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The St. John’s Review
Volume XLVI, number three (2002)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
James Carey
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Justin Castle
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the
distribution list, subscriptions are $15.00 for three issues,
even though the magazine may sometimes appear semiannually rather than three times a year. Unsolicited essays, stories,
poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P Box 2800,
.O.
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at
$5.00 per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore.
©2002 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
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Contents
Essays and Lectures
Wholes and Parts in Human Character......................... 5
Joe Sachs
Addition and Subtraction Without End in Oresme’s
Quaestiones super Geometriam Euclidis...................... 29
George Anastaplo
In Memoriam: Leo Raditsa
Toast to the Senior Class, May 12, 2000.....................59
Leo Raditsa
The Collapse at Athens and the Trial of Socrates.........61
Leo Raditsa
Poem
Ovid, Banished..........................................................83
Leonard Cochran, O.P.
Review
Philosophy Revived
Stewart Umphrey’s Complexity and Analysis..............85
Eva Brann
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5
Wholes and Parts in
Human Character
Joe Sachs
Who are you? What are you? I’m not asking for your
name or occupation, but rather for what you’re made of, or
what you amount to. And I’m not intending to be impolite or
impertinent, but to include myself in the question, to turn the
attention of all of us upon the philosophic question that
touches us most closely. Thomas Aquinas is not hesitant about
answering it (Summa Theol. I-II, Q. 1, art.1, resp.): “Man differs from irrational animals in this, that he is master of his
actions. Wherefore those actions alone are properly called
human of which man is master. Now man is master of his
actions through his reason and will.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet
articulates the same thought in praising Horatio, and formulates the contrasting state (Act 3, scene 2, 64-75): “Since my
dear soul was mistress of her choice, /And could of men distinguish, her election / Hath sealed thee for herself...Give me
that man / That is not passion’s slave and I will wear him / In
my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart, / As I do thee.” So
you amount to either a master or a slave, depending on
whether reason or passion has the upper hand in your makeup.
But is this contrast well-founded? David Hume doesn’t
think so. “Nothing is more usual in philosophy, and even in
common life,” he writes,” than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and to
assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform themselves to its dictates.” But Hume argues that reason has no
Joe Sachs is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College. This lecture was delivered to the Seattle University Philosophy Club on May 17,
2002, and to the January Freshmen at St. John’s College in Annapolis on
June 5, 2002.
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power to oppose passion or produce action, and concludes
that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions” (A Treatise of Human Nature, Bk. 2, Part 3, sect. 3).
This deliberate paradox may be more palatable when we note
that Hume is only adding force and vivacity to an earlier formulation of Thomas Hobbes, who had written that “the
Thoughts are to the Desires, as Scouts and Spies, to range
abroad, and find the way to the things Desired” (Leviathan,
Part 1, Chap. 8). Hobbes and Hume agree that reason is
merely instrumental to our primary mode of access to our
own good, which can only be irrational.
Now the weakness of reason may be granted by those
who would not go along with demoting it to a subordinate
role in us. Immanuel Kant reflects that “if...happiness were
the real end of nature in the case of a being having reason and
will, then nature would have hit upon a very poor arrangement in having the reason of the creature carry out this purpose...And in fact, we find that the more a cultivated reason
devotes itself to the aim of enjoying life and happiness, the
further does man get away from true contentment”
(Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Hackett, p. 8;
Academy p. 395). Kant sides with reason, but as our guide to
becoming worthy of a happiness which can never be realized
in the empirical world. We are radically divided beings, in his
view, and can never have it both ways.
But an older sort of wisdom is articulated in Plato’s
Republic (esp. 439D-442B), according to which the human
soul is not a duality of reason and passion, but has three parts,
with the middle part giving it the possibility of wholeness. As
described in the Republic, this middle part is what is irrationally spirited in us, just as in a spirited horse, but capable
of obeying reason, so as to be able to follow its leader like a
dog. There is nothing spiritual in this sort of spirit, but there
is something that can have dignity, since it appears not only
in pep rallies that arouse school spirit, but also as what we call
the indomitable human spirit which can rise above any adver-
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sity. The republic, that is, the regime or constitution, that
Plato’s Republic is about is the internal human commonwealth in which reason rules and directs the passions by joining with, and giving honor to, our spirited side. Only that
third part of us is capable of loving the good and being loyal
to it, and the constitution to which it submits is not the
despotic one of mastery, but the political rule of persuasion.
About fifty years ago, C. S. Lewis wrote a book about
education called The Abolition of Man. His claim there is that
all the ancient human traditions have addressed in some form
the middle part of the human being, while the prevailing
thinking of the enlightened twentieth century has lost touch
with it altogether. If we fear all the attachments of our spiritedness as divisive or sentimental, as obstacles to progress,
then we may proclaim our rationality, while in fact we come
to be ruled by the lowest common denominators among our
appetites, if not by mere caprice. Those progressive educators
who fail to understand this may like to call themselves intellectuals, Lewis says (p. 35), but “It is not excess of thought
but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them
out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the
atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.” If
reason is universal and the passions are generic, then it is the
spirited, honor-loving element in our make-up that most of
all makes each of us what we are, and a disdain for it, with a
consequent neglect of its nurture, leads to the dis-education
that Lewis calls the abolition of man.
Now these provisional sketches of the ways reason and
passion may stand toward one another in us may serve as
background to an exploration of Aristotle’s thinking about
the same topic. When I came to spend an extended time in
close contact with the Nicomachean Ethics, I found a number
of things that surprised me. After many earlier readings of the
book, I would have said confidently that Aristotle believes the
healthy human soul to be under the command and control of
reason, and that something in us that is neither wholly ration-
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al nor wholly irrational makes that possible. As in so many
other ways, that is, I thought that Aristotle had followed a
path marked out by Plato, making it determinate in his own
way. Now I am not so sure of that interpretation. Some distinct and memorable passages in the Ethics seem to paint that
portrait of what a human being is, but others that are more
difficult, more entangled, and more central to Aristotle’s
inquiry seem to tell a different story. I hope to make both
accounts clearer to myself, and to invite all of you to take part
in assessing them, both as readings of a text and as reflections
of the subject we all have an interest in knowing best.
Now, anyone who has ever taken Plato’s Republic seriously, and hasn’t been frightened off by its lack of currently
popular jargon and currently prevalent opinions, knows that
the three-part soul offers a powerful way of analyzing human
life. Socrates is challenged in Book 2 to refute the claim that
ethical virtue provides a second-best life, a social compromise
made among ourselves by the weak, who play it safe to
achieve a mediocre and watered-down version of happiness.
This argument of Glaucon (358E-359B) is in no way inferior
to similar ones made two thousand years later by the social
contract theorists, beginning with Thomas Hobbes. But by
the end of Book 4, not even halfway through the dialogue,
Glaucon admits that his argument has been exposed as ridiculous, and needs no refutation (445A). What has made ethical
virtue go from seeming indefensible to seeming unassailable
as a thing desirable for its own sake is nothing more than the
hypothesis of the three-part soul. With that hypothesis, the
examination of the pursuit of happiness shifts from the
conflict among human beings to the conflicts within each one
of us. That permits Socrates to conclude that virtue consists
in “ruling and organizing oneself and becoming a friend to
oneself, and harmonizing those things, of which there are
three, just like the three notes of a musical chord” (443D).
But Aristotle is not comfortable with partitioning the soul
at all. In Book 3, Chapter 9 of On the Soul, he says one can
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distinguish as many parts of the soul as one wishes, and easily find parts farther apart than the three in the Republic; and
even those three, he says, cannot be wholly separated, since
desire is present in all three of them. In the Ethics he is willing to adopt the popular way of speaking of a rational and an
irrational part, but even there he cautions that these may be
no more distinct than are the convex and concave sides of the
same circle (1102a26-32). Aristotle’s own investigation of the
soul focuses on ways of being-at-work, and on the potencies
for them, rather than on parts, but the purposes of an inquiry
into ethics do not require that degree of precision.
Why, then, if the division of the soul in any manner is
merely imprecise or figurative, does Aristotle prefer to accept
a two-part rather than a three-part division? Or, what
amounts to the same question, why does spiritedness play so
small a role in the Nicomachean Ethics? It is an explicit topic
in two places, and briefly in both: in one of them it is treated
as an attitude that resembles courage but is not the genuine
virtue (1116b23-1117a9), and in the other it is described as a
particular kind of lack of restraint, an oversensitivity to
insults that is less harmful than a lack of restraint in one’s
desires (1149a24-b3). Desires are governed by pleasure and
pain, while spiritedness is governed by honor and shame.
Now over the course of the ten books of the Ethics, the topic
of pleasure re-emerges more than once; as the inquiry deepens, pleasure itself is seen in new lights, and transforms itself
through the growth of human character. By contrast, the
topic of shame is set aside early on (Bk. 4, Ch. 9), as something appropriate only to immature and undeveloped states
of character. This is one of the clearest signs that Aristotle
does not consider ethics to be concerned at all with social
pressures, or the imposition of social norms, but to depend
upon rising above motives of that sort. He calls it absurd to
credit an adult with decent motives if he refrains from certain
kinds of acts only out of shame (1128b26-28).
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Honor too, the positive opposite of shame, is left behind
early in Aristotle’s study of ethics, but it is dealt with a little
more extensively, and in fact we can observe the very moment
when it drops out of the developing account of human character. Very early, in the fifth chapter of the whole work,
Aristotle dismisses the honor that is the highest aim of political life as too superficial a thing to be a plausible candidate
for the ultimate human good (1095b22-30). Honor shifts
with those who give it; one really wants honor from those
worthy to give it, and only for things in oneself that are worthy of receiving it, so the true standards that make honor
worth pursuing are some sort of virtue or excellence, and the
wisdom to recognize it. A little later in the inquiry, though,
honor turns up again as entangled with one of the virtues,
and the account of that virtue repeats the dialectical motion
of Aristotle’s earlier analysis of honor, this time as a lived
development within a human being. That virtue is a complicated one to understand, just because of its complex relation
to honor. Aristotle calls it greatness of soul.
Our times, in which so many people have attempted to
deny the existence both of souls and of any form of greatness,
offer us no clear equivalent of Aristotle’s phrase. The old
Oxford translation called it pride, which might capture the
greatness of soul Homer portrays in Achilles; some translations have called it high-mindedness, which might capture, or
rather caricature, the greatness of soul Plato makes visible in
Socrates. The worst translation of the phrase, magnanimity,
simply plugs in Latin equivalents of each of its parts, and gets
a result that has a totally different meaning in English, in
which generosity is the primary element. Brother Robert
Smith once suggested Charles de Gaulle as the twentieth century’s pre-eminent great-souled man, and generosity was no
part of the reason. Outside the Ethics, Aristotle mentions
both Achilles and Socrates as great-souled, the former
because he tolerates no insults, the latter because he is above
caring about good or bad fortune (Posterior Analytics 97b14-
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26). These may seem too different to be one virtue, but
Aristotle sees what they share as a correct sense of one’s own
worth, when this is in fact great. It is not a mere feeling of
self-esteem, but something that has to be earned. But Achilles
appears to have earned it by deeds on the battlefield that subdued other people, while Socrates earned it through talking
and thinking that conquered nothing outside himself. The
former demands honor as a thing more precious than life,
while the latter disdains to claim any honor at all, and keeps
insisting that his only distinction is knowing that he doesn’t
know anything.
These examples are no more puzzling than Aristotle’s
account of the virtue. He says first that the great-souled man
is concerned with great things (1123a34), and then quickly
decides that those great things are great honors (1123 b2021), but it takes him only a little bit of argument to conclude
that for such a person, if he is genuinely worthy of what he
claims for himself, “even honor is a small thing” (1124a19).
Putting together the examples with the argument: (a) the
great-souled man is obviously a lover of honor like Achilles,
and (b) by being great-souled through and through, Achilles
must become a disdainer of honor like Socrates. The argument that runs from 1123b26 to 1124a19 is one of the pivotal passages of the Nicomachean Ethics, the place in which
honor stakes its maximum claim, and earns it by rising above
itself. Greatness of soul is puzzling to us not because it
belongs to an obsolete aristocratic culture but because it is
inconsistent in itself. Aristotle takes it seriously not by way of
stooping to an audience of Athenian gentlemen but because it
is something serious for any serious human being at any time
or place. It is one effective first stage toward the full development of human character. We might make this clearer by
considering two of the pre-philosophical thoughts about
virtue that form part of the background of Aristotle’s inquiry
into ethics.
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One of those common opinions is a widespread acceptance that four virtues are the cardinal ones, namely wisdom,
courage, temperance, and justice. In the Nicomachean Ethics,
Aristotle gives justice and wisdom each a book to itself, and
courage and temperance together about half a book. By this
crude test of length of discussion, greatness of soul gains the
fifth place, as either the fifth cardinal virtue, or the ambiguous virtue that almost, but not quite, belongs among the primary elements of human character. Another piece of popular
lore that Aristotle alludes to (1095b17-19) may help us
understand what gives greatness of soul both a high rank and
a secondary position; it is an old Pythagorean parable of the
three kinds of life. The parable likens the ways of life to the
three kinds of people who go to the Olympic games. The
greatest number go to buy and sell things; a smaller number
go to compete. The third group, and by this account the
smallest number, go simply to watch. Aristotle calls the corresponding lives those devoted to enjoyment, to politics, and
to contemplative thought. Their aims are bodily pleasure,
external honors, and knowing.
Now it is clear that these three lives stand behind the
Republic, in which Plato’s Socrates seeks to blend their three
aims into one soul, understood as an interior polity or commonwealth. But Aristotle’s approach seems different. Even
the bodily desires are treated in the Ethics as capable of being
educated and redirected, to gain a deeper satisfaction than
they find in their crudest form. This is not a matter of moderating them, of making compromises with them, or of reason’s holding them in check by means of its spirited ally;
according to Aristotle, the temperate person has no harmful
desires (1119a11-15; 1146a11-12). Similarly, I think, the
person whom Aristotle considers worthy to be called greatsouled has no craving for honor. He has, instead, internalized
his standard of worthiness. The brief argument I referred to
a moment ago, in which honor must abandon its claims, is
Aristotle’s way of showing the honor-loving person that his
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true satisfaction lies nowhere but in well-grounded selfrespect. I believe that Aristotle has here discovered what has
come to be called a sense of honor, a meaning that the Greek
word for honor never had. Aristotle does not dwell on this
discovery, but pushes it one more step, into the realization
that even an internal tribunal of honor is an inappropriate
standard by comparison with the virtues to which it looks.
One of the most interesting things about Aristotle’s treatment of greatness of soul is that it generates a new series of
lives that replaces the three in the Pythagorean parable. It is
the first place in the Ethics in which Aristotle finds the virtue
he is discussing to be a center around which all the virtues
must be arrayed. Greatness of soul is not so much one virtue
as one way toward the wholeness of character. Aristotle asks,
for each of the virtues one-by-one, whether it would not be
completely ridiculous for anyone who lacked it to have any
claim to greatness of soul (1123b33-34). To someone
wrapped up in the craving for honor, Aristotle asks, in effect,
“Do you just want to have it or do you want to deserve it?”
It is strange but true that anyone who really wants honor is
bound to say that he doesn’t just want honor, since any other
answer would lose him what honor he had. Imagine a politician saying, “Vote for me because I love winning elections.”
A serious person, who seriously craves honor, cannot help
concluding that honor is not the most serious thing.
Now I’m not suggesting that Aristotle thinks that all one
needs to do to transform someone consumed with a drive to
be honored is to ask him a couple of questions. As I mentioned before, the questions and their answers seem to reflect
a lived process of discovery and development. There is an
exact analogy in the life of enjoyment. When Aristotle has
made his first provisional definition of happiness as activity in
accordance with virtue (1098a16-17), he observes that this
has the properties sought by the life of enjoyment more fully
and genuinely than does the indulgence of bodily pleasures
(1099a7-21). The difference is that those who pursue the
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crudest enjoyments are always chasing after pleasure as a
thing external to themselves, while those who live the virtues
have pleasures that are internal and durable and always present. Aristotle calls the latter the pleasures that are natural,
because they are pleasant in themselves, just by being themselves. He later analyzes the cruder pleasures of eating, drinking, and sex as attempts to magnify the natural pleasure
inherent in good bodily condition by violent departures from
it and restorations of it (Bk. 7, Ch. 14). This sort of thing,
which bar owners encourage by offering free salty snacks to
make people drink more beer, can’t really fool any grownup
for long, and can only continue to appeal, as Aristotle says, to
those who have found no other sources of pleasure (1154b56). Such people are not worthy challengers to the title of happiness, entitled to the pretentious name of hedonists; they are
merely failures as pleasure seekers, failures by no standard
but their own.
The analogy in the case of greatness of soul is evident in
the contrast between chasing after externally bestowed honor
and settling into a life that is inherently honorable. It is not
such a stretch to say that Achilles can achieve his aim only by
becoming more like Socrates. The 19th-century philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil, §212) believed
that Socrates had pulled off a brilliant piece of one-upmanship, making himself appear superior to the aristocrats who
thought they had a monopoly on superiority. But in
Aristotle’s view this was no transformation of values, but a
natural dialectic that leads the honor seeker beyond the random honors that can be won to the life of natural and selfsustained honor that accompanies the virtues from within.
This explains why Aristotle leads the discussion of greatness
of soul to the need for a life that demands the whole of virtue.
The honor seeker goes in search of an isolated prize, and if he
perseveres, and keeps his eyes open, he finds instead a life.
The next prize or the next victory accomplishes nothing more
durable than would the next beer. As the latter might be the
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perpetually renewed object of the deluded pleasure seeker,
the former perpetually enslaves the competitive athlete or
politician who has not learned that he can honor himself.
So, finally, we can see why Aristotle doesn’t build good
character on the spirited part of the soul. Good character is
achieved only when spiritedness subsides, and is built not by
harnessing spriritedness but by overcoming it, in letting it find
its truer and deeper satisfaction. Greatness of soul is a way of
life not in the sense of being, for some people, the primary
aim to which all virtues are subordinated, but in the sense
that it finds its end in making those virtues themselves primary. Aristotle gives greatness of soul not a static portrait, but
a dynamic impulse toward its aim. But how does he do this?
The appeal he makes is, oddly, neither to reason nor to spiritedness. There would be nothing unreasonable, and certainly
nothing self-contradictory, about saying one wants honors
more than one wants to be worthy of them, and there must
be something deflating to an aroused spiritedness in accepting
a giving up of competition. Defeated politicians and retired
athletes talk as though being unable to keep winning things is
like death to them. What Aristotle is addressing is a whole
human being who is driven to achieve great honor; his question brings such a person face-to-face with his own judgment
of what makes one honor greater than another.
Greatness of soul is the first and lowest portrait in the
Nicomachean Ethics of a complete way of life that replaces
the untenable claims of the life of bodily enjoyment. It is not
the last or the only portrait of such a life. The craving for
honor is not a necessary precondition of the development of
good character, but only one human road that gets there in
the end, for anyone who is serious enough about achieving
satisfaction in life. Aristotle’s tactic in leading the honor-lover
to virtue is no different at bottom from his means of exploding the claims of bodily enjoyment, and it is evident in the
first sentence of Book 1: “It has been beautifully said that the
good is that at which all things aim.” His tactic is not a nego-
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tiation for turf among separate parts of a soul, each of which
wants its separate good, but a constant recurring to the question, asked of the whole human being, What end is being
sought in each good object? What makes one pleasure more
satisfying than another? What makes one honor greater than
another? Whatever in us responded to these visible goods by
pursuing them remains sovereign in judging them. The task is
to free it from enslavement to the familiar and habitual, and
to lift its gaze to the widest view of its possible choices.
Now if this conclusion sounds plausible to you, that’s
remarkable. It implies, first of all, that Aristotle believes that
the well-ordered human soul is ruled by desires and not by
reason, and second, that he regards habits not as the source
of good character but as obstructions to it. These are not standard readings of the Nicomachean Ethics, and that’s putting
it mildly. But we’ve arrived at them honestly and we’re stuck
with them; we have no honorable course other than to follow
where they lead us.
I mentioned some time ago that there are some passages
in which Aristotle seems to say that reason needs to rule us.
They begin very early, with his first conclusion that the minimal condition of a satisfying human life is to put to work that
in us which has reason and listens to reason (1098a3-5); and
they continue very late, into his final description of the happiest life, with assertions that the intellect is the best part of
us, is the part that naturally rules and leads us, and is even
what a human being is most of all (1177a13-15; 1178a6-7).
But in between these passages, one of the things Aristotle has
done is spell out what he means by intellect, and it is not a
synonym for reason. Moreover, in discussing a number of the
virtues, he has stated what power in us has the ultimate say in
judging what is right, and it is not reason. And most conclusively, although almost everything else he says in the Ethics is
dependent on the dialectical process of inquiry that leads to
it, he has along the way formulated unequivocally and cate-
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gorically what constitutes a human being as a source of
action, and again it is not reason.
The most straightforward way one might imagine that
reason should rule us is to think each of our actions should be
deduced from some principle. Aristotle does talk this way at
one point, but the only complete example he gives belongs to
a vice rather than to a virtue: one ought to taste every sweet
thing; this thing in front of me is sweet; and one more act of
gluttony takes place with apodeictic necessity (1147a29-31).
But one point that Aristotle makes here is that even though
the major premise is a universal proposition and the conclusion is an action, the minor premise is something particular,
and all such things are governed by sense-perception
(1147a26). In two places Aristotle says that there can be no
rules for right action (1113a31-33; 1137b29-32), and in two
other places he says that the judgment or decision that determines all matters of action is in the perceiving (1109b23;
1126b3-4).
But what sort of perceiving is this? My dog might have
better eyesight than I do without being able to see what’s best
to do in any situation. While the dog might associate past
experiences with present perceptions, the human power of
perception is infused with an intelligence and an imagination
that lets us grasp particular things as instances of universals.
Aristotle’s word for this (epagoge) is nearly always mistranslated as induction, which suggests imposing some general formulation on the thing in front of me, but he means something
more direct, by which I see the thing in the first place as a
thing and an example of a kind. The power in us that operates in and through our perceiving to behold the universal
directly is called nous, or intellect. The intellect thus supplies
the starting points of all universal reasoning (Bk. 6, Ch. 6),
which are at the opposite extreme from the particulars
(1142a23-27), but at the same time grasps those very particulars (1143a35-b5). Practical reasoning about action, like
universal reasoning about the way things are, cannot begin
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unless and until something in us that is not reason provides
starting points to reason about. In both cases this is the intellect, the power that beholds the ultimate invariable thinkable
things in contemplation but also the ultimate changeable particulars in perceiving. Jacob Klein once compared thinking to
walking: taking steps is like reasoning, but having something
to step off from is like intellect. Reason is ruled by intellect.
Now it might sound as though I’m quibbling. When you
hear the claim that reason is the proper guide and ruler of our
lives, you probably understand reason to mean the whole
power by which we dispassionately recognize what is evident,
whether directly or through any number of steps. The important thing is that we should be led by something that is impartial or, we may wish to say, objective. But that isn’t good
enough. What’s needed is to see things in relation to us and
our ends. Aristotle says that for knowledge to accomplish its
work well, it has to guide it by discerning the mean in relation to us (1106b5-9), which is a mean in the sense that it
does not overshoot or fall short of our natural ends. That’s
what there are no rules for. That’s what has to be perceived.
That’s the practical work of intellect.
One of the most persistent themes of the Nicomachean
Ethics is that achieving any aim in life depends upon seeing
straight, seeing things the way they are. But at least five times
(1099a22-24; 1113a25-33; 1166a12-13; 1170a14-16;
1176b24-26), Aristotle tells us that it is only someone of
good character who is capable of seeing straight. The way
most people see things, he says, is distorted by the false
appearance of things that promise pleasure (1113a33-b1),
and he notes that overly spirited people are too quick to perceive things as insulting when they aren’t (1149a25-34). It is
obvious that fear has the same effect, since he says the coward is afraid of everything (1116a2-3). In fact, one way to see
what Aristotle means by virtue of character is to imagine all
the ways we might be so mastered by some kind of feeling
that we have no capacity to see things for what they are. The
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virtues of character are the stable conditions that free us, not
from those feelings, but from being unable to make choices
about them. A courageous person can distinguish what is
worth being afraid of, and still has the option to act for an
end beyond it. A temperate person can eat, drink, and be
merry when he chooses to and not every time an opportunity for indulgence is present. A great-souled person can avenge
an insult when his good sense and courage lead him to, and
not as a reflex reaction. Some translators call these states of
character moral virtues, but that misses the point. They are
practical virtues; without them action is impossible.
Intellect is not stronger or sharper in a person of good
character, but only in such a person is it free to operate. This
is a negative sort of dependence. Good character clears away
the bad habits that obstruct the sight of the intellect. But there
is also a positive dependence. A person of good character is
not someone who is neutral about pleasant or frightening or
insulting things—thinking itself moves nothing, Aristotle says
(1139a35-36). Good character combines intellect that is
clear-sighted with desires and aversions that are good, in the
sense that they are rightly proportioned to the end of one’s
own happiness. Free choice of action depends not on objectivity or independence from our inclinations but on the presence and participation of all our desires. Aristotle says that
for a choice to be good, one’s desire must be right (1139a3031), but the rightness of desire is entirely analogous to the
clarity of intellect. Right desire is unobstructed desire.
Aristotle does not understand our desires to be a disorderly mob that needs to be ruled, but the natural components
of a life in which they all must have full scope to act. Once
we have taken responsibility for our own lives, we can develop what Aristotle calls active conditions of the soul, and it is
these active conditions that make up character. Formation of
an active condition (hexis) begins with isolated choices
(1103b14-23), such as refraining from a harmful pleasure or
enduring a frightening situation. Sticking by these choices
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requires effort, because they go against the grain of the masses of bad habits that have already become ingrained in all of
us before we have any power of choice. All deliberate and
positive habituation, from parental training, the laws of the
community, or the effort of self-discipline, is for the sake of
cancelling out the blind and passive earliest habituation that
no one intends, that comes just from the reflexive slackening
of the tension of uncomfortable feelings. The active condition
is fully formed when no more effort of self-restraint is needed. Knowing how we want to be in life and action is not
enough (1105b2-3), but being that way is still up to us
(1114b21-23). Each of the virtues of character is an active
condition in relation to some of our feelings and impulses;
Aristotle’s claim is that for each of these active conditions
there is an unimpeded way of being-at-work, and that happiness is the being-at-work of them all (1153b9-11). When
cleared, by habit, from the distortions of bad habits, our
habit-free desires constitute ourselves as we are by nature; if
these natural desires are thwarted our lives are stunted.
Aristotle’s picture of the healthy human soul is not a
three-part hierarchy but an equal partnership of everything in
us. The center of the Nicomachean Ethics, early in Bk. 6
(1139 b4-5), is Aristotle’s unequivocal definition of a human
being as the source of action in the act of choice, that can be
equally well described as intellect fused with desire or desire
fused with intellect (orektikos nous or orexis dianoetike).
Neither side can have the upper hand. The dictates of reason
as master are as misguided as the caprices or addictions of an
overmastering passion. Even a state of compromise, in which
our rational and irrational sides each give up a little of what
they want to get a little, misses the mark. What Aristotle is
talking about is a genuine whole, in which the parts are not
externally connected but internally infused with one another.
Thinking and deliberating must come to be present within
our desires, if they are to be directed toward their true ends,
rather than toward immediate delusions. But it is equally true
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that intellect would be useless if it were objective or neutral,
and it has to be led by desire to see things as ends, in relation
to ourselves. The formation of the component parts of character is not a process of reasoning, not a discipline of the passions, and not a combination of the two; it is a gradual and
mutual development of thinking and desire as enlightened by
one another, each led by its partnership with the other to its
own end.
Now if this non-hierarchical picture of the soul strikes
you as un-Aristotelian, your uneasiness is understandable and
deserves a response. Aristotle seems always to be talking
about rankings of things as higher and lower, and we saw earlier that he refers to the intellect as the best part of ourselves.
And in the Politics, he says that whatever is composed of a
number of things and becomes one has a ruling part and a
ruled part (1254a28-32), and he gives the very example we
are exploring; he says explicitly that intellect rules desire
(1254 b5-7). But he is careful to say that this is not the rule
of a master or a monarch, but political rule. He explains soon
afterward that by political rule he means rule over equals
(1255b20), and he later adds that political rule requires an
alternation or sharing of ruling and being ruled (1277b7-16).
This is a working-out of his understanding that the political
community is not merely an alliance for the sake of promoting exchange and preventing injury, but is a genuine whole.
All the more so, one might suppose, is the human soul not
just a bundle of capacities and desires, but a unity.
It is in Bk. 7, Ch. 17, of the Metaphysics that Aristotle distinguishes anything that is truly whole and truly one from a
mere heap (1041b11-12). His example of a genuine whole is
a syllable. To see what he means, take the first syllable of the
word metaphysics, and try to sound it out by parts. You will
hum, and then make an exclamation that might sound either
dismissive or interrogative, and then make an explosion of
breath. No matter how fast you make these noises in
sequence, they will not make the simple syllable met-. It is not
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a sum of parts but can only come into being as a whole. You
cannot pronounce it at all unless you make an m sound that
is already shaped by the following e, and sound the other letters similarly, not as isolated bits of noise but with the whole
syllable present in each of them. When you try to remove the
part from the whole it becomes something different; it is not
at all like plucking one marble off the heap. Something is
whole most of all, Aristotle says, when its constituent parts
are distinct only potentially (1023b32-34), and in the Politics
he gives the famous example that a human being removed
from political community is not human at all, but either a
beast or a god (1253a26-29).
It follows that dispassionate reason is not the human
thinking power at all, and unintelligent desires are not human
desires. Remember that Aristotle cautioned us, when we first
separated a rational and an irrational part of ourselves, that
we might be trying to separate the convex from the concave
side of the same curve. We saw earlier how the positing of
external honor as the greatest of goods led back into the soul,
and into Aristotle’s first depiction of the virtues of character
as composing one whole life. There are four more occasions
in the Ethics in which Aristotle leads some partiality in the
soul back to a wholeness of character. The second type of
person who needs to be so led is also focused outward, but on
the good of other people (1130a3-5). Aristotle does not have
a word of criticism for such a person, and even calls him the
best human being. He merely points out that his aim requires
the presence of all the virtues, and goes back to discussing
those virtues. But when the examination of all the virtues is
said and done, it is not this life that is called best, but an
entirely different one. Like the assertion that honor is the
greatest of external goods, that is made in Bk. 4 (1123b2021) and quietly replaced in Bk. 9 (1169b8-10), the claim that
the person devoted to doing justice to others is the best
human being is also refuted just by being unable to withstand
five books of further inquiry.
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23
I find it enormously instructive that Aristotle permits justice to stake the same claim to being the highest good that
honor does, and makes it fail. It is not in the long and detailed
discussion of justice as one particular virtue among many that
this occurs, but in a brief preface on justice as a way of life.
Aristotle mentions one celebrated ancient political leader
(Bias) in this connection, but a clearer example for us might
be a Roman, Cato the Younger. Plutarch says of him (Lives,
Modern Library, p. 920) that he was inspired and possessed
by a devotion to every virtue, but especially to that “steady
and inflexible justice that is not to be wrought upon by favor
or compassion.” He exemplifies the immersion in political
life that is governed not by honor but by duty. I mention this
only because it helps one see that Aristotle’s ethics of character has nothing to do with impersonal duty. Aristotle is constantly speaking of what one ought to do, but for him this
imperative always arises only from within, from the need to
fulfill and put to work all our own powers to achieve happiness. I noted earlier that the Aristotelian virues of character
are not moral virtues but practical virtues. I am suggesting
that morality is a misunderstanding of Aristotle’s characterbased ethics. Morality, in the sense of doing right by others,
follows from the practice of the virtues in the same way pleasure does, but doesn’t work as its end. Why should you not be
a thief? Because that is your duty to other people, or because
to be one would distort your own life and make you fail to
gain your own happiness? Or put it the other way around.
Would you rather have a neighbor who grimly and dutifully
refrains from your property even though he might covet it, or
one who has found a life in which your property is of no
interest to him?
The third life Aristotle describes is that of practical judgment (1144b30-1145a6). This is usually translated as prudence or practical wisdom. It is the virtue of intellect that is
a precondition of every virtue of character, but it in turn cannot come into being without the presence of all the virtues of
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character, which permit it to discern its ends. This mutual
dependence is the clearest evidence that the intellect is not
uppermost in practical life, but there are certainly people who
seek not to rule others nor to serve others, but to be the guiding intelligence behind political life. William O’Grady used to
say that whenever he read Machiavelli’s Prince, he always
wondered whether that book was more like housebuilding or
flute-playing; that question is Aristotle’s way of distinguishing
activities with external ends from those whose ends are in
themselves. Themistocles, an Athenian general described by
both Herodotus and Thucydides, was a great conniver who
seemed happiest when he had successfully manipulated everyone on every side of a conflict; he found political maneuvering an end in itself. But Aristotle says at the end of the Ethics
that there has been no one up to his time who had all the
requirements of the political art (1181b12-13). As with
honor and duty, his purpose seems to be to show those who
aim at superior practical know-how as their highest end that
the only role of the practical intellect in a successful life is a
more modest one, on an equal footing with all our desires.
Now the progressive overcoming of the claims of greatness of soul, justice, and practical judgment to be the pre-eminent virtue seems to exhaust all the motives for which one
might call the political life the highest life. Aristotle does not
collect them in this way, but he concludes in general that
political life is unleisured and always aims in part at a happiness that is beyond itself (1177b12-15). He contrasts it to a
contemplative life, which he argues at length is the best and
happiest human life (Bk. 10, Chs. 7-8). This produces the
greatest controversies among readers of the Ethics, since it
seems so odd that any philosopher would devote 98% of a
long and lovingly worked-out inquiry to an examination of
the practical life, only to turn his back on it at the culmination of the work. Without entering into any such controversy here, I think we are in a position to see the general lines of
a solution. There is no contemplative life for anyone who has
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not achieved a good character, not only because his desires
would get in his way if they were not set right, but also
because human nature itself is one of the unvarying things
that the contemplative intellect needs to understand; in that
odd way, even in its non-practical employment the intellect
needs a respect for and partnership with our irrational
desires, since they are among its teachers. A human being is
intellect and desire, inseparably intertwined.
But also, I have so far skipped the fourth of Aristotle’s five
depictions of the whole life of virtue. Between the three versions of political lives and the contemplative life there is an
ambiguous middle life. The life of friendship in the full sense
also appears to involve the practice of all the virtues of character (1157a18-19, 29-31). But Aristotle does not say that
friendship requires the prior presence of those virtues, but
that friendship itself, in its proper sense, is present to the
extent that the friends possess the virtues (1156b8-9;
1157a30-31). He seems to mean that the friendship deepens
as the characters of the friends do. As with greatness of soul,
the picture seems dynamic rather than static, but not because
friendship is an inadequate motive. Like contemplative wisdom, friendship seems to be a final and all-inclusive end for
the whole of life; and Aristotle says it would be absurd to
imagine the happiest life as one devoid of friends who are
loved for their own sake (1169b16-28; 1156b9-11).
Friendship directly supersedes greatness of soul, since
Aristotle concludes that it is not honor but friends that are the
greatest of external goods (1123b20-21; 1159a25-26;
1169b8-10). But it is also precisely friendship that supersedes
justice as the highest aim and bond of political life, since
Aristotle says that where there is justice there is still a need
for friendship, but where there is friendship, justice is not
necessary (1155a22-28). Even the life devoted to the exercise
of the practical intellect seems to find its highest fulfillment in
friendship, since Aristotle says that one can contemplate his
own active life best in the actions of his friends (1169b30-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
1170a4). Everything a human being seeks in political life is
found only in friendship.
The relation of friendship to the contemplative life might
seem to be that of second best to best, and Aristotle says just
that (1178a5-9), but this is not a case in which the lower is
left behind in the achievement of the higher. As we have
noted, the claims of friendship within happiness are themselves final and indispensable, and a contemplative human
being does not cease to be a human being. And in a certain
sense, friendship has a claim to be not only of equal rank with
the pure life of intellect, but even superior to it. Aristotle
argues near the end of Bk. 9 that the highest life, spent in the
being-at-work of our highest powers, is deficient if it is not
expanded through being shared with friends (1170b7-19).
The motion throughout the Nicomachean Ethics is toward
the greatest wholeness of the life of everything in us, and this
can be achieved neither by a friendless life of contemplation
nor by any practical life shared between friends that excludes
the enjoyment of knowing. Aristotle says early on that the
truth deserves higher honor than do one’s friends, but he
does not say that either of them ever cease to be loved for
their own sake (1096a16-17); in one of the most powerful
indications of the destination of the whole work, he speaks of
the truth and his friends together in the dual number, a
resource the ancient Greek language had for naming things
that are more than one but inseparable.
So should reason, or our whole thinking power, rule the
soul? Clearly Aristotle doesn’t think so. Thinking guides
desire, but desire guides intellect, and intellect guides thinking. Under the guidance of thinking, desire can find itself
directed beyond bodily pleasures and political honors to an
end in friendship. Under the guidance of desire, intellect can
see the best choices before it in all their particularity. And we
are, first and foremost, choosing beings—not rational animals, not political animals, though we are those things too.
Choice cannot be full and unimpeded if anything in us is held
SACHS
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back or held down or has not become fully aware of its
nature. Ultimately, for us, even contemplation is a choice, in
which the activity chosen and the whole desiring being that
chooses it are equally necessary and equally sovereign.
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29
Addition and Subtraction
without End in Oresme’s
Quaestiones super
Geometriam Euclidis
George Anastaplo
This essay is an explication of the first two questions of
Nicole Oresme’s Quaestiones super Geometriam Euclidis, a
work the Parisian master is thought to have composed
around 1350 in conjunction with his teaching in the Faculty
of Arts.1 In these questions, offered as commentary on
Campanus’s edition of the Elements of Euclid, Oresme presented a formal understanding of infinite diminution and
augmentation of magnitude that far exceeded what is to be
found in the writing of either Campanus or Euclid.2
In what follows, I first consider Oresme’s approach to
infinite diminution, its context and mechanics. I next examine his presentation of infinite augmentation and reconstruct
the understanding in which it was founded. As a conclusion,
I offer some reflections about the form of Oresme’s work and
speculate about the implication it might have for his notion
of mathematics.
*
Oresme began his Quaestiones in a peculiar way:
Concerning the book of Euclid it is first asked
about the dictum of Campanus in which he laid
down that magnitude decreases without limit.3 It
is sought first whether magnitude decreases without limit according to proportional parts.4
George Anastaplo is an architect practicing in Cambridge MA. The author
writes: “Research in Oresme’s mathematics was supported by the National
Science Foundation. Michael S. Mahoney read an earlier version of this essay.
I appreciate the insight of his comments.”
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
To a modern reader, this initial question is unexpected.
On the surface, it would seem more appropriate to begin a
work on the geometry of Euclid by addressing the geometer
himself instead of his commentator. In its context, however,
Oresme’s question makes a credible starting point.
The propositions of the first Book of Euclid’s Elements
are prefaced by definitions, postulates and common notions.
In Campanus’s edition the last common notion and the first
proposition are separated by the following editor’s note:
Moreover it must be recognized that beyond these
common conceptions of the mind, or common
opinions, Euclid has passed over many others
which are incomprehensible in number, of which
this is one:
If two equal quantities are compared to some
third of the same kind they will both be at the
same time alike greater than that third, or alike
less, or both equal to it.
Another is this. As much as some quantity is to
some other of the same kind, so much [can] some
third be to some fourth of the same kind.
This is universally true in continuous quantities.
Either the antecedents will be greater than the
consequents or less. For magnitude decreases without limit; in numbers this is not so. But if the first
is the submultiple of the second, there will be
some third alike the submultiple of some fourth,
since number increases without bound just as magnitude decreases without bound.5
Of his two additional common notions, Campanus was content simply to assert the veracity of only the first. The second
he sought to make credible. In a ratio, the antecedent term
ANASTAPLO
31
will be either greater than, equal to, or less than the consequent term. Campanus apparently thought that in the case of
equal antecedents and consequents, the existence of a fourth
term, bearing to some third term the relation determined by
an original pair, should be obvious. With regard to the cases
of unequal antecedents and consequents, however, he was
less sure. For these he introduced comparisons calculated to
quiet whatever doubts might arise. Thus, the possibility of
unlimited augmentation in number was called upon to persuade one of the existence of a fourth term when the consequent was superior to the antecedent, just as the possibility of
unlimited diminution in magnitude was offered as an aid to
the acceptance of its existence in the inverse case.
The possibility of unlimited augmentation in number is
clear to anyone with the ability to count. The possibility of
unlimited diminution in magnitude, in contrast, is less obvious. On first consideration, it is unclear how Campanus
might have envisaged a magnitude to decrease without limit
or what he intended to be removed from it to make it shrink
so small. Indeed, it is not immediately apparent that this kind
of decrease is possible at all.
Oresme’s first question finds its basis in this quandary. To
be sure, Oresme focused the doubt into a specific query worded in carefully chosen terms. Nevertheless, from the response
that is made to the question, the concern just sketched is
clearly the one Oresme intended to address.
In this and other examples of treatises written in the sic et
non style of the disputation, the author’s teaching is cast in
the form of a dialogue between a student and his master.
Typically, the student is assumed to possess both a ready
capacity for argument and the youthful courage to speak
authoritatively in words not fully understood about matters
only partly appreciated. Here both of the virtues of the student are manifest:
There are not an unlimited number of parts in a
continuous [magnitude], therefore neither is there
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
an unlimited number of parts of the same ratio.
The antecedent is obvious, since otherwise [the
magnitude] would be without limit. The consequent is obvious, since any proportional part is a
part of the same quantity as any other [proportional part of that magnitude], therefore the parts
of the same [magnitude] are of the same ratio and
of the same quantity. (1. 9-14)
Apparently unaware of what proportional parts are, but
certain of the impossibility of the limitless subtraction of one
finite quantity from another, the student confidently asserts
that a proportional part is a constitutive part, that is, a part
which, with an integral number of equal counterparts, makes
up the whole. Interpreting the words “ratio” and “proportional” as referring to the number of parts into which the
whole is divided and thus as denoting the size of each part
with respect to the whole (and not with respect to some other
part), the objector puts his conviction to work and argues that
since in the same whole parts in the same ratio are always
equal to one another, the question should be answered in the
negative.
Just as the student in this genre tends to have a prescribed
attitude and level of ability, the master has a predetermined
role as well. He is cast as the guardian of a comprehensive
understanding who is responsible for the introduction of his
charge into the aggregate possession of scholarship. Because
of his learning, the master’s arguments never have the singlemindedness of those the student is apt to make. Nor are they
the same in focus. Where the student, because he is a schoolboy, is concerned to make a judgment based on his immediate perception and assessment of things, the master, because
he is a pedagogue, aims at conveying an entire approach to
conceiving the matter on which the question touches and
then, only derivatively, turns to the question itself.
The reply the master makes here divides into three parts.
In the first he cites the authority of Campanus. Looked at in
ANASTAPLO
33
one way, all the master’s efforts are directed toward showing
why a man called “perspicacissimus” might have said “magnitude decreases without limit.” Thus, in the second part he
works to present the background considerations in terms of
which Campanus’s dictum must be seen and then demonstrates its truth. Having reconciled infinite diminution with
reason, the master finally returns to the student’s objection
and inspects it in terms of the understanding he has just established. In what follows, only the major features of the master’s exposition have been sketched. Discussion of corollary
conclusions, replies to objections and the like has been omitted in the interest of brevity.
Two groups of statements provide the background to the
demonstration of Campanus’s dictum. One enumerates
things “that must be noted,” the other those that “must be
supposed.” First among the former is that:
Parts are called proportional with respect to a continuous proportion; and that such a proportion is
a likeness of ratio, as is said in the commentary to
the ninth definition of the fifth [book] where it is
said that a [proportion] is held between at least
two ratios; and for this reason Euclid said that the
minimum number of terms in which [a proportion] is found is three and the maximum number
cannot be given, since it goes on without limit. (9.
20-26)
Only Definition nine of Book five is cited in this passage,
nothing else. What must be noted first is not the definition of
“proportional part,” “ratio” or “likeness of ratio,” but simply
the fact that proportional parts, whatever they might turn out
to be, have to be understood in terms of the relation which
binds them together with other parts of the same proportion.
Thus the note continues:
From this it follows that properly, one does not
speak of a proportional part, or of two propor-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tional parts, but there must be at least three [proportional parts] and there could be an infinite
number. (1. 26-28)
The error the student made was to confuse proportional
and constitutive parts. What this means is that he mistook the
kind of part which is known by the relation it bears to other
parts for one which is known by the relation it bears to the
whole. Once the character of the student’s error is recognized, the intent of the statement just presented is clear. Its
goal is to spur the replacement of one notion of part with
another, and it works to do so by focusing attention on what
is distinctive about this second kind of part.6
Since every constitutive part is an integral portion of the
whole of which it is a part, the presence of one implies the
presence of the others. For such parts division is singular, and
once it is accomplished for one it is, in effect, accomplished
for all. With the acceptance of the alternative notion of part
as proportional part, however, it becomes apparent that division will have to be conceived differently. Just how, the second and third notes lay down:
Second, it is answered that division according to
such proportional parts occurs in as many ways as
there are continuously proportional [parts] and
there are as many of these as there are ratios,
which are without limit….Third, it is said that a
line and any continuum can be divided up into
such parts. A line can be divided up in two ways
because it has two ends and such parts can start
from either one. A surface can be divided up in an
unlimited number of ways and the same [is true]
of a body. (2. 1-10)
Seated in some quantity as the result of division, proportional parts may establish the relation of any ratio. And how does
the seating division take place? It takes place successively;
part by part, it radiates outward from one extremity of the
ANASTAPLO
35
quantity to be divided toward the opposite one. Unlike the
immediate and total division that yields constitutive parts,
this division is a process, not an event.
Because of these things to be noted, the consideration of
the question has been shifted into the realm of continuously
proportional parts and successive division. The statements of
things to be supposed progress further into this realm and
posit peculiarities of its determination later used in the proof
of Campanus’s comment. Rather than work through each of
them in isolation, however, these statements will be viewed in
terms of their function in the demonstration.
This is the assertion to be proved:
The first conclusion is that, if some part is
removed from a quantity and from the remainder
the same part is removed and from the second
remainder the same part is again [removed] and so
on without limit, the quantity through this manner
of endless subtraction will be exactly consumed,
neither more nor less. (2. 23-26)
It is important to be clear about the situation just described.
Let a be the total quantity. In the first division, some part of
a is removed to leave b. In the second, the same part of b is
removed to yield c that was formerly removed from a to yield
b, and so on for d, e, and the rest. The results of such division
can be schematized in this way:
a = whole
b = first remainder = a – a (part removed)
c = second remainder = b – b (part removed)
d = third remainder = c – c (part removed)
(where “part removed” is conceived as a fractional
multiplier)
What is to be proved is that the excesses taken away at each
stage to leave the remainders will eventually exhaust the
quantity.
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36
The proof itself runs as follows:
The whole assumed at the start and the first
remainder and the second and the third and the
rest are continually proportional (as can be proved
by arguing from a transformed ratio). Therefore
there is in this case, some ratio and as much again
and so on without limit.
Thus it follows from the second supposition
that the ratio of the whole to the remainder
increases without limit since it is composed with
itself.
And one term, that is the whole, is imagined
not to change; therefore, according to the first
supposition, the remainder is diminished without
limit.
And therefore the whole of the quantity is precisely consumed. (2. 26-34)
In the divided magnitude the relation of the whole to the first
remainder is reiterated in the relations of each remainder to
the one that follows it. In terms of the quantities a, b, c, d and
so on, this conclusion can be written as:
a : b = b : c = c : d…
The second supposition asserts that:
If to any ratio another [equal to it] is added and
then another and so on without limit, that ratio
will be augmented without limit and this applies to
all quantities.7
(2. 17-19)
ANASTAPLO
37
In the divided magnitude, the ratio of the whole to each
remainder is the sum of the whole to the first remainder taken
as many times as division must be made to produce that
remainder. For example,
since a : b = b : c = c : d
(a : b) + (a : b) + (a : b) = a : d
a3 : b3 = a : d
(1)
(2)
The consideration of this kind of expression provides the
basis for the crucial inference in the demonstration of
Campanus’s dictum. In such expressions, a, the whole quantity, plays two roles: it is both the basis of the first term of one
ratio (ratio 1) and the first term simply of the other ratio
(ratio 2). Now the calculation of ratio 1 through a continued
addition of a ratio with itself is exactly the calculation which
provides the situation of the second supposition, and so what
is posited there can be inferred here, namely, that the series
of ratios a : b, a2 : b2, a3 : b3… displays a limitless augmentation of ratio. But, consider the role of the ratios of this series
in expressions like the one above. There they are used to
“measure” the quantity of ratios like ratio 2, which express
the relation of the whole magnitude to some remainder.
Because of this, it can now be inferred of the series of which
ratio 2 is a member, that the succession of ratios in it too displays limitless augmentation.
Let us stop at this point and take stock of the argument.
So far, a process of division has been established in a quantity and the tendency of ratios of the whole to a succession of
remainders has been described. Now it is left to describe the
tendency that the remainders themselves reveal as division is
continued indefinitely. And to do this, the first supposition is
employed. It is a bridge between considerations of relation
and those of quantity:
And if some ratio be augmented without limit, the
first term remaining unchanged, the second will be
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
diminished without limit. This is clear since the
ratio can be increased without limit in two ways,
either through the limitless augmentation of the
first term or the limitless diminution of the second
term. (2. 11-16)
Of the two cases, it is clear which obtains here. In the
series of ratios established through the division, the whole is
the unchanged first term and the succession of remainders are
the changing second term. The conclusion is obvious: the
remainders are diminished without limit. But the remainders
are called the remainders because they are left behind after
the excesses have been removed. And, if they are diminished
without limit as division is continued, it can only be that the
excesses, when taken without limit, exhaust the magnitude
being divided. Is it possible for the excesses to consume more
than the whole through such division? No. At each stage of
division only part of what remains is removed. Therefore the
statement is proved.8
The statement just proved differs subtly from what was
asked originally, and necessarily so. In the opening question
and in Campanus’s comment the remainders of division and
their progressive diminution stood at the focus of concern. In
this statement, however, concern has been redirected toward
the whole magnitude and its eventual consumption.
To show the tendency of a series of magnitudes requires
that the members of the series be successively compared with
an invariant quantity of the same kind. In the case of continued division, the single possible standard of comparison is the
magnitude assumed at the start of division, since it is the only
invariant quantity to which the remainders themselves might
be related by means of the defining proportion or any of its
modifications. When the remainders of division are considered in isolation, as they were in Campanus’s note and in the
original question, a proof of their tendency is not even to be
hoped for because the single standard against which they
might be measured has been excluded from view. The results
ANASTAPLO
39
of division had to be restated to include the continued presence of the whole magnitude before a proof could be
offered.9
In this shift of focus from continuous diminution to eventual exhaustion can be seen a shift in conceiving the process
of continued division. When continued division is viewed as
continuous diminution, the results of division make up a
series of magnitudes known only in relation to each other.
Viewed as eventual exhaustion, on the other hand, what
before was considered a process of constant subtraction ending in either an infinitesimal particle or none at all, can now
be seen as an extended effort of addition which produces a
known sum. The parts which before were simply thrown
away, the excesses, can now be seen to fill in the divided magnitude. Because the unending process has been placed within
a known context and because its tendency can be stated in
terms of an already established result, its inherent lack of definition has been tamed and it gains an intelligibility, albeit an
indirect one, it did not formerly possess.
*
If the Quaestiones is recognized as a dialogue between
master and student, it is only natural to expect ideas introduced in the first question to be explored further in the one
that follows. In the second question the counterpart to the
first is taken up.
As a consequence, it is asked whether an addition
can be made to a magnitude according to proportional parts [applied] without limit. (3. 33-34)
To one who has just learned the lesson of the previous question, the possibility of what is entertained here seems slight.
Thus the student maintains:
If [such an addition] could [be made] it would follow that a magnitude would be augmentable without limit….The consequence follows [from the
antecedent], for from the fact that addition hap-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
pens without limit, the magnitude will be augmented without limit, since it is added on to
through the addition. (4. 1-7)
Diminution without limit was conceived as the achievement
of a finite sum through an endless addition of excesses. But
that demonstration was only possible because the addition,
although endless, always took place within a predetermined
boundary and could be shown never to leave it. In this case,
however, because the parts are added first on to the extremity of the magnitude and then on to each other, they successively establish and reestablish the boundary of their sum.
And, since the parts are to be applied without limit, it seems
obvious that the magnitude will not have a fixed extremity.
In the first question the master responded to the student
by fabricating an alternate understanding of part and division. In this question, he responds by sketching the mechanics of endless addition as they might appear from an alternate
point of view:
It is argued the opposite way that whatever can be
removed from some magnitude can be added to
another. But subtraction from some magnitude can
take place according to [proportional] parts without limit, in this way therefore, it can be proved
that [a magnitude] is augmentable without limit.
(4. 8-11)
The student views the parts to be added only in relation to
one another and so is at a loss to infer the boundary they
might approach in sum. The master counters this perception
of addition with another. In some cases, the addition to one
magnitude by proportional parts can be seen in terms of the
exhaustion by proportional parts of some other magnitude.
By presenting addition in this way, the master suggests the
existence of a boundary that might be established independently of the process of addition and thus also suggests that the
ANASTAPLO
41
process itself might be seen as the eventual exhaustion of a
predetermined quantity.
The qualification in what was just said was “in some
cases.” The different cases of addition according to proportional parts are distinguished according to the ratio in which
addition is made:
For the sake of the question it must be noted first
what the ratio of equality is and it is [the ratio]
between equals. Another [kind of ratio] is the ratio
of greater inequality which is the ratio of the
greater to the lesser, such as four to two. Another
[kind] is of lesser inequality which is of the lesser
to the greater, such as two to four…And it follows
from this, that addition to a quantity can take
place in three ways. (4. 19-25)
When the addition is made without limit by parts applied in
a ratio of either equality or greater inequality, the resultant
“whole” will be unbounded, as is clear. When addition is
made with parts applied in a ratio of lesser inequality, the
claim is made that the “whole will never be unbounded.” The
reason offered to support this conclusion is simple, and
unfortunately, almost totally obscure:
This is because the whole will have a fixed and
definite ratio to the [magnitude] assumed at the
start, that is, to that [magnitude] to which addition
is made. (4. 30-31)
It is the task in what follows to reconstruct the understanding
that lies behind this statement.
The question’s “first conclusion” provides a point of
departure:
The first conclusion is that if a quantity of one
foot be assumed and addition be made to it without end according to the subduplicate ratio, so
that first one half of a foot is added to it, then a
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
fourth, then an eighth, and so on without limit,
doubling the subduplicate, the whole will be exactly twice the [magnitude] assumed at the start. This
is clear since if from some [magnitude] parts are
taken away according to this order, exactly double
of what is removed first will be removed ultimately
from the whole, as is clear from the first, that is,
the preceding question. Therefore the same argument applies if the parts are added [to a magnitude]. (5. 9-15)
In this example of continued addition can be seen the fulfillment of the master’s earlier suggestion. The parts added to
one magnitude are understood as parts subtracted from
another. It is as if the two magnitudes were butted up against
one another and the process of addition reclaimed the latter
magnitude into the whole. In this case, to determine the size
of the magnitude to be exhausted in the course of unlimited
addition is easily done. The fact that the subduplicate series
composed on a unit basis exhausts the unit was presented as
a corollary to the demonstration of the previous question.
What would be the result if addition were made according to the subtriplicate ratio? What magnitude could such
parts be considered to exhaust? To answer these questions it
is necessary to backtrack and to reconsider continued division.
When division is made according to proportional parts,
the excess at each stage of division is less than the previous
remainder by a factor of the ratio that governs how division
is made. For example, when two-thirds of a unit magnitude is
Chart 1
removed in division,
and then two-thirds of
the first remainder is
removed and so on, the
excess at each stage is
two-thirds of the previous remainder (see
ANASTAPLO
43
chart 1). Because of this, given any excess and the ratio of
division it is an easy thing to calculate the size of the previous
remainder.
A more complex relation exists between successive
excesses. Each excess falls short of the one that precedes it by
an amount equal to the preceding excess diminished by a factor of the governing ratio. Consider chart 1 again. There, the
second excess, 2/9, falls short of the first excess, 2/3, by 4/9,
and 4/9 is 2/3 taken 2/3 times.
When addition is made according to proportional parts in
a ratio of lesser inequality, the addend at each stage of addition is less than the previous addend by a factor of the ratio
that governs how addition is made. Thus, when addition is
made in the subtriplicate ratio, the second addend is onethird of the whole and each subsequent
Chart 2
addend is one-third of the one it follows (see chart 2).
The difference between successive
addends may also be expressed in
another way. It can be said that each
falls short of the one that precedes it by
an amount equal to the preceding
addend diminished by some ratio and that this ratio is the
same for every pair of consecutive addends in the series.
Consider chart 2 again. In the subtriplicate series, the second
addend, 1/3, falls short of the given magnitude by 2/3, an
amount which can be understood as that magnitude taken 2/3
times. Similarly, the third addend, 1/9, falls short of 1/3 by
2/3, which can be understood as 1/3 taken 2/3 times. And the
same is true for the rest.
Now the groundwork has been laid for the crucial insight.
From the descriptions above, it is clear that the addends in
one series bear to one another the same relation that the
excesses bear among themselves in another series. In these
examples, the addends of addition made in a subtriplicate
ratio successively fall short of each other to precisely the same
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
degree that each excess of division made in the two-thirds
ratio is deficient of the one it follows.
Because of this, the addends of a process of addition performed according to one ratio can be understood as the
excesses left behind by division performed according to
another. The whole these terms eventually exhaust can be calculated as the “remainder” of the stage previous to the
removal of the first “excess.” And, as should be evident, that
whole will also be the sum that the addends eventually
approach. Consider chart 3. There, the addends in the subtriplicate series are expressed as the excesses of division
according to a ratio of Chart 3
two-thirds. The first
excess is 1, the first
addend, and so the
previous remainder,
which must when
diminished in a ratio
of two-thirds yield 1, is
3/2. Therefore, since it
has
already
been
proved that the excesses of division according to proportional parts exhaust the divided whole, the sum of the subtriplicate series when taken without limit is three-halves the magnitude chosen to be the first addend.
The trace of this understanding can be seen in the first
conclusion, in the justification given for the quantity declared
the sum in the subduplicate series (p. 36). There, the crucial
turn of argument was provided by the observation of the relation between the first excess and the whole that the series of
excesses ultimately exhausts. The one was presented as calculable because the other was already known.
A more explicit manifestation of the same understanding
can be seen in the second conclusion:
The second conclusion is that if some quantity,
such as a foot be assumed, and then a third as
ANASTAPLO
45
much is added, and afterwards a third of the addition and so on without limit, the whole will be
exactly a foot and a half [long]. That is, it will be
in the ratio of the sesquialtern to the magnitude
assumed at the start. And with regard to this, the
following rule should be recognized, that we ought
to see by how much the second part falls short of
the first and the third of the second and so on with
respect to the others, and to call that [quantity] by
its denomination and the ratio of the aggregate
whole to the magnitude assumed [at the start] will
be as the ratio of the denominator to the numerator. For example, in the case proposed, the second
part which is one-third the first falls short of the
first by two-thirds, therefore the ratio of the whole
to the first part or to the [magnitude] assumed [at
the start] is three to two and this is the sesquialtern. (5. 16-26)
The use of “rules” to encapsulate a method of calculation or
a criterion for judgment is a commonplace in medieval academic texts. Unlike other rules presented by other authors,
this one is not derived in the text itself. But, because of what
has already been said about addition without end, the function of its procedures can be readily unpacked.
When seeking the sum of a series of proportional parts,
the student is instructed “to see by how much the second falls
short of the first and the third of the second…and to call that
quantity by its denomination.” The amount that each term
falls short of the one preceding it is to be isolated and
expressed in terms of the preceding one. In the example
given, that of the subtriplicate series, 1/3, the second addend
falls short of 1, the first, by 2/3 which is called “two thirds [of
the preceding term].” The third falls short of the second by
2/9 which is again “two-thirds” and so on.10
In this step, the student, in effect, deduces from the series
of addends what the governing ratio would be were the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
addends considered as excesses. The analogy between this
procedure and the one laid out above for the same purpose is
obvious. There, the governing ratio was discovered as the
fractional multiplier used to diminish the first of two consecutive addends to yield the amount by which the second fell
short of it. Here, the same ratio is discovered as the relation
of the amount of difference in the first terms, a method
which, though distinct from the former, is functionally equivalent to it.
Once this ratio has been distilled, it is put to use in the
calculation of the eventual sum of the series: “and the ratio of
the aggregate whole to the magnitude assumed [at the start]
will be as the ratio of the denominator to the numerator.”
The ratio denominating the difference between consecutive
addends is expressed as a fraction, inverted and taken in this
form as the ratio between the whole that is finally achieved
and the first addend.11
As was shown above, in any process of division, each
excess falls short of the previous remainder by a factor of the
governing ratio. Or, to state the same situation another way,
each excess is to the remainder previous to it as the numerator of the governing ratio is to its denominator. Thus, to calculate the aggregate sum of addends, which, on the analogy
of division, is the remainder previous to the first excess
(addend), requires that a quantity be found which will have
to the first addend the ratio of the denominator of the governing ratio to its numerator.
The exposition just completed was taken up to explicate
the following statement:
If, in turn, [addition] is made according to a ratio
of lesser inequality, [the whole] will never be
unbounded although the addition be made without
limit. This is because the whole will have a fixed
and definite ratio to the [magnitude] assumed at
the start, that is, to that [magnitude] to which the
addition is made. (4. 28-30)
ANASTAPLO
47
The meaning of this passage should now be clear. In every
series of addends built up according to a ratio of lesser
inequality, each term is some part of the term which precedes
it. Because of this, every series of such addends (and only the
addends of such series) can be interpreted as a series of
excesses and the ratio governing the corresponding division
can be deduced. Inverted, this newly discovered governing
ratio becomes transformed into the “fixed and definite ratio”
between some magnitude and the first addend. And the route
to proving that this magnitude is the eventual sum of the
addends is readily indicated by the shift in perception which
allows the successive augmentation of the original magnitude
to be considered as the eventual exhaustion of this new one.
*
The questions of treatises written in the sic et non style of
the disputation each present a lesson in which a student is
taught by a master. In these lessons, the master is responsible
for the education of his student and strives to introduce him
into the orthodox understanding of the discipline being studied. In part, orthodoxy is a mode of perception. An aspect of
what it means to be educated in a tradition is to have adopted the established outlook on the world and to appreciate
why it is to be preferred above any other. Orthodoxy is also
a mode of communication. It is expected of educated people
that they be able to speak with precision and accuracy, in
terms acceptable to other educated people, about the matter
at hand.
In the first two questions of the Quaestiones, Oresme has
presented the master’s effort to inculcate the orthodoxy of
the infinite in his student. Within this orthodoxy, infinite
processes are never seen in isolation but are always viewed in
terms of a preestablished whole. The vocabulary in which the
orthodoxy is couched is the language of proportion. Ratio
and the relation of ratios form the means of describing the
processes posited and of demonstrating their eventual results.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Within philosophy, ethics, and theology, understanding
makes up a whole and until it has been fully grasped, each
aspect of it remains provisional. In the case of the student’s
appreciation of the infinite, this characteristic is clearly visible. As a beginner in mathematics, the student has only the
crudest grasp of ratio and proportion, the means the master
employs for denomination and proof. As a consequence, he
must accept the basis of the proof of the first question in the
form of a supposition and the teaching of the second question
as a rule. The student’s knowledge is contingent and will continue to be so until the sophistication of his understanding
matches that of his master’s.
Oresme’s willingness to present a mathematical subject in
a treatise written sic et non, his willingness to explore a mathematical subject dialectically rather than deductively, gives
some insight into his notion of mathematical understanding.
To Oresme, mathematical understanding seems to have been
of the same kind as the understanding of the traditional disciplines of disputation. It was not a special sort of knowing to
be differentiated from all others.
Notes
1
Nicole Oresme, Quaestiones super Geometriam Euclidis, edited
by H. L. L. Busard (Leiden, 1961), p. x. See also A. Maier, An der
Grenze von Scholastik und Naturwissenschaft (Rome, 1952), pp.
270, 345. Busard’s text has been reviewed and extensively emended by J. E. Murdoch in Scripta Mathematica 27:1 (1964), pp. 6791. An emended version of the Busard text of questions 10-15
appears with translation, notes and introduction as Appendix 1 of
M. Clagett, Nicole Oresme and the Medieval Geometry of Qualities
and Motions (Madison, 1969), pp. 521-575. My translation of the
questions under study appears as an appendix.
2
Two editions of Campanus’s redaction of the Elements have been
used in preparation of this essay. They are E. Ratdolt’s Praeclissimus
liber elementorum Euclidis (Venice, 1482), hereafter called Ratdolt;
and J. Lefevre’s Euclidis megarensis geometricorum elementorum
ANASTAPLO
49
libri XV. Campani Galli transalpini in eosdem commentariorum libri
XV, etc. (Paris, 1516), hereafter called Lefevre.
Previous study of this portion of the Quaestiones is confined to
Murdoch, pp. 68-70 and Clagett, pp. 130-31; 508-10. Clagett also
considered infinite progressions and their sums in other works of
Oresme and his contemporaries, see pp. 495-508. An old chestnut
on this latter subject, cited by greater scholars than I, is H.
Wieleitner’s “Zur Geschichte der unendlichen Reihen in
christlichen Mittelalten,” Bibliotheca Mathematica, 3 Folge, 14
(1913-14): 150-68. See esp., 150-54.
3
The Latin adjective infinitus is the composition of in + finio and
so has a primary sense, when used with respect to quantity, of
“boundless” or “immense.” The English cognate “infinite” possesses positive overtones as descriptive of a quality that is something in
its own right; in it the privative has lost much of its immediate connotative impact. Because of this, every attempt has been made to
avoid its use as the translation of its Latin ancestor. Only in those
cases in which avoidance would have made a complete farce of the
fluency of translation (almost all of these being uses of the adverbial
form) has “infinite” been deemed acceptable.
4
Busard, p. 1, lines 5-8. All subsequent textual references are by
page and line numbers and are included in the body of the essay. The
word proportio has been translated “ratio,” while the word proportionalitas has been translated as “proportion.” As is clear, proportionale has been translated as “proportional.”
5
Ratdolt, 2v. See also Lefevre, 4r.
6
Note that the Euclidean definitions of part and ratio (Elements,
Book 5, Definitions 1 and 3) do not focus on this aspect. Because of
this, they were passed over in preference for Definition 9.
7
Because this is a supposition, the effort has not been made to substantiate it. Nevertheless, it is credible. On the assumption that a is
greater than b, the ratio a : b added to itself results in a greater
ratio, a2 : b2. And with continued addition of the same ratio, it continues to increase. Thus a : b taken three times is a3 : b3, four times
a4 : b4, and so on. The same ratio added to itself without limit would
seem, in this way, to produce a ratio inassignably large.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
8
For those who might have found the foregoing demonstration
unsettling, the following derivation of an equivalent statement is
offered as a tranquilizer.
For any geometric series a + ab + ab2 + … + abn-1 = Sn, Sn = a
( (1-bn) / (1-b) ) as can be confirmed by division. If with respect to a
unit magnitude a is the first part removed, the “first excess,” and b the
first portion left behind, “the first remainder,” then the sum of the
excesses will be a ( ( 1-bn) / (1-b) ) where n + 1 is the number of divisions made. Since |b| < 1, lim bn = 0 and the sum of the excesses
n→
°
°
after division has been continued without bound will be a (1 / (1-b
) ) = 1, that is, the continued removal of excesses will exhaust the
magnitude. Note that in this derivation, as in the one presented in
Oresme’s text, the sum of the excesses is only calculable because the
remainder bn can be evaluated as zero as division is made without
limit. The crucial difference between the approach used here and
the one of the text is found in the difference between the ways used
to evaluate the remainders.
9
A comparison with the modern derivation, while not particularly
helpful in this context, is at least interesting. The modern analyst
employs two modes of mathematical description in the course of his
exposition. First he describes the process of continued division
according to proportional parts with a geometric series. Then, using
a completely different apparatus, one formulated without regard
for this particular series, examines his description for the symptoms
of convergence. This latter mode of description, the interval language which supports the limit concept, allows the analyst to make
the type of comparison mentioned in the body of the essay. It is a
means which may be used willfully to erect standards of comparison. With it, the analyst can import his own fixed quantities into a
mathematical context.
10
Murdoch, p. 69. Although Murdoch interprets this part of the
passage correctly, he goes on to add that “though Oresme does offer
a proof of his summation of [a] series [of excesses], he gives no
inkling of one when it comes to his rule” (p. 70).
11 Apparently Oresme wrote ratios in the bilevel form used today as
the fractional notation, see E. Grant, “Part I of Nicole Oresme’s
Algorismus proportionum,” Isis, 56 (1965): 328-29.
ANASTAPLO
51
Appendix
Question 1
Concerning the book of Euclid it is first asked about the dictum of
Campanus in which he laid down that a magnitude decreases without limit. It is sought first whether a magnitude decreases without
limit according to proportional parts.
And it is first argued that it does not. There are not an unlimited number of parts in a continuous [magnitude], therefore neither
is there an unlimited number of parts of the same ratio. The
antecedent is obvious, since otherwise [the magnitude] would be
without limit. The consequent is obvious, since any proportional
part is a part of the same quantity as any other [proportional part
of that magnitude], therefore the parts of the same [magnitude] are
of the same ratio and of the same quantity.
According to Campanus in the commentary [the matter]
appears in the opposite way.
For the sake of the question it must be noted: first, what is
meant by proportional parts or parts of the same ratio; second, in
how many ways such parts can be imagined; third, how something
can be divided up into such parts; fourth, suppositions and conclusions.
First, it must be noted that parts are called proportional with
respect to a continuous proportion; and that such proportion is a
likeness of ratio, as is said in the commentary to the ninth definition
of the fifth [book], where it is said that a [proportion] is held
between at least two ratios; and for this reason Euclid said that the
minimum number of terms in which [a proportion] is found is three
and the maximum number cannot be given, since it goes on without limit. From this it follows that properly, one does not speak of
a proportional part or of two proportional parts, but that there
should be at least three [proportional parts], and there could be an
infinite number. And [such parts] are called continuously proportional when as the first is related to the second, so is the second to
the third and so with the rest if more are assumed.
Second, it is answered that division according to such proportional parts occurs in as many ways as there are continuously proportional [parts] and there are as many of these as there are ratios,
which are without limit. For example, it could be that the first is
twice the second and the second twice the third and so on, just as it
is commonly said of continued division; and it could be that the first
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
is three times the second and the second three times the third and
so on.
Third, it is said that a line and any continuum whatever can be
divided up into such parts. A line can be divided up in two ways
because it has two ends and such parts can start from either one. A
surface can be divided up in an unlimited number of ways and the
same [is true] of a body.
Fourth, the first supposition is laid down as the following: that
if some ratio becomes augmented without limit, the first term
remaining unchanged, the second term will become diminished
without limit. This is clear since the ratio between two [terms] can
be increased without limit in two ways, either through the limitless
augmentation of the first term or the limitless diminution of the second term.
The second supposition is that if to any ratio another [equal to
it] is added and then another and so on without limit, that ratio will
be augmented without limit and this applies to all quantities.
The third supposition is this, that addition can be made according to proportional parts to any quantity and from the same quantity diminution can occur according to proportional parts.
The first conclusion is therefore that, if some part is removed
from a quantity and from the first remainder the same part is
removed and from the second remainder the same part is again
[removed] and so on without limit, the quantity, through this manner of endless subtraction, will be exactly consumed, neither more
or less [than the whole of it will be removed]. This can be proved
thus: The whole assumed at the start and the first remainder and the
second and the third and the rest are continuously proportional (as
can be proved by arguing from a transformed ratio), therefore there
is, in this case, some ratio and as much again and so on without
limit. Thus it follows from the second supposition that the ratio of
the whole to the remainder increases without limit since it is composed with itself. And one term, that is the whole, is imagined not
to change, therefore, according to the first supposition, the remainder is diminished without limit. And therefore the whole of the
quantity is precisely consumed.
From this the corollary follows that if from some [magnitude]
a foot long half a foot is removed and then half the remaining quantity and then half of the next remainder and so on without limit,
precisely a foot will be taken away from it.
ANASTAPLO
53
The second corollary is that, if from some [magnitude a foot
long] one thousandth part of one foot is removed and then a thousandth part of the remainder of that foot and so on without limit,
exactly one foot will be subtracted from it.
But this is doubted: Since exactly half a foot, half of the remainder of that foot and so on without limit make up one foot, let this
whole be a. Similarly, according to the second corollary, a thousandth part of a foot and a thousandth part of the remainder and so
on without limit make up one foot, let it be b. Thus it appears that
a and b are equal, but it is proved that they are not: Since the first
part of a is greater than the first part of b and the second part of a
is greater than the second part of b and so on without limit, the
whole of a is thus greater than the whole of b.
And this is supported [in this way]: If Socrates is moved over a
during an hour and Plato over b, and if they divide the hour according to proportional parts and correspondingly move over a and b,
then in the first proportional part [of the hour] Socrates will be
moved faster than Plato and similarly in the second and those
beyond. Therefore, Socrates will move through more space than
Plato, and therefore a is a greater space than b.
In reply to this argument the antecedent is denied, namely, that
the first part of a is greater than the first part of b and so on, for the
reason that, although the first part of a is greater than the first part
of b and the second part of a is greater than the second part of b,
nevertheless [when the parts are taken] without limit, eventually
one [part of a] is arrived at which will not be more than its counterpart [in b], but less.
From this the response to the question is clear, that any continuum can have proportional parts without limit. In imagination and
likewise in reality, the first can be separated from the others by a
process of corruption, and then the second, and so on without limit.
In reply to the arguments advanced in opposition I deny the
consequence, namely, that any part would be of the same quantity
as any other and for a proof of it I say that although some proportional part may be a part of the same quantity as others, nevertheless it is not the same in quantity as them since it is of the same
ratio. They are not equal for then it would follow that all would be
equal among one another.
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Question 2
As a consequence it is asked whether an addition to a magnitude
can take place through proportional parts [applied] without limit.
First it is argued that it cannot. If it could, it would follow that
a magnitude would be actually augmentable without limit. This
consequence is contrary to what Aristotle said in the third [book] of
the Physics and to what Campanus said in the first [book] of this
[work], where he laid down the difference between magnitude and
number, namely, that number increases without limit and does not
decrease and that for magnitude the opposite is true. But, the consequence follows [from the antecedent], for, from the fact that the
addition happens without limit, the magnitude will be augmented
without limit, since it is added on to through the addition.
It is argued the opposite way that whatever can be removed
from some magnitude can be added to another. But subtraction
from some magnitude can take place according to such parts without limit, in this way, therefore, it can be proved that [a magnitude]
is augmentable without limit.
An example may be offered of a right triangle and an acute
angle, or of two right angles. Let there be a line on top of another
which makes two right angles which are a and b. Then a line, c,
turns toward one extremity, d. It is now argued thus: as much as
angle b decreases through this motion, so much angle a increases. It
is clear that whatever is removed from angle b is added to angle a.
But angle b decreases doubly, threefold, fourfold and so on without
limit, therefore angle a increases without limit.
For the sake of the question, it must be noted first what the
ratio of equality is and it is [the ratio] between equals. Another
[kind of ratio] is the ratio of greater inequality which is [the ratio]
of the greater to the lesser, such as, four to two. And another [kind]
is of lesser inequality which is of the lesser to the greater, such as
two to four. And these names differ according to the relation of
position and supposition as is clear in what has been said. And it follows from this that addition to a quantity can take place in three
ways.
Second, it must be noted that if addition be made according to
proportional parts [applied] without limit in either a ratio of equality or [one] of greater inequality, the whole will be without limit. If,
in turn, it is made according to a ratio of lesser inequality, [the
whole] will never be unbounded although the addition be made
ANASTAPLO
55
without limit. This is because the whole will have a fixed and
definite ratio to the [magnitude] assumed at the start, that is, to that
[magnitude] to which the addition is made, as will be explained
later.
Finally, it must be noted that each [magnitude which is] less
than another, but bears a fixed ratio to the other, is called in relation [to the other] either the fraction or fractions of it or the part
or parts [of it]. And this is clear in the definitions of the seventh
[book] of Euclid. And the lesser is named by the two numbers, of
which one is called the numerator and the other, the denominator,
as is clear in the same [text]. For example, one is less than two and
so it is called with respect to two one half, and with respect to three
one third, and so on. And two is called with respect to three twice
one third, and with respect to five twice one fifth. And they ought
to be written in this way, the two is called the numerator and the
five is called the denominator.
The first conclusion is that if a quantity of one foot be assumed
and addition be made to it without end according to the subduplicate ratio, so that first one half of a foot is added to it, then a fourth,
then an eighth and so on without limit, doubling the subduplicate,
the whole will be exactly twice the [magnitude] assumed at the
start. This is clear since if from some [quantity] parts are taken away
according to this order, exactly double of what is removed first will
be removed [ultimately] from the whole, as is clear from the first,
that is, the preceding question. Therefore the same argument
applies if the parts are added [to a magnitude].
The second conclusion is that if some quantity, such as a foot
be assumed, and then a third as much is added, and afterwards a
third of the addition, and so on without limit, the whole will be
exactly a foot and a half [long]. That is, it will be in the ratio of the
sesquialtern to the magnitude assumed at the start. And with regard
to this, the following rule should be recognized, that we ought to
see by how much the second part falls short of the first and the third
of the second and so on with respect to the others and to call that
[quantity] by its denomination and the ratio of the aggregate whole
to the magnitude assumed [at the start] will be as the ratio of the
denominator to the numerator. For example, in the case proposed,
the second part which is one third of the first falls short of the first
by two thirds, therefore the ratio of the whole to the first part or to
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the [magnitude] assumed [at the start] is as three to two, and this is
the sesquialtern.
The third conclusion is this, that it is possible that an addition
be made to some quantity according to unproportional ratios of
lesser inequality and the whole will be unlimited [in magnitude],
notwithstanding. But if this be done proportionally, the whole will
be bounded as has been said. For example, let the quantity assumed
be of one foot, to which half of a foot is added in the first proportional part of the hour, then a third in the next, then a fourth, then
a fifth and so on without limit according to a succession of numbers.
I say that the whole will be without limit, which is proved in this
way. There exist in this case an unlimited number of which any one
will be greater than one half, therefore the whole will be without
bound. The antecedent of this argument is clear since a third and a
fourth are more than a half and similarly [the terms] from a fifth to
an eighth are greater than a half and so too are [those] from an
eighth to a sixteenth and so on without limit.
In response to the arguments raised in opposition: “it follows
magnitude” and so on, it can be stated that a magnitude will be augmented without limit. One sense of “without limit” can be with reference to the act of augmenting and in this sense it can be conceded that such an actuality can come about in an unlimited number of
ways, as long as [the augmentation] is continued. But this is an
improper sense [of “without limit”] and it follows rightly from the
question that another sense is proper. Because [to say] that it will be
augmented doubly, quadruply and so on without limit is false and
does not follow from the question.
In response to the other argument, namely, when it was argued
about the angle that “it will be augmented as much” etc. I say that
there is a need for a distinction here since “as much” and “so much”
can denote an arithmetical ratio which extends to the extent of the
quantity of the excesses; in such a case, I concede the major premise [that a will be augmented by as much as b is diminished] and
deny the minor since the supposed solution does not occur [namely, that neither a nor b suffers change without limit]. Alternately
[“as much” and “so much”] can denote a geometrical ratio and in
this case, I deny the major since a will not be augmented in such a
ratio as b is diminished, but it is required that a will be augmented
by as much as b is diminished. And it can be argued in this way concerning any other quantity or quality and this is clear since when
ANASTAPLO
57
the angle b is diminished doubly, the angle a is not augmented doubly, rather it is said to be augmented doubly when c turns all the
way down to d and that will be when b is fully diminished and corrupted. And thus the response to the question is clear, so ends the
question.
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59
In Memoriam
Leo Raditsa (1936-2001)
Toast to the Senior Class
May 12, 2000
Leo Raditsa
To say farewell, I would like to tell you: You are teaching
me—a much harder thing than teaching you. It started the
day I walked into a classroom thirty-five years ago at NYU.
For a long time I fought it.
Coming across takes two. To accept is harder than giving.
And unless there is movement in both directions, little confidence lives. For a teacher, ceasing to hang on to his knowledge takes years.
You give me a lot also in the things you don’t say, in your
obvious tact, in your experience in putting up with things you
cannot do much about. I mean your savvy, your readiness to
put up with imperfection in your work and your teachers,
and, above all in your readiness to go on—I always fear I
might stop. Most of all, your sense of humor, which amounts
to saying you are really there and not living in distraction,
shows me something I do not readily see.
I only began to understand this undoing in me, that I was
beginning to lose my fear of students, when memories of my
teachers crowded upon me: actual faces and voices. I grew
astonished at the number of very great teachers I had had. I
had had little sense these paintings lived in me. They came to
life in me when I let go of what these teachers had given me.
Dealing with you slowly brought me to move on my own. So
Leo Raditsa, tutor at St. John’s College since 1973, was editor of The St.
John’s Review from 1978 to 1982. His essay, “The Collapse of Democracy at
Athens and the Trial of Socrates,” is printed below.
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as I toast you in a minute, in my heart I will also toast my
teachers, and the ragged world I now realize they knew I
would live in. In this way the present lives the past’s strength.
For you, too, what you give your teachers may be the
more important way you learn from them, for this giving
means you are strengthening your wings. So I toast these
beginnings in you which may not be yet obvious to you, and
maybe not to us.
Your capacity to understand you are students impresses
me, your savvy and sense of solidarity with your peers, your
readiness to converse with each other, the prerequisites for
independence, and your readiness to respect your teachers,
and yet your ability to size them up, to live with their defects,
to be truly, not defensively, critical of them. In short your
willingness to make the best of it. You also teach me a sense
of measure—something that cannot be learned in books. I
mean proportion where all living beauty hides….
I wish you fortitude and endurance in these beginnings,
and also the courage to change your minds, and above all the
courage to listen to your inner voice, for nobody can really
make those choices except yourself. When you feel fright
before those choices, when you wake up and wonder whether
you have an education, it is a sign that your education has
taken hold: You are on your own. Without standing being
lost, there is little chance of beginning. I wish you also the
courage of going through the eye of the needle—not all the
time but sometimes—of daring to be true to your feelings, I
wish you the capacity to take risks and to take disappointment.
More importantly, I have learned from you that the only
virtues you can learn are the ones you see before your eyes,
not the ones you read of in books. They cannot be read alone.
You help me read the book of life.
I raise a toast to you from us your teachers, to your
future, and to teaching as a two-way street, something you
teach me.
61
The Collapse of Democracy at
Athens and the Trial of Socrates
Leo Raditsa
Thucydides did not finish his account of the “intense movement” (so he named it) among the Greek peoples that he
judged to be the greatest event of history including the Trojan
War. The incompleteness of Thucydides’ account suggests it
never ended—and perhaps there is some truth in that. For the
kind of war—and in his opening paragraph he carefully
defines it—Thucydides describes, without specific political
aims and which proceeds by revolution, is difficult to end.
One can terminate hostilities, but to make peace: that is
another, much more difficult matter.
The crisis which we call the Peloponnesian War did, however, come to some sort of end and it is about that end and
what came after it, especially the trial of Socrates, that I am
going to talk to you tonight. The period runs roughly from
410 to 399, the year of Socrates’ trial.
The historical question I wish to face is what the relation
is of the trial of Socrates to the collapse of democracy which
occurred at Athens with the slow ending of the war. To put it
simply, why was Socrates prosecuted in 399 instead of some
time earlier, for instance, in 423 when Aristophanes had The
Clouds produced?
Xenophon, who begins his narrative about where
Thucydides leaves off, does not mention the trial of Socrates,
although he does mention Socrates’ attempt when he was in
Prytany to prevent the illegal trial of the generals who had
commanded at Arginusae in 406. Diodorus Siculus mentions
the trial, but only in passing, the way he mentions the death
of Sophocles in 406. I think ancient historians did not include
the trial of Socrates in their compositions because they understood history to deal with the public life of a city, of its
This lecture was delivered at the Annapolis Campus on February 18, 1977.
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officers and of its citizens in public assembly and in battle.
They did not conceive history to include the relation of private to public life, something which was the subject of much
of Socrates’ activity. Although Socrates was charged with a
public crime— graphe, not a dike, which referred to a civil
suit, as Socrates reminded Euthyphro at the start of his conversation with him—he was charged as a private citizen, not
as an office holder.
There was another and deeper reason for not including
the trial of Socrates in the ancient accounts of the period. In
contrast to Plato—and in this he is profounder than Plato—
Xenophon admits that he does not understand how it could
have happened that Socrates was tried and condemned. That
is, Socrates made him question the world his eyes saw, and
this involuntary questioning is Xenophon’s greatest tribute to
Socrates. But this questioning did not extend to history. For
Xenophon, history bore some relation to tragedy. But public
men and cities suffered tragedy. To include the trial of
Socrates in his composition Xenophon would have had to
conceive of the tragedy of a private man. He could not—like
most Athenians.
Think on it a second. All the Athenian tragedies are about
public individuals, kings and princes, when they are not about
Gods. There is something radically wrong with the way we
read tragedies, as if they were about the lives of private individuals. The private individuals, the individuals who hold no
office, appear in comedies. There they trip over their fantasies, which they take for actions, grow embarrassed at
themselves, at the greatness they feel trapped in their insides
but which betrays them when they open their mouths. There
they grow haughty with their magnificent and outrageous
gods. It is a measure of what happened at Athens that a generation after he had been subject to a comedy, Socrates
became protagonist of an event that the best of his contemporaries knew they could not understand.1 For it was the
tragedy of a private man. Even now we cannot easily inte-
RADITSA
63
grate the trial of Socrates into the history of Athens and of the
other Greeks, just as historians of the Roman empire hardly
ever include the trial of Jesus in their accounts of that period.
The Collapse of Democracy at Athens
The last years of the war [and following years], the period
from 411 to 401, represent the precipitation of that crisis in
leadership which we call the Peloponnesian War. It is the period of the war in which the war became more and more something that happened to Athens and something that Athens did
to herself. It is also the period in which Sparta took to the sea
and in which Persia became increasingly deeply involved.2
The events of 411, the formation of the oligarchic government of the Four Hundred and then of the Five Thousand,
which represented a reaction to the Sicilian disaster, not only
shook Athens’ domestic political confidence. They isolated
Athens in the Greek world. The oligarchic revolutions in
other allied cities which had accompanied the changes at
Athens in 411 had not served, as the oligarchs at Athens had
expected, to make settlement with the Lacedaimonians possible, but had instead contributed to bringing these cities under
Lacedaimonian sway. Everywhere there was instability, and
the cities lived on the brink of civil war. At Athens itself the
situation was tense—the democracy had passed strict laws
encouraging the punishment of those who had been involved
in the oligarchic movement of 411. There were many exiles.
The division which had occurred with the coming of the oligarchs in 411 had not been overcome. In an important sense
Athens in 410 was no longer one city but two. This meant
nobody knew what might happen next.
With the weakening of the predominance of Athens and
her instability, other Greek cities grew more aggressive in
their views. For the first time during the Peloponnesian War,
Greek leaders, especially the Spartans, reckoned with public
opinion outside of their cities. For instance, Pausanias, one of
the kings of Sparta, is said to have intervened in the Athenian
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civil war at the end of the period of the Thirty because he
feared the consequences to the reputation of Sparta if the
slaughters of the Thirty continued.
In the first part of this period, the six years leading up to
the destruction of almost the entire Athenian fleet at
Aegospotami in September 405, the war was largely at sea for
both sides. The sea war of these six years took place mainly
in the Hellespont and in the Bosporus, and along the adjoining coasts of Thrace and Asia Minor with its three major
islands, Lesbos, Chios and Samos. It was through these straits
that many of the Athenian grain ships sailed. When she challenged Athens in this area, Sparta was aiming at her life lines,
but not, in the beginning, at least, for total victory. For after
several of the major battles she attempted to negotiate with
Athens. For the first time in the war Athens was on the defensive in a way she had never been when Sparta had wasted
Attica in the first years of the war.
For her part Sparta appeared to be without a coherent
policy in this period. Her most noble commander drowned at
the battle of Arginusae; Callicratidas tried to keep free of
Persian entanglements; but Lysander, the Spartan commander who was to bring the war to an end, had no scruples about
taking all the money he could from Persia for building the
fleet and paying its crews.
The main events of this period were the return of
Alcibiades to Athens in 407; the victory of the Athenian fleet
at Arginusae in 406 and the unlawful trial and execution of
the generals of the fleet which followed upon it; Lysander’s
destruction of the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami in the fall of
405; and the collapse of Athens in the period 405-401, especially after the siege and surrender, in the fifteen months
which run from [April] 404 to [May] 403, when the Thirty
were in power.
Of these events the collapse of Athens or the time of the
Thirty, as it is usually called, was the most devastating. The
experience of Athens during this period left an indelible
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65
impression on the whole ancient world. People thought of it
with the same horror as the men of Colonus looked upon the
face of Oedipus. Sallust’s Caesar, written during the death
agony of the Roman Republic, in the face of the procriptions
of the young Octavian, recalls the horrors of the years of the
Thirty at Athens with a vividness which makes one imagine
Sallust had lived through the time. The Thirty, who were led
by two of his closest relatives, and Socrates’ trial—these were
the two central experiences of Plato’s life.
Somehow no matter what she did Athens always wounded herself. This is the terrible sense of this last decade and
earlier—for it really started at Melos in 416. When the
Athenian people illegally condemned commanders they suspected to be innocent after the great victory at Arginusae in
406, they hurt themselves. As Socrates later pointed out,
when they violated their own laws they discredited themselves, destroyed their public life and made themselves incapable of recognizing and standing up to their real enemies.
In Socrates’ presence Athenians knew they were doing
this to themselves. This is the meaning of Alcibiades’ wonderful and terrifying remark that Socrates was the only man
in Athens who made him feel ashamed. In Socrates’ presence
he could not fool himself—he knew that what he did somehow betrayed what he was. Alcibiades meant that Socrates
made him feel alive. Socrates gave men something like the
feeling you sometimes get from infants when they make you
wonder how you have become what you are.
Alcibiades’ return to Athens in 407, with his appearance
before the council and the assembly and his election to position of Commander in Chief, made a deep impression on
Athens. They saw him now almost like an outcast, like
Oedipus, forced to live beyond the protection of the laws, his
life always in danger, in Sparta and Persia. Here was the man
who in his life, almost in his person, summed up most of the
destructive and constructive actions of the years since 415:
the castration of the Hermae and the parody of the mysteries
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(from which he was exonerated), the expedition against
Syracuse, the Spartan fortification of Decelea in Attica, and
the involvement of Persia in the war—and constructively and
more recently, the prevention of civil war during the oligarchic crisis in 411 and the re-establishment of Athenian
control of the Propontis and the Bosporus in 410.
When Alcibiades sailed into the Piraeus he waited cautiously, without disembarking, for his friends and relatives to
escort him up to the city. To many, both rich and poor,
democrats and oligarchs, he seemed like the one individual
capable at the same time of overcoming the division which
remained within the city and of prosecuting the war with
intelligence.
But something like six months later he was either not reelected or removed from his command because a subordinate—against his express orders—engaged Lysander and lost
fifteen Athenian ships. He went into exile on his estate in the
Chersonese. The great expectations had come to nothing—
the crisis continued.
Almost a year apart, the two great naval disasters at
Arginusae and Aegospotami were in a sense both self-inflicted. I call Arginusae a disaster even though it was an Athenian
victory, because its repercussions at home did much to discredit the unstable democracy. When Athens learned that the
Spartan commander Callicratidas had encircled the Athenian
commander Conon at Mytilene she sent out a hastily-gathered fleet of 110 ships which she manned with free men and
slaves (who were later awarded their freedom).
Immediately after the Athenian victory a storm suddenly
rose which prevented the Athenian commanders from picking
up the several thousand dead and survivors floating in the
rammed and waterlogged ships that had not sunk. At Athens,
the news of the losses blunted the joy of victory. Following a
little after the news, the Apaturia, a festival which drew
together families to acknowledge births and marriages, made
the grief worse.
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67
The matter came up in the council and the assembly.
Under the influence of their politicians the people seemed
unable to accept that some things are not under human control, that a storm occurs in “divine necessity,” as one speaker
put it.
Their politicians dominated them by nourishing their
yearning to make someone responsible for everything.
Theramenes, an important and able politician who had been
a subordinate commander at Arginusae, accused his superiors
of neglect. There was debate both in council and assembly,
and the six generals who had dared to come back to Athens
defended themselves ably and with witnesses, even though
they had not yet been formally accused. At the point when it
appeared the generals would win some kind of release the
assembly was adjourned.
In a subsequent assembly it was proposed to vote on the
guilt of the generals as a group and to count their previous
testimony as a trial—all highly illegal. A brave speaker in the
assembly attempted to stop the proceedings on the grounds
of unconstitutionality (the graphe paranomon); but the people, turning into a mob, threatened him. This was the first,
crucial attempt to resort to the graphe paranomon since it had
been restored after the Four Hundred had abolished it in
411.3 It failed. But the grounds of the illegality had been
clearly stated in the assembly. The crowd also intimidated all
of the council except Socrates when it sought to keep the
motion for sentencing from the assembly. The generals were
condemned as a group and immediately executed.
Sometime later the people regretted their action, as they
had been warned they would in the assembly. They turned
upon their leaders and prosecuted them, depriving one of
them of fire and water. But it was too late. All along they had
known what they were doing was wrong, but they could not
stop it. Against the speaker who had opposed them they had
shouted that it was unthinkable that the people should not be
allowed to do whatever they desired.
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After Arginusae the tension in many of the cities
increased. Returned as acting Commander of the Spartan
fleet, Lysander, with headquarters at Ephesus, supported the
so-called oligarchs in a bloody seizure of power at Miletus.
Four hundred of the wealthy and prominent citizens of
Miletus were executed in the market place. For his predecessor Callikratidas’s attempt to lead the Greek cities with
words, Lysander substituted terror, for which party labels
were mere pretexts. In Karia, a city allied to Athens was
wiped out.
Sailing from Samos, the Athenian fleet found no support
among the Greek cities. Except for Mitylene, all Asia turned
away from Athens. When news came that Lysander was retaking Lampsacus on the Hellespont almost the entire Athenian
fleet, one hundred and eighty ships, sailed to Aegospotami, a
barren stretch of beach just fifteen stades (a stade is 600 feet)
across the water from Lampsacus. Despite Alcibiades’ warning—from his estate on the Chersonese he watched the whole
disaster take shape before his helpless eyes—the Athenian
commanders remained in their exposed position and offered
battle to the Spartans for four days. On the fifth day Lysander
surprised the Athenians after they had disembarked and
destroyed or captured more or less their whole fleet. It was
the Fall of 405.
At Athens they prepared for siege: all the harbors except
one were filled up, walls were repaired and guards put on
them. The city sought a hasty and incomplete unity in the
restoration of full citizen rights to those who had been partially deprived in the previous troubles. But they did not
recall the exiles.
At Aegospotami in assembly with the allies of Sparta,
Lysander executed one of the Athenian commanders, because
he had been the first to break the international law of the
Greek cities. He had hurled the captured crews of two ships
of Sparta’s allies from a precipice, and in the assembly at
Athens he had supported a motion to cut off the thumbs of
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69
all prisoners of war and make them incapable of ever rowing
again. Lysander also showed himself as the undoer of
Athenian outrages: at Melos, Torone, Scione and Aigina he
restored the remaining original inhabitants.
From Chalcedon and Byzantium on the Bosporus and
elsewhere, Lysander set the Athenian garrison loose on the
condition that they sail nowhere else but to Athens. He wanted to burden Athens with as many mouths as possible.
Everywhere the Greek cities turned to Sparta.
But at Samos, the other port of the Athenian fleet, the
democracy held, and again knew itself in the slaughter of
prominent citizens. For the first time since before the Persian
wars, Athens was cut off from the sea, closed in upon herself—Athens, whom almost ten years before, Peisthetaerus in
the Birds had called “the city of the lovely triremes.”
Throughout the whole winter and until April of the following year, 404, Athens and the democracy resisted—and
people starved. There was an early attempt at negotiation in
which Athens offered to accept Sparta’s leadership in alliance,
a situation that would have allowed her considerable independence. But at Sparta the Ephors insisted on tearing down
part of the walls. In response the people at Athens forbade
any motions concerning peace. Men grew convinced that any
terms with Sparta meant the fate of Melos.
In this tense and dangerous situation Theramenes managed to persuade the assembly to let him find out from
Lysander whether the Spartans wanted to destroy the long
walls to reduce Athens to slavery, or simply as a guarantee of
their good conduct. Theramenes remained with Lysander
who was besieging Samos until with the worsening situation
at Athens the assembly granted him power to negotiate.
The new terms which the Lacedaimonians and their allies
offered were much harsher than the previous demands of the
Ephors: Athens was to have the same friends and enemies as
Sparta. (In our terms this meant Athens lost the capacity for
an independent foreign policy.) She was to tear down the long
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walls. Her fleet was not to number more than twelve ships.
The exiles were to return.
When Theramenes returned to the starving city with
these terms, men crowded around him in fear—but in the
assembly there was still some resistance to surrender. In acting as go-between between the Athenian democrats who
desired to resist to the end and the probably undecided
Spartans Theramenes had saved his native city from total
destruction—or rather from destroying itself. To the intoxicating sound of flutes, Lysander had sections of the long walls
torn down. The Spartans and the returning Athenian exiles,
according to Xenophon, imagined that that day meant the
beginning of freedom for the Greeks. It was April 404.
In the following month the Athenian assembly, in the
presence of Lysander, voted to give thirty men the power to
revise the laws and reform the constitution. The Thirty promised to make the city clean and honorable and to impel the
citizens to justice and excellence. Plato, then twenty-four
years old, and many others, perhaps even Lysias (a speech
writer, son of Cephalus and brother of Polemarchus, who
appear in the first book of the Republic), believed in them at
first.
The commission delayed the reform of the laws, but
appointed magistrates and council, and started to rule. Before
the council and with public balloting, they tried and killed
notorious sycophants, individuals who had used the threat of
prosecution for extortionary purposes. Although illegal, these
killings won wide consent among the citizens, because men
felt they were justified.
Soon, however, Critias, a close relative of Plato and an
interlocutor of Socrates, asked Lysander for a Spartan governor and garrison to support him in dealing with unruly and
subversive elements. With Spartan troops behind them, the
Thirty now began to kill all individuals who might oppose
them, and whose property would furnish the money necessary for the support of the Spartan garrison.
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71
At these outrages many went into exile, including Anytos
(who later instigated the prosecution of Socrates) and
Thrasybulus, who was to lead the democrats. Megara and
Thebes teemed with Athenian exiles despite Sparta’s order
forbidding any Greek city to receive them. (By January 403,
when the Thirty left Athens for Eleusis, where they had exterminated the population, perhaps as much as half of the male
population had left Attica.)
Among the Thirty themselves the outrages also produced
opposition. Theramenes, who knew the distinction between a
moderate oligarchy and terror, told Critias that they were
now much worse than the sycophants of the democracy who
had extorted money, but not killed for it. Critias answered,
brutally, that changes of constitution required killing: “How
do you think thirty can rule over many without terror?”
Critias now disarmed all the population except three
thousand of the more wealthy. All except these three thousand could be arrested and executed without trial. As Socrates
later pointed out in his own trial, Critias sought to dominate
by involving as many as possible in his outrages. Under the
swords of the Spartan garrison he compelled the Three
Thousand to condemn the inhabitants of Eleusis to death.
When he could no longer tolerate the free-spokenness of
Theramenes, he made the council his accomplice in his death.
Sometime during the early winter of 404, Thrasybulus,
with about seventy followers, took the border fortress of
Phyle which overlooked the whole Attic plain to Athens. The
Thirty immediately responded, but were repulsed in a minor
skirmish. This minor setback shattered their confidence and
showed that their cowardice matched their brutality.
Sometime after this Thrasybulus, now with something
like seven hundred badly armed followers, took the section of
the Piraeus called Munychia. There in pitched battle the men
of the Piraeus, as they now came to be called, managed to
defeat the Thirty and the Three Thousand. Critias, first
cousin to Plato’s mother, and Charmides, his uncle, were
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both killed. Mindful that the enemy dead were citizens, the
men of the Piraeus did not strip their bodies. They sought
instead to use their victory to shake the by now largely forced
loyalty of many of the Three Thousand (especially those who
had not committed crimes) to the Thirty. Shortly after the
battle the Three Thousand removed the Thirty from office
and elected twelve to rule. The Thirty and their followers fled
to Eleusis. It was January, 403.
At this point Athens was no longer a living city but three
factions, one in the city, one in the Piraeus, and one in Eleusis.
From Eleusis the Thirty sent men whom they fancied ambassadors to Lysander, saying there had been a revolt of the mob
at Athens and requesting his help. Intent on surrounding the
democrats at the Piraeus, Lysander managed the appointment
of his brother as naval commander and authorization for
himself to hire mercenaries. But Pausanias, one of the kings
of Sparta, alarmed at the thought that Lysander might turn
Athens into his private possession, convinced the Ephors and
the Spartan assembly—ostensibly to help Lysander, but actually to prevent the destruction of the men of the Piraeus.
Pausanias’s expedition, with the Spartan army, amounted
almost to a reopening of the war. In fact, Thebes and Corinth
refused to join, because they said Athens had not violated any
of her treaty agreements. With Spartan authority to come to
a settlement, Pausanias managed to negotiate an agreement in
which both the oligarchs of the city and the democrats of the
Piraeus agreed not to fight each other. At Pausanias’s insistence they also agreed to return property expropriated under
the Thirty to its owners. The constitution of the democracy
was restored. It was probably August 403, fifteen months
after the assembly had first elected the Thirty.
For the next two years Athens lived in fear of renewed
attempts to undo the democracy. In 401, upon rumors that
the Thirty at Eleusis were hiring mercenaries, the whole city
took arms and went out to meet them. During the ensuing
negotiations the men of the city killed the commanders from
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Eleusis and managed a reconciliation with their followers,
with the help of their relatives and friends in Athens.
Either at this time or two years earlier, in August 403,
when Pausanias negotiated the reconciliation, every individual in Athens swore not to bear grudges for anything in the
past. This meant nobody could prosecute for offenses under
the Thirty, probably including the expropriation of property
which Pausanias had sought to undo. The agreement to forget did not cover the Thirty, “the twelve” who had committed their “executions,” and several other categories. It was
contractual and could only be enforced upon appeal from
individuals in court. (Andocides, for instance, appeals to it in
his speech “On the Mysteries” in 399, the year of the trial of
Socrates.)4
Athens After The Thirty and the Trial of Socrates
The atmosphere in Athens after the Thirty was somewhat
unreal. It had become a city that feared disturbances and
feared itself. It also remained in an important sense two cities.
When you spoke at Athens during this time you always
addressed two audiences, the men of the city and the men of
the Piraeus. In these years Lysias spoke directly to a deep
sense of unease and complicity with terrifying events which
must have prevailed among the majority of Athenians. For the
heroes of Phyle and Piraeus had been few. Lysias understood
the deep struggle for self-respect Athenians waged during this
time. “The Thirty killed my brother,” he says, “they even
made it hard to bury him—I will not forget.” “Then, under
the Thirty, you were afraid,” he tells the judges, “but now
there is nothing stopping you from voting the way you desire,
now there are no excuses.”
Lysias attacked Theramenes, not distinguishing him in
any way from Critias. Theramenes had betrayed the trust the
people had shown him and brought the city down in starvation. Everything that had occurred in the assembly which
voted authority to the Thirty in the spring of 404 had been
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arranged beforehand, secretly, between Lysander and
Theramenes. The vote had not been freely taken. If the Thirty
had not killed Theramenes the democracy would have had
to—a remark that, in its inverted way, pays a deep compliment to Theramenes.
In all the violence the only obvious palpable tie that
remained between the factions was the gods; to them the city
now made appeal. Of the Thirty, Lysias said, “they wanted us
to participate in their shame instead of the gods, to substitute
complicity with them for our common relation to the gods.”
He also described the Thirty as men who believed their
power to be firmer than the vengeance of the gods—something quite like the Melians had said to the Athenians.
When the men of the Piraeus addressed the Three
Thousand after their defeat in January 403, they spoke first
of their common gods. Immediately after Pausanias had succeeded in bringing peace between the factions, Thrasybulus
went up to sacrifice on the Acropolis: he meant to reaffirm
that Athens belonged to Athena, who lived on the Acropolis.
Perhaps Euthyphro exemplifies this newfound, somewhat
showy piety of Athens after the Thirty. It is full of unquestioning assurance—and yet at a loss for words.
With this piety there was a forced and unconvincing blustering patriotism. Andocides did not blush to compare the
Athens of the year of Socrates’ trial with the Athens of the
Persian wars. Anytos showed the brittle, touchy confidence of
these years when he takes “personal” (as we would say)
offense at Socrates’ observation (in the Meno) that the sons of
the pillars of the community had not turned out so well.
People yearned for conviction, but were incapable of it.
Socrates came from another world—the world of Athens
and the Greeks before the Peloponnesian War. At its outbreak
in 431 he was about 40, and already famous throughout at
least the Greek world. Men came from as far as Cyrene to listen to him.5 This is the Athens of the fifty years between the
Persian and the Peloponnesian War, the Athens that neither
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feared itself or others. It was a city that did not fear the unexpected. A city in which important things besides crime happened on the streets. In fact, to that street life and its casual
encounters, to how one can live on the streets, Socrates is one
of our greatest witnesses. I think his refusal to wear sandals
speaks of his feel for that life and of his insistence on its
importance.
Another witness to that street life is Herodotus, whose
book, like the Odyssey, is also a book of manners.
Although—or perhaps because—careful and cautious,
Herodotus is confident and respectful of his readers’ intelligence, of their capacity to think. Socrates has the same
respect for the intelligence of the people he encounters. He
could tolerate the movement of other peoples’ minds (when
they did actually move) and he knew that movement to be as
unexpected as truth. That is why he preferred to talk, to listen as well as to speak, rather than to write or teach.
Unlike Herodotus, Socrates did not travel—as he
remarks, he never left town. Even when everybody went to a
festival, he remained behind with the cripples and beggars in
the deserted silent city. Herodotus instead went everywhere
with the same ease that Socrates stayed home. Both give an
example of the best kind of courage, the unassuming kind,
the kind that does not have to prepare a face to meet the faces
that you meet.
The Athenians of that time were used to living in a world
that strengthened them, in a world where the throbbing glow
of the sky was palpable, in a world that knew nuance, that
could see the shape of the human body because it knew it to
be more than the sum of its parts. Pericles says Athens was
largely free of the jealousy of the lives of others which contributed so much to the later hatred of Socrates. In the presence of Herodotus and Socrates one feels one’s pretensions
like a kind of awkwardness that one could drop.
The only man who breathed this confidence during the
Peloponnesian War besides Socrates was Aristophanes.
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Aristophanes knew, in the way he appears to know everything, that in this time you could only breathe it in laughter,
his kind of laughter which serves for reverence and respect.
Alcibiades knew this confidence lives, but it always eluded his
grasp although he traveled the world to seek it—when he
knew perfectly well (but only Socrates could make him admit
it) you could only find it at home.
This kind of unassuming confidence cannot be experienced without remembering Aeschylus, a man with strength
enough to have compassion for a god. Significantly, during
the time of the war it is only Aristophanes who could
approach Prometheus with something equivalent, but at the
same time entirely different from, the pitiless tenderness of
Aeschylus.
Most of the spectators and judges at Socrates’ trial knew
nothing of this world of Athens before the Peloponnesian war
except what they saw before them in Socrates. Plato was born
ca. 429, Xenophon, who was not at the trial, perhaps in 435.
Meletos, Socrates’ official accuser, was perhaps Plato’s age,
certainly not much older; “a youthful defender of the youth,”
Socrates calls him. Ashamed at appearing in Court—for the
first time in his life, he emphasizes—Socrates at his trial felt
the weight of seventy years of living and the dignity they
demand. He says he did not prepare a speech because it was
not something for a man of his age to do—especially since his
whole way of life with its love of justice speaks for him—in
his defense.
