowitz addresses
this question directly in a section of his book entitled “Socrates’
Approach to the Theological Problem” (92). He contends that
Socrates tries to show his interlocutors, or at least those among
them who claim to have had “vivid and detailed experience of a
god,” that “the moral content of their experience—the divine
command, let us say—is incompatible with the moral perfection . . . that they demand, perhaps without knowing it, of god”
(93). “Consciously or unconsciously,” as Leibowitz elaborates a
bit later, “the believer raises the claim that god’s commandments
and actions are just, and this claim can be examined” (94). And,
returning to the original passage, “In the most successful cases the
interlocutors then come to doubt, at least for a time, that their
experience was genuinely divine” (93). This would of course
corroborate Socrates’ own suspicion. Leibowitz illustrates the
possibility of such conversations by referring to Socrates’
refutation of the definition of justice that he attributes to Cephalus
at the beginning of the Republic. In Leibowitz’s view, Cephalus’
belief that it is a requirement of justice always to return what one
has taken—to the extent, at least, that this really was his belief—
seems to have its origin, or to find support, in dreams in which a
Zeus-like figure commanded him to pay all his debts or be
tormented forever. On this view, and assuming that Cephalus
really held this belief about justice, Socrates would have hoped to
confirm that Cephalus would not respond to a reasonable critique
of this belief by objecting that a god’s commands must be obeyed
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whether or not they are just or seem just to our human reason, but
would instead come to doubt that his dreams were really divine.
This account, however, of Socrates’ approach to the
theological problem suffers in the first place from a lack of textual
evidence. Leibowitz’s premise that Socrates’ interlocutors
thought of morality or virtue as consisting in obedience to
divinely revealed commands seems to me to find no support,
except in the Euthyphro, where the virtue in question is piety (cf.
Leo Strauss, Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse, 134-35). The only
other instance I can think of where interlocutors in a Platonic
dialogue speak of virtue as obedience to divine commands, and
where their beliefs about what the gods have commanded are
transformed in the wake of a rational critique of their opinions
about virtue, is in the Laws. But in the Laws, the philosophic
character is not Socrates, but an Athenian stranger. And though
this stranger does indeed seem to be a kind of fictional “Socrates”
(who chose to flee Athens rather than accept death at the hands of
the city), his intention is not to provide a theoretical defense of the
possibility of philosophy, but rather to help frame a code of laws
for a newly founded city in Crete in which philosophy would, to
the extent possible, have legal sanction. Now it is true, as these
two instances suggest, that Leibowitz’s account does indeed
capture a genuine aspect of Socratic thought. But I see no
evidence that it gives an adequate picture of what Socrates hoped
to learn about the gods, or about our knowledge of them, from his
Delphic examinations.
Moreover, there is at least one substantive difficulty with
Leibowitz’s account, a difficulty that he raises himself, namely,
that it deals only with those interlocutors who believe that the
gods are just, and not with anyone who believes that they are
“unjust or unconcerned with justice” (95). Now for Leibowitz to
state the objection in this way is perhaps unfair to his own
argument, since he has just said that in Socrates’ view the believer
“consciously or unconsciously” (94) claims that god’s commandments and actions are just, and he has argued that Socrates
confirmed this view by seeing his interlocutors’ response to his
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refutations. But at all events, Leibowitz goes on to downplay the
significance of this objection by claiming, as he suspects that
Socrates discovered, that the belief in gods who are unjust or
unconcerned with justice is both rare and “almost never
supported—at least among believers who are even modestly
educated and sane—by the experience of revelation, that is, by
seeming evidence that natural philosophy cannot assess” (95).
Still, he acknowledges that “Socrates’ approach to the theological
problem cannot tie up every loose end,” and that “the possibility
of revelation from an amoral, willful, or radically mysterious god
cannot be ruled out” (95). But this last is a very serious admission.
For whatever may be the case about belief in gods who are unjust
or unconcerned with justice, the belief in a god who is radically
mysterious—in his actions, and even in his commands—has been
held by thoughtful people throughout the centuries (cf.
Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, III 25-26). For Socrates to
leave unchallenged, then, the alleged evidence of those who claim
to have had experience of such a god would be to fail to respond
to a most serious objection to the possibility of philosophy.2
But let me turn to Leibowitz’s most important reason for
focusing only on believers who believe in (intelligibly) just gods,
a reason that comes to light in what is also his most important
discussion of the confusion about morality that he thinks these
refutations disclose. Leibowitz claims that Socrates thought of
morality or virtue as something that people regard as the source
of happiness, not by constituting happiness itself, but by
promising it as a deserved reward. But since virtue itself, as the
argument continues, does not deliver this reward, it can have the
power that people think it has only if there are gods who do
deliver it. “Virtue, one can perhaps say, is a claim on the attention
and concern of just gods” (177). Leibowitz goes on to argue that
Socrates rejected the belief in just gods on several grounds, but
chiefly because the concern for virtue that it presupposes (and to
which it also gives support) rests, as he claims that Socrates
thought, on a confused and even contradictory view of our own
motivation. Leibowitz presents what he sees as this contradiction
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in the following way. He begins by observing that “virtue, seen in
the first place as noble, inspires devotion” (178). But then he says
that “devotion would seem to be harmful, if only because it
distracts us from the pursuit of our own good” (178). And since,
as he reminds us that Socrates claimed, no one voluntarily (or
knowingly) harms himself, he asks how voluntary devotion is
possible. His proposed answer to this question is that devotion to
virtue gives us hope that we will obtain—because we deserve to
obtain—a greater good than anything we might give up as a result
of such devotion. It is, then, as he says that Socrates suggests, “the
expectation, perhaps only half-conscious, of benefit to oneself
that makes devotion possible” (179). But this line of reasoning,
Leibowitz continues, which would seem to establish the possibility of voluntary devotion, “suggests instead the impossibility of
all devotion. For if benefit to oneself—as Socrates implies—is
our ultimate consideration, no true devotion is possible, for
devotion embraced as a benefit is not true devotion” (179). And
“if men are never truly devoted, they never meet the condition of
deserving rewards as they understand that condition” (179).
However, most of us never face up to this truth about our
motivation, and it is through this failure that we can preserve the
hopes that our attachment to virtue inspires. Accordingly,
Leibowitz concludes, our attachment to virtue, or at least the kind
of virtue that arouses hope in rewards from the gods, is rooted in
the contradictory thought that what we most care for is both the
noble and our own happiness.
This is a powerfully stated argument, as it seems to me, and I
am sympathetic to it, having even tentatively proposed something
similar to it in print myself. But Leibowitz proposes his argument
without tentativeness, and I must therefore say that in my view he
has failed to make his case. I will leave aside the difficulty that his
description of the believer as someone who thinks he deserves
divine rewards shows a surprising insensitivity to the fact that at
least the most thoughtful believers regard themselves as unworthy
to receive the blessings they hope for. For even apart from this,
the argument fails to show that the believer has contradictory
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thoughts about what he most cares for. A believer will readily
grant to Leibowitz that he cares very much about his own good or
his own happiness, which he hopes for both in this world and the
next. But he would deny that this is what he loves or cares for
most (cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II, qu.26, a.3).
He might fear that, because of his weakness, a loss of hope for his
own happiness could undermine his attachment to virtue, but he
would not believe that it would necessarily do so, and he might
even be thankful never to have experienced or yielded to such loss
of hope. And Leibowitz’s argument, it seems to me, has done
nothing to show that the believer’s view of himself is wrong. The
most he has done is to attribute to Socrates the claim that we care
mostly for our own good. But I don’t see his evidence even for
this assertion. What he apparently relies on is Socrates’ exhortation to virtue, “Not from money comes virtue, but from virtue
comes money and all of the other good things for human beings
(30a-b).” Leibowitz interprets this exhortation to mean that “men
should care above all for virtue, and for virtue for the sake of the
good things it brings. Men should and should not care above all
for virtue” (178). It is the latter of these conflicting claims that he
thinks Socrates means seriously. But Socrates’ statement that all
good things come from virtue does not say, as Leibowitz says it
does, that men should care for virtue for the sake of the good
things it brings, and surely not for the sake of these good things
above all. Socrates knew, of course, that the many among his
listeners might take him to be saying this. But that he made it easy
for them to do so means only that he understood them well
enough to know that he could not reach them with a higher
appeal. Leibowitz has therefore not shown that our own good is
our ultimate concern even according to Socrates. And so he has
also not shown, and not even shown that it was Socrates’ view,
that a believer’s hope for divine rewards rests on self-contradictory thoughts about what he cares for most.3 And this means,
finally, that he has neither undermined nor shown that Socrates
thought he had undermined the basis for this hope on the part of
the believer.