Plato knew, of course, that Socrates came from another
world; in fact one major part of his work was remembering
and recreating a world he had never entirely known, but
which he knew to be destroyed. Remember that Plato lost
Socrates just after the experience of the Thirty had forced
him to acknowledge the dishonor of his family—perhaps not
of his parents, but of the brothers of one of his parents and
of another close relative. His repudiation of their acts is
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strong, and it awakens admiration. For Plato, the trial of
Socrates was a terrible as the time of the Thirty.
Plato’s love for Socrates is for a dead man; everything he
writes is about a man who has disappeared. Unlike
Aristophanes, Plato never had to face Socrates with any of his
writings. His writings were meant to substitute for Socrates,
to replace him, to keep him alive once he was dead. This is
the hardest illusion to deal with when you read Plato, the illusion that you are inside Socrates, that you are hearing his
voice. It is also the drama of reading Plato, who is an artist, a
different kind of artist than the poets, for he thought he was
not an artist.
With Xenophon it was different. He stayed outside of
Socrates. In Xenophon you can hear how Socrates’ voice
sounded to somebody who did not entirely understand
Socrates but who knew he did not understand him, who
knew he was out of his depth but had the courage to stay
there—that is rare. “I cannot forgive him, I cannot forget
him, the memories keep overwhelming me,” Xenophon says
somewhere with wonder. But unlike Plato, he never forgot
they were memories.
Socrates was charged with impiety. The specific charge,
which is preserved with slight variations by Xenophon and
Diogenes Laertius, was that he did not worship the gods that
the city worshipped and that he introduced new gods. The
second charge is that he destroyed the youth. There are other
examples of charges of asebeia [impiety] with other charges
attached to them. For instance, Aspasia was charged with asebeia and letting Pericles meet free women in her house. There
is a text of Aristotle that associates asebeia with disrespect for
parents and corrupting the youth. In any case it is clear that
corruption of the youth was a prosecutable offense.6
Plato’s stress on corruption of the youth accords with
Anytus’s own views. In the only direct quotation from his
speech we have, Anytus told the judges he had not expected
Socrates to appear in court, but once he had, they had no
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choice but to condemn him. Otherwise, he would ruin their
sons. In this Anytus agreed with the Thirty, who had actually
attempted to order Socrates not to speak to the young,
Anytus’s argument to the fathers to protect their sons is
the strongest kind of appeal. As Socrates points out in his
questioning of Meletus, it makes him responsible for all the
troubled youths in the city. How lucky they would be if I am
the only one who ruins them, Socrates remarks.
There is plenty of evidence of disturbed relations in
Athens between fathers and sons during the Peloponnesian
War. The son of Pericles in Xenophon speaks matter-of-factly of Athens as a place where sons held their fathers in contempt. You remember the struggle between Pheidippides and
Strepsiades in the Clouds, where there is little question of the
father holding the respect of his son. In the Birds there is a
scene between a youth who desires to murder his father and
Pisthetaerus, where Pisthetaerus manages to show him, by
conversation not unlike those of Socrates in Xenophon, that
he belongs on the Thracian front. Aristophanes means to
show here—and it is probably meant as a compliment to
Socrates—that the youth can be talked out of these wild fancies if there is anyone around who knows how to take the
time to talk to him. (Incidentally, in our world, where we do
not call things by their proper names, the would-be fatherkillers pass for revolutionaries.) There is in Xenophon also a
remarkable conversation of Socrates with his son who is
deeply angry with his mother. In all this we should keep in
mind that disrespect for parents carried severe penalties, perhaps even death.7
These disturbed relations between fathers and sons were
intensified by the war. Thucydides mentions the enthusiasm
of the youth for the war at its beginning. Pheidippides would
have been brought up in the country if it had not been for the
war.
Socrates was one of the few people in Athens willing to
look these troubles in the face rather than deny them and, by
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denying them, wish them away. Anytus instead wanted to
wish them away, in somewhat the way Iocasta tried to talk
Oedipus out of what he had learned—and then committed
suicide. “Because I can help,” Socrates says with something
like astonishment, “I am overwhelmed by their jealous rage,
as you put it, Euthyphro”—the word is phroneo, used elsewhere of the gods’ resentment of overreaching human beings.
Anytus’s relation to Meletus shows something of what
Anytus thought the proper relation of the elder generation
should be to the younger. He put Meletus up to charging
Socrates, Meletus who was just a kid in Socrates’ astonished
but fearful eyes. How did he dare accuse him of impiety?
Socrates asked. Did he not know what he was getting into?
With a charge of impiety anything could happen.
Meletus was one of those young men for whom the world
is unreal, for whom, as Socrates said of others, everything is
upside down. He was one of those youths who wished to be
serious but did not dare to be, who wanted to be a hero but
feared the risks. Anytus offered him the easy way out, the illusion of self-respect, the easy way to grow up: the role of protector of the city and of his peers. Socrates is fierce when he
questions Meletus, catching all the irresponsibility of that
pretended earnestness. Anytus trapped Meletus with his conceit—and to all intents and purposes ruined him.
Contrast Anytus’s manipulation of Meletos with
Socrates’s handling of Glaucon, Plato’s brother, as Xenophon
tells it. Like Plato, Glaucon at twenty wanted more than anything else to go into politics. Uncontrollable and the despair
of his family, he was making a fool of himself climbing up and
speaking in public, and doing the other things you did to have
a political career at Athens.
Socrates cared about him because of Plato and because of
Glaucon’s uncle Charmides, and because he must have had all
the charm of intelligence awakening. (There is always something important to be said for young men who dare to make
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fools of themselves in defiance of their family—as long as it is
of their own—and not to please somebody else.)
Socrates asked Glaucon some questions which incidentally show something that I do not think is apparent from Plato,
that Socrates had a fairly extensive knowledge of the facts of
Athenian politics. He asked how long Athens could live off
the agricultural production of the Attic countryside; how
much food she needed in general; what her expenses were;
what were her revenues—the list reads like a catalogue of the
facts Pericles had at the ready when he spoke to the
Athenians.
Glaucon could not answer any of these questions. At one
point he answers, “But, Socrates, I can make a guess.” “No,
when you know, we will talk.” Then Socrates asks him something else, “Why don’t you run your uncle’s estates?”
Glaucon answers innocently, “Because I cannot persuade him
to entrust them to me.” “You cannot persuade your uncle, but
you think you can persuade the city!”
This is pretty much the opposite of what Anytus did to
Meletus. It is the kind of humiliating conversation which
teaches the difference between dreams and facts, between
illusion and life—without learning that distinction (and it is
not something you learn in the head), you live your whole life
among the shades.
Politics is also a struggle to distinguish the actual from
illusions, enemies from friends, war from peace, what you
can do from what you cannot, and, most importantly, aggression from goodwill and life from death. In the fifteen years
preceding the trial of Socrates Athens had clearly failed in
that struggle, over and over again misjudging the situations.
When the consequences of those misjudgments turned to disaster, it grew difficult to put up with Socrates: he reminded
people of too much. Without wanting to he made Anytus feel
he was a bad father, and that there might be a connection
between the kind of father he was and the kind of political
leader he was. More generally, he made people feel they
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81
might have been responsible for what had happened to them.
Or, as he puts it to the judges, “You cannot hurt me but you
will hurt yourselves putting me to death.”
Nobody in public life after Pericles, and probably not
even Pericles, had been able to make people feel responsible
for what had happened. Socrates made them feel responsible
because he came in between the relations between generations. You remember how he says, “If I went abroad and had
conversations, the fathers would drive me into exile; and if I
did not, the sons would.” In Athens it had taken collusion
between generations, between Meletus and Anytus to prosecute him. For it is the relations between generations which
determine whether cities live or die or merely survive.
People had gone through disaster; they had seen their
fathers and brothers and children and friends killed. They
had taken that, but they could not take the dim but unmistakable sense they had in the presence of Socrates that these
disasters were of their own doing, that these disasters had to
do with how they thought and talked and what they were.
When Socrates told them they took better care of their slaves
than their friends, of their bodies than their lives, he reminded them, quite unwittingly, of that.
Because he knew his own smallness Socrates struck other
men as grand, boastful, even arrogant. Because he took his
own measure, he appeared to tower over other men who had
trouble telling themselves from gods. And this was intolerable, especially after the events of the last ten years had held
up their smallness to them. A generation before they had
laughed at him and respected him—now in the narrowness of
defeat, possessed by memories they could not face, they killed
him—because they feared themselves in him.
Notes
1
For the relation of The Clouds to Socrates, Bruno Snell, “Das frühste Zeugnis über Sokrates,” Philologus 97 (1948): 125-34;
Wolfgang Schmid, “Das Sokratesbild der Wolken,” Philologus 99
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(1948): 209-28; T. Gelzer, “Aristophanes und sein Sokrates,”
Museum Helveticum 13 (1956): 65-93.
2
On the sources for this period, S. Accame, “Le fonti di Diodoro
per la guerra Deceleica,” Rendiconti della R. Accademia dei Lincei
(Classe di scienze morali, sotriche e filologiche) 14 (sixth series),
1938, 347-451; “Trasibulo e i nuovi frammenti delle Elleniche di
Ossirinco,” Rivista di filologia classica 28 (1950): 30-49.
3
J. Hatzfeld, “Socrate au procès des Arginuses,” Revue des Etudes
Anciennes 42 (1940): 165.
83
Ovid, Banished
Publius Ovidius Naso relegatus non exsul.
The Decree of Banishment
He envies the ocean,
its coming and going,
4
its vast itinerary
and easy arrogance.
5
Certain days he leans
toward it, reaches
For the character of this agreement, Ugo Enrico Paoli, Studi sul
processo Attico, Padua, 1938, 121-142, especially 122; also, Studi
di diritto Attico, Florence, 1930.
Burnet, Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates and Crito,
(Oxford, 1970), especially v and the commentary to the Apology.
6 For
the charge, A. Menzel, Untersuchungen zum Sokrates Processe,
Abhandlung der Sitzungsber. d. kais. Akd. zu Wien 145, 1901-02,
especially 7-29. Also E. Derenne, Les procès d’impiété intentés aux
philosophes à Athènes au Ve et au IVe siècles avant J.-C., Liége,
1930; N. Casini, “Il processo di Socrate,” Iura 8, 1957, 101-120.
For the association of asebeia with disrespect for parents, Aristotle
“On Virtues and Vices,” 1251a31:asebeia men he peri theous plem˜
meleia kai peri daimonas e kai peri tous katoikhomenous kai peri
goneis kai peri patrida. Also see J. Lipsius (with Meier and
Schoemann) Das Attische Recht und Rechtsverfahren, Leipzig, 1908,
359.
For the death penalty for disrespect of parents (kakoseos goneon
˜ ˜
˜
graphe ), Lysias, 13, 91. As with many crimes, the penalty for disre˜
spect of parents was probably not specified (for leeway in Attic legal
procedure after conviction, U.E. Paoli, Processo Attico, Padua,
1938, 86-89. Recent scholars think disrespect for parents was usually punished with partial loss of citizen rights (atimia) for life, for
instance, with loss of the right to hold office and speak in the assembly—but not with the loss of private rights, such as the right to hold
property. L. Beauchet, Histoire du droit privé de la République
Athénienne, Paris, 1897, 1, 362-371; A.R.W Harrison, The Law of
.
Athens, Oxford, 1968, 1, 78-81.
to touch, and touching
touches what it has touched.
Then the poems come,
torrential, unstoppable,
each riding the back
of the one before,
their dolphin words
like news from home.
7
Leonard Cochran
Leonard Cochran, O.P is retired from the faculty of Providence College. He
.,
is a 1982 graduate from the Annapolis campus of the Graduate Institute.
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85
Philosophy Revived
Eva Brann
Those of our alumni who had really good Republic seminars won’t have forgotten the spectacularly innocuous beginning of all philosophizing that Socrates sets out in the seventh
book. He is talking to Plato’s brother Glaucon about an education not so unlike ours. Where and how does reflection
begin? With arithmetic. Take the one finger on your hand that
doesn’t even have an ordinary name, the fourth. It sends an
odd message: It’s always a finger, but it is long in respect to
the pinkie, short compared to the middle finger. The attentive
soul summons calculative thought to examine whether the
eye’s vision is announcing one or two things. If two, then
each is other and one. And yet they are together a Twosome;
is this Two itself a unity, a one? Now the soul is forced by its
perplexity to inquire whatever One Itself might be. Counting
and calculation is thus the “winch” to Being, and thoughtful
arithmetic turns the soul around to that invisible Being. In
another dialogue, the Phaedrus, quite another, an erotically
ecstatic beginning of the ascent to Being will be set out.
Stewart Umphrey’s book is the working out, meticulously reasoned and unflinchingly self-critical, of this humble
finger problem and its relation to the second beginning in the
ecstasy of love. But it is not a commentary on Platonic dialogues or on any of the writers—Hegel, Kant and a slew of
moderns—that the author calls on. Though he puts to good
use considerable philosophical learning, especially training in
logic, it is an instrumental use. He wields the precision tools
developed over two and a half millennia in the service of
Socrates’ great last care in the Phaedo: that the logos,
thoughtful conversation, should live and not die with him. I
used to think that commenting on major texts was by and
large the most respectable kind of philosophizing, since it
kept one honest, in the sense of preventing the inventive kind
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of originality that substitutes fascinating novelties for the
same old truth. Stewart Umphrey’s book, however, proves
that there is honest originality—the kind that makes straight
for the origin but by a unique route. It shows an independence of mind whose distinctiveness verges on eccentricity—
the kind that reaches the center by leaving the mainstream,
whose perspective rouses thought by being a little askew, by
shifting the world by a few degrees.
Stewart Umphrey’s distinctive mode is a sort of faith-ful
skepticism. His first book was in fact called Zetetic
Skepticism, a title alluding to the hypothesis that searching
inquiry (zetesis) can never be complete, that it is the indefeasible human condition not to be perfect in knowledge—and
that this is absolutely no reason not to carry on; not despair
but the energizing exercise of the intellect is the proper
response. Complexity and Analysis is, among other things, a
demonstration of the intellectual gymnastics that is at once a
preparation for and an expression of this illusion-stripped
faith. Of course, the reasons why it is best to keep inquiring
are detailed along the way.
The Law of Contradiction with the divisions and branchings it induces is what this author lives by—to begin with,
when the differentiations of analysis are wanted (“this is not
that”) and also later when distinctions in truth or falsity of
statements about complex entities are to be made (“either this
holds or that”). Some sections consist of very close reasoning,
but the purpose is not to deconstruct polemically but to discover peacefully what is the case; it never gets irritating. At
worst it is a sweaty workout, at best an illuminating high.
Sometimes a long argument ends in misgivings after all; often
the author, like a reasonable human being, admits to as-yetunreasoned preferences.
If readers may quail a little before the logic (yet—no pain,
no gain), they will be enchanted with the distinctive flavor of
the style, the underhanded wit, the anomalous vocabulary,
the dry logic that supports as it contains the soaring of
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87
thought. Did you ever think of newsstands as an exemplification of “the truthvalueless things we make,” or use “obvelation” as the obverse of revelation, or see a rational flow chart
of philosophic madness? And then there is occasional lyricism. —If you thought you knew your tutor, read the last
couple of pages of his book.
So far I’ve talked round about the book, but I want to give
some notion of its contents. Since for Stewart Umphrey the
good of philosophy is more (though not only) in the thinking
than in the thought, in the doing rather than the having done,
the text is practically beyond summary. Though it is full of
passionate belief, it contains no thesis that won’t be denatured by being baldly stated. So I’ll be picking small samples,
those that twang my logical funny bone or that speak to my
philosophical preoccupations.
The book has three parts: The first is about analysis and
its limits, thus about ways of knowing, epistemology. The second is about complexity, about the constitution of things that
are discernible in thought (here called “entities”), thus about
the inside workings of beings. (I have no idea why the order
of the complementary parts is reversed in the title of the
book, but have perfect faith that there is an interesting reason.) The last part draws the practical, the life-affecting consequences of the theoretical insights gained; it is thus about
human wholeness and what lies beyond.
“Analysis” in this book is a way of trying to know some
given whole by breaking it up into its constituents, be they
themselves entities or something else, something central to
the argument, namely “subentities,” “parts” that are not independently countable or even discernible in analytic thought,
yet somehow in evidence. Analysis deals comfortably only
with fairly independent countable components. Analysts are
clear and precise but not always deep and comprehensive.
They can capture complexity but have trouble with unity.
(They know that the finger contains two ideas, but not how
Two comes to be one.) Some of the darkness of our day is due
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
to a case of bad analysis, to “analysitis” (“Things fall apart;
the centre cannot hold”), but reflectively used it is the beginning of understanding. Stewart Umphrey reviews the tensions
that arise in mathematics and the natural sciences between
analytic precision and comprehensiveness; the notes provide
helpful sketches of several formalizations of this dilemma,
two of which our seniors study: Gödel’s incompleteness
proof, showing that there is more in mathematics than proofs
can reach, and the Einstein-Podolski-Rosen argument that the
Heisenberg indeterminacy principle taken as a description of
the physical world is incomplete. One principal aspect of
what turns out to be the inherent paradox of analysis is thus
the Socratic problem: If you analyze an entity into, say, two
constituents, you’ve lost the one whole you were trying to
understand.
In the second chapter of this part, Aristotle’s metaphysics
is considered as a model display of the insufficiency of analysis. This presentation not only advances the agenda of the
book, it also enacts it: While showing why Aristotle has to
become “transanalytic” it attempts to understand his several
approaches (often made perspicuous in diagrams), and to
comprehend in one understanding his notion of natural
beings, of form and matter, essence and accidents, actuality
and potentiality, and of divine being—unsuccessfully, of
course. Anyone—all of us—who has ever wondered how
these perspectives jibe will find this exposition independently
illuminating.
“Complexity” describes the character of all thinkable and
interesting entities. (Recall the trouble Plato’s Parmenides
runs into in trying to think simple unity, the One.) The types
of entities are set out with respect to their constitution, from
the extremes of mere pluralities or heaps to undifferentiated
unities. In between are found the ones that matter: those with
definite components that are nevertheless real unities and
those that are real unities but with parts—subentities—not
discernible in analysis.
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Entities are now inventoried; facts, for instance, which
include relations or properties that seem to require a transanalytic “ontological glue” to hold them together with the
entity itself. Living individuals are particularly complex entities, and with respect to them we can’t help asking about their
center or essence, what each being really is. But the familiar
difficulty arises: The essence is what the individual is, but is it
one and the same with or other than the individual? In the
former case, knowing the essence adds nothing new to our
understanding; in the latter it yields nothing true about the
entity.
Individuals take up or partake in space, and so space must
be analyzed. Is it itself an entity, a whole? Are points its
“parts”? They certainly belong to the understanding of space,
but they are not its components. They are almost model
subentities; space is thus a complex entity with constituents
inseparable by analysis. The chapter on space is especially
interesting, not just as an acute dissection of the spatial features, but because space is the field of display for the non-analytic thinking that is needed to understand the subentitive
complexity which characterizes the wholes we most care
about. This kind of thinking is analogical. Analysis should, at
the least, give us clear and distinct components to go on with.
But while clarity belongs to the content of an entity, to its
own internal nature, distinctness pertains to its location, its
externally delimited place in “conceptual space.” Now the
discernible components of a complex entity are particularly
clearly and distinctly expressed in spatial representations
(such as the author draws in the Aristotle chapter and
throughout the book). But such spatial images also make visible indiscernible subentitive parts, for example points (see
below).
Why is spatial representation so illuminating? Because we
naturally analogize the mind itself to space—our spatial imagination is so close a neighbor to our intellect—and space is
the most potent field there is. Moreover, being itself transan-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
alytic, space is particularly apt for representing that kind of
complex entity.
Individuals also partake in universals through their
species. And universals in turn have similar problems: How is
the species a part of the universal? Is the universal genus composed of species? Then where’s the universal? So we again
have Socrates’ “One-out-of, or -over, or -beyond Many” perplexity. The author proposes yet another non-analytic kind of
understanding which he calls dialectical prismatics: If we
think of individuals (or species) as refractions of the universal, as white light is refracted into the color spectrum, then
we might, by looking through the prism backwards, so to
speak, sight the unitary source. Anyone trying to squint
through appearances at what is thinkable in them will recognize the experience of reverse prismatics.
In the section on universals (part of the chapter on entities) we may, moreover, discover that this member of our
community inclines toward “metaphysical realms of the ante
rem sort,” a fancy way of saying that ideas not only exist, but
exist both separately and before the world. But that’s
Platonic, glory be!
Next God is viewed prismatically and then negatively.
Like the reverse prism, the via negativa, seeing God through
what he’s not, is not analytic. The chapter on entities ends
with a section called “Everything,” for wisdom—which is
what philosophy is for—is the comprehensive understanding
of everything: whether all things form a whole and how, and
if not, why not. Extreme analysts, such as the logician Quine,
eliminate whatever it is that might make wholes of parts, such
as universals. They slash away whatever isn’t countable, as
the ultimate comprehensive unity certainly can’t be. They
wield what is here wittily called “Quine’s machete,” the crude
counterpart to “Ockham’s razor,” which deftly excises only
the truly unnecessary. Extreme “haplists” (from Greek haplous, “simple”), believers in a simply single being, like
Parmenides (though I don’t know another), think that there
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91
is one non-complex entity. Neither of their accounts is sufficiently accountable for what there is.
There follow three chapters on the ways of gaining
understanding that can supplement analysis. The chapter on
analogy, already mentioned, contains a sensible inquiry into
“likeness,” since analogy involves likeness; it is so much the
more welcome because some recent estheticians have pretty
much analyzed imitative resemblance away. The chapter ends
with precepts for the safe use of analogies. The one I take
most to heart is that philosophical analogies should be carefully framed as similes (“this is like that” rather than
metaphor (“this is that”), and that some of the dead
metaphors of our daily speech should be resurrected as
instructive similes. (My favorite is the contrastive pair
“eidos,” that which is like something seen, and “concept,”
that which is like something grasped.)
Dialectic is a second transanalytic way. Dialectic is a term
that has lived through many meanings. The author begins
with Hegelian dialectic. Again, here, apart from this book’s
agenda, is a good account of the main moments of this developmental logic, whose chief feature is that all the analytic
components are synthesized and reabsorbed into each other
and the whole. It is complemented by a critique, an inventory of the “myths” underlying its beginning, its progression, its
culmination, its very possibility for our thinking. A while ago,
Stewart Umphrey, Chester Burke, and I together read our
way—it took several years—through Hegel’s Science of Logic,
a great dialectical experience for all of us (which Stewart
kindly acknowledges); this critique revived for me our perplexities of long ago—now neatly marshaled.
The author then turns to the dialectic best known here at
the college: dialogue, conversation. “The soul of dialectic,”
he says, “is philosophy. Only secondarily are dialecticians
elenctic [refutational] wizards.” This kind of philosophical
reasoning does not dwell in beginnings or completions but
the in-between. It is both its own end (as a healthy activity)
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
and for a purpose (as the search for wisdom). He says much
more, of course, but the point is that dialectic implicitly
affirms the philosophic condition of incompleteness.
Finally there are the ways of negation. “Is it possible to
combine the metaphysical splendor of infinitistic realism
[faith in vague beings] with the epistemological refinement of
finitistic irrealism [unbelief in any imprecisely delimited entity]?” asks the author. “No,” he answers. “We’re caught then
between two opposing views, one of which appears decidedly pinched, the other decidedly vain.” Then follows a critique
of Kant’s transcendental dialectic, insofar as it means to show
that our deepest philosophic desires must remain forever
unmet because the dilemmas we burden ourselves with are
based on an illusion—that we can know things in themselves
apart from the constructions of our understanding. The
author shows precisely something that is eventually divined
by every student of Kant: the Critique of Pure Reason is perforce shot through with the very transcendence Kant wants to
cure. It is a book far more self-refuting and thus far more suggestive than the first laborious reading reveals.
Kantian naysaying having been analyzed, a praise of wonder and perplexity (carefully distinguished, of course) is
mounted in a final section on intuition. Here the impersonal
“one” gives way for some reason to the politically correct
“she”—an object lesson in the trickiness of that business,
since the attribution of intuition to women is, as it happens,
quite politically incorrect. I had to grin.
The third part consists of three enticing chapters,
Integrity, Ecstasy and Community: how human beings
become whole and how they transcend themselves as persons
and also as social beings.
The chapter on integrity culminates in a section about
“presence of mind,” a kind of undefined summary virtue capping the qualities of “reason, choice, character,” to which are
opposed “will, commitment, appetite, freedom.” I find
Stewart Umphrey’s preference for unity and integrity over
BRANN
93
plurality and disorder deeply agreeable; others may find it
usefully provocative. In any case presence of mind is the oldest intellectual virtue known to the West: wise Athena once
calls her darling Odysseus angchinoos, “present-of-mind.”
The chapter on ecstasy presents a sober analysis of ways
of going beyond oneself, especially in love; its conclusion
presents the union of integrity (wholeness) with transcendence (going beyond) in the “sober madness of philosophy.”
What is remarkable is that the careful descriptions and
distinctions of these human chapters really are applications.
They are the practical consequences of the preceding pure
theoretical thinking when brought to bear on living experience; they trace out incompleteness as a human condition.
The final chapter, on community, begins with the political, the “most authoritative,” human community. Within it
we work ourselves into integrity, out of it we pass beyond
ourselves. Careful consideration shows that although it is the
basic ground of our well-being, it is imperfect as a community. Friendship appears to be the realization of a paradigmatic
community. So an analysis of friendship is in order:
“Friendship is complex. It involves a relation that is usually
dyadic and always symmetrical”—so this ultimate topic is
broached with the formal precision and logical perspicuity of
the inveterate analyst who relishes his human reserve; I have
to smile even as I’m thinking along. But the logic eventually
yields to love, and, as I’ve said, the last two pages of this book
speak of the most intimate of human experiences.
�
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The St. John's Review
Volume XLVII, number one (2003)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
James Carey
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Justin Castle
The St. John's Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John's College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the
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poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John's College, P.O. Box 2800,
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at
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©2003 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�3
Contents
Essays and Lectures
Philosophy and Resurrection:
The Gospel According to Spinoza ................................. 5
John Cornell
What Tree is This?: In Praise of Europe's Renaissance
Printers, Publishers and Philologists ......................... ... 39
Chaninah Maschler
The Empires of the Sun and the West ... ....................... 83
Eva Brann
Plato's Timaeus and the Will to Order......... ........ .... .. 13 7
Peter Kalkavage
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
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i
Philosophy and Resurrection:
The Gospel according to
Spinoza
John F. Cornell
Many years ago, as a student in a course on philosophy, I
wrote the obligatory essay on David Hume's theory of causality, laying out his famous criticism of the principle of cause
and effect taken as a ground for metaphysical knowledge. I
gave my draft to a typist, as was common before the days of
computerized word processing. I recall my annoyance when I
received back the typed version of my paper on Hume's idea
of cause. The title read: "David Hume on Casual
Relationships." Now I understand that the Scottish philosopher enjoyed himself in the salons of Paris as much as any
foreign visitor, and that the new title had some potential as a
line of research. But that was not the paper I had written; and
so I had to insist that my typist correct a good hundred references to "casual connections" and the like, to express the
more philosophical affair of causality.
This correction of my academic essay recurred to me
recently in reading the books of Spinoza. It recurred to me
because this transformation of "casual" into "causal experience" seemed a perfect summary of the philosophical life as
Spinoza understood it. While Hume, the skeptic, saw our
minds' ideas somewhat as my typist had, with no great
distinction between the casual and the causal, Spinoza made
much of the difference. He taught that "casual experience,"
where things merely happen to us, is our lowest level of
awareness. If we do not wish to live and think merely at
random, we have to raise our minds above the accidents of
existence that have generated our opinions and pursue the
John Cornell is a tutor at the Santa Fe campus of St. John's College. This
essay was delivered as a lecture in Santa Fe in October 11, 2002.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
deeper reasons for things, the causal necessities inherent in
Nature . We have to replace our vague notions with what
Spinoza calls "adequate ideas," ideas manifesting their logical
power in the comprehensive order of thought.1 The distinction between casual and causal thinking thus marks for him
the two endpoints of the steep path that leads from mere
opinion or collective belief to wisdom.
The departure point of belief that Spinoza generally has
in mind is biblical religion. He holds that the foundation of
all adequate ideas is the idea of God. But he deems the stories
of the Bible to reflect a natural, in-adequate opinion about
deity and the divine rewards and punishments. The God
whose special providence in human history is described in
Scripture is a casually received notion answering to imagination. Spinozist philosophy, however, revises the idea of God,
understanding God as the one Substance conceived in and
through itself. He finds it necessary to revise other biblical
concepts, too-the "love of God," "divine decree," "blessedness," "salvation" and "true religion." Judaism and
Christianity take these ideas in an inadequate sense, whereas
his philosophy assigns them their proper meaning. Now we
know few details about the early thinking of Spinoza, which
led to his expulsion from the Synagogue in 1656. But we
might deduce that his original confrontation with orthodoxy
arose from his radical redefinition of religious language to
make its primary object purely philosophical.
Spinoza comes to rewrite the European treaty between
philosophy and faith on similar terms. He reverses the
doctrine of Thomas Aquinas that the truths of religion are
above human reason, and teaches that it is the philosopher
who knows true blessedness. What the religious believer
believes is a shadow of what the serious thinker thinks (53).
This teaching entails a unique, philosophical view of the
Gospel, which I shall try to explain by looking at Spinoza's
understanding of the idea of resurrection.
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In general, Spinoza's achievement resembles that of the
navigators who sought a new route to the East Indies and
incidentally discovered America. In the course of re-negotiating the relation of faith and philosophy, and arguing for the
separation of church and state, Spinoza incidentally founded
modern biblical criticism.2 Most scholarly explorations of the
Bible today take place on the spiritual continent that he
discovered. Yet what may be particularly significant for us in
the 21st century, as we study his view of the New Testament,
is the difference between him and present-day students of
Scripture. The difference lies in this paradox of Spinoza's
thought-that, as an interpreter of the Bible, he is more radical and rational than our contemporaries, but at the same
time he is a more considerate and humane advocate of biblical religion.
Spinoza and Present-day New Testament Scholars
I should begin by clarifying this claim about Spinoza's superiority. When one walks into an urban bookstore today, one
finds shelves upon shelves of books of the latest biblical
research, books disputing the Old and New Testaments as
creditable texts and traditions. Few of the more popular of
these writers hold anything sacred except what goes by the
name of "scientific history." On our topic, the rising from the
dead, we might find a book-length debate entitled Jesus'
Resurrection: Fact or Figment, or a video of a lecture with the
subtitle "The Greatest Hoax in History?" The blend of vulgarity and sophistication in these scholars is striking. But one
should also be on the lookout for the bad conscience betrayed
sometimes in their prose. For the majority of them are exreligionists who have not thought their way to any sound philosophy or even to a learned ignorance.3 As a result many of
them indulge guiltily in the destruction of traditional biblical
faith, while they themselves are unable to replace it with any
comparably profound vision of life, a vision that might continue to bind people to community and meaningful activity.4
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Spinoza, by contrast, writes the Theological-Political
Treatise in the Latin of the learned, and further specifies that
he only addresses philosophers. Even so, he is cautious about
disclosing his boldest thoughts. While driving his stake into
the heart of religious fanaticism (and this in the service of
religion), he refrains from explicit criticism of the founding
miracles of either Judaism or Christianity, the revelation to
Moses on Mt. Sinai or Jesus' Resurrection. Publicly he
respects these miracles as constitutive of particular religious
faiths. In human terms, what matters about the Resurrection
is not the literal fact of the event (which, as we'll see, Spinoza
does not believe). What matters is what the Resurrection
means spiritually and practically to people as an idea. This
distinction corresponds to the general distinction he makes
between the truth of the Bible as a factual account of the
world and what the text's language means (91)5. For Spinoza,
biblical science could establish the essential thing for faith,
the meanings of scriptural texts, which converge in their
moral message. But believers would be mistaken to try to
establish the factual truth of, say, the miraculous events in the
history of salvation (52, 85). Establishing truth always leads
to questions of a philosophical sort. Spinoza would have
considered our contemporaries, continually testing religious
"facts" (like Creation or the Resurrection) through scientific
research and debates, as rather too literal-minded-as misunderstanding the aims of both Scripture and science.6
What Spinoza thought decided the question of religion
vs. philosophy was not the persuasiveness of some research
but the attractiveness of a particular way of life (38). This is
a point that few present-day Bible scholars understand,
perhaps because they have not made such a choice and are
neither full-fledged philosophers nor whole-hearted believers. For Spinoza, as I said, philosophers are committed to
thinking beyond accepted beliefs to a comprehension of the
whole. But most people (including philosophers in their
youth) require the support that traditional belief gives their
�CORNELL
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efforts to live good lives. This distinction between the
philosopher and the believer-the distinction that today's
Bible scholars ignore-is important for the way it enters into
Spinoza's understanding of the New Testament and makes it
so exceptional. He holds that this distinction between the
freedom of philosophy and the natural necessity of religion is
the key to understanding Jesus. Jesus counts as a philosopher
precisely because his thinking was distinct from the religion
he taught (55,146,148). It is even reported by Spinoza's
confidant Ehrenfried von Tschirnhaus that Spinoza held Jesus
to be the "consummate philosopher." "Christum ait fuisse
summum philosophum. "7
Now one might object that such a view of the founder of
Christianity only shows Spinoza's bias. His enterprise is to
impose a naturalistic viewpoint upon the Bible and its
miracles. Of course he would project his own rationalistic
mind back onto Jesus, just as he overrates Solomon's wisdom
and Moses' political craft. Moreover, the objector might ask,
how do the rationalized heroes of Bible history that Spinoza
imagines result from his own rule of interpretation, of strictly adhering to the book? Yet Spinoza would remind his critic
that he defends the rights of reason against religion on scriptural grounds. He does not just reduce miracles through a
systematic naturalism. He argues that theology has made
more out of miracles than the Bible intended (78-79, 85-86) .
Europeans took the "miraculous," which is largely an idiom
in biblical poetry, as literal truth (17, 80-4).8 Spinoza's rules
for biblical interpretation only generalize this check on
anachronistic practices (89). So long as scholars proceed
through apt comparisons and with linguistic sensitivity, they
are free to interpret the Bible rationally and speculatively (57,
78, 82, 85, 92, 94-101, 158-9, 162-3). Spinoza's rule of
establishing scriptural teaching systematically from Scripture
itself is a guide for historical accuracy (86, 90-2), not an
excuse for literalism. He is far from underestimating the
Bible's intellectual power,9 and that is all his reading of Jesus
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
insists upon. Spinoza discerns a bold philosophical mind
behind the Gospel texts, bolder than theologians might imagine. He only conceals the full import of his view of Jesus, for
he has no desire whatsoever to disturb the beliefs of ordinary
believers. He would simply indicate to philosophical readers
that the Gospel's historic power is no miracle to one
acquainted with the power of philosophy. Today's "quest for
the historical Jesus," forever entangled in religious controversy, was not only anticipated by Spinoza but also concluded by him to his own satisfaction. Jesus was a thinkera thinker with a new program, as we shall see.
Jesus' New Idea of Salvation according to Spinoza
Let us look more closely at the Treatise with this problem of
Jesus in mind. At the foundation of the Treatise is a distinction between philosophical or causal knowledge of nature
and the knowledge revealed to the prophets that they teach
to everyone. Now bear in mind that the Treatise teaches that
all knowledge is divine, and that prophetic knowledge may
simply duplicate natural knowledge under another form (9).
That leaves us to wonder what the genuinely prophetic
knowledge is, that might be unexplainable in any natural
terms. This question will play a subtle role in Spinoza's
interpretation of Jesus-or "Christ," to use the name Spinoza
chooses. Only on one point will it turn out that Christ has
characteristically prophetic knowledge. I promise to come to
that shortly. The greatest part of Christ's wisdom is simply
natural. Spinoza teaches that God communicates to philosophical minds naturally without mediation, and that
Scripture exhibits Christ's communication with God to be
like that-a direct intellectual intuition, "mind to mind" (14 ).
Although Spinoza never puts it so bluntly, Christ appears to
be specifically a Spinozist philosopher, since he assigns Christ
the indispensable credentials for philosophy according to
Spinoza's other writings. Christ perceived the things revealed
to him truly and adequately and he taught these things, at
�CORNELL
11
least to his disciples, as eternal truths rather than as laws
designed for the good of human beings (55-6).
Now, in declaring Christ's knowledge to be "true and
adequate," Spinoza refers us to Jesus' parables of the kingdom and to Matthew 13 in particular. Here Spinoza hit the
bull's-eye. In Matthew 13, Jesus addresses to the crowd parables of "things hidden since the foundation of the world."
Then, taking the disciples to private quarters, he restates the
speech, but with subtle verbal omissions and substitutions. It
can be argued-though we will not do so here-that this private speech of Jesus on what he calls scandal explains the
essential enmity that motivates the behavior of groups and
individuals.lO Spinoza's claim for Jesus' higher knowledge has
good scriptural support.ll The Gospel actually shows Jesus
adapting an obscure wisdom to the unschooled multitude
(55).
Spinoza thus discovers in Christ not a Savior sent to take
away the sins of humankind-at least not in the mysterious
theological sense-but a sage attempting to enlighten the
mass of humanity. Similarly, Spinoza wonders about the
import of certain remarks by the apostle Paul. Why does Paul
regularly state in his epistles that he is adapting his language
for ordinary human comprehension? Why does he say openly that it is not possible to say everything openly? Why does
Paul speak of having the mind of Christ, referring ambiguously to a spirit of knowledge as well as to a more encompassing spiritual renewal? (56) Much takes place in the New
Testament, in Spinoza's view, as if Jesus and some of his
disciples spoke the scriptural language of redemption as an
idiom to capture the imagination of the Gentile world without the world being able to realize just how ambiguous that
idiom might be.
Now at the heart of the Bible's mission to the Gentiles is
the teaching of "true virtue." Spinoza considers the demonstration of the "divinity" of Scripture to hang upon the truth
of its moral doctrine (90). But let us beware. Since all knowl-
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
edge is divine, the Bible's "divinity" can prove nothing about
its special, supernatural source. Moreover if, as Spinoza
insists, the study of the Bible only yields what its language
means and not the truth of what it says, then only a philosopher can demonstrate its divinity through its true moral
doctrine. For only the philosopher can compare biblical
teaching to a true account of morality-like Spinoza's Ethics,
which derives the social virtues from first principles (51,
58).12 The Treatise proceeds as if the divinity of Scripture
were established by anyone and from Scripture alone, since
Scripture has to tell us what its idea of true virtue is (90). But
this procedure only tests the reader's mettle. Spinoza also
teaches that how much the reader sees into the truth of the
Bible, as truth, depends on how much reason there is in the
reader (101). Later he turns this question of the method of
discerning biblical truth into a question about the historical
origin of that truth in reason. The Apostles themselves, he
tells us, depended on a related method of rational deductions.
He says darkly that they drew many conclusions from whatever Christ revealed to them, and that they could well have
disclosed a few things but they declined to do so (146) .13
Now surely the apostles and prophets could not have
relied upon pure reason for their doctrine of God. For, in
teaching humanity about God's Providence, they attribute to
God affections such as love and forgiveness; whereas unaided philosophical reason cannot recognize the attribution of
feeling to God (166-7). Thus the teaching about God's care,
which is indispensable to the moral effort of most everyone,
reaches people through sacred Writ. Yet, according to
Spinoza, the Bible's view of Providence is not definite. He
claims that the Bible does not teach "formally" in what way
precisely God cares for all those who worship him and
practice good works (93). Scripture allows for both a popular idea of God's relation to humanity and a purely rational
idea (163). God may be taken as the exemplar of good life
because he has a just disposition (popular conception), or
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because we see by means of God what is true and just (philosophical conception). God may direct human affairs by giving
commandments or by letting some men discover natural laws
as "eternal truths" (168, cf. 56).
Now if knowledge of the way God directs the world is
not the specialty of the prophets, is not the distinctive knowledge for which we can rely on them, then what is their claim
to superior vision? Spinoza's answer-which he has presupposed throughout his discussion-is given in Chapter 15. The
essential prophetic insight is this, that those without understanding may be saved-the salvation of the ignorant.
Scripture not only teaches true virtue and obedience to all
human beings, whether they are philosophers or not, but it
also teaches that everyone may be saved. People without any
genuine understanding, indeed people with mistaken ideas
(say, about how Providence really works), if they practice
charity and justice, can achieve blessedness. Now the reader
of the Treatise must be aware that in Chapter 4 Spinoza
defines "blessedness" as the knowledge of God. Our true
salvation, our "supreme good" is philosophical knowledge, of
which God is the totality (51-2). So serious is Spinoza about
the philosopher's blessedness, that at one point he identifies
the Holy Spirit itself as the rational spirit of truth, regardless
even of how the prophets and historians of the Scriptures
expressed or experienced it (95). But in Chapter 15, he
redefines the Holy Spirit in a way that takes it to be clearly
accessible to all, not just to philosophers or the God-filled
prophets. Here he calls the Holy Spirit the peace of mind
resulting from "good actions" (177). On this view everyone,
even people with no learning at all, may be "saved."
From page one of the Treatise Spinoza has assumed an
uncompromising philosophical standpoint in looking at the
Bible. Wisdom for him is the gold standard of "salvation." In
Chapter 15 he presents almost as a philosophical curiosity the
idea that people without wisdom can be "saved." But this
curiosity happens to constitute the distinguishing feature of
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
biblical revelation (175-77). And such a feature of revelation
must affect, in particular, Spinoza's account of Christianity, as
Christianity is a teaching addressed to all humankind. Now if
we turn back to Chapter 1, and to that one point on which
(as I said earlier) Christ's knowledge surpassed ordinary
philosophy, I believe we shall see how Spinoza implicated
Christ in this business of the salvation of the ignorant:
A man who can perceive by pure intuition that
which is not contained in the basic principles of
our cognition and cannot be deduced therefrom
must needs possess a mind whose excellence far
surpasses the human mind. Therefore I do not
believe that anyone has attained such a degree of
perfection surpassing all others, except Christ. To
him God's ordinances leading men to salvation
were revealed, not by words or by visions, but
directly (14)
Now the attribution to Christ of an intuition of what is not
encompassed by human cognition surely makes Christ superhuman. So one might have thought. But there is a verbal subtlety here, which the English translations obscure. Spinoza's
text does not use the term "human" as a positive description
of "mind," except in this passage. Instead, it plainly states
early on that "mind," meaning the thinker's experience of
certitude, is divine (1 0). Hence saying that Christ has a mind
"far surpass[ing] the human mind" does not place Christ
above philosophers. In fact, when Spinoza first uses this
expression, "far surpassing" (Ionge excellentiore),14 it is to say
that all mental intuition surpasses by far our grasp of words
(10). The only superiority Spinoza grants to Christ is one of
degree-as this translation has it, he "attained such a degree
of perfection." Spinoza goes on to specify that Christ received
by direct intuition "the ordinances leading men to salvation"
(14 ). This is a valuable clue to Christ's particular excellence,
but the reader cannot appreciate it until he or she reads later,
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in Chapter 15, that the one biblical idea above philosophy is
the salvation of people who are ignorant but righteous (174).
Retrospectively the implication is clear. Christ's "higher"
intuition, formerly unknown to philosophy, was the insight
that confirmed and expanded the prophets' teaching
(cf. 224). Christ saw that all ignorant but righteous people in
the world could be saved.15
The reader who discerns Spinoza's hypothesis about
Christ must apply it to a rereading of the Treatise in order to
realize its full implication. Spinoza claims Jesus for philosophy because he sees him as universalizing the Hebraic mission
of saving the unlearned (79). He sees him as recasting biblical
beliefs so that they apply to every soul independently of political context-inspiring in all people a faithful way of life that
resembles the conduct of the wise (161). Spinoza hints in
chapters 4, 5 and 11 that Jesus' popular teaching was a philosophical contrivance (55, 67-8, 146), and in chapter 13 that
such a contrivance was not in fact unknown to the prophets
(158, 169). Then in chapter 14 he derives by rational deductions a popular religion-including the indispensable but
non-philosophical precepts about God's love and forgiveness-a religion that happens to correspond to the Gospel. In
this religion, he says, a believer whose heart is inspired by the
love of God "knows Christ according to the spirit" (167).
The faithful person can "know" Christ without actually
participating (like the philosopher) in Christ's knowledge.
Spinoza's points all add up. Jesus reasoned out a general,
interior gospel on the conviction that the ignorant could be
saved. He taught what all people should do and believe in
order to experience an inward blessedness like that of the
philosopher (177)16.
A tentative sketch of the founder of Christianity as
Spinoza saw him begins to come into focus. While both the
Hebrew prophets and the philosophers of late antiquity had
glimpsed the possibility of improving human accord and thus
the fortunes of wisdom in the world, pagan polytheism had
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
presented a general obstacle. For it inspired only a shallow
piety in the multitude and never commanded the social
virtues. But a sage like Jesus, arising amidst the people of the
one righteous Lord, might abstract the great moral lessons of
the prophets and broadcast them in order to pursue several
great objectives (94, 224). First, to try to preserve the spirit
of Israel, as Israel would find herself dispersed increasingly
through the Roman Empire. Second, to expose the Empire as
a mere secular authority despite its cult of divine emperors.
And third, to awaken in the Gentile world a desire for spiritual blessings and a collective life more compatible with
reason. The heart of the new program was the simplified
creed that taught the salvation of all people. But if this
general salvation was opaque to most philosophers, Spinoza
saw far enough into the Gospel to recommend it from a
powerfully practical viewpoint (17 6). For, properly understood, the Gospel would help foster the conditions of enlightenment, both for philosophers and for the multitudes, in this
world, in generations to come.17
The difficulty for us in grasping Spinoza's account of
Christianity lies not just in conceiving a Jesus with a rational
program for humanity. The difficulty also lies in imagining
Spinoza's approach to the New Testament. Unlike most of us,
he was learned in all the great Jewish literature. He did not
begin with the assumption that the Gentile Christian theologians knew best how to read Gospels and Epistles that were
written by Jews in a Hebraic style (90, 100). Himself in
possession of older and subtler practices of interpretation, he
viewed later Christian theology as translating the Bible's
extravagant poetry into dogmatic absurdities (16-21, 89).
When Spinoza conceived Jesus as a sage who taught a popular salvation, he by no means thought he flouted the account
of Jesus in the Gospel. Here is where a closer look at the
theme of resurrection may be illuminating. A philosophical
inquiry into Christianity can hardly ignore its central miracle,
though, as I mentioned, the Treatise does just that.18 Yet in a
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private letter we find Spinoza's view that the Resurrection is
not an actual physical event, but rather a powerful idea suited to the general imagination. For him the "true" resurrection
is salvation through philosophy, which is the topic of his
book, the Ethics. So our next step is to become acquainted
with his thinking about resurrection in these other texts.
Then we can test the adequacy of that thinking by trying to
read the Gospel from Spinoza's standpoint, seeing if the
Gospel treats the theme of resurrection at all compatibly with
his theories. The second half of this essay will therefore take
up two questions. What is salvation through philosophy for
Spinoza such that the believer's faith in the Resurrection
could stand in for it? Can we find in the Gospel Spinoza's
Christ, a philosopher who preaches the Resurrection as the
means of saving the unlearned? Let us try to be open to
Spinoza's boldest thoughts.
Philosophical and Popular Salvation in Spinoza
We saw in the Treatise that, to explain divine Providence,
Spinoza distinguished a popular idea from a philosophical
one. The popular mind imagines God caring for people like
an attentive, invisible parent. Spinoza's Ethics spells out that
this conception is a reflex of the believer's emotional needs.
These may evolve into the desire to find special favor with
God, to search out the divine will so as to be on the winning
side. Philosophy, the Ethics explains, has a more sublime
conception - an adequate idea of God. From experiences like
that of intuitive certainty in mathematics,19 it envisions the
divine intellect as working by necessity. God who lacks nothing desires nothing. He predetermines things without willing
or aiming at them: to have purposes would betoken imperfection. Hence God does not make extrinsic objects. He
expresses his infinite power into Nature-expresses it through
his attributes, which are dynamic like verbs, rather than static properties like adjectives.20 God is ceaselessly entering into
everything. Such is Spinoza's view, and the philosophical view
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
that he suspects lay behind the Hebrew scriptures (though
they have come down to us in a corrupted condition).21
Spinoza denies to human sentiment the satisfactions that
the God of tradition afforded, but he purports to give no
small compensation. The adequate idea or the "intellectual
love of God" sublimates the old feeling for divinity and
raises it above deception. It needs no sanction outside itself.
From blind obedience we turn to a dynamic vision of eternal
truth, according to which everything moves by causal necessities-including human beings. Over against this cosmic
necessity, the categories of the human moral world-praise
and blame, merit and sin-appear as inadequate opinions
with no power beyond our conventions (d. 49). In the universe at large the human moral perspective is a small affair,
like the interests of the salamander or the fly. Philosophers in
pursuit of self-understanding seek a connection with the larger Whole. They look suspiciously not upon the passions, as
the moralists do, but upon the moralists' self-centered ideas
about attaining the Good. Indeed the moralists' doctrine of
free will is misleading. Free will describes only our ignorance
of the causes that move us as we experience our own striving.
Philosophers prefer to search out the unconscious causes of
desire and envy. They would look upon passion without
passion, and transform it into the higher pleasure of interpreting it. In the end, if their conduct surpasses the ethical
standard of the city, it is because they are moved by reason's
deepest necessities.
Relieved of the illusory notion of the will, the philosopher is little aggravated by other people's "willfulness."
Others' offenses, like everything in the world, have causes,
the understanding of which robs them of their power to
offend.22 What we take to be a nuisance or an evil, Spinoza
says in the Ethics,
arises from the fact that [we] conceive these things
in a disturbed, mutilated, and confused manner:
and on this account (the strong human being]
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endeavors to conceive things as they are in themselves, and to remove obstacles from true knowledge.23
The so-called "problem of evil" is dispelled like vapor. It
arose simply by mistaking God for a human mind and mistaking human minds for separate, free agents. The philosopher meditates on the general causes of things and declines to
take the cosmos so personally.
Spinoza admits the existence of freedom in one sense.
Namely, freedom as the escape from ignorance that begins
when one is disencumbered of the very notion of evil. A
proposition in the Ethics states, "If men were born free, they
would form no conception of good or evil as long as they
were free." (4.48) But we are not born free, because instead
of wisdom and judgment we acquire opinions about good and
evil. We are conditioned and motivated by others' emotions;
we are ingrained in the fear of death. We "fall" into mere
nature-this is the mythical expression-we descend to an
inferior psychic state where every pain and anxiety is designated an "evil." Spinoza is actually re-interpreting Genesis in
a non-moral sense, as a note to this proposition spells out:
Thus it is related that God prohibited free man
from eating of the tree of knowledge of good and
evil, and that as soon as he ate of it, at once he
began to fear death rather than to desire to live;
again, when man found woman, who agreed most
perfectly with his own nature, he knew that there
could be nothing in nature more useful to him; but
that afterwards, when he thought that the brute
creation were similar to himself, he began at once
to imitate their emotions and lost his freedom,
which the Patriarchs under the guidance of the
spirit of Christ, that is, the idea of God, afterwards
recovered: on this idea alone it depends that man
should be free, and that he should desire for other
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20
men the good which he desires for himself. (cf. 5457)24
Spinoza is saying that latent in every human being is the adequate idea of God or (as he calls it here) the "spirit of Christ."
Whatever our individual histories, the realization of that ideal
of wisdom would be a release from fear and obsession, from
passivity and the irrational imitation of others. What does
this Spinozist liberation look like?
Before proceeding to answer this question by further
glossing Spinoza's Ethics, I should cite the crucial statement
he makes in a letter about Christ's Resurrection. In a way it
contains our answer. For Spinoza the Resurrection is an
incontrovertibly profound symbol (cf. 83, 95). It describes for
all minds the shift in a person's spiritual center of gravity
from the self to the presence of God in the self. Remember:
the special virtue of prophecy and religion is to teach everyone, which philosophy as philosophy fails to do.
I ... conclude [Spinoza writes] that the resurrection
of Christ from the dead was really spiritual, and
was revealed only to the faithful in a way adapted
to their thought, namely that Christ had been
endowed with eternity and rose from the dead
(here I understand the dead in the sense in which
Christ did when he said, "Let the dead bury their
dead"), and also by his life and death gave an
example of extraordinary holiness, and that he
raises his disciples from the dead, in so far as they
follow the example of his life and death. And it
would not be difficult to explain the whole teaching of the Gospel in accordance with this hypothesis. (emphasis added)25
Spinoza goes on to say (and with reason) that Paul's arguments in 1 Corinthians 15 agree with him that the
Resurrection is spiritual.26 However Jesus' immediate disciples may have experienced his Resurrection, its spiritual
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essence was his being "endowed with eternity." He rose from
the dead in the sense of rising gloriously above the living
death that people accept as human life, and the disciples truly
rise from the dead when they follow Jesus' example.27 The
"fact" of the Resurrection is the spiritual event effected by
faith. Faith makes the faithful person active and able to fulfill
a higher vocation in joy.
Now to return to Spinoza's Ethics. It traces out a hereand-now "resurrection" on the plane of rational metaphysics.
(Again I must reduce the argument to simple steps.) The idea
of every person exists in God.28 Initially an individual has but
an inkling of it. What one calls one's "self" is largely one's
body's idea, one's ego we might say today, defined and affected by other people's egos,29 One's eternal essence remains
impersonal and unrealized. But rational people derive from
the adequate idea of God other adequate ideas about how the
soul functions. They learn to transform the affects that are
passions, incited in the social entanglement of inadequate
ideas, into affects associated with the joy of self-understanding,30 Spinoza's is a philosophy of endeavor: the endeavor to
be who one truly is, is the activity of God within.31 As
individuals reinforce their true being with whatever outside
them enhances it, they move by degrees toward intellection
of their true natures-as if a special Providence were guiding
them,32 Thus the self as an essence understood increases at
the expense of the inadequate idea held by the empirical self.
The individual's irreducible, original essence-at one time
impersonal and unrealized-is gradually personalized and
eternalized.33 In an early sketch of the Ethics, Spinoza called
this arrival at self-knowledge a rebirth-echoing the Gospel
of John.34 The rationally enlightened person is thus like the
man born blind in that Gospel, who washes away the mud
and begins to see. He can now say meaningfully, "It is 1." Or
to be precise, he says, "I am," ego eimi Uohn 9:10, cf. 6:20).
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Resurrection as Philosophical Allegory in the Gospel of John
Now let us turn to John's Gospel, to chapter 11 on the raising of Lazarus, to test the plausibility of Spinoza's conception
of Christ and resurrection from the biblical side. Spinoza
himself took Lazarus as a test case. According to Pierre Bayle,
the French philosopher who lived in Rotterdam, Spinoza told
his friends that "if he had been able to convince himself of the
resurrection of Lazarus, he would have broken his system
into pieces."35 Perhaps Spinoza was implying that the Gospel
itself did not really try to convince him of a literal resuscitation of a dead man. For John's story of Lazarus is extremely
odd and provokes a series of questions in the inquiring reader. Indeed, since the early Church Fathers the story of Lazarus
has sometimes been taken as an allegory.36 For no one had
found this Lazarus, the alleged friend of Jesus, in any other
ancient source,37 John may well have invented him. Such
invention is called midrash, the Jewish practice of elaborating
tales on Biblical ideas. Spinoza assumes this practice in his
general account of the Bible and recognizes the special role
midrash had in generating the Gospels (21, 146-7).38 For him
the Christian scriptures were characteristic products of the
Hebrew genius,39 for which the notion of history never
excluded fiction and poetic play. Each Gospel writer had pursued freely his own original method of teaching (147). Paul
had not hesitated to lead the Christian movement, having
fetched inspiration from the mere echo of Jesus' words.
Spinoza's awareness of the evangelical imagination made him
audacious about reinterpreting the New Testament texts; but
this audacity comes out in reference to few specific
passages.40 We cannot say exactly how he read John's text
about Lazarus. Nor can we pretend to offer this text's "true"
meaning on objective grounds. (As Spinoza knew, when it
comes to the speculative reading of Scripture, there are no
rigorous proofs.41) But we can develop a rough idea of how
a philosopher might read this resurrection episode in John.
We can try to "explain" the chapter on Lazarus as Spinoza
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suggested in the letter I cited-according to the "hypothesis"
that the whole Gospel takes resurrection to be a spiritual
awakening rather than a literal event.
Clearly John 11 teaches that resurrection follows from
belief in Jesus (11:25). But reading it as a factual account of
Jesus' power to revive a corpse does run into a paradox. For
how would any factual proof of such power over nature be
consistent with belief? Moreover, readers cannot come to
believe in Jesus and the Resurrection the way the characters
in the story do, for these latter are on the scene for the miracle. Perhaps we should first ask, what exactly is the miracle?
The very premise of the story, the fact of Lazarus' physical
death, is made ambiguous from the start. Jesus says Lazarus is
not sick with the sickness one dies from.42 When Jesus later
mentions Lazarus's "death," it is following a metaphorical
speech about spiritual deadness. It is his disciples' dullness
that takes the "death" of the living literally. Then, we note
that Lazarus' sisters suggest that his "death" is a result of jesus
not being there with him, the absence that the text dramatizes by having Jesus not go to Lazarus when he hears of his "illness" (11:6). The text becomes coherent if we posit (after
Spinoza) that Lazarus's illness-not-unto-death is metaphysical, like the ailment we call the "human condition"-the universal affliction of the "absence of God."43 This illness would
still be "for the glory of God," as Jesus says (11:4). Only
the glory here would be the "awakening" that follows a
person's experience of absolute loss and disillusionment. As
Spinoza observed, death in the Bible is a metaphor for life
lived in anxiety about all sorts of evils. Resurrection is the
higher identity a person attains that overcomes this attitude
(Mt 8:22, Jn 5 :25).
This metaphorical reading agrees well with Psalm 82,
which Jesus cites in John immediately before we hear about
Lazarus. In fact, the Psalm teaches a view of Genesis something like Spinoza's. All humans are gods, children of the
Most High, but all are living under the reign of mortality.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
According to the psalm, the weak and needy go about in
darkness, without knowledge, whereas those who should be
enlightened have done little to help humankind. Is this the
human situation that Jesus remedies, allegorically, in John
11? When Jesus proposes to go to Lazarus in Judaea, the
disciples-most un-philosophically-declare their fear of
death: they all might be killed with Jesus on the way. Jesus
replies with a metaphor inspired by the psalm: they have to
learn to walk in the night by the light within (11: 10;
Ps. 82:5). He adds that Lazarus "sleeps," associating Lazarus
with these disciples who are in the dark. Ironically, Jesus'
hints are lost on the disciples who take his speech literally. For
such as them, Lazarus' death and their visit to his tomb must
be literal events. But if we understand Lazarus' "death" and
"illness" to refer to one and the same condition, then the
story takes place in a beautiful figurative sense. Jesus calls
Lazarus by name out of the cave of the unconscious; he
enjoins the crowd to unbind him, so that he can emerge as an
individual.44 Note that not all of the disciples are left out of
the language game surrounding Lazarus' uncertain "death."
For Thomas the twin-the double man-responds with a
double meaning of his own to Jesus' proposal to go to
Judaea.45 He says "Let us go and die with him," obscuring
whether he means literally to die with Jesus, or figuratively to
die and be raised with Lazarus. So the chapter plays upon the
ambiguity of what is literal and what is literature. Thus it
unfolds on two planes simultaneously, addressing different
readers in their different needs.
Prominent among the needs of most readers is the need
for a God (like Jesus ought to be) who does not leave human
beings in the lurch. Notice, almost everyone in John's story
complains about the evil of Jesus letting Lazarus die. Martha
is the first. This wouldn't have happened, she says, if Jesus
had been here. Mary follows suit: her accusation is the first
thing out of her mouth. Finally the crowd chimes in with the
complaint against Jesus-like a chorus in a Greek tragedy,
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always a little late but nonetheless helpful in stating the
theme. For the crowd fully generalizes the grievance against
Jesus. They ask (with unintended irony), couldn't the man
who opened the eyes of the blind have kept poor Lazarus
from dying? Spinoza would detect in that complaint all the
anxiety that people have named the problem of evil (1-2).
Why did God let such and such tragedy happen? Martha, in
her grief, hints at the possibility of a miracle. The
Resurrection on the Last Day, she implies, is not doing much
for her or her brother now! So Jesus tells her (ambiguously),
I am the Resurrection and the Life who does indeed "work"
right now. People need assurance of God's willing compensations for the felt evils of the world. And Jesus gives them what
they ask.
How the "miracle" of raising the dead works-how Jesus
helps people overcome their passive devastation by the
world-seems to be indicated in a curious passage. Martha
goes to Mary to say the Master calls her, and Mary immediately "rises." But as far as the reader knows, Jesus may or may
not have called her as Martha claims. On the textual facts
alone, Mary's getting up is an effect of pure faith that she is
personally called. Is this not the faith that Spinoza says lifts
people out of their misery? Twice it is said that Mary
"rises"-once using the same Greek word as is used for
Lazarus' rising (anistemi: 11:23). The second time the crowd
watches her rise up-an even plainer adumbration of the
Lazarus "miracle." This superfluous vignette is not so
superfluous if we see it as a genuine miniature of the Lazarus
drama-a play within the play, reflecting the very power of
belief that the larger story calls upon. In other words, the text
is self-conscious. It points to its own concern to move people
in their secret depths (11 :28) in accord with their idea of a
personal God.
Yet this is not the only moment when John's text affords
us a higher perspective on his miracle play of Lazarus. As the
people remove the stone from Lazarus' tomb, and Jesus is
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
about to call him forth, he makes a not too subtle aside.
"Father, I thank you, that you have heard me. And I know
that you always hear me, but because of the crowd (ton
ochlon) who are standing by I said this, that they may believe
that you sent me." Here Jesus is certainly not addressing the
crowd, and not the Father who always hears and hardly needs
to be addressed aloud. There must be another, self-selecting
audience for these remarks. Jesus distinguishes between his
speaking for the crowd, for the sake of their belief, and his
speaking more frankly what he knows. Implicitly, he distinguishes between the apparent "miracle," and the eternal
presence of God, the fully "awakened" state to which he calls
Lazarus. But the crowd hears Jesus' prayer as expressing
gratitude for filling their need. They need, he says, to believe
that God sent him-sent him (no doubt} to display God's care
in a more dramatic way.46 The evangelist has made Jesus
rupture the realistic surface of the very story he is in, and
indicate to the attentive reader that the miraculous fiction
itself follows from his charitable mission to teach everyone.
In sum, a reader might see in the story of the resurrection
of Lazarus a spiritual allegory and-more than that-a tale of
the sage instructing appropriately both the learned and the
unlearned in the faith that will elevate them. If one is willing
to run the risk of reading the Gospel philosophically, one may
find it surprisingly consistent with Spinoza's hypothesis, that
Jesus was a wise man who, in making wisdom accessible to
all, was obliged to make it speak in widely different ways.
Summary: Spinoza and Christianity
Spinoza's account of Christianity resulted from the extraordinary combination of his Jewish learning, his passion for
philosophy, and the historical crisis to which he responded.
Following the civil wars and religious violence of the 16th and
17th centuries, it was apparent that Christianity in the West
was in jeopardy as a civilizing force. The aftermath of the
Reformation raised a fundamental question about the relation
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of traditional theology to the political order. Spinoza's
answer was officially to excise truth from the religious
sphere-to destroy the zeal for mere "true belief," the varieties of which were tearing European states apart-but to
preserve for humanity the Bible's teachings of justice and
charity.
This emphasis on the Bible's moral teachings, however,
did not prevent him from asking why these teachings agreed
with the truths of pure reason, or what pure thinking was
behind biblical texts. In this Spinoza made the learned
assumption that biblical language, like much poetry,
contained a surrogate knowledge (21,53,95). A philosophical
mind (expressing God's self-activity} might liberate from the
parables and fictions of Scripture their deeper truths.47 Given
this philosophic stance toward the Bible, and the dogmatic
conflicts of Christianity in Spinoza's day, the paradox of the
Theological Political Treatise follows. The Treatise officially
separates religion from philosophy, and insists that the Bible
does not teach speculative reasoning. 48 But at the same time
the Treatise indicates a passage from biblical faith to wisdom.
As the Scriptures occasionally associated their own teaching
with wisdom, Spinoza had only to associate wisdom in turn
with the Scriptures. The result was his use of a pious vocabulary to describe the philosopher's inner life, his express
reverence for Solomon and Jesus the sage, and his doctrine of
the salvation of the unlearned, behind which lay the idea that
belief in resurrection approximated the philosopher's identification with divine mind. To readers today, these ambiguities of Spinoza are puzzling in the extreme. But by such
ambiguities he left open for future philosophers the path he
had traveled in his own thinking. He left open the possibility
of overstepping religion with the implicit sanction of religion
itself, of moving from faith to philosophy without rancor or
guilt.49
The siren call of philosophy makes modern intellectual
adherents of the Bible anxious. If they remain faithful to their
�28
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
religion, it is often by flirting with nihilism or skepticism
at the same time. Since Pascal they have argued that our
choices are either to subjugate the intellect to the mystery of
revelation or to wander aimlessly in a futile search after
meaning (cf. 171-2). They hardly dream that the Bible itself
might "save" anyone by confirming one in the life of reason.
But Spinoza looked at the Bible differently. He suspected that
some of its authors had faced the problems of despair and of
disappointment in divine Providence (78, 222), and had
wrestled with the problems of existence no less bravely than
the classical schools of wisdom (5). Such biblical authors simply expressed their spiritual discoveries in inspiring and philanthropic ways. As for Jesus, he was the "consummate
philosopher" because he not only knew in himself the way to
blessedness, the "natural light" that the philosophers would
always follow (cf. John 11:10), but also found a general path
for all those who could not travel the philosophers' dangerous road. If the learned grasped the Bible's intentions,
Spinoza thought, they would see that the salvation of the
ignorant was in fact their own salvation, too. For the learned
would no longer be lost in scholastic quarrels arising from a
confusion of the Bible's pedagogy with metaphysical theory,
and in compensation they would find new "meaning" both in
the literary depth of the scriptural text and in the humane
guidance of others. The political order was therefore not
doomed. The ethics of happiness might be acquired by the
multitudes and, over generations, the number of those
coming to wisdom might increase. It all depended on whether
wisdom presented itself wisely. It depended on the solicitude
of the learned toward the learners.so
Near the end of John's Gospel is an episode with Thomas
the Twin, who challenges the disciples' story that the Risen
Jesus came and spoke to them. He is struck in their account
by Jesus' showing them his hands and his side, as if this selfdisplay carried some special meaning. Only if Thomas sees
and touches these wounds, he tells his friends, will he believe.
�CORNELL
29
Days later, the group (along with Thomas) is visited again in
its sealed rooms. Jesus specifically addresses the skeptical disciple and invites him to touch his wounds. The text indicates
no such move on Thomas' part. It thus underscores what
Jesus says next, that Thomas believes because he has seen
him, using the word horao-"to see"-which in John's text
includes the divine act of knowing.51 Jesus adds, Thomas
should recognize that others too are blessed, though they
believe without "seeing."52 Now a philosophical reader,
understanding "seeing" as a metaphor for knowing, may
detect in Jesus' remarks about blessed belief the Spinozist idea
of the salvation of those without knowledge. Such a reader
might therefore entertain the ironic possibility that Jesus'
rebuke of philosophy conceals some philosophy, and that
what Thomas beheld with the eye of knowledge, apart from
his friends, is the essential question implied in the story. Did
Thomas know Jesus as the one who scorned every apparent
evil and thus overcame the world? Or, to express it in the
text's figurative language, did Thomas know Jesus as the one
who through his very wounds attained his eternal identity?
The story quietly approves some such conjecture. Yet it does
not, as a story, offer certitude. Hence the Spinozist reader
receives the same cautionary lesson as Thomas. He must
respect the belief of believers in the literal Resurrection, as
the way in which God has made manifest to them their tie
with eternity.53
Acknowledgement: The author expresses his gratitude to
many generous colleagues who gave valuable advice in the
development of this essay: Karina Gill, Ned Walpin, Brendan
Laselle, David Bolotin, Linda Wiener, Daryl Koehn, Barry
Goldfarb, David Levine, Michael Golluber, Tucker Landy,
Janet Dougherty, & Caleb Thompson.
�30
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Notes
1 Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, translated as
The Way to Wisdom by Herman De Dijn (West Lafayette, Indiana:
Purdue University Press, 1996), pp. 21-25, and 115 on experientia
vaga; and Ethics 2, P 40, Note 2. All Ethics citations are from the
A. Boyle translation of Spinoza's Ethics and De Intellectus
Emendatione, with an introduction by T. S. Gregory (London: J. M.
Dent & Sons, 1959).
2 Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1990), p. 112.
3 Some
examples of the New Testament scholars' true belief in "critical progress" and their innocence of philosophy may be found in
Studying the Historical Jesus: Evaluations of the State of Current
Research, Bruce Chilton and Craig Evans, ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1994), e.g. pp. 253, 270.
As examples of scholars who have popularized their work, yet have
vague misgivings about it, see John Dominic Crossan imagining
himself having to account to Jesus for his research, in Jesus: A
Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: Harper, 1994), p. xiv; and
Marcus Borg, jesus: A New Vision (San Francisco: Harper Collins,
1991) who feels he must "recover the vision of Jesus" for the sake
of "church and culture" (p. 17), but can only serve up some lame
cliches about "spirit."
4 Karl Jaspers raised similar concerns half a century ago. See his
debate with Rudolf Bultmann in Myth and Christianity: An Inquiry
into the Possibility of Religion without Myth (New York: Noonday
Press, 1958), pp. 51-53.
Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, Samuel Shirley trans.
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1998). These and all page
references in the text refer to this edition (and differ in other printings).
5
6 Cf. Roy Hoover, "A Contest between Orthodoxy arid Veracity," in
Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment (Downers Grove, Ill.:
InterVarsity Press, 2000), pp. 124-146.
7 Die Leibniz-Handschriften der Koniglichen offentlichen Bibliothek
zu Hannover, ed. Eduard Bodemann, (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1966),
�CORNELL
31
p. 103. The authenticity of Leibniz' note recording Spinoza's conversation is little contested today. See Xavier Tilliette, Le Christ de
Ia Philosophie (Paris: Cerf, 1990), p. 72. See also Richard Mason,
The God of Spinoza: a philosophical study (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), p. 212; Richard Popkin, "Spinoza and
Biblical Scholarship" in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed.
Don Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
p. 401; Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano
of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 236,
n. 4. Granted, contemporary biblical scholarship recognizes that
Jesus is steeped in the Jewish wisdom tradition. See, for example,
Frances Taylor Gench, Wisdom in the Christology of Matthew (New
York: University Press of America, 1997), and Ben Witherington III,
Jesus the Sage: The Pilgrimage of Wisdom (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 1994). But it is the very rare scholar who gives us any profound idea, comparable to Spinoza's, of what Jesus' wisdom was
about. See Jean Grosjean, Ironie Christique (Paris: Gallimard,
1991); Albert Nolan, Jesus before Christianity (Maryknoll, N.Y.:
Orbis Books, 1992); and Jack Miles, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of
God (New York: Knopf, 2001).
8 See also Letter 75 to Oldenburg, in The Correspondence of
Spinoza, A. Wolf trans. (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1966), p. 349,
where Spinoza refers to the style of expression typical of oriental
languages.
See Letter 21, to Bylenbergh, Ibid., p, 179-80. "I take care not to
impute to [Scripture] certain childish and absurd views; and this no
one can do better unless he understands Philosophy well, or has
Divine revelations."
9
10 See John F. Cornell, ''A Parable of Scandal: Speculations about
the Wheat and Tares in Matthew 13," in Contagion, 1998, 5: 98117. Under the influence of Spinoza's suggestion about Matthew
13, Alexandre Mather on draws similar conclusions about the deeper layers of this Gospel text. See Alexandre Matheron, Christ et le
salut des ignorants chez Spinoza (Paris: Editions Aubier, 1971),
pp. 132-134.
11 Pace Sylvain Zac, Spinoza et ['interpretation de l'ecriture (Paris:
P.U.F., 1965), p. 199.
�32
12
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
See also Spinoza, Ethics, 3 P 30; IV P 35-37, 46.
13 "Atque hoc eadem etiam modo Apostoli ex rebus, qual viderant,
quasque audiverant, & quas denique ex revelatione habuerant,
multa concludere, & elicere, eaque homines, si libitum iis esset,
docere poterant." Spinoza, Opera, Gebhardt edition (Heidelberg:
Carl Winters Universitatsbuchhandlung, 1972), III, p. 156.
Compare "natura nobis dictat, non quidem verbis, sed modo
Ionge excellentiore" (Gebhardt, III, p. 16) and "ejus mens praestantior necessaria, atque humana longa excellentior esse deberet"
(p. 21).
14
15
Cf. Matheron, Christ et le salut, pp. 144-145.
16 Johan Colerus left us some interesting biographical details bearing on Spinoza and Christianity, as cited in the introduction to the
Dover edition of Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise & A
Political Treatise, R. H. M. Elwes, trans. (New York: Dover
Publications, 1951). According to Colerus, Spinoza once assured his
Christian landlady that her religion was a good one and that she
could be "saved" in it, so long as she lived a pious and peaceable life
(p. xix). See also the end of Letter 75 to Oldenburg (touching on
the Gospel of John), in The Correspondence of Spinoza, A. Wolf
trans. (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1966), p. 350, and Letter 43 to
Jacob Ostens, p. 259, on the salvation of the ignorant among nonChristian nations through the "spirit of Christ." Spinoza's private
comportment is perfectly consistent with holding an idea of Christ
the philosopher who represents wisdom and makes salvation open
to all people whether they get that wisdom explicitly or implicitly.
The idea that Spinoza was too fearful to speak his mind tactfully
among his friends matches little in the philosopher's character. His
indifference to giving his thinking the color of orthodoxy among
them can be seen at the end of Letter 73 (21) to Oldenburg, in
Correspondence, p. 344.
17 Cf. Matheron, Christ et le salut, pp. 54-70, 77-84, 276. The
Treatise suggests, in chapter 16 (directly following the chapter on
the salvation of the unlearned), that a genuine political problem,
opaque from the standpoint of pure philosophy, is mitigated thanks
to the prophetic mission to all ordinary people. For according to
chapter 16, as less rational people enter into the social contract,
�CORNELL
33
they compromise their "sovereign right" or "self-interest" (to
remain irrational) far more than rational people. (180) Thus
Spinoza delicately raises the question of how the prophets' teaching, promising "salvation" to people who strive for moral goodness
without wisdom, helps them endure the harm they may suffer by
nature under the constraints of civilized life.
18 Spinoza could not but take an interest in the subject of the soul's
fate. Steven Nadler, in Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish
Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) argues that what
drove the Synagogue to pronounce its ban against the young
philosopher was his adamant denial of personal immortality.
19 Ethics 1, Appendix, p. 32. Spinoza makes an exception for the
great non-mathematical sages of history.
Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York:
Zone Books, 1992).
20
21
Letter 73 to Oldenburg, in Correspondence, p. 343.
22
Ethics, 5 P 5 - P 10.
23
Ibid., 4 P 73 Note.
Ibid., 4 P 68 Note. Again, independently of Spinoza but perfectly in accord with his doctrines, I have argued that Matthew 18
teaches salvation from our "fall" into the world's scandal, and
teaches it at two significant levels, one philosophic and one popular. See ''Anatomy of Scandal: Self-Dismemberment in the Gospel of
Matthew and in Gogol's 'The Nose'," in Literature and Theology,
16 (2002), pp. 270-290.
24
25
Letter 75 to Oldenburg, in Correspondence, pp. 348-349.
26 Spinoza's reading of 1 Corinthians 15 is entirely sound. One
cannot make good sense of this curious argument of Paul-"For if
the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ
has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your
sins." (15: 16-17)-on the notion that the Resurrection is a past,
historic event. The apparent consequence of Christ's non-Resurrection,
futile faith, is really the reason for the non-Resurrection! Faith has to
bring about Christ's Resurrection in the faithful.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
34
27 Spinoza avoids deciding whether the disciples all understood the
Resurrection in the same way. Both in the Treatise and in his earlier
response to Oldenburg (Correspondence, p. 344) Spinoza leaves
open what parts of Jesus' knowledge his disciples received.
According to Oldenburg's more literal reading of the Gospels,
Spinoza recognizes (or "does not deny") that that the texts show the
disciples receiving an apparition of the Resurrected Jesus and
believing in it. In this way God accomodated to them the revelation
of his mind (p. 348). Perhaps his remark near the end of the letter
applies here: Spinoza holds that Paul and John know and teach spiritual meanings, albeit in a Hebraic way (p. 349). All this is relevant
to the reading we propose of John 11, where the disciples do not
all have the same depth of insight.
28
Ethics, 2 P 11-12, 45, and 5 P 22, P 30.
29
Ibid., 2 P 13.
30 Ibid., 4 Preface, P 15; 5 P 6.
Cf. Ethics, 3 P 6, and "Short Treatise on God, Man, and his
Well-being," (chapter 5) in The Collected works of Spinoza, ed.
Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), vol. 1,
pp. 54, 84.
31
32
Ethics, 4 P 18 Note, P 19-20, 30-35.
Ibid., 5 P 20, Note, P 21-22. Regarding the distinction between
personal immortality and eternity in Spinoza, see Genevieve Lloyd,
Spinoza and the Ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 1996),
pp. 114-117.
33
"Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-being," pp. 138-140
(Chapter 22). Spinoza also develops there the distinction between
human beings moved merely by their animal spirits and those
reborn in spiritual knowledge, following John's Gospel and
1 Corinthians 2-3. From the discussion of the soul's re-awakening
in divine union, Chapter 23 follows on the subject of its "immortality."
34
Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary (Selections),
Richard Popkin trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.,
1991), p. 320.
35
�CORNELL
35
Evangile de Jean, traduit et commente par Jean-Yves Leloup
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1989), p. 281. It is worthy of note that the
Fathers of the Church understood the political implications of allegorical reading of the Gospel, given that spiritual knowledge could
not be attained by most believers. See Jean-Yves Leloup,
Introduction aux 'vrais philosophes' (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998),
pp. 61-2. In any case, Spinoza's philosopher Christ can be loosely
traced back to the early Fathers, probably by way of Erasmus,
whose philosophia Christi could not have been unknown to him.
Spinoza even includes Erasmus in one of the dialogues contained in
his "Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-being." (See note 31,
above.) I say "loosely traced to the early Fathers" because the idea
of "philosophy" that is applied to Jesus undergoes significant mutation from the Fathers, to Erasmus, to Spinoza; and these writers
base their conceptions independently upon the New Testament. See
Anne-Marie Malingrey, Etude semantique des mots de Ia famille de
'philosophia' dans Ia litterature grecque chretienne des quatre premiers siecles, 2 vols. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1961).
36 I;
37 Add to this the fact that the ancient Gospel of Thomas (to which
John's Gospel is closest in point of view) assumes that resurrection
is an interior event, already accomplished by some disciples. See
The Gospel of Thomas, Marvin Meyer trans. (San Francisco:
Harper, 1992), and Harold Bloom, Omens of Millenium, The
Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrections (New York: Riverhead
Books, 1996) p. 188.
In contemporary scholarship, see Frank Kermode, The Genesis of
Secrecy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 81-83,
and especially pp. 105-109 regarding John's "reality effects." Also
see Bernard Dubourg, La Fabrication du Nouveau Testament, v. II:
];Invention de jesus (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). Dubourg details the
cabbalistic mechanisms that could generate Christian ideas from the
language of the ancient Hebrew scriptures.
38
E.g. Letter 75 to Oldenburg, in Correspondence, p. 349.
Incidentally, Dubourg (see previous note) makes the strongest argument, and joins a growing scholarly consensus today, that the New
Testament exhibits the same literary craft (or craftiness) as the
Hebrew Scriptures, only differently employed.
39
�36
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In certain passages of the Treatise (35 ,67) its author suggests that
he has figured out more than he will say. He prefers to encourage
the experienced reader to re-examine the Bible with Spinoza's ideas
in mind.
40
41 Letter 21 to Bylenbergh, in Correspondence, p. 172, and cf.
Treatise, p. 105.
Kierkegaard founds his text Sickness unto Death on the Lazarus
miracle, skillfully inverting the meaning in John's text, which says
that that sickness is not Lazarus'! Nonetheless, Kierkegaard's psychological teaching exhibits some striking parallels with Spinoza's
teaching about overcoming anxiety and becoming oneself. "It is
Christian heroism-a rarity, to be sure-to venture wholly to
become oneself, an individual human being, this specific individual
human being, alone before God" See S0ren Kierkegaard, The
Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for
Upbuilding and Awakening, Howard and Edna Hong translation
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 5.
42
43 Another parallel of Spinoza's thinking with our interpretation of
Lazarus: the subtitle given (by another hand) to Spinoza's "Short
Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-being" (an early sketch of his
Ethics) mentions the text's purpose to cure those who are sick of
mind.
Daryl Koehn pointed out to me why it follows that the crowd is
told to unbind Lazarus.
44
Ancient gnostic texts even suggest that Thomas is the spiritual
"twin" of Jesus. See Robert M. Grant, The Secret Sayings of Jesus:
The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday,
1960), p. 65.
45
A related example of the pedagogy of the Bible occurring on two
levels: Spinoza refers to instances of biblical texts that both give a
poetic description of some supernatural occurrence (like "being
sent" by God) and then redescribe the same occurrence in natural
terms. (Treatise, pp. 19, 80)
46
47 See Spinoza, Emendation, (1st part regarding fictions and feigning) especially pp. 103-105. Also Ethics 3 P 11-13, 28-30, 4 P 1
Note, and 5 P 10 Note, P 11-14, 20. For discussion of how
�CORNELL
37
Spinozist reason collaborates with the power of the imagination, see
Christopher Norris, Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical
Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 217- 250.
Cf. Letter 21 to Blyenbergh, in Correspondence, p. 180.
Remember: Socrates could not teach wisdom to Meno or to anyone
else.
48
Concerning the avoidance of scandal by the wise, cf. e.g. Romans
14:13-23, 1 Corinthians 8.
49
50
See Spinoza, Emendation, p. 27 (paragraphs 14 and 17).
51 A complete list might begin with John 1:18, 3:3, 3:11, 3:36,
6:46, and 8:38.
52 The Greek tenses at John 20:29 indicate that what divides
Thomas from other disciples is not Thomas' historical opportunity
to converse with the resurrected Christ.
53
Again see Letter 75, p. 348.
�38
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�39
1-
What Tree Is This?
In Praise of Europe's
Renaissance Printers,
Publishers And Philologists
Chaninah Maschler
Prefatory Note
The aim of this essay is to praise certain lovers and makers of
books-the printers and publishers and philologists of early
modern Europe. That these men deserve to be remembered,
that we owe them a huge debt, though not because they
authored great books, I found out only because I stuck it out
with the perhaps "idiot" question, What tree is this? which
initially I asked about the tree that is pictured on the title
page of Galileo's last great work, the Discourses on Two New
Sciences.
Three publishing dynasties-Elzevier, Etienne, Plantinare spoken of in the course of the first portion of the essay. At
the essay's midway mark Pico della Mirandola enters the story.
My discovery that Pico had a hand in diverting a scholarly
friend of his, Aldo Manuzzio, from the life of pure scholarship to a publisher's life made the inclusion of Pico in my
narrative plausible. A brief (largely borrowed) account of
Aldo's life and work led me to a short narrative about
Erasmus's work as a Bible scholar. Inclusion of Erasmus was
due not only to my believing that it is with justice that
Erasmus is given a place among the great re-educators of
Chaninah Maschler is tutor emerita of St. John's College. This lecture was
delivered at Annapolis on January 18, 2002. The lucidity of the illustrations
for this lecture is due to the care and expertise of Cara Sabolcik and Tom
Crouse. The Editor regrets omission of the following thank-you note from the
book review of Eva Brann's The Ways of Naysaying in volume 46, number 2:
"Conversation with my friends Rob Crutchfield and Priscilla Shaw substantially contributed to the writing of this review."
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
40
Europe, but also because-enigmatic though he be-he
shows, in how he comments on the imprints of two of the
publishing houses who served him and whom he served, that
he was as aware as Bacon of the long run differences that
print might make to our lives.
I hope that when this year's crop of St. John's seniors
drinks a toast to the American Republic, to the Republic of
Letters, and to Plato's Republic, they'll call to mind that the
men commemorated in the present lecture helped make our
citizenship in these republics possible.
,~
[Before the art of book printing was known],
the manuscripts of any single book were few in
number, and to obtain the entire literature of any
one science involved considerable difficulty,
expense, and travelling, which only the rich could
afford. It was easy for the dominant party to effect
the disappearance of books that shocked its prejudices and unmasked its impostures .... Besides, only
works recommended by the names of their authors
were copied. All the research that could acquire
importance only if allied to other research, all the
isolated observations and detailed advances that
serve to maintain the sciences ... and to prepare a
way for further progress, all the materials amassed
by time and awaiting genius, remained condemned
to eternal obscurity. The conversation of scholars
and the unification of their labours ... did not exist.
Each man had to begin and to end a discovery
himself and was obliged to fight alone against all
the obstacles that nature puts in the way of our
efforts .... [Contrariwise, once printing was on the
scene], many copies of a book would be in circulation at the same time, information about facts and
discoveries reached a wider public and also
�MASCHLER
41
reached it more promptly.... Any new mistake was
subject to criticism as soon as it was made.1
Condorcet, whose words in his Sketch for a Historical
Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind I quoted just now,
is selectively expatiating on a passage in Bacon's New
Organon (Aphorism 129), where Bacon, intending, he says,
to "quicken the industry and kindle the zeal" of men of
scientific talent, had claimed that the world-historical efficacy
of such instruments as the directional compass, gun powder,
and moveable type has been far greater than the virtu of any
political or even religious leader, so that it is only right that
inventors be given divine honors, while political founders and
legislators are honored as mere heroes.
That the voyages of discovery (thus the finding of a "new
world" beyond the Mediterranean) were "made possible" by
the directional compass, and that the ways of waging war
(against, for instance, the natives of this recently discovered
new world) were drastically altered by the use of guns-of
this I was, in a dim and general sort of way, aware. But not
until fairly recently did it occur to me that the way the world
looks to human beings and even, perhaps, the way it is may
have been transformed by printing. (Take my words as paraphrase of Bacon's "[These inventions] have changed the whole
face and state of things throughout the world" Aph. 129). And
it was really more or less by accident that I became curious
about the individuals who practiced the art of printing, I
mean the businessmen, artisans, and scholars who constituted the publishing industry. As yet I know a little about just a
few. They are:
the
the
the
the
the
Italian Aldo Manuzzio
Swiss Johann Fro ben,
Frenchman Henri Estienne
Belgian Christopher Plantin
Dutchman Louis Elzevier
�-
-------
--- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
42
I learned these names because I made a mistake about a
certain picture that had provoked my curiosity. Here it is:
fig. 1
DISCORSl
E
DIMOSTRAZIONI
MATE MATICH E,
intorno J d11e nuout fcien~e
Attcnenti aUa
MEC:ANICA
& i
MoviMENTI LocALI;
tk/SjziiiiT
GALILEO GALILEI LINCEO,
Filofofo e .Matematico prima rio del Sereniffimo
Grand Duca di T ofcana.
0•111UAfpnuliutkleelllr~~ JjgrAMit.tl"Jc~~t~iSIIiJi.
IN LEIDA,
Apprcll"o gli Ellevirii. x. n. c. xnvW'.
The picture you're looking at comes one's way at St. John's
College when, in the junior year, Galileo's Discourses on Two
New Sciences are begun. Perhaps, like me, you overlooked the
bottom line identifying printer and publication date and erroneously assumed that this emblem was inserted at Galileo's
instance, either because your psychological "set" was to treat
the author as "figure," the printer-publisher as negligible
"background"; or, conceivably, because the cover of the
Dover paperback version looks like this:
�43
MASCHLER
fig. 2
dialogues concerning
TWO NEW SCIENCES
TRANSLATED llY HENRY CREW
AND ALFONSO DE SALV!O
WITH AN !NTRODUCTIQN llY ANTONIO FAVARO
fig. 3
L £ 11
CEUVRES
Mathematiques
DE
SIMON
~TEVIN'ci<Brugcs.
OufontuuctCcslco
MEMOIRES MATH.IlMATIQV·BS,
Efq,udltsldt:u.erdleTra-lu.ut&:Trc..Jllalbd'rincc M&UI.ICI
dcNu;~~~'::.~~::-._
lAI'IfllmJIIIoAWizi,(ro.g.-J
P• ALBEJlT ~IRAilD.samidou,~
A
LEYDE
CllorDon,vcnrllre&:Abr.lum~,lmpdlacllnord!n&lre.
dci'Univerlir(, AIUI!il cl~b-o.IDIT.
~
�44
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Seeing the Stevin title page (figure 3)-with the same
man, tree and motto-may, without your hearing anything
further, have the immediate effect of your correcting your
previous error and shifting to the idea that the emblem is the
printer-publisher's rather than author's "hall mark." (Goldand silversmiths or pewter ware manufacturers were required
to identify themselves on their products. Printers too were so
obliged by law. By the way, the craftsmen who made the
printing fonts had to be highly skilled workers in metal.) But
this third picture did not come my way until long after I'd
become curious about the title page of Galileo's Discourses on
Two New Sciences. Since that page is obviously carefully
designed-just look at the message conveyed by the relative
sizes of the letters!-it was not unreasonable to imagine that
the title page entire, including the picture that intrigued me,
was some sort of commentary on the message of the book
that it was introducing .
Now when I first encountered Galileo, I had spent some
years as teacher of the history of philosophy at a conventional
college. Therefore my head held such facts as the following:
Descartes's Meditations are spread out over six days, that is, a
week sans Sabbath. His Discourse too seems to be mimicking
the Divine rhythm of creation by being laid out in six parts.
In his Letter to the Translator which precedes the French
edition of the Principles, Descartes compares philosophy to a
tree.2 Bacon's Great Instauration (renewal) too was intended
to have six parts, and his College of Bensalem is called the
College of Six Days. The Latin name of Bacon's "Preparation
for Natural and Experimental History" is parasceve, which is,
in New Testament Greek, a stand-in for the Hebrew erev
shabbath (Sabbath eve). So, since I'd been taught to rank
Galileo with Bacon and Descartes as fellow-founders of
"modernity," men whose teaching sought to undermine the
medieval heritage, it was just about inevitable that I should
take the tree on the Discorsi title page to be the tree that
stood in our first parents' garden, the twisting item a snake,
�MASCHLER
45
the man a wise man such as Galileo, filosofo e matematicohere caught in the act of plucking a fruit from the forbidden
tree, this fruit being, perhaps, one of the two "new" sciences.
It did not occur to me that seeing the tree as the tree of
knowledge might be a mistake! The riddle for me was not
what tree this might be but rather, why does Galileo, as per
the motto Non Solus (Not Alone), deny that he's alone when
the picture shows him to be alone? This question was made
the more vivid when I learned that the standard name for the
emblem is The Solitary.
Puzzling over the perhaps piddling question about the
apparent discrepancy between motto and picture led to a
larger question. The Renaissance greats are often described as
marked by a new individualism and pride, such as is shown,
for example, by Bacon, when he sends his Great Instauration
into the world with a proem that begins: "Francis of Verulam
reasoned thus with himself and judged it to be for the interest of the present and future generations that they should be
made acquainted with his thoughts" (New Organon, p. 3).
This same pride is also exemplified by Descartes when, in Part
2 of the Discourse, he stresses that towns and legal codes
designed by a single "projector" are much to be preferred to
those that spring up higgledy-piggledy in the course of generations, and he insinuates that he, Descartes, is such a solitary
"projector." It is an individualism expressed in a somewhat
different way by Montaigne, when he publishes the Essays as
a book whose "matter" is himself. How, I came to ask myself,
do this individualism and pride harmonize with these authors'
equally notable emphasis on the collaborative and progressive
character of science and invention? (Advancement of
Learning, pp. 3 0-31; p. 143 of the Oxford Bacon paperback)
The book of Galileo for which The Solitary serves as
emblem is written in dialogue form: three charactersSalviati, Sagredo, and Simplicia-converse, in every-day
Italian, about matters of physics. Salviati, who opens the
conversation, is the conversation leader. He does not always
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
46
speak in his own name. Sometimes he reads aloud from a
Latin book written by someone known to all the conversation
partners but not identified by name. He is simply called "our
author."
Taking these facts into account, I construed the enigmatic emblem cum motto to mean that if there are to be "new sciences," neither the author, vicariously present to the three
men conversing through his Latin book, nor the three men
instructed by it, should be regarded, or regard themselves, as
solitaries. (Inventing a demonstration is probably something
that you do alone, in your study, but conversation, in the
course of which demonstrations are appraised, doesn't happen when you're by yourself.)
Something like this interpretation seemed confirmed by
the printer's Address to the Reader, which begins with the
sentence:
Civil life being maintained through the mutual and
growing3 aid of men to one another, and this end
being served principally by the employment of arts
and sciences, their inventors have always been held
in great esteem and much revered by wise antiquity.
It ends:
Of these two new sciences, full of propositions
that will be boundlessly increased in the course of
time by ingenious theorists, the outer gates are
opened in this book, wherein with many demonstrated propositions the way and path is shown to
an infinitude of others, as men of understanding
will easily see and acknowledge.
It may be further nuanced by the opening remarks of
Sagredo, who reports that he likes to hang around with
artisan foremen at the Venetian shipyard because by talking to
them he has frequently received information about matters of
mechanics that he would not have obtained had he relied
strictly on already available book learning.
�MASCHLER
47
The interpretation of Non Solus just reported was conceived while I was still under the mistaken impression that
Galileo was the one responsible for the emblem on the
Discorsi title page. The Solitary is, however, the trademark of
Louis Elzevier, the printer and publisher of the Discorsi, so I
found, as more books with this device on their title page came
my way-many of them, though by no means all-scientific
or mathematical books. 4 So the original question now
became, what did the printer-publisher-the man whose
Advice to the Reader spoke of how, by employing the arts and
sciences, men help one another to improve civic life-what
did he have in mind in marking his merchandise with this
emblem?
fig. 4
Figure 4 resembles the
Elzevier tree. Yet the lines
below the picture cite anothVARRONIS
opera quz fupcrfum.
er publisher, Henri Estienne,
under the date. And there
J N L I B. D E .L IN G. LAT.
Conictlancalofcpbi Scaligcri, r«<>are, of course, pictorial
gnita 3c appcnditc .wa..
differences: This bearded sage
IN Ll B R 0 S DE R B R V ST.
Notz clufdcm lof.Scal.non uuca cditz.
seems to be wearing a Roman
or Greek toga rather than a
HitJ/i1111llifotrMIII<.A DR.. T Y.RN.
c,.,..,,. in tm.DI U,guutiM:c.university man's scholar's
blltii.Uti•llih~t~ <.ANT. A Y G YSTJN/. /ttiiiP.YICTCJ!/1
gown; nothing twists around
Clliig•tUIItsitlli&.DtrtrM.fliel.
the tree, though its branches
seem similarly disposed; the
banner with the motto is on
the right rather than on the
left; and this time the motto
A N N 0 M-. D. LX X II I,
runs Noli Altum Sapere
ExcudcbatHcnr.Stephanus.
(Whether this should be read
to mean Don't Seek to Know High Things or, rather, Don't
Be Haughty depends on whether you take the Latin word
altum adverbially or accusatively).
M.. TERENTII
�48
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
figs. 5, 6, 7, 8
PAI.IIIII
&r«bwa.oa.J.TIITUB.Aifl•cnp.S;!d.-~
M.P. J:l: Ylllo
CVW
r-.IVILIDIO
.. I D I &
I find pictures 5 - 8 quite intriguing, particularly the ones
showing a pruning hook suspended from heaven and bearing
�49
MASCHLER
the motto Rami ut Ego Inserrerer Defracti Sunt (Branches
Have Been Broken Off So As To Let Me Be Engrafted). If the
pictures leave you cold, perhaps I can persuade you to take an
interest in them by showing you page 43 (notice the Arabic
numeral!) from Henri Estienne's Plato edition.
figs. 9,10
]> L A T 0
N
I S_
opera qua: extant omh!a_
EX NOVA JOANNIS SI!RRANiiN-
Rij=t:O'kn~m:~::~:::?:~7!:-~g:.--
El,ID~M ..i!Iuutdi.llwJUI~IIiiUwwprtttUtMNTiiot.
If you were to pull out your own edition of the Platonic
dialogues, you would notice that the opening lines of the
Crito bear the Stephanus page number 43 : the Estienne
dynasty's Hellenized name is Stephanus . My picture
acquaints you with the fans et origo of what you learned to
call, when you were St. John's freshmen, Stephanus pagination!
Here is another odd effect of encountering these
Stephanus trees, especially the title page of the Bible: Though
the initial interpretation of the Elzevier tree (the tree that
brought us here), was mistaken; and though the Stephanus
�50
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
tree is not the tree of knowledge either, nevertheless the
motto Don't Seek To Know High Matters or Don't Be Proud
does seem to demarcate (roughly) some such territory as
Don't Grow Too Big For Your Breeches.S
The reason for my being skeptical about the idea that the
Stephanus tree was intended as a reminder of Genesis 3 is
that some of the pictures very prominently display grafts, and
all the pictures, even those which do not exhibit a pruning
hook or marks of grafting, show branches that have been cut
off from the tree.
The world, our minds, the Bible, and other great books
are simply full of all manner of trees.6 One tree is likely to
conjure up another in our minds. But obviously, this need not
mean that so it was intended by whoever designed the title
pages. Doesn't the mind's associational play becomes tedious
when there is no principle for sorting the relevant from the
irrelevant ?
As it turns out, there is a passage inCh. 11 of Paul's Letter
to the Romans directly apposite to the Stephanus emblems
that were shown. It runs as follows:
If the dough offered as first fruits is holy, so is
the whole lump; and if the root is holy, so are the
branches. But if some of the branches were broken
off and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in
their place to share the richness of the olive tree,
do not boast over the branches. If you do boast,
remember it is not you that support the root, but
the root that supports you. You will say 'Branches
were broken off so that I might be grafted in.' That is
true. They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast only through faith. So do
not become proud, but stand in awe."
The Greek uses the verb hupselophroneo, that is, "I am
high minded," "I am proud," which rings rather differently
than does the Latin, especially when, as on the picture, the
�MASCHLER
51
Latin is taken in isolation. Notice that when the motto is Noli
Altum Sapere, the "solitary" points; when the motto is Ut
Ego Insererer he prays. Is the solitary intended to be St. Paul
when he points and a grafted pagan when he prays?
fig. 11
The pictures in figure 11 are three versions of an emblem
employed by the great Antwerp publisher, Christopher
Plantin. Again there is a tree and a man, but this time the man
sits comfortably in the tree's shade, to the left, and holds one
branch that he's cut off. Besides, unlike Elzevier's solitary,
he's wearing a hat. The motto runs: Exerce Imperia Et Ramos
Compesce Fluentes, that is: Exercise Authority and Trim the
Flowing Branches. I tracked down the words to Virgil's
Georgics, 2.370 (Loeb ed., p. 141) Milton, in Paradise Lost,
9.215f, 9.427f, 4.305, uses the same image, as does
Shakespeare in the garden scene of Richard II (4.3).
I earlier took the step of detaching the emblems plus mottoes from the titles and authors of the books on whose front
page they appear and of attaching them, instead, to three
publisher-printers-Elzevier, Stephanus, Plantin. Do the three
trademarks "allude" to each other? Intentionally so? How
could one tell? More generally, why would an engraver, poet,
man of letters, painter, publisher want to be "reminding" the
viewer or reader of another artist's artful item? On the other
�52
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
hand, if there is no intentional alluding going on, why all
these tree pictures? Mere habit and lack of invention?
One of the surprises that came my way as I kept on the
track of finding the sense and purpose of the Elzevier imprint
was that bibliophiles, historians, curators of libraries, and
professors of the curious subject "bibliography" have all for
some hundreds of years been studying publishers' imprints. 7
Since these devices sometimes look reminiscent of heraldic
coats of arms, and since coats of arms-plainly visible identifying marks that can be seen even from a distance and in the
melee of battle-probably originally served warriors to make
it possible for their brothers in arms to rush to their assistance, it occurred to me that the likeness between coats of
arms and publishers' imprints to which the just mentioned
book experts draw attention may conceivably imply that the
three publishing dynasties that I have so far mentioned-in
roughly chronological order, the Estiennes, the PlantinMoretus house, the Elzeviers-all used trees as their trademark, as though to proclaim to the world that they were, so
to say, "in this together." Such a notion, of "us against them,"
is perhaps not altogether misguided, since Christopher
Plantin, in preparing his magnificent polyglot Bible, relied on
the scholarly philological work previously done, and published, by Robert Estienne,s and several Elzeviers, before an
independent press under that name became established, seem
to have worked for the House of Plantin.9
The tree motif that I've shown you was, however, not the
sole Plantin publisher 's imprint. It was the first. But the far
more famous and more frequent identifying mark of the
House of Plantin-Moretus is not a tree; it is a drawing compass. It was under this imprint that, for example, most of the
works of the Flemish engineer, bookkeeper, and mathematician Simon Stevin (1548-1620) were first published (the polyglot Bible of 1568-72 as well).
�MASCHLER
53
fig. 12
I had become interested in Simon Stevin
even before reaching the
St. John's campus or reading Jacob Klein's book on
the history of algebra for
linguistic reasons. Having
spent some of my early
school years speaking
Dutch (the vernacular
language in which Stevin's
Works were, by his
express choice, originally
published), I was aware
that Dutch holds a double set of words for things mathematical and scientific-one employing strictly ordinary
natively Dutch words and roots, the other pseudo-Latin or
pseudo-Greek, as is our English mathematical and scientific
vocabulary. When I found out that Simon Stevin was the one
who had, single-handedly, coined the former, the scientific
vocabulary employing strictly Dutch roots, I became curious
about this man. His teaching style too was special (initially it
was, perhaps, developed to instruct the then ruler of the
northern Low Countries, William the Silent's son, Maurice of
Nassau, 1567-1625). It seemed much more welcoming than,
say, Vieta's, more like Galileo's. Stevin's pedagogic mode
gives the impression of being shaped by the desire to give
"people who have good horse sense" (to use Galileo's phrase
in a letter to Kepler) an opportunity to become engaged by
and to contribute to scientific endeavor even if they lack
university training and, embarassed by this fact, feel excluded
from discourse peppered with alien Latin and Greek jargon.
To my delight, it turned out that Stevin had written a booklet
called Het Burgerlyk Leven (Civic Life), which fact seemed to
�54
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
confirm that, though chiefly an engineer, Stevin was far from
oblivious to matters socio-political.lO
Given these facts, it is not so strange that my imagination
was piqued when I found that some of the books of Stevin's
published by the Plantin press exhibited the banner bearing
the Plantin motto Labore Et Constantia (By Dint of Work and
Perseverence) as held by a man with a spade, that is, someone
who works the soil, and a woman with a Jacob's staff (a
Jacob's staff is a right-angled cross with a long vertical used
by surveyors and anyone studying the heavens to estimate the
size of angles).ll
fig. 13
Since the hand holding
the characteristic Plantin
compass seemed to come
from the heavens (clouds
surround the wrist to which
that hand is attached),
I wondered whether the
message was that all threethe mathematician-engineer, the farmer, and the
student of the heavensshould live by the printer's motto: By Dint of Work and
Perseverance. Of course, the motto leaves enigmatic what the
goal or outcome of such a "work ethic" might be.12
Had it not been for the fact that, before joining the
St. John's faculty, I had been interested in the relations of
science and religion, so that I had spent time mulling over the
early chapters in Genesis, I would probably not have paid
much attention to the emblem with which this talk began, the
Elzevier tree. But given a long-standing curiosity about
whether the psychological sources of religion and science are
one or many, it was inevitable that I would, eventually,
encounter the Jewish mystical tradition, called Kabbalah and,
�MASCHLER
55
having heard that a certain Italian nobleman, Pico della
Mirandola (1463-1494 ), was the first Christian to dabble in
Kabbalah, that I would try to read some of this man's books.
The most famous of these, today, is called An Oration on the
Dignity of Man. Pica's Oration, which is an astonishingly
hope-filled celebration of human freedom, was intended to
serve as an introduction to the defense of a huge tome of 900
theses which the then twenty-four year old prodigy of learning had published and to the public disputation of which, in
Rome, he invited all scholars.
I have not yet read Pico's Nine-Hundred Theses. [A copiously annotated translation by S.A. Farmer was brought out
in 1998 under the title Syncretism in the West: Pica's 900 theses (1486).] I have, however, read Pico's Oration. It begins
with a retelling of the myth told by the travelling teacher
Protagoras when, in Athens, he conversed with Socrates
about the question whether virtue can be taught (Protagoras
320Dff):
Reverend Fathers: I have read in the records of the
Arabians that Abdala the Moslem, when questioned as to what on this stage of the world ...
could be seen most worthy of wonder, replied:
'There is nothing to be seen more wonderful than
man.'... It seems to me I have come to understand
why man is the most fortunate of creatures and
consequently worthy of all admiration and what
precisely is that rank which is his lot in the universal chain of being-a rank to be envied not only
by brutes but even by the stars and by minds
beyond this world .... God the Father, the supreme
Architect, had already built this cosmic home we
behold, the most sacred temple of His godhead ....
But when the work was finished, the Craftsman
kept wishing that there were someone to ponder
the plan of so great a work, to love its beauty, and
to wonder at its vastness. Therefore, when every-
�56
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
thing was done (as Moses and Timaeus bear
witness), He finally took thought concerning the
creation of man. But there was not among His
archetypes that from which He could fashion a
new offspring, nor was there in His treasure
houses anything which he might bestow on His
new son as an inheritance, nor was there in the
seats of all the world a place where the latter
might sit to contemplate the universe. All was now
complete; all things had been assigned to the highest, the middle, and the lowest orders .... At last the
best of artisans ordained that that creature to
whom He had been able to give nothing proper to
itself should have joint possession of whatever had
been peculiar to each of the different kinds of
being. He therefore took man as a creature of
indeterminate nature and, assigning him a place in
the middle of the world, addressed him thus:
'Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine
alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have we
given thee, Adam, to the end that according to thy
longing and according to thy judgment thou
mayest have and possess what abode, what form,
and what functions thou thyself shalt desire. The
nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by
Us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance
with thine own free will, in whose hand We have
placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of
thy nature .... Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are
brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy
soul's judgment, to be reborn into the higher
forms, which are divine.' ... Why do we emphasize
this? To the end that after we have been born to
this condition-that we can become what we
�MASCHLER
57
will-.. .we may not, by abusing the most indulgent generosity of the Father, make for ourselves
that freedom of choice He has given into something harmful instead of salutary. "13
The two most remarkable things in the Oration are, first,
that Pico nowhere mentions original sin; and second, that (in
a passage which I did not cite) he seems to regard what we
would probably call science as the endeavor whereby
mankind becomes ruler of the powers of wickedness.
Pico never got to deliver the speech, nor was it published
during his lifetime (1463-1494). But it was published soon
thereafter, by his nephew, Giovanni Francesco, in a posthumous edition of his uncle's Works . Now Pico's Oration holds
the line: ''As the farmer marries elm to grapevine, so the
magus marries earth to heaven, that is, lower things to the
qualities and virtues of higher things."14
Look again at the Elzevier tree. What's twisting around
the tree is not a snake but a grapevine. The tree does not bear
apples or pomegranates (the fruits which the "forbidden tree"
is frequently said to have borne). It is an elm tree. But our
original idea, that the solitary man standing beside the tree is
whoever plays the role of Galileo-the filosofo e matematico
-seems affirmed. Pico calls him a "magician," but since Pico
is careful to explain that the art practiced by magi such as
Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, Plato (all of whom he
mentions by name) "does not so much make wonders as
carefully serve nature which makes them," it does not seem
altogether unsafe to regard Stevin or Galileo as illustrative of
Pico's idea of the magus.l5 We seem, then, to have succeeded
in finding an answer to the question what the Elzevier
emblem means.
Pico's words become all the more interesting when one
finds out that there is a long church tradition of "hexahemeral," that is, six-day literature. It goes back to the Greek
church father St. Basil the Great's Hexahemeral Homilies.
(Basil was Bishop of Caesarea. His birth and death years are
�58
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
330-379.) St. Ambrose (340-397, Bishop of Milan), St. Bede
(672-735, priest and author of an ecclesiastical history) and
Grosseteste (1175-1253, Bishop of Lincoln) all imitated these
homilies in their own Hexahemera. Hexahemera are, I gather
from editors' notes, a series of sermons delivered over the
first week of Lent. St. Ambrose, sometimes directly translating Basil's Greek into Latin, in the course of his sermons
affectionately describes the beautiful and well-adapted
creatures that God made. He seems to be using the opening
chapters of Genesis as a topical outline for natural history.
From the translator's editorial notes one learns that many of
the joyous descriptive passages are culled from pagan authors
while others are recognizably lines from Job, Psalms, the
Prophets, or the New Testament, where the relevant natural
wonder comes up. The effect isn't at all bookish. The
congregation, eagerly waiting for Easter, must have felt
confirmed in its faith that everything that God made is beautiful and good, that God cares for his creatures. There is no
hint of a conflict between secular and sacred authorities.
Indeed Basil, in his 6th Homily, concerning the sun and
moon, argues for rational astronomy: "Do not then measure
the moon with your eye but with your reason, which is much
more accurate than the eyes for the discovery of truth"
(Fathers of the Church, volume 46, p. 102).
As luck would have it, St. Ambrose, while celebrating the
works of the third day, touches on the tree of the Elzeviers.
He writes:
Who does not marvel at the fact that from the
seed of the grape springs forth a vine that climbs
even as high as the top of a tree? The vine fondles
the tree by embracing and binding it with vine
leaves and crowns it with garlands of grapes. In
imitation of our life, the vine first plants deep its
living roots; then, because its nature is flexible and
likely to fall, it uses its tendrils like arms to hold
tight whatever it seizes. By this means it raises
�MASCHLER
59
itself and lifts itself on high. Similar to this vine
are the members of the church.
A little further on in the sermon Ambrose, by merging the
Tower of the Prophet Isaiah's Song of the Vineyard with the
tree just described, comes to identify the tree as the church
leaders-the apostles, prophets, and doctors"-while the vine
remains the Christian Congregation.
Pico, I conclude from this textual evidence, is drawing on
a Church tradition which is not afraid of allowing Pagan
authors (Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, even Lucretius) to join the
Biblical in testifying to God's hope that human beings, rightly guided, can learn how to use their freedom wisely. But he
seems, somehow, to have added a "third thing" to Ambrose's
two: the farmer is the one who marries tree to vine; the
magus is the one who ensures the entwining of lower (say
material?) and higher (say mathematical?) things. Is God the
one who marries church leaders to their congregation? My
guess is that according to Pico the farmer's work, which
includes but does not consist of the work of matchmaking,
imitates God's work as described in Genesis 1. Non Solus
refers to the vine and the tree in the Mediterranean landscape; to Man and Woman; to church leaders and congregation.
This same short-lived Pico, whose oration on our "perfectibility"16 became (according to the Cambridge History of
Renaissance Philosophy, p. 313 ), a popular and influential
work that was often quoted and imitated, and many of whose
ideas filtered into the thought of sixteenth-century thinkers,
was instrumental in establishing one of Europe's most important early presses, the Aldine. Here's the story: Pico and
young Aldo Manuzzio had become friends in their student
days. Aldo even resided with Pico for two years. Pico
arranged for Aldo to serve as tutor to Pico's two nephews.
One of these nephews came to supply Aldo with funds to
start up a printing press. The city of Venice was selected as
locale for the printery-the same city that later figures as
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
locale for Galileo's Discorsi. The plan was that Aldo would
retrieve, edit, print, and distribute, and thus preserve for the
entire world, the whole corpus of Greek literature. The 11th
edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica (volume 17, pp. 624626) contains a glowing account:
At Venice Aldo gathered an army of Greek scholars and compositors round him. His trade was
carried on by Greeks and Greek was the language
of his household. Instructions to typesetters were
given in Greek.17 The prefaces to his editions were
written in Greek .... His own industry and energy
were unremitting. In 1495 he issued the first
volume of his Aristotle. [The whole Aristotelian
corpus, in 5 volumes, was eventually brought out
by Aldo.] ... Nine comedies of Aristophanes
appeared in 1498. Thucydides, Sophocles, and
Herodotus followed in 1502. Xenophon's
Hellenica and Euripides in 1503. Demosthenes in
1504 ... .In 1513 Aldo reappeared with Plato, which
he dedicated to Pope Leo XlB .... Nor was Aldo idle
in regard to Latin and Italian classics.... To his
fellow workers he was uniformly generous, free
from jealousy and prodigal of praise. While aiming
at that excellence of typography which renders his
editions the treasures of the book collector, he
strove at the same time to make them cheap ....
When he died, bequeathing Greek literature as an
inalienable possession to the world, he was a poor
man."19
We, who take the availability in our bookcases of our very
own volumes of Aristotle and of Plato so much for granted,
owe much gratitude to Aldo!
Aldo, the businessman and scholar, gathered 'round
himself an international circle of men of learning who would
constitute a New Academy {presumably in emulation not only
�MASCHLER
61
of Plato's Academy in Athens but also to rival the one
established under Medici auspices in Florence and headed by
Marsilio Ficino, 1433-1499). A catalogue published by the
Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, commemorating an exhibition entitled "Learning from the Greeks, an
Exhibition Commemorating the Five Hundredth Anniversary
of the Founding of the Aldine Press," reports that, according
to its rules, the Aldine New Academy's members were to
meet for symposia, serve as an advisory board to the press,
and assist in the editorial tasks of seeing the texts into print.
While the Beinecke catalogue is scrupulous about discriminating what is known about the New Academy's rules (which
included the stipulation that only Greek was to be spoken at
meetings) from what is known about obedience to them, it is
altogether confident that there was an Aldine circle, to which
scholars of many different nationalities belonged, including
an Englishman, Thomas Linacre. It was owing to this English
connection that the Dutchman, Erasmus, came to visit Italy
and became an intimate of Aldo's.
The sequence of events appears to have been, roughly, as
follows: Erasmus (1469-1536), the first European to succeed,
literally, in living by his pen, keeping himself independent
from churches and courts and universities and casting his lot
with Europe's great printer-publishers,zo in his younger days
served as tutor to an Englishman, Lord Mountjoy, while they
were both studying in Paris. Lord Mountjoy invited Erasmus
to England and there introduced him to Thomas More,
Colet, and Linacre. Colet, who later became Dean of
St. Paul's Cathedral in London and founder (or re-founder?)
of one of England's most famous "public schools,"21 had
become convinced that it was necessary, and possible, "to
bring back the Christianity of the Apostles." He, though
agemate to Erasmus, seems to have set Erasmus his life's task:
Erasmus was to learn Greek very well so that he would be
able to retrieve the original New Testament as well as the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
work of the early church fathers and have them-the original
authorities for a Christian life-published and spread.22
Erasmus carried out this plan. He went to Italy, partly, at
least, in the hope of bettering his Greek. He met and made
friends with Aldus and his circle. Eventually he brought out a
New Testament in Greek and Latin (several of the early
Church Fathers' Works as well). Erasmus's text of the New
Testament, in the 1519 edition, was the one that Luther used
for his German translation. It was also the base text for
Robert Estienne's third edition of the New Testament, published in Paris in 1550, and it was the first to be published
with critical apparatus. Erasmus's text underlies our King
James version, and when the Elzeviers, in 1633, published
their Greek Testament they proclaimed it "the received text"
(textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptus). The scholars
who produced the recent University of Toronto edition of
Erasmus's Works, on whom I am relying for this information,
write: "Thus was created the so-called textus receptus, the
foundation of protestant Bible scholarship for three centuries,
until the ninteenth century ushered in a new era of Biblical
criticism. "23
It was, more than anything, because of such philological
labors that the more learned of his contemporaries hailed
Erasmus as "the prince of theologians." One of these writes
to Erasmus:
[You are] ... the first author in our times of the
rebirth of theology, [you are the man who] called
back theologians from the ... turbid waters of the
scholastics to the sources of sacred letters ....As
with a trumpet you have summoned the entire
world to the philosophy of Christ. We do not
doubt that you were born to restore theology.
Therefore, fulfill your destiny and purge with your
most learned hand Augustine and Hilary that we
may distinguish the spurious from the genuine, as
�MASCHLER
63
in previous years you did most successfully with
Jerome.24
I do not know why Erasmus, when he brought out the
first edition of his "purified" New Testament, called it Novum
Instrumentum.25 But the coincidence that this tag should
sound so much like Bacon's Novum Organum to our ears
helps to make vivid that Erasmus's hopes for reform and
renewal were as much vested in the recovery of access to
Sacred Scripture as were Bacon's, later, in the recovery of
access to nature. Both men thought of themselves as fighting
idol worship!
Erasmus apprenticed himself to the notorious philologist
Valla (1406-1457), whose notes to the New Testament he had
discovered a decade or so earlier. By quoting from Erasmus's
letter to the man to whom he dedicated his edition of Valla's
Notes on the New Testament, I may convey why I believe we
do wrong in looking down our noses at philological labors as
mere dry-as-dust scholarship, a scholarship for which only
men who have the soul of someone raised by maiden aunts
would have the patience. Erasmus writes:
As I was hunting last summer in an ancient
library.. .luck brought me a prey of no ordinary
importance, Lorenzo Valla's notes on the New
Testament. At once I was eager to share it with
the world of scholarship, for it seemed ... ungenerous to devour the prize of my chase in solitude
and silence. But I was a little put off... by the
entrenched unpopularity of Valla's name .... 26
You, however... began to urge me ...not to cheat
the author of the credit he deserved or to deprive
countless students of such an enormous advantage
.. .I am inclined to believe that the most unpleasantly hostile demonstrations ... will be made by
those who stand most to profit, that is, the theologians. They will say it is intolerable presumption in
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
a grammarian, who has upset every department
of learning, to let his impertinent pen loose on
scripture itself.... Tell me what is so shocking about
Valla's action in making a few annotations on the
New Testament after comparing several old and
good Greek manuscripts. After all, it is from Greek
sources that our text undoubtedly comes; and
Valla's notes had to do with internal disagreements, or a nodding translator's plainly inadequate
rendering of the meaning, or things that are more
intelligibly expressed in Greek, or, finally, anything
that is clearly corrupt in our text. Will they maintain that Valla, the grammarian, has not the same
privileges as Nicholas the theologian? .. .! do not
believe that theology herself, the queen of all the
sciences, will be offended if some share is claimed
in her... by her humble attendant grammar; for
though grammar is of less consequence in some
men's eyes, no help is more indispensable than
hers. She is concerned with small details, details
such as have always been indispensable for greatness. Perhaps she discusses trivial questions, but
these have important corollaries. If they protest
that a theologian is too grand to be bound by the
rules of grammar, and that the whole business of
interpretation depends on the inspiration of the
holy spirit, what a novel distinction is offered to
theologians, who are to have the exclusive privilege of expressing themselves ungrammatically.. .It
will be said that it is sinful to change anything in
the Holy Scriptures .... On the contrary, the sin of
corruption is greater, and the need for careful revision by scholars is greater also .... The ... discrepancies in our current texts prove clearly that they are
not free from errors.27
�MASCHLER
65
If, though a Christian, you believe that serving God is
something quite distinct and separate from ferreting out
truth-the true and correct reading, for instance, of the verses in Romans that had been taken to teach men that their will
is depraved-you may impatiently shrug off Erasmus's
exegetical labors as mere fussing. If, further, you have not
been advised, by secondary literature, that ever since St.
Jerome and Augustine there had been opposition within the
Christian church between those who held to a philological
idea of Bible exegesis and those who believed in the need for
an "extra" of a directly inspirational sort, scholarly Europe's
adoration for Erasmus will be baffling. There is, however, a
book bearing the title Erasmus, Lee and the Correction of the
Vulgate: The Shaking of the Foundations (Librairie Droz,
Geneva, 1992) which argues that it would not be a distortion
to see the quarrel between Luther and Erasmus in terms of
the fact that whereas Luther claimed that at a certain time
and in a certain place he "underwent an illumination or
inspiration enabling him to penetrate to the meaning of
Romans 1:17 .... Erasmus undermines and rejects the need for
this kind of extraordinary intervention .. .insofar as his own
day is concerned" (p. 17, Coogan).
As Erasmus reads Romans 5:12, the Vulgate translation of
the Greek text eph' ho pantes hemarton was erroneous. The
Vulgate takes the Greek words to mean "in whom all sinned"
(in quo omnes peccaverunt).
Augustine had supported his doctrine of original
sin as an inherited depravity with this translation.
Erasmus was the first in the history of Western [as
opposed to Eastern) exegesis to understand [the
Greek preposition] epi as having a causal sense
(because all sinned). In a very lengthy annotation
expanded over several editions Erasmus defended
his translation and interpretation ... as referring
not to original sin in the Augustinian sense of an
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
inherited guilt but rather to personal sins committed in free imitation of the sin of Adam.
When criticized for his paraphrase, Erasmus replied that
Origen, Ambrose, and Theophylact Gerome, or rather, pseudo-Jerome as well) all favor his interpretation here. The
editors of the Toronto ed. of Erasmus's Paraphrase of Romans
(volume 42, p. 147) add a quote from the Greek Church
Father Origen in evidence: "For all who are born in this
world are not only nourished by parents, but also instructed,
and they are not only sons of sinners, but disciples"
(PG 14;1018B-C).
Given Erasmus's return to what was in the West a preAugustinian reading, more nearly in acccord with Origen, not
only of Romans 5:12 but also of 6:15ff, it is not surprising
that he became a hero to such as were filled with Pico's pedagogic hopes! And no wonder that some of the eighteenthcentury philosophes, for example, Pierre Bayle and Jean
LeClerc, embraced him as one of their own kind! The
Toronto editors of Erasmus' Paraphrase of Romans
(pp. 148ff.) go so far as to say: "Like Origen and Pelagius,
Erasmus interprets Paul as teaching that sin is more a matter
of custom [that is, second nature] than of nature."28
Erasmus's philological labors on the New Testament
made scriptural warrant for the dogma of the trinity questionable as well.29 This did not lead him to deny the doctrine.JO Rather, in accord with the Estienne motto Noli Altum
Sapere, Sed Time (Don't Be Haughty, But Be Mraid), it led
him to question a theology-, that is, theory-centered
Christianity. In evidence I cite from a letter which he used as
preface to his edition of St. Hilary of Poitier (ca.315-367):
Is he who cannot disentangle according to the
method of philosophy what distinguishes the
father from the son or the holy spirit from both,
or what the difference is between the generation
of the son from the father and the procession of
�MASCHLER
the spirit, is he destined not to have fellowship
with the father, son, and holy spirit? .... After the
richest talents have applied all their energy for a
long time to the investigation of [high theological
questions], this at last is the final result of their
effort: they realize they know nothing; and, what
is more, they contribute nothing to the devout life.
Thus, nowhere more does that well-known passage
from Paul apply: 'Knowledge puffs up, charity
builds up.' What arrogance, what contentions,
what tumult, what discord ... do we see gush forth
from this kind of absurd learning. Although our
life is so fleeting, we neglect meanwhile those
things without which no one has any hope of
attaining salvation. Unless I pardon my brother's
sins against me, God will not pardon my transgressions against him. Unless I have a pure heart, I
shall not see God. Therefore, with all my energy I
must aim, I must practice, I must strive to cleanse
my soul of malice, hatred, envy, pride, avarice, and
lust. You will not be damned if you should not
know whether the spirit proceeding from the
father and the son has a single or a double principle, but you will not escape perdition unless you
see to it in the meantime that you have the fruits
of the spirit, which are charity, joy, peace,
patience, kindness .... Toward this end the chief
concern of our study must be focused and directed .... The sum and substance of our religion is
peace and concord. This can hardly remain the
case unless we define as few matters as possible and
leave each individual's judgment free on many
questions. This is because the obscurity of most
questions is great and the malady is for the most
part intrinsic to our human nature... Many puzzling
questions are now referred to an ecumenical coun-
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�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
68
cil. It would be much more fitting to defer such
questions to that time when we shall see God face
to face without the mirror and without the
mystery.31
Let me conclude by reporting what Erasmus offers in the
way of commentary on the publishers' emblems and mottos
on which I have threaded much of this essay. He does not, in
the Adages, which are my text for this purpose, touch on the
motif of the tree and, as far as I know, omits adages derived
from Holy Writ altogether, mining solely pagan literature. So
it was I, not Erasmus, who brought an anti-theological,
Erasmian, reading of the Estienne motto and tree . He does,
however, include a motto that came to figure (in 1642, thus
long after Erasmus's death) on the title pages of some of the
Amsterdam Elzeviers: It runs Ne Extra Oleas (Not Beyond
the Olive Trees). The words were taken, says Erasmus,32 from
Aristophanes's Frogs (993 ), and a scholiast is reported to have
explained33 that the sense of the motto is Acknowledge
Limits.
Erasmus does dwell on two other printers devices-the
Aldine press's anchor-cum-dolphin and the Frobens's
caduceus.
Fig.14 and fig. 15
Without Aldo
Manuzzio-the
Venetian printer set
up
m
business
through the good
offices of Count Pico
della Mirandola, see
p. 55 above-and
without Christopher
Proben-the Basel
printer from whose
presses most of
�MASCHLER
69
Erasmus's writings issued-such
a life as that of Erasmus, independent scholar and man of letters, would have been impossible. Erasmus was well aware that
his own freedom and his service
of mankind depended on these
printer-publishers. The longest
commentary on a proverb (14
pages) is devoted to the Aldo
motto, Festina Lente (Make
Haste Slowly).34
Erasmus tracks the saying to Suetonius's "Life of
Augustus" and remarks:
It does not surprise me that this proverb was a
favorite with two Roman emperors, and they by
far the most worthy of praise, Octavius Augustus
and Titus Vespianus ... .It is easy to see that this
saying pleased Titus Vespianus, from the evidence
of ancient coinage. Aldus Manutius showed me a
silver coin of old and obviously Roman workmanship, which he said had been given him by Peter
Bembo, a young Venetian nobleman, who was
foremost in scholarship and a great delver into
ancient literature. It was stamped as follows: on
one side there was the effigy of Titus Vespianus
with an inscription, on the other an anchor, with a
dolphin wound round the middle of it as if round
a pole. This means nothing else than the saying of
Augustus Caesar, Hasten Slowly, or so the books
on hieroglyphics tell us. That ["hieroglyphics"] is
the word for the enigmatic carvings which were so
much used in early times, especially among the
Egyptian soothsayers and priests, who thought it
wrong to exhibit the mysteries of wisdom to the
vulgar in open writing, as we do; but they
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
expressed what they thought worthy to be known
by various symbols, things, or animals, so that not
everyone could readily interpret them. But if anyone deeply studied the qualities of each object, and
the special nature and power of each creature, he
would at length, by comparing and guessing what
they symbolized, understand the meaning of the
riddle .... The anchor, because it delays, slows
down, and stops the ship, means slowness; the dolphin represents speed .. ..This kind of writing... not
only has great dignity but gives no little pleasure .... What symbol is better suited to express the
ardent and dauntless activity of the mind than the
dolphin? .... So this saying, Make Haste Slowly,
appears to have originated in the mysteries of the
most antique philosophy, from thence to be taken
up by the two most admirable of Roman emperors .... Now it has come down to Aldus Manutius of
Rome [Aldo was born in Rome] as the third heir in
succession ... .Indeed I should not think this symbol
was more illustrious when it was stamped on the
imperial coinage and passing from hand to hand
than now, when it is sent out beyond the bounds
of Christendom, on all kinds of books, in both
languages, recognized, owned and praised by all
to whom liberal studies are holy.... Consider as
well that, however one may sing the praises of
those who by their virtue either defend or increase
the glory of their country, their actions only affect
worldly prosperity, and within narrow limits. But
the man who sets fallen learning on its feet (and
this is almost more difficult than to originate it in
the first place) is building up a sacred and immortal thing, and serving not one province alone but
all peoples and all generations.35 Once this was the
task of princes, and it was the greatest glory of
�MASCHLER
71
Ptolemy [the ruler, not the astronomer]. But his
[Ptolemy's] library was contained between the narrow walls of its own house, whereas Aldus is
building up a library which has no other limits
than the world itself.
Of Proben he writes:
What Aldus was striving to do among the
Italians ...John Proben is trying to achieve on this
side of the Alps ... .lf the northern princes were to
favor good learning as honestly as the Italians, the
serpents of Proben would not be so far from the
riches of Aldus's dolphins. Aldus, making haste
slowly, gained both riches and fame, and deserved
both; Proben, holding his staff erect, looking to
nothing but usefulness to the public, not losing the
simplicity of the dove while he expresses the wisdom of the serpent ... Proben has amassed less
money than fame.
The interpretation of Proben's caduceus emblem that
Erasmus gives derives, of course, from the New Testament.
Erasmus is quoting Jesus' words, who says, addressing his
disciples: "I send you out as sheep admidst wolves, so be ye
wise as serpents and innocent as doves." (Matthew 10:16).
Whether the Proben bird really is a dove I cannot tell from
the picture. Nor have I seen a Proben imprint with this motto.
It may exist. But it is equally possible that Erasmus is pulling
everybody's leg, rousing hopes for the revelation of secrets
that are non-existent.
But perhaps both of his comments constitute an apologia
pro vita sua? Erasmus never joined Luther's Protestant fold.
And while court records of inquisitorial interrogation of men
accused of heresy show that some, for example, Baptist,
laymen framed the formula of their Christian faith exactly in
the terms provided by Erasmus's New Testament text,36
which they knew by heart and quoted to the inquisitor,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Erasmus, unlike these Baptists, died in his bed, not at the
stake. For this he has been blamed. Luther denies him the title
of Christian and calls him a sceptic. Some pre-World War 2
twentieth-century historians have called him a coward.
I don't call him anything but thank him.
Notes
1 Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the
Human Mind, Weidenfeld and Nicolson English ed. of 1955,
pp. 72££, first published in French in 1795 . A richly detailed working out of what's "in" these words of Condorcet's is given by
Elizabeth Eisenstein's book The Printing Press as an Agent of
Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Earlymodern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1979). Somewhat
surprisingly, Eisenstein does not mention Condorcet.
2 Francis Bacon, New Organon, trans. Fulton H . Anderson (Library
of Liberal Arts, 1960); Advancement of Learning, ed. G.W. Kitchin.
3 Italics, unless otherwise indicated, are mine. Please notice that the
printer is sufficiently self-possessed to take it upon himself to
address the reader.
Since the list of Elzevier science books deserves to be known, I tick
off some of them: Descartes's Geometry, Meditations, Principles,
Passions, Opera Omnia; Gilbert's De Mundo nostro sublunari
philosophia nova; Hobbes's Elementa Philosophica; several of
Francis van Schooten's mathematical books, which were studied by
Newton; Vieta's Collected Works; Stevin's Mathematical Works, in
a French version; Christian Huygens's Theoremata; the medical
writings of that Professor Tulp whom Rembrandt depicts in his
''Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp,"-all of these were brought out by
the Elzeviers.
4
5 The Amsterdam branch of Elzevier, which used the goddess
Athena, along with her shield, olive, and owl as its imprint, likewise
stressed that curbing hybris is the mark of wisdom, for their motto
was a quotation from Aristophanes' Frogs, line 993:
me ... ektoth ... ton elaon (Not Beyond The Olive Trees) . A.C.J.
Willems, in his book about the Elzeviers, reports that an ancient
�MASCHLER
73
scholiast explained the meaning to be something like ''Acknowledge
limits!" A.C.J. Willems, Les Elzeviers, 1880, p. xciii.
Yeats's chestnut tree at the end of ''Among School Children," the
"tree diagrams" of Chomskyan linguistics, the genealogical tree of
Jesse, the tree of which the Duchess speaks to John of Gaunt in Act
1, scene 2 of Shakespeare's Richard II, not to mention the fact that
in the days when our St. John's Liberty Tree still stood, it was spoken of as a symbol for our nation in that "the relation between
branches and trunk suggests the joining of unity with diversity,
which is the genius of America."
6
7 Evidently, scholars who do intellectual or cultural history rather
than study great books, have long taken cognizance of the fact that
the capitalist enterprise of printing and publishing has, as Bacon
claimed and the eighteenth-century philosophes reiterate, changed
the face of the world.
8 Fred Schreiber, in his book The Estiennes (E.K. Schreiber, New
York, 1982), terms Robert Estienne the founder of modern lexicography through his Latinae Linguae Thesaurus. Robert was also the
publisher of David Kimchi's Sefer haShorashim, a Hebrew thesaurus
designed on the principle of grouping words of the same (usually
triliteral) root together. Henri 2 Estienne, Robert's son, later
applied this same principle of organization to his huge Thesaurus of
the Greek language. The Plantin polyglot Bible, in Latin, Greek,
Hebrew, Syriac, and Aramaic is, by cognoscenti, ranked as "the
most important work ever produced in the Netherlands by one
printer"-so says L. Voet, former director of the Plantin-Moretus
Museum in Antwerp and author of The Golden Compasses: A
History and Evaluation of the Printing and Publishing Activities of
the Officina Plantiana at Antwerp (Amsterdam, London, New York,
1969-72).
According to the business records preserved at the PlantinMoretus House in Antwerp, Louis Elzevier had done some bookbinding for the Plantins in 1565-7, and his father, Hans Elzevier,
had-between 1567 and 1589-worked as a "pressman"for the
Plantins. Colin Clair, Christopher Plantin (Cassell and Co., London,
1960), pp. 154ff.
9
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
For a summary of this little book, see Ch. 14 and 18 in Edward
Dijksterhuis's remarkable Dutch biography, Simon Stevin, an
abbreviated English version of which was published by R.
Hooykaas and M.G.J. Minnaert under the title Simon Stevin:
Science in the Netherlands around 1600, (Martinus Nijhoff, 1970).
(For Dijksterhuis's comment on what I called Stevin's teaching style,
see especially p. 121, beginning ?lines from the bottom of the page,
describing the distinctive logical and rhetorical attributes of Stevin's
famous "wreath of balls" demonstration). Dijksterhuis, in the
concluding chapter of his biography of Stevin, cites a fascinating
passage about city planning. Stevin recommends that on both sides
of the street houses be furnished with canopies. These would serve
pedestrians as protection against rain, sun, and traffic. "Such
protection would not only be agreeable for the wealthy but also
advantageous to the poor, who must, to gain a living, stay outside
and who don't have a change of clothing when once they're
drenched to the skin, and whose stockings and shoes wear out with
mud, so that they walk around with wet feet, as a result of which
they contract many diseases, diseases that are infectious, so that
they reach the wealthy. Therefore, if the wealthy were to underwrite the erection of such canopies, they would advance their own
interests as well." (I tried to render this amazing prose roughly as it
stands in Stevin's sixteenth-century Dutch. Dijksterhuis expects the
modern reader to find fault with Stevin for caring so little for the
well-being of the poor per se. It has, strangely, not occurred to him
that (a) the Adam-Smithean idea of enlightened self-interest is
entirely in accord with the rest of Stevin's thinking and (b) that
Stevin, precisely if he really wants those overhangs built, had better
appeal to the interests of the only burghers who have the wherewithal to put them up.)
10
J.
11 According to Dijksterhuis's list, the books published under this
particular Plantin vignette are: Dialectic (1585), The Art of Tenths
(1585), La Pratique d'Arithmetique (1585), The Building of Forts
(1594). I give the Dutch titles in English. We, who take the availability of printed self-help books on every conceivable subject for
granted, need a little dose of history to realize how huge a difference it makes that even commoners with just a little education can,
without going to school, teach themselves double entry bookkeeping or "how to draw a picture, compose a madrigal, mix paints,
bake clay, survey a field, handle all manner of tools." (p. 243
�MASCHLER
75
Eisenstein). Self-help literature is, to this day, the most lucrative part
of publishing.
12 Cf Bacon's New Organon Bk 2, last sentences of the concluding
aphorism, 52 (pp. 267f. LLA ed.). See also the quotation from
Bacon that Kant selected as frontispiece for the 2nd edition of the
Critique of Pure Reason.
The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer et al,
(University of Chicago, 1948), pp. 223££.
13
14 On the Dignity of Man, p. 28, Library of Liberal Arts ed. Cf.
Renaissance Philosophy of Man, p. 249. I am a little bewildered
that, as the English sentence runs, the elm is earthly and lower, the
vine heavenly and higher.
15 Pico holds that there are two kinds of magic. The first, he says,
the Greeks called goeteia. "The second sort they called mageia, the
perfect and highest wisdom as it were. Porphyry says that in the language of the Persians, magician means the same thing as interpreter
and lover of divine things means in our language .... The first is the
most fraudulent of arts, the second is firm, faithful, and
solid .... From the second comes the highest splendor and glory of
letters, desired in ancient times and almost always since then. No
man who was a philosopher and desirous of learning good arts has
ever been studious of the first. Pythagoras, Empedocles,
Democritus, Plato, travelled across the sea to learn the second.
When they came back they preached it and held it chief among the
esoteric doctrine ....As the first magic makes man subject to and
delivered over to the powers of wickedness, so the second makes him
their prince and lord .. ..The second, among the virtues sown by the
kindness of God and planted in the world, as if calling them out from
darkness to light, does not so much make wonders as carefully serve
nature which makes them," Dignity, p. 27-28. For commentary on
Pico's distinction between goeteia and mageia, compare D. P.
Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella,
(London: Warburg Institute, 1958). See also Maryjoe Teeter Dobbs,
Foundations of Newton's Alchemy, (Cambridge University Press,
1975). I found the latter book especially helpful in its effort to
explain how and why moral and religious self-formation was thought
to be accomplished through alchemical practices. This ought to be an
important question for those who value the distinction between
�-
-
- - - - - - - --- -- --------- -
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
liberal and servile arts on the ground that, unlike the merely useful
arts, the role of the liberal arts is to improve the human soul. To
determine whether alchemy and Pica's "magic," understood as
Dobbs and Walker explain them, are rivals to the Sacrament of the
Eucharist, one might have to study the portions of Part 3 of
St. Thomas's Summa Theologica that directly concern the latter.
16 Cf. Rousseau's Second Discourse, on Human Inequality, trans.
Masters and Masters (St. Martin's Press, 1964), pp. 113f.
17 Something analogous is reported, for Latin, by Henri 2 Estienne,
in a Preface addressed to his son Paul (see his 1585 edition of Aulus
Gellius). The father writes: ''And as I am on the topic of speaking
Latin, I will add another notable reminiscence of my father's family, by which you may understand the facilities I enjoyed as a boy for
acquiring that tongue. There was a time when your grandfather
Robert entertained in his own household ten men employed by him
as correctors on his press, or in other parts of his business. These
ten persons were all of them men of education; some of them of
considerable learning; as they were of different nations, so they
were of different languages. This necessitated them to employ Latin
as the common medium of communication, not at table only, but
about the house, so that the very maidservants came to understand
what was said and even to speak it a little. As for your grandmother, except one made use of some very unusual word, she understood
what was said in Latin with the same ease as if it had been French.
As to myself and my brother [Robert 2], we were allowed at home
to use no other language whenever we had to address my father or
one of his ten journeymen." Quoted by M. Pattison, Essays, vol. 1,
p. 71. Readers of Montaigne may be struck by the resemblance
between Montaigne pere and Robert Estienne. I am reminded of the
household of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, "the father of modern Hebrew,"
where, long before the founding of the modern state of Israel, only
Hebrew was to be spoken. This last observation is relevant to my
purposes because I am trying to convey how large a debt we owe to
the single-minded, perhaps fanatical, devotion of these men who
believed that through the right kind of filial piety, a critical filial
piety, re-birth is possible.
18 Before his elevation to the Papacy, Leo X was Giovanni de
Medici.
�MASCHLER
77
19 I could imagine that the relatively lengthy narrative about the
Aldine press is included in the eleventh ed. of the Brittanica because
the Encyclopedia's editors felt that their own enterprise of serving
the public good through the diffusion of knowledge beyond the
halls of the University and that of the house of Aldo were one and
the same (If you are of little faith with respect to the educational
value of encyclopedias, you may be willing to reconsider in light of
the report that young Faraday picked up the rudiments of science in
the course of reading the scientific articles included in the encyclopedia volumes which he was binding while he was apprenticed to a
French emigre bookbinder). For a detailed acount of Aldo
Manuzzio, see Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius:
Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice, Blackwell and
Cornell, 1979. Lowry reports that there is a letter from Aldo to
Catherine Pia which expresses the "idealism" inspired in him by,
among others, Pico's faith in human dignity and Pico's hope of
"reconciling all faiths in a single ultimate mystery." Unfortunately
Lowry does not quote from this letter. He does, however, quote a
"sort of declaration of intent" which Aldo, from 1495 on, attached
to all of his editions of Lascaris' Greek Grammar and of his own
Latin Grammar. It runs: "I have decided to spend all my life in the
service of my fellow men. God is my witness, I desire nothing more
than to do something for them, as my past life shows, wherever it
has been spent, and as I hope my future life will show still more,"
Lowry p. 66.
20 In 1509 the Archbishop of St. Andrews presented Erasmus with
a ring bearing a figure that Erasmus identified as an image of the
Roman godlet Terminus. Erasmus adopted the Terminus figure,
having added the inscription Cedo Nulli (I Yield to No One), as his
personal emblem, with which he confirmed his most important documents (see Erasmus, volume 2 of Correspondence, ed. R.A.B
Mynors and D.F.S. Thomson (University of Toronto, 1974),
p. 150). I am, however, obliged to report that according to Lisa
Jardine (Erasmus, Man of Letters, p. 82), there is a letter of Erasmus
to Charles V's secretary Alfonso Valdes, in which Erasmus attaches
the words Cedo Nulli to Terminus, not to himself, and Terminus he
identifies as Death. Yet since Erasmus so writes in response to his
being criticized for pride, it is hard to tell who is "really" speaking
in the motto.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
78
The school still exists. It counts John Milton (1616), the Duke of
Marlborough (1650-1722), G.K. Chesterton (1874-1938), and
Montgomery (1887-1975) among its graduates.
21
22 Cf Frederic Seebohm, The Oxford Reformers, (London, 1869);
J.A. Froude, Life and Letters of Erasmus, (New York: Charles
Scribner, 1912)
23
Erasmus, Correspondence, 3.220.
Urban Rieger, in a letter to Erasmus quoted on p. 33 of John C.
Olin, Six Essays on Erasmus, with a translation of Erasmus's 1523
Letter to Carondelet, (Fordham University Press, 1979).
24
25 Erasmus's Novum Instrumentum came out one year before
Luther affixed his 95 Theses to the portal of the church of
Wittenberg.
Valla's reputation as an enemy of the Catholic Church derived in
large measure from his having employed his philological expertise
to debunk the genuineness of the so-called Donation of
Constantine. In this document, "the emperor Constantine, in gratitude for his conversion by Pope Silvester, supposedly granted to
that pope and his successors for ever, not only spiritual supremacy
over the other great patriarchates and over all matters of faith and
worship, but also temporal dominion over Rome, Italy, and 'the
provinces, places, and civitates of the western regions."' I have not
read Valla's De (also credita et emendita Constantini donatione
declamatio, though there is an English translation by Christopher B.
Coleman. All my information about Valla derives from Cassirer et
al., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, (University of Chicago,
1948), and the 11th ed. of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
26
Letter to Christopher Fisher of 1505, Correspondence, vol. 2,
pp. 89-96.
27
That Augustine's "reduction of all bad concupiscences to the concupiscence of sex and the identification of sexual concupiscence
with the ... corruption [we all have inherited from Adam was] something new, introduced by Augustine into Christian theology," is
argued at length by Harry Wolfson in a 1959 lecture reprinted as
Essay 6 in his paperback volume Religious Philosophy: A Group of
Essays (Atheneum, 1961). See also Elaine Pagels, "The Politics of
28
�MASCHLER
79
Paradise: Augustine's Exegesis of Genesis 1-3 versus that of John
Chrysostum" and "Christian Apologists and 'the Fall of the Angels' :
An Attack on Roman Imperial Power?" in Harvard Theological
Review 78:1-2 (1985) 67-99 and 78:3-4 (1985) 301-25. On this
same topic (the so-called Pelagian controversy), see Peter Brown,
"Pelagius and his Supporters ... " and "The Patrons of Pelagius: The
Roman Aristocracy... " in Journal of Theological Studies, N.S.,
volume19, Pt 1, April1968 and volume 21, Pt 1, April 1970. Our
own Peter Gilbert's finely balanced account of the Pelagian controversy in his recent lecture "Predestination in the New Testament
and St. Augustine" reopens the issue.
In Erasmus's edition of the New Testament the last chapter of
1 John lacks the Vulgate's verses 7, 8: "Quoniam tres sunt qui testimonium dant in caelo: Pater, Verbum, et Spiritus sanctus: et hi tres
unum sunt. Et tres sunt qui testimonium dant in terra: Spiritus, et
aqua, et sanguis: et hi tres unum sunt." When he was criticized for
thus deleting the "proof text" for trinitarianism, Erasmus answered
that he had not found any Greek manuscript containing these
words "though he had in the meanwhile examined several others
besides those on which he relied when first preparing his text."
(Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its
Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, (Oxford, 1964), p. 101,
quoted by Coogan.
29
Newton, along with every other Christian anti-trinitarian of
modern times, uses the philological labors of Erasmus.
It is reported that six years after the Council of Trent and sixtythree years after Erasmus's death, the following dialogue between a
Franciscan friar and an Anabaptist layman occurred:
INQUISITOR: What, don't you believe that Christ is the second
person of the Holy Trinity?
ANABAPTIST: We never call things but as they are called in
Scripture.... The Scripture speaks of one God, the Son of God, and
the Holy Spirit.
INQUISITOR: If you had read the creed of Athanasius you would
have found in it God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy
Spirit.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ANABAPTIST: I am a stranger to the creed of St. Athanasius. It is
sufficient for me to believe in the living God, and that Christ is the
Son of the living God, as Peter believed; and to believe in the Holy
Spirit which the Father has poured out upon us through Jesus
Christ our Lord, as Paul says.
INQUISITOR: You are an impertinent fellow, to fancy that God
pour out his spirit upon you, who do not believe that the Holy
Spirit is God. You have borrowed these heretical opinions from the
diabolical books of the cursed Erasmus of Rotterdam, who, in his
Preface to the Works of St. Hilary pretends that this holy man says,
at the end of his twelfth book, that the Holy Spirit is not called God
in any part of the Scripture .... Will you be a follower of that
antitrinitarian? .... You have sucked the poisoned breast of
Erasmus .... But St. John says ... There are three that bear record in
heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three
are one.
ANABAPTIST: I have often heard that Erasmus, in his Annotations
upon that passage, shows that this text is not in the Greek original."
The source for this dialogue is an early Mennonite martyrology recorded in G. Brandt, The History of the Reformation in the
Low Countries, (London: 1720-23). All of the foregoing information derives from Coogan, pp. 68££, who also reports that the
Anabaptist, a certain Herman van Flekwijk, died at the stake at
Bruges on 10 June, 1569. Bruges is Simon Stevin's city of birth.
Erasmus's peace-loving "accommodationism" is in the spirit of
Paul's Romans 14, broadly interpreted.
30
31 Olin, pp. 99-101. See also pp. 105, 108-10 of this same letterpreface. Erasmus concludes the letter, manifestly addressing contemporary issues (his tract against Luther-the Discourse on Free
Will-comes out the following year): "Diverse are the gifts of men
of genius, and many are the different kinds of ages .... Reverence is
the due of ancient authors, especially those authors who are
recommended by the sanctity of their lives in addition to their
learning and eloquence. But this reverence does not exclude a
critical reading of them." The Colloquies, the Discourse on Free
Will, the Paraclete, the Anti-Barbarus are all to the same effect.
32
University of Toronto ed., vol. 33, p. 82
�MASCHLER
81
33 Alphonse Charles Joseph Willems, Les Elzeviers, Histoire et
Annates typographiques (Paris, Bruxelles, The Hague, 1880), p. xciii
University of Toronto ed., vol. 33, pp. 3-17. In the Margaret
Mann paperback edition of (selected) Adages (now out of print) this
is the lead entry.
34
Cf. Bacon on the three kinds of ambition, pp. 118f. LLA ed. of
New Organon. I leave it to the Bacon scholars to determine whether
the resemblances between Erasmus's commentary on the adage
Festina lente and Bacon's Aphorism 119 are significant.
35
36
See footnote 21 on pp. 26f.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�83
t
The Empires of the Sun
and The West
Eva Brann
This lecture is dedicated to my friend and fellow tutor
William Darkey in Santa Fe, who first introduced me to the
book behind this lecture, William Prescott's History of the
Conquest of Mexico.
>f
I shall begin with two sets of facts and dates. On or about
August 8 of 1519 Hernan Cortes, a hidalgo, a knight, from
Medellin in the Estremadura region of Spain, having sailed
his expeditionary fleet from Cuba to win "vast and wealthy
lands," set out from a city he called Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz
on the Gulf of Mexico to march inland, west toward the
capital of Anahuac, the empire of the Nahuatl-speaking
Aztecs. The city was called Tenochtitlan and its lord, the
emperor, was Montezuma II. Cortes knew of the place from
the emperor's coastal vassals and from delegations
Montezuma had sent loaded with presents to welcome-and
to forestall-the invaders. The presents included many works
of well-crafted gold.
Cortes had with him about 300 Spaniards, including
about forty crossbowmen and twenty arquebusiers, that is,
men carrying heavy matchlock rifles. He probably had three
front-loading cannons. His officers wore metal armor. There
were fifteen horses for the captains and a pack of hunting
dogs. (I might mention here that the Aztec dogs were a hairless type bred for food.) The band was accompanied by
Indian porters and allies, a group that grew to about 1000 as
they marched inland. Early in November they passed at
13000 feet between the two volcanoes that guard the high
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John's College, Annapolis. This
lecture was delivered on September 13, 2002, at Santa Fe and was the
Homecoming Lecture on October 4, 2002, at Annapolis.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Valley of Mexico. Some Spanish captains astounded the
Indians by venturing to climb to the crater rim of the ominously smoking Popocatepetl. On November 8, Cortes was
on the causeway to Tenochtitlan. On November 14,
Montezuma, the ruler of a realm of 125,000 square miles,
capable of putting in the field an army of 200,000 men with
a highly trained officer corps, quietly surrendered his person
to the custody of Cortes, declared himself a vassal of
Emperor Charles V, sovereign of the Holy Roman Empire,
and transferred his administration to the palace assigned to
the Spaniards. He soon made them a present of the state
treasure which they had discovered behind a plastered-over
door in the palace aviary. Cortes's surmise that just to enter
Tenochtitlan was to take Anahuac captive seemed to be
justified.
On June 30, 1520, Cortes being absent, Montezuma was
either murdered by the Spaniards or stoned to death by his
own people as he appeared on the palace wall attempting to
contain a rebellion. The latter account seems more plausible,
since he appears to have been shielded by Spaniards to whom
he was a valuable pawn and since some of his nobles were
growing disgusted with his submissiveness. The uprising had
been induced by the young captain whom Cortes had left in
charge, who had massacred unarmed celebrants of the feast
of Huitzilop6chtli, the city's chief god; this god both was and
stood for the Sun.
The Mexican uprising culminated in the noche triste, the
Sad Night, when the Spaniards were driven from the city with
enormous loss of life. In June 1521 the Spanish situation
looked desperate to them, as a vigorous, indomitable, eighteenyear-old emperor, Cuauhtemoc, Montezuma's second
successor (the first having died of smallpox), assumed the
leadership of an Aztec army now better acquainted with these
once apparently invincible invaders.
On August 15, 1521, just two years after his landing,
Cortes's band, augmented by some new arrivals and an allied
�BRANN
85
Indian army from Tenochtitlan's old enemy, Tlaxd.la, fought
its way, foot by foot, back into the city, with frightful losses
on both sides. The Spaniards were supported by a flotilla of
forty brigantines, light square-rigged sailing vessels that
Cortes had ordered built and dragged overland to Lake
Texcoco, the complex shallow water on which Tenochtitlan
stood. It was the first fleet of sailing ships to float on the lake.
I am still in the realm of fact when I say that within a few
days this city, surpassing all cities then on earth in the beauty
of its situation and the magic of its aspect, was completely
razed. Within four years it was overlaid, under Cortes's
supervision, by a complete Spanish city, whose cathedral, the
Cathedral of Mexico City, was eventually built hard by the
Great Temple of Tenochtitlan. In this total catastrophe the
Spaniards had lost fewer than 100 men, the Aztecs or Mexica
about 100,000.
I have, of course, omitted myriads of gripping details,
such as a novelist might hesitate to invent. But I shall now
abbreviate an abbreviation: In August 1519 there was a large,
powerful, highly civilized empire called Anahuac. By August
1521 it was gone; instead there was a new realm, a colony
called New Spain; Spanish was replacing the native Nahuatl.
Now the second set of facts, even more curtailed. On May
13, 1532, Francisco Pizarro (like Cortes from the Estremadura
and his distant relation) arrived at Tumbez, a port at the
northern end of the Inca empire and of modern Peru. This
empire was called by its people Tahuantinsuyu, meaning the
Realm of the Four Quarters. Pizarro had 130 troopers,
40 cavalry and one small cannon. The Inca Atahualpa-Inca
means Lord-had an army of 50,000 men. On November 16,
1533, the Inca came, at Pizarro's invitation, to meet him in
the town plaza of Cajamara. There he was unintelligibly
harangued by the chaplain of the expedition and given a
breviary: the Inca scornfully threw the scribbles to the
ground. Within 33 minutes, he having been seized, 4000 of
his men had been massacred. Resistance and the empire itself
�86
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
fell apart with his capture. Atahualpa offered to fill his prison,
a cell 22 x 10 feet, with gold to the height of his reach in
exchange for his freedom. While the temples which were
encrusted with gold were being denuded and the condition
was being fulfilled, the Inca was condemned to death by burning. This sentence was commuted to strangulation when he
agreed to be baptized. Pizarro soon took Cuzco, the capital,
and installed a puppet Inca, Manco Capac, who mounted a
rebellion; it was put down with great loss of life on the Inca's
side in 1534. There followed a period of civil war among the
conquerors. Again to summarize the summary: A tiny band of
Spanish ruffians brought down, within two years, the most
efficiently administered polity of its time. Quechua, the native
language, was replaced by Spanish as the chief language.
It is thought that this second scenario was, on Pizarro's
part, a reprise of Cortes's conquest. If so, it is a demonstration of the inferiority of imitations.
The kind of facts I have listed here are spectacular yet
uncontested discontinuities in the stream of life. The dates,
which tell us both the temporal order of these facts and their
distance from us, serve to dramatize the discontinuity: About
half a millennium ago there occurred, not very far south of us
and close to each other in space and time, two mind-boggling
events-the destruction by a very few Spaniards of two great
civilizations.
We at this college have read or will read in. Herodotus)
Persian Wars hqw in July of480B.C. a band of 299 Spartans,
the same in number as Cortes's original companions, died in
holding the pass of Thermopylae against an Asian army of
who knows how many hundreds of thousands, led by Xerxe~,
king of Persia. Their. object was to give the Greeks time and
courage to repel the invader. But the Spartans were defending their own land from a self-debilitating .behem<?th. The
Spaniards' situation in Mesoamerica isjustthe inverse, except
that in each case the few were the . free. What, we may
�BRANN
87
wonder, would our world be like if the Asians had prevailed
in 480 B.C. or the Nahua in 1519 A.D.?
How could it happen? How did these American empires
fall? Just as Herodotus drew conclusions about the nature of
the Greeks from the Persian defeat, so one might wonder if
illumination about the nature of our West might not be found
in these catastrophes that mark the beginning of modern life.
To put it straightforwardly: In reading about Mexico and
Peru I began to wonder if there might be a clue in these events
to the apparently irresistible potency of the West when it
touches, be it insidiously or catastrophically, other worlds, be
they receptive or resistant.
Let me explain the not altogether appropriate use of the
term "the West" in my title, "The Empires of the Sun and the
West." Our tradition-! mean the one whose works we study
at this college-is usually called the Western tradition. It is
thereby revealed as defining itself against the East, Near and
Far, the Orient, the place where the sun rises. Our North
American republic is in this sense the West's very West and its
currently culminating expression. But, of course, the Aztecslet me interrupt myself to say that the people of the imperial
city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan did not call themselves Aztecs but
Mexica and that they called those who spoke their language
the Nahua and that the term Aztec was introduced to the
English-speaking wprld by the aforementioned. Prescottthese Mexica, then~ of course thought of the invaders as being
from the quarter pf the rising sun, from the e;ast. This .turns
out to be .a significant Ja~t. C~lumbus thought that he was
"sailing not the u1)ual. way" but w:est-:-:-sailing west to reach
the East, Japaq, China, India. It was for quite a while a very
unwelcome discoyery that the people whom the adventurers
so hopefully .called Indians (as I will continue to do here)
inhabited a long continent which, although it contracted into
a J:lal:'row isthmus in the middle, blocked the ocean. route to
the fabul9us Orient.. Thus .Prescott calls Tenochtitlan "the
great capital of .the western world .." So "West" is, strictly
�88
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
speaking, nonsense as used in this context, but I cling to it
because it is the available shorthand for ourselves, for those
living in the tradition that has its roots in Jerusalem and
Athens, achieves its modernity in Europe, has come to its current culmination on this continent, and is spreading its effects
all over the globe. What can be more necessary at this
moment than to grapple with the being of this West?
As I read on it seemed to me often that the reasons given
by historians for Anahuac's sudden collapse before the
Spaniards might well be cumulatively necessary but could not
be sufficient conditions. I mean that without their operation
the Empires could not have fallen so quickly, but that
altogether they did not so completely account for the fall as
to make it seem unavoidable. It is true that the Spaniards
brought horses into a land without draft animals, and so the
cavaliers could run down the pedestrian Aztec warriors and
frighten the Indians into seeing the Europeans as centaurs,
four-footed monstrous men-horses. But these Indians soon
learned that man and horse were separable and mortal;
during their desperate and bloody defense of Tenochtitlan
there appeared on the skull rack of a local temple, beneath
53 heads of Spaniards, the heads of a number of horses, of
"Spanish deer," as they were now called. The crossbows and
cannons may have delivered more swift and terrifying
destruction than the Aztec javelin-throwers, the metal armor
deflected the cuts of obsidian-studded wooden swords. The
driving greed for gold, which, as Cortes ironically represented to an Indian official, was the specific remedy for a disease
that troubled the Spaniards, may have disoriented the people.
The physical disease brought by the Spaniards, the smallpox,
did more than decimate the uninoculated natives; Spanish
luck at crucial junctures may have demoralized the caciques,
the Indian chieftains. The harsh exactions and suppression of
Montezuma's empire did indeed provide Cortes with Indian
allies (though the 150,000 Indians that came with the now
900 Spaniards to retake Tenochtitlan were by their very
�BRANN
89
numbers an encumbrance on the heavily defended causeways
into the island city and by their excited hatred for their
Mexica oppressors a danger to Cortes's prudent intentions;
moreover, they tended to fade away when things went badly).
The crucifix may well, in Carlos Fuentes's words, "have made
their minds collapse," as they saw how their own numerous
gods demanded numerous sacrifices of them, while this one
Christian god sacrificed one man, himself. Such factors or
forces are called, in the categories in which history is conceptualized, technological, demographic, epidemiological, political, psychological, or what have you. Perhaps they were necessary to Spanish success. But a number of contemporaries
thought that at various junctures it might well have gone
otherwise. For example, the strong-minded king of Texcoco,
Cacama, said that all the Spaniards within Tenochtitlan
could be killed in an hour; Cortes himself thought so. To me
historical inevitability seems an ex post facto cause. It is the
way a fait accompli presents itself, when passage has turned
into past. I cannot quite tell whether my rejection of historical determinism should be reinforced or thrown into doubt
by the fact that the Mexica themselves had given themselves
over to fate, as I will tell. Perhaps that very self-surrender was
a sufficient condition, the factor that makes the outcome
practically certain. But that would only be half the explanation; for the other half one would have to look in the nature
of the Europeans as well.
Before doing that, let me complete the apology for my
title. In it I mention the two empires, though I will speak of
one only, Anahuac. I mean no reflection on the Inca realm,
that marvel of social administration and public works built
with the most astounding masonry I've ever seen. But both of
the Peruvian protagonists were like deteriorated copies of
their Aztec templates. Pizarro was an intrepid thug, by all
accounts, and Atahualpa a culpably and carelessly arrogant
man with a violent history. Since it seemed to me that the
pairs of chief actors in this drama not only were the main
�90
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
factors because both empires were autocracies, but were also
in their very distinctive ways personally emblematic of their
worlds, I chose the more humanly accessible, the more
expressive duo.
Finally, I refer to the Sun because the solar domination
under which both these Precolumbian empires labored
seemed to me more and more significant. The Incas called
themselves the Children of the Sun; their great Sun Temple at
Cuzco, the Coricancha, was studded with gold, "the tears
wept by the sun." So too the Mexicans, who called their
generals "the Lords of the Sun," had come into the marshes
of Lake Texcoco, their place of destiny, led by priests who
bore on their backs a twittering medicine bundle. It was
Huitzilopochtli, who was reborn on the way at Teotihuacan,
the birthplace of the gods, and later installed in Tenochtitlan
in the Great Temple. There he was incessantly nourished with
human blood. Of course, when I use the indicative mood in
speaking of the Aztec gods, I am not reporting fact-I am
telling what the Aztecs said and are thought to have believed.
The most difficult thing, I have discovered, is for historians to
find the right voice in speaking of alien gods, especially when
they are many in number, fluid in function, and visible in
many forms.
The Indians' relation to the sun I have come to think of
as symbolic of the whole debacle. and even its proximate
cause. To anticipate my version of a common.idea: rhe daily,
annual and epochal returns of the. heavenly bodywere to the
Aztecs so fearsomely antic, so uncertain, that they burdened
themselves, as their traditions taught them,. with rituals and
sacrifices .. These were so demanding that they enfeebled bpth
th.e Nahua empire and the Nahua's souls. The West's relation
t.o the Sun was just the opposite.
In 1506, just about the time young Cortes came to the
Indies, Copernicus was beginning to write On. the
Revolutions of. the Heavenly Spheres. It .is one of Western
modernity's seminal works, which our sophomores studY. In
�BRANN
91
it he shows that the mathematical rationalization of the
heavens is more economically accomplished and the celestial
phenomena are better "saved" if the sun stands stably at the
center of the world. But his motive is not only mathematical
economy. "For who," he says, "would place this lamp of a
very beautiful temple in another place than this, wherefrom
it can illuminate everything at the same time?'' Cortes was
surely not a premature Copernican, but he acted out of a
tradition in which one God controls the cosmos through the
laws of nature. Since the deity is not capricious, celestial
nature is ever~reliable, well-illuminated and confidenceinspiring. Nature's sun does not, in any case, respond to
human propitiation and Nature's god prefers prayers to ritual sacrifices.
Let me append here a poignant incident told by Cortes.
In the final days of the investment of Tenochtitlan, a delegation of parched and starving Mexica came to the barricades.
They said that they held Cortes to be a child of the Sun, who
could perform a circuit of the earth in a day and a night. Why
would he not slay them in that time to end their suffering?
Let me hold off yet one more minute from my main task
to tell you what motives drew me into a study so far from our
Program. To begin with, there was the sheer enchantment of
what proved to be a fragile civilization and the unburdened
romance of comfortably un.~current drama. All that romance
I got from reading William Hickling, Prescott's Conquest .of
Mexico ofl843, and his Conquest ofPeru of 1847. Of the
first ~ook he himself wrote that it was conceived "not as a
philo$ophical theme but as an epic in prose, a romarice.of,
chivalry.'' For this approach later historians, for who111
demythification, deromanticization, and rhe dispersal of
human deeds into forces and patterns is a professional
requirement, despise.him somewhat, .and it .took me awhile.
to see what valuable lesson..could be .drqwn from .his telling.
Presc,ott has it right: first the great ,tale: then . the critical
theory~
�92
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
From the first I knew I was reading the American Gibbon.
We at St. John's used to read parts, particularly the notorious
fifteenth chapter, of that English historian's monumental
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, completed in 1788. To
my taste the American is the finer of the two. Gibbon
conceals in the magnificantly Latinate periods of his style the
universal irony of the ultimately enlightened man. I do not
fault him for sitting in judgment, for a non-judgmental
historian is an incarnate contradiction and produces only an
armature of facts without the musculature that gives it human
shape. But I am put off by his judging as an Olympian
enthroned on Olympus. In that fifteenth chapter, which treats
the question "by what means the Christian faith obtained so
remarkable a victory over the established religions of this
earth?" (a question of the kind I am asking) he reflects with
raised eyebrows in turn on the mortification of the flesh,
pious chastity and divine providence, so as to come to a
pretty secular answer, just as if Christianity were not first and
last a faith. Surely when a faith conquers, its substance must
be given some credit.
Prescott, on the other hand, who had in his youth
privately critiqued Gibbon's style for its "tumid grandeur,"
writes with deliberate American plainness, though to this
twenty-first-century ear, with a dignified elegance. What matters more to me is that he does his level best to enter into the
feelings and thoughts of his alien world, finding much to
admire in the Aztecs and much to blame in the Spaniards; for
example he calls the massacre of the Indians in fateful
Cholula a "dark stain" on Cortes's record. But for all his
romantic pleasure in new marvels he never condescends to
accept the horrifying elements of Aztec civilization.· He
recognizes that these are not individual crimes but systemic
evils that his Western liberal conscience cannot condone. One
might say that he dignifies his subjects with his condemnation. For this candor he is, as you can imagine, belittled these
days as naive, culture-bound, and ethnocentric. I shall have a
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word to say on the sophisticated reverse bigotry of his belittlers.
His style, to add one more feature, is extraordinarily
vivid; it compares to Gibbon's as a classical statue in all its
original bright encaustic colors to one that has been dug up,
now only bare white marble. This visual aliveness may be a
"blind Homer" effect. When Prescott was a young student
dining at the Harvard Commons, he was hit in the eye by a
hard piece of bread during a food fight and was half-blind for
the rest of his life. It is characteristic of this man that,
although he knew whose missile had hit him, he never told
the name. His enormous collection of sources was read to
him and evidently richly illustrated in his imagination.
I might mention the other chief sources I read. (A longer
bibliography, merging books read and those merely consulted, is attached.)
First for anyone interested in the actual course of the
Conquest is Bernal Diaz del Castillo's True History of New
Spain of 1555. This simply told, incident-rich account of the
march on Tenochtitlan and what happened afterwards gains
credence from the fact that the old trooper was disgruntled
with his captain's assignment of rewards-the common
condition of the Conquistador ranks; the poor devils got little for their endless exertions and wounds. In spite of his
grievances, Diaz's love and admiration for Cortes unsuppressably dominates his story.
The Conquistadores are sometimes represented as having
had eyes for nothing not made of gold. Here is the old
soldier's recall of Tenochtitlan as he first glimpsed it, thirtysix years before, on a causeway leading toward the island city:
We were amazed and said that it was like the
enchantments they tell of Amadis, on account of
the great towers and cues (temples) rising from the
water, and all built of masonry. And some of our
soldiers even asked whether the things we saw
were not a dream. It is not to be wondered that I
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here write it down in this manner, for there is so
much to think over that I do not know how to
describe it, seeing things, as we did, that have
never been heard of or seen or even dreamed.
These men, some of them ruffians, but with medieval
romances behind their· eyes to help them see alien beauty,
were evidently not altogether sick with gold greed. But those
later writers who don't blame them for the one, accuse them
of the other: they're either merely medieval knight-errants or
merely mercantile expeditionaries. In fact, they seem to have
been poignantly aware that they were seeing sights no
European had ever seen before or could ever see after.
Here is what they saw: A city edged by flowering "floating gardens," the mud-anchored chinampas, lying on the
shining flat waters of a shallow, irregular lake collected in a
high valley guarded by the snowy peaks-even in August-of
the two volcanoes; straight broad causeways connecting the
city to the shore giving into straight broad avenues leading
from the four directions of the winds to its sacred center
which the Mexica regarded as the center of the world, with
its great, gleaming, colorfully decorated temple pyramid; a
grid of smaller streets edged with bridged canals; a myriad of
lesser temple pyramids, some smoking with sacrifices; palaces
with stuccoed walls and patios polished to gleam like silver;
sparkling pools; crowds of clean, orderly people going about
their business, especially in the great market of Tlatelolco;
gardens everywhere; and the white houses of the city's quarter million inhabitants with their flat roofs, the azoteas from
which two years hence such a deadly shower of missiles
would rain down on the returning Spaniards that the
dwellings were demolished one by one.-All these features of
the vision have been, incidentally, described with a poet's relish by William Carlos Williams:
[T]he city spread its dark life upon the earth of a
new world, sensitive to its richest beauty, but so
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completely removed from those foreign contacts
that harden and protect, that at the very breath of
conquest it vanished.
Our tutor Jorge Aigla in Santa Fe has made a verse translation
of an anonymous transcript of Tlatelolco, written only seven
years after the starved and sick Mexica, who had defnded
their city foot by foot, finally surrendered its devastated
remains. Here are a few stanzas:
And all of this happened to us.
We saw it all
We watched it happen
With this sad and mournful fortune
We saw each other's anguish.
On the road lay broken arrows;
Hairs are scattered
The houses unroofed
Their walls red, blackened.
***
A price was set upon us.
A price for the young man, the priest,
The child, the virgin maiden.
Enough! The price of a poor man
was two handfuls of corn,
only ten insect cakes;
Our price was only
twenty cakes of salty gruel.
Gold, jades, rich embroidery,
Quetzal plumages,
All that which was precious
Was valued not at all. ..
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The mutual admiration of Indians and Spaniards was
great-in the beginning. True, the Spaniards, whom Cortes's
vigilance kept sleeping in their armor, stank in the nostrils of
the much-bathing Indians, and the priests with their long,
blood-matted hair in their gore-bespattered sanctuaries
nauseated the Spaniards. (I omit here, for the moment, the
Spaniards' response to the sacrifices themselves, which
marked, on the Christians' side, the beginning of the end of
amity.} The Spaniards were astonished by Indian craftsmanship. Dfaz describes after decades a necklace made of golden
crabs (others say crayfish) that Montezuma placed around
Cortes's neck. Of course, Dfaz described the golden gifts
more often in terms of the pesos they weighed when melted
down into bullion. I note here that the Aztecs did not,
evidently, have scales and did not reduce objects to their
universal stuff, ponderable mass (thus the Mexicans used natural items, quils of gold dust and cocoa beans, for currency,
while the Spanish had the peso d'oro, the "gold weight,"
calibrated in fact to silver, to 42.29 grams of the pure
substance); this intellectual device of universal quantification
even those critics of the West who deplore it can hardly
forego in the business of life. The Spaniards were astounded
by, and perhaps a little envious of, the stately splendor of the
cacique's accoutrements. The Indians, on their part, were
amazed by the invaders' daring, tenaicty, and endurance.
They called them, as the Spanish heard it, teules, teotl being
the Nahuatl word for god. The term seems to have been used
somewhat as Homer uses dios, indicating sometimes just
excellence and sometimes divinity. As we shall see, the Aztecs
had a serious reason to call Cortes and his people gods. The
Spanish, on their side, in their very horror of the frightfullooking Aztec god-images, paid them a certain respect in
regarding them not as mere idols, deaf and dumb objects of
stupid worship, but much as the Mexica themselves did:
Sahagun, of whom I will shortly tell, records an Aztec ruler's
admonitory speech in which he says: "For our lord seeth,
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heareth within wood, within stone." The god-representations
were not of masks of nothing to the Christians, but they were
images of demons, of the Devil in various shapes. Thus in
looking at the Nahuatl side in Sahagun's dual language text,
I noticed that diablo, Devil, had become a Spanish loan word
in Nahuatl-one new name for all the old divinities, to be
abominated but also acknowledged.
The second eyewitness source is Cortes himself, who
wrote to his sovereign, Charles V, five letters reporting on his
activities. Of these cartas de relaci6n, letters of report, all but
one are extant in copies. They are not notes but voluminous,
detailed accounts beginning with the first, pre-Cortes exploration of the Gulf Coast and ending with Cortes's own postConquest explorations; the second and third letter contain
the material for this lecture. The English version conveys a
flavor of studiedly plain elegance. These clearly literary works
are charged by historians with being both subtly self-aggrandizing and consciously myth-making. To me it would seem
strange if Cortes, in writing to his sovereign, on whom
depended acknowledgements and rewards, did not portray
his exertions most favorably. It might be said-! don't know
whether in mitigation or exacerbation-that he was also
willing to suppress a brave but irrepressible compaflero's
guilt: Nowhere have I found even a mention of Alvarado's
culpability in the events leading to the noche triste. It is also
said that Cortes invented the myth of an Aztec empire which
rivaled Charles's own, to whet the Spanish emperor's interest
in his new dominion. To me, the account itself, telling of
tributes owed by the subject cities and of their chiefs obliged
to be in attendance in Tenochtitlan, sounds more like information he was in fact given by proud Mexica officials or
disaffected dependents.
Above all, Cortes fills his letters with myriads of meticulously noted detail-too thick and too vivid to be attributed
to mere mendacious fantasizing. He would have had to have
been a veritable Gabriel Garda Marquez to invent so magical
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a reality. For, he says, "we saw things so remarkable as not to
be believed. We who saw them with our own eyes could not
grasp them with our understanding." Cortes himself will
appear in a moment.
The third source, the most exhaustive in scope and
remarkable in method, is The History of the Things of New
Spain by the before-mentioned Friar Bernadino de Sahagun.
He had arrived as the forty-third of the religious that Cortes
had requested in one of his letters to the emperor. The
Conquistador needed them to carry on the task of conversion, because, as he said, the Indians had a great natural
attraction to Christianity; indeed in the early post-Conquest
years, Indians were baptized by the thousands a day. (The reasons that Cortes's observation is not implausible will be mentioned below.)
The name New Spain in Sahagun's title is, incidentally,
Cortes's own for conquered Anahuac: "New Spain of the
Ocean Sea." For the Conquistador it betokens a great colonial
accession to old peninsular Spain and the emphasis is on
"Spain." But later the accent shifts to "New," as the criollos,
the Mexican-born Spaniards, rebel against the old country's
domination. Eventually a nativist revival and a growing sense
of nationhood leads to a rejection by the native-born
Spaniards themselves of their Conquistador heritage, and
when in 1821 the country achieves independence, it will be
called by the old Nahua name for Tenochtitlan, Mexico (now
pronounced in the Spanish way, Mehico). Nativist Mexico's
tutelary deity will be Quetzalc6atl, the dominating god of this
lecture, of whom more in a moment.
Back to Sahagun. He learned Nahuatl himself and spent
the rest of his life, with much untoward clerical interference, compiling the world's first inside ethnographic
account. In his college he trained his own informants,
Indian boys, often of noble descent, who could interview
their living elders and obtain the information that Sahagun
compiled in parallel columns, Spanish and Nahuatl. The
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work, in twelve volumes, is known as the Florentine Corpus.
Lisa Richmond, our librarian, fulfilled my unexpectant hopes
by buying the very expensive English edition for our library,
and if one reader a decade finds the delight and illumination
in it that I did, the investment will be well justified.
Sahagun begins with the gods and their births-for like
Greek gods, these gods were born, at Teotihuacan, 33 miles
northeast of Tenochtitlan. This sacred city was well over a
millennium old when Anahuac was established, and in ruins.
But there the Mexica came to worship, particularly at the
great temple pyramid dedicated to Quetzalcoatl. What bound
new Anahuac to old Teotihuacan-the name means City of
the Gods-was their common era, that of the Fifth Sun, upon
whose destruction the world would end.
Sahagun then records everything from the sacred rituals
and binding omens to the set moral speeches (much more
charming without failing to be scary than similar speeches
made by our elders) down to the riddles people asked, such
as "What drags its entrails through a gorge?" Answer: "A needle." The next to last book is an inventory of the "Earthly
Things" of New Spain, its flora, fauna and minerals; the chapter on herbs begins with the plants "that perturb one, madden
one," the hallucinogens. The twelfth book is Sahagun's own
history of the Conquest.
Some say that the first bishop of New Spain, Zumarraga,
conducted a huge auto-da-fe, a book burning of Aztec
codices, those screenfold books composed in glyphs (stylized
figures with fixed meanings) combined with lively pictures.
Others say that those codices that weren't destroyed by the
hostile Tlaxcalans or in the great conflagration of
Tenochtitlan were spirited away by Indians. In any case, the
art of illustration was still alive, and Sahagun used the talents
of Indian painters to supplement his records in this visually
delightful pre-alphabetic way.
Finally I want to mention the History of the Indians of
New Spain by another Franciscan, affectionately named by
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his Indian parishioners Motolinia, Nahuatl for "Little Poor
One," since he took his vow of poverty seriously. He reports
the terrible post-Conquest sufferings undergone by the Indian
population; worse than their cruel exploitation by the disappointed Conquistadores and colonists was the succession of
European plagues (smallpox, bubonic plague, measles, for
which the Indians reciprocated only with syphilis). I am
impressed, over and over, with this pattern: that the
inoculated West does most of its harm to other civilizations
unintentionally, and I mean not only through their physical
susceptibility but even more, through their spiritual and
intellectual vulnerability. The reason we can cope with our
dangerously developed, potent tradition is that we know how
to fight back, how to subject our powers to constraining
criticism and how to correct our aberrations by returns to
sounder beginnings. Critique and Renaissance are the continual evidence of our self-inoculation, and we see right now the
dangerous consequences of the Western invasion of souls not
so protected.
But Motolinia also reports successes, not only in conversions, which were too stupendous in number and abrupt in
spiritual terms to be always quite real. What is lovely to read
about is not only his affection for the gentleness and
dignified reticence of his boys but their quick intelligence
and general talentedness; some learned enough Latin in a
few years to correct the grammar-a tense but triumphant
moment for their teacher-of a visiting dignitary. They sang
liturgies like angels and easily learned to play European
instruments. No wonder Mexico City was to become, in the
eighteenth century, this hemisphere's greatest center of
baroque music; its chief composer, Manuel de Zumaya,
Chapel Master at the very Cathedral of Mexico City which
replaced Huitzilopochtli's temple, was part-Indian.
I should also mention two more works written with great
sympathy for the Indians: Bishop las Casas's Short Account of
the Destruction of the Indies of 1542, a book of passionate
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accusation against the Spanish conquerors and colonists, and
Cabesa de Vaca's Relaci6n, the story of the tribulations of a
discoverer of Florida, who was himself for a while enslaved
by Indians.
By contemporary historians the Aztecs are treated in
almost comically opposite ways. Jacques Soustelle paints their
daily life as an idyll of gentle, flower-loving, orderly culture,
made poignant on occasion by the necessities of the ritual
care and feeding of the gods. It is the myth of harmony and
happiness the Mexica themselves encouraged in the revisionist accounts that succeeded the "book burning" by Itzc6atl,
their first emperor. Inga Clendinnen, on the other hand,
depicts a somberly severe, fear-ridden, god-encumbered
society, whose sacrificial rituals, coruscating with whirling
sights and penetrating musical noise, were, she says, "infused
with the transcendent reality of the aesthetic." Hugh Thomas,
the most recent historian of the Conquest, a sensible and
thorough marshaller of thousands of facts, speaks similarly of
"the astounding, often splendid, and sometimes beautiful
barbarities" of Aztec ritual practice.
What astounds me is not the antithetical views of Aztec
life, for these polarities seem to have been of the Aztec
essence. What takes me aback is that my contemporaries seem
to wish to appear as knowing what is beautiful but not what
is wrong. There are of course exceptions, writers who feel
insuperable moral unease over these alien customs they are by
their professional bias bound to honor. The imaginary
experiment that I, as an outsider and amateur, have devised
for myself to put the profession in general to the test is this:
When the Spaniards first came on the remains of ritual
killings-later they saw the rituals themselves and eventually
found the body parts of their own comrades-they broke into
the holding pens where prisoners were being fattened and
stormed the temples. Would the professors have done the
same or would they have regarded the practice as protected
by the mantra of "otherness"? I am assuming here that they
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do disapprove of human sacrifice in their own culture. For my
part, I cannot tell what I would have had the courage to do,
but I would have been forever ashamed if I had not shared in
the revulsion, the reversal of an original appreciation that, for
all their rapaciousness, the Christians had for the Indiansand I might add, for certain remarkable Indian women.
I have thus evolved for myself two categories of historians: non-condoners and condoners. The older writers tend to
be non-condoners; they are not careful to cloak themselves in
moral opacity; what they abhor at home they will not condone abroad, be it ever so indigenous and ever so splendid.
One remarkable exception is the before-mentioned
Bartolome de Las Casas, who lays out the case for human
sacrifice as being both natural-since men offer their god
what they hold most excellent, their own kind-and also as
being within our tradition-since Abraham was ready to
sacrifice his son Isaac at God's bidding, and God himself
sacrificed his son. The difficulty with this latter argument
would seem to be that Abraham's sacrifice was called off, and
God's sacrifice was unique, while Indian sacrifices were
multitudinous.
Las Casas is the preceptor of Tzetan Todorov, a European
intellectual who, in his book Conquest, tries hard to come to
grips with "the Other," with the Aztec non-West. He finally
elevates the Other over his own: The Aztecs made sacrifices,
the Spaniards committed massacres. And here the rational
difficulty is that Aztec religion commanded these deaths and
Christian religion forbade them, so that Todorov is comparing customs with crimes.
This enterprise of restricting universal morality in the
interests of empathy with otherness puzzles me a lot. For if
we are really and radically each other's Other, then those
who leave their own side to enter into the Other will thereby
also lose their footing as open-eyed contemplators. In any
case, it seems to me that the non-condoning Prescott's grand
narrative has done more for the memory of this bygone
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civilization than have the condoning contemporaries. For he
induces what Virgil calls lacrimae rerum, tears for lost
things-while they invite, in me at least, contrariness, resistance to their sanctimonious self-denial.
You can see that as I read on I developed an interest in historiography, the reflective study of historical accounting itself.
For it seems to me of great current importance to consider a
propensity of Western intellectuals, particularly pronounced
in the social studies and expressive of a strength and its complementary weaknesses native to this tradition: knowledgeable self-criticism flipping into unthinking self-abasement
before the non-West. I say this mindful of the moral quandary
of pitting the humanly unacceptable, but, so to speak, innocent evils, the traditional practices of a whole civilization,
against the crimes of individuals transgressing the laws of
their own, crimes magnified by its superior power.
And now a final motive for this, my aberrant interest: We
here on the Annapolis campus are only 200 miles further
from Mexico City than from our other half in New Mexico;
Incan Cuzco is nearly on our longitude of 76° W Yet these
pre-Columbian empires are hardly ever in our common
consciousness, even less now than in the decades after
Prescott's very popular book appeared. True, some of the skyscrapers of the twenties and thirties intentionally recalled
Mesoamerican pyramids. True, the Nahuatl words chocoldtl
and tamdlli are in our daily vocabulary, as is Nahua cooking,
that is, Mexican food, in our diets. The Aztecs had in fact a
high cuisine; the description of the emperor's daily service
with its hundreds of dishes-among which (lest we be tempted too much) there may have been, as Dfaz reports, the meat
of little children-is staggering in its variety; indeed there
cannot ever have been a potentate more luxuriously or
elaborately served. Of all this we've adopted, through
modern Mexico, the low end, but where else do the Empires
of the Sun figure in our lives? This surprised sense of their
missing influence made me engage in another one of those
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imagination-experiments by which we see the world anew:
What if, as King Cad.ma of Texcoco and some later historians thought possible, the Mexica had just killed Cortes and
his band, so that the Westernization of Anahuac had been
held off for some centuries?-for it is not within my
imagination that the West was forever to be resisted. Suppose
the unwitting extermination of the Indians by disease had
thus been prevented. (I might say here that this huge demographic disaster, possibly among the worst in history, is
numerically unfixed. Some say Anahuac had thirty million,
some say it had four before Cortes. Some say by the midfifteenth century this population had been reduced to 2.6 or
1.2 million, to be fully restored only much later.) Suppose,
then, that the ravaged generation of the Conquest and postConquest era had instead been preserved, and Nahua civilization with it. Suppose eventually North American jeans
and technology had drifted down and Aztec gorgeousness
and craftsmanship up the latitudes.-! might inject here that
the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who has grappled
seriously with such dreams, comes to the sad but realistic
conclusion that the loss of native culture is worth the benefit
to ordinary people that these imports bring.-Suppose moreover that our American English had absorbed some of the
suavely dignified classical Nahuatl, its urbane address, its
poetic rephrasings, its expressive word-agglutinations;
suppose as well that the speech of the Nahua had accepted
some of our flamboyant informality. Suppose our clothing
had been restyled by Aztec orchidaciousness and our manners
had been a little improved by Aztec ceremoniousness.
Suppose our political discourse had been informed by a
neighboring monarchy against which we had never had to
rebel. We can learn in our imagination whether such fine
acquisitions could have come into our way of life without losing their hieratic heart. Would not one of the parties in this
cultural exchange eventually turn out to contribute the core
and the other the decoration? My provisional answer is that
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the West would assert itself as the substructure and the
Empire of the Sun would become part of its recreation-they
would be the pilgrims and we the tourists.
The Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes tells of a similar imagined reversal of history in the semi-historical story "The Two
Shores." Here Aguilar, Cortes's first interpreter who had long
lived with the Maya, speaks from the grave. He tells how
even while in Cortes's employ he held with the Indians and,
by always translating not what Cortes said but what he
thought, caused trouble . He confesses that he was jealous of
Malinche, the Nahuatl- and Mayan-speaking woman, whose
Mayan Aguilar translated into Spanish. She soon became
Cortes's mistress and learned Spanish; she was one of the
central figures of the conquest, present and mediating on
every great occasion; Aguilar was made redundant. But
revenge is not his final passion. It is rather a plan to mount
with his Mayans a reverse conquest, a successful invasion of
Spain, and there to recall the defeated Moors and the
expelled Jews, to inaugurate a darker-skinned, better melded
Europe, "a universe simultaneously new and recovered,
permeable, complex, fertile," where "Sweet Mayan songs
joined those of the Provencal troubadours . . .. "But Aguilar,
as he dreams his impossible dream, is dead of the bubonic
plague that did not attack only the uninoculated Indians.
So these imagination-experiments endorse the question
raised by the facts with which I began: How can we understand what happened here, on this American continent,
between 1519 and 1534? Can we compel the fortunes of war
and the forces of history to show their human motive power?
To get at some sort of answer, I shall take up the four
factors in the conquest of Mexico that seem to me most
revealing: One is a god, Quetzalcoatl; one is a practice,
human sacrifice; two are men, Montezuma and Cortes.
1. Quetzalcoatl, the most appealing of the Mesoamerican
gods, is also most deeply implicated in the Mexican debacle.
This is a complex figure, a god of human interiority and of
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the works of civilization, a searcher into the depth of hell and
the guardian of terrestrial idylls, a priest king of Tula and the
deus absconditus of Anahuac, an Indian Prometheus.
He was not the tribal god of the Mexica, having been in
the country long before they arrived. Their god was
Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and of the sun, or rather the
Sun itself, who shared the great temple pyramid of MexicoTenochtitlan, the scene of so much of the drama in this tale,
with Tlaloc, the god of rain-the god who floods the heavens
with the god who drenches the earth. When the Mexica were
still Chichimeca (as the Nahua called the wandering semisavages of the north), coming down from their mythical city
of origin Aztlan (whence the name Aztec) in search of their
appointed home, their priests carried on their backs, as I
mentioned before, a twittering medicine bundle. This was
Huitzilopochtli, reborn at Teotihuacan, the birthplace of the
gods, as the Fifth Sun. His name means "Hummingbird On
the Left" or "On the South," perhaps because he and his
people went southwest to find their marshland home on Lake
Texcoco, perhaps because those little hummingbirds are fierce
fighters and because the god-figure was half-bird, having a
thin, feathered left leg. In effect their god was crippled.
Cripples, dwarves, hunchbacks, albinos play a great role in
Nahua history, partly because the valley people had an inexhaustible interest in the sports and varieties of nature:
Montezuma's palace complex included besides an aviary, a
zoo, an arboretum, a gallery of anomalous humans; but there
may be something deeper to it, some sense of awe before the
exceptional-! don't know.
The war god was a hummingbird because Aztec warriors
who died in battle went not to the murky Hades of Mictlan
but to a sunny Elysium where they flitted about feeding on
flowery nectar-perfect examples of a dominant Aztec
characteristic, the abrupt juxtaposing of or transiting from
the brutal to the delicate.
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Most of the Aztec gods seem to have had frightful aspects.
There is a statue of Huitzilopochtli's mother Coatlicue, a
chunky monster with a necklace of human parts and a head
like an oblong package made up from two compressed snakes
springing from her neck. The tribal god himself must have
looked inhumanly terrifying. Not so Quetzalcoatl. The Aztecs
were very sensitive to human beauty-the ugliness of the
gods is clearly deliberate-and this god was represented as
beautiful, though in a way which, although not unique to
him, is yet most remarkable.
Quetzalcoatl's name combines the word quetzal, a
Mesoamerican bird that has precious green tailfeathers (the
green of quetzal feathers and of jade was the color of the
Mexica nobility), with coat!, meaning snake. So he is the
bird-snake, or the Plumed Serpent, belonging both to the sky
and the earth. And thus he is shown in some sculptures, with
coils whose scales are lengthened into feathers neatly piled
into a spiral. The fanged jaws are wide open and frame a
handsome, spare young male face, with high-bridged nose,
well-shaped eyes, thin-lipped mouth-the face, I imagine, of
a young Aztec noble.
Is this face that of the god within a serpentine integument, or is the creature as a whole the god, or is it the god's
priest in his ritual costume? It is not clear that it is even a permissible question. The Aztecs appear to have had the most
flexible notions of their divinities. The gods amalgamate
competences, share names, identify with their victims, and
merge with their priests. As far as I can tell, this mode is
neither confusion nor indeterminacy. It is rather a kind of
conceptual fluidity which does become fixed in the very
precisely promulgated rituals. The graphic art of the Aztecs
expresses this multifarious melding by its complexly intertwined figures with their attributes all drawn indistinguishably on one plane and discriminable only to an expert in
Aztec divinity.
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But of Quetzalcoatl we know that he was indeed both god
and man. As man he was then lord of Tula, and as the Toltec
lord he became fateful to the Mexica.
To me the most appealing characteristic of these newcomers, these recent Chichimeca, was their longing deference
to a city of the past, Tula, a city forty miles north of their lake
and overthrown more than 300 years before Montezuma's
day. Tula was to Tenochtitlan what Athens has been to Europe
and still is to us in Maryland and New Mexico: the source of
wisdom, art, and ideals of life. The Toltecs were to the
Mexica like gods, walking swiftly everywhere on blue sandals, wrapped in flowery fragrance . For them corn sprouted
in enormous ears, precious cocoa beans-one of the Mexican
currencies-were found in plenty, and cotton grew already
dyed in rich colors. They made works of art so exemplary
that the Aztecs gave their own craftsmen the generic name of
tolteca, Tulans.
Over this earthly idyll Quetzalcoatl Topiltzin, Our Dear
Lord Quetzalcoatl, ruled as priest and king, godlike but also
all too human. I cannot tell you what then happened in all its
tragicomic detail. But in brief, Huitzilopochtli and other gods
arrived in the guise of mischief-making wizards. Never mind
the disparity in dates. This is the story of a newer god of war
undoing an older god of civilization, and, I suspect, the story
of how Huitzilopochtli's people betrayed their assumed
Toltec heritage. These wizards assaulted the Toltec lord, who
had grown in some way neglectful, with portents and temptations. They tempted him with pulque, the wine made from
the maguey cactus, the American aloe, whose consumption
was fiercely regulated in Tenochtitlan. They raised indecent
passions in princesses and induced civil wars that
Quetzalcoatl had to win with his army of dwarves and
cripples. They caused the Tolteca to sing and dance themselves to death. To these temptations the lord of Tula
succumbed as a participant. Finally, however, they tried to
force him to make human sacrifices. Here he balked and
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refused and was for that steadfastness driven from Tula. All
this is told by Sahagun and other Indian sources. This is the
moment to say once more what needs saying just because it
seems too naive for words: To report that Huitzilopochtli did
this and Quetzalcoatl that is not to confer the status of
existence on these divine figures. Indeed they became fateful
to their people precisely because they were so vulnerable to
non-existence proofs.
There is a stone head that shows the Dear Lord weeping,
long clublike tears issuing straight from the god's eyes,
probably those he wept as he went into exile. The same head
shows him heavily bearded, an unusual feature in a young
god; and among the Indians in general. He is also supposed
to have been light-skinned.
Quetzalcoatl flees toward the east. He crosses, in space
not time, the path of the Mexica's god going southwest, and
he makes his way toward the east coast, there to embark with
his loyal band on a raft of serpents and to drift into the rising
sun-the very way Cortes, a white bearded man, took in
reverse going west and inland. Cortes comes this way in
1519, just as the year that in the Aztec calendrical cycle is
Quetzalcoatl's birth and death year, ce dcatl, One Reed, had
come round again. In this year the Dear Lord was destined to
return by boat from his trans-oceanic exile. You can see the
tragedy taking shape.
The biggest pyramid in America rose at Cholula to mark
one of the god-man's stations of flight. There the old god
failed his people when, on his way to Tenochtitlan, Cortes
massacred more than a hundred unarmed Cholulan nobles in
his temple precinct. Cortes thought he had uncovered a plot
to betray his band to the Mexica. Perhaps he had, and
perhaps the planned ambush would have been the end for
him if he had not prevented it with his characteristic
merciless decisiveness. That we shall never know, but we do
know this: The Cholulans remembered an old prophecy that
the god who had rested from his flight in their city would
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protect them, and that if they pulled a stone out of his
pyramid, a flood of water would sweep the enemy away. With
panicky energy they succeeded in wrenching out a stoneand got a cloud of dust.
The Plumed Serpent, briefly to finish his tale, was not
permanently discredited, nor did he cease to occupy imaginations. He became the savior god of a resurrected Mexico. The
friars who came at Cortes's request wanted a warrant for
treating the Indians as aboriginal Christians; they saw in the
wandering god St. Thomas, one of Jesus's twelve disciples
who was his missionary to India. Quetzalcoatl was also the
guardian god of the nativist movement in New Spain and
Mexico, celebrated in murals and hymns by Mexican painters
and intellectuals and even by that wandering Englishman D.
H. Lawrence. His novel of 1926, The Plumed Serpent, is a
repulsively fascinating, garishly proto-Nazi fantasy of the
god's return in provincial Mexico, complete with the
paraphernalia of Nuremberg: a charismatic god-representing
leader, choreographed soldiery, Nazi-like salutes, and finally
human sacrifice-all this so that the heroine, a manless
ageing Irishwoman, might find a man who is a man, that is,
who hardly ever talks. It is a travesty of the sorrowful Toltec
divinity of civilization.
2. Human sacrifice was, I have learned to think, not really
just a Mexican custom ascribable to "otherness." The Mexica
knew the story just told of Quetzalcoatl. I cannot believe that
some of them, especially their last emperor, did not reflect
that they were co-opting the god into a practice he abhorred
and over which he went into exile. Perhaps those priests of
Huitzilopochtli, with their skull-decorated black gowns and
blood-matted hair, were fanatics totally absorbed in their
cultic task, but the educated nobles, admirers of Tula, so
refined in their intimate habits and their social life, must have
had qualms and doubts-unless there is no way to infer from
ourselves to others.
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The numbers are staggering. It is reported that at the
inauguration of Huitzilopochtli's Great Temple in 1487,
20,000-by some readings 80,000-victims were lined up
four abreast in queues stretching from the temple onto the
city's causeways. (Is it altogether an ironical coincidence that
these were about the numbers of Indians said to have
presented themselves for conversion on certain days after the
conquest?) And this killing went on, in smaller numbers, in
the numerous minor temples of the city. Every twenty days,
by the ritual calendar, there was a god's feast, requiring sometimes quite a few children, sometimes a woman, sometimes a
specially prepared youth.
The operation itself is often shown in the codices. The
victims march, mostly unassisted, to the top of the pyramid;
there they are laid on a convex sacrificial stone, their limbs
are held by four priests while a fifth chokes off his screams
with a wooden yoke, the obsidian knife rips into the chest,
the heart, still beating, is held up to the Sun and put in a
wooden bowl, the "eagle dish." The victim is rolled down the
steps to be dismembered and distributed for feasting according to a strict protocol. The victims are children bought from
the poor, the pick of slaves for sale in the market (who are
ritually bathed), beautiful young nobles prepared in a year of
splendid living for their role as ixiptlas, god-impersonators.
Evidently certain divinities, like the ever-present
Tezcatlip6ca, Lord of the Near and Nigh, who shared functions with the city god, were not only recipients of victims
but were themselves sacrificed, albeit through their human
incarnations-one noteworthy parallel to Christianity.
It seems to be true that these ritual killings were not
sadistic in intention or demeaning to the victims. While there
are reports of weeping family and frightened victims, the
sacrificial human was evidently well co-opted into the
performance. Moreover, the cactus button peyotl and the
mushroom teonandcatl, "Flesh of the Gods," both hallucinogens, and the alcoholic pulque seem to have been
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administered to the sacrifices, who were, in any case, intoxicated with the ritual swirl and the musical stridor around
them. For the prepared chosen at least this passage into a
flowery next world was perhaps a high point of this lifethough who knows how many victims, particularly the
children, died experiencing extreme fear.
These frightful, somber, and splendid festivals were evidently thought to be truly necessary to the survival of the city
and the continuing existence of its world. Yet, as I said, the
Aztec nobility, who were so finely attuned to right and wrong
conduct (as their stock homilies, preserved by Sahagun,
show), must have felt themselves to be living over a moral
abyss, doing a balancing act in a threatening and fragile
sacred world, which doomed them in their hearts for what
they did and through their sacred duties for what they might
omit to do.
I have neglected to mention the largest and most steady
supply of victims, the prisoners.
The highest calling of Huitzilopochtli's people, the
soldiers of the Sun, was war, and the object of war was to take
captives, an even higher object than the merciless subjugation
of Anahuac's cities. Promotion in the army was strictly
according to the number of prisoners taken. The warriors
needed to take prisoners to rise in rank; the city needed prisoners for their flesh and blood, the sacrifices that would feed
and maintain the good will of the gods. It was a tight circle of
necessities.
This religious trap-! will call it that-had three devastating secular consequences. First, the Mexican army never
learned, until it was too late, to fight to kill, to fight a war for
survival in realest earnest. Second, Tenochtitlan trained up a
deadly enemy for itself, the city of Tlaxcala, seated between
itself and the eastern coast. There was a bizarre but logical
institution in Anahuac, the so-called "flowery war,"
xochiya6yotl. The Triple Alliance of Anahuac, eventually
dominated by Tenochtitlan and including Texcoco, had a
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mutual arrangement with three cities across the mountains, of
which the aristocratic republic of Tlaxcala was the most
independent. The agreement was to stage battles regularly for
the sole purpose of obtaining from each other prisoners for
sacrifice. This was a strange kind of ceremonious warfare,
which required the high-born warriors skillfully to take their
enemies alive, only to bring them back home to their delayed
warriors' death. Meanwhile the Tlaxcalans remained free, in
training, and full of hatred, and they became Cortes's most
effective allies.
And third, the evidence and actual sight of human
sacrifice turned the Spaniards' stomachs-as powerful a
revulsion as the moral one, I imagine. So when, as I said, they
saw the remains of their own people, an ineradicable repugnance seems to have turned their hearts, a disgust which
became the pretext for much savagery of their own.
3. Montezuma was installed as tlatodni of MexicoTenochtitlan in 1502. Tlatoani means "He Who Speaks,"
who has authority. Since Tenochtitlan was the secular and
sacred center of the Aztec world, he was the speaker over the
universe, the uei-tlatoani-usually rendered as "emperor."
When he was killed in 1520 he was 52. His lineage was even
shorter than the city's existence, whose founding date is
1345. The Anahuac empire was put together during the next
century; Axayacatl, Montezuma's father, who died in 1481,
was only the third emperor. As was the custom, the council
that chose the new lord did not go to the son but first to
Axayacatl's two brothers. When Montezuma became the
sixth emperor, Anahuac was less than seventy years old.
Historians disagree whether objectively the empire was in a
state of youthful vigor or in the course of rigidified decline
when Cortes came. But there can be no doubt that
Montezuma was a monarch who personally felt doom
coming. Motolinia says (probably incorrectly) that his very
name-nomen omen-meant one who is sad and serious, as
well as one who inspires fear and respect.
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As was necessary for the tlatoani, he had proved himself
as warrior and officer, but he was also a highly educated man.
The Mexica, like most high civilizations, were committed to
a well-defined and diversified plan of education for their
young. The set speeches, the traditional admonitions, that the
ruling nobles made to their boys and girls upon their having
reached the age of discretion are loving, somber, straitlaced,
meticulous-and full of Nahua charm. The one from which I
will read a sampling goes on for six of Sahagun's columns. It
begins thus:
Here art thou, thou who art my child, thou
who art my precious necklace, thou who art
my precious feather, thou who art my creation,
my offspring, my blood, my image.
And then the child is inducted into Aztec pessimism:
Hear well, 0 my daughter, 0 my child. The earth
is not a good place. It is not a place of joy; it is not
a place of contentment.
Then the little girl is given rules of conduct, for example:
At night hold vigil, arise promptly. Extend thy
arms promptly, quickly leave thy soft bed, wash
thy face, wash thy hands, wash thy mouth, seize
the broom; be diligent with the sweeping; be not
tepid, be not lukewarm.
What wilt thou seize upon as thy womanly
labors? ... Look well to the drink, the food;
how it is prepared, how it is made .. . .
Then the speech touches deep moral matters:
May thou not covet carnal things. May thou not
wish for experience, as is said, in the excrement, in
the refuse. And if thou truly art to change thyself,
would thou become a goddess?
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But there was also public education, a dual system. The
Young Men's (and Women's) House, the telpochccilli, was
open to the lower nobility and even to commoners. The boys'
house had features of our prep school. The emphasis was on
physical hardening and the performance of rough public
service. A lot of rowdy fun was overlooked; some of the older
boys even took mistresses, and, Sahagun reports, "they
presumed to utter light and ironic words and spoke with
pride and temerity."
The second institution, the famous calmecac, was part
seminary, part cadet corps. Here went the high nobility and
commoners destined by talent to be priests. The daily routine
was punishing; for example, sleep was often interrupted
when the boys were called to draw blood from their earlobes
and ankles with maguey spines. This self-sacrifice was said to
have been instituted by Quetzalcoatl, who was in fact the
tutelary divinity, the super-tutor, of the calmecac. Discipline
was fierce. There were constant humiliations, and if a noble's
son was found even a little drunk on pulque he was secretly
strangled; a commoner was beaten to death.
The curriculum was rigid and rigorous. The boys learned
the revisionist Mexica version of Nahua history from painted
books that were expounded to them. They learned to speak
ceremoniously and to perform ritual songs and dances accurately. They learned, besides the sign and number count of the
360-day solar calendar with its five unfortunate "hollow"
intercalary days, the divinatory calendar. This was the
"Sacred Book of Days" by which the priest told the feast days
of the gods, the personal destiny of a baby and the epochs of
the world. This study was evidently the most effective initiation into the Aztec way of seeing the world. That is the
reason why the friars, trying to extirpate Aztec worship,
denounced this sacred calendar with particular vehemence as
having cast loose from the natural heavenly revolutions and
being an evil convention-as they said: "the fruit of a
compact with the Devil."
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The two calendars came together every 52 years, an era
called the Bundling of the Years. Ominously, such an epoch
evidently occurred in 1506, "One Rabbit," when just as many
year-bundles had gone by as would make the setting of the
fifth Sun imminent, and with it the final destruction by earthquakes of Huitzilopochtli, his city, and the world whose
center was Tenochtitlan. The year of 1519, moreover, was, as
I said, ce acatl, "One Reed," the name of the year of
Quetzalcoatl's birth, exile and prophesied return. A student
of the calendar presumably knew himself to be living at once
near doomsday and near delivery.
From this schooling and his experience in the field,
Montezuma emerged as high priest, warrior and tlatoani:
spiritually austere for all his palatial luxury, a severe father to
his Mexica, rigidly religious, and, for all the self-abasement
his set accession speech required, an autocratic and aristocratic ruler, the first to restrict high office to the nobility. He
was inaccessible to the populace, stately and ceremonious
with his nobles, reserved as to his person: When Cortes, as he
himself tells, tried to hug him "in Spanish fashion,"
Montezuma's horrified attendants stopped him; this was
court etiquette but presumably also personal preference. But
above all he was a burdened man, doom-ridden, half hopeful,
self-doubtful. "What shall I do, where shall I hide? If only I
could turn into stone, wood or some other earthly matter
rather than suffer that which I dread!" he cried out, this victor of nine pitched battles, to his magicians who could not
turn to good the omens of evil to come (and got severely punished for it). This was no coward's funk but a pious man's
terror of a probably inevitable future.
There was a city across the lake, Texcoco, a member of
Tenochtitlan's Triple Alliance. It paralleled the Italian cities of
the Renaissance in high culture; it was a Tula revived. In the
fifteenth century it had a poet-king, Nezahualc6yotl, whose
poetry has the fragrance that arises when the melancholy of
existence melds with soundness of heart. Like a Nahua
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Lucretius he offers his bitter cup with the rim sweetened by
honey. He speaks:
I, Nezahualcoyotl, ask this:
Is it true one really lives on the earth?
Not forever on earth,
only a little while here.
Though it be jade it falls apart,
though it be gold it wears away,
though it be quetzal plumage it is torn asunder.
Not forever on earth,
only a little while here.
This is beauty to console for the brevity of being, but in the
Texcocan Renaissance prince it is without the panicky gloom
of the Mexican Emperor of the late Fifth Sun.
Nezahualcoyotl's underlying sense of life's inconstancy is the
same, but Montezuma's was infected by the consciousness of
a more starkly immediate doom.
I think that Montezuma was probably an overwrought
exemplar of a Mexica noble: devout witness of constant
bloody brutality; refined connoisseur of jade and feather
work; watcher for imminent death and destruction; avid
collector of fleeting things like birds and flowers; cruel lord
and ever-courteous prince; liar of great ability and treacherous too, as the Tlaxcalans believed; high noble of candid and
simple bearing: witness the poignant speech of submission he
appears to have made to Cortes when he was still in his own
palace, when he still believed in the Spanish savior. He said
with a smile:
You too have been told perhaps that I am a god,
and dwell in palaces of gold and silver. But you see
it is false. Myhouses, though large, are of stone
and wood like those of others. And as to my body
[here he threw open his cloak]-you see it is flesh
and blood like yours.
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Some see delicate irony in his words, particularly in the
reference to the absence of gold. But to me his speech sounds
heartfelt, and he was in fact submitting to men he thought
might be teules, gods; Cortes's band, the santa campania, the
Holy Company, might indeed be bringing back QuetzalcoatlCortes, "the white hero of the break of day."
He had had some cause to be thus receptive, for in the
decade before Cortes's arrival the omens had multiplied: the
spontaneous combustion of Huitzilopochtli's temple, tongues
of celestial fire, finally a bird found in Lake Texcoco bearing
a black mirror in its head in which the emperor briefly
glimpsed the strangers landing-Sahagun catalogues eight
serious omens.
I think Montezuma became heartsick and started vacillating, now welcoming the Spaniard from afar with golden gifts,
now holding him off or even arranging his ambush. In the
end he was transfixed like a rabbit by a snake, truly a snake
since Cortes played the role of the Plumed Serpent. So he sent
the Spaniard Quetzalcoatl's regalia, since it was the year
ce acatl, One Reed. Not all his nobles were pleased at the
emperor's submissiveness; they wept when not much later
they attended his litter to his place of custody, his father's
palace.
Some historians think the omens were an ex post facto
invention to make the catastrophe more palatable to simple
people. But they sound very plausible; ominous events do
occur in clusters before disasters (as Machiavelli observes in
his Discourses), at least for those who have prophetic souls.
The omens help explain Montezuma's fragility before the
crisis. It was, I want to say, a type of fragility almost designed
to highlight Cortes's robustness, as if Montezuma had found
his fated match, the better to reveal the West to itself.
Once he had made his submission to the Spanish emperor and been taken into Spanish custody, another side of his
character came out: He became receptive to new experiences,
learned to shoot the crossbow, sailed Lake Texcoco on a
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brigantine, the first wind-driven vessel on those waters.-It is
always the West's inventions, especially those that shoot far
and go fast, that first beguile the non-West. He retained his
exquisite courtesy and generosity; he became sociable and
even affectionate with the Spaniards. It has been suggested
that he was displaying the pathological bonding of a victim to
his kidnappers. But by a concord with Cortes Montezuma
was running his empire from Axayacatl's palace where he and
the Spaniards were quartered, and he was free to indulge in
his old pleasures like hunting. It is reported that if there was
fun afoot he could dissolve in giggles.
But this priest-emperor never converted or gave up
human sacrifice, although frequently subjected to Cortes's
passionate theological harangues against the ritual on the
grounds of human brotherhood. As Fuentes says, it was simply a more urgent question to him whether the sun would rise
and the world go on than what the Spaniards did to him or
his empire.
Nevertheless, I wonder if it ever came to him that his religious practices were, in the nature of things, futile, that the
Christians had a sun that moved reliably and stably (and
would soon even stand still) precisely because it was not a god
and therefore not amenable to human exertion and sacrifice.
Octavia Paz says in his Labyrinth of Solitude that the Aztecs
committed suicide because they were betrayed by their gods.
I think they were, speaking more precisely, betrayed by their
trust in their visible and palpable gods, who (as I think in contrast to the early invaders, who acknowledged them as devils)
did nothing and were nothing and absconded more crassly
than could an invisible deity or one less abjectly served-a
truth I have, strangely enough, never found enunciated by the
historians I have read.
4. Cortes, finally, the Conquistador, seems to me a man as
emblematic of the conquering West as Montezuma was of the
empire of the doomed Sun. Cortes was a hidalgo from an old,
turbulent, moderately situated family. Having gotten into
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various scrapes he chose to come to the Indies in 1504 when
he was nineteen-an age more often given over to wanderlust
than to acquisitiveness. In 1519 he began to subdue Anahuac,
whose chiefs became, as he put it to his sovereign, "Your
Majesty's vassals, and obey my commands." No sooner had
he conquered Mexico for Spain than he was beset by endless
audiencias and residencias, tribunals and inquiries, conducted
by officials whose rectitude was apparently not much greater
than his own and whose daring was considerably less.
Nevertheless, by 1529 he was Marquess of the Oaxaca Valley
and Captain-General of New Spain, empowered to discover
further lands and to colonize them. (In fact following Mexico
he discovered and named California after a queen in one of
those medieval romances.) He died in 1547, and his bones
have undergone grotesque removals paralleling his downward course in Mexican history, during which Quetzalcoatl
was raised to a national hero while his unwitting impersonator was suppressed by the descendants of the Conquest.
The story of his and his Holy Company's march toward
Tenochtitlan in 1519, his first peaceful entrance into the
sacred and magical city, his expulsion, near-annihilation and
devastating re-entry have lately been retold in all its fictiondefying detail by Hugh Thomas in Conquest. He lands on
Anahuac's eastern shore with his little fleet of "water houses,"
as the natives described his three-masted square-riggers, of
the type called naos. When they . first saw them, they
reported on them as "mountain ranges floating on water." '
His boldest first stroke is to dismantle his ships before he
marches inland. Now the thirty-four-year-old sailor emerges
as a man of many devices and deceits, a bold man of faithand greed-inspired audacity-albeit somewhat more devoted
to the salvation of his soul than to the amassing of gold; a
resilient man well acquainted with suffering and depression;
a man of self- and other-punishing endurance and scary
tenacity, who seems to live on little sleep; cruel and charming, careful of his companions and demanding their utmost;
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prudent and daring; circumspect and lightning-quick; generous and grasping; kind and manipulative; and always an
adventurer and a wanderer and an elegant teller of adventures and wanderings-as complex a man in his way as
Montezuma. Prescott says in his personal memoranda, in
which he details for himself the oppositions of Cortes's
character:
The great feature of his character was constancy of
purpose . . .. He was inexhaustible in resources,
and when all outward means were withdrawn,
seemed to find sufficient to sustain him, in his own
bosom.
Now listen to the beginning of Homer's Odyssey:
Tell me, 0 Muse, of the man of many twists who
wandered so much when he had sacked the sacred
city of Troy. He saw the towns of many men and
knew their mind, and suffered much on the sea,
seeking to save his soul and the return of his compamons.
No two men could be more alike; if I were to inventory the
characters of the two adventurers nearly every feature in one
list would turn up quite recognizably in the other, beginning
with "constancy of purpose" -Odysseus is polytlas, the
"much enduring"-including the occasional bouts of lassitude and depression. And this happy circumstance tells me
that Cortes was not primarily a man of his time: not just a
medieval knight-errant or a mercantile-minded gold prospector, or a hard-to-control vassal of the Spanish crown, or a
fierce competitor for the rights of first conquest.-He was
certainly all these, and it was because he returned to the Gulf
Coast to intercept his Spanish pursuers that he first lost
Tenochtitlan. But before these and more fundamentally he
was a man who in his intense individuality expressed an
ancient type of the West, Odysseus the self-sufficient, who
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talks to his own heart, who has many twists and devices, who
is blunt and tactful, who can be driven to extreme cruelty and
engage in gratuitous acts of kindness, who lies but not
ignobly, and above all, who can, in a pinch, rely on his virgin
goddess, Athena, because he relies on himself.
In Cortes that ancient pagan character type seems to have
comfortably accommodated, or better, absorbed the God
from the other root of the Western tradition, though Cortes
was-more parallelism-particularly devoted to the Virgin.
Hugh Thomas says that he became more God-fearing as the
expedition went on-who wouldn't? His flagship sailed
under a banner he had inscribed with the saying: "Friends, let
us follow the Cross and if we only have faith in this sign we
shall conquer." He was citing the legend under which the
Emperor Constantine fought the battle that in 312 turned the
Roman Empire Christian. Cortes's Christianity is a debated
subject, but to me it seems unquestionable. It is-to state the
obvious-Cortes's chief distinction from his pagan avatar,
and to my mind the reason why, unlike Odysseus the Sacker
of Troy who returns, however dilatorily, to his own rocky
Ithaca, Cortes the Conquistador of Anahuac stays to colonize
it for his "Most Catholic and Invincible Emperor." One kind
of evidence is that this prudent commander several times put
his expedition at risk because of his religious impetuousness
and had to be restrained by Bartolome de Olmeda, the wise
and patient friar with the expedition, a man who while
practicing prudence also thought of the Indians' feelings-so
unlike Pizarro's fatal chaplain. On one memorable occasion,
the emperor, at Cortes's request, invited him with some of his
captains to come up the Great Pyramid of Huitzilopochtli.
Montezuma himself was, as usual, carried to the top, but
Cortes insisted on marching up all 113 steep narrow steps
and declared to the solicitous emperor waiting for him that
"Spaniards are never weary;" indeed, as I mentioned, Cortes
slept little when on campaign. Montezuma then obtained permission from the priests for Cortes, who was clearly already
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123
in the Christian conqueror mode, to enter the sanctuary. This
reeking place so disgusted him that he asked Montezuma
with a smile-not a charming one, I imagine-how so wise a
prince could put his faith in a representation of the Devil. He
offered to install in this temple, as he had on other pyramids,
a cross and an image of the Virgin, before which the false
gods would shrink into oblivion. Montezuma was deeply
shocked and said-here is irony-that these were the gods
that had ever led the Mexica to victory. Cortes, perhaps
nudged by Friar Olmeda, apologized. But it was a dangerous
moment. Montezuma stayed behind to expiate the sacrilege.
This action, which could have meant the early end of
Montezuma's policy of submission, was certainly impolitic
and clearly inspired by pure if untimely Christian fervor. In
his own account Cortes naturally suppresses this incident in
favor of what must have been a later occasion, when he did
actually topple the idol down the pyramid steps, and, as he
claims, stop the sacrifices.