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It seems to me, then, that Leibowitz has not explained with
sufficient clarity what Socrates wished to accomplish through his
Delphic examinations or how he sought to accomplish it. In
particular, he has not explained adequately how Socrates hoped to
meet the challenge posed to philosophy or the study of nature by
those who claim to have evidence of miraculous gods. On the
other hand, he has outlined this challenge in an unusually
compelling way, and he has made a persuasive case that the
Apology presents the core of Socrates’ response to it. For this
merit, among many others, we should be grateful to Leibowitz for
his book. Even if he has not shown, as he intended to show, that
Socrates is an unrivaled guide to the good life, he has, I think,
shown that this is at least a serious possibility, and he will help his
best readers to keep considering the evidence for and against it on
their own.
NOTES
1. In a footnote, Leibowitz refers to Callicles’ anger in the Gorgias as a clear
case of what he calls the deeper kind of anger, but he offers no evidence that
Callicles ever becomes aware of his ignorance of virtue, as I believe he does
not. (Moreover, at the moment when he seems to come closest to that
awareness, at Gorgias 513c4-6, he is not angry at Socrates.)
2. I suspect that Leibowitz thinks that the possibility of revelation from a
radically mysterious god can indeed be ruled out, at least to some extent, on
the basis of what he speaks of as a necessary “second branch” of Socrates’
Delphic examinations, or the conversations he had with those “promising”
young people who could go “to the end of the road” with him in their
critique of our ordinary moral beliefs. Accordingly, when he says that
Socrates sought to determine “whether for them, as for himself, all traces of
seemingly divine experience eventually disappear,” I think he meant to
include in this even the apparent experience of a radically mysterious god
(98-100; cf. 134: “the so-called experience of the gods of the city, and
indeed of any gods”). But even if one admitted for the sake of argument that
this was Socrates’ intention and that he learned what he hoped to learn from
his most promising interlocutors, this would not be adequate to the question
at hand unless one could show the bearing of these conversations with
regard to his examinations of his more typical interlocutors. After all, a
radically mysterious god, and even a not so mysterious god, might be disin-
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TOLERATION
clined to reveal himself to people like Socrates. And I do not think that
Leibowitz has given an adequate account of the bearing of this “second
branch” of Socrates’ Delphic examinations.
3. There is perhaps the outline of a stronger argument for Leibowitz’s view
of our ultimate concern in his discussion of Glaucon on pages 96 and 97.
But even there I think he has failed to present an adequate case. In this
connection, I wonder about Leibowitz’s claim, in note 72 on page 99, that
Socrates would like to know “whether those who reconcile themselves to
unfathomable gods and inexpressible divine experiences could also, if
brought to see the truth about highness, reconcile themselves to the unintelligible nobility and goodness of the commands that these allegedly divine
experiences communicate.” For if Socrates knows, as Leibowitz claims he
knows, that “the noble and good,” or virtue, “does not exist” (180), because
it rests on contradictory thoughts about our motives, why would he care
whether others who appeared to understand his argument would accept its
conclusion? If they did not accept the conclusion, wouldn’t he assume that
they had not understood the argument?
Eva Brann, Homage to Americans
Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2010. 273
pages, $19.95.
Book Review by Janet Dougherty
Eva Brann’s Homage to Americans is an expression of heartfelt,
genuine, and ungrudging respect for the American people. As Ms.
Brann explains in the first essay of the book, “Mile-High Meditations,” true respect may involve—nay, it requires—thoughtful and
sometimes pointed criticism. In particular, she notes that toleration,
which has eclipsed and perhaps supplanted all other standards in
contemporary American society, is “helpless before reality” (7)* and
“culpably helpless in the face of evil” (3). Like Lincoln, Ms. Brann
displays a kind of “radical conservatism” in her writing: she reminds
us of our roots and thereby invites us to renew our awareness of our
convictions and our goals. She never preaches; she reflects. Beginning, as she says all reasoning must, in media res, Ms. Brann speaks
for herself and writes so as to invite her readers to engage in the
examination of our shared habits of thought. Homage to Americans
is the work of a master teacher who respects her students and therefore wishes them to think for themselves.