Cortes became de facto emperor of Anahuac close to the
time, namely 1513, that Machiavelli's Prince appeared. So I
looked Cortes up, as it were. I have often wondered for
whom this manual on rulership is meant, since natural
princes already know it all and untalented rulers will simply
use it as permission for misconduct. Cortes, it turns out,
knows most of Machiavelli's lessons: how to fight both like a
fox and a lion, for he was proud of his "cunning stratagems"
and fierce even when wounded and unarmed; how not to be
good on occasion, for he could be brutal; how to get credit
for every exploit, for his letters take care that he should; how
to rule more by love than fear, as his trooper Diaz attests;
how, finally, to be lucky, and-a Machiavellian or Odyssean
trait of his own-how to lie royally without being commonly
dishonest. But there were many more things that he did not
do by this book but did rather against its explicit advice: he
relied heavily on auxiliaries, fought with an amateur's
improvisation, and did not study eminent predecessors-for
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there were none. But above all, Machiavelli doesn't seem to
know, or at least to enunciate, the two kindred qualifications
most needful to an imperial conquistador: large dreams and
deep faith-in Cortes's case, Christian faith, but faith also in
a more expansive sense, as I will try to show.
Both rulers made mistakes. Montezuma should not have
sent gold to greet the "Holy Company," though how was he
to know? He should not have quartered the Spaniards in
Axayacatl's palace where the state treasure was hidden-and
so on. But the chief mistake was to believe the prophecies and
to submit to the omens, and so to the bearded white men
coming over the water. Some of his nobles seem to have
realized this, but they were themselves used to submitting to
their lord, and so they wept silently.
Cortes's errors were those of a nervous yet decisive
aggressor. At Cholula he stained his name with a possibly
preventable massacre. At Tenochtitlan, when he hastened to
the coast to repel his pursuers, he left in charge a valorous
young brute, Pedro d'Alvarado, whom the Indians called
Tonatiuh, the Sun, because he was blond and beautiful. He
proved worse to them than their own doomed Fifth Sun, for
as he was edgy, eager and without judgment, he unleashed a
massacre on the unarmed celebrants of Huitzilopochtli's
festival which ended every chance of peaceful dominion and
brought on that Sad Night. This was the night when the
Spaniards, their Indian allies, and the Spanish women fighting
desperately alongside their men, were driven from the city
and nearly exterminated.
Above all, he razed Tenochtitlan, the finest city in the
world. Was it a mistake, a crime? Here is what he himself says
in his account of the recapture of the city from the Mexica,
who under the young Emperor Cuauhtemoc, Montezuma's
nephew, had learned the Spanish skills: to fight to kill, to fight
at night, to fight from the water. The passage is from the third
letter to Emperor Charles V:
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All I had seen forced me to two conclusions, the
one that we should regain little of the treasure the
Mexicans had taken from us; the other that they
would force us to destroy and kill them all and this
last weighed on my soul. I began to wonder how I
could terrify them and bring them to a sense of
their error. It could only be done by burning and
destroying their houses and towers of the idols.
Of course, the letter explains first things first: why the
Emperor isn't getting his customary fifth of treasure. Of
course, Cortes assumes that the Mexica are legally in rebellion (an imperial arrogation, to be sure, on par with the Aztec
emperor's treatment of cities that refused the dominion of
Huitzilopochtli). But it also reveals a certain travail of spirit,
a conscience, a care for a people whose intelligence Cortes
admired and whose fate he pitied, albeit he was its cause. On
Cortes's premise the destruction was a necessity, but was the
premise itself necessary? For my part, I simply cannot judge.
It is true, however, that once he was master of Anahuac he
looked carefully after his realm and probably did it more
good in the long run than it ever was in Montezuma's power
to do: He spent his own resources in rebuilding the country,
introduced new plants and draught animals, condemned the
enslavement of the Indians and recorded in his will his deep
misgivings of conscience about the institution itself, and tried
to mitigate the treatment of the natives by the colonists. And,
of course, he abolished human sacrifice. All in all, his dubious
deeds had the effect of relegating Anahuac to the past; his
good deeds gave Mexico a future. And, pressed to think in
these terms about the Conquest itself, I suppose with the
Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa that it belongs in the long
run to the credit side of something, call it human welfare.
But the question I proposed was how and why it
could happen. So let me try to come to some sort of conclusion. Two worlds clashed (here the cliche tells the simple
truth), and the leaders happened to be emblematic of their
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worlds. Let me first compare the divinities that led the
leaders.
We have an alumnus, Peter Nabokov, the stepson of the
man to whom this lecture is dedicated, William Darkey. He is
an expert on Indian sacred life and its sacred space. When he
heard that I was reading on this subject he sent me a large box
of books from his private library. In one of these books I
found an article containing an antithetical listing of Aztec and
Christian religiosity.
On the left, the Nahua side, is listed (I select for brevity's
sake) Symmetry, Autonomy, Interchangeability, and Cyclicality.
On the right, the Spanish side, is listed Hierarchy,
Centralization, Fixity, and Linearity. This right side is in fact
recognizable as a checklist of features condemned in the West
as evils of the West, a compendium of the self-critique of the
West such as was current in the later part of the last century
and still is, albeit somewhat muted by recent events.
I also recognize the left side of the list, and it does appear
to me to be descriptive of Aztec religion. But notice this
strange effect: how each characteristic of that religion
induced an opposite effect on the Aztec polity. The complexly related Symmetries of divine functions make for a draining
tangle of rituals; the Autonomy of the deities-as many as
1600-leads to a burdensome multiplicity of services; the
Interchangeability of identities leads to dependence on priestly interpreters; and the Cyclicality leads to a sense of
inescapable doom. In fact it was Anahuac that most tended
toward social Hierarchy, administrative Centralization and
rigid Fixity of protocol. The Spanish side, on the other hand,
gave its real-life practitioners one supreme god, reliable in his
operations, author of a stable creation, progressing hopefully
into a new day. And so it was the Spaniards who could afford
to be free, flexible, energetic, and self-reliant: When God
permits them to be defeated it is, Cortes says, on account of
their own sins, a deserved punishment, not an unintelligible
divine antic.
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But, a student of Aztec religion might argue, the similarities to Christianity are remarkably exact and numerous, so
why would religion make the difference? To give a sampling
of the parallelisms: The Indians had the symbol of the cross,
a Maltese type, that turns up frequently in their visual art.
They had absolution by confession, though it could be undergone only once in a lifetime. They had a form of baptism,
ritual fasting, even an invisible god. Above all, they had the
ritual ingestion of their god's blood: the victim's or their own
blood was kneaded into loaves of amaranth seeds that were
god-images and were then eaten. This last practice, the
analogue of Christian communion, is most interesting to me,
because some scholars represent this Christian sacrament as a
form of cannibalism that brings Christianity closer to the
Aztec feasting on flesh. But, of course, the blood partaken of
during the Christian Eucharist is precisely not the blood of a
living human being. Even a very untheoretical Christian
knows that it is a mystery which is accompanied by a complex
rational theology. Communicants know, if vaguely, that the
wafer and wine are neither merely symbolic nor brutely
real-the nature of their transformation is open to rational
questioning: For example, have they undergone transubstantiation, so that the substance itself, the bread and the wine,
are to be regarded as now the body and blood of Christ, or
have they achieved consubstantiation, such that they present
a duality of visible properties and invisible essence?
I may be allowed to dismiss the beguiling but bizarre
notion of the friars that the Indians were lapsed Christians,
baptized a millennium and a half ago by QuetzalcoatlSt.Thomas; at any rate, they themselves were always afraid
that the willing conversions of the Indians were perhaps
rather shallow and masked the survival of the old similarseeming worship. It remains a problem, requiring really deep
investigation by people who know not only the methods of
comparative ethnography but the ways of faith, whether such
similarities betoken pure coincidence, or are features belong-
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ing to some general human religiosity, and whether such
all-human phenomena have a deep or shallow common root.
To me it seems, judging only at first glance, that a stupendously unwieldy religion supported by many disparate narratives, whose meaning, being a matter of memory, is uncircumventably in the hands of trained priests, is simply incommensurable with a religion that has one simply told "Good
News" (Evangel/ion), one master story whose ever new
interpretations, carried on by priests, theologians, and
laymen alike, strive for coherence. Let me make my point
brusquely and minimally: Such a religion, Christianity in the
present case, seems to me simply more energizing. To wit:
Cortes liked to read, as he said, when he had time, and he
knew some theology which, in turn, gave him the selfconfidence to harangue an emperor. He went to mass in the
morning without fail and was ready for the day. In defense,
Montezuma could only tell divine stories-myths to us-and
insist on his gods' past services, which he had to keep securing by spending every day much time and many resources on
arduous cultic performances.
Moreover, Cortes's Holy Company could rely on their
God who, being invisible-though having one and only one
human incarnation-was therefore impervious to sudden
physical toppling, to being bodily thrown down the temple
stairs, as Moses had once burnt the golden calf. This God, a
god mysterious but not capricious, made nature according to
laws and left it largely alone. Thus God's created nature was
open to the self-reliant inventiveness of human beings. This
natural realm, being amenable to human rationality, invited
initiative, for its God had himself engaged in radical innovation when he created the world and when he irrupted into
history in human form.
I have been engaged by this puzzle: We know that the
Indians had wheeled toys; why did Anahuac wait for Cortes
to introduce wagons? It seems to me that it is not generally
true that necessity is the mother of invention, but rather than
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129
inventions develop necessities: We see a convenience and we
need it. Anahuac, to be sure, had enough slaves and
commoners with tumplines to drag its building stones anywhere. But why didn't someone think of the splendor of
rolling in stately carriages over the waiting causeways of
Tenochtitlan? By my premise it was not lack of need but
something else, at which I am guessing: the Aztecs were close
and loving onlookers and clever users of nature, but they
were not on the lookout to go her one better, to whirl rather
than to walk over her terrain. Perhaps the wheel isn't the
most convincing general example, since it seems to have
come to the Western world not as an original invention but
by diffusion, probably from Mesopotamia, but to me its
absence in Anahuac does seem telling for Aztec inventioninertia. Why did they not lever their simple tools into
machines, those devices for compelling nature to outdo herself? Why did they refrain from enlarging their bare-eyed
observation through those instruments that bring close things
that are beyond and below human vision? Why had they, as
gifted a people as ever was, no interest in seizing the mechanical advantage or extending sensory acuity? Well, as for the
latter, they had no glass for lenses (which is why Cortes's glass
baubles were acceptable gifts). But then-why not?
Theology, the laws of nature, interpretative accessibility,
and inventiveness-these are great but they are not the only
advantages that these Westerners who came out of the East
carried with them. Others have been intimated: the fraternal
equality of human beings insofar as they are ensouled
creatures that Cortes preached to the Aztec nobles, whereas
Anahuac was caste-ridden; the ensuing closeness of the leader
to his men that made Cortes listen to the complaints and
sometimes-never at crucial moments-heed the advice of
his companions, whereas Montezuma was deliberately
remote-the tlatoani, the Speaker, not the spoken-to, whose
subjects had to avert their eyes when he passed-and autocratic; the project of propagating to all the world a truth felt
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to be universal that unquestionably drove Cortes if not the
"Holy Company"-the name was first given ironicallywhereas the Mexica, once the conquered cities had accepted
Huitzilopochtli, collected their gods in turn, ever more of
them, for whom Montezuma even established a sort of allAnahuac pantheon; and (significant for our times) above all,
the tenacity of the Christians in holding on to life, whereas
the Aztecs seemed somehow-I'm far from understanding
it-to surrender themselves more readily to the thought of
death and so to death itself.
Of course, the Conquistadores' Christianity was intertwined with that other root of our West, pagan Greco-Roman
antiquity, of which I mention now only the intellectual taproot, the Greek one. From this dual root stems, it seems to
me, that faith in a more comprehensive sense I mentioned
before, the faith that underlies a daily life free for confident
projects: the trust in the stable motions of nature combined
with a contemplative care for transcendence, the faith in "the
Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," to cite our founding
charter
All of us here know-or will learn in the next four
years-how much the Christian and post-Christian West
owes to the Greek science of celestial nature and the rational
account of divinity. But I want to recur to the human model
that is exemplified with such spectacular accuracy by Cortes,
the Homeric Odysseus, the first mature Western man (for
Achilles, though in years the same age in the Iliad as was
Cortes in 1519, is constitutionally a youth). This man, a
soldier and sailor too, is free, self-reliant, inventive, a discoverer of new lands, be it of the world or the soul, and, I nearly omitted to say, the lover of women of stature: Like
Odysseus, who had his semi-goddesses abroad and his
Penelope at home, Cortes had in his life two royal daughters
of Montezuma and two Spanish wives, but above all his comrade, his advisor and interpreter, Malinali or Malinche, the
Mexican princess christened Dona Marina. It was his
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131
partnership with her that gave him his Nahua nicknamethe Indians addressed him as "Malinche;" if it was meant in
derision, it was a misplaced scorn. She and Cortes were, like
Odysseus and Penelope, one in their wily works, and they had
a son, Don Martin Cortes (named after the Conquistador's
father), a son to whom he was attached, as Odysseus was to
his-more legitimate-Telemachus.
I cannot pretend to understand how this distinctive
species of Odyssean individualists is propagated down the
ages, nor can I quite figure out whether this self-reliant,
energetic type produces the tradition of trust in nature's
manageableness or the tradition of inquisitiveness generates
the type of the man of many devices, the polymechanos. In
other words, to me this question seems askable and therefore
pursuable: Whatever may be the case for the rest of the
human world, is our West ultimately more a civilization or a
kind of human being? I tend toward the latter, but for the
moment I will take the safe though weasly way and say that
together, type and tradition in tangled reciprocity, they are
responsible for the West's apparently irresistible expansiveness. The Empires of the Sun, on the other hand, fell so fast
into ruin because they and their leaders displayed in their
high-bred, melancholic rigidity and their fearful care for the
courses of their Sun characteristics that were, so to speak, the
fateful complement, the matched antithesis, of the confident
and focused daring of the Western invaders.
The lessons learned in thinking about a problem amount
more often to collateral insights than direct solutions. So I
want to end with two such lessons I believe I learned: First,
that we really must come to grips with our West in its
apparently irresistible expansiveness and if, on thoughtful
consideration, it proves necessary, acknowledge candidly its
superiority-superiority, that is, in the scope it gives, remarkably enough, to individual human nature by the very universality of its conceptions. And two, that we, as conscious
representatives of that tradition, owe those overrun and
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
extinguished civilizations, with all their irreplaceable strange
beauty, a remembrance-not merely as projects for research
but as objects of human regard.
Addendum: In the question period at the Santa Fe
campus on September 13, 2002, a deeper issue than is
broached above was raised. I have presented Cortes as the apt
heir of a European tradition of ever-hopeful receptivity to
and invention of machines and devices (one such, not
mentioned above, is the huge-and ludicrously failed-catapult employed in the retaking of Tenochtitlan). Now the
question was asked whether, aside from being a more freeing
and invigorating faith than was the service of the Aztec pantheon, Christianity also provided the conditions for the transformation of the ancient theoria of natures into the modern
science of Nature and the project of mastery; in other words:
was Christianity implicated in technology? I have come upon
this claim in an article by M.B. Foster in Mind of 1935-36. Its
main point is this: Natural science presupposes that nature
must embody an intelligible mathematical scheme, but which
of the possible laws it realizes is left to experimental observation. These conditions imply that the world was created (not
generated) by a God who wills it-hence its contingencybut whose will is constrained by his understanding-hence its
intelligible lawfulness. This, Foster argues, is basic Christian
theology.
Books Read and Books Consulted
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Boone, Elizabeth Hill. 1994. The Aztec World. Washington, D.C.:
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Broda, Johanna, David Carrasco, and Eduardo Moctezuma. 1987.
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World. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Nunez. 1542. The Account: Alvar Nunez
Cabeza de Vaca's Relaci6n. Translated by Martin A. Favata and Jose
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Carmack, Robert M ., Janine Gasco, and Gary H. Gossen. 1996.
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American Civilization. Upper Saddle River, N .J.: Prentice Hall.
Carrasco, Davfd. 1982. Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire:
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Clendinnen, lnga. 1991. Aztecs: An Interpretation . Cambridge :
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Columbus, Christopher. 1492-1504. The Four Voyages of
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Baltimore: Penguin Books (1969).
Conrad, Geoffrey, and Arthur A. Demarest. 1988. Religion and
Empire: The Dynamics of Aztec and Inca Expansionism.
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Diamond, Jared. 1999. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of
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1-
Plato's Timaeus and the
Will to Order
Peter Kalkavage
"And whoever thinks another a greater friend
than his own fatherland, I say that man is nowhere."
Sophocles, Antigone 182-3
The Timaeus is the strangest of Plato's dialogues. It is so
strange that one wonders whether anything in it can be taken
seriously. Here conversation and inquiry are suspended, and
in their place Plato gives us long speeches that take the form
of myths. Socrates for the most part is silent. His silence is
like the receptacle we hear about in Timaeus' speech: it
provides the receptive "space" for all the stories and images
to come. We hear about Solon among the Egyptians, the lost
continent of Atlantis, an Athens grown young and heroic, the
musical construction of the soul, and the geometric construction of body. We also hear about ourselves. These are the
most bizarre tales the dialogue has to offer-tall tales about
our souls and bodies, about how we came to have a sphereshaped head, a neck and torso, eyes and ears, liver and spleen,
bone and flesh, an upright posture; about the manifold
diseases that afflict body and soul; about where sex came
from, and how birds evolved from feather-brained
astronomers. With the Timaeus, even more than with other
hat
dialogues, we wonder what in the world Plato is up to. \'(T
is the point of all this cosmomania? And why is Socrates
silent?
The silence of Socrates in the Timaeus signals the absence
and withdrawal of philosophy itself, as Socrates understands
it, from the day's proceedings. In particular, it signals the
Peter Kalkavage is a tutor at St. John's College. This lecture was delivered in
Annapolis on March 24, 2000.
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absence of that erotic stnvmg that draws the philosopher
beyond the passing show of mortal opinion to a godlike
vision of what eternally is. Plato's strange drama draws us
away from this striving. It directs our attention to a form of
thymos or spiritedness that may be called a "will to order."
This will is glorified in the famous likely story of Timaeus.
Craftsmanship, rather than contemplation, is the hero of the
story. Philosophy in a sense makes an appearance ; but it tends
to be understood as the mastery of distinct disciplines, the
systematic presentation of theories, the building of models,
and the solving of problems. It is philosophy made technical
and effective-philosophy (if one may call it that) with all the
divine madness taken out of it. Plato was so thorough a
student of Socrates that he imagined what it would mean to
go beyond Socrates-beyond the knowledge of ignorance,
the claim not to teach, the treatment of virtue as a perpetual
question, and the tension between philosophy and the city. In
the Timaeus, Plato seeks to interest us profoundly in one such
experiment in going beyond Socrates, an experiment in
which the love of wisdom is displaced by the will to order.l
The true center of the Timaeus is not its cosmology but
the desire of Socrates. This is the motive force behind all the
speeches to come. Socrates presents his desire in his longest
and most important speech in the dialogue. Yesterday,
Socrates gratified the desire of Timaeus, Critias,
Hermocrates, and the absent fourth to hear what Socrates
thought about the best political order. He did so, he says,
because he knew he would then be able to make a demand on
them (20B). He knew that those who showed up today would
be compelled by justice to pay him back with a "feast of
speech" -a feast that would depict the just city in the act of ,
waging war. Socrates expresses his desire through a provocative simile. "My affection," he says, "seems to be something
like this: it's as if someone who gazed upon beautiful animals '
somewhere, either produced by the art of painting or truly
living but keeping their peace, were to get a desire to gaze
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upon them moving and contending in some struggle that
seemed appropriate to their bodies" (19B-C).
The most striking thing about this desire is its irrationality. Socrates does not say, ''And so, now that we've looked at
the just city at rest, it makes sense to investigate the city in
motion." On the contrary, he portrays himself as a man struck
by a passing fancy. It is no thought, no logic that leads to the
city in motion but a mere feeling or pathos. The irrationality
is heightened by Socrates' reference to chance: he just
happens to feel like this (19B), the way we might just happen
to want to go to the movies. Furthermore, the desire for the
deeds and words of war seems to spring from thymos or
spiritedness, which delights in honor and victory rather than
truth. Socrates depicts himself as desiring, not a philosophic
account, but an encomium or song of praise. What he seems
to want from his hosts is not truth but beautification or
flattery. This fits well with the dominant word of the dialogue,
kosmos, which means not just order but ornament and beautiful display. It also fits with the name Timaeus, which
suggests time, honor. But why would Socrates, who refuses to
put up with the flattery of love in the Symposium, here in the
Timaeus compel his hosts to engage in flattery? And how is
the cosmology of Timaeus related to such a project?
The Timaeus is the story of a descent into Becoming. It
appears to be a sequel to the Republic. In that dialogue,
Socrates and Glaucon bring the discussion to its highest point
when they take up the question of philosophic education. To
reveal the need for such an education, they go down into a
cave. Human nature, we are told, dwells in a cavelike condition of ignorance and deception (7 .514A). The word for
condition in this passage is the same as the one Socrates uses
here in the Timaeus to describe himself-pathos, which also
means feeling or affection, as well as suffering or affliction.
The cave is the place of political orthodoxy or right opinion.
The cave dwellers sit in a sort of prenatal position with their
gaze forced upon the cave wall. They are enthralled-that is,
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both fascinated and enslaved-by moving two-dimensional
images of three-dimensional artifacts, projected. on the wall
by the enforcers of the city's opinions. These projectionists
are no doubt the poets, whose art of making deceptive imitations of human excellence binds the souls of the cave-citizens
to the city's beliefs and customs. The prenatal position of the
cave people suggests that they are in a kind of womb which
paradoxically refuses to give them birth and bring them to
light, refuses to let them grow into free and upright beings.
To ensure their provincialism, the protective cave-mother
keeps them in the dark and charms them with exciting
political movies that stir the soul to praise and blame. The
potential philosopher seeks freedom from this stultifying,
prenatal condition. He is turned around, converted, from
Becoming to Being and eventually to the study of the Good.
The art of thus turning the soul around, as Socrates describes
it, comes from the power of mathematics.2
Just as the Republic takes us from Becoming "up" to
Being, so the Timaeus brings us back "down"-back to the
cave of body, custom, opinion, and change. The dialogue is a
grand defense or apologia of Becoming in response to
Socrates' indictment of Becoming in the Republic. The will to
plunge from the heights of Being into the depths of Becoming
is intimately connected with the will to order, for the turn
from Being to Becoming is also the turn from theory or
contemplation to practicality and accomplishment. Becoming
engages us as practical, productive beings. As children of
Becoming, we are caught up in the doing and making of
things. We are ambitious, restless beings desirous of both
honor and mastery.
Socrates' hosts, who are praised for their reputation and
accomplishment,3 have an agenda: to make the realm of
doing and making look as good as possible. They will try to
renovate th~ cave of Becoming in order to make it more
receptive to the intentions and designs of enlightened
political craftsmanship. But this political agenda requires a
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preliminary step: a divine sanction and a basis in the overall
scheme of things. The will to order cannot accomplish politically what nature will not let it accomplish in the first place.
There must be a predisposition to order. This is where the
cosmological myth of Timaeus comes in. Through the power
of science and fiction combined, Timaeus will make
Becoming stand forth as a kosmos or beautifully ordered
Whole. This Whole is not so much discovered by the
cosmologist as it is made. Mathematics, here, has a role
contrary to the one it had in the Republic. Instead of turning
the soul from her fixation with Becoming to the dialectical
study of Being, mathematics now supplies the beautifying
principles in accordance with which the cave of Becoming
can be transformed into an enlightened home for moral
correctness, political reform, and scientific research. The
adjective kosmios in Greek means decent and well behaved.
This is the quality that Timaeus will try to infuse into the
world of Becoming. He will try to make the wild world of
body and change decent and law-abiding, at least in speech.
The turn from Being to Becoming is, in effect, the undoing of philosophic conversion. This turn is most clearly seen
in the character of Critias, the spokesman in the dialogue for
nomos or convention. At one point he tells Socrates that the
city described on the previous day was in fact a myth, and
that he, Critias, will carry over Socrates' merely theoretical
city into what he calls "the truth" (26C7-D3) . Critias
identifies the truth with Becoming. His extreme vanity
regarding his genealogy and his family connections with the
great Solon confirms this fact. The ancient Athens Solon hears
about from the Egyptian priests is more real than Socrates'
city because it actually existed in a real terrestrial place-so
Critias would have us believe. According to the wisdom of
Egypt, a wisdom Critias clearly admires, what is older is more
real and authoritative than what is younger and more recent.
Old ways are best. The oldest things are the most real and
true, and the oldest priests are the wisest of all. Truth is a
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long-standing custom or nomos, and knowledge consists in
the oldest hearsay about the oldest things.4
The Timaeus is a time machine. It attempts to unearth
hidden origins by taking us back to those origins in mythic
time. Throughout the dialogue, speech is playfully depicted
as generative or originating and, in that sense, thoroughly
temporal. Solon's story takes us back to a forgotten place at
a forgotten time . What he hears from the Egyptian priest is
about the periodic structure of time itself. Critias, in order to
retrieve this story, goes back to the time when he was very
young. Timaeus, too, stresses the playfully generative power
of speech: he presents the cosmic order, not as it eternally is,
but as it came to be "once upon a time." This temporalization
of logos is yet another way in which the Timaeus takes us
back to temporal beginnings but not "up" to eternal principles. Instead of recollection, as we hear it described in the
Meno, the Timaeus steeps us in the shadow land of memory.
Such is my prelude to the speech of Timaeus. In what follows, we shall explore how this speech embodies the will to
order. What is thinking in the likely story? What does it mean
to be kosmios, cosmic, in one's thinking? What is the
strength, and the weakness, of such thinking? My attempt to
address these questions falls into three parts, which mirror
the tripartite order of Timaeus' speech: The Piety of Physics,
Space Dreams, and The Human Condition.
The Piety of Physics
Timaeus introduces the phrase "likely story" in what Socrates
calls the prelude or preamble to the speech itself (29D).
Socrates reminds Timaeus that he ought to invoke the gods
according to nomos or convention. Timaeus agrees that it
would be sound-minded or moderate to do so, thereby
exhibiting his favorite moral virtue. He adds an invocation
that reflects a curious brand of piety. "We must also invoke to
hemeteron," he says-what comes from, or has to do with,
ourselves, our own resources (27D). This self-invocation
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embodies the will to order that animates the upcoming myth.
God, as Timaeus proceeds to say, is a demiurge or craftsman.
But a stronger and more daring claim seems to be at work:
the claim that productive art, demiurgy, in some sense is our
god.
Timaeus begins his prelude by drawing a sharp distinction
between Being and Becoming. The strictness of the distinction makes it extremely difficult to understand how a cosmos,
as the mixture of Being and Becoming, could ever come about
at all. This is typical of Timaeus: he makes hard and fast distinctions and then immediately proceeds to blur them. After
thus distinguishing what always is from what always comes to
be, Timaeus introduces his famous demiurge. This mythical
figure, in whom the will to order is most evident, hovers
between the realms of Being and Becoming. The word
demiourgos means "one who works for the people or demos."
It refers to anyone who crafts anything.s Now we all delight
in a thing well made-a well-made chair, building or piece of
music. We love the way everything fits together beautifully,
and how a thing well made is a thing that lasts. In the likely
story, Timaeus counts on and seeks to gratify this human
delight. He makes the world of nature into a well-made, longlasting artifact.6
The divine craftsman is postulated, willed into being.
There is no proof for his existence. The question for Timaeus
is not whether there really is such a being but what he was
looking at when he made the world: was it a changeable or
an unchangeable model? Timaeus at one point expresses
skepticism regarding our ability to discover the true poet and
father of the world (28C). He makes us suspect that the
demiurge is a practical postulate that fills the void of our
theological ignorance, that he is not the true god, whom we
cannot presume to know, but the god whom decent, intelligent people should believe in if they are to affirm the best of
possible worlds. Later we hear that this divine craftsman is
good and therefore ungrudging (29£) . Unlike the gods of
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Herodotus, the divine craftsman had no envy: he did not
jealously guard his divine prerogative, the flame of artful
intelligence, but wished that all things should possess it to the
extent that their natures allowed.7 Artful intelligence, one
might say, is always in the mode of generosity. It seeks to
bestow itself on the world as a divine gift; it rejoices in seeing
itself multiplied, reflected, and embodied. The cosmos comes
about, not through chance and necessity, nor through the sex
and violence depicted in Hesiod's Theogony, but through the
sober professionalism of techne or art. By presenting god as a
generous craftsman, a divine being who works for the common good, Timaeus saves us from making god in the image
of a tyrant.
For Timaeus, the world of body and change is made in the
likeness of a changeless and purely intelligible archetype or
model. Timaeus expresses his preference for a changeless
model in pious terms: it would be "not right," ou themis, that
is, blasphemous to say otherwise (29A). Herein lies one
reason why the likely story is likely. Likely, eikos, means "has
the character of a likeness." It also means probable, reasonable, and equitable or fair. Speech for Timaeus imitates the
condition of its objects. Accounts of what is abiding and
intelligible, he says, "are themselves abiding and unchanging"
(29B), while accounts of the nonabiding and changing,
accounts of mere likenesses, are afflicted with likelihood. In
an echo of the divided line in the Republic, Timaeus says:
"just as Being is to Becoming, so is truth to trust" (29C).
Likely stories are not put forth for the sake of insight but are
a kind of rhetoric. We must be persuaded by them, trust them,
and put up with their necessary flaws.
The infirmity of speech about divine origins points to a
deeper infirmity-human nature. Timaeus tells Socrates that
he must not wonder if many of the things said about the gods
and the birth of the All are self-contradictory and imprecise
(29C). This is where the phrase "likely story" first appears.
Adopting the formal tone of a man accused, Timaeus says:
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"But if we provide likelihoods inferior to none, one should be
well pleased with them, remembering that I who speak as
well as you my judges have a human nature, so that it is fitting
for us to receive the likely story about these things and not to
search further for anything beyond it" (29C-D).9
This sentence about accepting likely stories points to the
connection that physical accounts have, for Timaeus, to both
piety and prudence. Timaeus draws a line beyond which
prudent human beings should not go in speaking of things
divine. But the drawing of this line is not just an admission of
infirmity. Rather, it demarcates the realm within which
human beings precisely because they are aware of their
limitations and all the contingencies of life, are all the more
able to exert their powers of prudent mastery, their will to
order. Timaeus' defense of the inevitable shortcomings of his
speech is a not-so-veiled warning against the immoderateness
and erotic striving of philosophy. The immoderate questioning of everything, if left to itself, would undermine the
controlled play of invention with the unpredictable play of
conversation. In the end, it would prevent human nature
from being as masterful as it could be. Timaeus thus cautions
Socrates against being Socrates, against asking questions and
striving to go beyond the boundaries of plausibly established
grounds. Socrates must be receptive to, and content with, the
likely story about divine origins. If he wants to enjoy his feast,
he must mind his manners and act like a gentleman. He must
control his striving to be divine and remember that as
Timaeus' harshest judge, he too is, after all, only human.
Socrates is more than happy to accept the terms on which
his guest-gift is offered. In the most telling moment of the
dialogue, Socrates calls the likely story, not a logos or mythos,
not an account or a story, but a nomos (29D). Nomos is both
law and song, as well as custom and convention. Timaeus is
our singer and legislator for the day. He will entertain us, but
he will also lay down the law. His logos is a form of music. It
sings of Nature as both a divine Artifact and a divinely estab-
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lished nomos or Convention. It celebrates the prudent founding of the cosmic regime and invites us to join in by following all the mathematical constructions. Long before Critias
gives man his Athenian citizenship in the dialogue, the physics
of Timaeus will make us dutiful citizens of the world at
large-good cosmopolitans.
The world for Timaeus is both image and god.9 This is his
central teaching. Unlike the images put forth by Socrates, the
cosmic image does not point beyond itself. If it did so, it
would cease to be a god. In the divided line, Socrates revealed
the power of what he calls eikasia, imagination. It was at the
bottom of the line and served as the foundation for the whole
line. This is the power of recognizing images as images,
likenesses as likenesses.lO It is the power by which we are able
to make our ascent up the line. In the upper, intelligible
portion of the line, eikasia is the power by which we move
from hypotheses to non-hypothetical archai or principles.
This power is absent in the Timaeus, where we have plenty of
image making and imitation but no image recognition as
such, at least not the sort of image recognition by which the
soul is enabled to move from images to their intelligible
originals. To be sure, the world of Timaeus is full of images.
But these are all internal to the cosmos, all within the realm
of Becoming. Images here do not transcend themselves, even
though they are crafted in the likeness of intelligible originals.
This seems to be the direct result of the fact that they are
artificial: art, whether human or divine, conceals its foundations in order to build on them. The original points "down"
to the image; but the image does not point back "up" to the
original. Mathematics is no longer the prelude to "the song of
dialectic," as it was in the Republic,11 and the eide seem to be
necessary only in the way that a lifeless blueprint guides and
points ahead to the actual building. Furthermore, when
Timaeus first appeals to the intelligible model, he does so for
the sake of beauty and stability rather than truth (28A-B). The
model is postulated so that the cosmic edifice will be secure
j'
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and beautifully built-not so that the human soul, by reflecting on the heavens, might be drawn to the super-heavenly
beings that are beyond all hypothesis.
The construction of the cosmic soul is the most impressive architectural feat of Timaeus' first account of origins. The
soul is made out of music-a scale that stretches four octaves
and a major sixth in Pythagorean tuning. This act of scale
building is the most revealing instance of the will to order and
of what cosmic thinking means for Timaeus. Cosmic thinking
is productive and practical rather than theoretical. It makes
sturdy and beautiful wholes out of beautiful parts by negotiating its way through technical difficulties. Here the divine
craftsman takes the beautiful ratios of the Pythagoreans and
finds a way of fitting them together in a coherent whole. He
then bends his diatonic pattern into circles and makes the
orbits for the Sun, Moon, and planets. These outwardly
appearing circles are then mythically presented as the inward
revolutions of discursive thought, dianoia.
But before he does any of this, the craftsman first makes
a kind of intelligible dough out of the forms of Being, Same,
and Other, and kneads them into "one entire look." He must
use force or violence, since Other is loath to mix with Same
(35A-B). Here we have the most obvious example of the will
to order in the dialogue. Same and Other, as Timaeus understands them, have no natural togetherness. He denies them
the dialectical interweaving and participation in one another's natures that we hear about in the Sophist (253A). Same
and Other are simply separate ingredients, like Being and
Becoming. Force is required to get them to mix. The result is
not an intelligible unity but a highly useful blur. It is as
though Timaeus wanted to convince us of the impossibility of
ever understanding the world dialectically so that he could
get on with the more productive task of flattering the world
with mathematical constructs. He raises a dialectical problem
only to bury it with art.
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At several pivotal moments in his speech, Timaeus
reminds us that the cosmos is a god. The god who made the
world, in other words, bestows his divinity on the world.
Physical science, especially astronomy, thus becomes the '
truest form of piety. Strictly speaking, astronomy, like scale
building, is not theoretical for Timaeus but is a form of
praxis. This praxis supplies medicine and therapy for the
human soul. In our heads are housed the divine circuits of
Same and Other (44D). These are the circuits of sound judgement or phronesis, the circuits that govern a morally healthy
life. But once they are immersed in the sea of Becoming and
given mortal birth, they become deformed and we grow
abysmally ignorant and disordered. (Witness the behavior of
babies.) Before our birth as mortal beings, we dwelled with
the gods, whose happy life consisted in regularity, symmetry,
and perpetual health. This divinely healthy life Timaeus calls
the form, eidos, of our "first and best condition" (42D).
Astronomy is thus the great human homecoming, the happy
return to our heavenly origins. It is also the medicine by
which we correct and stabilize what Timaeus calls "the
wander-stricken circuits in ourselves" (47C).12
The piety, moderation, and lawfulness of Timaeus set him
at odds with eros and its notorious destabilizing influence
over human life. His war on eros is evident throughout the
dialogue. Eros, as it is described in the Symposium, is a yearning for that which one lacks, and Timaeus cannot abide lack.
He is driven to structural perfection, completeness, and
mastery. Timaeus is always filling things up. We see him filling
up the part of a missing fourth at the very beginning (17A-B),
filling up the musical intervals of octave and perfect fourth
(35C ££.),rejecting the existence of a void (SOC), and filling
our ignorant souls with scientific explanations designed to
dispel our wonder and cure our perplexity (SOB-C). He is
careful to make the cosmos into a nonerotic animal, an ,
animal that feels no lack. If the cosmos is to be a "happy
god," as he calls it (34B), then it must be complete and
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autonomous or self-related. Timaeus bestows on it the shape
of a sphere to ensure this result (33A ff.). As a sphere, the god
Cosmos neither needs nor fears anything whatsoever outside
itself. It has no arms, no legs, no sense organs, none of the
things we humans have that remind us of our condition of
dependence and vulnerability.13
This happy lack in the cosmic body is mirrored in what is
said about the cosmic soul-the best of all begotten things
(3 7A). The life of this soul consists in thinking. This is not
philosophic contemplation but the condition of unending,
unerring sensibleness or right judgement. This judgement is
mythically depicted as the inward circling of thought.
Happiness, for Timaeus, is really healthiness, and the healthy
process and condition of thinking are, in the end, more
important than what thinking is ultimately about. If there is
any pleasure in the soul's life of perpetual sensibleness, it
must be the pleasure of being constantly busy gathering information. She has no leisure. Soul is the thought-energy of the
world-always knowing what is going on everywhere and
always reporting to herself what she finds. She is like the
Egyptian priests described in Solon's account, and her truth,
like theirs, is really factual correctness. In the complex
description that Timaeus gives of the soul's intellectual
activity, he avoids the metaphor of seeing. Seeing suggests the
possibility of arousal and the pleasure we take in simply
beholding the objects of desire. The dominant metaphor
instead is that of touch, which is more amenable to a mechanical and physiological view of thinking. This absence of
seeing in the cosmic soul stands in marked contrast with what
we hear in the myths of the Phaedo and Phaedrus, where the
soul's ultimate joy consists in the leisured and ecstatic vision
of eternal truth.
Seeing is honored in the likely story. Without our vision
of the starry motions, we would never have discovered the
arts of arithmetic and astronomy (47A-B). But this seeing
inspires thoughts of duty rather than of love. Indeed, the stars
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themselves move in circles for Tirnaeus not, as Aristotle suggests in the Metaphysics, because they are in love with the
divine intellect,14 but because it is their assigned duty to do
so. Their prompting comes from piety toward a father rather
than desire for a beloved. In beholding the starry motions, we
indeed behold beauty. The function of this beauty, however,
is not to entice or arouse but to rectify. The glory of seeing,
for Tirnaeus, is that it leads, ultimately, to the highest form of
touch: the being in touch with our better, starry selves. To
think cosmically is to align our souls with the authority and
will of the heavens, especially with the all-mastering circle of
the Same (36C-D). In such a world as this, to think is not to
see but to obey-to obey, that is, the masterful motions of our
own souls projected onto the starry sky.
Space Dreams
The Timaeus is not just about order; it is also about disorder.
Plato makes disorder a rich and interesting topic. It even
acquires a certain dignity in the likely story. Disorder comes
from chance or what Tirnaeus also calls "necessity" (47E) and
"the wandering cause" (48A). This cause is present from the
very beginning of the dialogue when a fourth failed to show
up according to plan. Tirnaeus, in his very first likely story of
the dialogue, asks Socrates to believe that the mysterious
fourth was absent because he carne down with something,
that his absence was the work of chance and necessity rather
than choice. Chance and necessity are also present in the best
city that Socrates summarizes. Try as the city may to vanquish
disorder and keep people in their proper classes, the unpredictable sway of eros and sexual generation messes things up
(19A).15 The city can maintain its good order only by a constant and hard to imagine redistribution of human types.l6
But necessity is not just the spoiler of the best-laid plans.
It is also the other great cause, without which the cosmos ,
could never have been made. This is its dignity. Just as artful
intelligence is the cause of the good and the beautiful, so
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necessity is the cause of power and effectiveness. At a pivotal
moment in the likely story, Timaeus says: "For mixed indeed
was the birth of this cosmos here, and begotten from a standing-together of necessity and intellect" (47E-48A). He goes
on to tell us that the world came about through the persuasion of necessity by intellect. The world, in short, originated
in a grand piece of rhetoric. Presumably, this rhetoric goes on
continually, as the realm of efficient causes constantly cooperates, for the most part, with that of final causes. It is hard
to see what Timaeus means by "persuasion" here.
Nevertheless, a direct consequence of the image is that it
reminds us that intellect and necessity are two fundamentally
different and opposed orders of causality. Even as it yields to
thoughtful persuasion, necessity retains its right to do as it
pleases. Timaeus thus saves the phenomenon of unpredictability.
In this second founding of the cosmos, Timaeus is at pains
to make Becoming sound as perplexing as possible. Becoming
is the realm of unstable and illusory appearance.17 Earth, air,
fire, and water all appear to be constantly changing into each
other. They cannot be called elements at all, since they lack
integrity and steadfastness. To use Timaeus' language here,
you can never accuse fire of being a "this," since, no sooner
do you call it "this," fire, than it changes into "that," air. It is
always escaping the indictment of stability (49E). The legitimate name for any of the elements is therefore not "this" but
"suchlike" or "of this sort" (49B-50A).18 The assumption of
radical flux leads Timaeus to postulate the existence of a
mysterious "in which" that is prior to body and is the abiding
and underlying substrate of change. In the language of
Spinoza, this "in which" is the enduring substance of which
earth, air, fire and water (not to mention their composites)
are but passing modes. It is not really a thing at all but a force
field, the medium not of determinate things but of tensions
and resolutions-the field of things happening. Just as the
soul seems to be the world's thought-energy, the receptacle
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seems to be its body-energy, energy that somehow remains
self-same and "conserved" even as it assumes a variety of
forms.
Timaeus has many names for this field of dynamic qualities that underlies and causes change. He calls it a receptacle
and wet nurse (49A, 52D), a mold (SOC), and a mother of
Becoming (52D). It is simultaneously the unpredictable cause
of motion and the indeterminate ground of imaging. Art and
nature are continually blended in the likely story. Here this
uneasy blend-one of Timaeus' many blurrings-is especially
prominent. On the one hand, Timaeus likens the receptacle to
gold, which is constantly being worked into different
geometric shapes by a tireless goldsmith (50A-B). The curious
image reminds us of Timaeus' fascination with ornament:
even the matter out of which a cosmos is made must be
thought of as artistic and golden-a beautiful medium just
begging for a craftsman. On the other hand, the receptacle is
clearly biological or natural-not an artificial "it" but a living
"she," the cosmic womb and mother who gives birth to the
four kinds and keeps them in motion. The elusive receptacle
is not a merely passive substrate for form but a never-failing
process that somehow differentiates itself spontaneously or
from within, like the morphogenesis we witness in living
things. If the receptacle is body-energy, it also seems to be
life-energy. That is, the receptacle seems to correspond to a
certain primordial understanding of soul.
In spite of Timaeus' attempt to bring space down to earth
through humble similes like winnowing baskets (52E) and the
manufacture of perfumes (50E), the parts of his account are
obscure at best and don't seem to fit together. The incoherence seems to reflect the elusive character of space itself. For
example, space, chora, not only gives all things place; it also
dislodges them from their place (52E-53A). Space, we are
told, is like an instrument that causes shaking (53A). It is the
underlying cause of all the circulation and turbulence in the
mortal realm. It governs everything from vibrating strings to
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the circulation of the blood to earthquakes. We experience
this turbulence in the constant flow of our bodies and in the
passion of our souls. We also witness it, or rather hear about
it, in the rise and fall, the flowering and ruin, of cities and
even whole civilizations. The cycles of birth and death
recorded by the Egyptians are all due to the sway of space,
and so are the fates of legendary Atlantis and Plato's contemporary Athens.
But the most interesting thing Timaeus says about space
has to do with dreams. Space is neither purely intelligible nor
purely sensible. It is "graspable by some bastard reasoning
with the aid of insensibility, hardly to be trusted, the very
thing we look to when we dream and affirm that it's somehow necessary for everything that is to be in some region and
occupy some space, and that what is neither on earth nor
somewhere in heaven, is nothing" (52A-B). This amazing
description of space reminds us of Critias, who claimed to
make Socrates' city real by giving it place-Athenian place. If
the chora is, as Timaeus' description seems to indicate, a
seductive Siren who bewitches us into thinking that to be is
to be spatial, then Critias appears to be her adoring slave and
victim, her "space man." The dream-inducing power of space
reminds us of the cave-mother of the Republic. Space is the
cosmic counterpart and ground of our cave-condition. It is
the prepolitical, natural ground of our susceptibility to political indoctrination and of our unreflective rootedness in a
political place.
Critias first heard the story about Athens and Atlantis
during the festival of Apaturia (21A-B). On this day, Athenian
boys were initiated into their tribe as a preparation for fullfledged citizenship.19 The ceremony involved the singing of
songs. Critias remembers singing the songs of Solon, which
were new at the time. Through the festival that Critias nostalgically recalls, Plato draws our attention to the very
moment in time when, through songs that are also laws,
young prepolitical souls are planted in the soil and chOra of
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the motherland. The word Apaturia derives from the word
pater, father. But it also suggests the word apate, deception,
thus suggesting a dark side to this heart-warming event. In
being welcomed into the fold of tribe and city, the nascent
citizens are nourished on the nomoi. These laws and customs
are made sweet through song and are thus magically transformed into sentiments. The laws and customs will, from this
moment on, give the children eyes to see with and ears to
hear with. As dyed-in-the-wool citizens, they will be incapable of seeing and hearing anything else, anything outside
the boundaries of their protective "space." Convention will
be their wisdom.
Earlier, I suggested that eikasia, image recognition, is not
present in the Timaeus. Here in the receptacle we have the
sort of imagination that is present. The cosmic space that is
the ground of body seems, at another level, to be the inner
"space" of imagining-the phantasia of our souls. This is the
faculty that does not recognize images as images but rather
makes images and welcomes them unquestioningly.
According to this inner sense, the receptacle is our phantasia
writ large and made into a cosmic cause. When Socrates
expressed his desire for animals in motion, he seemed to
speak from within this very faculty. His irrational receptivity
to the speeches of his hosts, the pathos that he seems to have
contracted, is a playful imitation of our all-too-human
susceptibility to exciting images. It is the susceptibility that
allows us to be entertained and kept in the cave.
Timaeus calls attention to the fact that space is like a
dream-inducing drug. He also makes it clear that he posits the
existence of what he calls "the unsleeping and truly subsisting
nature" (52B). Presumably this refers to Being and the realm
of the eide of the four elements. Timaeus at one point "casts
his vote" for such beings (51D). But as we saw earlier, it is not
Timaeus' intention to use cosmic images to wake us up from
our space dreams so that we might transcend the cosmos
through dialectic. Likely stories employ the hypothesis of the
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forms in order to involve us, safely and entertainingly, in the
dangerous realm of body and Becoming. They are the dreams
of a sly and healthy soul. Having alerted us to the fact of
deception, to the poetic sophistry of space, Timaeus proceeds
to manufacture deceptive dreams of his own. These are the
beautiful mathematical dreams that invite us to imagine the
four elements of body, four beautiful animals in motion, as
though they were four regular geometric solids.
Along with the construction of soul out of musical ratios,
the construction of body out of geometrical figures is a paradigm of what cosmic thinking means for Timaeus. The demiurge is virtually absent here, and so the ingenious model
building arises completely from what has to do with us and
our will to order. The whole account is playfully deceptivea grand piece of poetic sophistry, in which image-making is
promiscuously fused with argument, mythos with logos. The
sophistry of geometrical physics reminds us of what Timaeus
had earlier called bastard or illegitimate reasoning. And the
poetry or phantasia that plays the guardian to this reasoning
reminds us of what he had called insensibility. Timaeus would
have us believe that geometric solidity or three-dimensionality can explain the properties of physically solid bodies. Like
Descartes, he attempts to explain body in terms of extension.
The questionable nature of this project is underscored by
Timaeus himself, who calls on "god the savior to grant us safe
passage out of a strange and unusual narration to the decree
based on likelihoods" (48D).
Like his mythic goldsmith, Timaeus schematizes space
with geometrical shapes. First, he selects the regular solids as
archetypes for the four elements of body. He does so on the
grounds that they are "the most beautiful bodies" (53D).
Truth seems not to be at issue, unless "is true" means nothing
more than "beautifully fits the appearances." Next, he fits
together or "harmonizes" the geometric solids by constructing their faces and assembling them through a kind of
cut-and-paste method. The construction here is very childlike
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and unsophisticated. Finally, he assigns each solid to the elemental body or kind that seems to be most like it: the cube to
earth, the pyramid to fire, the octahedron to air, and the
icosahedron to water. This account of body renovates and
beautifies our imagination of change. Change, the drunken
spree of appearance, is now the elegant rearrangement of
structural parts. Dionysus, it seems, has been persuaded to
accept the sober gifts of Apollo. As for the dodecahedron, the
god, we are told, used it to make panels for decorating the
sky with animals, presumably the animal figures of the zodiac and the various constellations (55C). The apparently
off-hand explanation actually reveals the point of all that has
gone before: the regular solids are a kind of jewelry that
beautifies and flatters the world. The mathematization of
body and change makes nature more presentable and more
pleasantly thinkable for decent-minded human beings. In his
Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl refers to what he calls
the "garb of ideas," with which modern mathematical physics
dresses up nature, covers its naked truth, with the formal
attire of constructs and symbols.20 Timaeus is doing consciously and deliberately what Husserl says the modern physicist does for the most part unconsciously. He is covering up
nature with a gorgeous dress of ratios and geometric figures.
Through Timaeus' playful, ceremonial act of dressing up
the world, Plato entertains us with a new kind of physicsa mythematical physics. The properties and behavior of fire,
for example, are now traced to geometric causes. Why is fire
hot? Why does it burn? Why, because it is a pyramid, and
pyramids have sharp angles and keenly cutting sides (5 6E57A). Why is earth resistant to change and motion? Why,
because it is a cube, and the isosceles triangles out of which a
cube's square faces are composed are not capable of being
redistributed to form the equilateral triangular faces of the
other solids. Furthermore, a triangular base makes an object
easy to tip, and a square base makes it harder to budge. Cause
here is completely analogical. To explain body, for Timaeus,
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is to build geometric models for body that function as beguiling analogies. Perhaps it is more correct to call them
metaphors, since the noble sophistry at work here consists in
identifying physical body with its geometric analogue, that is,
in blurring the distinction between the model and that of
which it is the model. This is what Critias says he will do with
Socrates' theoretical city: He will establish a beguiling correspondence and harmony between that city and ancient
Athens (26C-D)-a correspondence that will be so exact that
one would swear that the two cities were one and the same.
Socrates' desire was, at bottom, to be entertained by deceptive, life-like images that blur the distinction between the real
and the fabricated: the animals in motion he wanted to see
and hear about could be either "truly living" or "produced by
the art of painting." Timaeus and Critias enact a will to order
that provides Socrates with just such entertainment.
Like astronomy, physics for Timaeus has a practical function. Becoming is not just something we contemplate and
want to get to the bottom of. It is also our life-sustaining
world, the cosmic source of our coming to be and passing
away. We are the children of Becoming and must speak
appropriately about our cosmic mother. In speaking rightly of
the cosmos in general, Timaeus attempts to give physical
science a moral defense and reason for being. In fact, his
physics seems to be a direct response to Socrates' youthful
disenchantment with physics in the Phaedo. Timaeus does
what Anaxagoras had failed to do-present the phenomena
of change in terms of a best of possible worlds. He
re-enchants the world with intelligence, moral purpose, and a
kind of piety. Mathematical physics, quite apart from whether
or not it reveals nature itself as mathematical, acquires its
truest vocation in making us dutiful sons of the cosmic order.
In addition, it soothes our serious and turbulent lives with a
decorous distraction and provides what Timaeus calls "a
pleasure not to be repented of" (59C-D).
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The likely story teaches us how to sing noble songs of
change. These songs aim at "saving the appearances." But
they offer a form of consolation. They save us from despair
over our world and help us to cope with, and even to enjoy,
the otherwise meaningless spectacle of instability, violence,
decay, and death. Indeed, according to the official report of
the likely story, death from old age is geometric in nature and
is therefore a pleasure to contemplate: it consists in the
collapse of the perpendicular or root that keeps our inner
triangles erect. These triangles give way at last after fighting
numerous battles with the alien triangles that would invade
and destroy us (81D). Structure is power, and Becoming is a
war of structures, all battling constantly to preserve the
identity of their constitutions or regimes. All mortal things
eventually lose in this war-they die. But at least likely stories
furnish us human beings with intellectual armor so that we
may fight in the noblest and most intelligent way. Armed with
what Timaeus calls "the power of likely accounts" (48D), we
take on all comers who would disparage our cosmic place and
sing a song of despair. As we go off to do battle with
unhealthy opinions about the world, we remember the songs
of our cosmic Apaturia.
The Human Condition
Timaeus' role in the dialogue is assigned to him by Critias. "It
seemed good to us," he says, "that Timaeus here-since he's
the most astronomical of us and the one who's most made it
his business to know about the nature of the All-should
speak first, beginning from the birth of the cosmos and ending in the nature of mankind" (27A). Man, prepolitical man,
is the goal of the likely story. Timaeus achieves this goal in
some of the weirdest, and funniest, moments in all the
dialogues.
What is human nature for Timaeus, and why were we
born in the first place? Let us take the latter question first.
Man comes about because the cosmos must be complete. If
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the world is to be perfectly filled, it must contain all the animal kinds represented in the eternal archetype that Timaeus
calls "the intelligible animal" (39E). The various animals
derive from the mystic number Four, which is alluded to in
the dialogue's opening. The four animate kinds correspond to
the four elements of body (39E ff.). The star gods are mostly
made of fire. Then come animals that crawl on the earth, fly
through the air and swim in the water. Man is not one of
these four kinds. He is rather the generator of the mortal
kinds, the means by which the lower kinds come to be. In his
head, man lives the life of the gods, the life of circularity and
prudence. But in his torso he contains all the lower animal
possibilities-the thymos and rage of a lion, and the
epithymia or desire of all mortal animals. In the very shape of
his body, man thus unites the two cooperating causes of
cosmic order. He is the unity-in-opposition of the good and
the necessary.
The original humans were in some sense male, although
strictly speaking they lacked sexuality. When these "first
men" yield to emotionality and vice, when they abuse their
divine heritage, they are reborn, first as women, and then as
the various subhuman animals they imitated in life (42C-D).
The likely story, having begun with the stars, ends with
shellfish. These animals devolve from humans who were "the
most mindless and ignorant men of all" and whom the gods
deemed no longer worthy of "pure breathing" (92B). The
cosmos is thus completed by what Timaeus calls dike or just
retribution (92C). And yet blame and punishment seem to
have nothing to do with it at all. Vice and ignorance are
necessary if the world is to have its full complement of animals. In spite of the fact that they are said to be "punished"
by cosmic justice, vice and ignorance are nevertheless useful,
indeed necessary, to the cosmic purpose. Man completes the
world through his fall from divinity into the various animal
forms. Timaeus is so complete in his will to order that he puts
even moral evil and ignorance to an artistic use, thereby
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completing his justification of god's ways to man. Evil, in a
sense, becomes both ornament and demiurge. It is like the
dissonance for which a piece of polyphony is all the sweeter.
Such is man's cosmic function: he perfects and beautifies
the world with his evil. But what is man's nature? Here I
return to the word pathos, which occurs frequently in the dialogue. The recurrence of this word and its cognates signals
the extent to which necessity rules the dialogue and its
conception of a world. The human condition is a continual
state of affection and affliction, a continual suffering or
"being done to." Man suffers his birth and all his mortal
baggage. His pathemata or passions are also sufferings, as
Timaeus poetically reveals when he catalogues our "affections
terrible and necessary." He cites "pleasure, evil's greatest
lure," "pains, deserters of goods," "anger, difficult to
appease," "hope, easy to seduce," all mixed together with
Timaeus' archenemy, "all-venturing eros" (69C-D). Since he
suffers desire, man must have arms, legs, and a digestive
system. He must also have a respiratory system and a circulatory system. A reproductive system is grafted onto him only
later, after he has suffered his first fall. Timaeus gives a long
account of breathing. Breathing is completely mechanical in
nature and requires no action of the soul. It is a pathos
(79A)-not something we do but something we suffer. The
surprisingly long discussion of disease highlights the fact that
life is suffering. It is the correlate to Timaeus' glorification of
health. Ignorance, too, is a disease-the greatest of all
diseases (8 8B)-and education is therefore our greatest
medicine and therapy. In Timaeus' case, we would have to
say, ''A cosmologist looks at the world as a doctor looks at a
patient."
Just as Timaeus reveals the nature of the cosmos in the act
of showing the cosmos being made, so too man's nature is
revealed through the artful making of man. The likely story
puts us at the scene of our own birth-or rather, manufacture. The gods put us together piece by piece, like benevolent
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Dr. Frankensteins. Since there is no intelligible model for
man, they must make us up as they go along. The work is
neither easy nor desirable. In fact, the gods make us only
because they were told to do so by their father (41C-D). The
making of man, as Timaeus explicitly describes it, is a pious
desecration (69D). In obedience to their father and his will to
order, the gods must take the good and beautiful principle of
intelligence, the principle he most embodies, and defile it
with mortal madness and complexity. Their work consists in
the delicate and dangerous art of compromise. They must
make us capable of unintelligent organic life while at the
same time making us as good and intelligent as possible. The
art of compromise is most evident when they invent our hair.
Hair is a compromise between an unshielded head, which
would make us very intelligent but short-lived, and a head
protected by lots of flesh, which would make us long-lived
but "dense" (75E-76D).
The gods are provident for Timaeus. They make our parts
always with an eye to the various falls we are destined to
experience. They are always saving us from ourselves. They
make flesh as a protective padding (74B) . They make our
neck to keep our intelligent heads both separate from and
attached to the lower regions of our being (69D-E). They
make our intestines to fend off the constant gluttony that
would prevent us from engaging in philosophic research
(73A). And they make our liver smooth and shiny so that the
intellect can use it as a reflecting medium to frighten and pacify the desirous part of the soul with appropriate moving
images, thus bringing about a condition of law and order
(71A-D). The point of all this outrageous wit seems to be that
there is moral meaning and purpose to how we are built and
who we are. Through all his physiological jokes, Timaeus
causes our inward nature to appear right at the "surface" of
our bodies. We are what we look like, and our being is
revealed not through a dialectical inquiry into our nature but
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through the scientific examination of our prudently designed
structures and motions.
Throughout the likely story, Timaeus gives mathematics a
moral employment. In his account of man, he mathematicizes
morality itself. At one point, we are told, "all the good is
beautiful, and the beautiful is not disproportionate" (87C).
Virtue and happiness are a matter of establishing the right
ratios and proportions in things. Timaeus does not seem to
think that virtue is something we don't know, something
about which human beings most need to ask: what is it?
Moral education is like medicine and gymnastics. It is simply
a matter of paying attention to the manifest ratios that regulate life and seeing to it that the proper ratios and regimen are
established (87C-E). Thinkers should make sure they get
some physical exercise, and athletes should make sure they
study music and the liberal arts (88B-C). A sound mind in a
sound body. Like the cosmos, we must be well rounded. The
human good is uncomplicated. It is, like the art of medicine,
simply the conscientious application of sensible theory to life.
It is the will to order.
As we have seen, Timaeus is driven to filling things up and
making them complete. But in at least one respect his cosmos
is not complete. It does not contain the philosopher as dialectician. In the opinion of the likely story, Socrates, the erotic
troublemaker, must be banished from the cosmos. There is no
worldly place, no chora, for him. One who questions the
nomos and the dreams that attach us to place must be left
atopos-that is, both placeless and strange.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
So why is this dialogue taking place? Why has Socrates
allowed himself to sit passively by while his hosts entertain
him with the flattery of Becoming? It seems that the hesychia
of Socrates, his silence and his peace, is really a form of
passive aggression. Socrates has set up his ambitious hosts for
a Sicilian expedition in speech-an ambitious project that
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ends in ruin. He probably knows, in general, what to expect,
as he cunningly draws them out by imitating the cave-desire
for moving images-a desire that is theirs rather than his. But,
being an avid connoisseur as well as judge of human souls,
Socrates also wants to see exactly how they will reveal themselves, and how far they will go, in the act of trying to defend
Becoming and surpass the city in speech.
In the Timaeus, Socrates has shown up to guard the city
in speech from ever coming into being in space and time. He
does so to reaffirm what he said about the best city in the
Republic, that it is not a blueprint for political actualization
but "a model ... for the man who wants to see and found a
city within himself."2l Under a deceptive flag of truce and
welcoming receptivity, he draws out his hosts as though onto
a field of battle. Their effort is sure to entertain Socrates and
perhaps even to instruct him. But I suspect he is still more
entertained, and gratified, by their ultimate failure. This
failure is represented by Critias. In the dialogue that bears his
name, Critias never gets to the war-story he promised
Socrates. Plato cuts him off in mid-sentence, just as he is
about to give the speech of Zeus that will bring divine
retribution upon the Atlantians. The promised flattery of
Athens is consigned to oblivion, like Atlantis itself. It is as
though Critias, who had boasted so mightily of his powers of
memory (26B-C),22 simply and utterly forgot. Through his
failure to recover the speech in praise of Athens' heroism,
Plato playfully mimics something deadly serious-the folly of
forcing a city back, in deed and not merely in speech, to a
purported first and best condition. In his speech to Solon, the
old Egyptian priest referred to the myth about Phaethon, son
of Helios. Phaethon tried to drive his father's car, the sunchariot, in order to prove that he too was a god. The result
was destruction for him and near destruction for the whole
earth (22C). The Egyptian priest tells Solon that the truth of
this myth has to do with a periodically recurring alignment of
the planets. The priest's piety for scientific explanation blinds
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him to the political significance of Phaethon. The insolence of
Phaethon is the potential insolence of would-be reformersreformers like the famous Critias, who tried to force a democratic Athens into an oligarchic mold. The will to order,
when infected by the love of honor and the lust for power,
easily degenerates into the will to tyranny.
Plato, more than any other philosopher, is constantly
reminding us of the dangers of being human as well as the
dangers of philosophy. Danger and safety, perhaps the most
central terms of the Platonic dramas, become central because
of Plato's care for what we do and what we suffer. Through
the drama of the Timaeus-Critias, Plato continues his care for
the human condition. In the likely story of Timaeus, he
concocts a bizarre yet healthy-minded dream about a world
set straight by the will to order, a dream in which the world
is saved from disorder and despair. In the vanity and ambition
of Critias, he points to the diseases this will itself can
contract. Shakespeare's Ulysses supplies the most fitting last
word on the strength and the weakness of the will to order:
"0, when degree is shaked,/ Which is the ladder of all high
designs,/ The enterprise is sick. "23
Notes
1 Other experiments in going beyond Socrates include the Eleatic
stranger from the Sophist and Statesman, and the Athenian stranger
from the Laws.
2 For the "art of conversion or turning around," see Republic 7.
518D ff. The mathematical arts that pave the way for dialectic are,
in order of appearance, arithmetic, plane geometry, solid geometry,
astronomy and harmonics. The conversionary art must "draw the
soul from Becoming to Being" (7. 521D) .
The praise of Timaeus is breathtaking (20A) . He is rich, powerful,
honored, and he comes from an aristocratic family. The city from
which he hails is Locri, which Socrates calls "a city with the best
laws in Italy." Furthermore, he has "reached the very peak of all
philosophy."
3
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Solon heard the story about ancient Athens in the district of Sais
(21E). The word for district here is nomos. (Nomos comes from the
verb nemein, which means to apportion or distribute, and districts
are areas of distributed land.) Plato thus combines in one word the
deep connection between attachment to custom and attachment to
place.
4
The demiourgoi or craftsmen are central to Socrates' critique of
imitation in Republic 10. After postulating three kinds of couchesthe one produced by carpentry, the one produced by the art of
painting, and the one that is in nature-Socrates playfully suggests
that perhaps the couch that is in nature was also produced by some
kind of craftsman, not a demiourgos but a phytourgos or "natureworker" (597B-D). Socrates refers to a "craftsman of heaven" at 7.
530A.
5
6 Sometimes Timaeus makes the cosmos sound as though it were
eternal. But there are also indications that, while it is very long-lasting, it is nevertheless mortal. This fits with what Socrates announces
in the Republic: "for everything that has come into being there is
decay" (8. 546A). For example, time is said to come into being
along with the heavens "in order that, having been begotten together, they might also be dissolved together-should some dissolution
of them ever arise" (38B). And when the god makes the cosmic
body, he saves it from old age and disease but falls short of making
it deathless (33A ff.).
7 The ongoing presence of god's generous artistry in the world is
signaled by the fact that things other than the divine craftsman are
called demiurges in the speech, and that the verb demiourgein, to
craft, sometimes occurs as a synonym for "causes" or "brings
about." Earth, for example, is called "the guardian and craftsman of
Night and Day" (40C); fire is at one point the craftsman of nonuniformity in air (59A); and again, the color red is "crafted by the
cutting and staining action of fire upon moisture" (80E).
8 Timaeus' use of eti, still or more, seems to echo Socrates' use of
this little word at the end of his political summary. He asked
Timaeus whether he was "still yearning for something more in what
was said" (19A). Socrates seems to be tempting Timaeus to go
beyond the boundaries of his political mentality, beyond the will to
order. Timaeus has no yearning to do so. He says, "Not at all."
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Timaeus calls the cosmos "the god who was one day to be" (34AB) and a "happy god" (34B). See also 55D, where Timaeus says that
the cosmos is "by nature one god." In the dialogue's closing
sentence, the cosmos is a "sensed god" (92C).
9
10 Republic 6. 509C ff. For the definitive account of eikasia in the
Republic, see Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato's Meno, Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1965, pp. 112-125.
11 Book 7. 532A. Socrates' language here is very close to the way in
which he describes the likely story. He speaks of the "song itself that
dialectic performs," autos ... ho nomos han to dialegesthai perainei.
12 At the beginning of the Critias, Timaeus prays to "the god who
has just now been born through speeches" (1 06A). He identifies the
just retribution of this god (dike) with medicine (pharmakon) and
this medicine with knowledge (episteme).
Timaeus derives his catalogue of happy privations from two fragments by Empedocles (29 and 134). He discretely suppresses what
Empedocles in both fragments makes explicit-that the cosmic god
lacks organs of reproduction.
13
14 The final cause of motion moves things, says Aristotle, has eramenan, "as the object of erotic love" (Metaphysics 12. 7. 1072B).
15 Sexual generation is the cause of the decay of the best city in the
Republic. The rulers will fail to perceive and calculate the marriage
number, "and they will at some time beget children when they
should not" (8. 546B).
16 This political redistribution of types foreshadows the cosmic
reshuffling of the four kinds by what Timaeus later calls the ch6ra
or space. Socrates even uses the word chara in this part of his summary. This is its first appearance in the dialogue.
17 Necessity, in the form of what Timaeus calls "assistant causes,"
first began to assert itself in the likely story just as Timaeus is giving
a mechanical account of the reflective, and deceptive, power of
mirrors (46C-D).
18 In the simile of the goldsmith, Timaeus has a hypothetical someone ask the question "Whatever is it?" in response to the constant
"morphing" of the receptacle. The safest answer, says Timaeus, is
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that it's gold (SOB). This is the closest Timaeus ever gets to Socrates'
What is it? question. It is very interesting that his concern for
safety (which reminds us of Socrates' similar concern in the Phaedo
when he recounts his "second sailing" in search of cause) and the
What is it? question lead Timaeus, not to the determinate form
whose likeness fleetingly appears in the midst of change, but to that
which is itself undergoing change. His answer, in other words,
already points "forward" to geometric schematization rather than
"backward" and "up" to the eidetic "father" of the spatiotemporal
"offspring" (SOC-D).
19 For more on the Apaturia, see H. W Parke, Festivals of the
Athenians, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 88-92.
20 "In geometrical and natural-scientific mathematization, in the
open infinity of possible experiences, we measure the life-worldthe world constantly given to us as actual in our concrete worldlife-for a well-fitting garb of ideas, that of the so-called objectively
scientific truths" (Ibid., p . 51). The drama of the Timaeus takes
place during the Greater Panathenaea, the festival in honor of
Athena. The central event of this festival was the procession in
which an elaborately embroidered peplos or robe depicting the
Battle of Gods and Giants was carried to the Acropolis and draped
over the statue of the goddess. In his likely story, Timaeus participates in, and corrects, the Greater Panathenaea. His ceremonial
"garb of ideas," paraded before the silent Socrates, replaces the
Battle of Gods and Giants with decent gods and the beautiful war
of mathematical objects in motion.
Republic 9. 592B. The centrality of place in the Timaeus and the
man who was gazing upon beautiful animals "somewhere," pou,
contrast sharply with what Socrates says about the best city in this
passage: "It doesn't make any difference whether it is or will be
somewhere (pou)."
21
In the Critias, Critias invokes Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, as the divinity on whom the whole project of gratifying
Socrates depends (108D).
22
23
Troilus and Cressida I. 3. 101-103 .
��
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The St. John’s Review
Volume XLVII, number two (2003)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Shanna Coleman
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the
distribution list, subscriptions are $10.00 for one year.
Unsolicited essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome.
Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College,
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©2003 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
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�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essays and Lectures
The Wisdom of Jacob Klein..........................................5
Olivier Sedeyn, Translated by Brother Robert Smith
History and the Liberal Arts........................................11
Jacob Klein
Prudence and Wisdom in Aristotle’s Ethics..................25
Eric Salem
Jacob Klein and the Phenomenological Project of
Desedimenting the Formalization of
Meaning......................................................................51
Burt Hopkins
Opening Questions......................................................69
Ronald Mawby
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
5
The Wisdom of Jacob Klein
Olivier Sedeyn
Translated by Brother Robert Smith
In the Apology Plato tells us what led Socrates to the practice
of philosophy, a practice that finally landed him before the
Athenian court of law to defend himself against the charges
of not believing in the gods of the city and of corrupting the
youth. It happened, Socrates said, because his friend
Chaerophon had asked the Oracle at Delphi if any man existed who was wiser than Socrates, and had been given the
answer that there was none. Socrates reacted characteristically in refusing to believe the oracle and, upon noting “a god
cannot lie,” in wanting to verify the answer. The best way to
do this was to find people who everyone agreed were wise
and to examine them in order to “show the gods” that there
were many men wiser than Socrates. Everyone knows the
outcome: Socrates examined these men and realized that,
although they were reputedly wise and thought themselves
genuinely wise, they were not. Insofar as Socrates himself did
not claim to be wise but was aware of his ignorance, he could
in a sense be said to be wiser than they. Perhaps human wisdom consists in knowing that one doesn’t know, in being
aware of one’s ignorance, rather than in the “divine” wisdom
that those who think they penetrate the secrets of nature or
who think they know the secrets of education, like the
Sophists, supposedly possess.
Olivier Sedeyn, graduate of L’École Normale Supérieure, is professor of
philosophy in a lycée in Caen. He has completed a translation into French
of Lectures and Essays of Jacob Klein and is translator of works of Leo
Strauss in twelve volumes. The above essay originally appeared in
Commentaire, number 88 (1999-2000), pages 831-33, to introduce the
French translation of “History and the Liberal Arts,” and is reprinted with
their kind permission. Klein’s essay is reprinted below. Brother Robert Smith
is tutor emeritus at St. John’s College on the Annapolis Campus.
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But are there wise men among our contemporaries? The
very posing of this question shows how strange it is. Even so,
is not philosophy the “love of wisdom”? It is said that
Alexandre Kojève thought Jacob Klein was a wise man. What
can such a claim mean when made by the famous Hegelian
who inspired the idea of the “end of history”? Surely we are
not being shown an example of Hegelian wisdom, which rests
on the idea of the cyclical completion of the Concept, and is
founded on the history of Reason. He can mean none other
than ancient wisdom—that of Socrates, the seeker who
knows that he does not know, who never ceased to fascinate
Kojève, as his dialogue with Leo Strauss on tyranny shows.
Jacob Klein was a life-long friend of Leo Strauss, whom
he knew from the time the two were students at Marburg in
the early 20’s. And Leo Strauss felt it possible to say: “In my
opinion, we are closer to one another than to anyone else of
our generation.” It can be said that Strauss and Klein tried,
each in his own way, to reopen the quarrel of the ancients and
the moderns, and that each was determined to show that the
ancient point of view can be legitimately held today.
Obviously this stance did not win them widespread admiration—Klein is even less well known than Strauss. My purpose
in writing this introduction to the seemingly simple lecture
that follows is to encourage readers to consider it thoughtfully.
Klein was born in Russia in 1899. He was educated in
Germany between 1912 and 1922. He studied philosophy,
physics, and mathematics. He then continued his study of
mathematics and ancient philosophy. In 1923, he was influenced decisively by Heidegger’s way of reading the ancients:
to read them without presupposing the superiority of the
modern view; to read them for what they are, according to
their own criteria. From that point on Klein tried to deepen
his understanding of Plato and Aristotle. To acknowledge
Heidegger’s influence—and this is important—does not mean
an acceptance of Heidegger’s own philosophy. Neither Klein
SEDEYN
7
nor Strauss was ever in that sense a Heideggerian. They were
drawn exclusively to his way of reading the ancients. We see
this in the fact that Strauss and Klein, who throughout their
lives were intent on understanding and judging the differences between the ancients and the moderns, rejected
Heidegger’s judgment that subjectivity and modern metaphysics had their origin in Plato. The break, according to
them, occurred at the birth of modernity. Klein’s most important book, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of
Algebra,1 locates the difference between the ancients and
moderns in the distinctive way they conceptualize number. To
give a brief and insufficient account of this matter, we can say
that the ancients considered number to be “a definite quantity of definite things”; or, in other words, number always
refers to some thing beyond itself. On the contrary, for the
moderns, beginning with Vieta and Descartes, number does
not refer to things, but to a general concept, namely body or
extension. Modern abstraction is “symbol-generating.” It cuts
number off from a world it is supposed to reveal. This
explains the connection between this concept of number and
“universal method,” itself inspired by a mathesis universalis,
a method valuable in every domain. This is quite different
from the Greek notion of method as always particular, that is
to say, related to the objects under consideration. Klein’s
reflections thus bear directly on what seem to be the most
powerful pillars of the modern conception, the origins of
mathematical physics.
Klein tried to point out this striking ontological shift,
linked to the new way of conceptualizing number, which
allowed modern science to be concerned no longer with
ontological problems, to “leave them aside.” We hope that it
will soon be possible to read Klein’s book in French. It is
strange that a work whose importance is considerable is not
better known: it opens up an understanding of the origin of
mathematical physics, a discipline that holds a unique position of authority in the modern world.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Be that as it may, circumstances forced Strauss to emigrate
during 1932-33, first to France, then to England; and forced
Klein, after having taught in Prague, to immigrate to America
in 1938. He came to know Scott Buchanan, who was then
trying to renew an old college in Annapolis. In that Maryland
town, Klein was to find a new direction for his activities. The
program of learning that he along with Scott Buchanan established aimed to provide “over four years an education in the
liberal arts in which one reads great books from Homer and
Euclid to Freud and Russell.”
Klein’s main work from 1938-1976, at least up to his partial retirement in 1969, was consequently to teach the liberal
arts. The liberal arts, as is generally known, are composed of
the quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—and the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric.2 It is
surprising that in an era in which it seems that education and
instruction ought to have as their aim social utility, a university should choose as its model a type of study drawn up in
the Middle Ages and rooted in Greek antiquity. Yet maybe the
utilitarian purposes of today find their true meaning, if they
are to have one, in the higher purpose of making us free.
Jacob Klein consecrated his life to transmitting his knowledge of the fundamental texts of the Western tradition. In
particular, he placed emphasis on the arts helpful for interpreting texts. In his own way, Klein, like Strauss, insisted on
“the problem of the art of writing,” and a great part of the
program at St. John’s College consists in the reading of “great
books.” Klein pressed us especially to read Platonic Dialogues
paying particular attention to the dramatic structure of the
conversation. It even appears that he was the first to recognize the necessity of doing so. Every claim of a Platonic character, even Socrates, has to be interpreted in the particular
context of the dialogue in which it appears. It cannot be said,
as is perhaps common in contemporary works, that one finds
the theology of Plato, for example, at the end of the 10th
book of the Republic, because this “theology” derives its
SEDEYN
9
meaning from its place in the construction of the just city in
books 2-4. Klein was right to raise again and again the question of how to read a Platonic dialogue.
Klein wrote only three other books: A Commentary on
Plato’s Meno,3 which he pondered for several decades and
was published only in 1965; Plato’s Trilogy,4 comprising the
Theatetus, Sophist and Statesman, which is clearly imbued
with his knowledge of Greek mathematics; and a volume
entitled Lectures and Essays,5 assembled by his students and
friends after his death, that treats Greek mathematics and
mathematical physics, speech, and precision, and thinkers
such as Virgil, Dante, Plato, and Aristotle. This collection
constitutes a remarkable introduction to liberal education.
The following lecture is from this collection. Klein
attempts to show what specifically constitutes history and
what distinguishes it from what we call an “historical sense.”
History understood in the modern sense is in fact one of the
great gods of our era. Understanding history amounts to
preparing to better understand what is at stake in the quarrel
of the ancients and the moderns, since the ancient, Socratic
notion of wisdom has perhaps not disappeared. It may yet be
valid, despite the claims of universality of the “historical
sense.”
Notes
1
Die Griechiche Logistik und die Enstehung der Algebra, Quellen
und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomie und
Physik, Abteilung B: Studien, vol. 3, fasc. 1 (Berlin, 1934): 18-105
(first part); fasc. 2 (1936): 122-235 (2nd part). Published in English
as Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, trans.
Eva Brann, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968.
2
Thirty years ago, the corridors of the National Pedagogical
Institute were decorated with windows representing these liberal
arts. I suppose that these ancient references have disappeared.
3
A Commentary on Plato’s Meno, Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1965.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Plato’s Trilogy, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977.
11
History and the Liberal Arts
5
Lectures and Essays, Annapolis: The Saint John’s College Press,
1985.
Jacob Klein
Friends and enemies of the St. John’s Program, visitors to the
college and many of its alumni often raise the question: Why
is History neglected in the St. John’s curriculum? They point
to the obvious contrast between the chronological order in
which the “Great Books” are read and the remarkable lack of
historical awareness displayed by the students. The time has
come, I think, to deal with this question extensively. I propose to do that in this lecture. Let us reflect on the role and
significance of History in a liberal arts curriculum.
The first, rather simple, statement that can be made is
this: Man, having the ability to understand and being inquisitive by nature, wants to explore everything that he sees
about him—the various plants and animals, the stars and the
clouds and the winds, the surface of the earth, the rivers and
the forests and the stones and the deserts. Whether this preoccupation stems from his immediate and urgent need,
whether his inquisitive attitude is merely an extension of his
concern to provide the necessities of life for himself, whether
it is the manifestation of his very nature or simply idle curiosity, need not be discussed at this point. Whatever the origins
of this desire, man wants to find out, to figure out, to know.
In this sense, then, man may be said to be inquisitive not only
about what surrounds him, at the present time, but also about
the future: he wants to know what is going to happen to him
as well as to everything else around him. And finally he wants
to know what happened in the past. Out of this latter desire,
we may somewhat naively say, grows History, i.e., the exploration of the past, the finding of the past, the description of
what has happened in the recent as well as in the most remote
Jacob Klein (1899-1978) was a tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis, serving
as dean from 1949-1958.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
past. Curiously enough, as you know, the Greek word historia means originally exploration of any kind. Gradually, it
came to mean, even to the Greeks, the exploration of the past
and the description or narration of past events.
Thus we have History, i.e., historical books: Herodotus,
Thucydides, chronicles of all kinds, histories of Europe,
America, India, of Guatemala, of the city of Annapolis, of the
Universal Postal Union, of St. John’s College, of the Imperial
Palace in Peking. Such histories may be more or less correct.
Descriptions of events must be checked as to their accuracy
with the help of all the evidence available: books, old records,
letters, inscriptions, etc. Special skills in exploring and checking the evidence must be developed. Historical science and
the methodology of historical science become a branch of
knowledge; history can be taught and learned. Departments
of History and archives are established. Historical journals
come into being, dedicated to the improvement and enlargement of historical knowledge. All this circumscribes what
may be called the domain of History. Is this, then, what
History is?
You sense immediately: this is not quite it, this is not a sufficient description of History and what History means.
First of all, there is a special emphasis in the pursuit of
History which is lacking in other branches of learning. Take
the science of geology, for example. However important and
interesting its investigations and findings might be, this science does not make universal claims, it restricts itself to a definite domain. There is no such thing as a “geological
approach” to any given problem. And yet there always seems
to be an “historical approach” to almost any kind of problem
in almost any field.
Secondly, it is not quite correct to state that history is the
description and narration of past events. Not everything that
is past is “historic.” That one of us here went to Washington
or to San Francisco last week or some time ago does not
necessarily belong to any history. It might, though. From a
KLEIN
13
certain point of view, with regard to an event we judge a
significant one, we can—retrospectively—recognize the
importance of events which led to that significant one.
Nobody, indeed, ever assumed that all events and happenings
are equally important and significant and could become
recorded in history books. Even Tolstoi, who formulated the
idea of such an all-comprehensive history, based on integration procedures in the face of infinite series of minute events,
of historical infinitesimals, as it were, did that merely to
reduce history thus understood to absurdity. All written and
traditional history is based on a principle of selection. This
means that we must have—and in fact do have—some yardstick to measure the significance and importance of events,
whatever history we may be writing.
It is not too difficult to discern these yardsticks in
Herodotus or Tacitus or Gibbon, for example; more difficult
perhaps, but not impossible, to discover them in Thucydides.
We can even venture to say that in general the yardstick is
provided either (a) by the consideration of the present state
of affairs, the salient features of which want to be traced back
to their origins, in a sort of genealogical procedure, or (b) by
the desire to derive a lesson for the future either from mistakes and failures or from exemplary actions in the past,
which desire leads to what has been called, since Polybius,
pragmatic history. Sometimes both kinds of yardstick are
combined.
I say that both—the universality of the tendency to subject any theme to an historical investigation and the selecting
of events or facts to be dealt with historically—help us to win
a better understanding of this human enterprise called
History. This enterprise does not seem to be grounded in an
inherent property of events or facts that permits us to arrange
them in a sequence, an historical sequence, but seems rather
to depend on a certain way of looking at things which stamps
them into an historical pattern. One might be tempted to
apply Kantian terminology to this phenomenon—and people
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
have actually done so—: there might be something of an historical a priori, a form of our thinking that inescapably leads
us to see things in an historical perspective. Let us consider
this for a moment. Let us beware though lest we indulge in an
empty, if easy, construction.
As far as pragmatic history is concerned, the selection is
based on our sense of moral virtues or our understanding of
practical maxims of conduct. Hybris versus Moderation,
Tyranny versus Freedom, false hopes and foolish fears versus
prudence—these are presented and pointed out to us in the
unfolding drama of historical successes or catastrophes. Here,
then, the historical scene is merely the enlargement of our
daily life, providing us with great examples in large script.
History in this sense is founded on completely “unhistorical”
points of view. That is why this kind of history writing does
not constitute a specific domain like Physics or even Poetry.
Note that Aristotle, the great systematizer of human knowledge, in the face of such history—the only one he knew—did
not treat it as a pragmateia, a discipline in its own right. The
same Aristotle who investigated, defined, elaborated on every
conceivable art and science—grammar, logic, physics, botany,
zoology, astronomy, theology, psychology, politics, ethics,
rhetoric, poetry—did not elaborate on history, although he so
often prefaces his investigations with a review of positions
and opinions held in the past. I conclude: there is no historical a priori in pragmatic history.
The same holds true of the genealogical type of history,
though not in the same way. The very notion of genealogy
comprises notions of origin, source, development, more generally, the notion of a temporal order. But these notions are
not strictly historical ones. They also determine our understanding of biological phenomena, or more generally, of phenomena of change. They are not constitutive categories of
historical experience. They are operative in any myth, they
help to picture the growth and decay of institutions, the
expansion of dominion and power; but the emphasis is on the
KLEIN
15
nature of those institutions and the overwhelming character
of that power. The bases of this type of history, exemplified
in Polybius and the Roman historians, are still unhistorical,
mostly legal and political.
But when we turn to that universal tendency to view
things historically, to use the historical approach in almost
any field, the picture changes. It seems, indeed, as if here the
form of History shapes the material under consideration so as
to make anything we look at assume historical clothing, as if
the very basis of our looking at things were—we hear it so
often—History itself. When, a moment ago, I denied that this
was the case in pragmatic and genealogical history, I implicitly assumed, by way of contrast, the possibility of such a view.
The question, then, is whether this historical way of looking
at things is itself a necessary form of our understanding.
One way of answering this question would be to apply the
following test: Can we approach and solve this problem
historically?
The pragmatic and genealogical types of history are the
only ones known in antiquity and the understanding of the
nature of history corresponds to them. But a new understanding of history begins with the advent of Christianity. Let
us consider briefly in what it consists. I shall use two outstanding examples: Augustine and Dante.
Augustine, in the City of God (15-18), gives a World
History based on a fundamental distinction. Mankind consists of two parts: there are those who live according to Man,
i.e., in sin, and those who live according to God; there are
two communities, the city of men and the city of God. The
latter is in the making and after the Second Advent will
become the everlasting Kingdom of God. The earthly city will
then be destroyed and its inhabitants will join Satan. As long
as this world exists, both cities are intertwined. Augustine distinguishes six ages: 1) from Adam to the Deluge; 2) from
Noah to Abraham; 3) from Abraham to David (the “prophetic age”); 4) from David to the Babylonian captivity; 5) from
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
the Babylonian captivity to Jesus Christ; 6) from Jesus Christ
to the end of this world. This universal history is conceived
mainly in terms of the Biblical account; but the great oriental
kingdoms, as well as Greece and the Roman Empire, have
their place allocated in the general flow. This is not a
“Philosophy of History”; it is rather History itself, i.e., the
description of succeeding ages according to God’s providential ordering of all events. The important thing for us to note
is that historical succession itself, the fact of History, the fact
that men’s lives weave the history of the World, is not an accidental property of those lives but their very essence. Our and
our fathers’ years have flowed through God’s eternal Today,
says Augustine in the Confessions: “from this everpresent
divine ‘To-day’ the past generations of men received the
measure and the mould of such being as they had; and still
others shall flow away, and so receive the mould of their
degree of being.” History, then, reflects the essential temporality of man, but reflects no less the eternal timeless pattern
of his being. In following up the chain of historical events we
do not select significant links. We follow God’s providential
plan. Our historical perspective is our view of an eternal
order, just as the flow is our way of incomplete existence. For
us “to exist” is identical with “to exist historically.” But that,
again, means that our existence spreads out in time the timeless pattern of God’s wisdom. This is neither pragmatic nor
genealogical history. It is, one might say, symbolic history.
History presents the symbols that unfold in succession the
eternal relations between creation, fall, redemption, and salvation.
Let us turn to Dante. Here, again we see a World History
conceived in terms of God’s timeless providential pattern.
History is the sinister chronicle of man’s fall pursued through
all generations of men. The Greek and Roman worlds occupy a far more important place in this chronicle than in that of
Augustine. The horrors of Thebes more than those of
Babylon indicate the complete abnegation of God’s grace. It
KLEIN
17
is not the contrast between the City of Men and the City of
God which determines Dante’s general view of historical
events, but rather the contrast and intertwining of God’s spiritual and God’s secular order, of Church and Empire. The
secular order, stemming from God, reflects but is not identical with the spiritual order. Troy and its destruction are symbols of man’s pride and man’s fall. “And it happened at one
period of time,” Dante writes in the Convivio, “that when
David was born, Rome was born, that is to say, Aeneas then
came from Troy to Italy. . . . Evident enough, therefore, is the
divine election of the Roman Empire by the birth of the Holy
City (i.e., Rome), which was contemporaneous with the root
of the race from which Mary sprang.” The history of the
world is here a kind of symbolic duplication of the spiritual
history of man. It is by this very nature, as in Augustine, twodimensional. Or, to put it in different words, the horizon of
this kind of history, or better, of this kind of historian, is not
historical. In this respect this kind of history is akin to the
pragmatic and genealogical kinds. Here, again, it is worth
noting: the primary liberal disciplines listed by Dante in the
Convivio and linked to the ten heavens of the world (the
spheres of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter,
Saturn, the sphere of the fixed stars, the primum mobile and
the Empyrean Heaven) are Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric,
Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy, Physics and
Metaphysics, Ethics, Theology. History is not one of them.
When Machiavelli and Hobbes dethrone classical philosophy and revert to pragmatic history as the best teacher man
can have in planning and conducting his life, they still cling
to a two-dimensional history to build their own political philosophy.
But now the scene changes: Vico’s New Science marks a
new beginning. Like Machiavelli and Hobbes he defies all
preceding philosophy. He bases his work on the fundamental
(Leibnizian) distinction: the true and the certain. What is true
is common and therefore abstract. What is certain is the
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particular, the individual, the concrete. “Certum and commune are opposed to each other.” The philosophers pursue
what is common. They lack certainty. Only history (which
includes philology) deals with the certain. The most certain
for us is that which we ourselves have made, the facta, the
facts. “The world of civil society has certainly been made by
man; its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this
cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all
their energies to the study of the world of nature, which,
since God made it, He alone knows; and that they should
have neglected the study of the world of nations or civil
world, which, since man had made it, men could hope to
know.”
Vico sets out to fulfill this hope. This is the scope of his
New Science. It is historical by definition. The historian looking at man-made worlds can understand their innermost core.
He will thus attain a more certain truth than the philosophers
ever could; he will discover “the common nature of nations”
or the “ideal eternal history” of nations established by divine
providence. The New Science will thus be “a rational civil
theology of divine providence.” “Since divine providence has
omnipotence as minister, it develops its orders by means as
easy as the natural customs of men.” This also means that this
science is a “history of human ideas” (not a philosophical
reflection on ideas). There are recurrent cycles in the history
of nations that always comprise three stages: the divine, the
heroic, and the human. The proper field of the historian is the
customs of men, their institutions, their laws, their writings,
their poetry. In understanding them he understands truth that
is certain—truthful certainty—precisely what the philosophers are unable to accomplish.
At first sight it seems as if history in Vico’s understanding
preserved its two-dimensionality, since the objects of his findings are the “universal and eternal orders established by providence.” But these orders do not exist outside of time. Divine
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providence is not the providential plan of salvation anymore.
Vico’s history is bent on finding the laws governing the
human world in contradistinction to the laws governing the
world of nature. Historical reality with its recurrent stretches
is one-dimensional. On the other hand, the historian alone is
now the true philosopher. The methods of interpretation and
of philology he has to use constitute a new organon comprising axioms, definitions and specific rules of inference. In
other words: Vico’s work competes with the work of Natural
History, with the work of Mathematical Physics.
We have here a rather amazing historical fact before us.
Let us remember. Towards the end of the sixteenth century a
reinterpretation and reconsideration of the traditional, “classical,” mathematical sciences lead to the establishment of
Algebra, a hitherto obscure and “vulgar” discipline neglected
by all recognized institutions of learning, as the eighth Liberal
Art. Its progress coincides with the development of a new
symbolic discipline, understood as Universal Mathematics, a
new and most powerful instrument of human knowledge
which is meant to replace the traditional Aristotelian
Organon. The science of nature becomes mathematical
physics, begins to dominate all human understanding and
gradually transforms the conditions of human life on this
earth. The only force opposing this development is History
with its claim to universality, first attributed to it by Vico and
maintained with increased vigor up to this moment. It is significant, I think, that Vico’s idea of an “ideal eternal history”
is a derivative of the idea of a Universal Mathematics, a shadow, as it were, that the latter casts. As Universal Mathematics
is to all specific mathematical disciplines so is the “ideal
eternal history” to all specific histories of nations. But this
parallelism between Universal Mathematics and Universal
History is to be understood in the light of the distinction
between that which is “abstractly true” and that which is
“concretely certain.” The new science of Mathematical
Physics leaves the natural experience of nature far behind: all
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that is concrete vanishes behind a screen of mathematical
symbols. Any teleology loses its meaning. The new science of
History tries to restore the dignity of the concrete, fills the
gap between the abstract symbolic understanding of nature
and the immediate human experience of the world around us.
It cannot dispense with the notions of means and ends. It is
the distinction between the true and the certain which underlies the familiar and superficial distinction between Science
and the Humanities. The latter are conceived as inseparable
from History, can only be approached in historical perspective, come actually to life only in the medium of History.
Since Vico, the idea of an eternal pattern of history, a vestige
of the original Christian understanding, although occasionally forcefully advanced, has been generally abandoned. The
emphasis is on the development of what has been called the
historical sense.
Three consequences follow.
First, the fascination with the “otherness” of the past: the
discovery or reconstruction of cultures and civilizations “different” from ours, each with a different “sense of values”
ascertainable in customs, institutions, works of art, architecture, literature, philosophy, religion. This very notion of an
autonomous “culture,” underlying the various manifestations
of human activity can arise only within an historical horizon.
Truth itself becomes a function of “culture,” the existence of
which appears a certain fact; “relativity of values” becomes
inevitably the concomitant of the historical perspective.
Secondly, the sense of participating in the relentless
historical flow makes observable trends the guide of our
actions. The acceptance of events and doctrines that are supposed to follow the “historical trend” is one of the most
potent causes for the predicament in which European nations
have found themselves in recent decades. The impact of
Marxism which goes under the name of historical materialism and the reaction to it derive their strength from the
historical sense projected into the future. The Gallup Poll is
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one of the most recent and most ridiculous examples of this
preoccupation with trends.
Thirdly, a man understands himself completely as an historical being. “Historicity” becomes his very nature, but not
in the sense that it reflects some timeless pattern. His Self disintegrates into a series of socially, and that means historically,
conditioned reflexes. Historicity does not mean Tradition. To
see ourselves as historical beings means to break the invisible
traditional ties in which we live. At best, tradition then
becomes a romantic notion, at worst, an academic phantom.
If we consider the disciplines taught in our schools, it is
easy to see that all natural sciences are patterned on the
model of mathematical physics. The idea of a universal mathematics as the new organon of all science, however, dies away.
On the other hand, all the disciplines within the realm of the
humanities have become historical to the very core. The study
of literature, philosophy, religion, music and the fine arts, for
example, is almost exclusively the study of the history of literature, the history of philosophy, the history of religions, the
history of music, the history of art. Fields of study of a more
practical applicability as, for example, languages, political
science and economics, retain a certain autonomy. The theoretical dignity they may have, however, is safeguarded only by
historical considerations or, for that matter, by methods
borrowed from mathematical physics.
It seems, then, that Mathematical Physics and History
divide between themselves, in a fairly exhaustive way, the rule
over the entire domain of human knowledge. Does this
permit us to consider them as the two necessary ways and
forms of our understanding? If this be so, Mathematical
Physics and History would come close to being the two
Liberal Arts of the modern age. Any liberal arts curriculum
ought then to concentrate on these two great bodies of learning in keeping with the trend of events and in preparing
students to follow it further.
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At this point, we can pause and reflect on the results we
have reached.
As to Mathematical Physics, the task before us is clearly
not the tracing of its historic development. We have rather to
understand the methods and the nature of the concepts that
have made this development possible. We have to understand
the specific use made of mathematical symbols, the relation of
a mathematical deduction to a verifying experiment, the relations between observations, hypothesis, theory and truth.
That is indeed what we are trying to do in our Mathematics
Tutorials and in the Laboratory. And if we do not do that fully
and in the most satisfactory manner, we have to improve our
ways. The danger we are running in this case is the very same
that has threatened the integrity of scientific understanding
since the seventeenth century and which has barely begun to
be warded off in recent developments: the danger to confuse
the symbolic means of our understanding with reality itself.
If we turn to History, we have first to remember the question which gave rise to the preceding historical account. The
question was: Is the historical way of looking at things a necessary form of our understanding? The answer—in the perspective of History—is in the negative: The universal historical approach is itself a product of, and presumably nothing
but a phase in, an historical development, which cannot claim
any absolute validity, no matter how “natural” and familiar it
seems to us at the present moment. We have to recognize,
moreover, the possibility of a dangerous confusion similar to
the one I just mentioned with regard to Mathematical
Physics. The results of historical investigations based on specific historical concepts and methods of interpretation ought
not to be confused with the real picture of a real past. Not to
see that, means to surround us with a pseudo-historical horizon of almost mythical quality so as to make us talk glibly of
“Greek culture,” “medieval times,” “Renaissance,” the
“Seventeenth Century,” the “Age of Enlightenment,” etc.
Such pseudo-mythical notions are usually in the minds of
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people who recommend that we take into account the proper “historical background” whenever we read and discuss a
book. The assumption behind this recommendation is a
rather naive one, to wit, that in the effort we make to understand a book or a series of books we could fall back on an
objective and certain datum, the general culture in which the
ideas expressed or propounded in those books are rooted and
from which they derive their strength and intelligibility. We
ought to see instead that the commonly accepted picture of
an historical period is largely due to an interpretation of the
content of books and other documents which presupposes in
the first place the ability to deal with grammatical patterns, to
discern rhetorical devices, to grasp ideas in all their implications. In point of fact, the main task of any historian is of
necessity the interpretation of whatever data he may collect.
The art of interpretation and all the other arts which minister to it depend on the understanding of the function of signs,
of the complexity of symbolic expressions, and of the
cogency of logical relations.
To understand a text is not a simple matter. To arouse and
to cultivate this understanding is one of the primary tasks of
our Language Tutorials. More than anything else, more, certainly, than the historical sense fed so often on sheer ignorance, an improvement of our interpretative skills could help
foster genuine historical research and writing. We may ultimately get to see that the problem of History is itself not an
historical problem.
It follows, then, that in pursuing these goals we should
ignore history’s claim to universality, ignore History itself, if
you please, in order to devote our full attention to the development of all the arts of understanding and all imaginative
devices man can call his own. It takes courage to pursue a
rather narrow and steep path hardly visible from the highways of contemporary learning. But let us remember the
inscription on the old seal of the College: No path is impassable to courage. The reward may be high.
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25
Prudence and Wisdom in
Aristotle’s Ethics
Eric Salem
In Book 1 of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle defines happiness or the human good as an “activity of the soul in accordance with virtue,” then adds immediately, “and if the virtues
are many, in accordance with the best and most complete” of
them (1098a 16-18).1 Aristotle spends the next five books filling in this “sketch” or “outline” of happiness. He distinguishes intellectual and ethical virtue (1103a4-18).2 He
defines ethical virtue and its centerpiece, choice (1105b291107a2; 1111b4-1113a14). And he discusses at great length
a total of thirteen virtues, eleven ethical, and two intellectual. But nowhere in these first six books does he tell us which
of these virtues is “best and most complete.”
Could it be courage, the first of the virtues taken up by
Aristotle? Does happiness consist in doing beautiful deeds on
the field of battle, in withstanding one’s fear of death and
tempering one’s eagerness for the fight (1115a4-b24)? Or is
it perhaps justice, the only virtue to which he devotes an
entire book of the Ethics? Does the human good show itself,
above all, in the setting right of wrongs and the distributing
of good things according to merit (1130b30-1131a1)? Again,
is wisdom, the last of the virtues defined by Aristotle, a likely
candidate? Can we be fully ourselves, fully achieve human
happiness, only in looking away from the shifting tangle of
human affairs and looking to the unchanging sources of all
things (1141a16-1141b2)? Or is the sought-for virtue perhaps that curious disposition tucked away at the end of Book
4 which inclines us to listen and speak to one another in a fitting way in our moments of leisure? Is happiness to be found
Eric Salem is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College. This
essay is a revision of a paper originally prepared for delivery at the 1986
meeting of the Southwestern Political Science Association.
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in the witty play of intelligent conversation, in telling the
right joke at the right time to the right sort of people
(1127b28-1128a33)?
We are not told. We are not even told—or at any rate, not
told explicitly—how we might go about deciding the question, how, that is, we are to decide whether one virtue is better and more complete than another. And yet we are dealing
with a matter of the greatest practical import, and Aristotle
knows it. It is not just that our own good, our personal happiness, is at stake. From the outset Aristotle characterizes his
investigation of the human good as “a sort of political
inquiry” and he reminds us repeatedly, especially in the early
books of the Ethics, that the primary task of the statesman or
lawgiver is to make his citizens good, i.e., to educate them in
virtue by means of the laws (1094b10-11; 1102a7-10;
1103b2-6). But to set down laws with a view to happiness
would clearly require both that one know the order of the
virtues—and hence which one of them is best and most complete—and also that one know whether that highest virtue is
the sort of virtue that can be brought about by means of the
law.3
I think Aristotle has his reasons for almost leaving us in
the dark about these questions. Were he to dot every “i” and
cross every “t” in his argument, he would do us, his readers,
an injustice. We would not be disposed, or not as disposed, to
read his account of the virtues with discernment, to make that
argument our own by asking ourselves at every moment,
“Could this be the virtue that will bring me or my fellow citizens happiness?” Like Plato, the teacher and fellow lover of
wisdom to whom he refers with affection in Book 1, Aristotle
invites his readers to participate in, and not merely to
observe, his own inquiries. Aristotle the inquirer writes his
books for inquiring minds.
I said a moment ago that Aristotle almost leaves us in the
dark. I do not mean by this that he provides us with clear-cut,
final answers to the questions I’ve just raised at some later
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point in the Ethics, say, in Book 10. For I think—and I’ll say
more about this later—that what Aristotle says there about
happiness and the virtues is fraught with difficulties and full
of questions. I rather mean that in various passages throughout the Ethics Aristotle leaves hints which help us to think
through, if not to answer once and for all, the question,
“Which of the many virtues lies at the core of human happiness?” The famous discussion in Book 10 is certainly one such
passage. Another, and one of the most helpful, forms the conclusion of Aristotle’s inquiry into the virtues. In what follows
I want to focus on the latter passage, to see what progress one
can make by working through what Aristotle says and implies
at this critical juncture of his inquiry.4
*
Aristotle begins the final section of Book 6 by raising two
questions about the intellectual virtues. The first question
concerns the usefulness of prudence and wisdom; the second
treats the relation between them.5 Aristotle spins out the first
question roughly as follows. Men do not seem to become
happy through wisdom, for wisdom, as knowledge of the
eternal, knows nothing of becoming, “contemplates none of
those things through which a human being will be happy”
(1143b19-22). Nor are men better off for having knowledge
of the human good, i.e., prudence. For what prudence knows,
namely, “the just and beautiful and good things for man,” the
good man does (prattei) and does without needing to know
them (1143b22-28). What’s more, even if prudence were
knowledge, not only of the human good, but also of the
means whereby men become good, an already good man
would not need it. And a man who wished to become good
would not need to have it himself. After all, men do not
become doctors in order to become healthy—they simply
visit and obey them (1143b28-33). Or as Aristotle himself
had suggested as early as Book 2, men become virtuous, not
by reflecting on virtue, but by doing virtuous things, that is,
by doing the things prescribed by the law and the lawgiver
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(1103a31-1103b7; 1103b14-23; 1105b9-17). Why, then,
should a man who desires to become good or virtuous and
hence happy seek to acquire either wisdom or prudence?
Before we look at Aristotle’s answer, or rather answers, to
this question, we would do well to reflect for a time on the
particular understanding of both happiness and virtue that
gives rise to it. In the first place, Aristotle’s question seems to
rest on the assumption that the activity or being at work
(energeia) which constitutes happiness lies in deeds (en ergois), in performing good and beautiful works (erga): happy
men are men who act courageously, justly and so on. Because
happiness is this sort of activity (and not, say, the activity of
thinking), Aristotle can further assume that the virtues it
accords with are, in the first instance, the ethical virtues: if
happiness consists in doing courageous and just deeds, then it
makes sense to say that the virtues are courage and justice.
Some form of thinking might be an element of happiness, but
it could be only if it somehow made possible and were for the
sake of the doing of such deeds. Finally, Aristotle’s question
assumes that in fact the ethical virtues can both arise and
flourish within the human soul without the aid of thinking.
The sphere of ethical virtue and action is, as it were, a selfsufficient whole. Men acquire the ethical virtues, become
men of good character, by doing virtuous deeds, and once
they have acquired them, they need only exercise them, i.e.,
act in accordance with them, to be happy.
In sum, Aristotle’s question concerning the usefulness of
prudence and wisdom hints at a first answer to our initial
question; in fact, it presupposes an answer to it: the virtue we
are looking for is simply ethical virtue. For if happiness is a
matter of doing the right deeds, then ethical virtue, the stable
readiness to do such deeds, has to form at least part of that
virtue. But if ethical virtue is in itself sufficient to produce
those deeds, if ethical virtue can do without the help of reason, then it seems to possess the character of completeness
which Aristotle’s definition demands. Ethical virtue, by itself,
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seems to be the “best and most complete virtue,” best because
it issues in the highest human good, and most complete
because it accomplishes this without help from elsewhere.
Of course, someone might note at this point that we are
looking for one virtue and might raise the objection that ethical virtue is not a single virtue, but a name for eleven distinct
virtues. This objection seems to have been anticipated, however, by Aristotle’s own presentation of the ethical virtues,
where it is intimated, at least twice, that the ethical virtues
may be one in more than name (or even kind). First, in his
account of the magnanimous or great-souled man, whose perfect goodness and self-sufficiency he repeatedly emphasizes,
Aristotle calls magnanimity “all-complete” and describes it as
“a sort of kosmos of the virtues; for it makes them greater and
does not come to be without them” (1024a2-10).6 Here we
seem to be invited to imagine that the various ethical virtues
become fully themselves only as they occupy their proper
places within the spacious soul of the magnanimous man—to
imagine, that is, that ethical virtue becomes one complete
whole in the person of the magnanimous man. Again, several
times in the course of his account of justice in the broadest
sense, Aristotle identifies such justice with “complete” or
“whole” virtue (1129b26-27; 1130a14-16; 1130b6-8). The
notion here seems to be that the laws, at least the laws in the
best regime, enjoin men to be good in every sense of the
term—to be zealous in defense of the city, to be generous and
gentle and fair toward fellow citizens and so on—so that, in
principle, to be just, to be steadfast in one’s obedience to the
law, is to be virtuous simply (1129b11-26). Once more we
seem to be invited to regard the ethical virtues, not as a heap
of disparate dispositions, but as a unified whole, in this case a
whole that has its origin in law and its end in the good of the
political community.7
Someone might also wonder why, after spending a whole
book discussing the intellectual virtues, Aristotle would
choose to raise a question which so pointedly calls into ques-
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tion the goodness or usefulness of prudence and wisdom. The
first thing that must be said here is that Aristotle’s question,
and the assumptions upon which it rests, are in keeping with
much of what he says in the earlier books of the Ethics.
Activity and action, ethical virtue and virtue are treated as
near synonyms throughout the first five books. Only occasionally does Aristotle suggest that the life of action might
depend, ultimately, on the activity of reason, much less on a
virtue of reason; he never even broaches the possibility that
thinking might be choiceworthy for its own sake. Generally
speaking, the life of action and ethical virtue remain at center
stage in that discussion: reason and thought lurk in the wings,
barely visible at rare moments.8
Perhaps Aristotle wrote the first half of the Ethics in the
awareness that even the most serious of his readers would
tend to identify ethical virtue with virtue and happiness with
right action, and would have to be persuaded—and could be
persuaded only gradually—that excellence in reasoning must
play a central role in the good life. Or what may amount to
the same thing, Aristotle’s curious way of proceeding may
arise out of the determination, exhibited everywhere in his
works, to think his way to the truth of a matter by way of
everyday experience and common opinion—in this case the
common opinion that courage, moderation, liberality and the
like are the virtues and that happiness is a matter of eu prattein, acting or faring well.9
Whatever the reasons for Aristotle’s way of proceeding in
Books 1 through 5, the first question elaborated by him at the
end of Book 6 seems to sum up the general view of happiness
found in those books: ethical virtue, perhaps in the form of
magnanimity or justice, is the “best and most complete
virtue” whose issue is happiness. In Book 6 prudence and wisdom come in from the wings and occupy center stage for a
time, but the body of that book still leaves us wondering
whether those virtues are to be more than minor characters
in the drama of the Ethics.
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*
How, then, does Aristotle answer the question he has raised
about the usefulness of prudence and wisdom? His first
answer can be summarized as follows. Even if prudence and
wisdom produced nothing, each would be worthy of being
chosen for its own sake, for each of them is a virtue of the
part of the soul that thinks (1144a1-3). Moreover, wisdom
and prudence do produce something. Wisdom, in particular,
produces happiness, not in the way that medicine produces
health, but in the way that health itself produces healthiness
or healthy activity (1144a3-5). “For being part of whole
virtue, it makes a man happy through its possession and its
activity” (1144a5-6).
Perhaps the first thing we should notice here is the
use Aristotle makes of medicine and health. Earlier, in the
course of framing his question, he used that analogy to suggest that reason is of no use to the virtuous man: ethical
virtue was likened to health, and reason likened to the art of
medicine for which a healthy man has no need. Now reason,
especially in the form of wisdom, is itself likened to health,
and the art of medicine, for the moment at any rate, drops
out of the picture entirely. If wisdom does not replace ethical
virtue as the health of the soul, it is at least set on an equal
footing with it.
Two elements seem to be involved in this shift in analogy
or argument. The first is a certain deepening of our understanding of causality or responsibility. Aristotle’s question
assumed that wisdom and prudence could be regarded as useful or productive only if they brought forth virtue and virtuous activity in the manner of so-called efficient causes. But
wisdom, at any rate, cannot—and need not—be regarded as
a cause in this sense. Like the other virtues—and the vices as
well—wisdom is a hexis, an enduring condition, and, as such,
it both forms the soul and shapes the soul’s activity (1106a1012; 1139a15-17).10 But for just this reason it can be regarded as a cause, and in the measure that the part of the soul it
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conditions and the corresponding activity it shapes are central to our being human, wisdom can be regarded as responsible for human happiness. Wisdom, in other words, is, or
may be, a formal cause of human happiness.11
The second and, to my mind, more fundamental element
involved in the shift—without it the question about what sort
of cause wisdom might be could never arise—is Aristotle’s
abrupt setting aside, without the slightest comment, of the
assumption that happiness consists simply in right action.
That is, the ethical virtues could earlier be assumed to constitute the health of the soul, and wisdom could be dismissed in
a sentence as useless, only so long as happiness was assumed
to be a matter of acting well. And conversely, wisdom can
now be placed on an at least equal footing with the ethical
virtues only if the reigning assumption of Books 1 through 5
is no longer allowed to be the measure of the usefulness or
goodness of the virtues. Clearly, then, Aristotle’s first answer
is a radical one; it goes to the root of his question concerning
the usefulness of prudence and wisdom by denying the very
premise upon which that question rests, by denying, that is,
that happiness consists simply in right action.12
Indeed Aristotle’s answer might leave us wondering
whether happiness has anything at all to do with right action.
After all, he does not say that wisdom and the ethical virtues
together constitute the health of the soul and together produce happiness; he simply likens wisdom to health and says
that wisdom produces happiness. Aristotle does say that wisdom produces happiness in the measure that it is part of
“whole virtue,” and we might be inclined to think that by
“whole virtue” he means wisdom plus the ethical virtues plus
prudence, but he is in fact silent about the meaning of the
words “whole virtue.” Perhaps the ethical virtues have no
part in the whole of which wisdom is a part.
It may be useful at this point to spell out in some detail
the various possible consequences of Aristotle’s answer. In the
first place, if we accept Aristotle’s claims about wisdom, we
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can of course no longer regard ethical virtue, taken as a
whole, as the “best and most complete virtue,” and can no
longer assume that the activity of soul that is happiness is
exhausted in the performance of good and beautiful deeds.
Good works are not good enough. The activity that makes up
happiness must somehow include the being at work of thinking, and not just any thinking, but the knowing of objects
which are at once “most honorable” and “incapable of being
otherwise” (1139b18-22; 1141a18-20, b2-3). And the disposition of soul that makes this activity possible, namely, wisdom must form at least part of the “best and most complete
virtue.”
This is not to say that the ethical virtues cannot also be
part of the “best and most complete virtue.” It could be the
case that by “whole virtue” Aristotle means “the sum of the
virtues,” that wisdom, prudence and ethical virtue together
constitute the “best and most complete virtue.” If this were
true, the happy man would be the man whose soul’s parts
each possessed its proper virtue, and his happiness would
show itself in the beauty of his deeds, in his understanding of
human affairs, and in his knowing of the first and highest of
things. Again, if this were true, we might be compelled to
deepen and broaden our understanding of magnanimity, to
see it as the kosmos or constellation of all the virtues, including prudence and wisdom. And finally, if this were true, we
would surely be obliged to read the “if ” clause in “if the
virtues are many, in accordance with the best and most complete of them” as a genuine question: “if the virtues are
many” would have to mean “if the virtues are many and not
facets or parts of one whole virtue.”
On the other hand, it could well be the case that the ethical virtues are to be excluded from the notion of whole
virtue. Wisdom and prudence might be the two parts of
whole virtue. Or wisdom might be part of a whole whose
other parts are as yet unnamed. Finally, it seems at least possible that the words “whole virtue” are simply the first line of
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defense in Aristotle’s freeing of wisdom from the charge of
uselessness. By locating wisdom within the whole of virtue,
he suggests that wisdom deserves at least equal consideration
with the ethical virtues. But Aristotle’s final position might be
that wisdom, in isolation from the rest of the virtues, is the
sole cause of human happiness.
*
Aristotle’s second answer, to which I now want to turn, seems
to me to be a far less radical defense of reason than his first.
It answers the charge of uselessness, not by posing an alternative to the life of action based in ethical virtue, but by
showing that reason in the form of prudence is an integral
part of that life.
In effect, Aristotle shows here that the analogy drawn
from medicine and health does not adequately represent the
relation of prudence to ethical virtue. That analogy suggests
that the ethical virtues, and the actions commonly associated
with them, are in themselves independent of prudence, and
only incidentally in need of it. But in fact, Aristotle argues,
the ethical virtues cannot themselves produce the equivalent
of healthy activity, as health presumably can in the case of a
healthy body. The character of a man’s actions depends on
the quality of his thinking as well as the goodness of his character. We aim to do justice or to act generously, we are moved
to do what is just or what is generous, because we are just or
generous; the ethical virtues are responsible for the rightness
of desire and the rightness of our ends. But it is up to prudence to see all that bears on or contributes to those ends (ta
pros ta telê), and hence to discover just what the right things
are, right here and right now: we must think, and be able to
think well, if we are to see the particular shape that generosity or justice must take on in a particular situation. In short,
prudence and the ethical virtues are co-causes of those
motions or activities of the soul which make for happiness on
the level of deeds—assuming, that is, that such deeds have
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anything to do with happiness (1144a6-9, 20-22; 1145a26).13
But Aristotle’s answer goes further than this. Not only the
actions we associate with the ethical virtues, but also the ethical virtues themselves depend on the presence of prudence
within the soul. To be sure, Aristotle argues, there seem to be
certain natural bases for the ethical virtues. Certain men seem
to be by nature disposed to be just or moderate or courageous, and these “natural virtues” can exist in separation
from prudence (1144b4-9). But ethical virtue in the strict
sense cannot be or come into being without prudence
(1144b14-17). And the reverse is also true. Again, there
appears to be a natural power or faculty within the soul that
enables us to discover the means necessary to accomplish a
given end (1144a23-26). But this power of the soul, which
Aristotle calls shrewdness or cleverness, is open-ended; it can
be used for good or for ill (1144a26-27). Once developed
and perfected, it becomes prudence, but it cannot be developed and perfected unless the ethical virtues are there to
make the ends that we aim at the right ends (1144a271144b1). Ethical virtue and prudence, then, are not only cocauses of right action, but also co-causes of one another. They
form a two that does not admit of division: neither can be or
be at work without the other; neither of the parts of the soul
of which they are virtues can be fully itself in the absence of
the virtue of the other (1144b30-32).
The consequences of Aristotle’s second answer seem clear
enough. If by the words “best and most complete virtue”
Aristotle means to refer to only one of the many virtues he
has discussed, and if by “complete” he means, even if only in
part, “able to be and be at work without help from elsewhere,” then clearly neither prudence nor any of the ethical
virtues can even qualify for the position of “best and most
complete virtue.” This would leave wisdom as the only possible candidate. And the account of wisdom that Aristotle provides in the body of Book 6 suggests that wisdom does indeed
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possess the completeness which prudence and the ethical
virtues lack. For there wisdom is distinguished from knowledge precisely on the grounds that knowledge as knowledge
lacks insight into its starting-points, and is therefore incomplete, while in wisdom insight into starting points and knowledge of what follows from those starting points are inextricably linked (1139b25-35; 1140b31-35; 1141a17-20).14
And yet the very way in which Aristotle articulates the
relation between prudence and ethical virtue in his second
answer suggests that those virtues, taken together, possess
something like completeness. Although each by itself is
incomplete, prudence and ethical virtue together seem to
form a sort of self-sufficient whole, independent of wisdom
and, indeed, analogous in structure to wisdom, with ethical
virtue supplying prudence with the starting points from
which it deliberates, and prudence supplying ethical virtue
with that discernment and judgement of particulars upon
which any right action depends.
*
We seem to have reached an impasse. Although it has become
clear that the ethical virtues cannot themselves constitute the
“best and most complete virtue,” clear that reason in some
form must play a part in the good life, it still remains unclear
which form of reason is most likely to lead to happiness. Of
all the virtues, wisdom best fits Aristotle’s definition of happiness. Wisdom must not only form part of complete virtue,
as we gathered from Aristotle’s first answer; it may well be
that virtue. But it seems that prudence, in company with the
ethical virtues, could also lay claim to the title of complete
virtue. In fact, Aristotle goes out of his way here to single out
prudence, as if it, rather than magnanimity or perfect justice,
were the true unifying ground of the virtues related to action
(1144b32-1145a2). Should his bare assertion that wisdom
plays a major part in happiness be allowed to obscure what
can be said for prudence? Finally, we have not yet seen any
evidence to contradict the hypothesis, again drawn from
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37
Aristotle’s first answer, that by complete virtue Aristotle
means “whole virtue” and by whole virtue he means all the
virtues. Why should happiness not consist in the being at
work of all the parts of the soul, each in accordance with its
proper virtue?
As it turns out, the second of the two questions Aristotle
raises in the final section of Book 6 bears directly on the issue
before us, i.e., the relation between prudence and wisdom. If
that question and its answers do not provide us with final
solutions to the difficulties I have just articulated, I think they
may at least help us to understand them more clearly.
Aristotle asks: can prudence, whose work it is to rule and
give orders concerning each thing, also be said to rule and
give orders to wisdom (1143b33-36)? Like his first question,
Aristotle’s second question has two answers. And like those
earlier answers, these answers point us in different directions.
In this case, each answer hints at a different understanding of
the relation between prudence and wisdom.
Let me begin with Aristotle’s second answer. To say that
prudence rules wisdom, Aristotle claims, would be like saying
that politics rules the gods because it gives orders concerning
all things in the city (1145a10-12). Just as the gods dwell outside the city, out of the reach of politics, so too, we infer, wisdom lies outside—indeed, above—the domain in which prudence properly exercises its authority.
Aristotle’s answer seems at first glance to be a straightforward denial of the power and right of prudence to rule wisdom. But the very brevity of his answer—and if brevity is the
soul of wit, it should probably count as the wittiest response
ever made to a fundamental question—seems to invite further
reflection. We might wonder, for instance, whether politics
can and must give orders concerning all things in the city precisely because the gods take no interest and no part in the life
of the city. And we might wonder, too, whether political life
takes on a kind of wholeness and self-sufficiency precisely
because the gods leave men to their own devices. In short, we
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might wonder whether the supremacy and self-sufficiency of
the gods not only limits the extent of political authority, but
also constitutes that authority and the very domain in which
it is exercised: perhaps politics and the city are only in the
wake of divine withdrawal. But what may hold for the city
and its gods may hold for prudence and wisdom as well.
Perhaps the particular character that wisdom takes on over
the course of Book 6—its self-sufficient contemplation of the
unchanging sources of all things, its consequent separation
from human affairs and human doings—requires Aristotle to
grant the life of action a certain wholeness and requires
Aristotle to find a central place for prudence within it
(1141b2-8). The two apparently contradictory views articulated a moment ago, the view that wisdom alone possesses
completeness and the view that prudence in company with
the ethical virtues possesses a sort of completeness, may not
be incompatible after all: the second view may follow from
the first. The assumption about happiness which characterizes
such a large part of the Ethics, the assumption that human
happiness lies in acting well, may be the result, curiously
enough, of Aristotle’s gradually unfolded claim that wisdom
and true happiness exist in utter separation from ordinary
life.
Of course, to return to Aristotle’s image, it does not quite
seem true to say that politics and political life exist in complete separation from the gods. Surely one of the tasks of politics, one part of its educative work, is to teach citizens to
honor the gods.15 If so, might prudence not have an analogous task: to make the superiority of wisdom visible on occasion, to remind the ethical virtues, or those who possess
them, that wisdom is after all the most honorable of activities? Granted that for the most part prudence must keep its
ear to the ground, its nose to the grindstone and its eye on the
particular; granted that in general it must take its bearings by
what the ethical virtues disclose as the human good; still, it
seems difficult to believe that prudence would not in some
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39
form and on some occasions look beyond and point beyond
the horizon established by the ethical virtues.16
Indeed, isn’t this just what we find Aristotle himself doing
in Book 10? There he makes his most explicit claim for the
absolute superiority and self-sufficiency of wisdom, and he
does so in the strongest language imaginable (1177a18-b4;
1177b17-27; 1178b22-24). In light of that claim, the claims
of prudence and the ethical virtues pale: in Book 10 Aristotle
insists that the life based on prudence can be called happy
only in a secondary way, that the wise man will take up that
life, a merely human life, only with a certain reluctance
(1178a9-23; 1178b3-8). And yet, almost in the same breath
Aristotle begins to speak of educating men in what seems to
be ethical virtue, and begins to introduce his study of politics
as if nothing had happened (1179a30-b4; 1179b23-28). One
minute he is telling his readers not to settle for the human-alltoo-human but “to be immortal” instead, the next he is
exhorting them to attend to families and friends and to
engage in his “philosophy concerning human” i.e., mortal,
affairs (1177b32-35; 1180a29-33; 1181b12-16). He gives his
readers a glimpse of the highest life, shows them enough of it
to make them honor its claims, but then leaves them and their
lives more or less intact.
*
Aristotle’s first answer to his question concerning the relation
of prudence to wisdom tells a somewhat different story, and
leads to a somewhat different way of reading the drama of
the Ethics. Once again, the superiority of wisdom to prudence is emphasized: Aristotle calls wisdom the virtue of the
“better” part of the soul. And once again, Aristotle insists that
prudence does not give orders to wisdom. Likening prudence
to the medical art and wisdom to health, he says that prudence does not “use” wisdom, but sees to it that it comes into
being: prudence gives orders for the sake of wisdom, not to
wisdom (1145a7-10).
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Still, Aristotle’s very use of this medical analogy—yet
again—points to a different way of understanding the relation between prudence and wisdom than we find in his other
answer. Much earlier, in his initial question, Aristotle had
used the analogy to suggest that the ethical virtues are sufficient unto themselves: prudence might be needed to bring
those virtues into being, but those virtues, once in place within the human soul, can do without the help of prudence.
Now, having rejected this analogy in the case of the ethical
virtues, Aristotle resurrects it in the case of wisdom. He thus
suggests that wisdom in fact enjoys the self-sufficiency earlier
attributed to the ethical virtues. But he also suggests, as he
had not in his other answer, that wisdom in some sense
depends on prudence. Indeed his use of the words “sees to it
that it comes into being” seems intended to underscore this
dependence.17 Wisdom is not a god after all; it may possess a
divine self-sufficiency once it has come into being, but it must
come into being and prudence is somehow responsible for
bringing it forth.
What follows from Aristotle’s suggestion that wisdom is
not quite self-sufficient? If wisdom depends, for its very
being, on the activity of prudence, it cannot be regarded as
the sole cause, among the virtues, of human happiness. If by
the “best and most complete virtue,” we mean all those
human excellences through which happiness comes into
being, then that virtue would have to include prudence as
well as wisdom. But if prudence, in turn, depends on the ethical virtues, would it not follow that happiness depends on
the presence within a soul of all the virtues—at least in the
measure that wisdom is not fully present and at work within
that soul? Does Aristotle, then, intend us to identify complete
virtue with the sum of the virtues? Are we to understand,
after all, that happiness somehow consists in the being at
work of all the virtues, including the ethical virtues?18
Perhaps. But Aristotle’s words “prudence gives orders for
the sake of wisdom” oblige us, I think, to reconsider the rela-
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tion of prudence to the ethical virtues. According to
Aristotle’s earlier argument, prudence depends on the ethical
virtues because the ethical virtues, in directing desire aright,
illuminate or disclose the ends by which prudence takes its
bearings. But if the proper ends for the sake of which prudence makes its deliberations are not, or are not primarily,
courageous, moderate or just actions, if the proper end of
prudence is wisdom or the activity of wisdom, the ethical
virtues would seem to fall short in their work of forming right
desire. What seems to be needed instead is a new hexis, a new
ordering of the soul, that corresponds to the desire for and
delight in wisdom above all things. In short, what seems to be
needed is an inner condition or virtue we might call philosophia, love of wisdom.19
This is not to say that in the new order of things ethical
virtue would be rendered useless. What seems to be required
instead is a sort of transformation of the ethical virtues, a reformation of them that would leave wisdom at the core of
right desire. The man who underwent such a reformation
might, to all appearances, be scarcely distinguishable from the
man for whom right action was everything. The ethical life
would not have to be a matter of reluctance to him, as it
seems to be to the wise man alluded to in Aristotle’s other
answer. But his would be a greatness of soul, a “kosmos of the
virtues,” big enough to house a longing to take in the very
sources of all things; an ever-present appetite for wisdom,
which would somehow shape his every deliberation, would
distinguish him from the man who honors wisdom without
pursuing it. In short, the complete or whole virtue of such a
man, in whom prudence gives orders for the sake of wisdom,
would include the ethical virtues without being defined by
them.
Now nowhere in the Ethics does Aristotle explicitly discuss the constellation of virtues I have just described. He
does, however, point to it from time to time. For instance, I
think it is difficult to read Aristotle’s account of the curious
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disposition mentioned at the beginning of this essay without
being reminded of the philosophical life, especially when it is
read in conjunction with the discussion of its two companion
virtues, also unnamed: “friendliness” (displayed toward those
with whom one is not fully friends) and “truthfulness” or
“love of truth” (in which Socrates and Socratic irony or selfdepreciation loom large) (1126b19-31; 1127a33-1127b9;
1127b22-32). Indeed, by placing his account of the readiness
to engage in playful, leisurely, tactful conversation in the
midst of his account of the ethical virtues, Aristotle suggests
that philosophy can occur in the midst of the ethical life.20
But perhaps the clearest of Aristotle’s allusions to this conjunction of the virtues is to be found in his account of friendship, which by its position provides a delicate contrast to the
account of the apparent disjunction between wisdom and the
other virtues in Book 10.21
There, when at the end of Book 9 he returns to the theme
of complete friendship or the friendship between good men,
Aristotle makes it clear that the virtue or goodness of such
men lies in thought and action. In the course of a single chapter he at once describes the unalloyed delight which good
men take in contemplating one another’s deeds, and yet
insists that their living together comes to completion in philosophic conversation, in their “sharing of words and thought
in common” (1169b30-1170a4; 1170b10-12). Aristotle even
suggests that something like the completeness or self-sufficiency that belongs to wisdom characterizes the life of reflection and action enjoyed by good men who are friends. Using
language which seems intended to remind us of his account
of the divine life in Book 12 of the Metaphysics—the life in
which wisdom at work presumably shares—Aristotle
describes the “living together” of good friends as a sort of
“thinking of thinking” (Meta. 1074b15-35). Since friends are
other selves, friends see themselves “at work” in seeing their
friends “at work,” and this seeing or “theorizing,” being itself
a form of being at work, brings completeness and joy to their
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43
common life (1169b30-1170b19). While men who are lovers
of wisdom rather than wise may not themselves possess the
divine self-sufficiency which comes with wisdom, their lives
acquire a kind of wholeness and divinity in the presence of
their friends.22
*
Why does Aristotle leave us with these two, rather different
accounts of happiness? Some time ago I suggested that
Aristotle, exercising his own prudence, makes the superiority
of wisdom visible in order to instill in his readers a kind of
distant respect for wisdom, but then leaves them and their
lives more or less intact. I think that this suggestion, while
true, has its limits. Some of his readers might retain their
focus on the life of action; they might come away from the
Ethics with a deepened understanding of the foundations of
the ethical life along with a well-founded, if distant, admiration for wisdom and its pursuit. But for others, for those most
engaged by Aristotle’s inquiry into the highest good and most
eager to make his inquiry their own, the experience of reading the Ethics, especially Books 6 and 10, would surely be different. They would see, with Aristotle, the insufficiency of the
everyday, customary understanding of virtue and happiness,
would see that the life of action must in truth be suffused and
completed by deliberative thought. But they would also see,
with Aristotle, the ultimate insufficiency of thought aimed at
action, would see that thought as thought reaches completion
only in the thinking for it own sake of what is simply thinkable. They would thus see, with Aristotle, that there is a space
in the human soul—the soul of the animal defined by thinking—that only wisdom can fill, would see that being complete
as a human being ultimately means passing beyond what is
human. For such readers a simple separation of spheres—“my
life of action here, the sphere of being wise somewhere over
and up there”—is simply not a possibility. For to have taken
in the thought that wisdom is the highest good, to have made
it truly one’s own, is already to have undergone the re-orien-
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tation of prudence described above; it is to have become
philo-sophic. And to have arrived at the thought that wisdom
is the highest good, to have taken a genuine part in Aristotle’s
philosophic deliberations, is to be already on the way to wisdom; it is to have made a beginning in the being at work of
philosophizing.23 To leave such readers with only a distant
vision of the superiority of wisdom would not be enough.
Aristotle must provide some sense of the sort of life to be
lived on the way to wisdom, if only to show how the pursuit
of wisdom might “fit” within ordinary life. Prudence and the
wish to see respect for wisdom flourish among those dedicated to a life of thoughtful action may require Aristotle to voice
the claims of wisdom, but prudence and a kind of friendship
with certain of his readers equally oblige him to show them,
in word and in deed, what a life of loving wisdom might look
like.
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4
1 All references to the Nicomachean Ethics are to Bywater’s edition,
the Oxford University Press (London, 1894). Citations and references are generally given in Bekker numbers. Translations are my
own.
Because the following investigation begins with the middle of
Aristotle’s own inquiry, it will have to take for granted any number
of claims, above all, the claim that happiness is an activity (rather
than, say, an occasional feeling) and the claim that it has everything
to do with virtue or excellence (rather than, say, pleasure). Aristotle
himself argues for both claims in Book 1, most explicitly in the
chapters (7 and 8) that treat his definition directly. A brief reflection
on the words he uses to define happiness may help make more
apparent what is at stake there. The word I have translated as
“activity” or “being at work,” energeia, is one of two words used by
Aristotle for the core meaning of a thing’s being; the near synonym
for it is entelecheia, which means something like remaining fully at
one’s end or being fully complete (Metaphysics 9, 1048a32-b9;
1050a3-24). Kata, “in accordance with,” clearly has its strong
causal meaning here; it means “through” or “because of ” rather
than simply “in alignment with” (Meta. 5, 1022a14-23). Finally,
“virtue,” aretê, related to the verb arariskô, “to join” or “fit together,” means “fitness,” the inner condition that allows for something
to be and work as well as possible (Ethics, 1106a15-21). To say that
happiness is an energeia, then, is to say that it is that activity in
which what we are as human beings, i.e., our human form, becomes
fully present. And to search for the virtue it accords with is to
search for the inner condition through which that complete presence arises, i.e., through which we are fully human or, as we like to
say, “are all there” (Meta. 9, 1050a34-b2).
2
5
Notes
Roughly speaking, the ethical virtues are the human excellences
that define character (êthos); they thus shape our responses to the
world, i.e., our feelings or passions (pathê), and our actions (praxeis) within it. The intellectual virtues have to do with the activities
most central to the “part” of us that thinks, that “has reason (logon
echei)” in almost every sense of those terms.
3
Aristotle’s inquiry is clearly meant, in the first instance, for men
who are serious about the pursuit of happiness both for themselves
and their cities (1095a8-11; 1102a12-26). His book is thus
addressed to hoi charientes kai praktikoi, “men of a certain cultivation or grace who are also able to act”—and this means, to men
who, if asked, would identify happiness with honor but who, if
pushed, would identify it with virtue (1095b22-30).
“Prudence” and “wisdom” are traditional translations of phronêsis and sophia. Neither is entirely adequate to the task. Sophia has
overtones of skill and precision in the arts entirely missing from the
ordinary sense of “wisdom,” while its connection to craftiness in
speech (as in “sophistry”) turns up only in degraded forms like
“wise guy” and “wisecrack.” Prudence, on the other hand, can
suggest a caution that has no correlate in phronêsis: Aristotle’s
phronimos is no fool; still, there might well be occasions and circumstances in which phronêsis would demand that a man throw
caution to the winds and hurl himself once more into the breach.
6
Kosmos has been variously translated as “ornament” (Apostle),
“crowning ornament” (Rackham) and “crown” (Ross). Though
magnanimity may be a crown, it is surely much more than an ornament. How it might serve as something like a unifying ground for
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the virtues begins to become clear as we recollect that hoi charientes
kai praktikoi are lovers of honor to begin with, that being chosen
for their own sake rather than the sake of honor is the hallmark of
virtuous actions and that magnanimity is the virtue concerned with
one’s response to another’s conferral—or failure to confer—honor
on one’s virtue (1105a26-1105b5; 1124a4-12). More generally,
magnanimity has to do with the way the good man keeps a grip on
himself and his virtue in the face of good and bad fortune
(1124a112-16). Hence its first appearance (in Book 1), where it is
said that, “the beautiful shines through whenever someone bears
many and great misfortunes with good grace, not through want of
sensibility, but because he is well-bred and great-souled” (1100b3033).
7
I have focused here on what magnanimity and whole justice share
in common. But there are also significant differences between them,
differences that point to significant difficulties with each of them.
The emphasis in the account of magnanimity is on self-sufficiency
and near stillness: the magnanimous man is said to be “lazy” or
“workless” (argos=a-ergos) in the absence of a project worthy of his
virtue and “to be unable to live for (pros) another (except for a
friend)” (1124b23-26; 1124b31-1125a1). In the description of
complete justice, by contrast, the whole emphasis is on the activity
or “using” of virtue for (pros) others; the perfect citizen is apparently completely absorbed in promoting the happiness of his city
and fellow citizens. The self-sufficiency and activity that together
characterize happiness seem to fall asunder in these first attempts to
characterize complete virtue (1097b14-21).
8
To be sure, Aristotle defines choice in Book 3 and defining it
involves him in a discussion of deliberation; he also mentions the
intellectual virtues at points and notes once that there will have to
be a discussion of “right reason” later on (1111b4-1113a14;
1103b31-34). Still, the whole emphasis is on the importance of
doing, of acquiring a good and stable character by acting in a certain way; “mere” knowing looks like a refuge for the lazy and weak,
and Aristotle no sooner gives himself opportunities to talk about
the virtues of intellect than he squanders them (1103b20-31;
1105b9-18; 1098a7-17; 1098b23-26).
9 For enunciations of the “hermeneutical” principle at work here,
see 1095a30-b4 and the beginning of the Physics, 184a16-184b14.
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For the centrality of the principle to the whole dialectical enterprise, see the beginning of the Topics, 100a30-b23 and 101a35-b4.
The grounds for the principle are perhaps best stated best at
Metaphysics 2, 993a30-b11. John Burnet provides a useful summary of the business and character of Aristotelian dialectic and its relation to ethical inquiry in the introduction to his excellent edition
and commentary on the Ethics. See The Ethics of Aristotle (London:
Methuen, 1900), pp. xxxiv-xliv.
10
For an illuminating discussion of the meaning of hexis and its
place within the ethical life, see J. Sachs, “Three Little Words,”
St. John’s Review 54, no.1 (1997), 1-9. Mr. Sachs underscores the
distinction between hexis and mere habit as well as the activity
implicit in hexis. Both points are well worth making. It is no accident that hexis is an action word derived from the future form of
echein, which means “have” “hold” or (used intransitively) “be in a
certain condition.” A hexis is no mere effect of an activity, as, say,
poverty is an effect of thinking; nor is it a mere condition for activity as, say, eating is a condition for thinking. It is instead a particular readiness for a particular activity; it is a being-in-shape-for, an
intending-to, a being-about-to that requires nothing but opportunity to spring into action; it is, one might say, that activity “on hold.”
11
For the senses in which wisdom and the other virtues can be
regarded as formal causes, see Burnet, op. cit., pp. 144 and 283.
12 Has anything in the intervening discussion in Book 6 prepared us
for this change in perspective? I think so. Although the bulk of
Book 6 remains focused on thought as it bears on human action, at
the beginning of the book and again in the discussion of knowledge
in the strict sense (epistêmê) we are reminded that not everything
we think about has to be marked by the changeability of human
affairs: there are some objects of thought which exist of necessity
and we have the “parts” to know them (1139a6-11; 1139b22-23).
Then, in the discussion of wisdom (sophia), we are reminded, or
told, that man is by no means the best thing in the cosmos—and
that it is precisely the “action” of sophia which puts us in contact
with the best of those unchanging things (1141a20-22, a33-b2).
13
Once Aristotle reminds us here of the part that reasoning plays
in the life of action, his question about the usefulness of the intellectual virtues may begin to seem merely odd, at least as regards
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prudence. But I think we should beware of dismissing that question
too quickly. In the first place, there seem to be any number of
moments in life when the most honest answer we can give for why
we did something is, “It just felt right” or “I had the sense there was
nothing else I could do.” In fact Aristotle himself notes in his discussion of courage that we really see whether the virtue is truly
there precisely in moments of sudden danger, when deliberation
simply is not a possibility (1117a17-22). Moreover, it seems possible to argue that the perspective of Aristotle’s initial question is simply the perspective of the law. We have already taken note of those
places where it is said that the intention of the law is to make men
good, i.e., to be a sufficient condition for (ethical) virtue in men.
But Aristotle also notes that it is the very nature of law to overlook
the particulars with which prudence works: from the point of view
of law, prudence, which frees a man to become “a sort of law unto
himself,” seems to be at best unnecessary (1128a29-33). Hence the
need for “equity,” which ad-justs for the universality of law by looking, if you will, from the particular situation, through the law to the
intention of the lawgiver (1137b11-34).
14
For example, the mathematician as mathematician uses his definitions and postulates rather than reflecting on them; he takes his
slice of being, his “field,” for granted and sets to work learning as
much as he can about it. The man engaged in first philosophy, the
man in pursuit of wisdom in the strict sense, accepts no such limit
on his thinking; even the so-called principle of non-contradiction—
the mathematician’s favorite tool—becomes for him an occasion for
reflecting on the being of beings. See Metaphysics 1003a20-28;
1005a19-b8.
15
For Aristotle’s comments on the place and necessity of “care concerning the gods” in the city, see the Politics 1322b18-29, 1328b1113; 1329a27-34.
16 At 1141b22-30 Aristotle distinguishes two aspects or modes or
kinds of prudence, an “architectonic” form that closely resembles
lawgiving and a form that corresponds to politics in the ordinary
sense, i.e., the hands-on deliberative engagement with the particulars of political life.
17
Aristotle’s words here directly echo the language he had used earlier in Book 6 to characterize art (technê): “art” or “the activity of
SALEM
49
art” (depending on what text one chooses to follow) “sees to it
(theôrein hopôs) that there comes into being some one of the things
that admit of being and not being . . . ” (1140a10-14).
18
I am assuming here that what Aristotle is referring to in the first
instance is the relation of prudence to wisdom within a single soul,
that the wisdom that prudence is working to bring forth is in the
first instance wisdom for oneself: the prudent man is like the doctor who tries to heal himself. To be sure, prudence in this sense
might also direct itself toward bringing about wisdom and the pursuit of wisdom in others; one need look no further than the Ethics
for evidence of this. Yet I think—and this should become clearer
momentarily—that prudence can direct itself outward in this way
only if it has already undergone an inner realignment, into a prudence that sees wisdom as the chief good. Only a man who had
come to see wisdom in this way, and so wanted it for himself, would
want to see others have it as well.
19
For the appropriateness of the name, consider Aristotle’s discussion of philo-words at 1099a7-21 (especially the philo-theôros, the
man who loves to behold) and the passage from the Republic it
clearly echoes, where Socrates “defines” the philosopher as a “lover
of the sight (philo-theamon) of the truth” (475b8-e4).
20 It is here that Aristotle first introduces the thought that a man
might be responsive to the demands of law or custom while remaining independent of it: “So the graceful (or gracious) and free (or
generous) man will keep himself in this condition, being a sort of
law unto himself ” (1128a31-32).
21
That friendship in some form may be a candidate for “best and
most complete virtue” is suggested by the following considerations.
Aristotle opens his account of friendship with the claim that friendship is “a virtue or involved with virtue . . . ” (1155a3-4). We later
learn that genuine friendship (philia) involves more than mere liking (philêsis); it is a hexis and involves choice, i.e., it shares certain
important structural features with ethical virtue (1157b28-31). We
also learn that justice, which at least in its broadest sense was earlier identified with whole or complete virtue, is in important respects
superseded by friendship (1155a22-28; 1163b15-18). Finally,
Aristotle’s name for friendship at its peak, “complete friendship,”
points directly back to the language of “best and most complete
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virtue,” and the friendship in question is between men who are
simply good or virtuous without qualification (1156b7-35). The
connection between friendship and philosophy begins to become
apparent in chapter four of Book 9, the beginning of the sequence
that leads to the passage discussed below. Here, for the first time in
the Ethics, man is openly identified with the intellect or thinking
part of himself, and the good man is characterized by his abiding
love and cultivation of his self in this sense (1166a13-23).
22
Cf. Amelie Rorty, “The Place of Contemplation in Aristotle’s
NE,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty
(Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1980) esp. pp. 388-391.
23
In the Ethics itself we are witness to a peculiar coming together
of theôria and praxis; “philosophic deliberations” is meant to get at
this conjunction. From one point of view Aristotle’s inquiry is simply a sustained practical deliberation about what to do with our
lives; from another it is a sustained philosophic exploration of a
what-is question—“What is the human good?”—in which any number of basic features of human being come to light. In it we see the
thinking of what is turn practical as it turns its gaze on itself—the
being capable of thought—and the conditions for its own activity.
But more to the point, we see practical thought turn theoretical as
it turns from deliberation about the particular conditions for this or
that virtuous act to deliberation about the virtues themselves, i.e.,
the conditions for happiness itself. Once we take into account this
doubleness in Aristotle’s own inquiry we must begin to wonder seriously just how settled the distinction is between prudence and wisdom—or at any rate, between prudential and philosophic inquiry
(1112b20-24; 1142a31-b2).
51
Jacob Klein and the
Phenomenological Project of
Desedimenting the
Formalization of Meaning
Burt C. Hopkins
Scope and Limits of Husserl’s Reactivation of the Sedimented
Origins of the Modern Spirit
For Edmund Husserl, phenomenology as First Philosophy has
but one goal: intuitive knowledge of what is. On his view,
both what in the world the formalized meaning formations of
mathematical physics (e.g., f = ma) refer to and therefore
make intuitable, and how in the world this reference and corresponding intuition is possible, is obscure. He traces this
obscurity to the fact that the formalized meaning at issue in
modern mathematics is made possible by the progressive
“emptying of its meaning in relation” (Crisis, 44/44)1 to the
“real [real]” (35/37), that is, to the intuitive givenness of the
things manifest to everyday sense experience in the surrounding world. Husserl’s historical reflection on the beginnings of the development of modern, Galilean science,
reveals that it is first made possible by this progressive emptying of meaning. That is, the meaning formations of the
mathematics that make physics possible are themselves made
possible by their “becoming liberated from all intuited actuality, about numbers, numerical relations” (43/44), and, of
course, from the intuitively given shapes of actual things.
More precisely, the ideal shapes of Euclidean geometry are
Burt Hopkins is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. He is CoEditor of The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological
Philosophy and is currently writing a book whose working title is Edmund
Husserl and Jacob Klein on the Origination of the Logic of Symbolic
Mathematics.
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substituted for the intuited shapes of things, while algebraic
calculation with “‘symbolic’ concepts” (48/48) that express
numbers in general—as opposed to determined numbers—
excludes the “original thinking that genuinely gives meaning
to this technical process and truth to the correct results”
(46/46).
To be sure, Husserl’s investigations of this problem in the
Crisis-texts are fragmentary. Their focus is on the origin of
geometry and on what he refers to as the “sedimentation”
(52/52) involved in the Galilean impulse to treat Euclidean
geometry in a taken-for-granted, and therefore straightforward, manner. Husserl uses the term “sedimentation” to designate the “constant presuppositions . . . [of the] constructions, concepts, presuppositions, theories” that characterize
the significations of the meaning formations of a science—in
the case at hand, of Galilean natural science—insofar as they
are not “‘cashed in’ [einzulösenden],”2 (OG, 376/366), that is,
reactivated in terms of the original activities that produced
their meaning. Cashing in the meaning formations in question requires that we eventually reactivate the “historical
beginning” (367/356) that this science “must have had,”
which in the case of Galilean natural science means that we
eventually have to reactivate the origin of the Euclidean
geometry that was taken for granted when its meaning formations were first established.
Husserl’s fragmentary analyses of the “origin of the modern spirit” (Crisis, 58/57), in which he links to Galileo’s name
“all of our characterizations . . . in a certain sense simplifying
and idealizing the matter,” function therefore to “de-sediment” the meaning formations and thereby to reactivate their
historical beginnings. Specifically, Husserl’s de-sedimentation
cashes in the impulse of the Galilean spirit to mathematize
the world by tracing this accomplishment back to its origin in
“the sphere of immediately experiencing intuitions and the
possible experience of the prescientific life-world” (42/43).
Husserl encounters the obscure or unintelligible meaning for-
HOPKINS
53
mations of present-day mathematical natural science, and
moves backward to an historical reference that mediates his
access to the life-world. Thus it is not as if Husserl, sitting in
his study, is somehow able to conjure up the direct experience
of the prescientific life-world and to compare it with the
abstract view of the world presumably found in the meaning
formations that make up mathematical physics. Rather, his
experience of mathematical physics, when combined with his
expectation that its meaning formations must somehow be
ultimately founded in a reference (or, more precisely, an
intention) to the world that is capable being intuitively fulfilled at some level, leads to his discovery (or, more properly,
his re-discovery) of the prescientific life-world and its true
origins.
Rather than rehearse Husserl’s well-known analyses,
what is necessary here is to thematize their salient results and
highlight their fragmentary character. Husserl shows that the
Galilean impulse rests on both a direct mathematization of
the appearances of bodies and an indirect mathematization of
their sensuous modes of givenness as they show up in the
intuitively given surrounding-world. That is to say, Husserl’s
attempt to cash in the ideal meaning formations of the pure
shapes of Euclidean geometry, which Galileo took for granted as the “true” shapes of nature, reveals that our direct experience of nature never yields geometrical-ideal bodies but
“precisely the bodies that we actually experience” (22/25).
Directing our regard to the mere shapes of these bodies in an
abstractive way cannot yield what modern science understands as “geometrical ideal possibilities,” nor can their arbitrary transformation in fantasy. Even though the latter yields
“‘ideal’ possibilities” in a certain sense, these possibilities
remain tied to sensible shapes and thus can only manifest
their transformation into other sensible shapes.
The method of operating with the pure or ideal shapes
that characterizes Euclidean geometry thus does not point
directly back to the sensible shapes of the bodies we actually
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experience in the life-world, but rather to measuring, “the
methodology of determination by surveying and measuring in
general, practiced first primitively and then as an art in the
prescientific, intuitively given surrounding-world” (24/27). It
is therefore the praxis of perfecting such measuring, “of
freely pressing toward the horizon of conceivable perfecting
‘again and again’,” (23/26) which yields “limit shapes
[Grenzgestalten] as invariant and never attainable poles”
toward which the series of perfecting tends. Euclidean geometry is then born when “we are interested in these ideal
shapes and are consistently engaged in determining them and
in constructing new ones out of those already determined.”
This is the geometry that was pregiven to Galileo as a takenfor-granted tradition. The original activity in which the ideal
meaning formations of Euclidean geometry were accomplished remained concealed to Galileo. Thus when Galileo
mathematized the intuitive shapes of bodies directly and their
sensuous manners of appearing indirectly by substituting for
them the ‘anticipation’ of their true being in the ideal shapes
of Euclidean geometry, the original intuition of the sensible
shapes of bodies, along with their transformation into limit
shapes by the praxis of measuring, became “sedimented.”
That is to say, as a consequence of Galileo’s methodical construction of the “true nature” through the substitution of the
ideal shapes of Euclidean geometry for the experience of sensible shapes proper to bodies, the original intuition of sensible shapes was lost. Hence, Husserl’s famous characterization
of Galileo as “at once a discovering and a concealing genius”
(53/52).
Husserl’s analyses of the Galilean mathematization takes
cognizance of the fact that “one thing more is important for
our clarification.” This “one thing more” is the “‘arithmetization of geometry’” (44/44). Aided by “the algebraic terms and
ways of thinking that have been widespread in the modern
period since Vieta,” this arithmetization transforms the ideal
shapes of Galileo’s Euclidean approach to the world into
HOPKINS
55
algebraic structures whose symbolic formula-meaning displaces—“unnoticed” (44/45)—the signification of magnitudes. The geometrical shapes of Galilean science are covered
over when replaced by algebraic notations. Husserl considers
this the “decisive accomplishment” (42/43) of the natural scientific method. In accord with its “complete meaning”
(Gesamtsinn), this accomplishment makes possible the anticipation of systematically ordered, determinate predictions
about the practical life-world. Such predictions are made possible by hypothesizing underlying ideal mathematical structures expressed in general formulas with indeterminate values. By means of these, empirically verifiable regularities can
anticipate the intuitions that constitute immediate, prescientific experience. Consequently, “[t]his arithmetization of
geometry leads almost automatically, in a certain way, to the
emptying of its meaning” (44/44). Husserl points out that this
unnoticed emptying of meaning eventually “becomes a fully
conscious methodical displacement, a methodical transition
from geometry, for instance, to pure analyses, treated as a science in its own right” (44/45). Thus this process of methodical transformation leads beyond arithmetization to “a completely universal ‘formalization’.” A purely formal analysis
transcends the pure theory of numbers and magnitudes of
algebra: analysis assumes the guise of a mathesis universalis, a
universal mathematics of “manifolds.” Manifolds are thought
of in “empty, formal generality”; they are conceived of as
defined by determinate modalities of the “something-in-general.” And although Husserl does not explicitly mention it
here, the construction of the “formal-logical idea of a ‘worldin-general’” at issue in the mathesis universalis is what he
elsewhere refers to as “formal ontology.”3 In contrast to his
analyses of the Galilean geometrization of nature, however,
Husserl’s analysis of mathesis universalis or formal ontology
does not attempt to reactivate the historical beginnings of the
original accomplishment that makes it possible. He makes no
attempt to cash in the sedimentation of meaning that accom-
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panies it. This sedimentation is inseparable from the displacement of the immediate intuitive experience of the lifeworld that takes place in the arithmetization of geometry, the
displacement that originally makes possible the formalization
of meaning at issue in formal ontology.
Despite Husserl’s failure to pursue this task of de-sedimentation with respect to formalization, it is clear that he
thinks that its de-sedimentation would lead to immediate
intuitions in the life-world. This is evident from the following
passage:
If one still has a vivid awareness of this coordination [among mathematical idealities] in its original
meaning, then a mere thematic focus of attention
on this meaning is sufficient in order to grasp the
ascending orders of intuitions (now conceived as
approximations) indicated by the functionally
coordinated quantities (or, more briefly, formulae);
or rather, one can, following these indications,
bring the ascending order of intuitions vividly to
mind.
Likewise in Formal and Transcendental Logic Husserl
expressed the conviction that
the meaning-relation of all categorial meanings to
something individual, that is, on the noetic side, to
evidences of individuals, to experiences—a relation
growing out of their meaning-genesis and present
in every example that could be used by formal
analytics—surely cannot be insignificant for the
meaning and the possible evidence of the laws of
analytics, including the highest ones, the principles
of logic. Otherwise, how could those laws claim
formal-ontological validity? (217)
However, neither the Crisis-texts nor Formal and
Transcendental Logic contain, respectively, concrete analyses
HOPKINS
57
that bring vividly to mind the ascending order of intuitions at
issue in the original meaning of symbolic formulae-meaning
or that trace the meaning-genesis of formal analytics from the
immediate intuitions of individual objects. Consequently,
Husserl’s conviction that it is possible to provide such analyses remains without a demonstrable phenomenological foundation. In what follows, I shall argue with the help of Jacob
Klein’s work that the peculiar character of the abstraction
that yields the symbolic formulae that underlie formalization
precludes, in principle, the cashing in of its meaning formations in the intuition of individuals. More precisely, I shall
show that the categorial meaning formations at issue in formal ontology do not refer directly to individual objects but
only to other materially and individually empty meaning formations. I shall do so by demonstrating that the original
accomplishment of the symbolic representation of numbers
leads to an indirect understanding of numbers and ultimately
to the substitution of symbolic expressions for the ideal
numerical entities referred to by Greek arithmetic. I shall also
show that the consequence of this is that a sedimented understanding of numbers is superimposed upon the sedimented
geometrical evidences at issue in Galileo’s mathematization of
nature. Finally, I shall argue that the result of this “double”
sedimentation is the impossibility of locating in the immediate experience of the life-world a direct referent proper to
formalized categorial meaning formations.
Jacob Klein’s De-Sedimentation of Symbolic FormulaMeaning
Jacob Klein’s Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of
Algebra,4 which was published in two installments in 1934
and 1936 (on the basis of research completed in the early
1930s5 and thus before Husserl began his Crisis-texts in
1934)6 is remarkable in that it, in effect, accomplishes the
de-sedimentation of the historical genesis of the development
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of symbolic thinking in modern mathematics that remained
unclarified in Husserl’s fragmentary analyses of mathematics
in the Crisis-texts. Klein accomplishes this by reactivating
what he refers to as the process of “symbol-generating
abstraction” (GM, 129/125), a process which he contends initially makes possible the formalized meaning formations of
mathematics. Yet unlike Husserl’s attempt to reactivate the
Galilean impulse behind the development of mathematical
physics, Klein’s reactivation is based upon actual research in
the history of mathematics.
Klein’s reactivation of this development traces its basis to
an abstraction that is radically different from the ancient
aphairesis (abstraction). Klein shows how the meaning formation that results from symbol-generating abstraction does
not refer to the direct perception of the quantity or magnitude of things. Rather, the term symbolum, which originated
with Vieta, was used both for the letter signs and the connective signs that referred neither to determinate numbers nor to
the arithmetical operations performed upon them, but to
indeterminate numbers and the general rules that govern the
algebraic art of calculation. Klein reactivates the meaning that
became sedimented in Vieta’s “universal extension [universale Erweiterung]” (179/172) of the ancient concept of the
eidos (species) of an arithmos (counting number), an extension “through which the species become the objects of a ‘general’ mathematical discipline which can be identified neither
with geometry nor with arithmetic.”
Regarding the transformation of the ancient concept of
number, the first part of Klein’s study definitively establishes
that Greek mathematics shared a common understanding of
arithmos as a “determinate amount of determinate things”
(53/46). Greek arithmetic sought to establish the truth of its
object, first as it shows up in counting, then as a determinate
amount of pure units (monads), and finally with respect to its
mode of being. Notwithstanding the ancient debate over the
ontological dependence (Aristotle) or independence (Plato)
HOPKINS
59
of the latter, the “theoretical” concept of number, as an ideal
being comprised of a determinate amount of “pure” units
that are indivisible, remained constant for the ancients. With
Vieta’s innovation of calculating with species represented by
letter signs, however, the direct relation of “number” to a
determinate amount of determinate things or units is lost. As
Klein puts it:
While every arithmos intends immediately the
things or the units themselves whose number it
happens to be, his letter sign intends directly the
general character of being a number which belongs
to every possible number, that is to say, it intends
“number in general” immediately, but the things
or units which are at hand in each case only mediately. (182/174)
Klein appeals to the mediaeval distinction between first
and second intentions (intentio prima and intentio secunda)
to characterize the letter sign as designating a “second intention,” that is, as designating “a concept which itself directly
intends another concept and not a being,” i.e., not a thing or
unit. In addition, the independence accorded the general
character of number (or “general number”) signified by the
letter sign insofar as it is now the object of Vieta’s calculational operations, “thus transforms the object of the intentio
secunda, namely the ‘general number’ intended by the letter
sign, into the object of an intentio prima, of a ‘first intention’,
namely of a ‘being’ which is directly apprehended and whose
counterpart in the realm of ordinary calculation is, for
instance, ‘two monads’, ‘three monads’.” The consequence of
this is that the “being” of the species “is to be understood neither as independent in the Pythagorean and Platonic sense
nor as attained ‘by abstraction’. . . in the Aristotelian sense,
but as symbolic. The species are in themselves symbolic for-
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mations—namely formations whose possible objectivity is
understood as an actual objectivity” (183/175).
As a result of this shift in the intentionality of the concept
of number, what was originally a “concept” for the ancients,
namely the eidos, species, is now treated as an “object.” It is
impossible, however, “to see amounts of things or units in the
isolated letter signs ‘A’ or ‘B’” (183/176) used by Vieta to represent this “object.” Hence, their “numerical character” is
only “comprehensible within the language of symbolic formalism” (183/175). According to Klein, Vieta derived the
rules of this formalism from “‘calculations’ with amounts
[Anzahlen] of monads.” Thus it is only through the application of these rules to the letter signs or symbols, that they
acquire a numerical character. Indeed, “[t]hese rules therefore represent the first modern axiom system; they create the
systematic context which originally ‘defines’ the object to
which they apply.” However, because letter signs do not signify amounts of things or monads but rather the “concept” of
“number in general,” Klein observes that they can retain a
numerical character “only because the ancient ‘amounts’
(Anzahlen) of monads are themselves [eventually] interpreted
as ‘modern numbers’ (Zahlen), which means that they are
conceived from the point of view of their symbolic representation” (184/176).
For Klein, Descartes was the first—and perhaps the
only—thinker to attempt to render intelligible the new mode
of abstraction at issue in the symbolic “mode of being” of the
modern concept of number. In addition, Descartes extended
the methodical scope of the general analytic of algebra. In
Vieta’s hands, algebra was thought of as an auxiliary discipline, in the sense that he still understood it as the method for
finding the solutions to traditional arithmetical and geometrical problems. By contrast, Descartes identified the methodically “general” object of the algebraically conceived mathesis
universalis, “number in general,” “which can be represented
and conceived only symbolically—with the ‘substance’ of the
HOPKINS
61
world, with corporeality as ‘extensio’” (207/197). This identification amounts, of course, to Descartes’s symbolic interpretation of Euclidean geometry, an interpretation that for
Klein involves “a ‘sedimented’ understanding of numbers. . .
[being] superposed upon the first stratum of ‘sedimented’
geometrical ‘evidences’”7 at issue in Galileo’s direct and indirect mathematization of nature. As a consequence of this,
“the ‘general analytic’ takes over the role of the ancient fundamental ontological discipline” (GM, 175/169). With this,
“an effort is made to let it supersede the traditional logic
completely,” an effort that for Klein gave rise to the battle
between the ancients and moderns in the seventeenth century, a battle that “is still being waged today, now under the
guise of the conflict between ‘formal logic’ and ‘mathematical
logic’ or ‘logistic’, although its ontological presuppositions
have been completely obscured.”
All of this can be seen more clearly on the basis of Klein’s
analysis of Descartes’s thinking in the Regulae. In that work,
Descartes attempted to come to terms with the mode of being
of the “pure” concepts presupposed by the “formal” meaning
proper to the symbolic concepts of the new algebraic quantities. Descartes speaks there of “‘abstract beings’ (entia
abstracta)” (210/200) that are the products of the “‘pure
intellect’ (intellectus purus),” which the mind apprehends
“when it thinks” and “in a way turns itself toward itself.” In
order to be true, these abstract beings “must be altogether
divorced from the imagination” (209/199). Thus for
Descartes “‘extension is not body’” (208/198), “‘number is
not the thing enumerated,’” and “‘a unit is not a quantity’”
(209/199). The mind’s attempt to represent the pure concepts
extension, number, or unit by means of the imagination
“‘would necessarily arrive at contradictions,’” because “‘in
the imagination the “idea” of extension cannot be separated
from the “idea” of body, nor the “idea” of number from the
“idea” of the thing enumerated, nor the “idea” of unity from
the “idea” of quantity.’” However, when the “pure” intellect,
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for instance, separates “from a multitude of units ‘represented’ in the imagination (a number of units, that is), their ‘multitudinousness’ as such, i.e., the ‘mere multitude’. . . the ‘pure’
indeterminate manyness to which simply nothing ‘true’, nothing truly in ‘being’, and hence no ‘true idea’ of a being corresponds, it must employ the imagination in order to be at all
able to get hold of the thing separated.” Thus for Descartes
the imagination, which allows the mind to envisage, for
instance, “‘five units’, here enters into the service of a faculty
not ‘perceptually clear’, namely the ‘pure intellect’, which,
being bare of any reference to the world, comprehends ‘fiveness’ as ‘something separated’ from ‘five’ counted points or
other arbitrary objects—as mere ‘multiplicity in general’, as
‘pure’ multiplicity” (211/201–2). Hence, according to Klein
for Descartes “the imaginative power makes possible a symbolic representation of the indeterminate content which has
been ‘separated’ by the ‘pure intellect’” (211/202). Klein calls
the “abstraction” at issue here a “‘symbol-generating abstraction.’” On his view “[i]t alone gives rise to the possibility of
contrasting ‘intuition’ [Anschauung] and ‘conception’, and of
positing ‘intuition’ as a separate source of cognition alongside
of reason.” This is the case because for Descartes neither the
“pure” intellect nor its symbolically represented “pure” ideas
have any “relation at all to the being of world and the things
in the world.” And because the ontological issue here is not
so much the “incorporeality” of the “pure” intellect and its
ideas but their separation from the corporeal, it is a philosophical legacy of Descartes and the formalization of the
modern concept generally that “intuition” comes to fulfil the
function of “re-establishing” an ontological connection
between cognition and the world.
The result of all of this for Klein is Descartes’s view that
the intellect, when directed to the “idea” of number as a
“multitude of units” presented by the imagination, turns to its
“own knowing” (221/208) and no longer sees it directly in
“the ‘performed act’ (actus exercitus). . . but ‘indirectly’,
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63
‘secondarily’ (secundario), or in terms of another scholastic
expression, in the ‘signified act’ (actus signatus). . . . Its immediate ‘object’ is now its own conceiving of that ‘multitude of
units’, that is, the ‘concept’ (conceptus) of the number as
such; nevertheless this multitude itself appears as a ‘something’, namely as one and therefore as an ‘ens’, a ‘being’.”
And when this “ens rationis as a ‘second intention’ is grasped
with the aid of the imagination in such a way that the intellect can, in turn, take it up as an object in the mode of a ‘first
intention,’ we are dealing with a symbol, either with an
‘algebraic’ letter sign or with a ‘geometric’ figure as understood by Descartes.”
If we substitute Husserl’s terminology of intentionality
for the mediaeval terminology employed by Klein, we can
readily understand the symbolic meaning formation yielded
by symbol-generating abstraction as an “empty intention.”
However, it is “empty” in a sense that Husserl did not appear
fully to appreciate, and could not because his programmatically announced project in the Crisis-texts has as one of its
goals the intuitive “cashing in” of the formalized intentional
meaning formations of symbolic formulae.8 But this is precisely what Klein’s de-sedimentation of the symbol-generating abstraction that produces such meaning formations shows
is impossible in principle. It is impossible for the simple
reason that what such empty meaning intentions intend is a
concept or category (presented in a “secondary” or “categorial” intention), which is apprehended by means of a first or
straightforward intention and which therefore presents a
“formalized” meaning formation that does not directly refer
to or intend the kind of individual entities that can be
presented or fulfilled in “intuition.” Put differently, Husserl’s
“felt” need to “de-formalize” the empty intention characteristic of the mathematical formula in the intuition of individual objects in the pre-scientific life-world—in order to provide a foundation that would render such meaning formations intelligible—is itself symptomatic of the lack of direct
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reference to these objects, a lack that makes symbolic meaning formations possible in the first place. He, of course, recognized that a progressive “emptying of meaning” was inseparable from the initial constitution of symbolic meaning formations. In other words, when the standard of meaning is
conceived as the immediate intuitive contact with the things
of the world, the formalized meaning formations that make
modern science possible cannot but be experienced as
“empty” of meaning. But this conclusion only follows if the
intuitive contact with the individual things of the world is
established as the sole criterion for providing a foundation
for meaning. However, this is precisely what Husserl fails to
establish but instead simply assumes. He assumes this as a
consequence of what he supposes is the “inner intentional
unity” of the history of philosophy and, therefore, the unity
of the intention proper to the First Philosophy of the ancients
and his transcendental phenomenology. Klein’s de-sedimentation of the historical accomplishment of the symbol-generating abstraction demonstrates that this standard for meaning
cannot be established for all meaning formations and therefore demonstrates that the relationship between ancient First
Philosophy and modern metaphysics is characterized by a historical discontinuity. In Husserl’s terms, what Klein shows is
that the intentional referent proper to the “empty intention”
of formalized meaning formations is essentially different
from that of the “empty intention” proper to general meaning formations. Thus, whereas the latter—for instance, the
categorial meaning of a house that is presented to consciousness in the absence of the perception of a house—lends itself
to the direct intuitive fulfillment of its meaning when a house
is “given” in perception, the “empty intention” of the formal
meaning of y = mx + b does not lend itself to a direct intuitive fulfillment of its meaning.9 The consequence of this,
then, is not the unintelligibility per se of the formal meaning
intention of the formula, but rather its relative “unintelligibility” in comparison to the “foundedness” of the general
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65
(i.e., the traditional categorial meaning formation or eidos)
meaning formation in the intuition of the individual things in
life-world.
Postscript: Symbol-Generating Abstraction and the Universal
Formalization of Meaning
The universal formalization of algebraic thinking that began
with Leibniz’s concept of a mathesis universalis, which severs
Descartes’s identification of the formalized meaning formations yielded by symbol-generating abstraction with extension, eliminates once and for all the possibility of establishing
even an indirect relation between such meaning formations
and the pre-given scientific life-world. Whatever else this universalization of formal analysis accomplishes, it is clear that it
removes the basis for any reference to the life-world by the
“empty intention” of the formal category proper to “the
something-in-general.” The consequence of this is that the
possibility of—however indirect—an intuitive “cashing in” of
the formalized meaning formations of the mathesis universalis of modernity is in principle precluded. Thus, also precluded in principle is the possibility of realizing Husserl’s
dream of grounding the formal ontology presupposed by
mathematics and formal logic in the intuition of individual
objects in the life-world.
Notes
1 Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und
die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die
phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel, Husserliana 6
(The Hague: Nijhoff, (1)1954; (2)1976); The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970). Hereinafter
cited as Crisis, with German and English page references, respec-
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tively. Quotes in series will bypass the convention of repeating the
reference to their source.
2
Originally published in a heavily edited form by Eugen Fink as
“Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Geometrie als intentional-historisches Problem,” Revue internationale de Philosophie 1 (1939),
203–25; Fink’s typescript of Husserl’s original, and significantly
different, 1936 text (which is the text translated by Carr) was published as Beilage 3 in Biemel’s edition of Hua 6; “The Origin of
Geometry,” appears in The Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology, 353-83. Hereinafter cited as “OG”
according to the convention for serial quotes stated in n. 1, above.
3 Edmund
Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorian
Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969), 190; German text: Formale
und transzendentale Logik, ed. Paul Janssen, Husserliana 17 [The
Hague: Nijhoff, 1974], 67; hereinafter cited as FTL with original
page reference, which is included in the margins of both the
German and the English additions cited.
4
Jacob Klein, “Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der
Algebra” in Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik,
Astronomie und Physik, Abteilung B: Studien, vol. 3, no. 1 (Berlin,
1934), 18–105 (Part 1); no. 2 (1936), 122–235 (Part 2); Greek
Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, trans. Eva Brann
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969; reprint: New York: Dover,
1992). Hereinafter cited as GM, with German and English page references respectively, following the convention for serial references
stated in n. 1, above.
5
Klein’s wife, Dodo Klein (who was Gerhart Husserl’s ex-wife),
reports that it was “probably 1932, 1933” when he wrote this text.
The quote is from p. 14 of a typed transcript of a tape recording of
memories of her second husband. The transcript (the tape recording is apparently lost) is among Klein’s papers housed in St. John’s
College Library, Annapolis, Maryland.
6 Husserl’s
work on the Crisis was begun in 1934, whereas his work
on the origin of geometry dates from 1936 (see Die Krisis der
europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie,
ed. Reinhold N. Smid, Husserliana 19 [Doredrecht: Kluwer,
HOPKINS
67
1993)], editor’s introduction, xi and lvi). The former was first published in 1936 and the latter, posthumously in 1939 in the version
edited by Fink.
7
Jacob Klein, “Phenomenology and the History of Science,” in
Marvin Farber, ed., Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund
Husserl, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940),
143–63; reprinted in Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays, ed. Robert
B. Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman (Annapolis, MD: St. John’s
Press, 1985); the quote is from p. 84 of the latter.
8
This goal is consistent with Husserl’s articulation of the possibility of a formal judgment in FTL. Regarding the “ideal ‘existence’
[Existenz] of the judgment-content” (193) that is at issue in formal
judgments, he writes: “we are referred to the syntactical cores,
which seem to be functionless from the formal point of view. That
would imply, then, that the possibility of properly effectuating the
possibility of a judgment (as a meaning) is rooted not only in the
syntactical forms but also in the syntactical stuffs. This fact is easily
overlooked by the formal logician, with his interest directed onesidedly to the syntactical—the manifold forms of which are all that
enters into logical theory—and with his algebraizing of the cores as
theoretical irrelevancies, as empty somethings that need only be
kept identical” (194). Thus for Husserl: “Prior to all judging, there
is a universal experiential basis. It is always presupposed as a harmonious unity of possible experience.” And this means that “in
respect of its content, every original judging and every judging that
proceeds coherently, has coherence by virtue of the coherence of
the matters in the synthetic unity of the experience, which is the
basis on which the judging stands.” However, it is just this experiential basis that Klein’s analysis of the shift and transposition of the
levels of intentionality at issue in the symbol-generating abstraction
shows is no longer a factor in the “intentional genesis” of the formal judgments that are at issue in algebraic calculations.
9
Husserl, of course, recognizes that “formalization is something
essentially different from variation. It does not consist in imagining
that the determinations of the variants are changed into others;
rather, it is a disregarding, an emptying of all objective, material
determinations” (Erfahrung und Urteil [Hamburg: Meiner, 1985],
435; Experience and Judgment, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl
Ameriks [Evanston, IL: Northwestern, 1973], 359). However, it is
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precisely the lack of relevance of the variation of an intuitively
apprehended individual variant (presented in the straightforward
intention proper either to the perception or imagination that yields
the individual exemplar that is the basis of variation) that is at issue
in formalization, which eliminates the possibility of tracing the
intentional genesis of the formal meaning (yielded by the formalizing abstraction proper to the symbol-generating abstraction) to an
intentional activity directed to the experience of the life-world’s
objects. Thus, in the case of the “empty intention” of a house, the
possibility of its general categorial meaning refers to an intentional
genesis in the intelligible structures of a straightforwardly intended
house. In the case of the “empty intention” of an algebraic formula, however, its formal categorial meaning refers to an intentional
genesis in a straightforwardly intended category—in other words,
the intentional referent of its “empty intention” is not the “synthetic unity” yielded by the “harmonious unity of possible experience.” “De-formalizing” the “empty intention” of a formal meaning
formation, then, does not lead to the possible experience of
straightforwardly intended objects in the life-world, but to ideal
meanings, meanings that of necessity have only an indirect relation
to this world. Insofar as the latter must already have been mathematized in order for the ideal meanings in question to achieve a
“worldly” status, the referent proper to the “empty intention” characteristic of formal meaning formations is in principle precluded
from straightforwardly intending the pre-scientific (pre-mathematical) objects of the natural life-world.
69
Opening Questions
Ronald Mawby
Introduction
One of the delights of language is that a single string of symbols can entwine so many meanings. So it is with my title,
“Opening Questions,” which unravels five ways. This essay is
first a reflective exploration of questions, so I will be opening
questions to our examination. We look briefly at what questions are, how they arise, what they presuppose, and the like.
Second, questions often occur in speech or thought as opening moves. When we think in the sense of engaging our minds
to find out what is true, we begin and direct our inquiry with
questions. Thus every episode of thought opens with a question. Third, questions appear as openings or gaps in the fabric of knowledge. The relation of enclosure between the area
of ignorance and the area of knowledge—which encloses
which—divides, I shall argue, the taxonomy of questions at
its root. Fourth, we call a question open when its answer is
not yet settled, so opening questions means posing but not
answering them. The adage says, “a fool can ask more questions in a hour than a sage can answer in a week.” Here I play
the part of the fool. The final thread ties these reflections to
our point of departure, which is the rich and important question that opens Plato’s Meno.
Rationale
Before going further, I will say why I consider this undertaking to be worthwhile. Aristotle begins his Metaphysics with
the statement that all humans by nature desire to know. A
desire to know is expressed by a question, so Aristotle
Ronald Mawby teaches in the Honors Program at Kentucky State University.
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appears to be saying that we are by nature questioners. If so,
exploring questions is one way to obey the Delphic injunction, Know Thyself.
Aristotle goes on to say that in the Metaphysics he is seeking knowledge of the highest kind, which he calls wisdom. He
thus intimates that seeking or desiring or loving wisdom, that
is, philosophy, is inherent in human being. I am told the
Greek usually translated as “desire to know” may be rendered
as “stretched out toward knowledge,” and “stretched out”
indicates a certain tension that may be uncomfortable. A
teacher of mine thought Aristotle was wrong, that human
beings by nature desire to feel comfortable, and implied that
the tension inherent in the desire to know is something we
seek to avoid. Oscar Wilde famously remarked that one way
to avoid temptation is to give in to it. Likewise we can avoid
unfulfilled desire by fulfilling it; we eliminate the tension of
desiring to know by actually coming to know. This, I take it,
is what Hegel thought himself to have done. He finished philosophy as the quest for wisdom by actually attaining wisdom, or rational knowledge of the whole.
Others tell us that the quest for wisdom should be finished by being abandoned. Recent positivists, for instance, say
philosophy is pointless because its questions are meaningless.
They depict the speculative philosopher as a failed Houdini
who entangles himself in verbal confusions from which he is
unable to escape. On this view philosophical problems are
pseudo-problems, calling not for solution but dissolution.
Kant, though his sensitivities differ, is often taken by the positivists as a precursor. His critique of human reason purports
to establish the necessary conditions for knowledge, and to
show that our reason is unsuitable for certain of its traditional speculative employments. Both Kant and the positivists
suggest that we sublimate the desire for wisdom by turning it
into channels where knowledge is possible, such as mathematics or natural science. Still others say philosophy is futile
because philosophical issues support no genuine epistemic
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distinction between knowledge and opinion. In philosophy,
they say, the distinction between truth and falsehood resembles Hobbes’s distinction between religion and superstition:
both are “fear of powers invisible,” religion “from tales publicly allowed,” superstition from tales “not allowed”(Hobbes,
56). What the community allows is truth, what it does not
allow is falsehood; the community may be either a proper
political entity or an academic group. This has been a position of rhetoricians from the ancient Sophists to the present
day.
All the foregoing, from the Sophists to Hegel, share this
opinion: the quest for wisdom is temporary. Philosophy lasts
only until we either get wisdom or give up wanting it. But
philosophy as a way of life takes the desire for wisdom as permanent. If Socrates may be said to have a position, this might
be it. Socratic wisdom is the same as Socratic ignorance; the
height of human wisdom is knowing what you don’t know.
Inquiry into which life is best reveals that very life of inquiry
to be best. But perhaps the only result of a life devoted to philosophy, the only result defensible in speech, is some coherent understanding of fundamental questions. If our most concentrated and orderly stretch toward wisdom results only in
the awareness of questions, then, at least for those of us
drawn to philosophy, it is worthwhile to ask about questions
themselves.
Meno’s Opening Question
In the dialogue that bears his name, Meno asks two large
questions, one to start the conversation, the other in an
attempt to stop it. Meno opens the dialogue by saying:
Can you tell me, Socrates, whether excellence can
be taught? Or is it not teachable but the result of
practice, or is it neither of these, but men possess
it by nature or in some other way?(70)
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What can we say about this question? First we can say
that it is important. We all have a stake in bringing about
human excellence. As parents, teachers, citizens, members of
the human community, as people trying to shape for ourselves
good and satisfying lives, the answer to Meno’s question is
important for us. How does one attain excellence? The question surely seems natural, the kind of question that might
arise for anyone who reflects on what he or she is doing. The
question is old, but fresh. It is a question that won’t go away.
Second, we can say that the answer is not obvious. Is
excellence teachable? Perhaps, but is it teachable in the way
that mathematics is teachable? Perhaps not. Do we attain
excellence by practice, as we acquire a skill or habit “by
doing”? This is plausible, though not self-evident. Does excellence arise from nature? Is it inherent in us, or at least in
those of us who have good natures? It seems reasonable that
nature at the least could help or hinder in the pursuit of
excellence. Are there other ways in which excellence could
arise? Perhaps from the grace of God? Perhaps in some way
that we cannot even name? Although Meno’s is a natural
question to ask, it is not an easy one to answer.
Third, we see very quickly that the question conceals
another question, namely, what is human excellence? If excellence is a kind of articulable knowledge, then it may be teachable. If excellence is a practical skill, then it may arise through
practice. If excellence depends on an innate capacity or disposition or insight, then it may arise from nature. If excellence is a free gift of the gods, then it comes to be neither by
teaching nor practice nor nature but in some other way. And
there is a further question, namely, is there such a thing as
human excellence? This question has both a formal and an
existential sense. Is there a single non-disjunctive characterization of human excellence, and if there is, has it or can it be
realized? We may know what we mean by excellence in mathematics, or athletics, or music, and we may be confident that
there are excellent mathematicians and athletes and musi-
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cians. But do we know in like fashion what it means to be an
excellent human being, and are we fully confident that excellent human beings do or can exist?
Meno's opening question is thus important, difficult, and
it exfoliates other questions. Let us explore it, for it is a question that bears examination.
Meno begins “Can you tell me, Socrates. . . . ” What is
Meno seeking? Does he seek the source of excellence, or to
discover if Socrates knows that source? The form of words
does not tell us. Interpreted strictly the question asks about
Socrates’ abilities, and invites the response, “Yes I can tell
you” or “No I cannot.” But the question may be intended
otherwise. When I say “Can you pass the salt?” I am not really asking about your abilities. I am making a polite request for
the salt. “Can you tell me” in this sense means “Will you tell
me” and that means “Tell me, please.” Meno, rather than
demanding a response, may be asking for one.
Is Meno’s question sincere, that is, does he genuinely
want the answer? If Meno’s question is really about excellence I see no reason to doubt that it is sincere. A sincere
question expresses a desire to have in mind the requested
information. One asks in order that one may come to know.
A sincere question expresses a desire for knowledge. In the
soul a question is a cognitive desire. If we use eros as the general name for desire, questioning is an erotic act.
If Meno’s question is about what Socrates knows, it may
be sincere, or it may be put to embarrass Socrates. Meno says
“Can you tell me, Socrates. . . . ” I think we should hear this
phrase in three ways, by emphasizing in turn “you,” “tell,”
and “me.” “Can you tell me, Socrates” sounds like a challenge. We sense in the background something like this:
“Gorgias could tell me, Socrates; I could tell you; anyone
who undertakes public speaking or instruction should be able
to tell; you think you’re so smart, can you tell me?” This puts
a challenge, or at least sets a task.
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If we retain the emphasize on the word “you” but omit
the challenge, we get a question whose focus can be put this
way: “I am looking for someone who can tell me about excellence; are you that someone, Socrates?” This is an important
question for the interpretation of this dialogue, indeed for
most Platonic dialogues: just what does Socrates know? What
can he tell us? And if we generalize this part of the question,
so that it reads, “Can anyone tell me. . . ” we hear a question
addressed to us all, which may be taken as a question about
our cognitive capacities.
Next, change the emphasis and say, “Can you tell me,
Socrates.” Now the focus suggests this background:
“Socrates, there might be a number of different ways to convey to me the requested information; is telling among the
ways?” This emphasis makes us aware that telling through the
content of explicit speech is not the only way to convey an
answer. Showing by pointing, or by enacting, or through the
action of speech rather than its content, are alternatives. The
dialogue shows the importance of these alternatives. In the
slave boy section, where the question is: given a square, what
line will produce a square with twice the area?, the importance of pointing rather than telling is made manifest. For the
line sought is the diagonal of the given square, and the side
and diagonal of a square are incommensurable. Thus if we
call the length of the side one unit, there is no finite specification of the length of the diagonal in terms of the unit. The
requested length is irrational, unsayable. We could of course
call it the square root of two, but in context that is just a way
of saying “the line whose square is double the given square,”
and repeating the question is not telling the answer. The
answer can be given, but not directly in speech—we can point
to the diagonal. The intrusion of the irrational raises the issue
of whether human speech and reason are adequate to answer
questions of human excellence. I also merely mention the
suggestion that Socrates answers Meno’s question not in
word but in deed. Human excellence might come to be pre-
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cisely in the quest for knowledge of human excellence, and
Socrates, by showing Meno how to inquire, displays both the
route to acquisition and the possession of excellence.
Thirdly, we can emphasize Meno’s words in a way that I
doubt Meno would approve: “Can you tell me, Socrates.”
The background now is this: “Socrates, I suppose you can
convey the answer to some people, but perhaps not to everyone; perhaps there are conditions for being told that not
everyone can meet; can I, Meno, meet those conditions, so
that you can tell me?” This raises the issue of what you must
have already in order to get what you ask for. Perhaps only
the sincere seeker can receive the answer. Perhaps only those
who already in some sense have the answer within themselves
can receive it. Perhaps we can pose questions that have
answers, but answers that we cannot grasp. These alternatives
too have importance in the dialogue. It is natural to ask, who
is Meno? Scholarship identifies a historical Meno who was
greedy, cunning, and unscrupulous. We recall Aristotle’s
statement that only a person with a good upbringing and disposition can benefit from ethical discourse. Perhaps Meno is
too vicious to be told about virtue.1 Later in the dialogue
Socrates angers Anytus by suggesting that he and his peers
lack the excellence of an older generation. Generational
decay may occur either because virtue is not teachable or
because Anytus and his peers are not teachable. Perhaps the
condition for hearing the truth is not directly moral but intellectual, if indeed we can make this distinction. Perhaps Meno
is too obtuse to be told—too shallow or too stubborn or perhaps too little aware to see that the answer to his question is
not conveyed by telling. Perhaps Socrates cannot tell Meno
the answer. Whether Socrates can tell us is a question we
must ask ourselves.
How does Socrates take Meno’s question? In part as a
challenge, in part as a sincere question. Meno may want to
test Socrates, but he gives Socrates an opportunity for real
inquiry. Socrates’ reply is certainly not a direct answer;
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rather, his reply corrects two false assumptions of the question. First, in a conversation a questioner, by the very act of
posing a question, seems to assume that the one to whom the
question is put knows its answer. Socrates denies this assumption when he denies that he knows. Second, in an inquiry the
questions should be put in rational sequence; thus by putting
this question first Meno appears to assume that it is properly
the first question. Socrates denies this assumption when he
says that he does not know what excellence is, and that no
one can tell how excellence arises without knowing what it is.
To Meno’s opening thrust Socrates makes a judo-like
response, saying in effect that Meno has put the wrong question to the wrong person. Socrates admits his ignorance of
the source and nature of excellence. When he adds that he
never met anyone who knew what excellence is, he turns the
tables on Meno, who is now challenged to tell Socrates something. Socrates has inverted their roles, and called Meno’s
assumptions into question.
Meno then tries to tell Socrates what excellence is. He
describes the excellence of a man, and a woman, and says
there are excellences for young and old, slave and free. Since
there are very many excellences, Meno is not at a loss to say
what excellence is. But of course this swarm of excellences is
not what Socrates seeks. Socrates wants the one “look” that
makes them all excellence. Meno has failed to understand
what counts as an answer. We are invited to wonder whether
Socrates’ question has an answer of the kind that he seeks;
perhaps Socrates is asking the wrong question.
Meno denies that there is a single excellence for all until
Socrates leads him to admit that all excellence involves moderation and justice. Meno agrees, saying that justice is excellence. Is justice excellence, Socrates asks, or is justice an
excellence? To get Meno to understand the question Socrates
uses the examples of shape and color. Roundness is a shape,
but not shape, for there are other shapes, and white is a color,
but not color, for there are other colors. Likewise justice is an
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excellence, but not excellence, for there are other excellences.
Meno then, to better understand what Socrates is looking for,
asks for a definition of shape. Socrates gives him two: shape
is the only thing that always follows color, and shape is the
limit of solid. Meno objects that the first is useless to one who
doesn’t know what color is. Socrates agrees that in a friendly
conversation one must define with terms understood by both
parties. Later Meno asks Socrates to define color, which
Socrates does after the manner of Gorgias, saying color is an
effluvium from shapes which fits the sight and is perceived.
Do the examples of shape and color tell us something special? In reading Plato the safest assumption is that nothing is
accidental, so the choice of shape and color is likely to be significant. What might it mean? Well, one candidate for excellence is that it consists in, or is correlative with, knowledge.
If we take that seriously, we get the following proportional
analogy: as shape is what always follows color, so excellence
is what always follows knowledge. Shape stands for excellence, color for knowledge. Since shape limits the solid, we
may think that the solid stands for the soul. The soul is then
likened to a finite three-dimensional object. As such it has a
shape, and that shape is disclosed to us in self-knowledge.
Excellence, if there be such a thing, is the proper shape of
soul. The pursuit of excellence involves us with shapes.
Geometry is the science of shapes.
If the soul is a solid, it is bounded by a surface. Whatever
depths of soul we have, the inner shines forth in what appears
to others and to ourselves as we reflect. We disclose ourselves
in speech and deed, so properties of the surface should correspond to speech and deed. A surface is both visible and tangible; we yoke visibility to speech and tangibility to deed. The
tangible is perceptible by touch, and touch can operate without sight, though often sight guides touch.
We touch things usually to change them, to alter the way
things are. We look to see, to discover the way things are.
Looking eventuates in belief, touching arises from desire.2
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Explicit belief and desire depend on ideas, not Platonic
Forms but Platonic images, in which content is distinct from
reality, the what-it-is divorced from the that-it-is. That the
mind can handle ideas makes belief and desire possible. Since
a question is a desire for a true belief, that the mind can handle ideas makes questions possible. No eros or no ideas means
no questions. Meno is soon to present a paradox the nerve of
which is that questions are nonsensical. One implication is
that when he puts the paradox, Meno lacks eros or ideas or
both.
Meno says that Socrates resembles a torpedo fish in both
his look and his touch; Socrates is one in speech and deed. To
grapple with Socrates, as Meno has done, is to be numbed
with perplexity. To be numbed is to be unable to speak and
act because one can feel nothing. Perplexity is to feel nothing.
When we are perplexed, the surface of the soul, the visible
and tangible limit that defines what we are, is felt to be rent
or torn. A gap is opened in the smooth fabric of our speech
and deed. To feel that emptiness is to be perplexed. Perplexity
ruptures us, it opens us, and the articulation of that opening
is a question. The desire for wholeness is the desire for closure, and that is the desire that spurs us to try to answer questions.
Meno’s Paradox and the Myth of Recollection
After Meno admits he is numb, he proposes his paradox, the
large question he puts to Socrates to stop the conversation.
When Socrates wants to seek together after excellence, Meno
says
How will you look for it, Socrates, when you do
not know at all what it is? How will you aim to
search for something you do not know at all? If
you should meet with it, how will you know that
this is the thing that you did not know? (80d)
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The conclusion of the paradox is that inquiry is pointless. The
argument is formally a dilemma. We either know or don’t
know. If we do know, inquiry is pointless, for we are seeking
what we already have. If we don’t know, inquiry is pointless,
for without knowing what we are looking for we can neither
direct our search nor tell when we have succeeded.
Socrates resolves the paradox by denying that we either
know or don’t know. We inquire when we both know and
don’t know. We possess knowledge but do not have it at
hand. It is in our souls but not immediately accessible. This,
by itself, is not enough to answer the paradox, for we need
some way to direct the search for what we don’t know and
some way to tell when the search is successful. We need a way
for our present ignorance to lead to the absent knowledge.
The myth of recollection—duly elaborated—presents us with
an image of how this is possible.
The myth supposes that the soul, the organ of knowledge,
is an original whole, a single totality, for all nature is akin.
The complete whole comprises all knowledge. The whole is
now broken and fragmentary; the fragments remain in the
depths of the soul, but the surface of the soul has gaps or
holes where pieces are missing. Gaps in our knowledge keep
us from what we want to do or see. Most of these openings
are entirely surrounded by the firm surface. What we can’t do
lies within the horizon of what we can do, and what we don’t
know is framed by what we do know. Absence of knowledge
is bounded by knowledge. Ignorance thus appears like gaps in
a jigsaw puzzle. The enclosed emptiness has a specific shape.
This shape partially defines a content that can be held in mind
and used to direct the search for the missing piece. The hole
is not simply nothing. Although it is a hole because it is not
there, it is just the hole it is because where it fails to be is just
there. To articulate its shape is to formulate a question, to say
precisely what gap in knowledge one aims to fill. When we
see what is not there we both know and don’t know.
Ignorance is emptiness, shadow, a hole in the light. The desire
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for full insight is the erotic impulse that moves us to inquire.
As an emptiness with a boundary shape, the hole enables us
to search for what will fill it. Like Cinderella’s prince, when
we have the empty shoe we can seek the foot that fits it.
If the shape of a hole is to direct its own filling there must
be a prior totality in which the hole is set. A gap in the fabric
of knowledge implies a fabric of knowledge; to see a shadow
one needs light. If we were in total darkness where all is shadow or in unbounded space where all is empty, then Meno
would be correct that inquiry is pointless. Questions are
boundary phenomena. They arise from the edges of belief,
and if there were no beliefs there would be no edges. Inquiry
arises in situations where knowledge bounds ignorance,
where what we know shapes what we don’t know so that we
can know what we don’t know.
Socrates tells Meno that the immortal soul has learned all
things. All knowledge has been collected together, and needs
only to be re-collected. The jigsaw puzzle was once assembled, and all the pieces are present, floating in the depths of
the soul. If one is brave and tireless one can assemble it again.
Or, at the least, Socrates says, we will be better, braver and
less helpless if we believe this than if we believe that inquiry
is pointless.
The completed puzzle will form the surface of the soul
and thus fix the boundary shape or definition of human excellence. Later in the dialogue Socrates introduces the distinction between right opinion and knowledge. In our image
right opinion would have the right pieces in the right places,
but they would be liable to fall out again. The numbing touch
of Socrates, for example, would be liable to shatter to pieces
a whole that is not firmly tied together. Knowledge surpasses
right opinion in part because it cements the pieces into a
cohesive whole. In our picture human excellence is knowledge, but not knowledge only of human excellence. It is all
knowledge, complete knowledge, or knowledge of the whole.
The whole soul is the excellent soul, and the whole soul is
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composed of knowledge of the whole. The excellent soul is
an image of the cosmos, so in the myth ultimately self-knowledge converges with metaphysical knowledge.3 Wisdom as a
moral virtue and wisdom as metaphysical understanding are
thus related. The questions regarding human excellence and
metaphysics are alike. Asking what it means to be human
resembles asking what it means to be.
Questions of Mathematics and Human Excellence
Socrates gives the myth and shows the slave boy’s recollection
of geometrical truth to overcome Meno’s reluctance to
inquire. Socrates’ argument is by analogy, and goes like this.
The slave boy was ignorant of the solution to the geometrical
problem, and once he became aware of his ignorance through
the numbing touch of Socrates, he grew eager to overcome
that ignorance, and succeeded in drawing the solution out of
himself. Likewise, Meno has been shown to be ignorant of
the nature of excellence by the numbing touch of Socrates,
and if Meno too becomes eager to overcome that ignorance
he too may succeed in drawing the solution out of himself.
My question is, should we accept the analogy?
The analogy is problematic on two counts. First, consider how the slave boy was able to succeed. Was it by teaching,
practice, nature, or in some other way? Socrates asked leading questions, and in that sense directed the boy’s inquiries as
his teacher. The boy initially beheld the solution as in a
dream, but Socrates says the solution would become fixed in
his mind by practice. The boy answered out of his own convictions; his answers, right or wrong, were his own, arising
not from learned opinion but from natural capacity. So the
boy succeeded in some other way, namely, through the combination of teaching and practice and nature. Now the teaching was performed by Socrates through questioning, and his
directing questions had this property: Socrates knew their
answers. Socrates was directing an inquiry into something of
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which the boy was ignorant, but which Socrates knew very
well. In the inquiry with Meno into excellence, however,
Socrates purports not to know the answer. It is not so clear,
then, that inquiry into the nature of excellence can be as successful as inquiry into the double square.
The second problematic feature of the analogy concerns
the properties of the respective questions. The geometrical
question is well defined. We know what counts as an answer.
We can present to ourselves in thought a series of increasing
lines and think that one of those lines is the one that is
sought. Once we see that the doubled line is too large we
eliminate an entire range of candidate answers. When we see
that the three-halves line is also too large, we eliminate
another range of candidates. We narrow our search as each
thread is picked up to knit together the hole in the fabric of
knowledge. That hole is determinate, and determinate
because wholly enclosed.
What about the general question of human excellence? Is
that question also wholly enclosed? I think not. If we ask
about the excellence of a particular station in life, such as
auto mechanic or neurosurgeon or gentleman’s personal gentleman, we get an answer insofar as the gap in our understanding is enclosed. Comprehending the station, we can say
what is needed to fulfill the station. But it is otherwise when
we ask about human excellence as such. Here we do not have
a fabric of understanding with an enclosed hole in it. We have
the entire fabric of human life held in mind, and we are looking for the place into which it fits. When we ask about particular stations we have the puzzle and are looking for the
missing piece. When we ask about human excellence as such
we have the piece and are looking for the puzzle.
Aristotle says that since the function of the eye is to see,
the excellence of the eye is to see well. We can all agree.
Aristotle goes on to say that if a human being as a whole has
a function, then human excellence is to perform that function
well. Yes, but does analysis in terms of function work the
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same way when we consider parts and wholes? The proper
function of the eye is to see well. The analogous function of
the whole person would be to live well. But seeing well just
means seeing as required for living well. The parallel statement for the whole person—living as required for living
well—merely reopens the question.
Aristotle’s ethical inquiry is immensely intelligent, and is
usually kept from being radical by its massive common sense.
Aristotle proceeds, I think, by differentiating the parts of the
soul and discussing their respective excellences, and then saying that living well happens when each part of the soul functions well. Aristotle assumes a soul functioning in a certain
way, and asks how it would look if it were excellent. He
posits an adequate soul, and seeks a great soul. It is as though
he were given a square, and sought a double square.
At times, though, Aristotle reveals his uncommon sense,
as when he presses the claims of the contemplative life. There
Aristotle suggests that the best life enjoins us to change shape
as well as size. The Meno pictures what I am pointing to when
in the slave boy sequence Socrates puts three equal squares
together and asks the boy if they could fill in the space in the
corner. This is an intriguing question, for in one sense the
three squares already form a complete figure. There is no
space in the corner, just space outside the figure. Of course
what Socrates invites the boy to say is that the triple square
be completed with a fourth square. This is the common sense
response. Once the figure is seen as an incomplete square, we
know what piece is missing. If coming to know what constitutes a complete human life is like completing that figure with
another square, then inquiry into excellence is like geometrical inquiry. The ordinary soul and the great soul are similar
figures.
But we could also fill in the space in the corner with other
figures, equal in area but different in shape.4 How we complete the figure is not determined solely by our intent to make
the resulting figure four square in area. The question of how
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to fill in the space in the corner has a mathematical dimension, but not a unique mathematical solution. The question,
of which whole is the three-square figure a part, is not a
mathematical question. If knowing what constitutes a complete human life is like knowing how to fill in the space in the
corner, then inquiry into human excellence fails to resemble
geometrical inquiry. Inquiry into the double square and
inquiry into human excellence are not alike.
Topological Inversion of the Area of Ignorance
How did we get from questions as holes in the fabric of belief
to questions of what encompasses the totality of belief? What
works this inversion? Several paths force the same twist.
When we are trying to put different pieces together, that is,
when we are trying to integrate diverse domains of experience, we may be led to the question of what larger frame
encloses them. So the quest for a synoptic view of several
pieces of experience is one path to inversion.
Another way arises from any single question that is large
enough. When we are serious about answering such questions, we wish to put them precisely, so we must accurately
map the boundary of our ignorance. If the question is a large
one, that is, if the hole in our knowledge is extensive, then we
may not be able to see at a glance the entire boundary of the
hole. We must move around the boundary in an attempt to
encompass it. It is as though we were trying to map the
boundary of an inland lake, a lake too large to see across.
Inversion happens when we discover that the shore we trace
is not the edge of an inland lake but the boundary of an island
on which we stand. We encompass everything we know, and
see our island set in an ocean of ignorance. The known is
encompassed by the unknown, the familiar by the strange. We
experience wonder. What, we ask, is the significance of all
this? Where does it all fit?
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We ask this sort of question when we are turned around
on the other side of the boundary. We ask it as outsiders.
Anytus takes Socrates’ questioning into human excellence as
an attack on Athens by one with no commitment to its ethos.
Socrates is a strange citizen, a citizen who questions like a
stranger. Metaphysical questions are likewise strange. All ultimate questions are strange. If our life consists of filling the
familiar holes with the familiar pieces, answering the routine
questions with the ordinary answers, then we need never face
such questions. Philosophy is evitable. But, as Whitehead
remarks, the refusal to think does not imply the nonexistence
of entities for thought. If we think far enough we will get to
the limits of land. What should we do when we get there?
Here is what Kant says in the first Critique:
We have now not merely explored the territory of
pure understanding, and carefully surveyed every
part of it, but have also measured its extent, and
assigned to everything in it its rightful place. This
domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is the land of truth—
enchanting name!—surrounded by a wide and
stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where
many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther
shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever
anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in
enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is
unable to carry to completion. (257)
Kant’s answer is that we should map the extent of the isle,
then turn back and cultivate our garden. Though the very
gravity of our mind will pull us down to that ocean shore,
once there we must discipline our reason. Though mathematics and natural science are boundless, speculative thought
must restrain itself within strict limits.5
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Hegel’s answer is that we live on a finite globe, part of
which is indeed submerged, but we are amphibian creatures,
both subject and substance, both knower and known. Every
line that limits understanding is temporary, for to be aware of
a boundary is already to have crossed it.6 The land is the sea’s
edge also; we find ourselves on each side of the boundary.
The whole globe is properly our home. Speculative thought
culminates in an equilibrium in which every question has its
answer.
Pascal’s answer is that we find ourselves marooned in the
midst of an infinite, empty, terrifying expanse that reason
cannot cross.7 Faith alone lets us pass over to the safety of the
mainland. Theology teaches that God’s power is unlimited,
and the gospel tells us that Jesus can walk on water, so the
Savior can perform the infinite task of bringing us to safety as
easily as he steps to shore from a boat on the sea of Galilee.
These three agree that the isle of knowledge is of fixed
size. Kant says that critical reason can determine the circumference once and for all, and teach us to stay on our own side
of the line.8 Hegel says reason operates in an Absolute that is
finite but unbounded—a sphere. Whatever encloses a finite
area also excludes a finite area. To grasp what is inside we
cross and look from the outside, and the dialectical sequence
of crossings and recrossings leads to a great circle of maximum circumference. Seeing both sides at once of that allencompassing circle is the absolute insight. Pascal says human
reason is finite but the world is infinite, a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. Knowledge of
beginnings and ends is forever beyond the scope of human
reason.
Others say that the boundary of knowledge can be pushed
back and the domain of the known enlarged. One such is
Whitehead, a twentieth-century advocate of the value of
speculative philosophy. He writes, “Speculative philosophy is
the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system
of general ideas in terms of which every element of our expe-
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rience can be interpreted” (Whitehead, 3). Whitehead says
the method of speculative philosophy is imaginative generalization. We generalize the shape of present knowledge to
obtain our metaphysical categories, which “are tentative formulations of the ultimate generalities” (8). They are tentative
because, for Whitehead, “In philosophical discussion, the
merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is
an exhibition of folly” (xiv).
I am suggesting that ultimate questions, the questions of
speculative philosophy, are persistent because of their topological relations to what we know. They seek the whole
understanding in which our current limited understanding
has its proper place. Likewise ultimate ethical questions, such
as the nature of human excellence, persist because of their
topological relations. Thinking as the desire for the whole
truth and willing as the desire for the whole good are analogous.
Looking for the Puzzle
One thing we can learn from Plato’s practice is to take our
images seriously. Let us see what we can extract from the
image of the piece of the jigsaw puzzle. Take our current epistemic and ethical situation as a given puzzle piece. We ask for
the whole puzzle. What are some candidate answers? I offer
six.
1. When we look at a piece we may say that it is already
complete. Epistemic incompletion depends on questions, and
questions depend on ideas whose content is distinct from
their reality. Ethical incompletion depends on some distinction between is and ought, and that too depends on ideas
whose content lacks reality. To say that our current situation
is complete is to deny any importance to free ideas, either in
belief or desire. It seems to me to deny the essence of our
humanity, but that is precisely its point. Free ideas make possible belief and desire independent of perception and action,
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and thus raise epistemic and ethical questions. If we eliminate
free ideas we cut off such questions at their root. The conceptual level of awareness may define humanity, but human
being is an unstable and unsatisfying way of being. Better to
be a beast or a god, to turn and live with the animals or dissolve into the godhead. No ideas means no felt discrepancy
between mind and world; when belief and desire go the
thinking and willing self disappears. Certain mystical and
meditative techniques aim at this—their view is that thought
disrupts mindfulness. A soul reduced to perfect stillness, to
total ideational inactivity, would experience no incompletion.
On this side of the mystic dissolve, what might this way
of life be like? Think of surfing. You paddle out, feel the water
and the sun, the seventh wave approaches, you stroke hard to
get it, you’re up, in the curl, thrust along by a surging wall of
water. In the exhilaration of that locomotive rush there are
no questions, no reflections, just total immersion in the vivid
now. The wave breaks, you end the ride, but suppose that
when you leave the water you retain the awareness, the concentration, the music of each moment moving through you
and sustaining you like the wave. Your life is complete in each
passing moment—no plan for the future, no recollection of
the past, just embedded in a present presence as in a music, in
Eliot’s words, “heard so deeply it is not heard at all, but you
are the music while the music lasts”(Eliot, 136).
Of course you might need to think sometimes, to prepare
a case at law, or deliver pizza, or whatever, but thought never
displaces the immediate experience in which you find your
satisfaction. Thought is good only if it helps you, as Thoreau
says, “. . . to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past
and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe
that line” (Thoreau, 11). Perhaps the best life would be one
of simple routine, like a well-learned dance.
2. When we look at a puzzle piece we may say that the
given piece uniquely determines the entire puzzle, for the
piece is premise and the puzzle is deductive conclusion.
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Reasoning can make explicit what is implicit and so complete
the whole. There are no genuine alternatives in the completion of the puzzle, for what now looks to be contingent is in
the end either necessary or impossible. The difference
between incomplete and complete is just the difference
between what we know and what follows from what we
know. This is a rationalism. One of its ethical versions teaches the virtue of complete understanding, and says that complete understanding reveals the coincidence of the is and the
ought. Unlike the doctrine that denies any distinction
between is and ought, rationalism accepts the distinction
between incomplete and complete insight, and says that we
ought to attain complete insight. Being as such is good, evil is
privation, and ignorance is privation of understanding. With
adequate insight, we see that everything is as it must be.
On the way to complete insight we seek awareness of the
permanent present, that which remains always as it is.
Pellucid apprehension provides our satisfaction. Lured by an
experience of beauty and power in one, we seek the calm certainty of fixed insight.
3. When we look at a piece we may say that what is given
may be completed in any way whatever. Whereas rationalism
says the completion is unique, this view says the completion
is arbitrary. Any puzzle can have any shape cut from it, since
carving is arbitrary—the world has no joints. Thus given a
piece there is no way to tell from what puzzle it comes.
Reason neither determines nor limits a completion. This is a
skepticism. Whereas for the rationalist we are free if we grasp
necessity, for the skeptic we are free if we see that everything
is contingent and could be other than it is. The ethical version
of this is some sort of relativism. It may be conservative, as
with Montaigne, or revolutionary, as with the utopians, or
libertine, as with the young. Ethics might be grounded in current practice, understood as relative and historical, but if we
push this doctrine we see that current practice does not deter-
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mine its own continuation. Anything can follow anything
else, and we make up everything as we go along.
Skepticism is often an interim position on a path that ends
in celebrating art and activity. Looking beyond our puzzle
piece and finding no shape at which to aim, we project there
a figure of our own making, and get our satisfaction by bringing it into being. Of course skepticism is not the only source
of this impulse to generation. We might find outside our puzzle piece a latent ideal figure calling for realization. In either
case action, either production or deeds, engenders our satisfaction. We take the emptiness surrounding the puzzle piece
as the painter’s empty canvas, or the architect’s vacant lot, or
the engineer’s drawing board, or a field for sport, or the
silence in which we make our song. Or we may take it as the
empty space where our other half should be, a vacancy we fill
when, as we say, we make friends, or make love, or when,
extending our line beyond ourselves in a way that somehow
completes us, we beget children. Be it artifacts or deeds or
relationships, our satisfaction is made through effective
action.
4. When we look at a puzzle piece we may say that what
is given is discontinuous with what would complete it. An
epistemic gap divides what we know from what would give
us adequate moral and metaphysical insight. That gap cannot
be crossed by reason. The completion is given to us from the
other side of the chasm by divine revelation. This is a doctrine of faith. God is the puzzle that tells us what being is and
who we ought to be. Faith shares with skepticism a conviction
that reason is inadequate, and with rationalism a conviction
that our proper completion is unique. Like the Muslim, we
submit to a superior. In constant intimate relation with that
superior we find our satisfaction, like a little child who, leaping into the embrace of a loving parent, feels himself at home.
5. When we look at a puzzle piece we may deny that it is
complete, for it lacks wholeness. It is not in equilibrium, since
it satisfies neither intellect nor desire. We may be dissatisfied
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with the deductive completions we have seen, for they appear
to rest, despite their own intent, on premises that are neither
self-evident nor inescapable. We may deny that completion is
arbitrary, for such a conclusion itself seems arbitrary.9 If we
refuse revelation, reject the incompetence of reason, and
insist that thought and desire be satisfied rather than eliminated, we seem to be left with philosophy. We seek, as one
philosopher says, “...a means by which, reflecting on our
moral and intellectual experience conjointly, taking the world
and ourselves into account, we can put the whole thing
together” (Green, section 174).
6. Finally, we may look at our puzzle piece in some other
way. This residual category makes the list of alternatives formally complete. Notice how little insight mere formal completion gives.
Unmediated mindfulness, luminous certitude, free creativity, obedient faithfulness, persistent inquiry, or something
else—these are the ultimate ways. Philosophy, when it poses
the question about the best life, includes philosophy itself as
a candidate answer. This sort of philosophy, which I understand to be Socratic, tries to occupy a place between rhetoric
and mathematics. Like rhetoric, its fundamental questions
arise from concerns that shape and move the soul. Like mathematics, it seeks fully adequate insight. Its logic I believe to be
nonmonotonic, its inferences defeasible, which implies that it
must always be open to beginning again.
Of course when we ask for the best way of life we are
seeking not just candidate answers, but true answers.
Questions stretch us toward knowledge only if we desire the
truth. Philosophy may draw us toward excellence even
though, as Socrates found, it may not keep us out of trouble.
Finish Line
It is time to bring this essay to a close. We asked about questions. If we view asking a question as a conversational act, we
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
can split asking into questionings where the asker knows the
answer and those where he does not. If we view a question as
an epistemological instrument that directs a course of inquiry,
we can split questions into those where ignorance is encompassed by knowledge and those where knowledge is encompassed by ignorance. Crossing these dichotomies breeds four
kinds of question. The search for the double square in the
Meno arose from an enclosed question asked by one who
knows. The question of human excellence, and the metaphysical questions which it resembles, are I believe of another type, namely, unenclosed questions asked by one who does
not know. The persistence of philosophical questions—the
fact that they won’t go away—stems from this. They are open
questions asked by those aware of their ignorance. Socrates in
the recollection myth implies that while our souls are broken,
imperfect and incomplete, the missing fragments drift submerged in our depths. We live the philosophic life when we
fish in the depths of the soul for what would make our knowledge and our excellence whole. Whether our nets are fine
enough, whether our lines are long enough, will remain for
us open questions.
Notes
1 It is not certain, of course, that Plato intends the Meno of the dialogue to be identical to Xenophon’s Meno. Jacob Klein in his commentary on the Meno says we are to make the identification, and so
should be astonished that a paragon of vice such as Meno would
initiate an inquiry into virtue. Klein may be right. If he is, it is
extremely unfortunate that no English translation of which I am
aware brings out the viciousness of Meno.
2
Blind children who are given a fragile object and told, “look but
don’t touch” respond by lightly running their fingers over the surface. “Looking” is seeking information through the sense of touch;
touching is manipulation, handling for one’s own purposes.
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3
“We may agree, perhaps, to understand by metaphysics an attempt
to know reality as against mere appearance, or the study of first
principles or ultimate truths, or again the effort to comprehend the
universe, not simply piecemeal or by fragments, but somehow as a
whole” (Bradley, 1).
4 For example, we could fill in the space in the corner with a single
figure composed of two different kinds of parts. Place the top half
of an ellipse on the hypotenuse of a right triangle whose equal
shorter sides are the same length as the sides of the other three
squares. The hypotenuse forms the major axis of the ellipse, and we
set the semi-minor axis to (√ 2)/π . The half-ellipse together with the
right triangle then make an area equal to that of each of the other
three squares.
5
Kant asserts that we can see now that certain speculative questions
are forever unanswerable; these are immortal questions. In the land
of truth, where knowledge can be grounded, Kant affirms instead
the immortality of questions, and he says the proper use of the Ideas
of pure reason is as regulative ideals within the phenomenal
domain.
6
“To say the reality is such that our knowledge cannot reach it, is
a claim to know reality; to urge that our knowledge is of a kind
which must fail to transcend appearance, itself implies that transcendence” (Bradley, 1).
7 “When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey
the whole universe in its dumbness and man left to himself with no
light, as though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing
who put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of
him when he dies, 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”
(Pascal, Pensées, #198).
9
“Our reason is not like a plane indefinitely far extended, the limits of which we know in a general way only; but must rather be
compared to a sphere, the radius of which can be determined from
the curvature of the arc of its surface—that is to say, from the nature
of synthetic a priori propositions—and whereby we can likewise
specify with certainty its volume and limits. Outside this sphere (the
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field of experience) there is nothing that can be an object for reason; nay, the very questions in regard to such supposed objects
relate only to subjective principles of a complete determination of
those relations which can come under the concepts of the understanding and which can be found within the empirical sphere”
(Kant, 607-608).
9
It is not the skepticism of the skeptic that I object to; it is the dogmatism. Until one has encountered it repeatedly, it is hard to credit the insistent and unyielding conviction behind the claim “It’s true
that there is no truth.”
References
Bradley, F. H. Appearance and Reality. London: Oxford University
Press, 1893.
Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950. New York,
NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971.
Green, Thomas Hill. Prolegomena to Ethics. New York, NY:
Thomas Crowell/Apollo,1883/1969.
Hobbes, T. Leviathan. Indianapolis, IN: Library of Liberal
Arts,1958.
Kant, I. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp
Smith. London: Macmillan,1929.
Pascal, B. Pensées. Translated by A. J. Krailsheimer. London:
Penguin, 1966.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Civil Disobedience. Ed. Owen
Thomas. New York, NY: Norton, 1966.
Whitehead, A. N. Process and Reality. (1978 Corrected Edition
edited by D. R. Griffin and D. W Sherburne). New York, NY:
.
Macmillan, The Free Press, 1978.
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The St. John’s Review
Volume XLVII, number three (2004)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Shanna Coleman
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the
distribution list, subscriptions are $10.00 for one year.
Unsolicited essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome.
Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College,
P Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are
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available, at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John’s College
Bookstore.
©2004 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
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The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
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Contents
Essays and Lectures
Educating by ‘the Question Method’:
The Example of Kierkegaard.........................................5
Mark W. Sinnett
What It Means To Be Human:
Aristotle on Virtue and Skill........................................43
Corinne Painter
Reviews
Kant’s Afterlife
Immanuel Kant’s Opus Postumum...............................59
Eva Brann
Odysseus’s World of the Imagination
Eva Brann’s Homeric Moments....................................87
Paul Ludwig
The City: Intersection of Erôs and Thumos?
Paul Ludwig’s Erôs and Polis.....................................105
Michael Dink
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Educating by ‘the Question
Method’: The Example of
Kierkegaard
Mark W Sinnett
.
“There was a young man as favorably endowed as an
Alcibiades. He lost his way in the world. In his need he
looked about for a Socrates but found none among his
contemporaries. Then he requested the gods to change him
into one.” This is an entry in the Journal of Søren
Kierkegaard from the winter of 1842,1 when he was putting
the finishing touches on his first great aesthetic work,
Either/Or. It is a reference to the pseudonymous author of the
texts that compose the first volume of Either/Or, and as such
it contains within it both the purpose and the origin of
Kierkegaard’s entire literary work. Kierkegaard’s works
embody the attempt of this gifted young man to be the
Socrates whom he could not otherwise find among his
contemporaries; they represent Kierkegaard’s attempt to
educate by what he calls “the question method,” to educate
by the method he has learned from his own teacher, “the
simple wise man of antiquity.”
In My Left Hand and in My Right
In the midst of the long-standing and ongoing disarray of
scholarly interpretation of Kierkegaard, there are two facts
on which there is general agreement. The first of these
presents us the fundamental problem in understanding
Kierkegaard’s work, while the second, as I argue, presents us
the solution.
Everyone knows, first, that Kierkegaard divided his
writings into two streams: the works, such as Either/Or, Fear
Mark Sinnett is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College. This
lecture was delivered at Annapolis on April 6, 2001.
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and Trembling, and Philosophical Fragments, which are
populated by various pseudonymous authors and editors; and
the “religious” works, such as the six volumes of Edifying
Discourses published concurrently with the above works in
1843-44, and signed in Kierkegaard’s own name.2
Kierkegaard’s rather elliptical explanation of this curious
procedure is given in The Point of View for My Work as an
Author which he wrote (but did not publish) in 1848. Written
in anticipation of the republication of Either/Or, the The
Point of View emphasizes that his writings have been misread
and misunderstood, but that from the proper “point of view”
they can be understood “in every detail” (16). The misunderstanding in question, Kierkegaard explains, is inseparable
from the fact that he has come to be regarded as an aesthetic
writer turned religious. He asserts, to the contrary, that he has
been a “religious author” from the beginning; that “the
whole of my work as an author is related to Christianity, to
the problem ‘of becoming a Christian’, with a direct or indirect polemic against the monstrous illusion we call
Christendom” (5-6). This is demonstrated, he says, by the fact
that from the beginning of his authorship his pseudonymous,
“aesthetic” works were accompanied by “religious” works
signed in his own name. The “duplicity,” thus, “dated from
the very start. For the Two Edifying Discourses are contemporaneous with Either/Or. The duplicity in the deeper sense,
that is, in the sense of the authorship as a whole, is not at all
what was a subject of comment at the time: the contrast
between the two parts of Either/Or. No, the duplicity is discovered by comparing Either/Or and the Two Edifying
Discourses” (11).