Homage to Amerians is divided into three parts: “Mile-High
Meditations,” “Close Readings,” and “Time-Spanning Speculations.”
“Mile-High Meditations” is a single essay in eight sections, named
according to the time and place of her reflections. In it we see Ms.
Brann’s mind at work, beginning with immediate responses to what
she sees around her and deepening into philosophical and practical
thinking of wide-ranging significance. The second part of the book
comprises close readings of Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance
*
Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in Homage to Americans.
Janet Dougherty is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe.
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and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The third part includes a lecture
given to the students of the Air Force Academy on “The Paradox of
Obedience,” together with a lecture given at St. John’s College on
the destruction of two great South American civilizations, the Aztec
and the Inca, by conquerors from Spain. The book is unified by Ms.
Brann’s persistent concern with the integrity of American culture,
and therefore with the prob-lem of reconciling the adherence to true
and defensible principles of human society with toleration of
otherness.
“Mile-High Meditations” is a fitting opening of the book, for in
it Ms. Brann puts into perspective the principle of toleration—which
means, in part, putting it into the context of the Western tradition.
Ms. Brann and the Americans to whom she speaks share this
tradition, albeit some of us half-heartedly and with little awareness.
Her writing moves seamlessly from contemporary American society
to Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Spinoza and Heidegger, Swift, Shakespeare, and Wallace Stevens. This is no display of erudition, but
rather of openness to the tradition wherever it can offer support for
genuine inquiry. Ms. Brann’s style of writing is egalitarian in its
openness to insight wherever it manifests itself, and therefore to the
tradition that shapes our society. In “Mile-High Meditations” she
invites her readers to reflect upon the appropriate limits to toleration,
and the invitation is unequivocally democratic. All may engage in the
inquiry she shares with her readers; all, that is, who are willing to risk
“respectful contempt,” the rightful punishment for those who fall
short of the standard to which we deserve to be held. This is democracy in the high sense. This is the democracy that we ought to count
as our heritage.
For a thoughtful citizen there are no insuperable barriers
between intellectual inquiry and everyday reflection. Americans can
seek depth of understanding wherever it is to be found and we ought
to begin wherever we find ourselves. Ms. Brann shows the way by
reflecting on an overweight couple playing chess in the Denver
airport. (Their tastes, happily, are not limited to fast-food pizza.) She
provides a model of judging cautiously without surrendering the
power to make judgments. Toleration, she shows us, cannot be held
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as a principle overriding all others without being intellectually flabby
as well as weak in the defense of right; but respect for others requires
openness to their sometimes surprising combinations of traits. With
no absolutes to rely on, Ms. Brann plunges into the morass of distinctions that alone help to untangle mere prejudice from thoughtful
conjecture. In this piece Ms. Brann exhibits an intellectual courage
and straightforward honesty worthy of emulation. She acknowledges
that she shares the “bias for the thinkable, the bias of our West” (63).
(Who, after all, lacks biases?) Her ability to examine the grounds of
her convictions and the convictions that characterize the West does
not fade but rather gains momentum as she identifies what may be
the bias of all biases: “The faith that some thoughts are true and their
opposites false is attended by this unease: It is not itself a truth,
meaning a mode of the intellect in which it is through and through
lucid and—or rather because it is—about something through and
through genuine. It is rather an opinion, even a prejudice” (27). The
prejudice that there are truths drives one to seek them. Ms. Brann
does not pretend to settle the difficulties she articulates and clarifies.
But she does work towards greater clarity and, ultimately, toward
answers.
The compelling question of this piece, as I see it, is whether our
biases serve us as human beings worthy of respect, and, in doing so,
serve humanity? Do they allow for the “personal practice of virtue”
(both intellectual and moral) that Ms. Brann, by her own admission,
prefers over general principles of morality (79)? While falsity is a
condition for thinking through to the truth (31), and a multiplicity of
perspectives can give us insight into another’s position, to acknowledge those perspectives is not to obliterate the sense that some things
are beyond the pale. Near the close of this essay Ms. Brann reflects
on the difference between intellectual and moral virtue (“a virtue in
thinking is, however, often a vice in doing” [82]), and announces the
importance of “doing right.” This conviction is easy to account for in
those who “care less about the livability of life than its consecration”
(8)—that is, those who acknowledge a firm religious faith. With
regard to faith in God, Ms. Brann is Socratic: she chooses “knowing
that I don’t know” (49). She begins and ends the essay, however,
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with a reference to the possibility of evil. Without assuming that evil
is always easy to recognize, one must acknowledge the problem of
evil while putting toleration into perspective. One brief reference to
Nazism is enough to prove the point: “What, for example, was the
attraction offered by the Nazis to the young but Romanticism writ
large and made official” (82)?