Unfortunately, however, not only did no one undertake
this comparison, virtually no notice of any kind was taken of
the little volume of discourses, notwithstanding its relatively
greater significance. “Although Either/Or attracted all the
attention, and nobody noticed the Two Edifying Discourses,
this book betokened, nevertheless, that the [upbuilding]3 was
precisely what must come to the fore, that the author was a
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religious author, who for this reason has never written
anything aesthetic, but has employed pseudonyms for all the
aesthetic works, whereas the Two Edifying Discourses were
by Magister Kierkegaard” (12).4 The popular success of the
pseudonymous work was very gratifying, especially that of
“The Seducer’s Diary”—“how wonderful!”—but it was of no
avail since no attention was paid to the “contemporaneous”
discourses, another instance of the all too frequent phenomenon that “things of the most vital importance often seem
insignificant, . . . [like] ‘a little flower hidden in the great
forest, not sought out either for its beauty, or for its scent, or
because it was nourishing’” (19). And he summarizes the mishandling of his works as follows: “I held out Either/Or to the
world in my left hand, and in my right the Two Edifying
Discourses; but all, or as good as all, grasped with their right
what I held in my left” (20); and, we may add, grasped not at
all what he held in his right.5
These remarks, brief as they are, furnish certain basic
parameters for the interpretation of Kierkegaard’s authorship, namely, that what is offered with the left hand is to be
received with the left hand and, simultaneously, what is
offered with the right is to be received with the right. Until
quite recently there have been no interpretations of the writings that satisfy these parameters. The “true explanation,”
nevertheless, “is at hand and ready to be found by him who
honestly seeks it” (16). It is to be found, as we shall see, in
Kierkegaard’s references to his “dialectical position” (6), to
the “dialectical” character of his authorship (15), to “dialectical reduplication” (16, 17), to his “indirect method” that
“arranges everything dialectically” (25), to “patient finger
exercises in the dialectical” (38), to “the criss-cross of dialectics” (39)—and many more can be adduced.
This brings us to the second generally accepted fact about
Kierkegaard’s work; namely, that his “dialectical method” is
also his “Socratic method” (40); in other words, that his
procedure is inspired by the “simple wise man of antiquity”
who is his “teacher” (41). Although many have written about
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Kierkegaard’s use of Socratic “irony,” and referred to
Kierkegaard’s maieutic role as “midwife,” and even to
Socratic “dialogue,” we find nowhere in the secondary literature a detailed comparison between Kierkegaard’s efforts and
his Socratic model as presented in Plato’s dialogues.
The insight that emerges from a close, comparative reading of the chronologically associated texts, and that makes
sense of the “duplicity” of the authorship as a whole, is that
these texts constitute between them the question and answer
of Socratic dialectic. The reason both sides of the authorship
are needed—the reason the dramatis personae on both sides
have a real dramatic role to play—the reason Kierkegaard
insists his intended meaning will emerge only through
“comparing” the pseudonymous works with their associated
discourses—is that the associated texts constitute between
them a “conversation” (dialektos), a dialogue, within which
“Magister Kierkegaard,” speaking in his own voice, is able to
critically examine the perspectives of his own pseudonyms,
and thus to apply his “indirect polemic against the monstrous
illusion we call Christendom.”
The task of understanding this dialectical structure of the
authorship of Kierkegaard requires that we understand the
inspiration he received through the example of Socrates. We
begin our quest for this understanding with Kierkegaard’s
discussion of Socratic dialectic—what he calls “the question
method”—in his doctoral dissertation, The Concept of Irony,
with Continual Reference to Socrates.
The Question Method
The significance of Socrates in The Concept of Irony lies in his
being, in Kierkegaard’s view, the originator of irony (9).
Among the members of the “Socratic movement” known to
him—Xenophon, Plato, and Aristophanes—Kierkegaard
prefers the latter two, laying particular emphasis upon the
“narrative” and “dramatic” dialogues of the one and the
Clouds of the other. Clearly realizing that all of these texts are
artistic constructions, Kierkegaard nevertheless believes that
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the “genuinely Socratic” can be recovered from them through
careful comparative study. But this brings us to what
Kierkegaard regards as the single most important source of
the “Socratic,” Plato’s Apology, which, he believes, presents
us “an authentic picture of the actual Socrates” (80).
The first lesson we learn from Apology, according to
Kierkegaard, concerns the utter “negativity” of Socrates. This
is illustrated in the course of Socrates’ defense by his indifference to the order of the family (184-85)6 and to the
collective authority of the state (193-94).7 This implies, says
Kierkegaard, Socrates’ “completely negative relation” both to
the “state” (160) and to “the established order with respect to
religion” (168). The latter is especially clear in Socrates’
reliance on the daimonion, whose silence in the face of the
Council’s death penalty persuades Socrates that he has nothing to fear from it (Apol. 40B-C). This suggests, according to
Kierkegaard, not only the privacy of Socrates’ religious life in
what is otherwise a very public Greek world (160-61), but
the silence that is here substituted for the “divine eloquence”
that permeated the whole of Greek religion (161). This is
consistent with the characteristic of the daimonion, which,
even if it is “something divine,” is “something that precisely
in its abstraction is above definition, is unutterable and
indescribable, since it allows no vocalization” (158). And the
negativity of Socrates is confirmed, Kierkegaard asserts,
by the same qualities of abstraction and silence in the
“dramatic” dialogues: the negative character of love as an
“empty longing” in Symposium (45, 46, 49); the “total
negativity” of teaching in Protagoras (52); the completely
“negative” views of death and of the soul in Phaedo (64, 71);
and the “negative conclusion” of Republic, book 1 (111,
115). What is significant, Kierkegaard insists, is that in each
case the discussion ends, not simply with no conclusion, but
with a “negative conclusion”; in other words, that it ends, not
simply with no positive result, but with Socrates’ “ironic
smile” at the vacuous result (57).
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This suggests the quality that is actually Kierkegaard’s
principal concern, namely, the irony in which the negativity
of Socrates is properly expressed. Apology, once again, is a
good illustration, for its “total structure” lets “Socrates’
position become apparent as irony” (79). For example, in
speaking, not in his own defense but on his accusers’ behalf
(Apol. 30D), “lest they sin against the gift of the deity” (96),
the relation of prosecution and defendant has been unexpectedly reversed, demonstrating not only the lack of any real
point of contact between Socrates and his accusers (88), but
“the ironic infinite elasticity, the secret trap-door through
which one suddenly plunges down . . . into irony’s infinite
nothing” (26). In Socrates, in short, Kierkegaard sees “irony
in all its divine infinitude, which allows nothing whatever to
endure” (40).
That “irony levels everything” (79), moreover, is in
Kierkegaard’s view no accidental circumstance: it is not
simply expressive of Socrates’ “negative relation” to the
established order of things, but the means of his conscious
and unrelenting challenge to it. The irony of Apology, thus, is
not simply Socrates’ failure to present any real defense, but
the fact that it is Athens that is on trial and Socrates who is
proceeding as “counsel for the prosecution” (173). The irony
of his “wisdom” was the weaponry of his “campaign” (175),
the means of his “cutting off all communication with the
besieged, . . . which starved the garrison out of opinions,
conceptions, time-honored traditions, etc. that had been
adequate for the person concerned.” He purposed, not to
supply “the idea” which he had glimpsed, but, by the
application of that “causticity . . . which nothing can resist”
(206), to strip away anything and everything that stood in the
way. Although his “total skepticism” (115) often invited comparison with that of the Sophists, Socrates singled out the
“teachers of wisdom” for his most intense “polemic” (209,
210): “When the Sophists, in good company, had befogged
themselves in their own eloquence, it was Socrates’ joy to
introduce, in the most polite and modest way of the world, a
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slight draft that in a short time expelled all these poetic
vapors” (37). Socrates’ irony was the means of his challenge
to both the ancient order of the polis and the Sophists’
attempted “surrogate” order; it was the “the glaive, the twoedged sword that he swung like an avenging angel over
Greece” (211).
Of course Socrates is especially known for the particular
means by which he presented his challenge: As illustrated by
his examination of Meletus and Anytus in Apology (24C-28A),
his “customary way is that of asking questions” (45). The
“question method” (55), which Kierkegaard also describes as
Socrates’ “dialectical method” (124), was precisely the means
of his challenge to the surrounding culture. Socrates begins
his inquiry where people already are—“on the periphery, in
the motley variety of life endlessly interwoven within itself ”
(32)—and “an exceptional degree of art is needed to unravel
not only itself but also the abstract of life’s complications.”
The “art” in question is “the Socratically disciplined
dialogue,” “the rather well-known Socratic art of asking
questions or, to recall the necessity of dialogue for Platonic
philosophy, the art of conversing” (33).
This art is preserved by Plato, the dialogical form of
whose writings appear, in Kierkegaard’s view, to be not only
inspired by but also intended as an extension of Socrates’ life
and teaching (30, 188-89). What we find in Plato’s dialogues,
according to Kierkegaard, is a Socrates created by “poetic
productivity” (15, 18, 125), and a literary form engendered
by the “epoch-making” experience of him (29). And thus is
revealed Socrates’ significance “in the world-historical development”; namely, “to be the infinite beginning that contains
within itself a multiplicity of beginnings” (216-17), including
the “beginning” undertaken by Kierkegaard himself in 1843.
We are surely entitled to ask, however, what this “beginning” really amounts to. If the result of Socratic inquiry is
simply “negativity”—if, as already suggested, this method
“allows nothing whatever to endure”—is it not better
described as the end rather than as a “beginning”? What we
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will now discover in considering somewhat more fully
Kierkegaard’s understanding of the nature of inquiry is that
“the question method,” both in the classical tradition and in
his own employment of it, is neither “negative,” nor “positive,” but always in between the two.
The In-Between Structure of Inquiry
“To ask a question,” Kierkegaard insists, “ultimately became
the primary issue for [Socrates]” (37). The crucial point is
that Kierkegaard regards this endeavor as being a form of
knowing. The polemic Socrates directed at the established
religious tradition, for instance, reflected his intimation of
better things to come: “The heavenly host of gods rose from
the earth and vanished from mortal sight, but this very
disappearance was the condition for a deeper relationship”
(173-74). Socrates’ insight represented, in this respect, “the
beginning of infinite knowledge” (174) and a “new direction”
for the age (175). According to Kierkegaard all of Socrates’
inquiry implies his apprehension of a reality worthy of being
explored and more fully understood. He describes Socrates’
questioning of his fellow citizens as the means by which “the
bonds of their prejudices were loosed . . . [and] their intellectual sclerosis was softened” (190)8; but “when his questions
had straightened everything out and made the transformation
possible, then the relation culminated in the meaningful
moment, in the brief silvery gleam that instantly illuminated
the world of their consciousness.”9
Kierkegaard elaborates on this image by means of a story
about “an Englishman who traveled in order to see the sights”:
When he came to a mighty forest and found a
place where he could open up an amazing vista by
having the intervening woods cut, he hired people
to saw through the trees. When everything was
ready, when the trees were sawed through for
toppling, he climbed up to this spot, took out his
binoculars, gave the signal—the trees fell, and his
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eyes instantaneously delighted in the enchanting
view, which was even more seductive because in
almost the same moment he had the opposite. (190)
“So also,” Kierkegaard says, “with Socrates. By means of his
questions, he quietly sawed through for toppling the primeval
forest of substantial consciousness, and when everything was
ready—look, then all these formations vanished, and the eyes
of the soul delighted in a vista such as they had never seen
before.”10 This illustration is significant in that it suggests the
directionality of questioning. Just as the traveler, glimpsing
the light filtering through the trees, “found a place where he
could open an amazing vista by having the intervening woods
cut,” so Socrates knew how to direct his inquiry so as to
reveal to “the eyes of the soul . . . a vista such as they had
never seen before.” The “ideality” that irony demands is
clearly already present in the desire because, as Kierkegaard
claims, “intellectually that which is desired is always in the
desire already, inasmuch as the desire is regarded as the
agitation of the desired itself in the desiring” (213).
“In Socrates’ demand,” otherwise said, “the satisfaction was
[kata dunamin (potentially)] present” (214). The challenge of
Socrates’ polemic, therefore, was just as much a beginning as
it was an ending, “for the destruction of the earlier development is just as much the ending of this as it is the beginning
of the new development, since the destruction is possible only
because the new principle is already present as possibility.”
This invites comparison with the importance placed
upon questions and the process of questioning in the thought
of such modern philosophers as Gadamer, Lonergan
and Polanyi.11 Kierkegaard’s account of questioning is particularly reminiscent of Eric Voegelin’s understanding of
philosophical inquiry “as a movement in the psyche toward
the [divine] ground that is present in the psyche as its
mover.”12 The philosopher’s wondering and questioning,
Voegelin argues, is itself a form of cognitive participation in
the reality being sought—a “knowing questioning and a
questioning knowledge.”13 As such, “the questioning unrest
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carries the assuaging answer within itself inasmuch as man is
moved to his search of the ground by the divine ground of
which he is in search.”14 “The man who asks questions, and
the divine ground about which the questions are asked, . . .
merge in the experience of questioning as a divine-human
encounter and reemerge as the participants in the encounter
that has the luminosity and structure of consciousness.”15
This realm of divine-human encounter is further characterized by Voegelin as the “In-Between,” or the “metaxy”:
Question and answer are intimately related one
toward the other; the search moves in the metaxy,
as Plato has called it, in the In-Between of poverty
and wealth, of human and divine; the question is
knowing, but its knowledge is yet the trembling of
a question that may reach the true answer or miss
it. This luminous search in which the finding of
the true answer depends on asking the true
question, and the asking of the true question on
the spiritual apprehension of the true answer, is
the life of reason.16
The symbolism of the metaxy is derived from Diotima’s
account of the “spiritual realm” in Plato’s Symposium, a
discussion which it will be helpful (in the following sections)
to bear in mind.17
Inhabited not only by “the great spirit,” Erôs, but also by
the man who has “skill” (sophos) in spiritual matters, “the
whole realm of the spiritual,” Diotima explains, “is in
between [metaxu] the divine and the mortal”; it “is the means
of all relation [homilia] and converse [dialektos] of men with
the gods and of the gods with men” (Symp. 202E-203A). The
“spiritual man” is also described as a “lover of wisdom”
(philosophos); that is, as one (like Erôs) who is neither
“resourceless” or “wealthy,” but “is in the middle between
wisdom and ignorance [sophias te au kai amathias en mesô
estin]” (203E). In order to explain this, Diotima notes that
neither the “gods” nor the “ignorant” (amatheis) are “lovers
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of wisdom” (philosophousin) (203E-204A). The former
already possess wisdom and the latter, though they utterly
lack it, are satisfied with themselves and have no desire for
that of which they feel no defect (204A). “Who then,” asks
Socrates, “are the lovers of wisdom, if they are neither the
wise nor the ignorant?” Diotima responds: “They are the
ones in between [metaxu] the two, and one of them is Erôs”
(204B). The “lovers of wisdom” are subsequently characterized by Diotima in terms of their loving quest of wisdom and
beauty: Each of them climbs aloft, “as on the rungs of a
ladder, from one to two, and from two to all beautiful bodies, . . . to beautiful institutions, . . . to beautiful learning, and
from learning at last to the special lore which is study of none
other than the beautiful itself [ho estin ouk allou ê autou
ekeinou tou kalou mathêma]” (211C). “Whoever has been
initiated so far in love-matters [ta erôtika], viewing beautiful
things in the right and regular order [theômenos ephexês te
kai orthôs ta kala], suddenly, as he draws near to the end of
his dealings in love, an amazing vision, beautiful in its nature,
may be revealed to him [pros telos êdê iôn tôn erôtikôn
exaiphnês katopsetai ti thaumaston tên phusin kalon]; and
this, Socrates, is the final object of all those previous toils”
(210E).
Here we see the in-between structure of inquiry, the
character of inquiry as being neither empty nor full, neither
ignorant nor wise, neither “negative” nor “positive,” but
always in between. Accordingly, we see also the character of
inquiry as a form of knowing, displaying a rational structure
(as indicated by Diotima’s “ladder”) and providing a sense of
orientation through the intimation of a reality worthy of
being more fully understood, a reality, indeed, that invites the
philosopher into the quest for understanding. This is especially clear in Symposium in that Socrates, in attacking the
uncritical opinion of Agathon as to the beauty of Erôs, admits
that he is only re-enacting the examination by which the
priestess “honored by the god” (diotima) had challenged the
same viewpoint in himself (201E).18 The philosopher’s
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inquiry, in other words, is an encounter in which the philosopher “is moved to his search of the ground by the divine
ground of which he is in search,” or, otherwise said, in which
what is desired is recognized to be “in the desire already,
inasmuch as the desire is regarded as the agitation of the
desired itself in the desiring.”
That Kierkegaard does indeed share this understanding of
the in-between structure of inquiry is confirmed in an entry
from his Journal from 1851: “I certainly do think that my
presentation or illumination of the essentially Christian
comes some points closer to the truth than the proclamation
of Christianity hereabouts ordinarily does—but I am only a
poet.”19 Commenting on this disclaimer, Kierkegaard
concedes that “‘the pastor’ can make capital of this; he can
say: To be a pastor is something higher; a poet, and Magister
Kierkegaard is right here, is inadequate when it comes to the
essentially Christian, and Mag. K. is only a poet—oddly
enough, says so himself.” Kierkegaard then emphasizes, however, that this is not what he said: “I have not said that I,
measured against ‘the pastor,’ that is, every pastor as such, am
only a poet, but measured against the ideal, I am only a poet”
(emphasis added). Similarly, a little farther on, he notes that:
I have also said “that before God I regard my
whole work as an author as my own education”;
I am not a teacher but a learner. Every teacher of
religion, every music teacher, every gymnastics
coach, every part-time teacher may make capital of
this if he wishes and say: There you see what it is
to be a teacher if Magister Kierkegaard, who is for
all that a gifted person, is only a learner, as he
himself says. But I have not said that I, measured
against every part-time teacher, could not be called
a teacher, but that before God, measured against
the ideals for being a teacher, I call myself a learner.
(emphasis added)
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Recalling the ironical stance of Socrates in Symposium, we
recognize here the daimonios aner, the “spiritual man,” who
moves “in between” the amatheis, the spiritual dullards
(represented especially by the “pastor,” complacent in his
authoritative possession of what is “higher”), and transcendent reality (represented here as the “ideal,” embodying the
inexhaustible challenge and invitation of God’s truth);
we find, in other words, the one who is wise only in his
admission of ignorance, who is a teacher only because he is
first and always a learner.
As we now turn to Kierkegaard’s account (in The Point of
View) of his own application of “the question method”—
what he calls the “criss-cross of dialectics”—we will find
Plato’s Symposium a useful guide.
The Criss-Cross of Dialectics
We begin with Kierkegaard’s description of the “monstrous
illusion” of Christendom that he seeks to challenge. A situation in which everyone is automatically certified by the
church and state as a Christian (22-3) indicates the presence
of “a tremendous confusion, a frightful illusion” (23). At the
motivating center of this illusion, Kierkegaard maintains, is a
profound horror at the possibility of uncertainty in relation
to God: in a manner analogous to those in Socrates’ time who
sought the technai, the techniques, with which to insure the
attunement of human society to divine reality,20 the common
characteristic of those residing comfortably within
Christendom is to have suppressed all conscious awareness of
“the problem of ‘becoming a Christian.’” Given that “the
problem,” as a problem, is for Kierkegaard inherent to
Christian faith, the “monstrous illusion” of Christendom can
only be maintained through suppression of this fundamental
question. Kierkegaard’s endeavor, in turn, may then be
described as the effort by means of “the question method”
to restore to his society conscious awareness of “the
problem”; in other words, to gain a hearing for this fundamental question.
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The first thing to be understood about this task,
Kierkegaard says, is that it cannot proceed directly. “Direct
communication,” after all, “presupposes that the receiver’s
ability to receive is undisturbed” (40), a condition that is not
satisfied in the case of those who live in a state of illusion. In
a manner reminiscent of Plato’s contrast between Socratic
inquiry and Sophistic speech-making, Kierkegaard asserts
that there is “an immense difference, a dialectical difference,
between these two cases: the case of a man who is ignorant
and is to have a piece of knowledge imparted to him, so that
he is like an empty vessel which is to be filled or a blank sheet
of paper upon which something is to be written; and the case
of a man who is under an illusion and must first be delivered
from that” (40).21 The “dialectical difference,” furthermore,
corresponds to that “between writing on a blank sheet of
paper and bringing to light by the application of a caustic
fluid a text which is hidden under another text” (40). This
“caustic means” is also described as “negativity” (40),
indicating again the ambition which Kierkegaard shares with
his “teacher” to dispel the mists and clouds of illusion.
Kierkegaard subsequently says that “negativity understood in relation to the communication of the truth is
precisely the same as deception” (40). This “deception,”
Kierkegaard explains, “begins with self-humiliation: the
helper must first humble himself under him he would help,
and therewith must understand that to help does not mean to
be a sovereign but to be a servant, that to help does not mean
to be ambitious but to be patient, that to help means to
endure for the time being the imputation that one is in the
wrong and does not understand what the other understands”
(27-8). In this way, precisely as he describes his “teacher”
doing, Kierkegaard begins by getting in touch with a person
where he is (26); not by vaunting himself over the other as
teacher over learner, but by identifying himself with the other
as a fellow learner (29), and thereby submitting himself to the
other’s perspective (30).22
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At this point, however, we discover the ultimate purpose
of the deception, for of course, neither for Socrates nor for
Kierkegaard, is it an end in itself. There is one thing, indeed,
“the author must not forget, namely, his purpose, the distinction between this and that, between the religious as the
decisive thing and the aesthetic incognito—lest the criss-cross
of dialectics end in twaddle” (39). The “criss-cross of dialectics” refers to the conversational collision between the aesthetic and the religious in which Kierkegaard’s aesthetic
deception is intended to involve his unsuspecting readership:
If a man lives . . . in categories entirely foreign to
Christianity, in purely aesthetic categories, and if
some one is capable of winning and captivating
him with aesthetic works, and then knows how to
introduce the religious so promptly that with the
momentum of his abandonment to the aesthetic
the man rushes straight into the most decisive
definitions of the religious—what then? Why, then,
he must take notice. What follows after this, however, no one can tell beforehand. But at least he is
compelled to take notice. (37, emphasis added)
Just as Socrates seduced his interlocutors into conversation
through his repeated admission of ignorance, the religious
writer must begin with the aesthetic in order to gain the
attention and willing participation of the person lost in
aesthetic illusion, but “he must have everything in readiness,
though without impatience, with a view to bringing forward
the religious promptly, as soon as he perceives that he has his
reader with him” (26, emphasis added). The “simultaneous
achievement of aesthetic and religious production,” thus, was
no accident (31-32), for it is the “criss-cross” of the two—the
dialectical interrogation of the former by the latter—that was
intended to bring the inhabitants of Christendom unexpectedly and unwittingly into collision with the challenge of the
“religious.”
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As we began the section by noting this occurs indirectly:
the “indirect method,” in fact, “loving and serving the truth,
arranges everything dialectically for the prospective captive,
and then shyly withdraws (for love is always shy), so as not to
witness the admission which he makes to himself alone before
God—that he has lived hitherto in an illusion” (25-26). By
directing the critique of the discourses at the pseudonymous
perspectives of the aesthetic works, Kierkegaard leaves his
reader free to judge the state of his own existence, just as the
readers of Plato’s writings are left free to judge between the
different participants in the various dialogues.23 Only insofar
as the reader is indeed made “captive” to the pseudonymous
perspectives—only insofar as the reader finds himself in
them—is he then possibly, and “indirectly,” subject to the
challenge of reality, which is what Kierkegaard means by “the
most decisive definitions of the religious.”
This leads to the further similarity with Socrates that is
clear in Kierkegaard’s understanding of his work as commissioned and empowered by “Governance.” His work,
Kierkegaard explains, had to be performed under conditions
of strict “divine discipline” (67). Unlike the poet, who is supplied his thoughts under inspiration of the divine muse,
Kierkegaard “needed God every day to shield [him] from too
great a wealth of thoughts” (68). From the beginning, God’s
“aid” was experienced by Kierkegaard in his being “under
arrest” (69), in his vast talents for “poetical” and “aesthetic”
productivity being under restraint by God. “It is as if a father
were to say to his child: You are allowed to take the whole
thing, it is yours; but if you will not be obedient and use it as
I wish—very well, I shall not punish you by taking it from
you; no, take it as yours . . . it will smash you. Without God
I am too strong for myself, and perhaps in the most agonizing of all ways am broken” (69-70). In the midst of the overwhelming riches of his imaginative capacities, he repeatedly
confronted “the frightful torture of starving in the midst of
abundance” (70).
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This tension between his poetic talents and the divine
“arrest”—what Kierkegaard refers to as the “dialectical
factor” (69) in his work—is subsequently described in terms
of a conversation between himself and “Governance.”
The actual work began with “an occurrence,” a “collision”;
namely, his failed engagement with Regine Olsen.24 “What
was to be done? Well, obviously the poetical had to be evacuated, anything else was impossible for me. But the whole
aesthetic productivity was put under arrest by the religious.
The religious agreed to this elimination but incessantly
spurred it on, as though it were saying, Are you not now
through with that?”
It had been Kierkegaard’s original plan to be “through
with that” (i.e., through with the aesthetic work) very
quickly indeed. “In a certain sense it was not at all my
original intention to become a religious author. My intention
was to evacuate as hastily as possible the poetical [by
publishing Either/Or]—and then go out to a country parish”
(86). On its own, Kierkegaard emphasizes, Either/Or did not
communicate his religious intentions, for “there was as yet no
scale presented, nor was the duplicity posited” (85, n.).
He had initially thought that “the most vigorous expression
of the fact that I had been a religious man and that the
pseudonyms were something foreign to me was the abrupt
transition—to go immediately out in the country to seek
a cure as a country parson” (86); but “the urge of productivity” remained so great within him that he sought another way
to present the “scale” that was needed for the proper
interpretation of Either/Or: “I let the Two Edifying Discourses
come out, and I came to an understanding with Governance.
There was allowed me again a period for poetical productivity, but always under the arrest of the religious, which was on
the watch, as if it said, Will you not soon be through with
that?” The “duplicity” of the authorship, thus, is the outward
expression of the “divine arrest” of “Governance,” the outward expression of the divine inward challenge to
Kierkegaard’s own poetic “reflection.” The dialectic of
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pseudonym and discourse, in other words, is the outward
expression of the inward “dialectical factor,” an outward
expression of Kierkegaard’s inward conversation with God.
Kierkegaard, furthermore, clearly understands the outer,
literary expression of this inner dialogue as the means of his
transmission of God’s challenge to the surrounding society.
He writes, he claims, “without authority” (87), since the
critique that the discourses present to the aesthetic perspectives of the pseudonyms has its origin in the inner “divine
arrest” to his own “poetic production.” Governance, thus,
has “educated” him, “and the education is reflected in the
process of the productivity” (73); he has been “conscious of
being under instruction, and that from the very beginning.”25
This, however, far from disqualifying him as the agent of
God’s challenge to others, is the real source of his power:
And now as for me, the author, what, according to
my opinion, is my relation to the age? Am I perhaps the ‘Apostle’? Abominable! I have never given
an occasion for such a judgment. I am a poor
insignificant person. Am I then the teacher, the
educator? No, not that at all; I am he who himself
has been educated, or whose authorship expresses
what it is to be educated to the point of becoming
a Christian. In the fact that education is pressed
upon me, and in the measure that it is pressed, I
press it in turn upon this age; but I am not a
teacher, only a fellow student. (75, emphasis
added)
The comparison with Socrates is, once again, irresistible.
In Symposium, as we have seen, the examination to which
Socrates subjects the Sophist Agathon is presented as the
re-enactment of the examination to which Socrates had
himself been subjected by Diotima. In both cases, thus, the
Socratic figure not only begins by sharing the delusions of
those around him, but is able to challenge others outwardly
only by means of the challenge he himself has received
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inwardly; he “press[es]” upon others the challenge that “is
pressed upon [him], and in the measure that it is pressed.”
Kierkegaard, in particular, seeking a hearing for the question—“the problem of ‘becoming a Christian’”—pursues outwardly, through the dialogue of discourse and pseudonym,
the inward dialogue within which he himself has heard the
question posed by God.
Finally, there is one further similarity with Socrates to
which Kierkegaard draws our attention in The Point of View,
namely, to the fact that the Socratic figure is, in both cases,
entirely without assurance as to the effect of “the question
method.” Kierkegaard can hope, as we saw, that “with the
momentum of his abandonment to the aesthetical [a] man
rushes straight into the most decisive definitions of the religious”; and Kierkegaard is confident that thereby the man
“must take notice.” “What follows after this, however, no one
can tell beforehand”(emphasis added). As with Socrates, who
could reliably arouse in his interlocutors the “sacred rage”
but could not guarantee their response to it,26 Kierkegaard
admits that “it is impossible for me to compel a person to
accept an opinion, a conviction, a belief . . . [even though] I
can compel him to take notice” (35). This is by way of
contrast with the standards of Sophistic education, with its
emphasis upon the assurance of reliable techniques and
predictable results.
We will now find that this contrast between Socratic and
Sophistic education is an important theme in Kierkegaard’s
first dialogue, that which unfolds between Either/Or and the
Two Edifying Discourses of 1843.
Educating the Poet
In Either/Or, the first of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works,
we are presented with a conversation between two friends.
The first volume (Either) contains various texts pertaining to
the “poetic” life, written by an extraordinarily gifted young
man (hereafter referred to as “the poet”). Through a bewildering variety of compositions, ranging from the seemingly
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random aphorisms of the “Diapsalmata,” through several
essays in literary and musical criticism of a very high order, to
the concluding “Seducer’s Diary,” all of it communicating an
equally bewildering variety of moods and emotions, many
troubling aspects of human existence are examined, many
comfortable conventions of respectable life exploded. In
volume two (Or), as if in response to the poet’s challenge, we
find two long letters from a magistrate, Judge William, along
with a sermon by his friend, a Jylland pastor, all of it intended as advice for the guidance of the errant young poet. Here
we find an elaborate and rather clever defense of the sort of
respectable life—and especially of married life—the poet
appears to hold in derision. Here also, especially with the
help of the pastor, we find reliable techniques for the overcoming of the despair that the poet does in fact clearly
display. The two volumes together present (what appear to
be) two very different views of life in conversation with each
other, the “poetic” life on the one hand challenging, and
being challenged by, the “ethical and religious” life on the
other.
As we learn from The Point of View, however, the “two
sides of Either/Or” do not by themselves fulfill Kierkegaard’s
intentions for his writings. Several months after the publication of Either/Or there appeared, signed in Kierkegaard’s
own name, Two Edifying Discourses, through which
Kierkegaard shows us exactly what he thinks of the characters
of Either/Or.27
The question of educational method is explicitly
addressed in the first of the discourses, “The Expectancy of
Faith,”28 and is, in and of itself, a main point of Kierkegaard’s
challenge to Judge William. In the introduction to the
discourse (8-16), Kierkegaard presents us a man—the
“perplexed man”—who is seeking to share his faith with a
friend and falling into greater and greater perplexity in the
attempt. He learns that, while it is indisputably a good gift,
faith is the one gift he cannot give his friend by wishing it for
him, realizing in the process the questionable character of his
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25
own faith.29 Finally giving over care of his friend to God,
who alone, the man realizes, is the teacher all men can equally claim (12-13, 14-15, 28-29), he contents himself with the
essentially negative, maieutic role of challenging the
delusions which, as he knows from his own experience, shut
his friend off from faith (15-16).30 Like Socrates in his inner
dialogue with Diotima, and like Kierkegaard in his inner
dialogue with “Governance,” the perplexed man has no
pretensions to question his friend except in terms of that
which has first questioned him. The “perplexed man,” in others words, precisely in his perplexity, has been equipped as
the expert practitioner of “the question method.” He is to be
assisted in his task by the main section of the discourse
(16-28), which is devoted to description and analysis both of
the forms of “expectancy” by which human beings seek to
maintain control of their own lives, and of “the expectancy of
faith” in which alone that control is given over to God.
The “friend” Kierkegaard really has in mind, however, is
the poet of Either (1.17-445). The categories of expectancy in
the discourse, in fact, correspond exactly to the measures
taken by the poet to defend himself from the threat of time.
The essence of the “poetic life,” in fact, is the “making” (from
the Greek verb poein) of an illusory world in which the poet
can shield himself from the anxieties of temporal existence.
As he says at the close of the “Diapsalmata,” from the sorrow
which is his “baronial castle,” sitting “like a eagle’s nest high
up on the mountain peak among the clouds,” “I swoop down
into actuality and snatch my prey” (42, no. 88). He does not
stay there, of course, for the whole point is to bring his booty
home,
and this booty is a picture I weave into the tapestry at my castle. Then I live as one already dead.
Everything I have experienced I immerse in a baptism of oblivion unto an eternity of recollection.
Everything temporal and fortuitous is forgotten
and blotted out. Then I sit like an old gray-haired
man, pensive, and explain the pictures in a soft
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voice, almost whispering, and beside me sits a
child, listening, although he remembers everything
before I tell it.
Depicted here is one whom the poet himself calls “the unhappiest one,” a man “turned the wrong way [in time] in two
directions” (225), hoping for what lies behind him, recollecting what lies ahead, a man utterly lost in the illusion of his
own “making.”
The matter receives particularly clear treatment in the
poet’s essay entitled “Rotation of Crops.” This refers not
to an agricultural procedure but to the necessity of constantly varying our experience, and more importantly to a
technique for the proper “cultivation” of experience. The
recommended procedure is to achieve an appropriate balance
“between recollecting and forgetting.” No part of life should
be allowed such importance that it cannot be forgotten at
will; neither should any part of life be relegated to such
triviality that it cannot be remembered at will (293). The key
is to throw hope “overboard” (292), for only then “does one
begin to live artistically; as long as a person hopes, he cannot
limit himself.” “It is indeed beautiful to see a person put out
to sea with the fair wind of hope,” but hope makes for a
dangerous pilot of one’s own ship, steering a course and
speed which threaten the greatest of all calamities (292-93).
For he who “runs aground with the speed of hope will recollect in such a way that he will be unable to forget” (293). Far
better to throw hope overboard than to collide with that
experience so recalcitrant as to defy every attempt at the
poesis of recollection.
The challenge Kierkegaard seeks to present the poet
through the discourse is to set sail with hope still on board,
to face the future as it really is, in all its threatening and
indeterminate contingency, and yet with the “expectancy of
faith [which] is victory,”31 the trust that whatever comes will
reflect the will of God, that it will be the victory to which no
one can give a shape beforehand. And there is reason for
confidence that Kierkegaard’s challenge may not fall on
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entirely deaf ears. The poet says himself that he can imagine
being converted from his boredom and despair through experience of “the faith that moves mountains,” but this remark
only serves to demonstrate that he has never had that experience. To the contrary, in several further remarks in
“Diapsalmata,” he emphasizes his disdain for the “timorousness” of the representatives of Danish Christendom (33-34,
no. 67) who are pale and bloodless, without sufficient
courage to passionately affirm or deny anything (23, no. 22),
and who can know nothing of salvation (20, no. 8), since they
are too “wretched” even to sin (27-28, no. 41). The poet, we
recall, is the gifted young man looking for a Socrates, looking
for someone who can question him, who can give his confusion direction and sharpen it into the joyous perplexity
known as faith.32 The poet’s despair, therefore, is part of
Kierkegaard’s indirect polemic against the society that could
not challenge him.
We most directly encounter the society in question in the
person of Judge William (Either/Or 2.3-333). As husband,
father, magistrate, church member, and devotee of fashionable philosophy, the good Judge is representative of
respectable Danish society in every respect. Judge William is
Danish society writ small. Kierkegaard’s “direct” attack on
the Judge’s “ethical and religious” life, therefore, is also
simultaneously his “indirect” critique of the spiritual poverty
of Danish Christendom. Particularly at issue is the Judge’s
educational method. Judge William, too, is anxious to help
the poet, and, unlike the “perplexed man” of the discourse (as
well as the perplexed man who wrote the discourse), he
knows exactly how to go about it. The poet is afraid of the
uncertainties and discontinuities of time, so the Judge shows
how the disjointed and contingent facts of “outer history”
may be “transformed and transferred” into the “continuity”
of “inner history” (98-9, 250-51). The poet is afraid of the
rigors of duty and responsibility, so the Judge explains that
duty is the road sign that never directs a person anyplace he
doesn’t already wish to go (149), the old friend that never
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commands anything a person is not already ready to do
(146).
The poet is afraid of dependence upon the uncertain
things around him, so the Judge shows him how he can posit
his own “self ” in “absolute security” (213). Choose something, says the Judge; choose anything; choose even to
despair (208-9). By freely choosing to despair the poet will
have posited an “either/or,” one of many possible either/or’s,
and this, being a realm which implies a discernible distinction
between what he will have chosen and its alternative, will
lead him to the “ethical.” Since this choice will have been
made in freedom, moreover, the self which chooses will have
been established in complete independence from anything
outside itself (180).
A particularly important case of this desired independence is that of the complete independence of the self from
God. This is to be achieved, says the Judge, by that free
choice in which we place ourselves always in the stance of
“repentance” before God (216). Only by the freedom of this
choice, in which human love for God is unmotivated by
God’s love for humanity, and in which humility before God
bears no relation to the majesty and holiness of God, can the
self choose itself “absolutely” (216). By placing ourselves reliably in the wrong before God, more importantly, we also
deny ourselves the perspective from which to notice what the
Judge regards as being otherwise unavoidable, the necessity
to “take God to court” for the ills and injustice of human
existence (216-17, 237). To do otherwise would be to confront the “riddle” that throws everything into confusion; it
would be to acknowledge the possibility that we may not
know what God intends for us in this life, the possibility that
the complacent joys of hearth and home may not be God’s
ultimate purpose for us; it would be to acknowledge the
contingencies of existence in time which would be for the
Judge of all things the most horrifying.
These procedures, the Judge claims, not only produce
predictable results for himself, but will do so as well for
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anyone who employs them. His pretensions to “absolute”
security notwithstanding, the real goal of the Judge’s
technique is to fight down his own despair in facing the
uncertainties of life, to bring the threat of time (and, in
particular, of the poet) under control. As in various of Plato’s
dialogues we find a sharp contrast of educational method
between the Socratic figure who is powerful only in his
perplexity, and the practical man of affairs (like Callicles in
Gorgias, to whom Kierkegaard clearly compares the Judge33)
who, if he is not himself the Sophist, ideally represents the
end-form of Sophistic education. He thus also represents the
society that Paul Shorey (in his edition of Republic) calls “the
Great Sophist,”34 the society in which the Sophist has become
the representative human being.
The Sophist himself we find in the Jylland pastor, whose
“edifying discourse” comprises the “final word” (ultimatum)
in Or (2.335-54). It has often been asserted, of course, that
the pastor’s sermon is actually Kierkegaard’s, that it represents Kierkegaard’s commentary on the conversation that
unfolds between the poet and the Judge.35 This, however, is
inconsistent with the dramatic structure of the dialogue; with
the fact, namely, that the Judge sends the sermon to his
younger friend in support of his own writings (337-38). The
pastor, like Judge William, is deeply troubled by the ills of
human life as well as by the merest possibility of uncertainty
in our human dealings with God (342-44). As with the Judge,
moreover, the solution is to lay hold of “the upbuilding that
lies in the thought that in relation to God we are always in
the wrong.” In this way, not only do we establish for
ourselves a determinate relation with God, we also avoid
the necessity of imputing evil to God. The pastor asks his
listeners to imagine that they have been wronged by a
beloved friend. In this situation, he reasons, we would derive
no comfort from the thought that we were entirely in the
right with our friend. “If you loved him, [the thought that
you had done right by your friend] would only alarm you;
you would reach for every probability, and if you found none,
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you would tear up the accounting to help you forget it, and
you would strive to build yourself up with the thought that
you were in the wrong” (348). “So also,” he continues, “in
your relationship with God. You loved God, and therefore
your soul could find rest and joy only in this, that you might
always be in the wrong” (349). In effect, as an expression of
his love for God, the pastor has extended to God a mercy and
forgiveness that he believes God doesn’t deserve. The pastor’s
“God,” in other words, is “without hope except in the sovereign grace and mercy of [humanity].” The pastor is indeed the
Sophist, the man who can make the worse appear the better
case, the man possessing the technical virtuosity to disguise
his cowardly “projection” in the persiflage of Christian
proclamation. He is precisely the man who can provide the
Judge the intellectual support he needs to defend himself
from the terror of contingency in relation to God.
He is also a man who has placed himself in the direct line
of fire from Kierkegaard’s second discourse, “Every Good
and Every Perfect Gift Is from Above.”36 The two discourses
are in fact mirror images of each other: whereas the pastor
emphasizes the “upbuilding” that arises only through free
choice, Kierkegaard emphasizes the power of the
Omnipotent One to crush such arrogant pretension and the
repentance that arises only through the challenge of God’s
Word (38); whereas the pastor extends his grace to God,
Kierkegaard emphasizes the creative power of God’s grace
through which alone we celebrate each circumstance of life as
“the good and perfect gift of God” (40-2); whereas the
pastor seeks the security of a relationship—being always in
the wrong before God—that can never change, Kierkegaard
emphasizes the mercy of God that is even greater “than the
anxious human heart,” the mercy that may place us
unaccountably in the right before God (48). Kierkegaard’s
brightest hope is therefore the pastor’s (and the Judge’s)
worst nightmare, that we cannot know the future God has
prepared for us. The sense of contingency that both the Judge
and the pastor fear, especially in relation to God, is the whole
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point of the “conversation” Kierkegaard pursues with his
characters, the whole point of the question for which he seeks
a hearing in the midst of the “monstrous illusion” they
represent.
The Conversation Continued
The conversation Kierkegaard began with the personalities of
Either/Or continued throughout the remainder of his short
life. We meet them again in Stages on Life’s Way, published
on 30 April 1845, one day after the publication of Three
Discourses on Imagined Occasions, a volume of “edifying
discourses” signed in Kierkegaard’s own name. And, of
course, they appear again with the republication of Either/Or
on 14 May 1849, the exact same day as the publication of
The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air, a collection of
“three devotional discourses” which, once again, are signed
in Kierkegaard’s own name, and which seek to gain a hearing
for the same question—“the problem of ‘becoming a
Christian’”—that the personalities of Either/Or are variously
attempting to ignore.37
In the course of our brief consideration of Kierkegaard’s
“direct” conversation with the personalities of Either/Or, we
have noted some indications of the “indirect” conversation
Kierkegaard was hoping to pursue with his fellow Danes. The
subtlety of his dialectic, however, was too great, and the
shades of meaning that distinguished him from the plausible
Sophistry of his pseudonyms too fine, for his critique to be
generally noticed. Kierkegaard’s “indirect” conversation with
Danish Christendom, thus, never really came off; nor, with
the passing of that cultural arrangement, will it ever do so.
Other conversations remain, even today, a lively possibility. Kierkegaard’s “interrogation” of the pseudonyms, in the
first place, will now be “indirectly” applicable to those moderns, such as the philosophers of existentialism, who are
variously adherent to the pseudonymous perspectives. Thus
may Kierkegaard’s strategy finally be vindicated: having gotten his readers with him—even if not quite the readers he had
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in mind—it is still possible to bring “the religious” promptly
forward so as to effect the “collision” through which one can
be compelled to “take notice.” There are surely as many in
our day as in that of Socrates or of Kierkegaard who look
about them for a practitioner of “the question method.”
There are many in our day, in fact, who resemble no one
so much as that gifted young man with whom we began: He
lost his way in the world. In his need, he looked about for
someone who could transmit to him, someone who could be
for him, the “true question”: He went to the “good people,”
looking for the “the faith that moves mountains,” only to find
them comfortable, and competent, and full of good advice.
He went to the magistrate, longing to see the self-sacrifice of
duty; only to learn that duty is an old friend who never
demands anything we are not already prepared to perform.
He went to the pastor hoping to hear of the grace of the
Omnipotent One to call his fantasy in question and to remake
him in the divine image; only to hear of the “God” who
stands in need of our human grace to avoid indictment for the
ills of human existence. He looked about for a Socrates, but
found none among his contemporaries. Then he requested
the gods to change him into one.
We have the evidence before us, in the dialogue of
discourse and pseudonym, to know who that gifted young
man was, and to know also that his request was granted.
Notes
1
Kierkegaard, JP 5.5613 (Pap. 4 A 43).
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4
See also the “First and Last Explanation” at the close of
Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in which Kierkegaard claims
responsibility as “the dialectically reduplicated author of . . . the
[pseudonymous] authors” (627); but also insists that “in the
pseudonymous books there is not a single word by me” (626).
5 Cf. the Preface to the Two Edifying Discourses of 1844 (in
Eighteen Edifying Discourses, 179), where Kierkegaard describes
“that single individual whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader, who with the right hand accepts what is offered with the right
hand.” The same point is emphasized in the Preface to
The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Devotional
Discourses, in Kierkegaard, Without Authority, 3.
6 This
is indicated, according to Kierkegaard (184-85), by Socrates’
assertion that sons should not necessarily be taught by their fathers,
as was traditional, but by whoever was most competent.
7 This follows, according to Kierkegaard (193-94), from the fact
that in remarking on the closeness of the vote by which he was
condemned Socrates indicates his exclusive concern for the beliefs
of people as individuals and his utter indifference to the “opinion”
of the Council as a whole.
8 The imagery of “bonds” refers to the imagery of the Cave in
Republic, 7.514A-515D.
9
Cf. Symp. 210E; Rep. 515E; and Ep. 7.341D.
10
For subsequent uses of this notion of a “clearing in existence,”
see Heidegger, Being and Time, 171 (and n. 2), 214, 401; and
Voegelin, “Anxiety and Reason,” in Collected Works, 28.87.
11
Cf. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 362f; Lonergan, Method in
Theology, 22f; and Insight: A Study of Human Understanding,
33-46, 309-15; and Polanyi, Knowing and Being, 117f.
2
Cf. the appended “Publication Schedule of Selected Works of
Søren Kierkegaard.”
3
The term opbyggelig is variously rendered as “edifying” (W F.
.
Lowrie) or “upbuilding” (H. V and E. A. Hong). The latter, more
.
recent, translation is preferred as implying a more broadly existential development of life than a merely intellectual growth.
12
Voegelin, “Reason: the Classic Experience,” in Collected Works,
12.277, 272 (emphasis added). For an introduction to Voegelin’s
thought, see Webb, Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History; Sandoz,
The Voegelinian Revolution; and Sinnett, Eric Voegelin and the
Problem of Theological Paradox.
13
Voegelin, “What Is Political Reality?” in Anamnesis, 148.
14
“Reason,” 271.
�34
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
15
Ibid.
16
Voegelin, “The Gospel and Culture,” in Collected Works, 7.175.
17
The importance of Symposium for Kierkegaard is demonstrated
by his extensive discussion of it in The Concept of Irony and by his
use of it as a model for his own “banquet” dialogue, “In Vino
Veritas,” in Stages on Life’s Way. For an extended version of the
following discussion, see Sinnett, “Eric Voegelin and the Essence of
the Problem”; and Restoring the Conversation, ch. 3.
18 Similarly,
in Republic (515E-520A), the philosopher who seeks to
free the prisoners from their bonds is one who begins as a prisoner
himself, only to be mysteriously freed, forced to turn around,
dragged “by force up the ascent which is rough and steep . . . [and]
drawn out into the light of the sun.”
SINNETT
35
who find ourselves addressed and who are called upon to account
for what we are saying.”
24
Cf. Lowrie, Kierkegaard, 1.191f.
25
Cf. Diem, 187-88.
26
Cf. Symp. 215D-E.
27
Cf. Sinnett, Restoring the Conversation, Part 2.
28
Kierkegaard, Eighteen Edifying Discourses, 8-29.
29 The challenge that brings the “perplexed man” to this realization
is supplied in an excursus on the nature of faith (10-13) which
interrupts his meditations.
30
20
In Symposium the first speeches in praise of Erôs by Phaedrus
(178A-180B), Pausanias (180C-185E), and especially by
Eryximachus (185E-188E), variously praise the technai of sacrifice
and divination which reliably establish that “communion between
gods and men” which is the basis of the right order of society.
Cf. esp. “The Expectancy of Faith,” 15: “And if he does not
possess it, then I can be very helpful to him, because I will accompany his thoughts and constrain him to see that it is the highest
good. I will prevent it from slipping into any hiding place, so that
he does not become vague about whether he is able to grasp it or
not. With him, I will penetrate every anomaly until he, if he does
not possess it, has but one expression that explains his unhappiness,
namely, that he does not will it—this he cannot endure, and then he
will acquire it.”
21
31
Kierkegaard, “The Expectancy of Faith,” 23.
32
Cf. “A,” “Diapsalmata,” in Either/Or, 42-3, n. 90.
19 Kierkegaard, JP 6.6786 (Pap. 106 B 145) n.d., 1851, in the
Supplement to Eighteen Edifying Discourses, 488-89.
Cf. Symp. 178A-D: In response to Agathon’s request to have
Socrates sit next him in order that he might be able to share in “the
piece of wisdom” that “occurred” to him as he was entering the
banquet hall, Socrates denies that genuine wisdom is so easily, or so
directly, transmissible: “I only wish that wisdom were the kind of
thing one could share by sitting close to someone—if it flowed, for
instance, from the one that was full to the one that was empty, like
the water in two cups finding its level through a piece of wool.”
22 Cf.
Symp. 175D-E: “[If direct communication of wisdom was possible,] I’m sure I’d congratulate myself on sitting next to you, for
you’d soon have me brimming over with the most exquisite kind of
wisdom. My own understanding is shadowy, as equivocal as a
dream.”
23
Cf. Gadamer, “Plato’s Unwritten Dialectic,” in Dialogue and
Dialectic, 128: “In [Plato’s] dialogues we ourselves are the ones
(thanks to the lasting effect of Plato’s artful dialogical compositions)
33
Cf. “B,” Either/Or, 2.16: “The intellectual agility you possess is
very becoming to youth and diverts the eye for a time. We are
astonished to see a clown whose joints are so loose that all the
restraints of a man’s gait and posture are annulled. You are like that
in an intellectual sense; you can just as well stand on your head as
on your feet. Everything is possible for you, and you can surprise
yourself and others with this possibility, but it is unhealthy, and for
your own peace of mind I beg you to watch out lest that which is
an advantage to you end by becoming a curse. Any man who has a
conviction cannot at his pleasure turn himself and everything topsyturvy in this way. Therefore I do not warn you against the world but
against yourself and the world against you.” Compare this description of the poet by the Judge with Callicles’ description of Socrates
in Gorgias, 485A-C: “It is a fine thing to partake of philosophy just
for the sake of education, and it is no disgrace for a lad to follow it;
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
36
but when a man already advancing in years continues in its pursuit,
the affair, Socrates, becomes ridiculous; and for my part I have
much the same feeling towards students of philosophy as towards
those who lisp or play tricks. For when I see a little child, to whom
it is still natural to talk in that way, lisping or playing some trick, I
enjoy it, and it strikes me as pretty and ingenuous and suitable to
the infant’s age. . . . But when one hears a grown man lisp, or sees
him play tricks, it strikes one as something ridiculous and unmanly,
that deserves a whipping.”
34
Cf. Paul Shorey’s Loeb Classical Library edition of Republic,
2.34, n.d.
35
Cf. W Lowrie, “Translator’s Preface,” in Either/Or, 2 (1944), 19.
.
36
Cf. Kierkegaard, Eighteen Edifying Discourses, 31-48.
37
37
SINNETT
Publication Schedule of Selected Works
of Søren Kierkegaard
Pseudonymous (“Esthetic”) Works
20 Feb. 1843
Either/Or, I-II
edited by Victor Eremita
16 Oct. 1843
Repetition
by Constantin Constantius
Fear and Trembling
by Johannes de Silentio
Cf. Sinnett, ch. 10.
Signed (“Religious”) Works
16 May 1843
Two Upbuilding Discourses
16 Oct. 1843
Three Upbuilding Discourses
6 Dec. 1843
Four Upbuilding Discourses
5 Mar. 1844
Two Upbuilding Discourses
13 June 1844
Philosophical Fragments
by Johannes Climacus
17 June 1844
The Concept of Anxiety
by Virgilius Haufniensis
Prefaces
by Nicolaus Notabene
8 June 1844
Three Upbuilding Discourses
31 Aug. 1844
Four Upbuilding Discourses
30 April 1845
Stages on Life’s Way
published by Hilarius Bookbinder
29 April 1845
Three Discourses on Imagined
Occasions
27 Feb. 1846
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
by Johannes Climacus
27 Feb. 1846
“A First and Last Declaration,”
appended to Postscript
14 May 1849
Either/Or, I-II
edited by Victor Eremita
14 May 1849
The Lily in the Field and the Bird of
the Air: Three Devotional Discourses
�38
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
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Hartshorne, M. H. Kierkegaard Godly Deceiver: The Nature and
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Gouwens, D. J. Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker. Cambridge:
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________. Without Authority. Trans. and ed. H. V Hong and E. H.
.
Hong. Kierkegaard’s Writings. Vol. 18. Princeton: Princeton
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________. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers [JP]. Trans. and
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.
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Hannay, A. Kierkegaard. The Arguments of the Philosophers. Ed.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
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________. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. London:
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.
Smith, 1970.
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.
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.
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.
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________. Anamnesis. Trans. and ed. G. Niemeyer. Notre Dame:
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Ed. E. Sandoz. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
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Press, G. A., ed. Plato’s Dialogues: New Studies and Interpretations.
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________.Collected Works. Vol. 28: What Is History? and Other
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.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.
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.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
43
What It Means To Be Human:
Aristotle on Virtue and Skill
Corinne Painter
In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle argues very forcefully
that virtue and skill are distinct. Although a distinction
between virtue and skill can be seen as philosophically important in a number of ways,1 and despite the force with which
Aristotle argues for this distinction, it is nonetheless the case
that Aristotelian virtue runs the risk of being mistaken for a
sort of skill, and vice versa. In fact, Aristotle’s lengthy
argument for their distinction suggests that he was aware that
this risk existed. The likely reason for such a mistake is that
virtue and skill to some extent share two important qualities:
each has a necessary connection with the knowledge of how
to do something and the exercise of each is connected to a
desired end that is taken to be of distinctive “value.”2
Moreover, because of these “shared qualities” it is even
possible to associate both virtue and skill with happiness,
since knowledge of how to do those things that we take to be
of value, i.e., those things that are connected to our desired
ends, is usually considered an essential ingredient of a happy
life. To speak more generally, it is even understandable to
conceive of the virtuous person as the one who has mastered
“the art—the skill—of living,” indeed as the one who knows
how—has the requisite skills—to do whatever he or she
deems is necessary to bring about a fulfilled and satisfying
life. In this case, it would seem to follow that exactly those
persons who possess this so-called “skill of living” will enjoy
the happy life.
In this essay, I will carefully reconstruct Aristotle’s
argument for the distinction between virtue and skill, in
order to bring out why he argues for it. In so doing, I will
Corinne Painter is a visiting Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
44
attempt to show that this crucial distinction is intimately
bound up with Aristotle’s conception of the essential relationship between virtue and happiness. Toward this end, I
will first examine the key claims that attempt to establish the
distinction between virtue and skill, which appear in Book 2,
chapter 4 and Book 6, chapter 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics,3
and, second, I will consider Aristotle’s account of the
relationship between virtue and happiness, which we find
within various chapters in Book 1. Finally, I will conclude by
arguing that because of the distinctive nature of virtue, which
serves to separate it in fundamental ways from skill, and
which links it to the distinctive nature of being human, and
because of the distinctive nature of happiness, which characterizes the way of life of those human beings who live most
excellently, virtue alone is a prerequisite for attaining happiness in the full Aristotelian sense.
Virtue and Skill
In Book 2, chapter 4 as well as in Book 6, chapter 5 of
the NE, Aristotle argues that the exercising of virtue is
not analogous to the exercising of skill. Aristotle firmly establishes virtue’s distinction from skill by offering several
related arguments that show how the two activities are
fundamentally different. One argument for their distinction is
that while what might be called the “value”—or, more appropriately, the “being-well-made”4—of a product of skill is
independent of the actual ability (skill-level) of its producer,
so that the value of such a product is the same regardless of
how (e.g., by accident) or by whom (e.g., an unskilled laborer) it is produced, the “value” or the “being-well-made” of a
virtuous act depends on whether it is done virtuously, on
whether, that is, the person performing the act is virtuous or
not. As Aristotle states in a central passage in Book 2:
It is not the same in the case of the arts as with the
virtues, for the things that come into being by
means of the arts have their being-well-made in
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45
themselves, [so that] it is sufficient for these
[i.e. the products] to come into being in a certain
condition. But with the things that come about as
a result of the virtues, just because they themselves
are a certain way it is not the case that one does
them justly or temperately, but only if the one
doing them also does them being a certain way:
if one does them first of all knowingly, and next,
having chosen them and chosen them for their
own sake, and third, being in a stable condition
and not able to be moved all the way out of it.
(1105a27-35, emphasis mine)
A second, closely related reason for maintaining that virtue
and skill are distinct lies in the latter’s necessary connection
to external results as compared to virtue’s connection not to
external results or achievements, but rather to the internal
source from which acts done in accord with virtue5 are
generated, namely, acting virtuously or being virtuous; for
according to Aristotle, “the end of making is different from
itself, but the end of action could not be, since acting well—
virtuously—is itself the end” (1140b6-7). In appealing to the
differing ends of making or exercising skill and acting well or
exercising virtue, this passage intimates that for Aristotle one
of the primary ways in which virtue and skill are distinct
involves the motivation or reason for exercising a skill in
comparison to the motivation or reason for exercising a
virtue.
Interestingly, in emphasizing the distinction in the ends,
this passage in a sense binds together the first and second
ways in which virtue and skill are said to be distinct one from
another. It should be clear that Aristotle holds that one exercises a skill in order to bring about or produce a good that is
other than or distinct from the activity by which it is brought
about, so that skills are not exercised simply for the sake of
themselves. Skills, then, in Aristotle’s view, are intimately
related to the distinctive products that they are responsible
for bringing into being. Virtue, however, is engaged in for the
�46
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
sake of itself and not simply for the sake of bringing about
another good that is wholly distinct from itself,6 which it is
said to “produce.” Thus, in connection with the first
argument, we may reaffirm that the “value” of exercising a
skill is determined on the basis of evaluating the worth of the
product of the skill rather than on evaluating either its
producer or the process by which it came to be produced. In
contrast, the value of virtue lies primarily in its exercise,
which is dependent upon the character of the person
performing the virtue and not simply on its “result.” As
Aristotle himself claims, “it is possible to produce something
literate by chance or by being advised by someone else”
(1105a23-24, emphasis mine), whereas this is not possible in
the case of virtue (1105a27). In connection with this, it may
be instructive to appeal to Aristotle’s discussion in Book 1 of
the possibility of engaging in an activity either for the sake of
itself or for the sake of some thing other than itself. While
exercising virtue belongs to the former sort, according to
Aristotle, exercising a skill belongs to the latter, and, given
that the former kind of activity “is more complete (teleion)
than an activity pursued on account of something else”
(1097a31-33), exercising virtue is more complete than
performing a skill. Later, I will return to this point in order
to argue why virtue is essential to happiness while skill is not.
A third and equally important way in which virtue is
distinct from skill can be formulated thus: skills are abilities
that stem from knowing how to do something, such that the
“knowing how” has (at some point) been satisfactorily
demonstrated in practice, whereas virtues are firm and stable
character traits of an agent, indeed, active conditions of the
soul. This suggests that, although it is possible for one to have
a skill and not exercise it even in a situation in which its exercise is called for, it is impossible for a person to possess a
virtue and knowingly fail to exercise it, given the proper
circumstance and barring any exceptions.7 Thus, in the case
of skill, Aristotle writes, “these things [i.e., choosing the act
for its own sake as well as performing the act from a firm and
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47
unshakable condition] do not count, except the mere
knowing, but for having the virtues, the knowing is of little
or no strength, while the other conditions have not a little but
all the power” (1105b1-4, emphasis mine). Here we can see
that for Aristotle, possessing virtue, which is to say, acting in
accord with virtue, is a “taller task” than possessing a skill.
As an example of this, one can properly be characterized
as a skilled basketball player if one has satisfactorily demonstrated in practice that one knows how to play basketball
well, so that if the skilled player chooses not to play in
perfect playing conditions, he will not lose his status as a
skilled player. In contrast, one may not be properly characterized as virtuous, as possessing, e.g., the virtue of courage,
just in case one has demonstrated in practice that one “knows
how” to hit the middle mark between cowardice and rashness
that courage, as the mean condition between these two
(vicious) extremes of deficiency and excess, is said to represent. Rather, in addition to “knowing how” to be courageous,
whenever the conditions call for courage, the virtuous person
will actively and willingly choose to be courageous from out
of a firm and unshakable character. To put this in the words
of another scholar, “unlike skills, virtues are entrenched
character traits that one cannot turn on and off as one
pleases. Virtues are always on, so to speak, and if one fails to
perform virtuous acts, it is either because one has encountered an exception or because one is not [really] virtuous.”8
The discussion of the conditions that must be met in
order for an action to be properly characterized as virtuous
brings us to a fourth way in which Aristotle attempts to establish that virtue and skill are distinct. Although it is preferable
for the skilled person to make mistakes willingly, so that the
mistakes are not made accidentally or unintentionally, as this
would certainly call into question the actual skill, it is
“better” if the practically wise person—i.e., the virtuous
person—make mistakes only accidentally and not knowingly,
especially as one cannot purposefully behave nonvirtuously
and remain virtuous. Aristotle claims, in fact, that “in art
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
someone who makes an error willingly is preferable, while in
connection with practical judgment this is worse, as it is in
connection with the virtues” (1140b24-27).
Thus far we have discovered that the following conditions must be met in order for an act to be rightfully called
virtuous: (1) it must be done with knowledge, that is to say,
knowingly, (2) it must be freely chosen for its own sake, and
(3) it must stem from a firm and unshakable character. Given
these conditions, we must attempt to understand what
Aristotle might mean when he claims that it is “better” if the
virtuous person make mistakes only accidentally rather than
knowingly or willingly. For on the basis of what we have
discovered, it would seem that virtue cannot be exercised
erroneously, unwillingly, or accidentally. Aristotle in fact
states repeatedly (e.g., at 1111b5-7, 1113b4-6, 1114b29) that
this is the case. Consequently, what renders virtuous acts
“better” or “more valuable” than those acts “performed by
accident” or “in error” cannot be that virtuous acts are
performed intentionally and with knowledge. Indeed,
virtuous acts are always and in the strictest sense voluntary
acts of choice9 for Aristotle, and thus they simply cannot be
performed accidentally10 or unwittingly by a person who
lacks the virtue in question.11
Consequently, even though action comes first, virtue
grows out of it, so that truly virtuous action can only come
about after the formation of virtue occurs, through repeated
actions. In this connection, Aristotle writes “active states
[e.g., virtue] come into being from being at work in similar
ways. Hence it is necessary to make our ways of being at
work be of certain sorts, for our active states follow in accordance with the distinctions among these” (1103b23-25).12
This passage indicates that while a person may unwittingly
perform an act that could be said to “look like” or “imitate”
a virtuous act, and while he must willingly attempt such acts
in order to become virtuous, strictly speaking, Aristotle
would not permit us to characterize these acts as virtuous
until they are the result of an active virtuous character at
PAINTER
49
work. It is for this reason that he writes: “while actions could
be called [e.g.] just or temperate whenever they are the sorts
of things that a just or temperate person would do, the one
who does them is not just or temperate unless he also does
them in the way that just and temperate people do them”
(1105a29-b9, emphases mine). Admittedly this passage most
directly thematises the conditions that must be met in order
for a person to be correctly called virtuous. Nevertheless,
I submit that it at the same time shows that unless an act is
performed by such a person, it is at best a virtuous act “in
name only,” but it is not truly virtuous, given that it is not
performed by one who does it while “being in a certain way”
(1104b32).13
Furthermore, we must reject the notion that virtuous
action can be the result of an intentionally performed
mistake, as seems possible in the case of exercising a skill. For
in the case of skill, it seems at least possible that the skilled
person can actually demonstrate skill by intentionally making
a “mistake” in the performance of the skill. For example, the
skilled person might intentionally make a different product
than is expected, or may intentionally proceed differently as
he or she exercises the skill. Interestingly, both cases reveal
that “intentional mistakes”—“willing deviations,” if you
prefer—could be ways to display skill rather than call it into
question, especially since such deviations point to the skilled
person’s ability to exercise skill creatively. Alternatively, to
intentionally err in hitting the middle mark between the vices
of excess and deficiency that virtue is said to consist in does
not produce virtuous action, it produces precisely the opposite, namely, vicious action. Indeed, it is not only impossible
for the virtuous person to demonstrate a virtuous character
by accidentally hitting the middle mark, since a virtuous act
must be performed knowingly, it is also impossible to
willingly stray from hitting the middle mark between the
vices of excess and deficiency and still act in accord with
virtue, for to act virtuously requires that one deliberately hit
the appropriate middle mark.
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Finally, then, the claim that prompted us to consider what
Aristotle could mean when he suggested that it is “better” for
a virtuous person to make a mistake accidentally rather than
on purpose is meant to point out not whether the knowing,
deliberate and intentionally chosen virtuous act is better than
the accidentally or erroneously performed virtuous act;
rather, this claim is meant to highlight a fundamental distinction between virtue and skill, namely, that while it is possible
and even preferable for the skilled person to err in the exercise of skill willingly, since this could be a way to demonstrate
skill, to do so in the case of virtue has the opposite effect, as
it brings to a crashing halt the possibility of acting in accord
with virtue.
Virtue and Happiness
Having considered the central Aristotelian arguments for the
distinction between virtue and skill, we are now in a position
to consider the special relationship that Aristotle claims exists
between virtue and happiness, so as to show that only virtue
is a prerequisite for attaining happiness in the full Aristotelian
sense.
Notwithstanding the sense in which the exercise of virtue
is to be understood as an activity whose goodness lies in its
very doing, as argued earlier,14 if we are to fully understand
how Aristotle conceives of virtue, we must not make the
mistake of claiming that virtue remains completely untied to
any good or activity that is distinct from itself. For as we learn
in Book 1 of the NE, virtue in its very essence is linked to
human happiness, which is not to be identified with virtue but
should be understood as the proper end of virtue. This is to
say that virtue functions as the means for achieving the end
of human happiness (1097b5-6), which constitutes the
ultimate good for human beings, as it is the only good that
is sought only for its own sake and never for the sake of
another good, whereas virtue, in contrast, is chosen both for
its own sake and for the sake of bringing about happiness
(1097b1-8).
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Indeed, happiness, as we will see shortly, is not a fluctuating, fleeting, temporary, circumstance-dependent, or
incomplete good or activity, as are all other goods and a
ctivities to some extent, including moral virtue, about which
Aristotle states that as great as virtue is, “even it seems too
incomplete” (1095b30-33) to be awarded the role of the
highest and most complete good. No doubt this is hardest to
understand in the case of virtue; as we have taken great care
to show, it would be incorrect to characterize the truly virtuous person as being virtuous in a merely fluctuating, fleeting,
or temporary manner. In addition to the passages we considered earlier, which show quite clearly the stable and
unwavering nature of the virtuous character as well as of the
action that comes from such a character, Aristotle, speaking
of moral virtue in Book 1, confirms virtue’s stable
nature, claiming that “in none of the acts of human beings is
stability present in the same way it is present in ways of being
at work in accordance with virtue” (1100b12-14). Notwithstanding virtue’s stability, we must also admit that the actual
exercise of any particular virtue is connected to certain
conditions that present themselves within the context of varying circumstances. For virtue as a whole is itself “divided,”
that is to say, it breaks up into many kinds—e.g., courage,
temperance, patience, generosity, justice—each of which is
called for in a particular situation, given certain circumstances, but none of which alone is enduring, self-sufficient,
complete, or final. In this connection, it is instructive to
consider what Aristotle writes in the context of discussing the
distinction between moral virtue and the intellectual virtue of
contemplation: “a just person still needs people toward
whom and with whom he will act justly, and similarly with
the temperate and the courageous person and each of the others” (1177a32-34). Here we see rather clearly that the particular virtues are not always performable, as certain external
conditions, over which the actor has no or very little control,
must be met in order for their performance to take place.
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In contradistinction to virtue, happiness is an active
(1100b19-20), enduring and permanent (1100b18), self-sufficient (1097b8-9), complete (1097b1-2; b20-21), and final
way of life (1100b34, 1101a8); for happiness is the “thatfor-the-sake-of-which” every other activity is ultimately
performed (1097b5-7; 1102a2-3). Happiness does not need
particular external circumstances or conditions in order to be
exhibited; once one’s life has earned the “right” to be
characterized as happy, that life exhibits happiness at each
and every moment (1100b21-22). Indeed, happiness is the
active condition—the constant being-at-work of the soul—
that describes or defines the way of living of the excellent
human being. More specifically, happiness characterizes the
kind of life that is lived by those who are able to live excellently, which is to say, by those who exercise moral virtue
regularly (1098a15-17; 1099b5-7; 1101a15; 1102a4-5), in
the varied and distinct ways that are called for on the basis of
the specific circumstances with which one is faced at different
intervals in one’s life.15 In this way, happiness characterizes
the whole of the virtuous person’s life, while the exercise of
moral virtue characterizes the way in which the virtuous
person responds to each individual practical situation with
which he or she is confronted, where the exercise of such
virtue constitutes the means by which the happy life comes
into being (1099b17). “[T]he virtue of a human being,”
Aristotle writes, “would be the active condition from which
one becomes a good human being and from which one will
yield up one’s own work well” (1106a24-25, emphases
mine).16 This passage highlights the sense in which the exercise of virtue yields or brings about a good that is distinct
from itself, to put it simply, the good—the happy—life, albeit
certainly not in the same sense in which the exercise of a skill
produces a “product.”
In order to better understand the relationship between
virtue and happiness, particularly how the former is said to
bring about the latter, as well as why happiness is ultimately
that condition of being for the sake of which we do every-
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thing else, it may be instructive to remember that according
to Aristotle while virtue is “praiseworthy” (1101b13-15;
b32), “happiness is . . . the prize of virtue . . . the highest end
and something divine and blessed” (1099b15-18, emphases
mine). Acknowledging both the supremacy of happiness that
this passage suggests as well as its status as the “prize of
virtue” allows us to go a long way towards understanding the
special place that happiness occupies in the thought of
Aristotle, as well as how he conceives of virtue’s relation to it.
If we add to this our recognition of what we noted earlier,
namely (a) Aristotle’s claim that “no one chooses happiness
for the sake of . . . anything else at all” (1097b6-7), (b) his
claim that happiness is complete and self-sufficient (1097b2021), together with (c) his related claim that happiness constitutes the only good to which nothing may be “added” in
order that it become “better,” given that happiness is lacking
in nothing (1097b14-21), then it becomes clear why happiness is characterized as that condition of being towards which
all human activity ultimately aims and beyond which there is
nothing else.
At this point we have recounted how Aristotle establishes
that happiness is the final “that-for-the-sake-of-which” all
other human activity ultimately aims; so also have we
elucidated its completeness, self-sufficiency, and permanence.
But in order to bring our consideration to its proper end, we
must say more clearly why Aristotle claims that happiness
characterizes the most excellent human life, for as Aristotle
himself admits, “perhaps to say that the highest good is
happiness is . . . something undisputed, while it still begs to
be said in a more clear and distinct way what happiness is”
(1097b22-24). Here, we would do well to follow Aristotle’s
lead and elucidate what it is about virtue that causes it and
not skill to serve as the means for becoming happy. Indeed
Aristotle suggests that if we “examine virtue . . . we might get
a better insight into happiness” (1102a7-8), and, thus, into
the life of human excellence.
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If we are to discover what kind of life is most excellent for
man as distinct from all other living creatures, we will have to
determine what work is distinctive to him and his unique way
of being (1097b25f). In a central passage about this in Book
1, Aristotle maintains:
If we set down that the work of a human being is
a certain sort of life, while this life consists of a
being-at-work of the soul and actions that go
along with reason, and it belongs to a man of serious stature to do these things well and beautifully,
while each thing is accomplished well as a result of
the virtue appropriate to it—if this is so, the
human good comes to be disclosed as a being-atwork of the soul in accordance with virtue.
(1098a12-17)
From this passage we get a clear statement of just how
uniquely special virtue is, since we are told without ambiguity that virtue consists in the “being-at-work” of the human
soul who lives its life and acts in accord with reason in the
most beautiful and best way. That such a life, i.e., the
virtuous life, is the most beautiful and best for man, that it is
the way in which man shows forth his unique way of being in
the way that he ought—for this is what is meant when we
claim that something is “best”—immediately leads us to link
virtue to the good life for man, whatever this turns out to be.
But if we are led to make the connection between virtue and
the good life for man, then given what we know about
happiness, we should be compelled to further understand
both (a) that the good life for man is nothing else than the life
of happiness, and thus (b) that virtue is therefore linked to
happiness. For indeed, happiness, according to Aristotle, is
that condition of being that characterizes the human life of
excellence, that is to say, the life of virtue.
Notwithstanding the clarity we have gained concerning
the nature of happiness, one last step must be made if we are
to understand why Aristotle does not think that skill plays an
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essential role in securing the life of happiness. Toward this
end, we should not forget that unlike virtue, skill is less
stable and less complete than virtue, since (a) skills seem to be
performed, or not, according to the “moods” of the skilled
person, which are easily changeable, and (b) skills are never
exercised for the sake of themselves but only for the sake of
the distinctive products that they produce. Alternatively,
whenever virtue is called for it is exercised, and, moreover, it
is exercised both for the sake of itself and for the sake of
happiness. Thus, given that exercising virtue is a more stable
and complete activity than exercising skill, naturally it will be
a better candidate for the role of securing happiness, even if
only because it is a more reliable and satisfying activity. If,
then, we understand the reasons why exercising virtue brings
about the life of happiness, we should immediately understand why exercising skill does not. For virtue secures the life
of happiness because (1) it is that activity on account of which
“people become apt at performing beautiful actions”
(1101b32-3), (2) it allows one “to live well and act well”
(1098b24), and especially, (3) it is the way in which man, as
man, does what he ought to do and is how he ought to be.
But skill, in stark contrast, neither makes one apt to perform
beautiful actions (inasmuch as skill can also be connected to
knowing how to perform ugly actions) nor makes one live
and act well (since skills bear no necessary association, for
Aristotle, with living or acting well). Furthermore, while the
exercising of skill allows one to demonstrate a special ability
to perform a particular act or to make a particular product,
as our earlier consideration of skill should have made apparent, there is nothing about skill that suggests that it allows
one to do or be what one ought to do or be as a human being.
Consequently, since the life of happiness constitutes the
fullest expression of the most excellent human life, which is
to say the human life that is in the best and fullest way what
it ought to be most essentially, skill will not be ableto to get
ithe job done, so to speak. Indeed, the only virtue can fulfill
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this important task, which is nothing short of the human project itself.
Notes
1
For instance, contemporary ethical theorists may employ
Aristotle’s arguments for the distinction between virtue and skill to
support the general consensus that whatever moral virtues are, they
are not best conceived as skills. However, although the distinction
between virtue and skill is fairly widely maintained in the Ethics
literature, some scholars argue against a (strong) distinction, including Julia Annas, Paul Bloomfield, and Robert Roberts. See: Julia
Annas, “Virtue as a Skill” in International Journal of Philosophical
Studies, Vol. 3 (2), 1995: 227-43; Paul Bloomfield, “Virtue
Epistemology and the Epistemology of Virtue” in Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, Vol. 60, No. 1, 2000: 23-43, as well as
Moral Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and
finally, Robert C. Roberts, “Will Power and the Virtues” in Robert
B. Kruschwitz and Robert C. Roberts, eds., The Virtues:
Contemporary Essays on Moral Character (Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth, 1987): 121-136.
In addition to the relevance of this distinction within ethics,
Aristotle’s arguments for the non-identity of virtue and skill can
also be of use within contemporary debates in epistemology. In fact,
the movement referred to as “virtue epistemology” has as one of its
primary goals to call in to question the paradigmatic status that
perceptual knowledge has enjoyed in the tradition, by showing how
something like Aristotelian virtue is necessary for knowledge. The
scholarship that discusses the connection between virtue and
knowledge, or “virtue epistemology,” is extensive, and thus I will
not give a listing of sources here, except to mention that the literature includes work from scholars such as Robert Audi, Lorraine
Code, Alvin Goldman, Alvin Plantinga, Ernest Sosa, and Linda
Zagzebski (just to mention a few). For quick reference to an introductory essay on virtue epistemology, I refer the reader to an
article published on the world wide web, which can be found at the
following address: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemologyvirtue. Especially impressive is this article’s extensive bibliography,
which offers many references to works that deal with the question
of the connection between virtue and knowledge.
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2
Shortly, I will discuss my employment of the term “value” in this
context, as it is in need of explanation.
3 All
references to the Nicomachean Ethics (except where the translations are my own) are from: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics,
Translation, Glossary, and Introductory Essay by Joe Sachs
(Newburyport, Mass.: Focus Publishing/R. Pullins Company,
2002). Hereafter, in this essay, the text will be referred to as NE.
4
Aristotle never really speaks of “value” when discussing the
“being-well-made” or the excellency of a thing or an act, but as we
can easily understand what is in a significant sense at issue here for
Aristotle, namely, what makes a product or a virtuous act “full of
worth,” by using the English term “value,” I have chosen to include
it in my explanation of the text.
5
Not incidentally, a closer translation of the Greek demonstrates
that Aristotle never uses the phrase “virtuous action” or “virtuous
act”; rather, he uses always “action resulting from (or, in accord
with) virtue.”
6
Although later, in the second part of my paper, in the context of
considering the special relationship between virtue and happiness, I
will discuss how virtue is also exercised for the sake of bringing
about happiness, as it is the means for securing the happy life.
7
In order to respond to a possible objection to this strict view—
which many scholars advance against Aristotle’s “virtue ethics”—
we should acknowledge that Aristotle does not rule out the possibility that the virtuous person might, in some, very infrequent and
exceptional cases, fail to act virtuously. These cases would likely
only include, however, the following scenarios: (1) the virtuous
person is deceived by others; (2) the virtuous person accidentally
(i.e., non-willingly and unknowingly) makes an error in determining how to attain the virtuous end; and possibly, (3) different
virtues prescribe incompatible actions.
8 This formulation comes from a paper delivered by Heather
Battaly at the Northwest Philosophy Conference held at Lewis and
Clark University, Portland, Oregon (October 2002), entitled “Linda
Zagzebski and Aristotle on the Distinction between Virtues and
Skills.”
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9
Aristotle distinguishes between willing acts and chosen acts,
claiming that while chosen acts are always willing (voluntary) acts,
chosen acts cover a narrower range (1112a15-16), since they
involve greater capacities (1111b8-18ff), most especially, the capacity to “reason and think things through” (1112a16). For a fuller
discussion of what is involved in choice, especially its connection to
deliberation, see Book 3, chapters 2 and 3.
10
This is also the case for vicious acts (see: 1113b6-15ff and
1114b21-25).
11
In this connection it might be helpful to remember Aristotle’s
discussion of the praiseworthiness of virtuous acts and the blameworthiness of vicious acts (which actually begins in Book 2 and is
filled out in Book 3). This discussion strengthens his claim that
neither virtuous acts nor vicious acts are performed accidentally,
since people typically do not praise or blame persons for committing an act accidentally, without knowledge, intent, or choice.
12
For a fuller discussion of this, see 1103b7-26.
13
Recall the central passage quoted in its entirety early on in the
paper, for it directly confronts us with the strict conditions that
must be met in order for an act to be rightfully called virtuous.
14
There are in fact numerous passages in which Aristotle claims
that virtue is exercised for the sake of itself, some of which we
considered earlier, many more of which are dispersed throughout
the NE.
15 And this is to neglect mention of the practice of contemplation,
which also figures into the happy life, and which is, according to
Aristotle, unlike the exercise of moral virtue, “the only activity that
is loved for its own sake, for nothing comes from it beyond the contemplating, while from things involving action [e.g., moral virtue]
we gain something for ourselves, to a greater or lesser extent,
beyond the action” (1177b3-5).
16
Some scholars might object to the use of the words “yield up,”
preferring the more usual translation of “perform,” but in agreement with Joe Sachs, I submit that “yield up” better captures the
true sense of Aristotle’s meaning: to give back a return on one’s
effort.
59
Kant’s Afterlife
Eva Brann
“Better late than never” is the motto of this review. The work
known as Kant’s Opus Postumum occupied him during the
last fifteen years of his working life, from 1786 to 1801. (He
died at 80 in 1804.) The first English translation, which
underlies this review, was published in 1993. The first
German printing began in bowdlerized form in a Prussian
provincial journal in 1882.
1882—that is the year after Michelson and Morley
carried out their epoch-making experiment in search of the
ether wind that must sweep over the earth if it indeed travels
through space filled with some sort of observable matter. It
had a dramatic null result. The ether, however, had a huge
role in Kant’s final project—final in both senses: last and
eschatological. Whether Kant’s ether is in principle amenable
to experiment or not is, to be sure, problematic; nonetheless
there is, to my mind, a certain pathos to the posthumous
work’s first publishing date, a pathos over and above the fact
that it took nearly a century to appear.
Eckart Förster’s English edition of 1993 (which I should
have studied ten years ago) is both an ordering and a selection. Kant left a manuscript, its pages covered in small tight
writing with even tinier marginalia, of 527 sheets (1161 pages
in the great Prussian Academy edition). The unnumbered
leaves had at one time evidently been dropped on the floor—
It was a labor to arrange and date them, a task mainly
performed by Ernst Adickes in 1916, and then to make the
Immanuel Kant. Opus Postumum. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
Eckart Förster. Translated by Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen. The
Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993.
Eckart Förster. Kant’s Final Synthesis: An Essay on the Opus Postumum.
Cambridge, Mass.: The Harvard University Press, 2000.
Ms. Brann is a tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis.
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work accessible by judicious selection, which is what Förster
has done in the Cambridge edition. The latter effort was
called for by the character of Kant’s writing—and, evidently,
thinking—which is obsessively repetitive, ever circling about
the issues in the terminological German of the Critiques
glossed by formulaic Latin, only to explode suddenly into
astounding new resolutions.
But then, this whole post-Critical legacy is astonishing. In
1790, Kant declared in his third Critique, the Critique of
Judgment, that here “I conclude my entire Critical enterprise”
(¶ 170). Only the dependent metaphysical doctrine was to be
worked out, that is, the system of a priori cognitions that
are implied in the Critical foundations. But almost simultaneously finished business turned into unfinished business.
People who first saw the discombobulated manuscript put
about the rumor of Kant’s senility. On the contrary: If in the
three Critiques we see everything fall into its systematic
“architectonic” place, in the Opus Postumum we see the
foundations of the edifice broken open in the attempt to
make the system more encompassing. Not that Kant is
countermanding any major postulate of the Critical system
but rather that, in the effort to specify it, to make embodied
nature and man fall out from it, he opens up its abysses, not
only for the enthralled reader but, palpably, for himself—
though the one chasm he steps over without the slightest
regard is, to my mind at least, the most abysmal one; more of
that below. In any case, during the last years, before he
stopped writing, Kant seems to have returned not to a second
childhood but to a second vigor, to the searching modes of his
pre-Critical years.
Here I want to insert a personal note. Why ever, I ask
myself, did it take me so long to come to this remarkable
work, especially when I was trying to think about Kantian
topics: imagination, time, memory, and nonbeing? Well, I
sought help in the Critiques and then elsewhere, in Aristotle,
Plotinus, Augustine, Russell, Meinong, Husserl. Of the Opus
Postumum only one—unforgettable—fragment had penetrat-
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ed to me: “I, the Proprietor of the World.” It should have
been intimation enough that the Critiques were—possibly—
being transcended.
To me Kant had never been primarily the systematician,
whose thinking was a relentlessly unificatory construction
and whose expression was an intricate terminological rococo.
He was rather the philosopher who, more than the selfavowed tightrope dancer Nietzsche, built his edifice over an
abyss. I found this the more absorbing since Kant seemed to
me the soul of probity, a philosopher of originality and
rectitude, the rarest of combinations in a vocation whose
business ought to be not novelty but truth, though it has
occasionally incited its professors to the self-exaltation of
invention and the blue smoke of mystification. Kant is the
man who reconceived philosophy as work (in the essay “On
a Refined Tone Recently Raised in Philosophy,” 1796). Yet in
that sober mode he works himself late in life into strange new
territories. Förster, to be sure, ends his book by saying that it
is a futile exercise to speculate on the ultimate—
unachieved—destination of this last phase. But to me this
speculation, though it may well be beyond the reach of
scholarship, has a particular attraction: Do these late second
sailings, to be found, for example, in Homer (Odyssey), Plato
(Laws), Shakespeare (e.g., Cymbeline), Jane Austen (the
unfinished Sanditon), as well as in the great musicians,
express a necessary development implicit in the work of their
floruits or novel, adventurous departures into terra incognita?
So as not to mystify the reader let me say here, for later
amplification, what seems to me the drift of the Opus
Postumum: It is a drift toward solipsism, the radical selfauthorship or “autogenesis” of the human subject and the
nature with which it surrounds itself.
Now to Kant’s work itself. My advice is to reverse good
St. John’s practice and to read Förster’s explication of the
Opus Postumum first. It is a conscientious and in places
brilliant introduction to what is, after all, an unwieldy,
unrevised and unfinished masterpiece.
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Since, however, the Opus Postumum takes off from the
three Critiques, particularly from the first, the Critique of
Pure Reason (A edition 1781, B edition 1786), I will give a
very stripped-down and tailored version for those few alumni who don’t perfectly recall that high point of their junior
year (1). Then, since I can make the attraction of the Opus
Postumum most plausible by listing the above-mentioned rifts
and chasms in the first Critique, I will articulate the global
perplexities that have always accompanied any local understanding I thought I had achieved (2). Then, with Förster’s
help, I shall give a brief sketch of the main topics of the Opus
Postumum (3), which I shall follow with a summary of the
way in which Kant’s last work confirms or reshapes or
resolves my perplexities (4). Finally I will attempt to say a
word about the work’s bearing on Kant’s afterlife in our
contemporary thinking (5).
1. Though Kant did not expect, while working on the first
Critique (which deals with theoretical reason as it constitutes
nature), to write a second Critique on practical reason (that
is, on moral action), it is arguable that his central concern is
all along with morality, with human reason as it causes deeds.
From that point of view, the mission of the first Critique is to
ground a system of deterministic nature in deliberate juxtaposition to the spontaneity of the freedom evinced by the
rational will when it acts as it ought, from duty. The realm of
nature is a system of necessary and universal rules which we
ourselves both constitute and cognize: We can know nature
with certainty because we are its authors. (The terms pertaining to this cognition itself rather than to its objects are called
“transcendental,” or almost synonymously, “Critical”:
concerned with the conditions that make knowledge possible.) Though the first Critique, as it finally appeared, has as
its positive consequence the grounding of experience, meaning the real knowledge of nature, its negative impact is to
clear a region for human freedom conceived as autonomy,
self-subjection to self-given law. Kant does this by showing
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that the theoretical understanding and the reason which
organizes it are strictly limited to human experience and incapable of dealing with transcendent questions except in terms
of “ideals” expressing the human need for completeness.
The crucial difficulty in establishing a sure and certain
knowledge of nature is for Kant the doubt cast by Hume on
causality: Cause is nowhere to be observed; we see constant
conjunctions of events but never necessary interconnections
among them. Kant’s answer, the crux of his solution, is that
we know our way through nature with complete certainty
because and insofar as we make it. Thus its laws are ours from
“the very first”—a priori.
Our cognitive constitution is twofold: by our understanding we think spontaneously (that is, originatingly, out of
ourselves) and also discursively (that is, by connecting
concepts), thereby unifying manifolds; by our sensibility we
are affected receptively by intuitions which are already given
as unities. The understanding is thus a formal, logical faculty
whose categories are adapted from a well-established
tradition. But these categories are empty grasps in the absence
of the pure material of the intuition to fill them, where
“pure” means unaffected by ordinary sensory influence.
To me this pure, pre-experiential sensibility and its pure,
non-sensory matter is Kant’s most original, not to say mindboggling, discovery (or invention—I am as perplexed about it
now as ever), for a sensibility is, after all, usually understood
to be a capacity for being affected by the senses. It has two
branches. The pure “inner” intuition is our sense of time. It
is pure because it is analytically prior to sensation. It is
“inner” because it is, in ways that become progressively more
unclear in the second edition of the Critique and in the Opus
Postumum, closer to our ego, called the “transcendental
apperception,” meaning the subject, the I that underlies every
object we present to ourselves. For that is what human
consciousness means for Kant: presenting objects to
ourselves. Self-consciousness or apperception is awareness of
the I that is putting this object before itself. It is that
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awareness which is said in the first Critique to represent itself
to us as a phenomenon in inner sense; we know ourselves as
pure egos when we attend to numerable time as it ticks away.
The corresponding outer sense is pure space. All we
intuit (except ourselves—so far) we give the form of space;
space is not formal (as is thinking) but formative. In this
pre-sensory sensorium we find externality within us. Or better, to assume the form of externality objects must be within
our receptive sensibility, together with the sensations that
give them their quality, the material manifold that gives them
body. Nothing could be more contrary to our ordinary sense
of things, where “outside” means precisely not within.
What is the purpose of this dizzying reversal, Kant’s
sequel to the Copernican revolution? That first revolution
made the sun stand still and our earth move, while this one
makes us again home base, though now the world moves to
our measure rather than to a divine maker’s plan. Kant’s
purpose is to bring causality from an outside world, where it
is objectively non-observable, into us where it is subjectively
an inherent necessity of our cognitive constitution.
There is a missing step in this sketch, the notoriously
fugitive “Schematism of the Pure Concept of the
Understanding” (B 176 ff.). It is the crux of the crux of the
positive Critique, and its brevity should warn us that something is the matter. Schematizing is the work of the imagination; it is not the capacity for fantasy but a “transcendental”
faculty, one that makes knowledge possible. It is, in its depths,
responsible for the mystery of conjoining the unconjoinable.
It effects this by bringing forth a general diagram (Kant calls
it a “monogram”) intended to draw together the absolutely
disparate effects of the formally functioning understanding
and the formatively receptive intuition. Thus time and space
are to be conceptualized or, if you like, the concepts of the
understanding are to be time- and space-affected.
Kant hurriedly carries out this “dry and boring dissection” for the case of time. For example, the concept of cause,
when time-imbued, becomes the necessary succession of one
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thing upon another according to a ruling concept. At this
moment the possibility of a causal science that has certainty is
grounded. (Here “possibility” does not refer to what might
happen but to that which enables knowledge to become real.)
Kant silently and completely omits the schematizing of
space. I had always supposed that, whatever difficulties I
might have, Kant thought it was too easy. I couldn’t have
been more wrong. Förster shows that it was too hard, and
thereby hangs the tale of the Opus Postumum (59).
2. First to me among those deep perplexities that gives the
Critiques their philosophical poignancy have been the space
puzzles already alluded to (the underprivileging of space in
the Schematism) along with other, related ones.
In the second edition of the first Critique Kant inserted a
sort of time bomb, the famous section called the “Refutation
of Idealism” (B 274, xxxix), in which he aimed to show
that time itself can only be perceived as a determined
phenomenon by us when observed against “something
permanent in space,” that is, against matter: “The consciousness of my own existence is at the same time a consciousness
of other things outside me” (B 276). Where, I ask myself, has
the first function of the “inner” sense gone? What is now
particularly internal about my self-perception?
But so is the very meaning of space as “outer sense” a
puzzle. Outerness seems to mean three things at once: It
means extension, the way a spatial dimension consists of parts
outside of each other, stretching away from themselves. It
means, second, externality, the way objects are experienced
as outside of the subject. And it means, third, outside and
“going beyond” us—the literal sense of “transcendent” (as
distinct from “transcendental”), though this is a region in
principle unreachable. For what we know, we know in us.
That is, after all, what Kant intends to show in the negative
part of the Critique, the “Transcendental Dialectic” which
exposes the illusions reason falls into in going beyond the
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limits of our experience”—and is thus the critique of pure
reason proper.
There is, second, a puzzle that arises incidentally from the
multivalence of Critical terms. The categories, Kant repeats
emphatically, have no being on their own and achieve meaning only as they grasp intuitive material. Take then the category of unity which imposes oneness on manifolds of sense.
There is, however, also the unity that reason strives for as an
ideal but can reach only illusorily. And there is “the synthetic
unity of apperception,” the unifying work of the subject deep
beneath appearance, its chief theoretical effect. Whence, we
might ask, does Kant get the notion of unity to begin with? Is
there not something suspect about this transcendental
notion—and others, for example, “thing”—which are necessary to establish the transcendental terms of the Critiques but
which are in traditional metaphysics terms of transcendence,
the attributes of Being that are beyond sensory experience?
How does Kant come to know these terms of Critical thought
that are antecedent to properly certified knowledge?
A third enigma is immediately connected with the space
puzzles. The dialectic of reason is intended to clear the decks
for human freedom and for the exercise of practical reason,
which expresses itself in deeds. But the system of nature
grounded in the positive part of the Critique is deterministic.
There are no loose joints. How then does moral action appear
in the natural world? How does it actually change events
determined by natural laws? How do we as moral beings
insert ourselves into, intervene in, nature? Further, where, in
fact, are we in the world as phenomenal, perceiving subjects?
In the Critique of Pure Reason there is matter, but no bodies,
human or natural—nor in the second Critique, that of
Practical Reason. The simultaneous actuality of moral deed
and natural events is a mystery: How does the practical
reason make our muscles do the right thing?
The fourth open question is this: How far is nature
specified by the Critical grounds and their ensuing principles?
Are the types of forces necessarily operating in nature
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specifiable, and are their mathematical laws determinable a
priori? How thoroughgoing are the grounds of possibility, or
in Kant’s terms: Can a complete metaphysical doctrine of
nature be worked out such as will descend to and determine
the actual laws of physics? But then, what of observation,
what of contingency? Is anything not under our own rules? Is
the world nothing but our mirror?
Thence arises the fifth question, truly a mystery. Whence
comes the matter of sensation which fills our space with its
quantities and qualities and reflects to us our time by being
the permanent material background against which motions
appear? Is the occasion for the appearance of this matter
infused into us transcendently, from beyond, or are we its
authors not only formally, formatively, but really, substantively? I would say that this is the most unregarded, the totally
unregarded, question in Kant’s writing—and in his thought as
well: Are we, after all, buffeted by transcendent influxes? Or
are we, when all has been worked out, shown to be our own
authors in every respect—which would be brute solipsism,
the philosophy of solus ipse “I alone, by myself ”? But then
what becomes of the ideal republic of mutually respectful
moral beings and of the real political community of embodied human beings? What access do we then have to each
other’s subjectivity?
Finally, the sixth problem, not of doctrine but of
argumentation: In the first Critique God is an ideal of reason,
a required hypothesis or postulate if we are to act morally, an
“as if ” representation whose existence is to us a necessary
thought though its actuality is provably unprovable. As Kant
works on the Opus Postumum the thought of a necessary God
is increasingly sharpened and the claim more pointed, as
shown in III: There are reasons that drive us to think that
God is necessary; thus God’s existence must be first postulated and then acknowledged as real. He is actual for us:
Est Deus in nobis, “There is a God—in us” (my dash and italics, O.P. 209, 248). And: “Everything that thinks has a God.”
That is to say, thinking requires a divinity and what thinking
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requires it must have—but only for the thinker. I simply
cannot make out whether this God really exists or is after all
what Kant himself would call a “subreption,” a surreptitious
rustling of Being by a needy reason, or perhaps some third
being I am too literal-minded to comprehend. To me it is
marvelous how scintillatingly ambiguous the severely systematic Kant really is at great junctures.
Whether the above items are enigmas, questions, problems, puzzles, they each open up abysmal depth for the
inquiry concerning human knowledge, action, and faith.
Except for the spectacularly absent fifth question, concerning
the origin of sensation and its stimulating matter, the Opus
Postumum will show Kant grappling with these problems,
sometimes only to focus them the more pressingly.
3. The early title of the Opus Postumum was “Transition from
the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science to Physics.”
The final title is “The Highest Standpoint of Transcendental
Philosophy in the System of Ideas: God, the World, and Man
in the World, Restricting Himself through Laws of Duty”
(Förster xliii). The distance between the titles betokens Kant’s
winding himself from system-driven, downward doctrinal
specification into ascending, comprehensive speculation. An
obvious question will be whether these speculations in the
main confirm or undermine the Critical enterprise. I want to
say here that either way it is a thrilling business. If the gaping
holes in the architecture of the system can be stopped and the
foundations reinforced, the edifice will surely be the more
magnificent and rivaled only by Hegel’s system. (I omit
Aristotle, not so much because his philosophizing historically
preceded the notion of philosophic system-making, but
because he would in any case have thought that first philosophy should be problem- rather than system-driven.) But if
Kant is impelled to let his own system implode the outcome
surely glows with the sober glory of thought outthinking
itself. In the event, it seems to be a little of both.
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The first question that has occupied students of the Opus
Postumum concerns the project of the title. Why was a transition needed, where was there a gap? The Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science of 1786 seemed to provide a
doctrinal transition from the general principles of the first
Critique (which ground the laws of action and reaction, of
causation in time and of the conservation of matter,
“Analogies of Experience,” B 218 ff.) to the specific
Newtonian Laws of Motion. That is to say, Kant has “constructed” these proto-laws, which means he has exhibited
them in the intuition so as to display their necessary characteristics. Why, then, does this transition require another
Transition?
Förster gives a thoroughly satisfying answer (59 ff.). As
we saw, the spatial schematization of the categories is missing
in the first Critique. The Metaphysical Foundation is in fact
this missing schematism, the spatialization of the categories;
I omit the details of Förster’s proof, but the argument is on
the face of it convincing. At this point matter comes in: Kant
must analyze empirical matter and its motion and then “construct” or “exhibit” the concept so obtained in space. (This is
an epicycle in the so-called Critical circle: Kant analyzes the
object, here matter, he intends to certify cognitively and then
provides its transcendental conditions of possibility.)
But in order for matter not just to occupy and traverse
space but to act dynamically (as it is empirically observed to
do), to compact itself into bodies capable of moving each
other, the forces of matter must be established. But forces are
not to be observed as appearances (as Hume insisted) and are
thus not constructable, that is, exhibitable as configurations in
the intuition. The Metaphysical Foundations do not succeed
in solving the problem of cohesive bodies (as opposed to
shapeless matter) held dynamically within their boundaries
and exercising attractive as well as repulsive force on each
other. Thus this metaphysical transition cannot present
physics with its basic concepts. A gap bars the way to the
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categories’ objective validity, that is, to their empirical applicability; the attempted schematism is incomplete.
So a large part of the early work on the Opus Postumum
is devoted to the Tantalus-labor of finding, a priori, the kinds
and ratios of forces that will underwrite our natural world of
dynamically moving cohesive bodies. Clearly Kant now
intends (or always did) for the Critical grounding to reach
very far into empirical, supposedly adventitious (unpredictable) cognition. We may wonder what will survive that
passage between the Scylla of complete systematicity and the
Charybdis of empirical science.
Now come the ether proofs, a huge and weighty presence
in the Opus Postumum. From a certain point on, Kant regards
it as established that ether (or caloric), an “imponderable,
incohesible, inexhaustible,” medium that is “universally
distributed, all-penetrating, and all-moving” (O.P. 98, 92) is
the condition of possibility of all the mechanical forces of
matter whose effects (if not they themselves) are apparent in
the making and the motions of bodies. Förster has lucidly
reconstructed the intricate essential proof from its many sites
and disparate approaches in the text (89 ff.). It is worth
attending to in spite of the negative Michelson-Morley ether
experiment of 1881, not merely because it makes vivid the
exigencies of the transcendental system (a system which
someone—not myself—might indeed regard as having merely historical interest), but because it is the result of a deep
meditation on the conditions of spatial experience.
To begin with, Förster points out that the Opus
Postumum reverses the first Critique on the source of the
unity of all appearances (84). In that Critique it was an ideal
of reason to bring unity into our necessarily piecemeal
perception. Then, in the third Critique, the Critique of
Judgment (1719), a new source of unity comes on the scene:
Nature herself is purposive and systematic. Under the
influence of this reversal from reason ideally unifying nature
to nature herself really unifying its forces into a system, a
strange new situation arises. (The ultimate possibility of its
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arising I would trace back, without having worked it out
sufficiently, to the above-mentioned ambivalence of the term
“unity” in the first Critique: Is unity a subjective function or
a transcendent characteristic of beings?) This situation is that
nature herself must now contain a priori principles of its
objective possibility; no longer are all a priori conditions of
experience in the subject.
Or are they? Förster is inclined to think that the ether, as
a condition of possibility of a system of nature (and hence of
its science, physics) is an ideal of our reason, hence subjective
(91-92). But he does not deny that Kant himself wavered and
sometimes speaks of the underlying medium as existing “outside the idea” (O.P. 82); this oscillating effect is not unlike
that of Kant’s treatment of God’s existence (see below).
The chief elements of the existence proof for the ether are
as follows. From the subjective side: Empty space is not
perceptible; a single space filled with moving forces is the
condition of the possibility of unified experience which is
knowledge of connected perceptions; hence we must form
the idea of an elementary material that is in space and time
and has the characteristics listed above; thus we get a subjective principle of the synthetic unity of possible experience
such as must underlie physics.
From the objective side: Nature is the complex of all
things that can be the objects of our senses and hence of
experience, and we do have experience of outer objects. But
experience requires that its objects form, for our judgments,
a system which has a necessary unity according to one
principle. The ether, distributed through space yet forming a
collective whole, is the one and only candidate for such a
system. Therefore, as making the whole of experience
possible, it is actual.
Thus the ether is a unique—and very peculiar—external
object that really exists in the—to my mind—oscillating way
of Kant’s existence proofs, which argue from the enabling
grounds of knowledge to the real existence of the object.
As a ground of possibility it is not itself perceptible or
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observable. Thus Kant might have replied to MichelsonMorley that, since the ether hypothesis was the condition of
all experiments, it was itself not falsifiable by experiment. But
they, as presumably positivist physicists, would have turned
this reply around and said that what is not falsifiable is not
positive knowledge. To me, too, the transcendental ether is,
as I said, illuminating less as a real ground of science than as
a reflection on the nature of our experience of space and its
contents. For isn’t it the case, after all, that the material ether
having been eradicated from physics, other fillers of space
had to be found, such as fields of force and geometric
conformations of space itself?
In any case, Kant considers that the specific dynamic
properties he assigns to his ether solve the problem of
systematizing the mechanical forces, attraction, repulsion,
cohesion, whose effects are mathematicized in the Newtonian
manner. The—surely superseded—details of this grounding
are obscure to me and I can summon interest in the argument
about them only insofar as they realize that “transition,”
announced in the early title of the Opus Postumum, from the
metaphysical doctrine of perceptible matter in motion to
bodies subject to an a priori determinable system of forces.
And now Kant realizes that a question looms that will
have made a reader of the Critique of Pure Reason and of the
ensuing Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science uneasy
all along: However does a scientist get wind of this now
systematically embodied nature? How does the subject come
to know its now exhaustively knowable external object?
This realization brings on a pivotal moment in the later
fascicles of the Opus Postumum, when the Selbstsetzungslehre,
the “doctrine of self-positing,” comes to the fore. Again,
Förster is a much-needed guide through the text (101-116).
The terms of the first Critique are, all in all, wellmarshalled—systematic and precise—within the work; it is
when we think beyond it that they become scintillatingly
obscure. We might worry that we are undercutting Kant’s
explicit intention in thus thinking outside the box. The later
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Opus Postumum shows us Kant doing it himself. One might
go so far as to say that the older he got the more radically he
thought (which, rightly considered, is the way it ought to be).
The late work reconsiders self-consciousness, at first in
the spirit of the Critique, but then in increasingly more
boldly enunciated ways. Everything begins with “I think,” the
self-recognition of the subject. It is a piece of mere logical
analysis (since no intuition is involved) by which I make
myself into an object to myself (O.P. 182). So stated this first
transcendental event makes me ask myself: Can so momentous a self-diremption, that of exercising my autonomy in
making myself into my own object, occur by a merely logical
act, the analysis of the meaning of “I think”? Doesn’t it
require some onto-logical activity? Kant answers this
question, though along Critical rather than metaphysical
lines. The first act can occur only together with a second one:
This is an act of synthesis, meaning one in which thought
grasps and unifies something given that goes beyond mere
logic—to begin with, pure time and space. In space and time
the subject posits itself, or better the subject posits itself as an
“I.” This is the doctrine of self-positing.
To appreciate how astounding this doctrine is we must
look at the notion of positing. For Kant, to posit is to assign
existence, the one and only way to realize existence (an
identification that goes way back to an essay on the proofs of
God’s existence of 1763). Thus in self-positing I bring myself
into existence. It is an act of self-creation. This way of putting
it tells me that existence is a subordinate condition depending on a somehow prior subject which is, however, itself
not—or is not knowable as—a being that has an essence, an
actuality, or, so far, personhood. The I-subject is a mystery
into which Kant himself proscribes inquiry in his critique of
dialectical reason.
So far, however, though I exist, I have not yet made it into
the natural world. This is where the ether does its service. It
makes space real to the senses, filled as it is with a universal
proto-matter that is the condition of connected perceptions
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wherever I find myself in it. Space is thus not only the
subjective form of sensation but a real unified object outside
me, unified by the ubiquitous presence of a weightless,
unbulkable ether.
And yet I, in turn, am in it. For as space becomes perceptible because of the ceaseless dynamism of its system of ethergrounded forces, so I can perceive it since I myself am an
organic body that is sensitive to forces because this body is
itself a system of organized forces: To get sensation I must be
sensitive, to get sensations from a dynamic system I must be
such a system myself—I must be continuous with nature.
Here at last is the embodied subject in the world. Selfpositing thus has a second phase. As I made myself exist
within my pure cognitive constitution, so I posit myself as
affected by forces that I have organized to enable me to
experience nature: “Positing and perception, spontaneity and
receptivity, the objective and subjective relations are simultaneous because they are identical as to time, as appearances of
how the subject is affected—thus are given a priori in the
same actus” (O.P. 132). Förster observes that the last phrase
means that the same original transcendental act brings about
the duality of empirical self and material world. Because in
apprehending the undetermined material manifold I insert
into it certain fundamental forces I can simultaneously
represent myself as an affected body and as so affected by an
external cause (107).
So it seems that the system finally has closed in on the
human body from the inside out through the transcendental
spatial intuition and from the outside in through the “hypostatized” forces of nature (meaning forces “supposed, but as
real”): the elementary dynamical ether and the mechanical
forces of physics known against its ethereal ground. Better
late than never, though this body be merely a self-moving
machine, which, incidentally, responds to impinging outside
forces as would a system of rigid and moving parts. The
subject has now called into existence not only itself but also
its world and its body—has made itself aware of itself as a
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certified knower and simultaneously as a participating inhabitant of perceptible space. Perceptibility, however, is just what
existence means for Kant: existence is a by-product of the
relation between a cognitive subject and the object it posits
for itself, even outside itself. I would put the puzzle here thus:
How real can such existence be, in the ordinary meaning
of the word, that is, indefeasibly and self-assertively independent of me? Yet Kant would find, had found, such a
question offensively obtuse since it voids the whole Critical
enterprise and its compelling motives. Nonetheless, it does
seem that in setting the limits of reason Kant has abolished
the finitude of human autonomy, the finitude that implies
something beyond me which I am not.
Förster interprets the doctrine of self-positing as a schema
for (perceptible) outer space (114) since a schema brings
together the spontaneous understanding with the receiving
sensibility, in this case, matter- or sensation-filled space. This
schema completes the conditions for a science of nature—
though something else is missing.
There is as yet no personhood. But since persons are
subjects to which deeds can be imputed, since they are moral,
that is, free and responsible beings, and since one purpose of
the whole enterprise was to ground human freedom and with
it morality, Kant is driven to a second, a moral self-positing
and, hard upon it, yet beyond, to a focusing of the idea of
God. More precisely, from the start of this final part of Kant’s
last work these two topics, human morality and God, are
more intimately related than they ever were in the Critique of
Practical Reason. For there God is merely a postulate of
practical reason (2.2.5), a kind of by-thought, required
because nature by herself offers no ground for assuring us of
happiness commensurate with our deserts. So we must
believe that there is a cause, working outside of nature, that
will bring about such a reward. But the moral necessity of
God is subjective, that is, it is a need, not an objective ground
of duty or belief. In the Opus Postumum it is as if man,
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having brought himself, his world, and himself-in-the-world
into existence, was now ready to posit God as well.
But there are more serious, systematic reasons for Kant to
turn to God in his last work. The said postulate of the second
Critique calls upon God as a condition of making moral
actions achievable for humans. Förster traces the various
functions God is assigned (summarized on pp. 134-135). The
last of these, stemming from Kant’s Religion within the
Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), is that of God as founder
of an ethical commonwealth. But in the Opus Postumum
Kant says repeatedly that the divine power cannot make a
man morally good: “He must do it himself ” (O.P. 249). So
here opens what Kant himself calls an “abyss of a mystery”;
Förster interprets this phrase as Kant’s realization that human
moral autonomy and God as founding father of an ethical
commonwealth are in contradiction (133). Kant finds a way
out, adumbrated in Religion and sharpened in the late Opus
Postumum.
The self-positing so far described had been theoretical,
cognitive. But now Kant introduces a second, moral-practical
self-positing, analogous to the first in having its own a priori
moving forces: the ideas of right that unite all persons, as
expressed in the Categorical Imperative (which commands,
unconditionally, the subjection of individual inclination to
laws acknowledged as universal, O.P. 198); the difference is
only that the first involves being affected by outer, spatial
forces, the second consists of obedience to one’s own rationality—self-forcing, one might say. Self-positing, recall, was
bringing oneself into existence by becoming conscious at
once of oneself as thinking and as being affected by objects
determined by oneself. So too moral self-positing is self-consciousness together with the consciousness that I can subjugate my inclinations and can myself determine my will, that
is, choose morally—which is what Kant calls freedom.
Kant now argues that the idea of human freedom, whose
force is formulated in the Categorical Imperative, brings with
it immediately, analytically, the concept of God. For the
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imperative is a command, which, like the law of a civil commonwealth, unites all rational beings, and therefore it
requires a law-giver and enforcer. Thus God must exist, and
to do as we ought (that is, our duty) is a divine command.
But God’s existence is not that of a being independent of
human reason (Förster 142). Rather just as we postulated an
ether to make a system of forces possible, so we postulate
God as real to give the idea of duty a moving force. Thus the
contradiction of human freedom and divine imposition
certainly seems to be resolved.
There is one more step to be taken. God is now an ideal
of practical reason, said, however, to exist—in some way.
What is the divinity’s relation to nature, particularly human
nature? This is Kant’s “abyss of a mystery,” mentioned above:
God and the world are heterogeneous ideas; as God cannot
make men better, for that would abrogate their moral freedom, so he cannot interfere with nature, for that would abrogate its lawful determinateness. Kant reaches for the solution
we would now expect: The unification of God and nature lies
in the human subject. It is to be found in “Man in the World,
Restricting Himself Through Laws of Duty,” as the penultimate title page puts it (O.P. 244). He is an ideal, an archetype;
the wise man, the philosopher, who knows God in himself
and the laws of nature and the imperative of action. Kant has
been, significantly it now turns out, in the habit of using the
term Weltweisheit, “world-wisdom,” for philosophy. With the
human ideal Kant has reached “The Highest Standpoint of
Transcendental Philosophy.” Förster says he has therewith
solved one of the oldest problems of philosophy, how to unify
theoretical and practical reason (146). And so he has—if we
can comprehend this solution.
From Religion on through the Opus Postumum Kant has
been emphasizing the importance of a human ethical community, superintended by God to the realization of morality.
In the latter work, it is this union of rational beings that
makes the force of moral law analogous to the unifying ether
of the natural system. Since now man has finally turned up in
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the body, a major enigma of the Critique of Practical Reason
appears to be resolved: How transcendental subjects, each,
moreover, locked within its own self-constituted natural
world, can ever appear and speak to each other.
I say the enigma appears to be solved because the subject
is now embodied and has material appearance. But that
doesn’t really help: How does my appearing body enter your
self-posited world—unless we hypostasize, very seriously, a
true outside, a transcendent Beyond, through which I can
come to you by infusing your intuition with a sensory manifold expressing my person in an appearance? But this is
language so alien to Kant that I am almost abashed to use it.
Nonetheless, the grounds of that intersubjective communication without which Kant cannot conceive an ethical
community—a human one, at least—are missing from the
Transcendental System. This enigma is clearly conjoined to
that of another’s body, because before we apprehend each
other as rational beings we must appear to each other as
material bodies. For we have no way (short of entering each
other’s minds) of conveying thought except in embodied
form.
Nor is the God implied in our recognition of “human
duties as divine commands” intelligible to me. This subjective
God induces in me a desire to get down to brass tacks: Is a
god who is “the inner vital spirit of man in the world”
(O.P. 240) a God who exists in any ordinary sense, that is, a
God who is a stand-alone substance, who is there, in his
realm, whether I exist or not?
Kant refuted, more than once, Anselm’s proof that God
exists (e.g., in the Critique Of Pure Reason B 626) because it
depends on regarding existence not as the subject’s positing
of an object but as a property of the object itself; thus Anselm
argues that in conceiving God we must necessarily include his
existence in his essence. Yet it seems to me that Kant has
accepted a precondition of Anselm’s proof, namely that when
thought necessarily conceives of (and therefore conceives
necessarily) the object as existing, then it must exist—only
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where Anselm would say “beyond me,” Kant says “in my
thought.” Is this an argument that gains anything as it goes?
I think the final pages of his life’s work, preoccupied though
it is with God-positing, show no sign that this question
oppressed Kant, that he felt an insufficiency in the thought
that the unifier of all realms is the dutiful man who has God
within but is otherwise left on his own, is “his own originator” (O.P. 209) and also the maker of Heaven and Earth—
except that once he says this: “There is a certain sublime
melancholy in the feelings which accompany the sublimity of
the ideas of pure practical reason” (O.P. 212).
4. Here, to conclude, is a summary review of the perplexities
that I found in the Critiques and of the bearing the Opus
Postumum has on them.
First, the space puzzles. The Opus Postumum acknowledges what the transcendental Critiques had, ipso facto, no
place for: that if the transcendental subject is to be affected
by sensation through, or better, in its sensibility, it must be
embodied. Kant now puts the subject’s body in space so that
through its own forces it may interact with the forces of
nature. This somatic positing quite literally fleshes out the
system, and it does so by fixing on one of the several meanings of “external” that “outer sense” seems to carry in the first
Critique: As one would expect, Kant now sometimes speaks
as if the ether-filled space, where my body meets nature’s
bodies, was in some real sense outside of myself as subject.
That cannot be, however, since space never ceases to be what
it was in the first Critique, the pure content (so to speak) of
our receptive outer sense, the spatial intuition. But that fact
results in this strangely involuted condition: The body,
through which the world affects me, is within this Kantian
sensorium, the intuition, the spatial sensibility; so we project
a body within ourselves to receive sensations from an “outer”
world we have ourselves created (Kant’s own term, e.g.,
O.P. 235). I keep asking myself how Kant would have
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responded to this construal of the post-Critical layout. Would
we could raise the dead!
On the second, more general, question concerning the
origin and fixing of the transcendental terms that stake out
the system, the Opus Postumum is silent, though Kant asks
himself over and over what transcendental philosophy is—his
very last proposed title (at least in Förster’s selection) is
“Philosophy as a Doctrine of Science in a Complete System.”
The question I am asking could be put like that: Where does
the philosopher stand when he establishes “The Highest
Standpoint of Transcendental Philosophy”? If Kant considered this question he does not say—perhaps he would have
thought it madness—much as Aristotle thinks it is ridiculous
to try to show that there is nature (Physics 2.1).
The third question, “How is moral action actually inserted into a deterministic natural world?”—is in fact answered
in the Opus: The rational subject exerts a moral force analogous to natural forces. But is it an answer? How exactly does
the force of reason move bodies? Psychokinetically?
My fifth question, “Whence comes adventitious sensation
and hence that contingency of nature which makes science
empirical in detail?,” is simply and spectacularly untouched
in the Opus Postumum, as it was in the Critiques. Yet it is not
an unreasonable problem to raise, because, though Kant likes
to describe what it is that comes to us as a mere “manifold”
(manyness simply), sensation is in fact the material of specific
appearances; hence, as it seems to me, some sort of
evidence for its origin must be forthcoming (for from
antiquity on, appearance is appearance of something, that is
to say, is evidence and screen at once of something beyond it).
One motive for drawing sensation more and more into
the subject is precisely the principled specification of natural
science: The more detail comes under the subject’s control
the more transcendentally grounded physics becomes, that is,
the more it can anticipate its findings and make laws by analogy. As it is, the ether theory goes pretty far in prescribing, a
priori, the types of mechanical force whose effects are to be
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noticed in bodies, even up to dictating some of their
mathematical laws, for example the inverse square law of
attraction: Kant explains that the following argument holds
for any force that is diffused from the center of force through
concentric spherical shells. Since the spherical surfaces vary
as the square of their radii, the larger the sphere, that is the
more distant from the center, the less will be the force distributed over each unit surface. Thus the effect of the force
will vary inversely as the square of the distance or as 1/r2
(Met. Found. ¶ 519).
Could it be that Kant might be driven to say that we ourselves are the creators of our sense material? In the
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783) he distinguishes bounds that are positive in having an enfolding
Beyond, from limits that are mere negations. In that work he
says that metaphysics leads to bounds beyond which lie the
“things in themselves,” which are inaccessible to experience
and cognition because they are beyond our cognitive faculties, but which it is nonetheless necessary to assume as
sources, presumably, among other things, of sensation (¶ 57).
In the Opus Postumum that Beyond seems to have receded;
then must we ourselves be the generators of sensation? Might
we be driven to suppose that the unknowable transcendent
noumenal I is itself the source of the sensations that affect
me? And if so, how is Kant’s system in that respect different
from Fichte’s Science of Knowledge, in which the subject is
completely self-posited, including its sensory affects, and of
which Kant says that he regards it “as a totally indefensible
system . . . for the attempt to cull a real object out of logic is
a vain effort” (O.P. 264)? Call it absolute idealism or
solipsism, in putting the world in man it leaves him solus, a
subject alone without a confronting object, and Kant seems to
find that insupportable in the Fichtean system. Recall from
hints above that the first Critique itself was already vulnerable to the charge of solipsism. Sartre, for example, in the
chapter “The Reef of Solipsism” in Being and Nothingness
(3.1.2), raises it with respect to time, insofar as it is an inner
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sense: How then can a Kantian “I” be synchronous with any
“Other”?
I want to insert a reflection here. Philosophers pride
themselves on following wherever honestly consequential
thinking leads, even into the insufferable. There came
generations after Kant who took a kind of unholy joy in their
desperate conclusions. But Kant is the philosopher of “conditions of possibility,” of finding the terms that enable the
satisfaction of rational humanity. So I imagine him to be open
to the question: Quo vadis?, “Where are you going?” For that
the love of wisdom should turn out to be totally self-love
seems indeed to be insufferable.
Finally, the sixth perplexity, the proof, no, rather the
positing of the existence of God: In the first Critique the
understanding, our faculty for organizing given material into
experience, sets the starting terms; the theoretical reason is
considered mainly as a faculty for attempting, indefeasibly, to
marshal judgments connecting these terms into inevitably
illusory syllogistic conclusions. In the Opus Postumum, however, the practical reason is paramount, for its requirements
come to be dominant. It leads the way in the positing of self,
body, and finally God. This God-positing is no longer the
“as-if ” postulation of Kant’s moral works, which entitles us
to act merely as if there were a God who sanctions and
rewards. In the Opus Postumum reason is compelled to posit
God as actual—though in me and not as a substance. Actual
though not substantial, subjective but an object—I seem to
lack the intellectual wherewithal for entertaining these
conjunctions. Indeed, one of the benefits of entering into the
ratiocinative preoccupations of a Kant, who explores and
pushes his own concepts to their limits and who is
moreover—as I think—incapable of mere invention or simple
confusion, is that one is confronted in precise and compelling
terms with the limits of intelligibility.
5. The Kant we study as a community is and will continue to
be the Kant of the two Critiques of Pure and Practical
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Reason, and so it will be, I think, for most students of philosophical works. Thus Kant’s influence on the thinking world
(where attention to Kant is growing rather than waning, for
example in cognitive science and in ethics) will be mostly
Critical.
That Kant had a living post-Critical afterlife is in itself a
source of fascination, which the review has tried to express.
The Opus Postumum, however, though it may never, and
probably should not, exert the direct influence of the
Critiques, also contributes to Kant’s posthumous afterlife, not
so much, as I said, in directly influencing the thinking of
people now alive, as in projecting a drift that is being realized
among us.
I am referring primarily to the topic of subjectivity. In
many departments of life the outcome of a venture is an
advance over the beginning—which is called progress. In
philosophy, however, the working-out of the origin is often a
shallowfication, to coin a term. One reason is precisely that
philosophy is treated as progressive, which entails either
contracting the deep open questions of original inquiry into
more effectively resoluble tight problems, or, on the contrary,
loosening the precisely significant terms of a coherent philosophy to connote its bowdlerized, or at least more relaxed,
possibilities. Kant’s terms are more liable to the latter fate.
For Kant expands, late in life, and late in the Opus
Postumum, on what he had asserted earlier: “Philosophy is to
be regarded either as the habitus of philosophizing or as a
work: through which there arises, proceeding from it, a work
as a system of absolute unity” (247; I can’t resist quoting a
neighboring entry, which shows Kant in what he would call a
“technical-practical” mode, that is, displaying mundane
practicality—always an index of mental alertness: “N.B. The
melon must be eaten today—with Prof. Gensichen—and, at
this opportunity, [discuss] the income from the university.”)
Consequently Kant’s terms are from the beginning welldefined and well-seated in a system, and thus apt to descend
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to the public by acquiring more diffuse rather than narrower
usages.
System-building is out of style at the present moment; the
mood is anti-foundationalist. Particularly out of favor in
philosophy are the two great Critical assumptions, the one so
deep beneath Kant’s thinking that there is no overt reflection
on it in the Critiques, the other perhaps the central preoccupation of the Opus Postumum. The former is representationalism, the apprehension of thinking as the activity of putting
objects before the cognitive faculties; the German for “representation” is Vorstellung, literally “setting [something] before
[oneself].” (I should mention that representationalism at least
is alive and well in the cognitive sciences, as opposed to
philosophy.) The latter assumption is the one expressed in the
quotation above, that the work of philosophy is “architectonic,” the building of a well-grounded, completely unified,
and thoroughly detailed edifice representing the activities and
aspects of the rational subject, the “I.” (To be sure, Kant’s
system is only the penultimate great Continental system; in
the ultimate one, however, that of Hegel, the dialectic of
concepts supersedes representational thinking, and the
system is not constructed architectonically but develops
organically.)
Three hugely influential shapes that the “I” as an object of
reflection has taken are: the Cartesian Ego, a thing that
knows of its existence as it thinks and can apply itself to
mathematicizable spatial extension; the Rousseauian Self, a
pure interiority that knows and revels in its mere sense of
existence; and a Kantian Subject, an I that knows itself in two
capacities, as theoretical (the subject of formal thinking and
of a formative sensibility which together give laws to external
nature), and as practical (an autonomous person that gives
the law to itself as a moral actor).
All three, Cartesian quantification, Rousseauian selfconcern and Kantian personhood, have been absorbed and
naturalized into contemporary thinking. The subject of the
Critiques, however, being the most complex and comprehen-
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sive of these ideas, has also been most liable to second-hand
connotations. For example, the word “subjective” evidently
got into general philosophical and hence into common use
through the Critiques, though when we say something is
“purely subjective” we tend to mean it in a denigrating sense:
lacking hard, public objectivity.
But the expanded terms of the Opus Postumum are not,
as far as my reading goes, known to our contemporaries—the
work has, after all, been available for barely a decade—
neither to the proponents of human self- and world-construction nor to the post-Nietzschean value-relativists who
hold some version of the idea that man himself is the creator
of values, or the religious thinkers who regard God as a selfgranted response to human need. Yet all these notions are in
a more disciplined, systematic form adumbrated in the Opus
Postumum: in the self-positing of the subject and its worldconstruction, in the autonomy of its moral life, and in the
required postulation of its God.
But in what mode, to return to a question asked in the
beginning, has Kant thus become the occulted projector of
our modernity? Did he succumb—Förster thinks this implausible (76)—to the then-current craze of “posito-mania”
(Setzkrankheit)? Is he spinning out the deep implications of
the Critical enterprise, perhaps into originally unintended
consequences and to his own uneasy amazement? Or has he,
in adventurous old age, leapt beyond the Critiques into the
stormy oceans that he once said surrounded the land of the
pure understanding, an island of truth enclosed by the
unchangeable bounds of nature (Critique of Pure Reason,
B 294)?
These questions I am in principle unable to answer for
myself, because I am not sure whether there can be a philosophical system with joins so tightly fitted that its inherent
necessities are unambiguously fixed, and in particular,
because the transcendental system of the Opus Postumum
offers surprises (the ether), superadded requirements (the
specification of empirical physics), shortfalls of closure (the
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source of sensation). Nor am I certain in general whether,
when a philosopher takes a structure of thought to a new
level either by fine-tuning its technicalities or by driving it to
its ultimate conclusions, he is doing the work of interpretation or of deconstruction. Instead I want to express this, my
sense of Kant’s late unfinished work: If “awe” signifies a
mixture of admiration and unease, here is the occasion to
recall a good word to its proper use, and to say that the Opus
Postumum is indeed awesome.
87
Odysseus’s World of the
Imagination
Paul Ludwig
Eva Brann’s Homeric Moments teaches where and how to
find hidden delights in the Odyssey and the Iliad. The book
aims to be a companion to Homer that can modestly step out
of the way after pointing out “moments,” those episodes or
imaginative visions within episodes that achieve vibrant stasis
and are therefore at once stations and peaks in the narrative
flow—an idea based on Aristotle’s distinction between
episodes and bare plot. The slow or static parts such as long
similes and apparent digressions, which many readers wish to
skip over in order to get on with the story, Homeric Moments
regards as affording the intellectual pleasure peculiar to reading epic. Brann’s interpretative assumptions are provokingly
face up on the table, and her conclusions are surprising and
radical: there is no archaic “mentality” by which heroes think
differently from us or which enables them to see a world full
of gods rather than natural causes. A world populated by
gods is superior to most of our own modern accounts of the
world: Odysseus’s tales of his adventures, like Homer’s gods,
are imaginary but true, factually false but better than a
recounting of material facts because they are spun from
Odysseus’s imagination, an imagination that practically
requires that he lose or destroy his men.
Epithets, Similes, and Gods
Homeric “moments” are primarily visual snapshots, including word-paintings such as Hephaestus’s shield and many
Homeric similes as well. Their meanings, like the meanings of
paintings, are not simply told to the reader. At issue is the
Eva Brann. Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and
the Iliad. Paul Dry Books, 2002.
Paul Ludwig is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College.
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place of surmise—including, for Brann, wild surmise like that
of Cortez’s men—in literary interpretation. What sorts of
surmises Brann makes about moments can be seen from her
treatment of an actual painting, Ajax’s suicide as depicted on
a sixth-century amphora. The vase painter’s huge but delicate
Ajax squats over his task of fixing into the ground the hilt of
the sword he will fall upon. A few choice words explain the
difference between black-figure and red-figure techniques of
vase painting: in the earlier genre, figures appeared as black
silhouettes on red clay backgrounds, but in the later genre
figure and ground were reversed. “Rather than black bulks
blocking the light, [figures] will appear as sunlit openings in
the lustrous black glaze” (Moments 73). For Brann, the blackfigure genre “seems made to depict a Hades-bound soul, a
prospective shade,” for example Ajax leaving the light. Few
classicists in their right minds would venture such a claim.
Since the painter is thought to have died around the time redfigure was invented, to give him a choice flirts with anachronism. The lack of clear historical evidence that the blackfigure artist ever worked in red-figure dictates that his genre
left him no recourse but to paint Ajax black. Since it is safer
to posit only one cause per event (shades of Occam’s razor),
and this generic explanation is sufficient, scholars discipline
themselves to refrain from speculating further. Brann by contrast “surmises” that the black-figure artist intended to
exploit that unique resource of his genre (blackness of
figures) that made it peculiarly appropriate for this depiction
(a soul in shadow). The crucial thing about interpretative
surmises is that they can never be conclusive. Here, the
generic cause screens or hides the existence of another cause,
the artist’s intention. Doubt, in the historical or critical
methods Brann opposes, takes on a life of its own, and lack
of a proof effectually becomes proof of a lack. Unconfirmed
means untrue. As with vase painting, so it is with Homer’s
epithets and the issue of their significance: Brann freely
admits that some epithets are scarcely significant and are
governed by metrical convenience, but that admission does
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not stop her from investigating each epithet or cause her to
doubt the appropriateness, irony, or other significance she
finds in many of them (28-9). Of course it remains obvious
that an epithet can both fill the meter and signify (i.e., fulfill
two purposes at once, thus having two “causes”) since even
the weakest epithet performs better than any random word
would have done. It would seem to follow that epithets may
sometimes have further significance; the issue is whether it is
more sophisticated to ignore these or to point them out.
Vision becomes double in Homer’s similes. First the
reader is presented with a visual background (“like a
poppy”), against which the vision of the thing or event
described (“he let his head droop”) can be seen afresh. The
insight that similes usually work better when the background
comes first can be substantiated simply by trying out some
Homeric similes backwards (139). The real situation quickly
entrenches itself and the comparison becomes mere embellishment (“he let his head droop like a poppy”). Such natural
occurrences are often the likeness made for manslaughter in
the Iliad; Brann concludes that the function of the simile is to
mitigate the horror of war. The Odyssey, with less gruesomeness to mitigate, specializes in uglier similes and tends to
magnify rather than mitigate. If, however, the horror is worsened and Nature seems all the more peaceful when the two
are juxtaposed, the sharpness of the contrast might work
against alleviating the pain in the Iliad. Homer’s observing
the horrific together in one vision with peaceful nature is a
“dry truth” akin to when economic considerations obtrude
on Diomedes’ and Glaucus’s exchange of armor, a truthfulness which Schiller thought “naive” and said often gave an
impression of insensitivity (Moments 122). The modern taste
prefers to concentrate on one side of life at a time: sweeping
the other temporarily under the rug becomes sensitivity.
Gods do the same work as similes and therefore they, too,
can make Homeric moments: they transfigure human life.
“Faith” is a term misapplied to the Homeric deities because,
unlike the invisible one God of the Abrahamic faiths, no one
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believes or disbelieves in them; rather, everyone senses their
presence unless or until the gods themselves choose to withdraw (36). Brann thus overcomes a misleading dichotomy of
the gods as either superseded objects of a naive faith or background machinery created by the sophisticated agnostic
Homer. A third alternative not considered might be
Herodotus’s claim that Hesiod and Homer essentially gave
the Greek gods their birth, honors, arts, and shapes (Histories
2.53). If Homer is telling a story of a fictional past time when
belief was not necessary because the gods were accessible, this
would not eliminate the possibility that belief might become
necessary in “latter” days, e.g., for Homer’s audience. Every
so often a Greek did opine that the Olympians were fabrications: Xenophanes said that if horses could draw, they would
draw gods shaped like horses.
It is here that Brann proudly declares her radicalism:
Homer’s gods are both imaginary and true, or at least truer
than many a world without them. Their manifestation to us
through the faculty of our imagination says nothing about
whether they originate in the imagination alone; rather, the
denigration of that faculty would seem to be the only motive
for dismissing the gods on the grounds that they manifest
themselves through our imagination. Because the gods transfigure the human, we are better off with them than without
them. Brann uses Athena’s visual transfigurations of Odysseus
to make this clear. Whenever the goddess is upon him,
Odysseus is most himself. His beautiful moments are
bestowed by the goddess yet are totally his own. Homer
observes something natural and calls it a divine gift. “Nothing
happens to [Odysseus] that does not happen to us all; we too
glow and crumble and have our alternating moments. What
is wonderful about that? Or rather when is it ever less than a
wonder?” (49-50; emphasis added). Thus the gods are a mode
of access to the all-important appreciation of the wonder in
everyday life. We are measured by our ability to see gods, but
what we mainly see them doing is watching us. Nothing
would change in result if the gods ceased to look on, but
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everything would change in significance (43): we would no
longer be dignified by the respect—literally “regard”—of
being watched, and we would no longer be blessed, or cursed
since it still dignifies life to have a Poseidon who curses us).
There could be none of that magnification and beautification
that Thucydides warned against (1.20). In a contrasting way,
the gods also bring gravity to mortal life by their own lightness of being. Because they do not die, nothing is serious for
them, and as a result, they lack seriousness. The gods, for
whom the living is easy, achieve a vulgarity in their bickering,
favoritism and one-upmanship that only the wealthiest and
most independent mortals can dream of, and they lead parodies of lives. This amounts to magnification, too, because the
“ability to lose one’s life is magnified by the divine inability”
(41). The gods represent the pinnacle of ordinary human
desire, and while for some Greeks the gods simultaneously
act as their own reductio ad absurdum to show why no one
should desire immortality, in Homer the grace and elegance
with which the gods carry through their vulgarity make it
possible for mankind to take a “proud delight” in them (42).
Like black-figure painting, their lightness and brightness form
a backdrop against which the dark shapes of mortals act. If
one grants that the gods, as products of the imagination, are
more true or genuine than the brute or material facts of the
world, one still feels cornered into a false choice between
materialism and imagination. Could the gods be propaedeutic to wonder at the cosmos and man’s place in it, a wonder
also devoted to the use of the imagination, as in geometry or
philosophy?
Mentality
The question of whether the gods cause events or merely
observe them involves an interpretative surmise governing
much of Homeric scholarship, namely, that Homer or his
heroes have a “mentality” different from our own. For Brann,
the issue comes down to exhibiting a passage in which Homer
or his heroes “think in an alien mode” rather than merely
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thinking about different things than we do (27). Some
previous scholars have seen the alien mentality at work when
the gods cause events which nature also causes. Two causes
then exist for the same effect, and Occam’s razor says that
should not be. A Homeric event is “overdetermined” if it has
two or more causes. The simplest physical occurrences such
as a spear’s ceasing to quiver in the ground can be attributed
to the gods (“Ares took away its impulse”; Iliad 13.442-4
with 6.611-13). Brann is nuanced on the issue. In the seaside
meeting with Nausikaa, “[n]othing happens that does not
happen to us all; balls get tossed wide and land in the drink;
people are woken up by shouts. Yet nothing happens that is
not under Athena’s aegis—both at once” (221). “Both at
once” sounds like overdetermination, but Brann provides an
avenue of escape from mentality, which she regards as a trap.
Homer and his characters see the wonder in everyday
occurrences and accordingly ascribe to divine interference
what would have happened anyway. Hence no miracles occur
in the strict sense of events running contrary to nature.
Nothing unnatural occurs, even at surprising moments, such
as when Eurycleia recognizes the scar and drops Odysseus’s
foot in the bathwater. Though he seizes her by the throat to
keep her silent, the old woman seeks out Penelope with her
eyes trying to tell her the stranger is Odysseus. Penelope,
however, “‘is unable to meet her glance or to pay it any mind,
for Athena had turned her mind away’” (280). Brann
interprets: on the merely mundane or unimaginative level,
Penelope is exercising tight self-control; she refrains from
even glancing in the direction of the husband she knows is
sitting disguised in her house. Brann’s Athena represents—or
is—the evocation of our wonder at Penelope’s control, her
mindfulness, Athena’s specific province. Thus Athena does
not cause the event in any way that would compete with
natural causes. A reading that allowed for miracles might
assume that Penelope has not recognized Odysseus yet.
The occurrence which, in the ordinary course of events,
would have been the occasion of her recognizing him is
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miraculously taken away by Athena’s interference. The goddess intervenes causally; she prevents nature from taking its
course. This miraculous reading, too, can avoid overdetermination, since there are many ways of being a cause, with the
proximate efficient cause being the least of these. The hand
which threw the spear could be one kind of cause, while Ares’
will is another (and Zeus’s plan a third). To find a Homeric
mentality in causal overdetermination would entail meeting a
higher bar of evidence, showing two causes of the same type
simultaneously causing the same event in the same way. For
Brann, modern critics have thought their way into a mentality: the only people with a mentality are those who think they
have one.
But Brann’s rejection of Homeric mentality goes further
and seems to entail rejecting the weaker, epistemologically
less radical assumption of ethical alienness. For many years,
an anthropological approach has been looking for “difference” in Homeric society. Brann asks students to see the
similarity between the heroes’ hunger for beautiful gifts and
their own patronage of department-store gift counters; she
uses the students’ own suppressed longings for recognition to
help them understand the glory-seeking of the heroes (26-7,
179-80). Here one wonders whether the vastness of the difference in degree does not cover over ethical differences that
could be historical or social developments. Few of Brann’s
students would enter the Cyclops’s cave to see if he would
give them gifts. Brann’s objection that societies as wholes do
not think and that only individual humans can do the thinking seems answered by the lemming or herd instinct. Societies
do tend to produce recognizable types; notwithstanding that
many individuals remain free to think their way out of their
society’s prejudices, a majority could be left (perhaps including or composing the sovereign) who thoughtlessly imitate
one another. Ethical alienness could then be responsible for
protagonists’ behaving in ways that modern readers do not
instinctively find admirable.
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The ethically alien preoccupation with fame is at issue in
Brann’s controversial interpretation of Penelope (see also
below). When, if ever, does Penelope consider remarriage,
and what constitutes faithfulness toward the husband she has
every reason to believe is dead? Penelope like the male
heroes—with the possible exception of Odysseus himself—
appears to be motivated primarily by a desire for fame. Brann
acknowledges this glory-seeking when she quotes the line
with which Penelope explains her motivations to the suitors:
“If Odysseus were to come home and be handmaid to my life,
my glory would be greater and finer that way” (Odyssey
18.254-5). But the primacy of fame over fidelity has broad
implications for Penelope’s intention to remarry. For Brann,
Penelope’s sudden announcement that Odysseus told her to
remarry once Telemachus had his beard is Penelope’s way of
signaling to the husband she knows is in the room that she is
mindful of his instructions. But what is alleged to be
Odysseus’s instruction could also be Penelope’s own newlyminted invention, designed not only to save what is left of the
throne for Telemachus (she says she will “leave the house” to
make clear that marrying the queen does not bring the kingship with it; 273), but also to recoup or secure such fame as
remains possible for a famous widow. This widow says
privately that the Olympians ruined her magnificence or
splendor the day Odysseus went away (18.180-1). That
splendor depends on her beauty and cosmetics (18.178-9;
192-6). So too in their speeches to her, the suitors exhibit
what they think she wants to hear: “You excel women in
looks and stature and the balanced mind inside you”
(18. 248-9; cf. 19.124-6, 108). Her rejoinder scarcely denies
that what she wants is to excel other women, although she
subtly changes the bill of goods by starting with aretê: “my
prowess and looks and figure the immortals destroyed, when
the Argives embarked for Ilion and with them went my
husband Odysseus” (18.251-3). A husband like Odysseus is
required for feminine magnificence or splendor. Penelope has
a conventionally acceptable motivation, then, for setting up
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the Bow contest: her fame has been diminished by Odysseus’s
delay or demise. Her fame can be partially recouped by
remarriage, but she needs a husband who approaches the
stature of Odysseus (one who can string his bow) so that her
fame will not be diminished further than necessary. In the
event, Odysseus’s successful return takes her fame to new
heights, but that is irrelevant to her motivations now. If these
motives were not sufficient, the suitors also appear capable of
forcing Penelope into marriage: since she has no protector to
prevent strong-arm tactics so long as the suitors feign obedience to the convention, she herself breaks the convention by
extending the courtship indefinitely. Brann admits that
Penelope may at times have seriously considered the unthinkable (262-3). If sometimes, why not now, with Odysseus
unrecognized in the room?
The difficulty with imputing this “alien” social ethic to
Penelope is that it makes her into a woman unlike any we
could admire under modern assumptions (though the still,
small voice of assumptions like ours is also present in Ithacan
assumptions: 23.149-51). Brann in another context rebuts
Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief,” perceiving the
futility of the attempt studiously to “cancel” our instincts
(36). Intellectual honesty at its best would assume the fault
lies with us: our current prejudice prevents us from seeing the
good in Penelope’s acceptance of a remarriage that is “hateful” to her. The ascription of alienness, like the ascription of
mentality, renders interpretation at once easy (they were different, that is all) and difficult since we implicitly assume that
our receiving equipment has a flaw. Artificially canceling and
correcting for our alleged flaws can produce monstrous
chimerical interpretations that say more about ourselves than
about Homer. For Brann, the fame-talk is mainly a screen, a
likely story Penelope tells about what another woman in her
circumstances might want, behind which she hides her true
intentions. But the likely story proves the rule for Homeric
woman generally. We tolerate Achilles’ desire for fame in
the Iliad, why not Penelope’s in the Odyssey? Brann thus
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rehabilitates fame-seeking but hesitates to ascribe it wholeheartedly to Penelope. Does she perhaps surmise a
Penelopean analogue of the conclusion Odysseus himself
arrives at—that fame is empty?
Penelope
Penelope penetrates Odysseus’s disguise the moment she sees
him. Moments supports this surmise with a host of small
details. Odysseus himself understands her beguiling the
suitors into a more standard gift-giving courtship to be a
sneaky Odyssean way of getting material wealth out of men
not long for this world (18.281-3; 273). The Bow contest
itself is all her own genius, a perfect way of getting a weapon
into the hands of the disguised Odysseus. Brann shows that,
in the foot-washing scene, Penelope’s thought pattern stumbles over both caesura and diaeresis, as she catches herself so
as not to betray her knowledge to Eurycleia. “Wash your
lord’s—agemate; and perhaps Odysseus/ By now has such
feet and such hands” (19.358-9; 279-80). The dash is the
caesura, the semi-colon the diaeresis. Penelope was about to
say “Wash your lord’s feet,” but caught herself, hesitated only
an instant and hastily substituted “agemate.” Then during the
diaeresis she thought up how to cover her faux pas with
speculations about how Odysseus’s feet—and hands—must
have aged. This is beautifully observed.
Yet the thesis that Penelope helps orchestrate Odysseus’s
retaking of the palace would have to explain away a soliloquy
(hence without guile) in which Penelope imagines Odysseus
far away or in Hades, wishes to join him there, and states that
the oblivion of sleep will help her to endure pleasing an
inferior husband (20.79-83). Brann’s thesis would also have
to explain away a good deal of weeping. During her interview
with the disguised Odysseus, the word used for her “weeping” is that used for the lamentation made for the dead
(19.210). Homer says explicitly that Odysseus hid his own
tears of sympathy with a trick (19.212). Why not construe
this small deception as a part of a successful overall
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deception? Perhaps Penelope’s tears at recognizing the “sure
signs” that the stranger met Odysseus long ago might be
explained as tears of relief that Odysseus is home rather than
as tears of renewed loss (19.249-50). But why go to bed and
weep for Odysseus until Athena throws sweet sleep upon her
eyelids if she has just met him (19.602-4)? Likewise she
weeps as she retrieves the Bow from its closet, and weeps for
Odysseus when sent away from the Bow-contest she herself
devised (21.55-7, 356-8). Is it tension about the long odds
against his successfully killing all the suitors with it? Or is it
grief over a cherished marriage that is finally coming to an
end?
Which is artistically more satisfying: to show that
Odysseus can fool even his nearest and dearest, or to show
that Penelope’s deviousness is the equal of, and hence a match
for, his own? Brann finds a number of telling ironies in the
dialogue between Penelope and the disguised Odysseus.
Would we rather hear innuendo in such lines as “Odysseus
will never again come home” (sc. “because you’re already
here now”; 276) or is it more poignant to make such lines
examples of her talking against her own hope? Brann points
out that he calls himself polystonos [much-groaning], intending that she hear odyssamenos [hated], directly after signaling
his name with odynaon [feeling pain] (244, 278); he is transmitting, but is she receiving? Irony there is for sure, but
whose irony is it: Homer’s or one of the two protagonists’,
that is to say, is the irony dramatic or verbal? If the ironies in
her own speech remain dramatic, Penelope could remain
ignorant that she is speaking to Odysseus in disguise, and
Homer would be teasing us with how close their conversation
comes to admitting his presence without her knowing it. It
would elevate Odysseus’s deviousness to read this teasing as
analogous to his later teasing of Laertes.
Here as in a host of other ways Moments shares assumptions with Seth Benardete’s The Bow and the Lyre even while
arriving at different conclusions. Both authors see in Queen
Arete of the Phaeacians what a female ruler can be and that
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her co-ruler husband can defer to her (Moments 223).
Benardete accepts that Odysseus deceives Penelope and
deprecates his shutting her out of the power struggle to
retake Ithaca. Brann refuses to accept what she too would
deprecate and pushes on with a thesis of equality: Penelope
cannot be a match for Odysseus if her cleverness is only a
diminutive version of his. For her worth to rest elsewhere and
not be defined by his, is not fully entertained (258-60),
probably because Penelope is in fact clever, self-possessed,
and steadfast—all virtues Odysseus has too. Brann finds it
more satisfying intellectually if the Bed-test shows recognition in a fuller sense than mere factual identity; this fuller
recognition can only be premised on Penelope’s already
knowing Odysseus is Odysseus. The “mutuality of their memory” is at stake: has Odysseus changed, or is he the same person he was before (283-4, 287)? Perhaps a “return of Martin
Guerre” situation, in which suspicions about imposture could
exist in tandem with worries about forgetfulness, would be
too confusing. The crucial passage occurs where Penelope
tricks Odysseus into an anger that betrays his selfsameness.
Odysseus feels betrayed by Penelope, but in what way precisely? He may think Penelope herself has forgotten the rootedness of the bed, but more likely it is a “How could you
think I thought” situation: he blows up at the injustice of her
gambit. “How could you think I would forget and fall for a
trick like that!” Penelope’s trick would then be two-pronged,
with her test of (or pretense about) his imposture also being
exactly the right instrument to test mutuality of memory.
Odysseus
Brann finds for Odysseus a motive to destroy his men still
more shocking than Benardete’s motive of prideful anger at
their opening the bag of winds (The Bow and the Lyre 83).
For Odysseus to be what he is—the soul of imagination—he
must rid himself of their unimaginative minds (Moments
175). Odysseus’s separate goals for his men and for himself
(striving for their homecoming but for his own soul, in the
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fifth line of the poem) prove to be incompatible aims (116).
Where many readers would say Odysseus indulges a reckless
curiosity, Brann stresses his imagination. The emphasis on
imagination makes better sense of how he transforms his
experiences into the concrete and tangible. If he is curious to
view the towns of mortal men and to know their mind, his
imagination transforms this mental intercourse with mortal
men in towns into carnal knowledge of immortal women
who live in isolation (249). To his men, the captain must seem
to be plunging ever deeper into a world of his own, losing
his grip on “reality.” Ordinary concerns such as security
and profit fade for him as he pushes them into greater and
greater dangers for smaller and smaller hopes of plunder.
Companions are required for the early experiences, for example, six to serve the Scylla. But as he retreats ever deeper into
his imagination, the issues become utterly private. The choice
Calypso offers between mortality and immortality is a choice
offered to a solitary (171). A self-referential narrative opens
up, in which the men are extras in a plot which has decreasing need for them and so Homer must invent ways to kill
them off (175). But Brann insists that Odysseus is culpable of
nothing worse than neglect leading to mutiny—he lets them
die, opportunistically passive (for example, asleep) at the
right times.
Striving for his soul means externalizing his own soul
through the exercise of his imagination. For Brann, the
fictional Wanderings are the progress of his mind (31, 177);
they unfold Odysseus’s true self or identity. By contrast,
Benardete’s Odysseus must cease to be himself and become
the anonymous universality of mind, living up to the pun on
one of the pronouns of negation in the Cyclops episode:
mêtis means “no one” but also “mind.” By struggling to maintain his identity as king of Ithaca and husband of Penelope,
Odysseus succumbs to the temptation of pride and self-glorification, and fails to sustain the peak of humanity he achieved
on Circe’s isle: knowledge of nature rather than desire for
fame. For Benardete, learning means becoming no one in
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particular. For Brann, learning entails being an “I” who learns
(51); Odysseus’s flexibility is all about using tricks to endure
or be steadfast, that is, to stay himself. Brann’s idea of learning saves Odysseus’s desire to return home from being overwhelmed by the wanderlust that overwhelms Dante’s and
Tennyson’s Odysseus. But it may be significant that domestic
bliss remains a promissory note at the end because of the
prophesied final journey. Brann admits that Odysseus prays
(like Augustine): help me return home, but not yet (116).
The encounters with Scylla and Charybdis never
happened; nor did any of the tall tales Odysseus tells, such as
the Cyclops, Circe and the rest. What Odysseus was really
doing during the decade he says he was having these adventures can be gleaned from the lies he tells upon his return in
disguise to Ithaca. The mundane events that actually made up
his journeys consisted of piracy and marauding, trading, and
the giving and receiving of gifts, all on known sea-routes and
in known countries such as Crete, Cyprus, and Egypt (182,
242, 247). Nymphs like Calypso are fairyland versions of the
prostitutes whom sailors dream about and find in port (1923). The lies Odysseus tells in the persona of a Cretan are “lies
like the truth” (19.203). They may not have happened, but
they are the kind of things that do happen. By contrast, the
adventure tales are lies of a different order: they are like
nothing that ever happens. The truth about Scylla and
Charybdis is that they are a fanastically-rendered image of a
universal human dilemma: the Choice of Dangers, when
neither alternative is good (211). Odysseus may have experienced several mundane versions of this choice, but none
could have captured the essence of the Choice like the
fantastic story he eventually relates. Therefore, the tall tales
are true, while the underlying trip is merely real (183-4). The
reader may consult his or her own experience: Scylla and
Charybdis are as proverbial today as the devil and the deep or
the rock and the hard place. And if that is what Scylla and
Charybdis are now, why not also for Homer’s first audience
and ever since? Brann dares to read our modern experience
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back onto the poem. Lotus-eating is equally proverbial, as is
the sirens’ song. Meeting a man with one eye? Readers will
have to savor this brief foray into postcolonial theory for
themselves.
Homer
It is especially daring to disbelieve the factualness of
Odysseus’s tales (while accepting their essential truth) in a
poem where Homer himself recounts equally mythical occurrences such as conversations in Hades, as well as vouches for
Calypso’s magical island (169). Distinguishing between fairyland adventures (made up by Odysseus) and “real” places like
Hades (known to all Greeks) introduces an odd literalism
into Brann’s interpretations. To declare, on behalf of the
Greek people, that Hades is “as real a place as there ever was”
comes close to attributing a mentality to the Greeks. Hades is
real until some Greek finds out differently. But Brann means
to draw a distinction between what Homer appropriates from
(or for) the tradition, and what he adds. Even if Homer is
making it all up, he presents some of it as made up by
Odysseus and pretends the rest is real. Brann’s Homer subtly
makes concrete to the imagination the way his epic brings
Greek mythology to the Greeks: Odysseus’s return from
Hades (the treasure house of memory) represents the poet
bringing the tales of great women and men back with him
(17, 200, 204-7). The mundane reality is that we remember
the dead, but the imagined truth is that the dead remember.
The poet tells us that none of the people in Hades are
fictions; they live down there and he heard of them through
the Muses. Brann is at pains to take Homer at his word: she
thus avoids rationalizing away her chance to engage with his
claim. But this feels odd because Brann permits no looking
behind that claim. Her refusal to know Homer better than
Homer knows himself could lead her into the trap of conflating Homer’s poetic persona with the real Homer. “The
Author” is a character in his own right in novels like Tom
Jones or Don Quixote, which are episodic and picaresque
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(and therefore comparable to the Odyssey although still
generically different). It would be a mistake to identify “The
Author” with the author of such a novel, or the intentions of
“The Author” with those of the author, who wishes us to
penetrate his persona in order to have access to yet greater
delights. The humor or absurdism in these modern novels
vitiates the comparison because the self-referentiality of an
authorial persona also generates humor. But it is unclear in
principle why, in a poem with the complexity Brann attributes to it, Homer might not have employed a similar subtlety, giving glimpses of himself that are equally important but
equally contrived. Surely the road to understanding Homer’s
intention runs through Brann’s careful distinctions, but she
does not base many surmises on those distinctions.
A related literalism is Brann’s insistence that Odysseus’s
tales were never meant for publication (notwithstanding the
fact that she has published a book about them). Observing
that the tales’ first audience, the Phaeacians, is cut off from
the world (though if Odysseus did not anticipate the
enclosure of their land, he might have expected these seafarers to carry his fame to all lands; 226), and their second
audience is Penelope in the privacy of home, Brann preserves
the possibility that Odysseus is exceptional among heroes: he
truly seeks something other than fame. Odysseus cannot
know that the Muses will find out about his private tale and
tell Homer, who will publicize it. The fact that Odysseus prefaces his account to the Phaeacians by saying his fame reaches
heaven does not imply a hero’s desire for more glory but
rather that he rests secure in the fame he already has (180).
Odysseus learned his lesson when he shouted his name to the
Cyclops, from which deed he earned the undying enmity of
Poseidon (189). Brann sums up: Odysseus’s adventures “will
never become a myth among public myths” (300; cf. 205).
And yet they did. Odysseus’s exceptionality may be indicated
by the fact that Homer in the Odyssey never calls him a hero;
only Circe does, after his return from Hades (180, 196).
Odysseus hears from Achilles that it is not better to reign in
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Hell than serve on earth. The discovery that fame is empty
may help Odysseus to transcend heroism. Yet Odysseus ends
up with a poem of comparable (though shorter) length to the
one Achilles gets, a poem which furthermore has acquired a
title which names it securely after Odysseus, an honor
Achilles is denied. Odysseus is very lucky to have won maximum fame after ceasing to seek it. His alleged eschewal of
fame is rewarded with fame. Virtue rewarded always entails
the problem of whether the virtue was sought for its own sake
or only for the reward. But Brann would never let such
skepticism essentially eliminate the possibility of true virtue
rewarded; to allow that would be to fall into a mentality. As
we saw, Brann’s Penelope also chooses what could be called
the path of least fame—to remain in widowhood—but thereby gains the greatest fame possible. If Odysseus learns to
demote fame, then Homer portrays a character who thinks
his way out of a central tenet of his society’s ethics, thereby
giving the lie to the inevitability of mentality.
Moments opens up many more windows on Homer than
can be discussed here. Not the least of these are the myriad
quotations of modern lyric poets—from Keats to H. D.—who
interpret Homer. Each of these, too, provides a moment in
which readers can lose themselves. Not to be missed are the
Helen chapter and the chapters laying out the structures of
the Odyssey and Iliad. Brann is particularly wonderful with
time, and many delightful intricacies come into focus when
she juxtaposes the order of occurrences with the order in
which they are narrated. The simple device of generous crossreferencing, so lacking in most books, enables the ripples to
spread. The accomplishment of Homeric Moments is to
progress from the visual to the invisible, but observation
remains its greatest virtue.
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105
The City: Intersection of Erôs
and Thumos?
Michael Dink
Ludwig takes us on a tour of sex and politics in Greek
political theory, focusing largely, but not exclusively, on the
political effects of the practice of homoerotic pederasty as
understood by certain Greek thinkers, using as his principal
texts Plato’s Symposium (primarily Aristophanes’ speech),
Aristophanes’ plays, and a few selected passages from
Thucydides. The ultimate goal seems to be to investigate how
these thinkers understood the political relevance of erôs in its
various forms. Not surprisingly, Ludwig finds that, at least in
its political manifestations, erôs is always mixed up with
thumos.
The path taken by the exposition can seem labyrinthine,
as Ludwig moves back and forth among different texts, and
takes up in sequence various loci of the intersection of erôs
and politics, while at the same time trying to develop an
account of what erôs is, what different forms it takes, how it
is related to thumos and its forms, and which aspects of it are
natural and which are conventional or “socially constructed.”
For a reader like myself, primarily interested in the intertwining of erôs and thumos, it is helpful to have a clear, even
if initially oversimplified, statement of the distinction
between erôs and thumos as a thread with which to negotiate
the labyrinth. Since Ludwig himself does not provide this
thread, I have spun my own, which I will share with you.
Let us define erôs as the striving to fulfill a perceived lack
in oneself and thumos as the striving to assert something
present in oneself, perceived as good. In erôs, one feels an
Paul Ludwig. Erôs and Polis: Desire and Community in Greek Political
Theory. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Michael Dink is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College.
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emptiness of self in need of fulfillment; in thumos, one feels
a fullness of self in need of expression.
The striving of erôs tends to seek possession of some
object outside of the self, in the expectation that this will fill
its lack. The object sought is usually regarded as being high,
exalted, or beautiful; the lack is considered to be grave and
its fulfillment of the greatest importance because tantamount
to finding happiness, and thus the striving is accompanied
with great intensity of feeling
The striving of thumos tends to be in opposition or antagonism to some object other than the self, either one that
threatens the self or one that is in some way in opposition to
the goodness that the self strives to assert. The sense in which
goodness is perceived in the self and the sense in which it is
asserted may vary widely: as existence asserted in selfdefense; as, excellence asserted in the striving for recognition; as rule over others asserted in the pursuit of conquest.
Ludwig begins with Aristophanes’ speech in the
Symposium, in which he finds two manifestations of erôs. The
one which Aristophanes explicitly calls erôs and makes the
object of his praise is the desire of each split half of the original circle people to rejoin with its former other half in order
to recover its (their?) original wholeness. The other impulse
which Ludwig identifies as a form of erôs is whatever motive
caused these original circle people to ascend into the heavens
and seek to displace the gods, thus provoking the splitting
that brought into being the first kind of erôs. Aristophanes
himself does not even name this second impulse, much less
call it erôs, and he does not give any explicit characterization
of its object. Ludwig names it ‘Ur-erôs’ and characterizes it in
a number of different ways. He argues that it is more original
and natural than the erôs of the split halves and that the
latter is the result of efforts to restrain ‘Ur-erôs’ in most
people, an effort originally made by a tyrant in the service of
better fulfilling his own ‘Ur-erôs.’
While Ludwig has not yet introduced the distinction
between erôs and thumos at this point, it seems to me that the
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erôs of the halves does fit the definition of erôs, insofar as it
strives to fill a perceived lack, even if there is lack of clarity
about what constitutes this lack and its fulfillment. Ludwig,
however, treats this aspect of Aristophanes’ account as a
romantic dressing up of a less attractive reality: a desire for
what is like oneself, which uses the self as the criterion of
likeness. Ludwig calls this “horizontal erôs,” twisting it in a
direction that strikes me as more thumotic: he makes it into
a kind of assertion of the goodness of the self, as if what it
seeks is only more of the same.
The other form of erôs, which Ludwig calls ‘Ur-erôs’ or
‘vertical erôs,’ is an impulse implied in Aristophanes’ very
brief statement that the original circle people made an ascent
into the heavens and launched an attack upon the gods. I find
both thumotic and erotic aspects in this impulse. The antagonistic and assertive aspect of thumos is manifest in the
attempt to overthrow or displace the gods by a violent struggle, as if they were a hindrance to be overcome. Nevertheless,
the erotic component emerges insofar as the circle people are
attempting to gain something high and exalted that they lack.
Ludwig does not initially thematize this duality or relate it to
thumos, but later adumbrates it in the phrase “violent
admiration.” He gives a wide range of characterizations of
the goal sought by the circle people without an explicit
attempt either to unify these or to choose among them: tyrannical domination of others; equality with or superiority to an
admired object; becoming a more grandiose version of oneself; higher status; self-aggrandizement; self-apotheosis; an
inhuman wholeness and perfection. In many of these phrases,
I find the peculiar implication that the one who seeks to
fulfill a lack nonetheless manages to suppress his recognition
of this lack, by somehow believing that what he does not yet
possess is rightfully his own or is the fitting external expression of what he really already is.
Ludwig reads Aristophanes’ speech as covertly acknowledging the natural character of this “Ur-erôs” while recognizing that it is dangerous and needs to be restrained, both by
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laws and by civil religion. The other kind of erôs is derivative
from the restraining effects of convention, but is safer.
Aristophanes tries to make it more attractive by playing up
the romantic and idealistic side of it and covering up its dark
and selfish side.
Ludwig, however, identifies a particular problem in
Aristophanes’ strategy. He has included male homosexual
love as one of the forms of the convention-tamed erôs. Yet in
noting that the political men come from lovers of this kind,
he recognizes that Ur-erôs is less tamed in them, and that they
represent a tendency to reconstitute the original whole at the
political level, rather than at the private level. As a consequence, they tend toward the dangers of internal tyranny and
external imperialism.
This question of the political effects of the Greek practice
of homosexual pederasty forms one of the main strands of the
book’s analysis. The practice combines erotic neediness on
the individual level with ambition to rule and conquer on the
political level. Ludwig identifies a basic internal contradiction
in the practice as one of the principles of its dynamism. While
the relationship of older lover to younger beloved was in part
understood as a path to political power for the beloved, the
acceptance of the passive sexual role by one male in relation
to another was regarded as shameful and as a disqualification
from the exercise of citizen rights (technically only if in
exchange for money). Hence the threat of such hubris on the
part of the lover was guarded against by a convention that
encouraged the pursuit of young males by older ones, while
at the same time discouraging sexual consummation. Ludwig
argues that this convention fostered the sublimation of sexual desire into a kind of love that expressed itself largely in an
attempt to educate the beloved so as to win the favor of his
recognition. But Ludwig points to a number of elements in
this education that strike me as thumotic: the lover first seeks
to cultivate and display his own excellence in rivalry with
other lovers, and then to impress the stamp of his own excellence on the beloved. Insofar as this excellence has a political
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character, and insofar as erotic energy is directed away from
heterosexual love and the private household and is denied
sexual satisfaction, it tends to spill over into ambitious political activity. Insofar as this pederastic relationship was an aristocratic or oligarchic practice, the political activity tended to
be oligarchic, and to be viewed as a threat by the democrats.
In his plays Aristophanes often satirizes the pederastic
proclivities of Athenian politicians, and suggests that heterosexual desire is more compatible with contentment with
private life and avoidance of dangerous political ambition
and the wars brought on by imperialism. Yet Ludwig finds
evidence in the plays that Aristophanes is aware that heterosexual desire and the pleasures of private life may have their
own admixture of thumos, in a kind of belligerently possessive and even randomly cantankerous behavior.
In connection with the practice he calls “civic nudity,”
in which Greek males exercised and engaged in athletic
competition in the nude, Ludwig explores politico-erotic
phenomena along a different axis, stretching from shameinduced covering of the body to its shame-free (but not
shameless) uncovering. He seems to want to argue, on the
one hand, that some degree of covering up out of shame or
modesty is a necessary condition of the emergence of love as
distinct from sexual desire, but on the other hand, that an
obsession with covering up is an over reaction that generates
a vicious cycle of “modesty—sensitization—predation—modesty.” Ludwig argues that Thucydides, at least, regarded
Greek civic nudity as a sign of civic trust and a display of
“conspicuous moderation,” in contrast to what is reported of
modern nudist colonies, that universal nudity of itself
suppresses sexual desire. In treating this as a single axis, he
may not give sufficient attention to the distinction between
the shame or modesty involved in covering and uncovering
the body and that involved in the desire for privacy for sexual intimacy.
In a bold extrapolation, he claims that a “structural
feature of erôs” emerges from this dialectic of covering and
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uncovering. What erôs really desires is not the consummation
of sexual desire, much less the naked body, but rather the
transgressive motion from one degree of covering to the next
lower degree, ad infinitum, albeit per impossible. He even
suggests that beauty itself may somehow have a structure that
lures us on to such transgressive unveiling. If his claim is that
this is a structural feature of all erôs, he has not substantiated
it by showing how it is present in all the cases he has
examined. Although he does not make this explicit, the transgressive character that he finds in this kind of voyeuristic erôs
bears traces of the aggressive and antagonistic features of
thumos.
In his final chapter, Ludwig both introduces new political
manifestations of erôs and tries to sort out some of the possibilities he has surveyed. The augmented range of possibilities
includes the narrow attachment to and preference for one’s
own because it is one’s own; the attempt to extend this to the
city as a whole in part by weakening it at the family level;
homoerotic pederasty, as a practice which diverts erotic
energy from love of one’s own into a relationship with civic
consequences both beneficial and dangerous; Periclean love
of the city because of its grandeur or merit, along with a
desire to be honored by it, shadowed by the ambition to possess it as sole tyrant and/or to leave one’s stamp on it; love of
seeing things exotic and alien, which undermines the effort to
conquer them; and love of acquiring foreign things, which,
when assimilated, undermine loyalty to and defense of one’s
own.
Ludwig tries to marshal this motley crew into a single
orderly column or spectrum, with the narrow, possessive love
of one’s own on one end, and the selfless love of beauty on
the other end. He further suggests that Sparta and Athens
each marched gloriously over the cliff at one end of the spectrum, Sparta staying too close to the narrow love of one’s
own, although transferred from family to city, and Athens
flirting dangerously with love of the beautiful as detached
from one’s own.
DINK
111
Ludwig’s book does much valuable work in uncovering
and exploring many aspects of erôs in Greek political
phenomena and theory. His tone is always judicious and
non-polemical, and his mastery of a wide range of material,
primary and secondary, ancient and modern, philological,
sociological, and philosophical, is impressive. From the point
of view of explicating the intertwining of erôs and thumos,
however, the organization of the book presents a significantserious structural impediment. His discussion of the two
kinds of erôs in Aristophanes’ speech in the early chapters
precedes his introduction of the distinction between erôs and
thumos. When he introduces thumos in chapter 4, his discussion focuses almost exclusively on ways in which it shows up
in combination with “horizontal erôs.” His primary example
is a character from the Wasps, Philocleon. An old man who
loves to serve on juries, his attitude is one of punitive moralism, ostensibly in response to threats against the common
good of the city. In contrast, Ludwig’s discussion of
Peisetairos, a character from the Birds, who resembles the
circle people in making an ascent into the heavens that turns
out to be tyrannical, is couched entirely in terms of erôs. In
other words, despite a brief allusion to the connection of thumos to the ascent of the circle people, Ludwig never makes
an explicit attempt to assess the thumotic elements in
“vertical erôs.” Thus we are left with the impression that
verticality and violence belong together intrinsically, and that
this togetherness is the most fundamental form of erôs.
In contrast, when he lines up the many manifestations of
erôs along a spectrum in the final chapter, he seems to put the
violence together with the selfish and the possessive on the
horizontal end of the spectrum, which is therefore regarded
as more thumotic than erotic, and to put self-forgetting in the
presence of the beautiful at the other, vertical, end, which is
therefore regarded as more erotic than thumotic. We can’t
help wondering where on this spectrum to fit vertical erôs as
the aspiration to tyranny.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Perhaps this apparent inconsistency could be resolved if
we said that the violence and assertiveness in the aspiration of
the circle-people are due to an admixture of thumos with the
erotic desire for a certain kind of perfection. This would still
leave us with a number of questions. Are erôs and thumos
halves of an original, natural whole, which are only split from
one another by convention? Or are they intrinsically distinct
principles, whose co-presence in any phenomenon is in need
of explanation? If the latter is the case, is one more natural
than the other? Is the impulse to ascend more fundamentally
due to one rather than to the other? Is the desire to acquire a
perfection that one finds lacking in oneself necessarily linked
to an impulse to displace others who are seen as possessing
this perfection? If erôs and thumos are mixed along both
horizontal and vertical axes, what determines the difference
between these axes?
113
�
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Carey, James
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
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Coleman, Shanna
Sachs, Joe
Sinnett, Mark W.
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Ludwig, Paul
Dink, Michael
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The St. John’s Review
Volume XLIX, number three (2007)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Elizabeth Curry
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Michael Dink, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10 for one year. Unsolicited
essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. All
manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P
.O. Box 2800,
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5
per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore.
©2007 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essays and Lectures
Vedic Tradition and the Origin of Philosophy
in Ancient India ........................................................... 5
James Carey
The Forgotten Faculty: The Place of Phronêsis
or Practical Sense in Liberal Education
(Plutarch and Aristotle)............................................... 67
David Levine
Reviews
Friedrich Nietzsche. Prefaces to Unwritten Works;
On the Future of Our Educational Institutions..........101
Jonathan Badger
Jan Blits. Spirit, Soul, and City:
Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.......................................... 117
John E. Alvis
�4
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
5
Vedic Tradition and the Origin
of Philosophy in Ancient India
James Carey
1
“Philosophy” is a term that turns up with variable frequency
in presentations and discussions of the religious and speculative traditions of ancient India. There are those who
maintain that philosophy is an Indian no less than a Western
phenomenon. In support of this claim they point out that in
ancient India there was a vast amount of speculation about
the whole of things, how it is constituted and what its origins
are, and that this inquiry came to expression in a variety of
highly developed systems of speculative thought. There are
others, however, who maintain that philosophy is a uniquely
Western phenomenon. Philosophy, they claim, is not just
speculation about ultimate causes. It is, rather, a whole way
of life, one that is governed by the conviction that knowledge
is to be pursued for its own sake, as an end subservient to
none other, however so loftily conceived. This ideal emerged
first in ancient Greece, and later on only under the influence
of Greek thought.
In the disagreement between these two groups, the latter
appear at first glance to be on stronger ground. There was
indeed plenty of speculation about ultimate principles in
ancient India. There was arguably a wider range of such
speculation there than anywhere else in the ancient world,
Greece included. But speculation about ultimate principles is
Mr. Carey is a tutor at St. John’s College, Santa Fe, currently on leave and
serving as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the United States
Air Force Academy. A shorter version of this paper was presented as a lecture
at St. John’s College, Annapolis, in March, 1993. The present version is
dedicated to the memory of Ralph Swentzell, Tutor, as an expression of
gratitude for his tireless efforts on behalf of the Eastern Classics program at
St. John’s College, Santa Fe.
�6
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
as old as man and often does not rise above the level of superstition.
Moreover, philosophy is not simply the love of wisdom,
or the longing to see the whole, to see it clearly for what it is
and without illusions. Philosophy is this longing, to be sure,
but accompanied by a sense of obligation, or some kind of
urge, to give a rational account of what it takes to be true,
without appeal to external authority. In the West, philosophy
has traditionally been regarded as one member of a pair of
alternatives, the other being religion. The guiding lights of
philosophy are reason and ordinary, verifiable human
experience. Philosophy does not take its bearings, as religion
does, by alleged disclosures from above that are supposed to
transcend reason and ordinary experience altogether. That
neither philosophy nor religion can be simply reduced to the
other is not controversial. What is controversial is the claim
that philosophy and religion are so opposed to one another
that one and the same person cannot be both a philosopher
and a believer. We are, of course, familiar with the arguments
of such thinkers as Thomas Aquinas and Kant to the effect
that reason cannot penetrate on its own to the first principles
or the deepest stratum of being, that reason can recognize this
limitation and can thereby infer its need to be supplemented
by some kind of faith, be it only a religion within the limits
of reason alone. But, against these arguments there are
others, rather more widely accepted by philosophers, though
until recent times less forcefully advanced, to the effect that
religious belief contains, either in its explicit doctrines or in
its implicit presuppositions, certain contradictions the
affirming of which is incompatible with a fully rational life.
In arguing for the emergence of philosophy in ancient
India I shall make use of the narrow conception of
philosophy as an enterprise of rationally autonomous
enquiry, not simply distinct from but opposed to and in
varying degrees antagonistic to religious belief. I shall argue
for the emergence in ancient India of an atheism that under-
CAREY
7
stood itself to be grounded in a rational consideration of the
whole, and of man’s place within the whole. I shall not raise
the question of whether this conception of philosophy is
ultimately defensible but shall assume it as a working
hypothesis, so to speak. Accordingly, I shall be working with
a conception of philosophy that some might criticize as excessively narrow. I might criticize it that way myself. The justification for my procedure, however, is that I wish to show that
philosophy, even according to this narrow, perhaps excessively narrow conception, did in fact emerge in ancient India.
If this can be shown, then it can be shown a fortiori that
philosophy less narrowly conceived also emerged there. It is
not possible, however, to argue convincingly for a tradition of
autonomous rationality without exhibiting something of the
variety of forms it assumed, in particular, the main points of
controversy and the rival claims and arguments of the
contending parties. I shall be giving no more than a rough
sketch, however, and I shall omit much that is relevant to my
topic. I hope, nonetheless, not only to show that philosophy,
however so rigorously defined, really did exist in ancient
India, but to shed new light on the conditions of its
emergence and the trajectory it assumed, and perhaps to
communicate something of its flavor as well.
Philosophy and religion both are ways of regarding
ultimate causes, but philosophy is the younger of the two. In
defining its way in opposition to that of religion, philosophy
presupposes religion, not, of course, as something true, but as
a mistake that it has managed to get beyond. Moreover,
philosophy presupposes leisure, and human beings find
leisure only within the life of political communities. Political
communities are particular. They are particularized by
nomoi, that is, by laws and other conventions, among the
most important of which are religious nomoi. It stands to
reason, then, that the peculiar character of the reigning
religion would contribute something to the form that philosophical questioning of it assumes and to the prominence of
certain themes taken up for specifically philosophical consid-
�8
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
eration. For this reason, we need a preliminary overview of
early Indian religion. It must be admitted at the outset that we
are handicapped somewhat. The attitude of the ancient
Indians to history seems to have been one of ethereal indifference. We possess little in the way of chronicles, and most
dates given for significant events are crude approximations at
best, often having several centuries as a margin of error.
2
Sometime during the second millennium B.C., a people
speaking an Indo-European language and calling themselves
¯
“A ryans”1 migrated from the northwest into the Indian
subcontinent. A few centuries later their sacred hymns,
prayers, and incantations began to be gathered into three
collections called Vedas. A fourth Veda was later assembled.
These hymns were not written down at first but were passed
on orally from generation to generation by a priestly caste, to
whose prodigious memory the preservation of the hymns was
entrusted. Of the four Vedas, only the fourth, the Rg Veda,
contains much that is of genuinely speculative interest. It
consists of over a thousand hymns largely celebrating in the
most disparate fashion a florid polytheism, somewhat akin to
Greek religion and having almost nothing in common with
the religion of the Bible. But the Rg Veda also contains
material of a different sort, such as the so-called creation
hymn, the beginning and conclusion of which are as follows:
There was neither not-being (asat) nor being (sat)
then. There was neither a space nor a heaven
beyond. What stirred? Where? In whose
protection?....That one [neuter - tat ekam] was
breathing, windless, by its own determination [or
spontaneity - svadha ]....Who may proclaim when
¯
this creation was produced? The gods [came]
hither with the creation of this [world]. Who then
knows whence it has arisen? Whether it established itself or did not establish itself, the one who
CAREY
9
surveys it in the highest heaven alone knows. Or
else he does not know.2
Such questions about ultimate principles, real and not just
rhetorical, are frequently raised in the hymns of the Rg Veda.
Occasionally, questions are raised regarding even the
existence of the particular god celebrated in the hymn, and
are left unanswered or answered with what appears to be
strained conviction or, perhaps, irony.
Striving for strength, bring forth a laud to Indra, a
true one (satyam), if he truly exists (yadi satyam
asti). One and another say, “There is no Indra.”
“Who has beheld (dadarsa) him?” Whom then
shall we honor?3
And from another hymn,
He about whom they ask, “Where is he?” or say of
him, the terrible one, “He does not exist,” he who
diminishes the flourishing wealth of the enemy as
gambling does—believe in him (srad asmai
dhatta)! He, my people, is Indra!4
In spite of the prevailing polytheism of the Rg Veda,
celebrated alternately in confidence and in perplexity, there
are occasional suggestions of a tentative monotheism and,
more remarkably, even of monism simpliciter.5
Monism, or the view that all is one and that the apparent
plurality of things veils a more fundamental unity, is the
prevailing perspective in the principal Upanisads, which
emerged in the centuries after the Vedas were compiled. In
these works certain other common features can be discerned
that are characteristic of early or proto-Hinduism.6 Among
these are belief in transmigration of the soul, karmic encumbrance, the concept of dharma or law, the caste system,7 and
liberation as the end goal of all perfect self-knowledge. It is
worth sketching each of these features briefly, since one or
another of them, separately or in combination, comes to the
�10
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
fore not only in the teaching of those speculative thinkers
who present themselves as theorizing within the orthodox
Vedic tradition, but even in the thinking of some of those
who reject this tradition. There were wide differences of
opinion among sophisticated thinkers regarding the most
fundamental principles of Vedic tradition. In what follows, I
shall emphasize those interpretations that, though far from
being universally accepted by believers, were most
provocative of a properly philosophical response and appropriation. I shall focus on, without restricting myself to,
themes that are central to the principal Upanisads. The divine
is presented there in a way that has little in common with the
polytheism of the Vedas.
The word “brahman,” which is neuter in gender, names
the fundamental reality that lies behind the manifold and
multiform world of appearances. Brahman, the hidden
reality, is not many but one. The world as it appears, in all its
manifoldness, is maya. This word is frequently translated as
¯ ¯
“illusion,” but one should not assume that maya is altogether
¯ ¯
unreal. It is rather the surface play of the fundamental reality.
The world of appearances is illusion only to the extent that it
is mistaken for the fundamental reality.
But what intimation, we might ask, is there of an underlying unity? The answer is that there is one thing that is
experienced as single and self-identical throughout space and
time, throughout the multiplicity of spatial and temporal
phenomena, and throughout even the manifold topics that
thought takes up for consideration. This one thing is the self,
the ¯tman. The self cannot be identified with the external
a
objects and internal concerns with which it is almost always
preoccupied. The self in its purity is, we are told in one of the
earliest Upanisads, “not this, not that” (or “not this, not this”neti neti).8 But to the very extent that the self is distinguishable from all appearances, inner appearances—including
the individual thoughts that come and go—as well as outer, it
seems to be indistinguishable from all other selves. The
thought dawns that there is perhaps only one self, and that
CAREY
11
the path to brahman, the fundamental unity underlying the
manifold appearances of the world, is through selfknowledge. This knowledge is achieved in part by study and
reflection, and in part by mastery of desires, which may,
though need not, entail acts of physical discipline and austerities (tapas). It turns out, though, that the path to brahman is
not exactly through knowledge of the self, for in the
Upanisads the self is actually identified with the fundamental
reality: ¯tman is brahman.9 Or, as it is also said, “That art
a
thou.”10 This core of indivisible individuality at the center of
our being is paradoxically what each of us really is, what is
common to us all, and finally the underlying unity supporting
everything else that in any way exists. It is not only one but
simple and self-identical.
Brahman should not be confused with Brahma, which is
¯
the name, masculine in gender, of one of the three primary
deities in the Hindu pantheon. Brahma is the creator, Visnu
¯
the preserver, and Siva the destroyer.11 In the history of
Hinduism, cultic devotion to Brahma was superseded early
¯
on by devotion to Visnu and Siva, indicating a greater
interest, even at the popular level, in the present and future
manifestations of reality than in its originating source, a
greater interest in what the world is and the limits of its transformations than in who made it or where it came from, a
greater interest in constitution than in cause, one might say.
Of the three gods, Siva is the most puzzling to the Westerner.
He is described as the great ascetic and is typically depicted
as meditating or dancing, wearing a necklace of skulls, and
possessing three eyes, one of which is closed. When Siva
opens his third eye, which is in the middle of his forehead,
the world of appearances, it was said, will be consumed by
fire. Siva is the destroyer of illusion.
Returning to the less picturesque monism of the
Upanisads, it is all-important to realize that brahman, or the
fundamental reality, is not a person. Least of all is brahman a
transcendent deity who has created a world distinct from
himself, which he governs through law, awarding happiness
�12
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
in rough proportion to morality, if not in this world at least
in a world to come. Hinduism is, of course, not indifferent to
the question of morality. Indeed, the vexing problem of how
desire for the fruit of action can contaminate the moral purity
of the action, and thereby render the fruit unattainable, is
discerned as early as the Upanisads and is a recurrent theme
in Hinduism, and in Buddhism as well. But in conspicuous
contrast to the way this problem is conceived in the West, a
moral theology is not invoked to manage it.12 Instead, the
problem of the connection of the just deserts of action with
the actions that merit them is addressed through the related
doctrines of transmigration and karmic causality. If the self is
indivisible then it is indissoluble. It cannot be naturally
destroyed, and so it survives the death of the body. But the
indestructibility of the self does not keep it from being
encumbered with the moral effects of the acts it has
committed. This encumbrance is called karma. Although a
man may not experience in this life the effects of the karma
within which he has encrusted his indestructible self, at death
this karma binds the self to reincarnation. Moreover, karma
causes the self to gravitate, so to speak, to a new incarnation
and re-incarceration specifically appropriate to its moral
history. By committing bad actions a man becomes bad and
accumulates bad karma. At the death of his body he finds
himself entering a new body and life worse than that from
which he has just departed. How much worse that life is
depends on how bad he was, and reincarnation as something
subhuman is a distinct possibility. The indestructible self of a
man who has lived a good life is reincarnated into a better
life. As we shall see, though, reincarnation is not the only
destination for the self.
If one is reincarnated as a human being, the karma
accumulated from the preceding life determines what caste
one will be reincarnated into. The justification for castes in
the sacred tradition is traced to a well known though mysterious passage in the Rg Veda describing the sacrifice and
dismemberment of a primordial gigantic man called the
CAREY
13
purusa, a word that in later works came to mean spirit, mind,
intelligence, or consciousness.
When they divided the purusa, into how many
parts did they apportion him? What do they call
his mouth, his two arms and thighs and feet? His
mouth became the brahmin; his arms were made
¯
into the Warrior, his thighs the People, and from
his feet the Servants were born.13
This fourfold division has over the course of time become
transformed into a great plurality of castes governed by all
sorts of injunctions and prohibitions. The original fourfold
division was not nearly so complex, nor, one is tempted to
add, was it so perverse as what holds sway in India today. In
the Arthasastra, a treatise on politics, written by Kautilya
¯
toward the end of the fourth century B.C., the specific duties
of the original four castes are described as follows.
The special duties (dharmas) of the brahmin are:
¯
¯
studying, teaching, performing sacrifices for self,
officiating at other peoples’ sacrifices, making gifts,
and receiving gifts. Those of the ksatriya (the
warrior or king) are: studying, performing
sacrifices for self, making gifts, living by [the
profession of] arms, and protecting beings. Those
of the vaisya (the farmer or merchant) are:
studying, performing sacrifices for self, making
gifts, agriculture, cattle rearing and trade. Those of
the sudra (or servant) are: service of the twiceborn [i.e., the members of the aforementioned
three castes], engaging in an economic calling [viz.,
agriculture, cattle rearing, and trade] and the
profession of the artisan and the actor.14
In addition to the duties of the special castes there are the
duties proper to the four stages of life for the members of the
three highest, twice-born castes, brahmin, ksatriya, and
¯
vaisya.15 These are the stages of student, householder, forest
�14
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
recluse, and wandering ascetic, the duties of which are also
specified by Kautilya. Additionally, there are duties common
to all: “abstaining from harm, truthfulness, uprightness,
freedom from malice, compassion, and forbearance.”16 The
entire system of duties of the various castes and stations of
life make up part of what is called dharma. This word could
be translated as “law” as well as “duty,” depending on the
context. No more than lex does dharma mean nomos or
convention, that is to say, mere convention. It means rather
the proper order of human life sanctioned, if not explicitly by
the Veda, then at least by way of extrapolation and development of Vedic lore and tradition.17 It is supported by and
expressive of karmic causality. Moreover, and of apparently
greater importance to Kautilya, dharma, including the
distinctions of caste, is the shield against barbarism and chaos.
It is, of course, difficult for those of us living in the modern
West to regard the caste system, even the less extreme form
of it that held sway in ancient India, as anything other than
arbitrary and unjust. It has been argued, however, that an
egalitarian social order that does not degenerate rapidly into
anarchy, followed most likely by tyranny, presupposes an
economics of plenty. Instead of an economics of plenty, an
economics of scarcity reigned in ancient India, as it did
throughout the ancient world in general. It should not be
forgotten in this connection that even democratic Athens
made use of slaves. An economics of plenty, such as we have
today, allows for a more just social order to be sure, even the
possibility of equal opportunity for all. The price paid for this
social order is the technological mastery of nature as a consequence of which machines can do the work—at least a lot of
it—that slaves used to do. And, needless to say, the mastery
of nature generates problems of its own, problems that were
unknown in the ancient world.18 In any case, the dharma
promulgated by the Veda not only allowed for but mandated
study for three of the four castes while providing sufficient
leisure for them to engage in it. And leisure, to repeat, is a
CAREY
15
necessary if not a sufficient condition for the emergence of
philosophy.
The whole system of dharma was upheld by the king,
who was, significantly, not a member of the brahmin caste but
¯
of the ksatriya or warrior caste. Kautilya writes that the king
should employ the scepter or rod, that is to say, punishment,
for the good of the people.
For the rod (or scepter - danda), employed with
due consideration, endows the subjects with
dharma, material well-being (artha), and objects of
desire (or pleasures - kamas). Employed badly,
¯ ¯
whether in passion or anger, or in contempt, it
enrages even forest recluses and wandering
ascetics, how much more then the householders? If
not employed at all, it gives rise to the law of the
fishes. For the stronger man swallows the weak in
the absence of the wielder of the rod. Protected by
him, the weak man prevails.19
The education of the king in the science of politics,
(dandaka), more literally the science of wielding the rod
¯
(dandani ti), is treated at length in the Arthasastra. It aims at
¯
the formation of the sage-king, or raja rsi.20 Among the
¯
¯
subjects studied by the king is ¯nvi ksiki or reasoning, to
a ¯
which we shall return shortly.
The end goal of all action is liberation (moksa).21
Liberation is, at the simplest level, release from the cycle of
birth and rebirth, i.e., release of the self from karmic
causality. Since the self is a pure unity it cannot be dissolved
into its components. It is indestructible, and it does not need
to be incarnate to exist. The liberation of the self from the
cycle of birth and rebirth, then, is the union of ¯tman with
a
brahman. This liberation is most often presented as a state
that can be achieved only after an indeterminate number of
reincarnations through which bad karma is gradually shed.
However, if at the end of even an exemplary life, a life in full
accord with dharma, there remains any residue of bad karma,
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
there is no liberation at death. Bad karma can be shed only
within a life, and not in the transition (most consistently
regarded as instantaneous) from the previous life to the
following. But if, within an exceptionally good life, bad
karma is entirely eliminated, then there is no longer a barrier
to union with brahman within that very life. There is no need
to die in order to experience liberation. Seen in this light,
liberation is essentially release from the ignorance that
prevents one from recognizing the identity of ¯tman and
a
brahman. Although this ignorance can be regarded as due to
bad karma, the attempt to apprehend this identity, and hence
to achieve the highest possible state of existence, presupposes
right action not as an end in itself but only as a means, as the
taming of the passions that interfere with clarity of apprehension. Action in accordance with dharma, or, as we might
say, morality, is for the sake of a non-moral end, namely the
end of seeing the concealed, though immanent and impersonal oneness of all things, without the distraction of the
desires that it is the wholly subservient and instrumental
function of morality to moderate. It should go without saying
that seeing the oneness of all things, and in particular the
oneness of ¯tman and brahman, cannot be understood as a
a
union of love, for there is not the otherness that love presupposes. There is ultimately no seeing face to face, because there
is ultimately only one face.22
3
So far we have not encountered anything that can be called
philosophy, at least not as we have hypothetically conceived
it. But it is clear that the relatively “demythologized” religion
of the Upanisads does not present the same kind of contrast
with philosophy that one finds in Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam. In the latter religions the believer affirms allegiance to
a personal creator and moral governor of the universe who
transcends and is “wholly other” than his creation, and yet
who loves it and commands love in return. In the religion of
the Upanisads, the fundamental reality, even on the highly
CAREY
17
questionable assumption that it can be called “God,” is
impersonal. It is not the creator of the universe ex nihilo but
is its inner core. Brahman is not strictly transcendent to, but,
rather, immanent within, the world, and is so far from being
“wholly other” as to be wholly the same. Unlike the God of
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, brahman is not jealous.
Hinduism has historically exhibited an exceptional
willingness to concede that other religions also have insights
into the reality that is concealed behind appearances.23 It has
thus been able to assimilate other religions into itself with
some success, although, not surprisingly, it has failed to do
this with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Judaism and
Christianity have not historically been major forces in India,
disregarding, of course, the missionary efforts of the latter in
the last few centuries. The case is different with Islam, which
began to make substantial inroads into India during the tenth
century A.D. The bitterness of the conflict, often bloody,
between Hinduism and Islam is due in large measure to their
radically different conceptions not simply of the divine but of
what religion itself is.
In this connection it is worth considering the sources of
the Hindu analogue to what is known in West as revelation.
The Vedic hymns are, in effect, the foundational sacred scriptures. Actually, “scriptures” is not quite the right word since,
it is estimated, they were not written down until about
500 B.C., at the earliest. As we noted, they were memorized
and recited by brahmins, who were entrusted with preserving
¯
them and keeping them a living force in rituals and teaching.
The language of the Veda is an early form of Sanskrit. To
preserve the original hymns from alteration in the course of
recitation over millennia, the rules for euphony in different
phonetic contexts and for morphological change were
specified by Panini in his classic grammar, generally conceded
¯
by linguists who are familiar with it to be by far the greatest
work of its kind in any language. It is not certain when Panini
¯
composed his grammar, or even whether it was originally
written rather than composed orally and preserved in this
�18
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
form until written characters came to be employed. In any
case, Panini’s grammar virtually precluded further phonetic
¯
development of the language. Consequently, the sound of the
Veda when recited today is arguably the same, perhaps down
to the smallest nuances, as when it was recited in Panini’s
¯
time, if not earlier.
It is all-important to recognize in this connection that the
oral tradition of ancient India was entirely different from the
oral traditions that Westerners have recently begun to show
an interest in. Those who recited the Vedic hymns and
appended works such as the Upanisads were mere vehicles for
the most exact transmission of these works possible. The
transmitter was anything but an integral component of what
was being transmitted, unlike the narrator in many other oral
traditions—the storyteller did understand himself to be part
of the story. Consequently, the Indian tradition can be
considered, for all practical purposes, literary, well in advance
of the appearance of the written language itself. As in the case
of letters proper, the best minds could address the best minds
across centuries with a minimum of interference from intermediary transmitters.
The word Veda itself means “knowledge.” It is cognate
with the Greek word eidos. The knowledge that the Veda
contains was acquired by the sages (rsis) of old. They did not
acquire it as gift from a god. They acquired it, rather, through
their superior powers of apprehension. This knowledge was
passed on orally in the very form in which it was acquired.
For that reason successive generations have access to it and it
can be authoritative for them. This knowledge is acquired,
moreover, not through seeing but through hearing, just as it
was acquired by the sages.24 The sages heard what one hears
when the Veda is recited today, though back then there seems
to have been, mirabile dictu, no one doing the reciting. What
the sages heard was the eternal though hidden articulation of
the truth, or, as we might be tempted to say, thinking of
Heraclitus, the logos.
CAREY
19
I shall continue to use the term “revelation” to designate
Vedic lore, though the term is inaccurate to the extent that it
implies the self-disclosure of God, not to sages, i.e., to the
wise, but to the elect. Hindus have difficulty understanding
the Biblical concept of revelation, and many object to the
term being applied to the sources of their sacred tradition.25
When the Muslims first began their conquest of northern
India, about a thousand years ago, they were shocked to
discover that the Hindus did not even pretend to have
prophets.26 Still, “revelation” is the only word we have for the
Vedic analogue of Biblical and Qur’anic revelation, and I shall
¯
continue to use it, not without misgivings, in speaking of
what bears only a trace of resemblance to revelation as
conceived in the West.
Now, a distinction is drawn within early Hinduism
between two levels of revelation. The primary revelation is
called sruti, or that which was heard by the sages. It consists
of the four Vedas and appended material, the Upanisads in
particular. The secondary revelation is called smrti or that
which is remembered. It consists of later works, some
devotional, some legal, and some speculative. An instance of
¯¯
the latter is the Bhagavad Gi ta, which is sometimes accorded
almost as much authority as sruti proper. This work is an
excerpt from the Mahabharata, a gigantic Indian epic eight
¯ ¯
times as long as the Iliad and Odyssey combined. Because of
the variety of material contained in the sruti, considerable
controversy emerged among the learned as to the precise
character of Vedic authority.
So far I have sketched only the most central features of
early Hinduism, emphasizing the sophisticated religious
speculation of the Upanisads and ignoring entirely the
polytheism of the popular religion.27 The highly sophisticated
religious speculation of the Upanisads does not count as
philosophy, as least not according to the conception of
philosophy I have adopted on hypothesis. Nonetheless it is
not difficult to see how philosophy could emerge in this intel-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
lectual milieu. It was a period of leisure, mandated study, and,
not least, freedom of speculation, including freedom to
rethink and reinterpret the meaning of the Veda, which
manifestly contains passages of religious skepticism and even
satire.28
4
Sometime around the sixth century B.C. three systems of
speculative thought broke with the Vedic tradition. These
were Buddhism, Jainism, and Lokayata. All three denied the
¯
authority of the Vedas and, in particular, the caste system it
supported. The first two are classified as religions. The third
is something else.
In Buddhism, as in Hinduism, one must distinguish
between the popular belief and the philosophical appropriation. Whereas the Upanisads teach the substantial oneness of
all things, Buddhism teaches the insubstantial voidness (or
emptiness - sunyata) of all things. In the writings of the
¯
¯
Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, who is thought to have
¯ ¯
lived and taught around the end of the first century A.D., the
implications of this teaching are pressed home with dialectical force. To take a single example, against the doctrine of
the voidness of all things, the Hindu opponent objects that if
all things are void (sunya), then the very thesis that all things
¯
are void is itself void, and is thereby refuted. To this
objection, Nagarjuna responds essentially as follows. It is
¯ ¯
indeed true that if all things are void, then the thesis that all
things are void is itself void. But this consequence, so far from
being a refutation of the thesis, is in fact an exemplification of
it and contributes to its confirmation.29 The Protagorean
relativist, familiar to us from Plato’s Theaetetus, cannot avail
himself of so neat a defense. For the thesis that all theses are
relative precludes itself from being absolutely true. The thesis
that all theses are void, however, does not preclude itself
from being absolutely true, if, that is, the Buddhists are right
in holding that voidness (sunyata) is at the heart of everything
¯
¯
that in any way is, including absolute truth itself. It would be
CAREY
21
a serious mistake to think that the Buddhist doctrine of
voidness is mystical or even intuitive. Buddhism, at least as it
developed in India, regards inference, i.e., logical reasoning,
as a valid means of cognition. The teaching on voidness is
supported with reasons. As the Hindu thinkers discovered in
their formal disputations with the Buddhists, the latter came
to the occasion well armed.
Needless to say, the Buddhist doctrine of voidness leaves
no room for an eternal and substantial being, either
immanent or transcendent. Indeed, it leaves no room for
a being, strictly so called, at all. Every so-called being is
but a phase of becoming, a segment of the indefinitely
flowing causal sequence called “dependent arising”
¯
(prati tyasamutpada). According to Buddhism, the recog¯
nition of the absolute insubstantiality and dependent arising
of all things is enlightenment. Enlightenment is liberation
from attachment to what is insubstantial and transitory. It is
liberation from deluded belief in permanence, from deluded
belief in any eternal presence. There have always been, within
Buddhism, a significant number of thinkers who have taught
that the Buddha’s enlightenment was achieved through sense
perception and inference exclusively, that is, through powers
lying completely within the nature of man.
Jainism shares much in common with Hinduism while,
like Buddhism, rejecting the authority of the Veda. There is a
¯
line of sages (ti rthankaras) who have disclosed the truth
about reality. Reality is ultimately dual. Everything is either
soul or matter, and neither of these can be reduced to the
other. It is expressly taught that there is no need to recognize
any higher being than man. Jainism includes doctrines of
karma, reincarnation, and liberation similar to those of
Hinduism, and the same is true of Buddhism. But, given
Buddhism’s doctrine of the insubstantiality of all things, and
its denial of the substantial self in particular, it has the complicated task, which it does not evade, of addressing how it is
that the exceptionless state of dependent arising can allow for
encumbrance with karma, reincarnation, enlightenment, and
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
final liberation. The solution to this problem depends on the
cogency of the Buddhist claim that continuity does not
presuppose identity, at least not substantial identity. Both
classical Buddhism and Jainism were regarded as, strictly
speaking, atheistic, and neither seems to have made much of
an effort to deny the charge.30
In Lokayata (also called “Carvaka”), the third school of
¯
¯ ¯
speculative thought that denied the authority of the Veda, we
find unabashed atheism, materialism, and hedonism. We
know of this school for the most part only from excerpts of
texts no longer extant but quoted, sometimes at length, by
orthodox thinkers who not surprisingly dissociate themselves
from what they are quoting. The following excerpt represents
something of the teaching and spirit of Lokayata.31
¯
An opponent [of Lokayata] will say, if you do not
¯
allow for something unseen [or invisible - adrsta]
the various phenomena of the world become
destitute of any cause. But we [members of the
Lokayata school] cannot accept this objection as
¯
valid, since these phenomena can all be produced
spontaneously from their own nature [or own
being – svabhava].Thus it has been said [and here
¯
an earlier Lokayata text is quoted] – “The fire is
¯
hot, the water cold, refreshing cool the breeze of
morn; from whom came this variety? [Answer:]
From their own nature [svabhava] was it born.”
¯
The word translated here as “own nature” has two components, sva- which means “one’s own” or “intrinsic,” and
bhava, which is the Sanskrit word for being, derived from the
¯
verbal radical bhu.32 The text continues.
¯
And all this has been said by Brhaspati [the
legendary founder of Lokayata.] “There is no
¯
heaven, no final liberation, nor any soul in another
world. Nor do the actions of the four castes,
orders [that is, stages of life], etc., produce any
CAREY
23
real effect. The fire sacrifice [agnihotra], the three
Vedas, the ascetic’s three staves, and smearing
oneself with ashes were made by nature [or,
perhaps less misleadingly, made by the elements dhatu-nirmita] as the livelihood of those destitute
of knowledge and manliness. [Presumably the
brahmins are meant here.] If a beast slain in the
¯
Jyotistoma rite [a Vedic sacrifice] will itself go to
heaven, then why doesn’t the sacrificer offer his
own father? ... It is only as a means of livelihood
that brahmins have established here all these
¯
ceremonies for the dead—there is no other fruit
[than what is found in this world] anywhere.”
In an ancient drama, Prabodha-Candrodaya, which reflects
the views of this school, a materialist offers a simple response
to the question of why believers wear themselves out with
fasting and other forms of mortification: “These fools are
deceived by the [sacred texts] and are fed with the allurements of hope.”33
The name of this school, Lokayata, is derived from loka,
¯
the Sanskrit word for world. Sankara, a philosopher working
within the orthodox tradition, writes of Lokayata as follows:
¯
According to the Lokayatika doctrine, the four
¯
elements alone are the ultimate principles—earth,
water, fire, and air; there is none other. Only the
perceived exists; the unperceivable does not exist.
[Frank materialism and, indeed, nominalism.]
Others should not postulate [that is, infer] merit
and demerit from happiness and misery. A person
is happy or miserable through nature; there is no
other cause. [A denial of karma.] Who paints the
peacocks, or who makes the cuckoos sing? There
exists here no cause except nature. The soul is but
the body characterized by the attributes signified
by the expressions “I am stout,” “I am
youthful”…. It is not something other than the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
body. The consciousness that is found in
[organisms] is produced in the manner of the red
color out of the combination of betel, areca nut,
and lime. [Conscience is at most a mere epiphenomenon of matter.] There is no world other than
this one: there is no heaven and there is no hell:
the realm of Siva and like regions are invented by
stupid impostors…. Liberation is death, which is
the cessation of the life breath. The wise ought not
to take pains on account of it. [That is, there is no
need to take pains on account of liberation since,
being death, nothing more and nothing less, it is
going to come upon the wise and the unwise alike.
No effort is needed to bring it about.]. It is only
the fool who wears himself out by penances, fasts,
etc.34
Sankara wrote around 800 A.D., but Lokayata is much older.
¯
Its chief work, the Brhaspati Sutra, which is not extant, is
estimated to have been composed around 600 B.C. And references to Lokayata teachings occur in other works estimated
¯
to date from an early period.35
5
The denial of the authority of the Veda by Buddhism, Jainism,
and Lokayata, did not occur without provoking a response
¯
from the upholders of Vedic tradition. In the attempt to meet
the various criticisms leveled at the authority of the Veda, six
main schools of speculative thought emerged. These schools
are usually spoken of as “orthodox”, which is a rough but not
altogether misleading rendering of “astika,” (from Sanskrit as
¯
- “is”) which is employed to mean “accepting of sacred
tradition”, that is, Vedic tradition. Over and against these are
the “heterodox” or nastika (from na as - “is not”) schools of
¯
Buddhism, Jainism, and Lokayata. Each of these different
¯
schools is referred to by the Indian commentators as a view
(darsana). They were schools in the sense that they had
CAREY
25
su tras, or basic texts expressing the central tenets in concen¯
trated form, adherents, and a rich commentarial tradition of
textual exegesis. Needless to say, as the schools developed,
divisions emerged within them. There were, additionally,
important thinkers working both at the margins of the
schools and outside their confines. Formal, intermural disputations took place, and these are recapitulated and developed
further in the commentaries.36
To get a clearer view of philosophy as it existed in ancient
India, we need to undertake a brief survey of the orthodox
schools. The range of themes taken up for specifically philosophical treatment is comparable in scope, at least, to what
one finds in Western philosophy. Some themes strike the
Westerner as not only unfamiliar, but exotic, and even bewildering, while others are familiar but approached and
developed in unexpected ways. The task of our survey is
twofold. We need to observe the philosophical mind at work
on particular questions that are interesting in their own right.
At the same time, we need to determine exactly where and
how Vedic authority comes into the picture. For it is in
assessing the character of this authority that we can estimate
the extent to which philosophy in India succeeded in distinguishing its way from that of religion.
The six orthodox schools are conveniently grouped in
¯ ¯ ¯
pairs. In the first place there is the Pu rva-Mi mamsa—Uttara¯
¯mamsa pair. “Mi mamsa” means “inquiry”; “pu rva” and
¯ ¯ ¯
Mi ¯ ¯
¯
“uttara” mean “earlier” and “later” respectively. Pu rva¯
¯mamsa takes its bearings from the earlier part of Vedic
Mi ¯ ¯
¯ ¯ ¯
lore, the Vedas proper, and Uttara-Mi mamsa takes its
bearings from the later part, in particular, the appended
Upanisads. Of the six orthodox schools of thought Pu rva¯
¯ ¯ ¯
Mi mamsa is at first glance much the most orthodox. It is
concerned with such things as the resolution of inconsistencies in the Veda, their claim to be an eternal revelation,
and how sound can be the vehicle of revelation. These
inquiries are all in the service of supporting the rule of
dharma as the central Vedic disclosure relevant to human life.
�26
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
¯ ¯ ¯
Today one might be tempted to call Pu rva-Mi mamsa “Vedic
¯
fundamentalism” were it not for the cunning of its apologetics and the subtlety of its investigations, particularly into
the nature of speech (vac), which in one Vedic hymn is
¯
presented as a goddess extolling herself as all embracing and
the first of those who are worthy of sacrifice.37 Given the
¯ ¯ ¯
uncompromising determination of Pu rva-Mi mamsa to
¯
defend the Vedic injunctions to the letter, one might expect
the texts of this school to betray the kind of blinkered
irritability one often runs up against in those committed to
the defense of indefensible positions. Instead, one finds there
what is characteristic of the texts of almost all the schools,
namely, a serene and fair minded statement of the most
powerful objections that have been advanced against the
tenets of the school in question, followed by a measured
point by point rebuttal.
¯ ¯ ¯
Uttara-Mi mamsa is usually called “Vedanta,” literally, the
¯
end of the Veda, since its authority and the focus of its
interest is the Upanisads. It is probably the school of Indian
speculative thought best known in the West, as it has well
known adherents in our time. There are several versions of
Vedanta, but the most influential is Advaita-Vedanta, literally,
¯
¯
non-dualist Vedanta. Its greatest exponent was Sankara,
¯
whose account of the heterodox school of Lokayata I quoted
¯
earlier. Advaita-Vedanta holds to the Upanisadic teaching of
¯
the oneness of all things, of the world as maya, and of the
¯ ¯
identity of ¯tman with brahman. Where, one asks, does the
a
manifold and illusory world that we mistake for reality come
from? The world is not created, either ex nihilo or out of a
¯¯
pre-existent matter. The world is the play (or sport - li la) of
38
brahman. This play has no purpose outside itself. In
particular, this play is not for the good of the world, a claim
that Sankara supports by referring to a passage from the sruti,
“It is not for the sake of all, my dear, that all is loved, but for
one’s own sake that all is loved.”39 According to AdvaitaVedanta, brahman is both the efficient and the material cause
¯
CAREY
27
of the world. We might add that it is the formal and final
cause as well.
Another pair is Sankhya-Yoga. The Sankhya school is
¯
¯
dualistic. The ultimate constituents of reality are nature and
intellect, and this school gives an intriguing account of how
the two are related. The word translated by “nature” here is
prakrti. The components are pra-, kr-, and -ti. Pra- is equivalent to our prefix pro- and could be translated as “forth.” Kris the root of the Sanskrit verb for “to make” or “to do.” And
-ti is a suffix that, like the Greek -sis, endows a verbal root
with a nominal character indicating process, as with poiesis
¯
(making) or, for that matter, physis (nature or, more literally,
growing). Prakrti is then making-forth.40 To the extent that
this making-forth is an ongoing and immanent principle of
production, and not the original and originating act of a
transcendent creator, “nature” could hardly be a better
rendering of prakrti. The etymology of this word reminds
one of Aristotle’s discussion at the beginning of the second
book of the Physics, where physis is presented as a principle
of impersonal immanent governance, the source of motion
and rest within the world, and is compared to a doctor
healing himself.41 Like Aristotle’s nature, prakrti is both what
makes and what is made.
It is worth noting that the two Sanskrit terms I have translated as “nature,” namely, prakrti and, in my account of
Lokayata, svabhava, are etymologically unrelated. The
¯
¯
former names nature as process whereas the latter, which as
we saw is derivative from the Sanskrit verb “to be,” names
nature as being, primarily in the sense of essence. Parallel to
prakrti and svabhava are the Greek terms, physis and ousia,
¯
which are also etymologically unrelated. The former, like
prakrti, names nature as process, whereas the latter is derived
from the Greek verb “to be” and, like svabhava, names nature
¯
as being, also primarily in the sense of essence. Since the
Sanskrit and Greek terms developed prior to any influence of
Greek speculative thought on Indian speculative thought or,
so far as we can tell, vice versa, the correspondences are
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
remarkable. One might suspect that these linguistic developments were not entirely independent, in spite of the absence
of any influence of one on the other. Because Greek and
Sanskrit are related languages, one might be tempted to chalk
up the comparable derivations of svabhava and ousia from
¯
the verb “to be” in their respective languages to merely
coincidental exploitations of a possibility latent in protoIndo-European, the hypothesized common ancestor of the
two languages.42 But the independent emergence of prakrti
and physis within Sanskrit and Greek as names for the whole
material order construed as immanent, ongoing, selfemergence cannot be easily dismissed as happenstance. On
the contrary, there is every reason to think that these two
terms came into being to express something already caught
sight of in the nature of things, so to speak, and, moreover,
that this discovery was the dawn of a properly philosophical
orientation and outlook.
The relationship between prakrti in the Sankhya school
¯
and physis in the philosophy of Aristotle is not limited to the
central and common concept of “making forth.” Prakrti is
animated to its activity by the presence of spirit. The word I
am translating as “spirit” here is, again, purusa, which in one
of the Vedic hymns we considered was the gigantic victim of
a primordial sacrifice, a victim who, on being dismembered
by the gods, served as the origin of the four castes. Not
surprisingly, in the Sankhya system, the concept of purusa has
¯
become demythologized, as indeed had already happened in
the Upanisads.43 By itself, spirit lacks any power to produce
things, and is accordingly regarded as a pure “witness.”44 The
relationship of purusa to prakrti is likened to a man who is
clear-sighted but lame (purusa) mounted on the shoulders of
a man who is sure-footed but blind (prakrti).45 The presence
of spirit stimulates nature to evolve out of itself a manifold of
beings. This evolution is from three elemental constituents
(gunas), which, had nature not been excited to activity by the
presence of spirit, would simply have remained in
equilibrium. These three constituents of nature are called
CAREY
29
sattva, rajas and tamas, for which there are no corresponding
English words. Sattva is buoyant and shining; rajas is stimulating and moving; tamas is heavy and enveloping. Their
functioning, we are told, is for a single purpose, like that of a
lamp.46 Exactly how the upsetting of the equilibrium of these
three constituents within primordial nature happens is
problematic because spirit itself does not act directly on
nature. Spirit engages in no action at all, but only in a pure
beholding. On the other hand, nature cannot be so blind as
to be totally unaware of the presence of spirit, since this very
presence is what provokes nature to activity. The problem has
a rough parallel, at least, in Aristotle’s conception of the
relationship of the unmoved mover, who is pure intelligence
(noesis noeseos), to what is moved, that is, to material nature.
¯
¯ ¯
To be sure, for Aristotle, some moved things, such as the
heavenly bodies and human beings, are themselves intelligent.
But certain other things, such as particles of earth and other
elements, which are also moved to their proper places at least
ultimately by the unmoved mover, are as blind as blind can
be.47
In the Sankhya school the modifications of prakrti, or
¯
nature, entail a complex and graduated evolution, one consequence of which is the individuation of purusa or spirit into
individual selves, which results in a delusion as to what they
really are. But prakrti, like Arisotle’s physis, also works for an
end. The end is the overcoming of the delusion of the
individual purusas. This overcoming of delusion is liberation.
That prakrti can be construed as non-sentient and at the
same time as nonetheless acting for an end, and furthermore
for the end of another, is addressed in the Sankhya-karika, the
¯
¯ ¯
fundamental text of this school, and in the commentaries on
this text. The argument begins, characteristically, with an
objection, in this case the objection of a theist. In an animal,
many organic processes such as digestion have a purpose but
nevertheless take place without the animal’s being conscious
of them. So another being, an omniscient and powerful deity,
in fact, must be invoked to account for these processes. After
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
all, the objector continues, there cannot be purposes unless
they are consciously intended, either by the organism or by its
providential creator. To this objection the proponent of
Sankhya responds with an example. Milk flows out of the
¯
cow for the sake of the calf, without any conscious intention
on the part of the cow (much less, one might add, on the part
of the milk). In a similar way, the whole of prakrti, which is
non-sentient, can be understood to act for the liberation of
another, namely, for the liberation of purusa. Neither divine
intention nor any other conscious intention needs to be
invoked. No intention needs to be invoked at all. Nature,
prakrti, is purposive, period.
The proponent of Sankhya then assumes the offensive
¯
and advances an argument against a divine, omniscient
creator altogether. Every sentient being acting for a purpose
does so either out of selfishness, that is, for its own good, or
out of benevolence, that is, for the good of another. Neither
of these motives could account for God’s creation of the
universe. God cannot create the universe out of selfishness.
For, on the hypothesis of the theist, he has all that he
requires. Nor can he create the universe out of benevolence.
For prior to the alleged creation of the world—which,
incidentally, is not envisioned by either party to the dispute as
ex nihilo—the purusas would be without bodies and organs,
which are the source of their delusion. Consequently, they
would not be afflicted, prior to creation, with anything that
God could be aroused through benevolent pity to remove.
Finally, if God created the world out of benevolence he
would create only happy creatures. So, why are there so many
unhappy creatures? The theist, obviously, cannot answer this
question by attributing the unhappiness of creatures to their
past deeds, as is required by the orthodox doctrine of karma.
Prior to creation of the world, purusa, whether understood as
one or many, cannot be understood to have encumbered itself
with karma.48
According to the Sankhya school, the purposive action of
¯
non-sentient prakrti is neither amorally selfish nor morally
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31
altruistic. It is amorally altruistic. Its purposiveness is an
irreducible given, not to be accounted for by appeal to
conscious design. After all, one would not infer conscious
design unless purposiveness were apprehended first. The two
concepts, purposiveness (understood as having an end or
telos) and conscious design, can be kept distinct. As students
of Western philosophy might be inclined to put it, the proposition that purposiveness presupposes conscious design is not
an analytic judgment. It is a synthetic judgment. Its denial
entails no logical contradiction: one is not logically
compelled to infer conscious design from purposiveness. The
existence of purposiveness is so obvious, particularly in living
beings, that the theist does not argue for it and the atheist
does not argue against it. Unlike the Medieval theologians
who argued from teleology to the conscious intention of a
divine artisan, and unlike the Modern philosophers and
scientists who undertook a polemic against teleology because
they feared admitting it would commit them to the existence
of a divine artisan, the Sankhya school, like Aristotle, takes
¯
teleology as a given. It no more feels a need to account for the
fact of teleology by appeal to a divine artisan than it feels a
need to account for something equally mysterious, namely, a
plurality of spirits or minds, by that same appeal.
Purposiveness is, then, simply a feature of prakrti, just as
consciousness is a feature of purusa. Neither of them can be
convincingly accounted for by appeal to something as
problematic as the intention of an omniscient creator since,
again, no rational motive can be assigned for his creative act.
The flowing of the milk from the cow to the calf is a
paradigm of this purposiveness. It occurs without any
intention from within on the part of the cow and without any
intention from without on the part of a god. The Sankhya
¯
school of orthodox thought was openly atheistic.
Sankhya is, as noted earlier, usually paired with Yoga in
¯
summaries of the orthodox views. There is more to Yoga than
the system of physical discipline and exercises familiar to us
in the West. Yoga employs the prakrti-purusa distinction, the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
distinction between nature and spirit that we find in Sankhya,
¯
and, like that school, regards this dualism as irreducible.
Unlike Sankhya, however, Yoga is theistic. However, it intro¯
¯
duces the concept of the Lord (Isvara) more as an object
of devotion than as a causal principle. The Lord can serve as
the focal point of mental concentration. So envisioned the
Lord is but one purusa among many, though unique in his
eternal freedom from illusion and perfect cognition.49 In
some respects he seems to function chiefly as an ideal to
approximate.
The remaining pair of orthodox schools is Nyaya¯
Vaisesika. Their concerns and investigations appear, at first
glance, at the greatest remove from the Veda. The best known
teaching of the Vaisesika school is atomism. More significant
is its attempt to categorize all that in any way can be said to
be. Though Vaisesika is at least nominally theistic, its attenuated theism is hardly central to the ontological investigations it undertakes, and the sincerity of its theistic
commitment was called into question by philosophers of
other Indian schools, both ancient and modern.50
The Nyaya school is interested in the question of how
¯
knowledge is possible. According to this school, knowledge
involves a knower, what is known, the means whereby
knowledge is attained, and the act of knowing. The means of
valid cognition that are admitted by the Nyaya school are
¯
perception, comparison, inference, and verbal testimony.
“Perception is that knowledge which arises from contact of a
sense with its object, and is determinate, un-nameable, and
unerring.”51 Perception is determinate in that its object is
present in clarity and distinctness, and it is unerring because
falsity occurs only in propositions. The argument that
perception is un-nameable is directed against the claim that
all cognition has a linguistic structure. A thing can be
perceived for which we do not yet have a name. And when
something we perceive has already been given a name, the
name is not a part of the perception proper. Communicating
the name of a thing to someone who has never perceived the
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33
thing does not, by itself, produce for him a perception of it.
And even when someone has at his disposal a name for
something he actually has perceived, calling up the name does
not produce a genuinely determinate perception of the
thing.52
The Nyaya school developed, independently of Aristotle,
¯
a theory of the syllogism and principles of reasoning. Rather
than three steps—major premise, minor premise,
conclusion—the Nyaya school distinguishes five steps in the
¯
syllogism, at least as it is employed in disputation. These are:
proposition, reason, example, application, and conclusion.53
They are ordered as follows, with the favored example.
1. The proposition to be established: Sound is noneternal. This step indicates that in disputation
reasoning is directed from the beginning toward a
conclusion that it intends to establish. The
conclusion rarely pops up as an unanticipated
proposition, resulting from the fortuitous
conjunction of a major premise with a minor,
which just happen to have a middle term in
common. Not that such things do not occur, but
they never or almost never occur in a formal
disputation.
2. The reason why the proposition is affirmed:
Because it is produced. In effect, this step is an
anticipatory relating of the major premise to the
minor.
3. An example founding what is, in effect, the
major premise: A dish, which is produced, is not
eternal, so—unless our opponent produces a
counter example at this point—we say that everything that is produced is non-eternal. If the
opponent cannot at this point name a counter
example invalidating the major premise, the latter
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
has to count as established and true.
4. The application or reaffirmation: Sound is
produced. This is, in effect, the assertion of the
minor premise on the heels of the major premise if
the latter has been established by the example, i.e.,
if the opponent was unable to produce a counter
example in the preceding step.
5. The conclusion: Sound is non-eternal. This
should, of course, be the same as the proposition
stated in the first step. It is nonetheless a separate
step in the inference. The first step announces the
project. The last step concludes it.
Comparison, or knowledge by analogy, the third means of
valid cognition admitted by the Nyaya school is “the
¯
knowledge of a [new] thing through its similarity to another
thing previously well known.” The fourth and last means of
valid cognition is verbal testimony.