The key to toleration might be seen as “letting others alone,” but
in the face of evil it is clear that such thoughtless toleration is
shameful and irresponsible. In section IV of the essay, Ms. Brann
lays out several reasons for thoughtfully respecting, not merely tolerating, others. Throughout the essay she demonstrates what it means
to avoid forcing the truth into preconceived notions, by letting something be, but not letting it alone (12), and this distinction, it seems to
me, points to a standard for action as well as for thought. Like people
who espouse values in conflict with one’s own, the current trends
demand respectful examination; Ms. Brann demonstrates that they
are unworthy of slavish adherence. Toleration without respect is a
standard that is below the dignity of human beings. The contemporary emphasis on the dissimilarity of races, for example, on “dissimilation” rather than assimilation (59), is flawed in that it overemphasizes otherness. Particular humans combine their share in universal humanity with particular accidents and unique choices—here
Ms. Brann finds an opening into the perennial philosophical problem
of the relation of same and other. That problem is just beneath the
surface of the complex and delicate issue of how various ethnic,
racial, religious and otherwise differentiated groups relate to one
another in a society that derives its fundamental principles from
universal humanity and whose status depends upon the respectability
of these principles. American society cannot maintain its integrity
unless its members maintain a habit of thoughtful reflection. Ms.
Brann’s “Mile-High Meditations” provides us with a model.
In the next section of Homage to Americans, Ms. Brann goes on
to make available to the reader the kind of thinking and writing that
gave this nation its character. Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address are both models of
thoughtful eloquence; the first united Virginians, the second, Amer-
REVIEWS | DOUGHERTY
105
icans committed to the preservation of the union, to uphold convictions that provided the basis for liberty and mutual, respectful, toleration. Ms. Brann’s examinations of these two texts are models of
close and informed reading. Her analyses reveal to the reader the
greatness of these documents in a way that a casual reading—that is,
a reading uninformed by knowledge of the tradition in which
Madison and Lincoln were steeped—cannot. After a paragraph by
paragraph account, Ms. Brann, quoting from Hume’s “On
Eloquence,” sums up Madison’s work as “at once ‘argumentative
and rational,’ grandly passionate and carefully constructed” (123).
As for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Ms. Brann shows in a line-byline reading its beauty as poetry and its resonance with the Biblical
language by means of which Lincoln tried to persuade his audience
of the “bonds of affection” (181) that could alone preserve the union.
Both sections of this central part of the work deserve slow and
careful readings. The section on Madison’s Memorial showed me
that I had read this document only superficially. While I have read
and heard Lincoln’s Address many times and with great appreciation,
Ms. Brann’s account showed me that it too is a richer piece of writing
than I had ever imagined.
In his Memorial and Remonstrance, Madison argued against a
bill to support Christian education and in support of the toleration of
all religions because he was confident that without governmental
interference they would thrive. He was far from disparaging the role
of religion in supporting a healthy society. Ms. Brann asks, “What
would Madison have said in the face of an observable decline of
religious commitment and the increasing legal expulsion of religion
from communal life” (110)? She wonders whether the kind of
rhetoric he uses in the Memorial is an irrecoverable art. These are
pressing questions for us to consider, questions, it seems to me, that
were easier to address in a time when the hope that the United States
could provide a “practical political pattern to the world” (161) was
not considered narrowly self-serving, and when few if any would
claim that “truth is a private predilection and everything is ‘true for’
them that believe it” (116).
Not only did Lincoln and Madison not share this prejudice, but
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they did not feel obligated to respond to it. The depth of both
statesmen’s grounding in religion, far from being a hindrance to their
promotion of democracy, was at its heart. Lincoln looked forward to
a “new birth of freedom” in the aftermath of the Civil War, a new
birth that was possible only through the common respect for the
principles of the Declaration of Independence, and especially the
principle that “all men are created equal.” The principles of the
Declaration must be held, he thought, as sacred. Respectful
tolerance thrives on the support of such principles.
In the penultimate piece of Homage to Americans, a lecture
addressed to students of the U. S. Air Force Academy entitled “The
Paradox of Obedience,” Ms. Brann maintains her characteristic sense
of balance between opposing respectable views in the difficult
context of the use of armed force. She avers that an “unthinking
warrior is a fearful thing” (195), and argues that “submission can be
an act of freedom” (208). She broaches a question that is urgent for
those who defend this nation with force: how does one fulfill one’s
duty to obey one’s superiors while cultivating a thoughtful awareness
of the possibility that “personal, conscientious disobedience” (206)
may sometimes be morally necessary? Citing the Spartan obedience
to law rather than to an individual, Ms. Brann suggests the possibility
that freedom requires some sort of obedience. But blind obedience
cannot support freedom. It seems to me clear that the respectability
of a warrior must depend on the respectability of the nation he or she
serves, but it is equally clear after reading this lecture that the
nation’s general character is insufficient by itself.
The discussion of toleration that opens the book is complemented by the last piece in the book: “The Empires of the Sun and
the West”—and in particular by Ms. Brann’s account of the intolerance of human sacrifice that characterized Cortés and his men,
which contributed to their determination to conquer the Aztec
people. This is no whitewashing: the Spanish conquistadors were
guilty of unnecessary brutality, which Ms. Brann appropriately deplores (253). The motives of the Spanish conquerors were self-interested, but their prejudices, like ours, were integral to the Western
tradition that promotes respect for human dignity. Where then ought
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107
we to set the limits to toleration? This is no small problem. Ms.
Brann peremptorily dismisses the suspension of judgment as any
kind of solution: “A non-judgmental historian is an incarnate contradiction and produces only an armature of facts without the musculature that gives it human shape (222). In this respect she sides with
Cortés himself, who “dignifies his subjects with his condemnation”
of their practice of ritual human sacrifice (223).
The role of human sacrifice in the Aztec (or Nahuan) culture,
Ms. Brann argues, is the key to their defeat by the Spanish conquistadors. For the Aztec people thought they were compelled to sacrifice
human beings in order to render more reliable the annual and epochal
returns of the sun, their primary god. The nobles themselves may
have experienced a sense of doom, for they were “living over a moral
abyss” (241) created by the compulsion to kill their own kind. They
were betrayed by their trust in their gods (248-9). The Spanish, by
contrast, worshipped “a god mysterious but not capricious, [who]
made nature according to laws and left it largely alone” (257).
Although Ms. Brann describes the conquistadors as ruffians, she
attributes their victory over the Aztecs and the Incas to the Western
culture that shaped them, and she supports their disgust and horror at
a practice they could not see as justified or tolerable.
This account of the conquest of the Aztecs is well informed and
extensively researched. Ms. Brann describes a wide variety of
sources, including Cortés’ own letters to his king, and acknowledges
their biases. No set of citations can demonstratively establish the
truth of Ms. Brann’s account, but its plausibility is, to me at least,
manifest. The contest was by no means a conflict between good and
evil: it is worth repeating that there was plenty of wrongdoing on the
side of the Spanish conquerors. But their victory does seem to have
been a victory of the West (our “West”—an ambiguous but convenient term, as Ms. Brann acknowledges [217]), of a culture that
produces a kind of human being who knows “how to fight back,” and
“how to correct our aberrations by returns to sounder beginnings”
(229). The Aztecs were trapped by their culture; we, with all our
defects, may find renewal at the heart of ours. This is not a promise
but a task.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Ms. Brann has accomplished a great deal if she has helped her
readers to understand that task. I think she has done that and more.
To read Homage to Americans is to prepare to undertake the task of
renewing our culture.
�
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<em>The St. John's Review</em>
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<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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thestjohnsreview
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108 pages
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The St. John's Review, Fall 2011
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2011
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Pastille, William
Brann, Eva T. H.
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Arnaiz, Deziree
Sachs, Joe
Braithewaite, William
Howland, Jacob
Smith, Joseph
Boxel, Lise van
Bolotin, David
Dougherty, Janet
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Volume 53, Number 1 of the The St. John's Review. Published in Fall 2011.
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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text
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English
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ISSN 0277-4720
St_Johns_Review_Vol_53_No_1_Fall_2011
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St. John's Review
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