There is clearly a decreasing reliability reflected in the
order in which the four means of valid cognition are listed.
Perception was said to be unerring. The same was not said for
inference, since there can be faulty inference, a problem
treated specifically in the Nyaya-Sutra. Comparison is
¯
obviously less reliable than inference, since the fact that two
things, one of them familiar and the other unfamiliar, have a
certain feature in common does not, by itself, justify the
inference that every feature the one has, the other has as well.
Just as inference needs to draw its examples from the more
reliable perception, so comparison needs to anchor itself in
the more reliable inference and perception. By implication
then, verbal testimony, the last mentioned means of valid
cognition, is the least reliable of the four. It is, as we say,
“hearsay.” It is a means of valid cognition in that it might be
true; but, then again, it might not be true. Some combination
of the other three means of valid cognition must be employed
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35
to determine whether the verbal testimony comes from a
reliable source rather than from a child, a lunatic, or an
impostor. And yet verbal testimony is the sole means for the
transmission of the Veda. Consequently, we can infer that the
Nyaya school regarded Vedic authority as less than fully
¯
reliable, except when buttressed by other, more reliable,
means of valid cognition.
This inference is supported, as we shall see, by the curious
example that the Nyaya-Sutra uses in its treatment of the
¯
syllogism, an example that recurs throughout this text: the
non-eternality of sound.54
6
Of the six schools that professed allegiance to Vedic tradition,
¯ ¯ ¯
Pu rva-Mi mamsa could appear to have been the least specula¯
tively adventuresome. Among other things, it did not accept
the Vedanta teaching that the phenomenal world is illusion.
¯
Things are pretty much the way they appear. Pu rva¯
¯ ¯ ¯
Mi mamsa affirmed a rather prosaic and sober, even tough
minded, realism—with one big exception. This school based
its argument for the authority of the Veda on its presumed
eternity. In accounting for the revelation of the Veda, the
¯ ¯
Mi mamsakas had argued that it was quite literally heard by
the sages of old. We today no longer hear the Veda because it
is covered by a veil, so to speak. Unlike the sages we lack the
discernment to hear through this veil. The Veda is a hidden
but nonetheless eternal sound. An eternal sound is
¯ ¯
conceivable, argues the Mi mamsaka, because sound is incorporeal. Being incorporeal, it is not subject to decay and dissolution.
¯ ¯ ¯
The prime concern of the Pu rva-Mi mamsa school, as the
¯
¯mamsa Su tra indicates, is the explication of
first line of the Mi ¯ ¯ ¯
dharma, i.e., right conduct or duty. The medium whereby
dharma is announced is sound (sabda), which construed as
¯
verbal testimony is a means of valid cognition. Now, an interesting principle of reasoning in formal disputation, as
¯ ¯ ¯
practiced and urged by the Pu rva-Mi mamsa school, is that
¯
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
any proposition advanced, and therefore any verbal
testimony, must count as true until and unless it can be shown
to be false.55 The only way verbal testimony can be shown to
be unreliable is if its author can be shown to be untrustworthy
or if the testimony is itself preposterous.
The first line of attack will not work if the Veda—in
particular, the sound of which it is constituted—is eternal.
For verbal testimony cannot have an untrustworthy author if
it has no author at all, either human or divine. Atheism is one
¯ ¯ ¯
of the tenets of Pu rva-Mi mamsa, not in spite of, but because
¯
of its, adherence to Vedic tradition. Its atheism is not
extracted from the Veda, but read off it, so to speak, as a kind
¯ ¯
of meta-atheism. The Mi mamsaka asks, with a perfectly
straight face, if the Veda were composed by a god, might he
not be inclined to exaggerate his accomplishments a little bit,
to lie, in fact? How can we rule that possibility out? The truth
of the Veda is most plausible on the assumption that it is
¯ ¯
eternal. And it can be eternal, so the Mi mamsaka argues, only
if it has no maker, that is, no author.
The second line of attack, trying to show that the
contents of the Veda are preposterous, will not work either.
¯ ¯ ¯
For example, the opponent of Pu rva-Mi mamsa asks, “How
¯
do you know that all this [the Veda] is not like the utterance
of lunatics and children? After all, we find in it such sentences
as ‘Trees sat the sacrificial session.’”56 To this objection the
¯ ¯
Mi mamsaka responds that all such sentences can be interpreted figuratively. This particular sentence is merely a poetic
way of indicating the centrality and solemnity of the
sacrificial session. The polytheism of the Veda can also be,
and in fact has to be, demythologized. Of greater concern are
the dharmic injunctions. There are statements about the fruits
of dharma that seem to be contradicted by facts. But they
cannot really be contradicted by the facts, for the fruits are all
future relative to the enjoined action. If promised fruit
follows shortly after the enjoined action, the truth of the
Vedic promise is confirmed. If it does not follow shortly after
the enjoined action, it will most assuredly follow later on.
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37
Reincarnation is invoked. If the fruits of enjoined actions do
not follow in this life, they will most assuredly follow in the
next life. But what of people who receive fruits in this life
that the Veda declares are consequent only to specifically
enjoined actions, which these same people say they never
performed? These people are wrong. They did perform these
actions, only not in this life but, rather, in a preceding life.
The Vedic promise is not contradicted.
In spite of such ingenious ways of interpreting Vedic
assertions that seem on the face of it not to be true, there is a
¯ ¯ ¯
marked tendency in Pu rva-Mi mamsa to downplay declar¯
ative statements in the Veda across the board and to
emphasize those that are prescriptive only. The basic concern
is always dharma, that is, what ought to be done. As such, a
Vedic injunction cannot be contradicted by anything that
sense perception or any other means of valid cognition might
determine about what exists. Put another way, the ought,
precisely because it is not derived from the is, cannot be
contradicted by the is. What might appear to be the weakness
¯ ¯ ¯
of the Pu rva-Mi mamsa position, namely the virtual
¯
detachment of the ought from the is, turns out to be its
strength.
But free floating dharmic injunctions presuppose at least
the declarative sentence that the Veda is eternal, and consequently that the sound, the sabda, that reveals these injunc¯
tions, is eternal. This claim is so odd, not to say weird, that
one is inclined to tone it down. Is it possible that the
sounding of the Veda is to be understood figuratively, perhaps
as a metaphor to indicate the eternal order of things having
come to expression in language proper? No. The sounding of
the Veda is not a metaphor. The Veda is literally sounding,
sounding and resounding eternally through the cosmos.
Indeed, the very letters that go to make up the verses in the
Veda have an eternal sound.57 Put together they constitute an
articulation that is more than just noise, and these articulate
sounds are those that one hears when the Veda is recited. The
recitation that we hear only manifests a sound that is already
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
and always there. The word and the utterance manifesting it
are, we are told, analogous to a pot and the lightening
manifesting it in an otherwise dark night.58 Just as the lightening does not cause the pot to come into being, so the
utterance does not cause the sound to come into being. The
lightening only manifests the pre-existent pot, and the
utterance only manifests the pre-existent sound, which in the
case of the Veda is the very sound of eternal truth that the
sages heard. The eternally sounding Veda is in a language.
That language—it will come as no surprise—is Sanskrit. We
can perhaps see more clearly now why it was critical to freeze
the development of the Sanskrit language, particularly its
sound, early on. In any case, however strange we may find the
notion of an unmanifest eternal sound, however much of an
exception it is to everything we experience in the production
¯ ¯
of sound, the Mi mamsaka makes his point: “Prove, without
begging the question, that the Veda is not eternally
resounding throughout the universe. That you cannot hear it
is a trivial fact that does not contribute materially to the proof
you need.”
The counter-argument for the non-eternity of sound, in
the example that the Nyaya school appears at first glance to
¯
have taken out of nowhere simply to illustrate its syllogistic
theory, is directed quite obviously against the teaching of the
¯ ¯ ¯
Pu rva-Mi mamsa school. But, more strikingly, this counter¯
argument is directed against the very concept of sruti, of
“what is heard,” construed as an eternal foundation of sacred
¯
tradition.59 According to the Nyaya school, it is not sufficient
to say that sound is eternal simply because of its incorporeality. On the basis of perception and reasoning, i.e., on the
basis of experience, we know sound to be produced. At least,
we have no experience of an unproduced sound. From the
perspective of the Nyaya school, an admission of the possi¯
bility of an unproduced sound would be something like an
admission of the possibility of miracles, which are by
definition wondrous occurrences that are exceptions to the
regularity and continuity of experience. Indeed, sabda, i.e.,
¯
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39
¯ ¯ ¯
verbal testimony, as understood by Pu rva-Mi mamsa, would
¯
seem to be the miracle, the miracle par excellence, one might
say. The possibility of such a thing would not only undermine
the authority of sense perception and reasoning, it would
undercut the possibility of there being any thing like nature
in the strict sense of the word. To this concern the
¯ ¯
Mi mamsaka would respond that the Veda, though wondrous
indeed, even miraculous, is not an exception to anything. It is
an eternal miracle. The Veda is the norm. Precisely because it
is eternal it cannot be construed as an interruption to the
regularity and continuity of experience.
There was a sustained controversy between the Pu rva¯
¯ ¯ ¯
Mi mamsa and the Nyaya schools on the character of Vedic
¯
authority, turning on this very issue of the eternity of sound.
In the controversy, the primacy and timeless validity of Vedic
revelation, advanced by the putatively ultra-orthodox Pu rva¯
¯ ¯ ¯
Mi mamsa school, takes the form of an argument against the
existence of a creator God and for the eternity of the world,
precisely so the Veda can be understood to be uncreated and
its authority unqualified. The counter-argument for the
temporal character of Vedic revelation, and its subordination
to sense perception and reasoning, advanced by the epistemologically oriented Nyaya school, takes the form of an
¯
argument for a creator God and against the eternity of the
world, precisely so that the Veda can be understood to be
created and its authority qualified. If we are right in our
contention that the root of the Naiyayika denial of an eternal
¯
sound is, in effect, a denial of miracles, then it has to count
as a capital irony, at least from the Western point of view, that
this denial had to be supported by an argument for the
existence of a creator God.
The depreciation of Vedic authority, and thereby of Vedic
tradition, in the orthodox Nyaya school is not announced
¯
with trumpets. It can be discerned in the choice of a wry
example adduced ostensibly just to clarify a simple logical
distinction.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
That word is called “too generic” which, while
applying to the thing desired to be spoken of overreaches it. For example, the brahmin-hood [i.e.,
¯
the priestly caste that transmits the Vedic
tradition]—which is denoted by the term
“brahmin”—is sometimes found to be concomitant
¯
with “learning and character” and sometimes
found to over-reach it, i.e., not be concomitant
with it….60
Nyaya was not the only orthodox school to call into
¯
question, however so delicately, the authority of Vedic
tradition. The Sankhya-karika begins with a discussion of the
¯
¯ ¯
various kinds of pain and how they can best be removed.
Among pains are mental pains, of which several are
mentioned, two of them being fear and “the non-perception
of particular objects.” The text addresses this matter bluntly.
The revealed (or scriptural - ¯nusravikas) means
a
[of removing pain] is like the perceptible: it is
verily linked with impurity, destruction, and excess
(atisaya); different in form and superior thereto is
that means derived from the discriminative
knowledge of the manifest, the unmanifest, and
the knower [i.e., the discriminative knowledge
touted by the Sankhya school].
¯
The appended commentary explicates this text as follows.
The means of removing pain, consisting in the
direct discriminative knowledge of the intellect
(purusa) as apart from matter, is contrary to Vedic
means and hence is better. The Vedic remedy is
good inasmuch as it is authorized by the Veda and
as such is capable of removing pain to a certain
extent; the discriminative knowledge of the
intellect as distinct from matter is also good; and
of these two, the latter is better, superior.61
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41
Vedic testimony is recognized by the Sankhya school and by
¯
every other orthodox school (astika-darsana) as a means of
¯
valid cognition. Indeed this recognition is what stamps a
school as having an orthodox teaching (astika-mata). But
¯
¯ ¯ ¯
except in the case of Pu rva-Mi mamsa, and to a lesser extent
¯
Vedanta, the authority of Vedic testimony is tightly circum¯
scribed. We are told shortly after the passage just cited that
Vedic testimony is limited to what cannot be controverted by
the other means of valid cognition (perception and inference
for the Sankhya school) and to what is not accessible to them.
¯
This formulation could appear to be only the flip side of the
¯ ¯ ¯
Pu rva-Mi mamsa principle that any proposition advanced in
¯
disputation has to count as true until refuted. But in the
Sankhya teaching it is not clear what is left over as the specific
¯
matter for Vedic authority. For, in the passage just quoted, the
Sankhya school’s superior knowledge of the manifest (vyakta)
¯
and the unmanifest (avyakta) is explicitly contrasted with
Vedic testimony, to the disadvantage of the latter. Even
concerning the unmanifest,62 then, the “discriminative
knowledge of the intellect” advocated by the unabashedly
atheistic Sankhya school is superior to Vedic authority, to
¯
which this school nonetheless concedes a measure of ambiguously defined validity.
My earlier remarks on Sankara, arguably the greatest
philosopher India has produced, might have seemed unduly
meager. Sankara wrote near the beginning of the eighth
century A.D., and so his teaching is somewhat off topic in an
introductory account of the origin of philosophy in ancient
India. Moreover, it is not possible to present an adequate
summary of his complex, ingenious, and extended elaboration of Upanisadic monism in a few paragraphs. One issue,
though, is of particular relevance in the present context.
Sankara speaks both of an impersonal brahman, which, just as
in the Upanisads, is identical with one’s own innermost self
(atman), and of a personal lord (or governor - ¯svara), who
¯
i
qua lord would have to differ from one’s self. Or so it would
seem. One way of managing this two-fold interpretation of
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
42
the highest principle is to say that Isvara is simply the way
brahman is experienced under the conditions of illusion,
which after all is the illusion of multiplicity and otherness.
Devotion to Isvara has the salutary effect of elevating the
mind above preoccupation with worldly worries and desires,
which are mistaken for the self—a confusion of empirical ego
with transcendental ego, a Kantian might say. Detachment
from worldly concerns, which devotion to Isvara helps effect,
is a necessary condition for realizing the identity of brahman
and ¯tman, and, concomitantly, for enlightened recognition
a
of the illusoriness of all multiplicity and otherness, including
not only the world but also any lord distinct from the self.
One might have expected Sankara to reserve the term
¯svara solely for contexts in which he is speaking of the world
i
as it appears and our efforts to penetrate through this veil to
what is fundamentally real. But such is not the case. Sankara
is disinclined to treat Isvara as illusory even when regarded
from the most privileged perspective of enlightenment.63
Accordingly, one could infer a commitment to theism on
Sankara’s part, given his virtual identification of Isvara and
brahman. But, then, the realization that, through this very
identification, Isvara also becomes identical with ¯tman could
a
as easily lead one to the opposite inference. It should be
remembered that, for Sankara, Isvara is the material cause of
the phenomenal world as well as its efficient cause, a teaching
rejected by his more theistically oriented successors in
Vedanta. Moreover, in spite of using Isvara and brahman
¯
more or less interchangeably, Sankara explicitly teaches that
¯
the Lord’s lord-ness (i svaratva), presumably his lordship over
the world and over man within it, is ultimately illusory. And
in the sentence, “[H]e who, having been led to be brahman,
is consecrated to sovereignty does not wish to bow to
anybody,” Sankara the philosopher momentarily removes his
mask.64
7
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43
In the Arthasastra of Kautilya (c. 300 B.C.), whose description
¯
of the duties pertaining to the four castes I cited earlier, we
find a limiting of Vedic authority similar to what we have seen
in some of the other orthodox schools. After describing the
contents of his treatise in the first chapter, which is primarily
on politics, Kautilya devotes the second chapter to an
enumeration of the sciences (vidyas). The four sciences are
¯
¯ksiki or analytics, the Veda, economics, and the science
¯
¯nvi
a
of politics. The first science mentioned is the science of
¯
reasoning. Since ¯nvi ksiki is listed as a science, and not just a
a ¯
means of valid cognition, it would seem to have, like the
other three enumerated sciences, a subject matter of its own.
For this reason it has occasionally been translated as
“philosophy.” But we shall use the more precise translation of
“analytics,” understood as the science of reasoning.65 Shortly
after his enumeration of the four sciences, Kautilya quotes
Brhaspati, whom he does not specify as the founder of the
heterodox Lokayata school. “Vedic lore is only a cloak
¯
(samvarana) for one conversant with the ways of the world
(lokayatravid).”66 Kautilya himself takes exception to this
¯ ¯
Lokayata reduction and includes Vedic lore within his
¯
enumeration of the sciences, giving as his reason “since with
the help [of these four sciences] one can learn dharma and
material well being.” He then proceeds immediately to a
discussion of analytics, explicitly citing the Lokayata school
¯
or system as one instance of it.
Sankhya, Yoga, and Lokayata—these constitute
¯
¯
analytics. Investigating by means of analytics
dharma-and-non-dharma [dharmadharmau - a
¯
Sanskrit copulative compound] in Vedic lore,
material gain and loss in economics, good policy
and bad policy in the science of politics, as well as
the relative strength-and-weakness [balabalau ¯
copulative compound] of these [three sciences],
analytics confers benefit on the people, keeps the
mind steady in adversity and in prosperity, and
brings about proficiency in thought, speech and
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
action. Analytics is ever thought as the lamp of all
sciences, the means of all actions, and the support
of all dharma.67
This passage is interesting for several reasons. In the first
place, Kautilya includes Lokayata, along with Sankhya and
¯
¯
Yoga, as part of analytics, in spite of the fact that he has just
quoted Brhaspati, the founder of this school, as limiting
science to economics and politics. Kautilya evidently thinks
that at least some of the claims of Lokayata can be appro¯
priated by his own ostensibly orthodox account, which
includes a defense, of sorts, of the very tradition that was
excoriated and mocked by this arch-heretical school.
Moreover, according to the passage under consideration,
analytics is autonomous. As in Western philosophy, reason is
subject only to its own laws. It is analytics that determines the
scope of dharma in Vedic lore, this latter being apparently less
than fully coherent or sound in its own proper realm. Even
more strikingly, analytics investigates both the strength and
the weakness of Vedic lore. One can hardly imagine a similar
formulation of the relation of reason to revelation by a pious
Jew, Christian, or Muslim.68 Nor can one imagine any
orthodox believer saying that it is reasoning, and not sacred
scripture or holy tradition, that brings about proficiency in
thought (including belief?), speech (including prayer?), and
action (including the performance of sacrifices?).69 Most
interestingly of all, in the final clause of passage, which is the
final clause of the chapter, Kautilya assigns to analytics, rather
than to Vedic lore, the “support of all dharma.”
This mystifying conclusion is clarified in the chapter that
immediately follows, the scope of which is limited to what
Kautilya wishes to say about Vedic lore itself. Since he has
said that analytics is the “support of all dharma” we expect
him to employ reasoning, and not just an appeal to authority,
in making his case for why Vedic lore is beneficial. This
expectation is not disappointed. After a preliminary listing of
the Vedas by name and the topics they include, Kautilya says
in the third sentence of the chapter:
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45
The dharma laid down in this Vedic lore is
beneficial, as it prescribes the special duties
(svadharma) of the four castes (varnas) and the
four stages of life.
This sentence, the first substantive sentence in the chapter,
must be read as an expression of analytics, of the science of
reasoning, in the thought of Kautilya himself, and aimed at
clarifying the relative strength of Vedic lore in the “support of
all dharma.” The sentence gives the reason for why Vedic lore
is beneficial: it prescribes the duties of the four castes and the
four stages of life. This reason is meant to be accessible not
just to the orthodox but to anyone reading the treatise,
including adherents of the anti-Vedic Lokayata school, who,
¯
Kautilya implies, should have known better.70
8
We are now in a position, at last, to see what exactly constitutes orthodoxy in those schools and thinkers who
acknowledge the authority of the Veda while nonetheless
subordinating Vedic lore as a “means of valid cognition” to
perception and reasoning, that is, to powers possessed by
man as man, powers that are independent of the hearsay of
unknown sages living in the remote past. The break with
Vedic tradition occurred with the emergence of the three
heterodox schools of Buddhism, Jainism, and Lokayata.
¯
Although the first two of these are typically classified as
religions, all three of them are atheistic, the last one exuberantly so. Of the six orthodox schools that formed within early
¯ ¯ ¯
Hinduism, Sankhya is atheistic and so is Pu rva-Mi mamsa.
¯
¯
Nyaya is theistic, though, as we have seen, its theology is
¯
advanced at least in part as a counter to the excessive claims
¯ ¯ ¯
for Vedic authority made by the Pu rva-Mi mamsa school.
¯
Vaisesika adopts the theology of the Nyaya school, though
¯
theism is even more tangential to the atomism of the former
than it is to the logicism of the latter.71 Vedanta, taking its
¯
bearings from the Upanisads, emphasizes the identity of the
self with brahman and the ultimate oneness of all things, and
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Sankara’s Advaita-Vedanta, in particular, has no room for
¯
God in anything remotely resembling the Biblical sense.72
Yoga alone is unambiguously theistic, though Isvara serves
there more as an object of devotion and mental focusing than
as a causal principle per se. Still, the adherents of all six of
these schools, and the independent, no-nonsense political
realist Kautilya as well, concede at least some authority to the
Veda, with exactly how much varying from school to school
and from individual to individual. It is by virtue of this
concession that these thinkers understand themselves to be
situated within the Vedic tradition, however daring their
speculative ventures.
But why do these thinkers bother to concede any
authority at all to the Veda? Kautilya tells us why, and he tells
us as clear as day, in the passage from the Arthasastra we just
¯
considered: the Veda is beneficial. It is beneficial because it
prescribes the duties of the stages of life and of the four
castes.73 But the stages of life are subsumed under the caste
system, since they pertain only to the top three castes. Who,
then, we are led to ask, benefits from the caste system?
Kautilya’s explicit answer is that the whole people benefit.74
The more pertinent answer, which he leaves us to infer, is that
the life of free inquiry, exhibited even in the most orthodox
of these so-called orthodox schools, itself benefits from the
caste system. We noted that economic circumstances, not just
in ancient India but in the ancient world in general, simply
could not support an egalitarian social order. Whatever its
injustices and to whatever abuses it led, the rule of dharma,
of which the hierarchy of castes was much the most
conspicuous embodiment, permitted the leisure and
mandated the literacy without which philosophy could not
emerge. And it permitted surprisingly candid depreciation of
the authority of sacred tradition. The interpreters of dharma
and of sacred tradition in general, namely, the members of the
brahmin caste, enjoyed an unparalleled freedom of specu¯
lation. Within the orthodox schools of speculative thought
we see monism, dualism, an attenuated monotheism, and
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47
¯
atheism, with a deity or lord (i svara) forcefully denied,
simply ignored, identified with the self, and construed as
distinct from the self as part of a technique for disengaging
the mind from worldly concerns; arguments for the necessity
of creation and arguments against the possibility of creation;
ontological categorization of different kinds of entities;
logical and epistemological investigations; inquiries into the
material constitution of the world with cases being made for
and against an irreducible atomism; idealist and realist
accounts of the phenomenal world; and, with surprising
frequency, a distinct ranking of the authority of sacred
tradition below reasoning and ordinary perception, which is
a giant step toward dismissing the possibility of miracles out
of hand. And this broad range of speculation can be found
within the sphere of what passed for orthodoxy.
Now, although most brahmins may well have accepted in
¯
complete sincerity the whole of Vedic lore, at least to the
extent that it formed a whole, it is virtually certain, I think,
that more than a few paid only lip service to it. Of these,
some may have insisted on the authority of the Veda because
of the social privileges accorded them by the caste system it
mandated (though it should be noted that the brahmins were
¯
themselves subject to a variety of strictures, social and
otherwise). But it is highly likely that some brahmins upheld
¯
this authority solely because of the intellectual freedom it
granted them. They appealed, in a tour de force of resourcefulness, to religious authority in support of a social order that
uniquely guaranteed the possibility of unimpeded questioning
and inquiry.75 To repeat, the brahmins were not subject to any
¯
authority other than that of the king. And the king, who came
from the warrior caste and not from the brahmin caste, did
¯
not have the authority to teach the Veda. He was not in a
position, then, to compel the brahmins to toe a more conser¯
vative line in their speculations and queries. Furthermore,
there was no ecclesiastical structure, and there were no
creeds.76 The way to whatever wisdom is naturally available
to man was, for the brahmins, wide open.
¯
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Some of the most astute scholars of the tradition of speculative thought in ancient India have admitted that they find
the adherence of the orthodox schools to Vedic authority
inscrutable, given the sophistication and independence of
their views on the question of ultimate origins and on the
question of Vedic authority itself. It is remarked, with
something amounting to dismay, that the logical, physical,
and (with a few exceptions) even metaphysical speculations in
these schools are not supported by appeal to Vedic lore but by
appeal to reasoning and ordinary experience.77 The express
adherence of the orthodox schools to Vedic authority is often
put down to a thoughtless cultural bias, as though it never
occurred to the orthodox thinkers that the caste system might
be mere artifice and convention, in spite of the fact that the
heterodox schools, whose emergence provoked the orthodox
response, had taught precisely that.
9
It has been claimed that philosophy originates with the
discovery of nature, more particularly with the discovery of
the difference between nature and convention, nature being
an intrinsic governing principle inherent in the world, as
distinct from an extrinsic governing principle, i.e. a creatorGod, transcendent to the world. We saw earlier that the
concept of prakrti, particularly as developed in the orthodox
Sankhya school as a teleological, though unconscious,
¯
intrinsic governing principle, corresponds in large measure to
the Greek concept of physis. Another close correspondence is
found in the concept of svabhava, which, I noted, can be
¯
translated as “own being” or “own nature.” Lokayata
¯
contrasts svabhava directly with unseen causes and indirectly
¯
with Vedic injunctions, both ethical and ritual, that is, with
convention.
That the uncaused nature of things, their own being,
could emerge in explicit connection with a critique of
convention in the heterodox Lokayata school should, then,
¯
come as no great surprise. That nature did not emerge in
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49
explicit connection with a critique of convention in the
orthodox schools, even the most venturesome of them,
should also come as no great surprise. The precarious state of
svadharma prevented nature from being opposed to
convention within the orthodox tradition. But for this reason
a theme conspicuously present in Western philosophy is
conspicuously absent in Indian philosophy. Although the
nature of consciousness, mind, and intellect are central
questions, the question of man as such does not receive much
of an investigation. The reason for this otherwise
unaccountable omission is that even before the question is
asked the answer is given, appalling in its starkness. Man as
such is the caste animal.
But how, the student of Western philosophy will ask,
could genuinely philosophical natures endure the injustice of
such a system? To this question a sophisticated brahmin might
¯
respond, “It was precisely the passion for justice, coupled
with the attempt to elevate the fundamental principle of
reality, brahman, above all concern with justice, that led to
the doctrine of karma: one gets exactly what one deserves,
without any assistance from on high. One’s present caste
standing is determined by the moral quality of one’s past
deeds, just as one’s future caste standing is determined by the
moral quality of one’s present deeds. What’s that, if not
justice?” But it’s just a myth. “True, but it’s a salutary myth.
After all, isn’t it one of the discoveries made by philosophy
itself that all political communities have, and must have, their
myths, their noble lies, about justice?” You’re right of course,
but…. “And while we’re at it,” our sophisticated brahmin
¯
might continue, “let us not forget that the philosopher as
philosopher, in the West no less than in India, necessarily
gives wisdom a higher place than morality in his scheme of
things. What business does a philosopher have being
indignant?” (Profound silence.)
Seen in the above light, the ethical order of law and duty,
of dharma, supported by Vedic tradition, simply could not be
taught in the orthodox schools to be merely conventional, to
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
be only one way among others, to be “just our way.” The
thinkers in these schools taught, quite understandably, that
Vedic dharma was the right way simply. But it is likely that the
more speculatively bold among them upheld Vedic dharma
solely for the reasons mentioned earlier. At any rate, it is
incontestable that, by institutionalizing a system in which
status and power were vested in different castes, a system in
which learning was the sine qua non for the higher if less
politically powerful, though nonetheless independent, caste,
the Veda, as interpreted by the brahmins, also institution¯
alized the possibility of speculative boldness, or philosophy.78
Still, one might object, is not the knowledge that this socalled speculative boldness aims at merely a means to
something else, namely liberation? And is not knowledge, as
an end in itself, the goal of philosophy properly understood?
There is a twofold response to this question. In the first place,
it is by no means clear that knowledge is conceived by all, or
even by the greatest, Western philosophers as an end in itself
simply. They might say that the end in itself, at least for
human beings, is happiness. If knowledge contributed not to
the happiness of the knower but to his unhappiness,
philosophy as a way of life could hardly be defended except
in moral terms. And a moral defense of philosophy would
hardly be congenial to philosophy, at least not as I have
narrowly defined it.79
In the second place, though knowledge in Indian
philosophy is indeed in the service of liberation, liberation is
not first and foremost liberation from successive reincarnations. It is, first and foremost, liberation from illusion, i.e.,
liberation from ignorance. Certainly a demythologized
concept of liberation would have occurred to those orthodox
thinkers whose allegiance to the Veda was mainly prudential.
In any case, knowledge, and neither mere belief nor moral
action and dutiful fulfillment of Vedic ritual injunctions, was
in several of the orthodox schools held to be the sole path to
liberation. More precisely, knowledge was held to be both the
necessary and the sufficient condition for liberation, or to be
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51
liberation simply. Knowledge for its own sake, knowledge as
an end in itself, then, cannot be regarded as a specific feature
of philosophy in the West in contradistinction to philosophy
in ancient India.
One of the curiosities of the Indian speculative tradition
was its tendency to become more, not less, theistic with the
passage of time. One cannot help but suspect that the
growing theistic orientation was occasioned in part by
external developments, especially by contact with Islam
following the Muslim conquest and with Christianity during
the British raj. A number of articulate and well known Indian
thinkers of the last two centuries, apparently construing
themselves as something like good will ambassadors to the
West, have offered popularized accounts of Indian speculative
thought that have exaggerated the affinities between Vedic
tradition, including the philosophical tradition, and the
revealed religions of the West, particularly Christianity. At the
other end, Westerners in search of an alternative religious
experience, free from the scrutiny of a judgmental God, have
claimed to find in Hinduism a less guilt-ridden spirituality,
one that is less dogmatically divisive and more accepting of
people for what they are.80 All this has led to the familiar
picture of Indian thought as almost uniformly mystical and
intuitive, a caricature that a number of scholars, Western and
Indian, have taken pains to correct.81 Students of the rationalist tradition of the West, from Parmenides through
Thomas Aquinas right on up to Husserl, as well as students
restricting their attention to the contemporary analytic scene,
are not inclined to regard what strikes them on first hearing
as an amorphous mix of meditation and compassion as a
substitute for thought. Few of them are aware that the ideal
of rational autonomy, to which they themselves are
committed, shaped the life of the mind in ancient India as
well.
The study of Indian philosophy provides an important
perspective on Western philosophy, a perspective from which
Western philosophy can be viewed from without but not from
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
above, and as an alternative rather than an opponent. In
particular, the study of Indian philosophy sheds unexpected
but welcome light on a theme dear to Western philosophers,
namely, the choiceworthiness of the philosophic life itself. In
the West the great antagonist to philosophy has been revealed
religion. The truth-seeking philosopher cannot be indifferent
to the possibility that the Truth might choose to reveal itself,
or rather himself, to man. For such revelation, undertaken at
the initiative of the divine and eclipsing in significance everything man could find out about ultimate principles on his
own, would render the achievements of philosophy paltry, to
say the least. Not surprisingly, then, Western philosophy has
invested a lot of energy in trying to rule out this possibility,
so much so that, viewed from the outside, it can appear to be
more interested in convincing itself of the rightness of its own
way than in apprehending ultimate principles and ontological
truth. Indian philosophy, on the other hand, devotes little
attention to justifying itself. It has no comparably great antagonist. For Vedic religion, as interpreted in the various schools
of orthodox speculation, is, as I have tried to show, not a
religion of revelation, at least not in the Biblical sense. The
existence of the divine, or the closest thing there is to the
divine, namely brahman, does not imply limitations on what
man can achieve in the way of knowing ultimate principles
and ontological truth on his own. Quite the contrary. Of
course, the Western philosopher might say that it is not just
the possibility of revelation, of a disclosure undertaken at the
initiative of the divine, that is worrisome to philosophy. Quite
apart from the special problem of election that is part and
parcel of the concept of revelation, the possibility that there
is a being who, right now, possesses the very wisdom that the
philosopher does not possess, but only loves, is humbling. To
this concern the Indian philosopher would respond that it
needn’t be regarded that way at all. Certainly not, if ¯tman is
a
indeed brahman, not just later on in some kind of misty
hereafter but here and now. He would attempt to reassure his
Western counterpart on this point: “That art thou.” It is just
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53
a matter of realizing this fundamental and ultimate truth, he
would add. And he would ask what experience the Western
philosopher has had that causes him to persist in doing battle
against an opponent so immature and unworthy of serious
consideration as is Biblical religion.
I shall not venture to suggest an answer to this question
on behalf of the Western philosopher82 The primary purpose
of this paper has been to argue that philosophy, even
according to its most austere conception as rational atheism,
did in fact emerge in ancient India.83 After all, if philosophy
is natural to man, if it is not just the dispensation of an
inscrutable historical fate, then one would expect it to have
emerged, given enough time, wherever it was not impeded.
The impediments to the emergence of philosophy are absence
of letters, absence of leisure, and the presence of a religious
or political authority hostile to unfettered speculation about
the whole, its essential constitution and its ultimate
foundation. These impediments were not operative in the
speculative tradition of ancient India. It would be surprising,
then, if philosophy had not emerged there, assuming that
historicism is wrong and that the classical Western philosophers were correct in their assessment that philosophy is
natural, that it is a permanent possibility coeval with man.
Notes
1
I have adopted the current Romanization convention for Sanskrit terms,
with one exception: I have rendered anusvara prior to labials with an
¯
“m,” but in all other cases with an “n.”
2
Rg Veda 10.129 in A Source Book in Indian Philosophy, ed. Sarvepalli
Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1957), 23. Hereafter cited as Sourcebook. (In the interests of
greater literalness and consistency, I have modified some of the translations from this text and from others that I cite. I have entirely retranslated certain passages.) Compare 10.121 (24-25). On the original relation
¯¯
of being and non-being, see Bhagavad Gi ta (ed. and trans.Winthrop
Sargeant (Garden City, NY: Doubleday), 9.19; 11.37; and especially
13.12: the “beginningless” (anadimat), which is neither being nor non¯
¯¯
being, is identified with brahman. Compare also Bhagavad Gi ta 2.16.
�54
3
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Ibid. 8.89.34 (Sourcebook, 34). Compare 10.121 (24-25).
4
Rg Veda 2.12.5 in The Rig Veda: An Anthology, ed. and trans. Wendy
Doniger O’Flaherty (London: Penguin, 1981), 161.
5 See, for example, 1.164.6 (Sourcebook, 21) and 10.114.5, quoted in
The Vedic Experience—An Anthology of the Vedas, ed. and trans.
Raimundo Panikkar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 660.
6
Vedic religion gradually turned into Hinduism. Although a distinction
can be made between them, I shall, in the interests of simplicity, treat
them as earlier and later stages of one evolving phenomenon.
7
It is sometimes said that the original fourfold division should be understood as a division into classes, and that only the polymorphous divisions
that subsequently emerged should count as caste divisions. This
distinction, however, cannot be insisted upon. The bewildering multiplicity of castes that came into being later on appears to have emerged
¯¯
out of the forbidden mixing of the original four. See Bhagavad Gi ta 1.4044 and Laws of Manu 7.24, 8.352-353, 8.418 (Sourcebook, 186,177,
187). There was also a certain overlap in the usage of the terms “class”
(varna) and “caste” (jati) in the so-called “Epic” period of ancient India.
¯
See Wilhelm Halbfass, Tradition and Reflection (Albany: SUNY Press,
1991), 350-53. The term “caste” has the advantage over “class” of
naming not merely a group into which one happens to be born, but, due
to karmic causality, the group into which one deserves to be reborn. “The
problem of a potential injustice of such exclusion [of the su dra, or
¯
servant, from the Vedic ceremonies of initiation] is…easily resolved by
referring to the doctrine of karma and rebirth, which explains and
justifies the current caste status and allows for a future ascent to higher
stages” (Ibid. 72; cf. 349. See Chandogya Upanisad 5.10.7; Manu 9.335,
¯
12.9 in Sourcebook, 66-67, 188, 173). Louis Dumont, in his important
and controversial study, Homo Hierarchicus (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980), refers to this karmic justification of caste (359, n.
25g.), but he can hardly be said to give it proper emphasis, although it
supports his claim that hierarchy is an essentially religious concept (6566). Dumont himself tries to limit the term “castes” to the later development and uses “classes” to name the original distinction. But in the
original distinction we also find the separation of status from power that
Dumont rightly insists is constitutive of Indian society, ancient and
modern, a separation that is not readily suggested by the word “class.” In
this paper I use “caste” in referring to the original fourfold division. Since
it is only about this fourfold division that I shall be speaking, there should
be no confusion.
8
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 4.5.15, in The Thirteen Principal Upanishads,
¯
2d rev. ed., trans. Robert Hume (Delhi: Oxford University Text, 1931),
147. The whole clause “sa eva neti netyatman” (with sandhi) is translated
¯
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by Hume as “That Soul is not this, it is not that,” which is fine except for
the fact that ¯tman is more literally rendered as “self ” than “soul.” The
a
Sanskrit text, moreover, does not distinguish between small and large case
letters. The demonstrative pronoun is presumably intended to distinguish
between the ¯tman, i.e., the genuine self in its purity, and the familiar
a
though spurious self that is absorbed, one might say, in maya.
¯ ¯
9
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 1.4.10; Chandogya Upanisad 3.14.4; 8.7.4;
¯
¯
8.10.1; 8.11.1. These two Upanisads are of great antiquity. See also
Mandu kya Upanisad 2; Isa Upanisad 4-6, 15-16; and Mundaka Upanisad
¯ ¯
¯
2.1.2-4,10; 3.2.9. (These texts are all contained in The Thirteen Principal
Upanishads.) The threefold relationship of brahman, maya, and ¯tman
¯ ¯
a
forms something of a parallel to the threefold relationship of thing-initself, phenomena (the total complex of which is nature), and transcendental ego that one finds in the philosophy of Kant.
10
Chandogya Upanisad 6.9-13; 8.11.1: tat tvam asi.
¯
11
Nor should brahman be confused with brahmana, the name of a
¯
member of the priestly caste. To avoid confusion I shall adopt the
convention, employed in Sourcebook and other texts, of transliterating
the latter term as “brahmin.”
¯
12
In the West, philosophy has been concerned with validating itself as the
most choiceworthy way of life. It has been concerned in particular with
showing that the philosophical life is more choiceworthy than the life of
simple piety, that is, than the life of devotion and loving obedience to the
loving command of a providential God. The evidence closest at hand for
the existence of such a God is found in our moral experience. The moral
view of the world, which originates out of this experience, postulates
God as the ultimate author of the moral law, or as moral judge, or both.
A central project of Western philosophy, then, has been the critique of
morality, especially of such concepts as radical freedom of the will,
transcendent law, and dutiful obedience as the unconditioned condition
of the human good. There is no comparable critique of morality in
classical Indian philosophy. The reason is that in the Hindu religion, at
least in the sophisticated religion of the Upanisads, the divine is neither
the author of a moral law nor a moral judge, nor providential in any
sense recognizable in Biblical religion. The doctrine of impersonal karmic
causality lies entirely outside the theological problematic except insofar as
it supports an equally impersonal concept of the divine. See, for example
Sankhya-Pravacana Su tra 5.2. (Sourcebook, 450).
¯
¯
13
Rg Veda 10.90.11-12. Compare Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 1.4.10-15;
¯
¯¯
Bhagavad Gi ta 4.13; Manu 1.31.
14
Kautilya, Arthasastra, ed. and trans. R.P Kangle (Delhi: Motilal
¯
.
Banarsidass,1988), 2:1.3.4-7, hereafter cited as Arthasastra.
¯
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
15
The expression “twice-born” refers to the initiation (upanayana) or
investiture with the sacred thread that the members of the upper three
castes undergo. It is likened to a second birth.
16
Kautilya, 1.3.13.
17
Kautilya, 1.3.4-8. I shall use the general expression “the Veda” to refer
not only to the four Vedas but also to the appended treatises that were
accorded comparable authority in the tradition. Kangle makes the
following observation: “[A]ctually it is only in the Dharmasu tras, a
¯
branch of the Vedanga Kalpa, that the duties of the varnas [castes] and
¯
¯sramas [stages of life] are laid down in detail” (2:7). This fact may help
a
explain why su dras were not permitted even to study the Veda.
¯
18
See Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy (Glencoe, Ill: The Free
Press,1959), 37 and Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic
Books,1969), 11-12.
19
Arthasastra 1.4.11-15. On the separation of the political from the
¯
religious, see Dumont, 263-93. On the concept of danda as legitimate
force, see pp. 302-03, where Dumont quotes the following passage from
the Mahabhvrata: “if there was on earth no king bearing the stick of
¯
punishment, the stronger would roast the weaker as fishes on a spike.”
See also Manu 7.22. In this connection, it is worth noting that a rise in
caste status within a single life occasionally happened as a result of
political exigency, a state affairs expressed in the dry aphorism, “Whoever
rules is a ksatriya.” See A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India
(Calcutta: Rupa and Co., 1954), 92.
20
Arthasastra 1.7.
¯
21
There are other end goals, namely, right action (dharma), wealth
(artha), and pleasure (kama); but these end goals are subservient to liberation, which is, above all, liberation from ignorance.
22 Hume, in his translation of the Katha Upanisad (The Thirteen Principal
Upanishads) renders the second half of 4.2.1 (353) as “A certain wise
man, while seeking immortality, introspectively beheld the soul (Atman)
face to face.” The translation is marred by the inexplicable insertion of
the phrase “face to face,” which corresponds to nothing in the Sanskrit
text, at least as it appears in Eight Upanisads, (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama,
1989), 1:180. There the text reads, without sandhi, as follows: kas cit
¯
dhi ras pratyak ¯tmanam aiksat ¯vrttacaksuh amrttvam icchan.
a ¯
a
23
“Those who, even worshiping other divinities, sacrifice with faith
¯¯
(sraddha) sacrifice also to me,” Bhagavad Gi ta 9.23. Compare Exod.
34:14; Deut. 29:17; Ps. 96:5; John 4:22; 1 Cor.1:20.
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24
The Sanskrit verbal radical “vid-” means “know,” not “see.” The root
sense of “veda” does not refer to sight, though this sense is present in the
Greek “eidos” and “idea” (which were originally preceded by a digamma
having the sound of an English “w”) and also in the closely related Latin
“video” and English “vision.” All these words are conjectured to have
derived from the Indo-European root “weid-”, which itself may not have
referred exclusively to sight. Two conjectured derivatives of “weid-” in
English that do not refer exclusively to sight are “guide” and “wit.” Cf.
Calvert Watkins, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo European
Roots (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 74.
25
There is nothing in Hinduism, at least in the sophisticated Upanisadic
tradition, that is comparable to, say, God’s election of Abraham.
26
Cf. W Halbfass, India and Europe (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 29.
.
27
It should go without saying that faith (sraddha), particularly in the
¯
carrying out of ritual performances, and devotion (bhakti) are central to
religious Hinduism, however marginal they may be in this or that speculative school. Such concepts are not absent from the Upanisads.
Occasionally, however, what at first glance seems like an unqualified
theism turns out, on close inspection, to be quite different. See, for
example, Katha 1.2.23. There the self (atman) that reveals (or discloses,
¯
vivrnute) its own (or its own character, svam) is not exactly “a thou”
¯
since it is ultimately the same as the self that is seeking it. Hume (The
Thirteen Principal Upanishads, 350) divines “the first explicit statement of
the doctrine of Grace (prasada)” just a little earlier in this section, at
¯
1.2.20. To his credit, however, he notes that prasada can also mean
¯
tranquility, that it unquestionably has this meaning in other Upanisadic
passages that he cites, and that the greatest commentator on the
Upanisads, namely, Sankara takes the term to mean precisely tranquility,
and not grace. See Eight Upanisads: With the Commentary of
¯¯
Sankaracarya, trans. Swami Gambhi rananda, (Calcutta: Motilal
¯¯
¯ ¯
Banarsidass, 1989) 1:153-54. That prasada, in the philosophical tradition
¯
at least, presupposes advance preparation and discernment (not to
mention merit) on the part of the recipient, if that’s even the word for it,
further distinguishes this notion from the Biblical conception of grace.
28
See, for example, Rg Veda 7.103; 9.112; 10.86.
29
¯
Vigrahavyavartani , Sections 21-24.
¯
30
“The worship of the Buddha is merely an act of commemoration. The
popular gods were introduced into Buddhism in its more religious form
to serve as objects for meditation,” Sourcebook, 273. Sokyo Ono, in
Shinto: The Kami Way (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1962), gives the
following account of the adjustment that, after an initial period of
conflict, allowed for the peaceful coexistence of Shinto, which is the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
native religion of Japan, and Buddhism, which had been imported from
without. “[I]n the eighth century a compromise was reached which
resulted in the teaching that the kami [Shinto gods] were pleased to
receive Buddhist sutras as offerings and to hear them recited in worship.
As a consequence, Buddhist temples were established alongside shrines,
ostensibly to satisfy the kami, make them into Buddhist believers, and
finally raise them to the level of buddhas” (85-86). One wonders if the
Shinto gods, in coming to recognize their own insubstantiality, were
supposed to have converted to atheism.
31
Excerpted from the Sarvadarsanasangraha in Sourcebook, 233-34. I
have added some commentary within brackets, in this text and in the
next one cited, to bring into sharper relief the central claims of this
school.
32
W Halbfass speaks of the “intriguing etymological kinship” of the
.
Sanskrit bhu with the Greek phy- from the Greek word for nature,
¯
physis, is formed. On Being and What there Is: Classical Vaisesika and the
History of Indian Ontology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 21-22. On the
Indo-European root bheu-, see Watkins, p. 8, and the table of sound
correspondences on p. 111. In the first passage that I quoted from the Rg
Veda, the word I translated as “own determination,” which can also mean
spontaneity, namely svadha, includes the component sva, as does
¯
¯¯
svabhava. Note the use of svabhava in Bhagavad Gi ta 5.14; compare with
¯
¯
sambhavami, “I originate myself.” in 4.6.
¯
33
Sourcebook, 248.
34
Sarvasiddhatsangraha, in Sourcebook, 234-35. I commented on some of
¯
these passages in my article, “On the Discovery of Nature,” The St. John’s
Review, 46/1, (2000): 127-28, 141.
¯¯
See, for example, Baghavad Gi ta 16.8, and compare 18.71. One
occasionally comes across materialist speculation even in the sruti, the
most venerable sources of Vedic tradition. See, for example,
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 2.4.12; compare Chandogya Upanisad 8.7-8
¯
¯
35
36
A close equivalent in the West can be found in the Summa Theologiae
of Thomas Aquinas, the articles of which commence with a statement of
objections to the thesis being proposed, followed by a quotation from
authority, often but not always scriptural, and, after this, a comprehensive
argument in favor of the thesis, typically without appeal to authority, and,
in conclusion, responses to the objections seriatim.
37 Rg Veda 10.125. The dividing up of speech by the gods, referred to in
the third verse of this hymn, reminds one of the dismemberment of the
purusa in Rg Veda 10.90.
CAREY
59
¯
Brahma-Su tras 2.1.33 in Brahma-Su tra-Bhasya of Sri Sankaracarya,
¯
¯
¯
¯¯
trans. Swami Gambhirananda, (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1983).
38
¯
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 2.4.5. See Brahma-Su tra-Bhasya of Sri
¯
¯
¯
Sankaracarya, 360.
¯¯
39
40
“The Discovery of Nature,” 122 ff.
41
Physics 199b31.
42
That philosophy may have emerged more naturally where IndoEuropean languages were spoken would hardly prove that the emergence
of philosophy was an accident of linguistics. After all, it is at least
thinkable—if not so easily sayable these days—that some languages are
naturally superior to others, precisely because they are more in tune with
what is fundamentally real or at least suggest a wider range of possibilities
for thought. See Martin Heidegger, Einleitung in die Metaphysik, 2d. ed.
(Tübingen:Max Niemeyer Verlag 1958), 43. See the English translation
by Ralph Manheim, Introduction to Metaphysics, (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1959), 57. In any case, the conditions favoring the
emergence of philosophy in ancient India were, as I argue in the sequel,
not so much linguistic as theologico-political.
43
See, for example, Brhadaranyaka 1.4.1; Katha 1.3.11, 2.1.12; Isa 16.
¯
¯
44
There are a plurality of purusas, in the Sankhya school. But they are all
¯
of the same kind, so the system can still be regarded as essentially
dualistic.
45
Sankhya-Karika 21 in Sourcebook, 424. This analogy, however, cannot
¯
¯ ¯
be pressed too far, since for Aristotle the divine intellect does not, as final
cause, direct nature in quite the same way that the lame man being
carried would presumably direct the blind man carrying him.
46
¯¯
Sankhya-Karika 13 in Sourcebook, 429. In the Bhagavad Gi ta it is said
¯
¯
that the gunas are present everywhere, even among the gods in heaven,
and that they, too, originate out of prakrti (18.40; cf. 3.33).
47
Physics 922b19; cf. Metaphysics 1072b14.
¯ ¯ ¯
Sankhya-Karika 56-57 in Sourcebook, 442-43. The Pu rva-Mi mamsa
¯
¯ ¯
¯
school makes similar arguments against divine creation of the world. The
notion that the play of brahman, and not any purpose outside of this
play, is responsible for the phenomenal world may have emerged in
response to arguments against creation such as the above. Sankara at least
argues this way. See his commentary on Brahma-Su tras 2.1.32-36.
¯
48
49
50
Yoga Su tra 1.23-29. (Sourcebook, 458-459).
¯
Halbfass, On Being and What There Is, 231; cf. 70 and 271. Halbfass’s
study is a comprehensive account of Vaisesika and contains translations of
some of the more interesting ontological texts of this school, 237-69. See
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
also Archibald Edward Gough, The Vaisesika Aphorisms of Kanada (New
¯
Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1975, originally published in 1873).
Knowledge of the truth is explicitly said to be the highest good in
Aphorism 4, and this may be implied as early as Aphorism 2 (see the
commentary on pp. 2-3). In Aphorism 3, authoritativeness, presumably of
the Veda, is linked to what is said in Aphorism 2. After Aphorism 4, the
author gets down to business, namely, categorizing all that exists,
beginning with substances (dravya): earth, water, fire (tejas) air, ether,
time, space, self (atman), and mind (manas). Halbfass points out that the
¯
“radical [Vaisesika] innovator…identified space, time, and ether, with
God.” On Being and What There Is, 217.
51
Nyaya-Sutra 1.1.4 in The Nyaya-Su tras of Gotama, trans. M. M.
¯
¯
¯
Statisa Chandra Vidyabhu sana, rev. and ed. Nandalal Sinha, (Delhi:
¯ ¯
Motilal Banarsidass, 1990), 3. Compare The Nyaya-Sutras of Gautama,
¯
trans. and ed. Ganganatha Jha, (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984), 1:111,
¯ ¯
¯
hereafter referred to as Jha. Jha’s four-volume edition of the Nyaya-Sutra
¯ ¯
¯
includes a massive amount of commentary, both traditional and more
recent.
52
Compare Aristotle, On Sense and Sensible Objects 442b9.
53
Nyaya-Sutra, 1.32-39 in Sourcebook, 362-63. Jha, 1:355-445. Note
¯
¯
that Steps 3, 4 and 5 virtually replicate the classical syllogism familiar in
the West. Whatever is produced is non-eternal; sound is produced;
[therefore] sound is non-eternal. Steps 1 and 2 of the Nyaya syllogism set
¯
the stage for what we might call the syllogism proper. Step 1 is the
enunciation, and this is rarely omitted, even in the West. It suffices to
think of the propositions of Euclid’s Elements, the articles of Thomas’s
Summa Theologica, and the “Antinomies” in Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason, all of which commence with an announcement of what is about
to be demonstrated. Step 2, which is the most dispensable of the five,
foretells and encapsulates the syllogism that is about to occur. What is
most peculiar in the Nyaya syllogism is the use of an example—a single
¯
one suffices in the absence of a counter example—to establish the major
premise. The syllogism implies the presence of an opponent not so much
as the target of an elenchus but, rather, as a kind of conscience to check
the introduction of less than fully evident major premises.
54
In the Nyaya and Vaisesika schools, sabda “is of two kinds: noise
¯
¯
(dhvani) and articulate alphabet sounds (varna).” John Grimes, A Concise
Dictionary of Indian Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 287. In the
English version of the Nyaya-Sutra to which we have been referring, one
¯
and the same Sanskrit term, sabda, is variously rendered as “sound,”
¯
“word,” and “verbal testimony.”
55 This principle occurs in a slightly different form in the syllogistic of the
Nyaya school, where, as we saw, a universal proposition can be estab¯
CAREY
61
lished as a major premise by means of a single example, unless the
opponent can advance a counter-example.
56
See Sourcebook, 491.
57
Slokavartika, trans. G. Jha, in Sri Garib Das Oriental Series, no. 8,
¯
(India: Sri Satguru Publications), 460.
58
Slokavartika, 416
59
Grimes, A Concise Dictionary of Indian Philosophy, 301 and 339. See
¯
¯
Bruce Perry, “Early Nyaya and Hindu Orthodoxy: Anvi ksiki and
¯
Adhikara,” Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the
¯
Humanities 59 (1997): 455. “Vacaspati [a Naiyayika] thus contends that
¯
¯
the ultimacy of reasoning consists in the ability to teach someone the
validity of the Veda and the nature of the objects of knowledge. That
these cannot be conveyed without reasoning is a bold enough claim. That
Nyaya actually establishes the validity of the Vedas is extraordinary. The
¯
Vedas, which define orthodoxy, are now dependent on reasoning. It
follows that Nyaya is the most fundamental of the orthodox sciences,
¯
since it is the means by which orthodoxy itself is established.”
60
Nyaya-Sutra 1.2.13, Commentary; Sourcebook, 365; cf. Jha, 1:571-72.
¯
61
Sankhya-karika 2 in Sourcebook, 427; Gerald Larson, Classical
¯
¯ ¯
Sankhya, 2d rev. ed. (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1979), 256. Compare
¯
¯¯
Bhagavad Gi ta 2.46 and 2.52.
62
Not insignificantly, “the unmanifest” according to Sankhya is nature.
¯
The products of evolving nature, among them the particulars that lie
before our eyes, are “the manifest.” The relationship between the unmanifest process of production and the manifest products is comparable to
the relationship between natura naturans and natura naturata, respectively, in the philosophy of Spinoza.
The complexity of Sankara’s account of ¯svara is treated by Paul
i
Hacker in “Distinctive Features of the Doctrine and Terminology of
Sankara,” in Philology and Confrontation, ed. W Halbfass (Albany: SUNY
.
Press, 1995), 90-91: “What characterizes God as creator of the universe
and Lord of the universe…is ‘dependent on restriction through illusory
upadhis [deceits, or adventitious connections, i.e., the conditions of
¯
maya].’ It is possible to conceive of God as creator and Lord of the
¯ ¯
universe only in the context of mundane existence….” And yet, “[t]he
term ¯svara can be replaced for brahman everywhere….With ¯svara…is
i
i
seldom [sic!] connected the notion that there is something illusory about
it.” Not surprisingly, Sankara has sometimes been accused of an
unaccountable “illogicality” in his account of ¯svara, in spite of an
i
abundance of evidence attesting to the fact that his logical acumen was
extraordinary.
63
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
64
Vakyabhasya on the Kena Upanisad, cited in P Hacker “Relations of
¯
¯
.
Early Advaitins to Vaisnavism” in Philology and Confrontation, 38. The
word translated as “sovereignty” here is svarajyam. Compare Chandogya
¯¯
¯
Upanisad, 7.25.2, where it is said of anyone who recognizes the
omnipresence of the ¯tman (self), “he becomes sovereign” (sas svarat
a
¯
¯¯
bhavati). Whereas Gambhi rananda (564) translates svarat as “sovereign,”
¯
Hume (261) translates it as “autonomous,” which is somewhat more
accurate. The components of this word, in stem form, are sva and raj—
¯
literally, “own king.” It is worth noting here that Sankara explicitly calls
attention to a significant privilege of the ¯tman: its logically indubitable
a
existence. See Sarvepalli Radharkrishnan, Indian Philosophy, (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, Centenary Edition, 1989), 2:476.
65
Perry, 466, n. 16.
66
Arthasastra, 1.2.5. See the gloss of the Malayalam commentary (Cb):
¯
“[Vedic lore] only serves the purpose of preventing people from calling
[one conversant with the ways of the world] a nastika [one who does not
¯
accept the authority of the Veda].”(Arthasastra, 2:6).
¯
67
Arthasastra, 1.2.11.
¯
68
Compare The Decisive Treatise, Determining What the Connection is
between Religion and Philosophy, in which Averroes similarly shows how
the interpretation of the Qur’an can be carried out in a way that is
¯
compatible with the aims of philosophy.
69
It goes without saying that reason was not universally accorded such
authority and autonomy in ancient India. Perry, (450, 465), cites the
following colorful passage from the Mahabharata 12.173.47-49: “I was a
¯ ¯
savant (panditaka), a logician, a despiser of the Veda, devoted to
worthless analytics, the science of reasoning (or logic, tarkavidyam), an
utterer of logical doctrines, a speaker with reasons in assemblies, both a
reviler and haughty in speech against the twice-born concerning Vedic
rituals, heterodox (nastika), and a doubter of everything, a fool and a
¯
self-styled learned man: the full fruition of which is this—my being a
jackal, oh twice-born one.” It stands to reason that this text and others
that Perry also cites would have made sense only if certain individuals,
perhaps even whole schools, were well known to be living this
questionable life of autonomous inquiry. Compare Manu 12.95.
70
Consider, in this connection, the following passage from Leo Strauss’s
Persecution and the Art of Writing: “Of the superstitious ‘books of the
astrologers,’ the [Jewish] scholar mentions one by name, The Nabatean
Agriculture, to which he seems to ascribe Hindu origin; and of the Hindus
he says in that context that they are a people who deny Divine revelation
(the existence of a ‘book from God’)” (123). “[T]he possibility is by no
means excluded that the originators of some of the superstitious practices
CAREY
63
or beliefs, and hence perhaps the authors of some of the superstitious
codes, were themselves philosophers addressing the multitude….[The
Sabeans] believed in the eternity of the world, i.e., they agreed with the
philosophers over and against the adherents of revelation as regards the
crucial question” (124). “It is perhaps not absurd to wonder whether
books such as The Nabatean Agriculture were written, not by simpleminded adherents of superstitious creeds and practices, but by adherents
of the philosophers” (125). “Avicenna’s esoteric teaching was expounded
in his Oriental Philosophy, and he is said to have called that teaching
‘oriental’ because it is identical with the view of the people of the orient”
(126 and n. 98). Strauss refers his readers to studies on these themes by
others, but to my knowledge, he does not undertake a further exploration
of the possibility of an Indian philosophy, properly so called, in his own
published works. See, however, Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 7.
71
It has been suggested that passages in Vaisesika texts that refer to
“liberation” might be later accretions, perhaps added in response to
accusations of heterodoxy. Cf. Halbfass, India and Europe, 271.
72
That the non-dualism of Advaita-Vedanta is truly theistic was
¯
challenged by later Vedantists, who abandon strict monism in favor of
some form of dualism that allows for an ultimate and not merely
aspectual distinction between the human self and brahman.
73
“An important consequence of accepting the Vedas as valid is that the
whole orthodox social order (varnasrama), which derives from the Veda,
¯
has to be accepted as valid as well” Perry, 465.
74
Arthasastra, 2.9. The classic if extreme expression of the necessity of
¯
staying within the confines of the caste to which one has been assigned by
karma accumulated in a previous life is the following:
Better one’s own dharma defective (that is, defectively performed viguna)
Than another’s dharma well performed;
Doing the action (karma) prescribed by one’s own nature (svabhava)
¯
One does not incur guilt.
¯¯
Bhagavad Gi ta 18.47; 3.35 and Manu 10.97. Compare Socrates’ use of
the phrase “to tou hautou prattein” at Republic 433a ff.; see also 434c1.
75
Not surprisingly, neither the Buddha nor Mahavira, the founder of
Jainism, were members of the brahmin caste. However, Brhaspiti, the
¯
legendary founder of Lokayata, appears to have been a brahmin prior to
¯
¯
his apostasy. All teachers in the orthodox schools were, of course,
members of the brahmin caste since the brahmins alone were permitted to
¯
¯
teach the Veda.
76
Consider the observation of S. Radharkrishnan, “The Brahmins are not
¯
a priesthood pledged to support fixed doctrines, but an intellectual
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
aristocracy charged with the moulding of the higher life of the people,”
Indian Philosophy, 1.112. Needless to say, this “moulding” can take a
variety of forms. For example, “According to all Indian traditions [the
emperor Candragupta—fourth century B.C.] was much aided in his
conquests by a very able and unscrupulous brahman advisor
¯
called…Kautilya,” A. L. Basham, The Wonder that was India, 51. The
ruler “is told [by Kautilya] to go the length of having his secret agents
disguised as gods, and allowing himself to be seen in their company, in
order that his simpler subjects may believe that he mixes with the gods on
equal terms” (84).
77
Daya Krishna forcefully asks exactly what is meant by acceptance of
the Veda in the so-called orthodox schools, but after persuasively ruling
out the inadequate answers usually given to this question, he seems to
abandon the question itself. Indian Philosophy; A Counter Perspective
(London: Oxford University Press, 1991), 7 ff.
78
“…mit Hülfe einer religiösen Organisation haben [die Brahmanen] sich
die Macht, dem Volke seine Könige zu ernennen, während sie sich selber
abseits und ausserhalb hielten und fühlten, als die Menschen höherer und
überköniglicher Aufgaben” (#61); […with the help of a religious organization the brahmins appropriated the power of naming kings for the
¯
people, while they held themselves, and felt themselves, apart and
outside, as men of higher and supra-royal tasks.] Friedrich Nietzsche,
Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Kritische Studienausgabe 5, ed.Giorgio Colli
and Mazzino Montinari, 80.
79
Cf. n. 12.
80
It goes without saying that Western admirers of Hinduism are rarely
inclined to offer a spirited defense of the caste system.
81
I have in mind Surendranth Dasgupta, Daya Krsihna, Wilhelm
Halbfass, Paul Hacker, Natalya Isayeva, Jitendra N. Mohanty, and Dale
Riepe, to name just a few.
82
For a possible answer to this question see Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s
Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (New York: Schocken Books,
1965), 8- 9.
83
If this is true, it follows that what is most distinctive about the West is
not philosophy but the Biblical God.
Glossary of Terms
Advaita - non-dualism (i.e., monism), a branch of Vedanta
¯
¯
¯nvi ksiki - analytics, reasoning
a ¯
¯tman - the self
a
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65
brahman - the fundamental reality
brahmin (brahmana) - a member of the priestly caste
¯
¯
dharma - law or duty
Isvara - the Lord
karma - the effect of one’s actions on the self
Kautilya - a political philosopher and author of the
Arthasastra
¯
ksatriya - a member of the warrior caste (the king is a
member of this caste)
Lokayata - a heterodox school—materialism and hedonism
¯
maya - illusion; the world of appearances
¯ ¯
¯ ¯
¯ ¯ ¯
Mi mamsakas - adherents of Pu rva Mi mamsa
¯
Nagarjuna - A Buddhist philosopher and dialectician
¯ ¯
Nyaya - an orthodox school—logic and epistemology
¯
prakrti- nature
purusa - spirit; intellect; person; witness
¯ ¯ ¯
Pu rva-Mi mamsa - an orthodox school—Vedic apologetics
¯
sabda - sound: verbal testimony
¯
sandhi - adjustments for euphony within and between
Sanskrit words
Sankhya - an orthodox school—fundamental dualism of
¯
nature and spirit
Sankara - an Indian Philosopher and proponent of AdvaitaVedanta
¯
smrti - that which is remembered - secondary “revelation”
sruti - that which was heard by the sages - primary
“revelation” = the Veda
su dra - a member of the servant caste
¯
sunya - empty; sunyata - emptiness - the fundamental
¯
¯
¯
ontological concept of Buddhism
svabhava - own being; nature
¯
svadharma - lit.“own duty” i.e., one’s duties as a member of
a given caste
Upanisads - speculative treatises appended to the Vedas
¯ ¯ ¯
Uttara-Mi mamsa = Vedanta; an orthodox school—based
¯
chiefly on the Upanisads
Vaisesika - an orthodox school—atomism and categorization
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
vaisya - a member of the farmer-merchant caste
Veda - generic name four the four Vedas and appended
treatises
Vedanta (lit. “end of the Veda”) - an orthodox school based
¯
on the Upanisads
vidya - science; knowledge
¯
Yoga - an orthodox school, paired with Sankhya
¯
Some tips on how to begin pronouncing Sanskrit words Macrons over “a,” “i,” and “u” indicate a lengthening of
these vowel; “s” and “s” can both be pronounced as “sh;” and
“c” is pronounced approximately as English “ch.” The letter
r (note the dot under it) is a vowel, not a consonant (the
consonant does not have a dot under it), often pronounced by
Westerners as “ri” but closer to “er” uttered quickly and with
a hint of a trill. Otherwise, the letters can be pronounced
pretty much as written, ignoring the dots under consonants,
which signify that they are cerebrals and not dentals. Native
speakers of English have difficulty distinguishing between
cerebrals and dentals, since the English dental is actually a
cross between a genuine dental and a cerebral. I have
rendered the nasal, anusvara, prior to labials with an “m,” but
¯
in all other cases with an “n.” Unvoiced non-aspirated consonants are hard to pronounce without hearing them in
contrast to unvoiced aspirated consonants. For example,
Sanskrit aspirated “ph” is pronounced exactly like English
“p”; Sanskrit unaspirated “p” has no English equivalent, that
is, no air is expelled when it is pronounced. Voiced aspirated
consonants, such as Sanskrit “bh,” are hard to pronounce too.
67
The Forgotten Faculty: The Place of
Phronêsis or Practical Sense in Liberal
Education (Plutarch and Aristotle)
David Levine
We think in generalities; we live in details.
Airport terminal display
Reading maketh a full man,
Conference a ready man,
And Writing an exact man.
Francis Bacon
Would a new Plutarch even be possible [today]?
Nietzsche1
1. Prologue in Seminar
Educations tailored to each person
are better than those given in common.
Aristotle2
The title of tonight’s talk, The Forgotten Faculty, is
ambiguous, deliberately so. One might have anticipated a talk
on the role of the teaching faculty in modern higher
education, in particular the regrettable subordination of the
teaching function to other lesser ends in today’s universities,
thereby distorting its proper role. Important though this
subject is, this is not my subject tonight.
Indeed, it is our good fortune at St. John’s that the faculty
is rightly understood to be at the very heart of the college, the
David Levine is a tutor and former dean on the Santa Fe campus of
St. John’s College. This is the Dean’s Lecture, delivered on August 27, 2004,
in Santa Fe.
�68
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ministers and stewards of what we call the Program. We
tutors are not content with imparting bare skills and empty
generalizations, not satisfied with conveying the results of our
own or others’ thinking without requiring that you develop
your own capacities for such thoughtfulness. We have learned
from Plato’s Meno that lecturing and learning are not correlates like throwing and catching. Thus we don’t lecture at or
‘talk down’ (katagorein) to you. In our view it is the question,
¯
and not some answer, that is the proper instrument of
education. We begin each class accordingly.
Last night your seminars began with a question. Perhaps
at that moment, or perhaps somewhat later in the evening, a
member of the seminar, a tutor or fellow student, asked a
question or made a remark that “spoke to you,” that is, it
seemed “tailor-made” just for your learning, that bore on
your perplexity, your state of understanding then and there.
In “speaking to you” it spurred you to further reflection. It
somehow enabled you to step over your settled or
unexamined view and opened up a horizon of possibility
hitherto unforeseen. All of a sudden you were engaged as
never before; you were propelled forward; you had an
investment in jointly finding out where it all led. In short, you
were actively engaged in that joint enterprise we call conversation. You were on your way to discovery.
The question or remark that prompted all this was not so
much leading as opening, not a disguised commentary but an
invitation to exploration. It didn’t necessarily provide the
missing link of an incomplete thought process but, rather,
made you think about how you had been thinking and, in so
doing, cleared the way for discovery, or it offered for consideration something that opened a window of unsuspected
prospects. Such remarks or questions may have been coincidental, but they may also have been a tailor-made question
that artfully and with foresight made for greater thoughtfulness. How is this possible? To help us with this we need to
take a bit of a detour with the help of two authors on the
program, Aristotle and Plutarch.3
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2. “Human Beings Like to Talk”
They fought their countries battles and
conducted their campaigns in their talk.
Pyrrhus 1.5314
Aristotle is not an especially funny man. But there is a remark
in the Nicomachean Ethics—a book freshmen will spend long
hours studying this spring—that makes me smile at least, one
that suggests a very wry and penetrating way of looking at the
world, in particular at human life and our foibles and pretensions. He observes that human beings like to “talk,” in
particular we like to talk about human excellence or virtue
(aretê). Indeed, by so “philosophizing,” we think we are being
“serious human beings” (spoudaios).5
We all recognize this tendency to speak more loudly with
words than with deeds, to posture without actually being
effective, to “philosophize” and “pontificate” in the worst
senses of those terms (as well as to second guess, to play
Monday morning quarterback, to presume to know what one
should have done “if I were only there”—in short, to enjoy
the barbershop or coffee shop conversation, etc.).
There is much in Aristotle’s wry remark, but minimally he
is seeking to redirect his reader (“transpose them,”
Heidegger), and this in a decisive way, to get us to see that the
“truth” of such reflections and discussions—of what has come
to be called “ethics”—is not to be found in the talking, and
surely not in a “theory,” but can only be in the life lived and
the numerous individual deeds out of which a life is made.
Human beings like to talk, to be sure, but Aristotle, and we,
are interested in much more than just talk.
So let us turn tonight to someone who sought to look
carefully at “lives,” the writer of Lives of the Illustrious
Greeks and Romans, the first century political philosopher
Plutarch. In his work we see men of action who are often also
thinkers and who are distinguished by their judgment as
much as by their actions. They lived their lives one insight at
a time—as we all do—yet with such quality that their actions
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are not a staccato series of events, but reflect and have their
source in a more developed faculty. These are men who are
not content to just talk but to act and live fully, if not also
well.
3. Much More than History
Antony was so great that he was thought by others
worthy of higher things than his own desires.
Lives, Comparison of Demetrius and Antony 2.535
There is another reason why we should turn to Plutarch.
I was walking out of the bookstore last fall and about to turn
into the coffee shop, when I overheard a sophomore say to a
friend, somewhat puzzled and maybe even a little
exasperated, “Why are we reading Plutarch? It’s only
history.” At that point, turning around, I interjected the
enthusiastic remark of Rousseau (actually he was quoting
Montaigne at the time), and I quote, “Plutarch, he’s my man”
(“C’est mon homme que Plutarque”),6 hoping thereby to
encourage a reconsideration. I don’t know if it helped that
student, but it did spur me to undertake a course of reading
this past year from which I tried to answer this question and
understand the enthusiasm for Plutarch on the part of so
many of our program authors. For these authors—and they
number not a few,7 including, in addition to Montaigne and
Rousseau, Shakespeare, Montesquieu, most of the founders
of our country (Franklin, Madison, Jefferson), Emerson,
Nietzsche, Tolstoi, etc.—for them he is not “just history” but
much more, a teacher of a higher order.8
Though I read all of Plutarch’s Lives—all 1,451 pages!—
I have to admit that it was only a first reading for most of
these, and in general this is a new arena of exploration for
me. Nevertheless, drawn by the question, I ventured forth.
Now here I am before all of you, presenting my first formulations for your consideration (1.27). As in seminar, I trust
that I am among friends, friends who help each other to think
better, more precisely and deeper, about one another’s first or
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nascent thoughts. Thus this dean’s lecture, my “annual essay”
if you will, is indeed an essay, an attempt, a first effort of
discovery with all the attendant uncertainty that such a
venture always entails—as many of you know well from your
own efforts of discovery. Thus your generosity and
forbearance will be called upon this evening.
In reading Plutarch we are invited to re-enter9 the realm
of the city, of the “political” (politikê) in its original meaning:
the realm of the probable and the unlikely, of the inadvertent
and the deliberate, the unpredictable as well as of “signs and
auguries,” of strife (2.42) and harmony, fortune and
misfortune, good and bad (2.104) (where “things can be
otherwise,” according to Aristotle). We re-enter, in short, the
world in which we actually live our lives, “worthy of
memory,” Plutarch would say (1.49, 100, 583; 2.61), indeed,
worthy of our deepest consideration.
Here not everything is easily seen. With some things we
need assistance, a magnifying glass if you will, in order for
them to be brought to fuller view. Plutarch helps us to
experience the contest, travails, and challenges of the soul by
portraying it writ large,10 so to speak, in the public arena, on
the world stage and on the field of battle.11 Alongside the
virtues—moderation, justice, courage, prudence—we
experience the encompassing, worldly context in which
virtue fights to raise its head and become effective: jealousy,
fear, ambition; betrayal, flattery, avarice, cultural decline, and
ambition; privilege, shame, superstition, hatred, rivalry, and
ambition; avarice, disillusionment, panic, self-interest, and
ambition.12 Here we are given an opportunity to reflect on
the distinctive features of lives lived, their relative effectiveness, their weighty consequences, and their manifold
difficulties.
In reading Plutarch we experience the complexity of the
attempt to give order to human life in the city with Lycurgus
and Numa Pomplius; the precariousness of virtue with
Themistocles, Aristides and Marcus Cato; the havoc of tyrannical ambition with Pyrrhus and Lysander; the limited effec-
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tiveness of justice with Lucullus; the disasters consequent
upon excessive caution with Nicias and Crassus. We
experience also the lamentable loss of prudence with
Pompey; the ineffectiveness of absolute principles with Cato
the Younger; the transformation of excessive tenderness into
its opposite with Alexander; the futility of virtue when undermined by life’s circumstances with Phocion; the unbridled
desire for glory with Agis; the suspect powers of eloquence
with Demosthenes and Cicero; and, of course, the dominion
of passion with Antony.
Amidst these abundant and luxurious life stories—
“histories” he sometimes calls them—are observations
perhaps neither bound nor diminished by time: we are
encouraged to reflect on “the ages of man,” the causes of
political change, on statesmanship as the “art of the possible,”
the political force of character and example (paradeigma), the
ambiguity of greatness and the liabilities of success. We are
asked to reflect as well on the fate of youthful optimism; the
clash of virtue and misfortune, the psychodynamics of human
failings; on self-transformation forced by rude experience,
the absolutist language of the passions, the self-justifying
linguistic universes of the vices; on the pathological strategies
of ambition, and the moral intractability of wealth. These,
and many more, are indeed “worthy of memory.”
Before we proceed, one further remark. In presenting
Plutarch’s mature reflections, we are reminded of Aristotle’s
concern about young people:13 young people, he says
profoundly, are, well, young. And this presents a difficulty.
Because young people lack life experience, he says, they do
not make good observers and students of “politics,” that is,
they do not make good students of their own lives in the city,
in the polis.
Here Aristotle does not mean to be insulting, only honest.
For experience can only be one’s own. It cannot be taught,
and surely cannot be borrowed or poured from one person
into another. It requires time and judgment. Thus for
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Aristotle, there is no alternative to “growing up,” to
overcoming isolating adolescence and becoming a person of
experience—“mature.” So it falls to us during our period of
personal transformation at the College (beginning this
evening) to resolve to overcome this lack, through careful
reading (1.201) and greater thoughtfulness, that we might be
“strengthened by [such] experiences (1.646),” made better
students of our own lives in the polis and better able to
navigate its often-bewildering seas.
4. The Liberal Art of Life Writing
Everyone has faults; not everyone has virtues.
Goethe
It is in bagatelles that nature comes to light.
Rousseau
At various moments throughout his work, Plutarch steps back
and reflects on the activity of writing lives. On the first such
occasion, what strikes him above all is the benefit to himself
of such exercises:
It is for the sake of others that I first commenced
writing [what he here calls] biographies [he says,
yet] I find myself...attaching myself to it for my
own [sake]; the [excellences] virtues of these great
men serving me as a sort of looking-glass [or
mirror] in which I may see how to adjust and
adorn my own life. Indeed it can be compared to
nothing but daily living and associating together;
we...entertain each successive guest, view their
‘stature and their qualities,’ and select from their
actions all that is noblest and worthiest to know.
(Timoleon 1.325)
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“What more effective means to one’s [own] improvement
[than associating with what is excellent is there]?” he
wonders. He then elaborates:
My method in the study of history, is...by the
familiarity acquired in writing, to habituate my
memory to receive and retain images of the best
and worthiest of characters. I thus am enabled to
free myself from any ignoble, base, or vicious
impressions...by the remedy of turning my
thoughts....to these noble examples.
What is striking about this passage is that for Plutarch this
kind of writing is first of all a liberating (and hence a liberal)
activity, freeing and enabling him to shape himself as he seeks
to give shape to the lives of others. He here draws on two
ancient nomic principles:14 (1) we become like those with
whom we associate. This he extends to writing and books: we
become like that about which we think and like those from
whom we choose to learn.15 And its correlate, (2) we are
moved to imitate what we admire,16 or what one might call
the principle of emulation. “The mere sight of a conspicuous
example of excellence,” he says, immediately (euthus) brings
one to admiration (thaumazesthai) and therewith brings one
to imitate the doer. Indeed for Plutarch there is nothing like
the “living example” of human character (1.99).17 The
beautiful,18 he says, moves one to action towards it (to kalon
eph’hauto praktikos kinei kai praktiken euthus hormen
entithesin) (Pericles 1.202; 2.2-3).19 As a result he “thought fit
to spend his time and pains” associating with these illustrious
Greek and Roman “guests” for the benefit both of himself
and us.
Let us note, especially for our work here at the college,
the many rewards of writing that reach beyond the final
product. Writing can be an occasion for self-discovery and
self-improvement. It is the process, after all, that is enabling.20
Later he compares writing lives to portrait painting. He
says, we first must do “honor” (2.245) to our subject and that
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means, in the case of human beings, to capture “the stature
and qualities” of the person and not be content with external
likenesses (the mere “face”). Yet there is a question of
judgment here. He writes:
As we would wish that a painter who is to draw a
beautiful face, in which there is yet imperfection,
should neither wholly leave out, nor yet too
pointedly express what is defective, because this
would deform it21...so it is hard, or indeed perhaps
impossible, to show the life of a man wholly free
from blemish....any lapses or faults that occur,
through human passion or political necessity, we
may [generously] regard...as the shortcoming of
some particular [excellence] virtue, than as a
natural effect of vice...[and this] out of a
tender[ness] [aidoumenous: respect] to the
weakness of nature. (Cimon 1.643-4)
Conspicuous in this reflection is a different principle of care
from what we are accustomed to. It judiciously abstains from
journalistic realism, and above all from that sensationalism by
which we are daily overwhelmed by our media. It seeks rather
a measured rendering of a whole life, without at the same
time ignoring or exaggerating the negative (see 1.699; 2.285,
394). Discretion, in this view, is the better part of realism:
discriminating, weighing, focusing, estimating (2.394),
selecting (2.445), and finally diagnosing22 (1.699). On yet
another occasion he forewarns his readers that he is not—as
we might first think and as he himself sometimes says—an
historian, “collecting mere useless pieces of learning” (1.699),
but rather that he seeks to “epitomize” the lives of his
subjects.
It must be borne in mind that my design is not to
write histories, but lives. [For] the most glorious
exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest
discoveries of [excellence and deficiency] virtue
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and vice in men; sometimes a matter of less
moment, an expression or [even] a jest informs us
better of the character and inclinations, than the
most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the
bloodiest battles.... Therefore, as portrait-painters
are more exact in the lines and features of the
face, in which the character is seen, than in the
other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to
give my more particular attention to the marks
and indications of the souls of men. (Alexander
2.139)23
So I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to
the marks and indications of the souls of men. The outside of
a human being reveals the fullness of the inside, more than we
might think. Little things, after all, are not any the less
significant for their being little or not obvious; they are only
harder to discern.
It thus falls to us as readers of Plutarch to seek to emulate
his perspicacity, to attend to the fullness of being he presents
to us. That this might require that we not be unduly taken by
the great and the eventful (and “what is done publicly in open
day” (1.469)) in favor of the private and the small means that
we too must resist our own inherited tendency to look at
things from an historical perspective24 (see also 1.698)).
Plutarch’s psychographic art, then, entails a different kind of
insight, one that sees past the obviousness of “weighty
matters” to the telling marks, however small, that bespeak
and “epitomize” a soul.25
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5. “A Subtle Logic of Discrimination”
It works in practice but unfortunately not in theory.
French Diplomat26
Plutarch relates this story about Caesar:
Seeing some wealthy strangers at Rome,
carrying...puppy-dogs...embracing and making
much of them, [he] took occasion not unnaturally
to ask whether women in this country were
unused to bearing children.... By th[is] prince-like27
[that is, indirect] reprimand [Caesar] gravely
reflect[ed] upon persons who...lavish upon beasts
that affection and kindness which nature has
implanted in us to be bestowed on those of our
own kind. (Pericles 1.201)
While we may not particularly like this example—we may
ourselves have puppy-dogs—Caesar’s and Plutarch’s intent
can be made plain otherwise: human beings do not always
attend to what serves them best, indeed what nature would
have them do.
“With like reason,” Plutarch says,
may we blame those who misuse the love of
inquiry and observation which nature has
implanted in our souls, by expending it on objects
unworthy of the attention either of their eyes or
their ears, while they disregard such as are
excellent in themselves and would do them good.
We can misdirect our attention to unworthy objects. We can
even misuse our love of inquiry, philosophy. He continues,
whereas
[T]he mere outward sense, being passive...
perhaps cannot help taking notice of
everything...be it...useful or unuseful; in the
exercise of his mental perception every man...has a
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natural power to turn himself...to what he judges
desirable. Therefore it becomes a man’s duty to
pursue...the best and choicest of everything, that
he may not only employ his contemplation but
may also be improved by it.... A man ought [then]
to apply his intellectual perception to such objects
as...are apt to call it forth and allure it to its own
proper good.
We see here a suspicion of abstract speculation, of that
theorizing that takes us away to the remote reaches of
thought—the “clouds,” in Aristophanes’ image—“mere
theory,” as we and Plutarch sometimes say (Dion 2.543)—
and away from the things that bear most on our own lives.
We have control over that to which we apply our “intellectual
perception,” yet paradoxically, in Plutarch’s view, we do not
always apply ourselves well to what would do us the most
good. “We find such objects,” as we have seen, “in the works
of excellence (aretês ergois),” he says, “which also produce in
the mind [even] of mere readers...an emulation and eagerness
that may lead them on to imitation....” (1179b8-11). No less
than life experience, reading provides such formative
examples.
Understandably wary, Plutarch is not condemning
philosophy here (as some might: see 1.47628). On the
contrary, he seeks rather to focus his philosophic attention,
and therewith to redirect ours, back onto its “worthy and
proper objects.”29 In being so constrained, philosophy
remains no less indispensable to the perfection of human life:
How else can one find one’s bearings amidst the turbulence
and tides of fortune but through that human insight which
enables us, amidst it all, to be thoughtful, farsighted, circumspect, principled, and steady? This he brings us to see
repeatedly (for example, 1.329, 336).
Thus as we read Plutarch’s accounts, the reader is brought
to a new manner and degree of acuity, to a new sensitivity to
the rich complexity of human things, ordinary and extraor-
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dinary. Each life is different. Each figure vigorously seeks to
make a life of distinction out of circumstances that are, well,
never quite “tailor-made,” but rather challenging, threatening, and over the course of a career, hard to sustain. Each
“story” is treated, not abstractly, but with the attention to
detail that brings forth what is original and properly its own.
The active judgment and skills necessary to live such lives of
distinction—and write about them—is itself exemplary.
The higher degree of acuity aspired to is revealed in a
reflection on two of his subjects:
Phocion and [Cato] may be well compared
together...for assuredly there is difference enough
among virtues of the same denomination, as
between the bravery of Alcibiades and that of
Epaminondas, the prudence of Themistocles and
that of Aristides, the justice of Numa and that of
Agesilaus.... The mixture both of lenity on the one
hand, with austerity on the other; their boldness
on some occasions, and caution on others; their
extreme solicitude for the public [etc...] so that we
should need a very nice and subtle logic of
discrimination to detect and establish the distinctions between them. (Phocion 2.247)
Plutarch’s Lives are such gold mines of subtle distinctions.
They actively attempt to flesh out the overly broad categories
of abstract “theories of ethics” and, to be sure, that of the
natural generality of language.30 Plutarch paints his characterological studies with a subtlety of observation known to us
from playwrights and novelists, embedding each in their life
circumstances, rich in variables and innumerable vectors. In
this regard the Lives needs to be seen as a necessary
complement31 to our tradition of theoretical accounts of
“ethics,” allowing us to consider the fate of the effort of
virtue in the world, to consider the formative importance of
circumstance, the variety of courses of development, and the
real consequences of personal decisions, however large or
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small. He was concerned that this was what the liberal arts
did not teach often enough (2.440). Moreover, in Plutarch’s
own artful approach to writing we have seen a different sort
of touch, one that is properly self-interested, discreet,
measured, judicious, and self-reflective.
All this brought me to wonder whether there wasn’t a
different “sensibility” made evident here or more precisely, I
would venture, even a different faculty of discernment at
work. It is not just that we have here a different line of sight.
Rather, there seems to be brought to light another rational
excellence, one that has its distinction in revealing the
richness of the particular as opposed to the breadth of generality, that allows us to focus on the life lived as opposed to the
one that is, as we have come to say somewhat emptily,
“ideal.”
6. Phronêsis
It is not possible to understand phronêsis and sophia
under the guiding line of the Kantian distinction
between practical and theoretical reason.
Heidegger32
We are thus presented with a paradox of sorts: we are asked
to consider a mode of thoughtfulness that is not speculative
(1141b1), yet is deeply rational, that is not as “profound” as
theoretical wisdom (1141a21; Lives, 2.181), perhaps, yet is
more important for human life (1140b30).
Aristotle may be of help in considering this paradox. In
the middle of his account of the shaping of human
character—Chapter 6 of The Nicomachean Ethics—we find
an extended reflection on our possibilities for thoughtfulness.
He looks first at the various objects available and concludes
that there is not just one faculty, not one “reason,” but
multiple modes of truth, artful know-how, deductive
knowledge or science, and wisdom among them. In addition
he introduces us to another active condition (hexis)33 that
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may be unfamiliar to us, however one that proves to be
distinctively human: phronêsis.34
Let us step back. Aristotle does not think as we do.35 We
see this, for example, in his very different understanding of
“choice,” a concept especially important to us today. Choice,
according to Aristotle, is not just some “personal preference”
we willingly stick with. In his view “...without intellect and
thinking [and] without an active condition of character
(1139a33-4; also 1145a4f),” choice is nothing but blind selfinsistence. Moreover, we tend to focus on choice in the
abstract, either on the intention or on the outcome by itself.
But for Aristotle choice is part of an integrated event “since
[with] action there is no such thing as doing well or the
opposite without thinking or [without] character.” We will
see in a bit why this must be so.
He begins his exploration of this special capacity by
asking us first to consider what sorts of people we say have
“good sense.” Preserved in our languages is a recognition of
a unique mode of insight evident in persons whose
perspective on human things, on people and circumstances, is
particularly sound. A person of “singular judgment,” we
might say: a wise grandfather, a seasoned friend, a native
truth teller, a parent—in short, people who have taken their
long experience and made it bear on their and others’ lives.
He puts it this way: they are people who are “able to deliberate beautifully about things that are good and advantageous
for [themselves]” (1140a23-4), those also who know what is
“conducive to living well as a whole.” We look to people who
are not necessarily concerned to know things “in general” but
rather to those whose life experience has been brought to
bear on their own lives, and equally, those who are not shortsighted but seek to see how each particular event and act
might contribute to one’s overall good.
This focus on the particularity of events and actions
brings Aristotle to point out the obvious yet for us surprising
conclusion, namely, that “there is no [necessary] demonstration of these things, since all of them are capable of being
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otherwise” (1140a31-4).36 Nevertheless, despite being
indemonstrable, Aristotle is emphatic that these things are
not therefore untrue. That they are not matters of theoretical
knowledge does not invalidate them—does not make them,
as we might say, matters of “mere opinion,” and surely not
“merely relative.” (Their truth therefore is not to be
dismissed as merely mundane, merely demotic, or merely
ontic.37) Our question becomes, if not knowledge per se, what
faculty is at work discerning what is to be done?
Here Aristotle introduces phronêsis, a faculty difficult to
translate, rendered variously as practical sense, practical
judgment, practical intellect, particular reason (Thomas),
circumspection (Heidegger), prudence, and indeed
sometimes practical wisdom. “[Practical sense] is a truthdisclosing active condition (hexis alêthê meta logou pratikê)
involving reason that governs actions, concerned with what is
good and bad for human beings” (1140b3, also b20).38 This
will take some explaining.
Phronêsis, or practical sense, differs from those other
faculties that have to do with “what is everlasting” in that it
is of “the part of the soul concerned with opinions,” that is
with the world of change we live in, the world Plutarch
invited us to consider seriously. Though concerned with
opinion, it is not some mere “idea” that Aristotle is looking
at but something “far more deeply interfused” (Wordsworth).
He brings us to see this by observing that such a developed
capacity is not something one can “forget.”39 While we might
forget one of the zillion Greek forms or a proposition in
Euclid—not a good idea—we are speaking of a different kind
of thing, a state of being of the soul, a developed state of
readiness, of incipient action. And like riding a horse or
mastering a craft, he points out that, while it can be
perfected, once possessed we can’t “lose” it.40 We always
thereafter somehow have it.41 This points to a deeper mode
of having.
Indeed, we even think we see such a deeper source in
other animals. Concerning other species, Aristotle observes
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“that that which discerns well the things that concern itself is
possessed of [a kind of] ‘practical sense’” (1140a25). Animals
are said to have such a sense of what is best for them. We
mean thereby that they have a “capacity for foresight about
their own lives,” that is, they act in such a way that they do
not justly blindly react to some present stimulus but in a way
that secures their overall good. By way of contrast, Aristotle
gives the embarrassing human example of the early Greek
philosophers Thales and Anaxagoras, whom people unfortunately said were “wise but not possessed of practical sense”
(1141b3f.). He here highlights the paradox of the overly
theoretical man, who knows divine things, perhaps, but not
his own good.
In so doing Aristotle puts the man of practical sense into
further relief: “one who is a good deliberator simply is one
who, by his reasoning, is apt to hit upon what is best for a
human being among actions” (1141b12-3), he says; such a
person responds not to the demands of a syllogism but to that
of circumstance, and their reasoning ends, not in some
abstract proposition, but with action. (Phronêsis “lives in
action” [Heidegger].) Plainly this entails a different kind of
reasoning, one that “is not only about what is universal but
[also] needs to discern the particulars [in their difference] as
well...since action is [finally] concerned with particulars”
(1141b15).42
Practical sense is thus that unique faculty that is able to
integrate particulars—this, that, and the other this and that—
into a larger view that leads to action.43 Again contrasting the
theoretical man, Aristotle points out that “those who have
experience are more adept at action than those with
knowledge [alone]” (1141b17). That’s why we admire our
grandfather or friend; because they have done things that
show that they have learned the lessons of life and can turn
them to account to what one should do next. Experience with
particulars, Aristotle emphasizes here, is the more valuable in
this regard.44
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Indeed, it is this same capacity to deal with particulars, he
notes, that is also at work on the world stage—brought so
vividly to view in Plutarch—as in our own efforts to live well.
“The political art is the same active condition as practical
sense” (1141b22f). The ability requisite to craft a specific
political decree—not a general law but a specific mandate—
must have in view “an action to be performed as an ultimate
particular thing” (cp. 1137b11-32). So just as the artisan
crafting a chair, just as our own efforts to do the right thing
in given circumstances, the lawmaker is not well served by
generalities alone but must think the circumstances through
to a specific recommendation. This too, according to
Aristotle, is a species of knowledge.
But of what sort? Aristotle sees a kind of middle between
art and wisdom. While “it is clear that practical sense is not
knowledge [in the sense of science], for it is directed to an
ultimate particular” (1142a22), Aristotle is emphatic that
“knowing what pertains to oneself [and knowing what one
should do in a particular circumstance] is [yet] a species of
knowledge” (1141b33).
But how? At this point Aristotle notes something of
interest. Practical sense, he observes, would seem to focus on
...the opposite extreme from the intellect [nous],
for intellect is directed at ultimate terms of which
there is no articulation, while practical sense is
directed at the ultimate particular of which there is
no knowledge [technically speaking] but only
[simple] perception [aisthêsis]—not the perception
of the separate senses, but the sort of [“intellectual
perception” (Lives, 1.201)] by which we perceive
that the ultimate figure in mathematics is a
triangle. (1142a22-30)45
Surprisingly, the example that Aristotle gives to highlight
the particular mode of insight that is practical sense comes
from geometry. We “see” that the smallest figure into which a
rectilinear plane figure can be divided is a triangle. We see it.
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He thus asks us to consider another mode of access to things
in their completeness as wholes that he also calls
“perception,” though of particulars that are sensible only to
the mind’s “eye,” an intellectual perception, if you will.46
7. “An Eye Sharpened by Experience”
The manner of forming one’s ideas is
what gives character to the human mind.
Rousseau47
Before we proceed, let us step back for a moment and look at
the requirements of responsible action. In the earlier
chapters, Aristotle was at pains to point out that to act well
requires a great deal of thought and experience. It requires
that we somehow have a world of things in mind all at once,
as the rightness of any action “results from what is beneficial
in the end for which, the means by which, and the time in
which it ought to occur” (1142b28).48 Action is through and
through specific and circumstantial, responsive to the many
vectors that need to be factored into consideration in order
for some appropriate good to be accomplished.
Thus our question: what kind of thinking can integrate
such particularity in its particularity? Other than a name, we
may still be hard pressed to see what it precisely is, to identify
it in its own right. Aristotle thus turns to other like-seeming
faculties to contrast and therewith to delimit it. For example,
one might think that what we are talking about is someone
who is skilled at thinking things through (angchinoia;
1142b14f). While there is some overlap here, Aristotle at this
point says something by way of contrast that, if not shocking,
may at first make no sense to us as a reply. He says: “someone
who lacks self-restraint or someone of bad character
will...deliberate badly.” He does so first that we might see that
we are not looking just for some “mental agility.” Rather, we
seek a deeper, more responsive source. Surprising though it
may be, one’s thinking, he suggests here, is deeply dependent
on one’s character. He therewith challenges us to make a
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connection between things where today we see no
connection.
Might we mean by “practical sense” a kind of astuteness
of judgment (sunesis or sagacity), then? Yet “practical sense is
something that [also] imposes obligations, since the end that
belongs to it is what one ought or ought not to do” (1143a710). And astuteness is satisfied to identify distinctions (“mere
theory,” Lives, 2.543). Perhaps then we mean another form of
thoughtfulness: “the right discrimination of what is decent,”
considerateness (sungnôme), if you will? All these various
examples—skilled thinking, astuteness, considerateness,
practical sense—converge for Aristotle to the same meaning:
“All these capacities are directed at things that are ultimate [as
well as] particular.... All actions are among the things that are
particular and universal” (a27-30),49 and this requires a
different and separate faculty to apprehend (1139a9-11).
This brings Aristotle back to his earlier observation about
the similarity of theoretical intellect and practical sense. He
now sees that it is the same fundamental activity, though
differently directed, that is at work in both universal and
particular knowledge. For Aristotle, thought, whether
theoretical or practical, is always rooted in specific experiences and it is intellect, we now learn, that allows us to
apprehend these specific beginnings. “Intellect [nous],” he
observes, “is directed to what is ultimate on both sides, since
it is intellect and not reason [or speech, ou logou] that is
directed at both the first terms and the ultimate particulars”
(1143b1-6).50 On the one side, intellect discerns the ultimate,
first terms of logical demonstration. And on the other, the
very same faculty, in thinking about action, sees the other sort
of “premise,” the ultimate, if contingent, particular. “Of these
[particulars],” he says, “one must have a perception and this
[ultimate] perception [aisthêsis] is intellect.”
But by “intellect,” we now learn, Aristotle means even
more than the apprehension of these beginnings. He asks
how the several perfections he’s considered become useful to
us. It is not through theoretical wisdom (sophia) that they
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become so. Indeed, truth be told, “Wisdom contemplates
nothing by which a human being will be happy” (1143b19).
Rather it is this other faculty phronêsis that “is concerned
with things that are just and beautiful and good for a human
being [;] these are the things that it belongs to a good man to
do, and we are not more able to perform these actions
[merely] by knowing about them” (b21f). At this point we
may still be having difficulty seeing that practical sense is
more than a latent potential (a “capacity”). Rather, we have
to understand it as an active condition, a fullness of thought
that seeks to actively integrate circumstance and experience
in a complex calculus issuing in an action. And for Aristotle
knowing does not get us to such a developed and active
readiness of soul. It is rather practical sense, phronêsis, that
allows us to so engage the world (1139b1-7).
Seeing the soul as an integrated whole (and not made up
of disparate parts, distinguishable though they may be),
Aristotle now returns to his earlier perplexing insight that the
character of our minds is dependent on the character of our
characters. “The work [ergon] of a human being,” he says, “is
accomplished as a result of practical sense and of excellence
[virtue] of character” (1144a5f), for “the starting point [of
thoughtful action]...does not show itself except to a good
person.” This, Aristotle observes, is plain from its opposite:
vice warps our perspective and makes it difficult for us to see
what is good. Thus he concludes it is the “eye sharpened by
experience” (1143b9) that sees what is beautiful as an end or
highest good of action and gains its active state only with
virtue (1144a31-2; Sachs paraphrase).51 Good judgment
about the right action issues only from a person of like
quality. (Good sense here reclaims its double meaning.)
To be effective, excellence requires even more than the
having of goodness. It requires an activating intelligence
(nous), Aristotle says, the kind of intelligence that “carries
over into action,” or what he calls “virtue in the governing
sense” (1144b12f).52 And it is precisely this that “practical”
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sense makes possible53 (b17: “does not come without
practical sense”54).
Phronêsis is thus not just one among the several human
excellences: “all the excellences will be present [only] when
one excellence, practical sense, is present.” Here we see that
phronêsis is the enabling excellence.55 Moreover, at the very
beginning of his book, Aristotle emphasized that we must first
discover what is the principal activity or work, unique to a
being, for it is the perfection of this “work” that leads to its
fulfillment or happiness. We here learn that it is practical
sense that is the prerequisite to that fulfillment, our
fulfillment.56
This conclusion is striking both for what is said and who
says it: Aristotle, the man who for the tradition represents the
speculative philosopher par excellence. Yet it is Aristotle here
who urges us to develop “that other intellectual excellence,”
as the virtue that will enable us to think well and that is the
one most important for “our own proper good” and for our
lives together in the city.
8. The Looking Glass
He did not know how to govern free men.
Lysander 1.594
It is a hard thing to give laws to the Cyrenians,
abounding [as they do] in wealth and plenty.
Lucullus 1.661
Such a view of the centrality of phronêsis is shared by
Plutarch. Indeed here we see why the reading of Plutarch is
so valuable. Many things in his work are “worthy of
memory,” but unlike abstract treatments, the Lives display
pre-eminently the interplay and indeed the consequences of
character and practical sense in the world of circumstance.
We are brought back to our place in the city, re-concretized
in our thinking, our thoughts firmly founded on the rich soil
of unmediated experience.57 This Plutarch understood to be
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the proper role of “history” and “biography” in liberal
education.
But not only “in theory.” Just as he discovered for
himself, it is Plutarch’s profound hope that his readers would
find in the “looking glass” of his texts experiences wherein
their own capacities for “subtle discriminations” might be
developed and their practical sense honed. He hoped as well
that we would find therein people from whom we might
“gain experience,” both of what to avoid—and there are
plenty of lessons there to be found—and of those rare
individuals whose excellences might inspire us to emulation.
Thus for those wondering, “Why are we reading Plutarch?
It’s only history,” we would propose this as the beginning of
a reply.
So we ask you to reopen the book on “that other intellectual excellence,” phronêsis or practical sense, and reclaim
its priority for our lives. Minimally, by so doing we would
become more attentive to the complexity of human things
and the richness of the world before us; maximally we would
develop our fine judgment and perhaps begin to live up to
that with which we choose to associate ourselves (2.445).
So we ask you as well to emulate Plutarch—not just by
being “strengthened by the experience” (1.201, 646) of
reading him—but also by ourselves taking up the “looking
glass” of writing as a medium of self-discovery wherein we
may shape ourselves as we seek to discover the shape of
things.
9. Postscript in Seminar: The Faculty of the Faculty
Good judgment goes with the way
each one is educated.
Aristotle58
Lastly, let us return to where we began: seminar. By a
somewhat long and oblique route, we have been exploring a
faculty of knowledge, distinctive to human beings, that
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focuses on the confluence of the general and the specific. At
the outset we spoke about an ability that good tutors and
students possess that enables them to so craft their questions
or remarks that they are not only generally apt but are tailormade thoughts aiding learners in their personal struggles to
find their way through the confusions of a developing conversation. That is, our prompting questions or nudging remarks
might be “just right” both for the larger context—the seminar
conversation as a whole—and for you, the learner with your
particular degree of readiness and openness to possibilities.
Such just-right questioning presupposes a knowledge both of
the particular and the general; it requires that capacity, I
would submit, that Aristotle identifies as “practical sense.”
Thus we see that speaking is not the same as thinking. It
is more complex. When we speak, we not only think about
something but also speak to someone. Speaking is thus biintentional (or bi-prepositional, if you will). And it is this
additional to-ness that is required for a conversation to be
successful, for genuine communication to take place. This toness seems also to require an additional sense, that sense of
aptness, that practical sense that enables one to speak to
someone in their particularity, “where they are,” not to
mention at the right time, in the right way, etc, or all the
qualifiers that, for Aristotle, distinguishes practical sense.
Indeed, this is the distinctive excellence of a teaching
faculty59 (as opposed to a research faculty): to hear where a
particular learner is “coming from” and design our response
“to order” that our question or comment might help them as
they seek to find their way to discovery. In the midst of
perplexity, what we want and need as learners is not a lecture
or a theory but helpful, specific, “practical” guidance.
(Phronêsis is not unique to the faculty, though perhaps it is
more developed there.) Thus we do our students and one
another a disservice when we do not offer an opening
question but give a closed answer; we fail as a faculty when
we fall back into being professors, and you fail as students
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when you fall back into being passive scribes. As we learn
from Plato’s Meno, answers and abstracted, deracinated,
blind thoughts do not help us to find our way to Larissa.
Such tailor-made teaching (10.9, 1180b8-9) can only
happen in a place small enough for genuine conversation,
where faculty are present to their students and not lost in
their own thoughts, where we are all attentive to the learning
trajectories of one another, and where—and this is equally
important—students likewise are insistent that they must find
their own way to discovery.
So we ask you to make such a place a reality, to seek to
question well, to make your efforts of inquiry such that they
further both your own learning and that of your fellow
learners. And may we continue to say: Good question!
1
Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in Hard Times, #71 in Philosophy and
Truth, ed. Daniel Breazeale (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979), 117.
2
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, Mass.:
Focus Publishing, 2002), 10.9.1180b8-9. All references to Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics—hereafter NE—are from this translation.
3
All references are from Plutarch’s Lives, trans. John Dryden (1683) and
rev. Arthur Clough (1864), 2 vols. (New York: Modern Library, 2001),
hereafter Lives.
4
See also Demosthenes 2.396: They were “...better able to recommend
than to imitate virtues of the past.”
5
NE, 2.4.1105b11-13: see also 1112a10; 6.10.143a1-20, 1179b5.
6
Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom
(New York: Basic Books, 1979), 240.
7
Montesquieu: “What Histories can be found...that please and instruct
like the Lives of Plutarch? ... I am of the Opinion with that Author, who
said, that if he was constrained to fling all the Books of the Ancients into
the Sea, Plutarch should be the last drowned.” And Emerson: “A bible for
heroes.” For an even longer list of those influenced by Plutarch, see Roger
Kimball, “Plutarch and the Issue of Character,” Lives of the Mind: The
Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Chicago: Ivan R.
Dee, 2002), 18-21.
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A question we should ask of all the authors on the program.
9
“Re-enter” because we live in more than one world, we moderns, with
our abstract thoughts overriding and prisming our experience.
10 Compare Plato, Republic, Book 2, where we are asked to see the city as
the magnified image of the soul.
11
“The Greeks invented the art of biography as an exercise in moral
philosophy. The lives of “pre-eminent” statesmen and generals were to
serve as ethical exemplars—both good and bad—for the rest of us, subject
as we are to the same all-too-human appetites and temptations. Thus the
early years of an Alcibiades, an Alexander, or a Cicero were mined by
Plutarch for anecdotes that might reveal an unchanging and essential
character; its elements becoming more manifest during the crucible of
adulthood and thereby accounting for the subject’s ultimate achievement”
(Victor Davis Hanson, Commentary, vol. 116, no. 5 (December 2003):
53-4.
12
“Beware of ambition, as of all the higher powers, the most destructive
and pernicious” (1.609). “For men whose ambition neither seas, nor
mountains, nor unpeopled deserts can limit, nor the bounds dividing
Europe and Asia confine their vast desires, it would be hard to expect to
forbear from injuring another ...when they close together. They are ever
naturally at war, envying and seeking advantages of one another, and
merely make use of those two words, peace and war, like current coin, to
serve their occasions, not as justice, but as expediency suggests...” (Lives,
Pyrrhus 1.527). Also, “...the innate disease of princes....” (1.523)
13
NE 1.3.1095a1-10: “Therefore good judgment goes along with the
way each one is educated.... For this reason, it is not appropriate for
young people to be students of politics, since the young are inexperienced
in the actions of life.... And since the young are apt to follow their
impulses, they would hear such discourses without purpose or benefit....
And it makes no difference whether one is young in age or immature in
character, for the deficiency doesn’t come from the time, but the living in
accord with feeling and following every impulse.” Also 6.8.1142a12-20:
“A sign of what is being said is why young people become skilled geometricians and mathematicians, and wise in respect to such things, but they
do not seem to become possessed of practical judgment, and the reason is
that practical judgment has to do with particulars, which become known
by experience, but the young are not experienced, since it is length of
time that produces experiences.” See also 6.9.1143b 10-15, and Lives,
Lucullus, 1.661.
14
Plato, Republic, Books 2-3.
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15
As we recognize in proposing a “great books program” for one
another’s improvement.
16
“For the mere sight itself of a shining and conspicuous example of
virtue in the life of their prince will bring them spontaneously to virtue,
and to a conformity with that blameless and blessed life of good-will and
mutual concord, supported by temperance and justice, which is the
highest benefit that human means can confer; and he is the truest ruler
who can best introduce it into the hearts and practice of his subjects”
(Lives, Numa Pompilius, 1.99). In this respect, there is little one can say
that can approximate the radiance of the paradeigma or example: “Now
there’s a man!” Indeed it may not be something that lends itself to logos,
“to argument and proof ” (cp. 1.420). Plutarch thereby helps us to restore
our attention to what is imposingly present even in our small worlds.
Martin Heidegger in Plato’s Sophist (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1997), renders paradeigma as “striking example”: “they show the
universal through the obviousness of some particular case, through a
definite example. This is the way to produce conviction in others. This is
the way of epagogê (Posterior Analytics, 71a8).” “To elucidate what is
familiar already at the outset is rather a matter of epagogê, the mode of
clarification proper to straightforward perception. Epagogê is clearly the
beginning, i.e. that which discloses the archê [the source]; it is the more
original, not epistêmê” (25). How to articulate what is revealed thereby
remains a question for us: do “striking examples” show the universal
through the particular or the fullness of the particular? See also
Emmanuel Levinas, “Without Identity,” Humanism of the Other, trans.
Nidra Poller (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2003), 61.
17
Aristotle too urges us to take our bearings by those who are serious
(spoudaios, paradeigma). They provide a standard or reference (not just
an illustration or instance) by which to act, from our direct experience of
their influence and from our reading of their deeds.
18 To kalon: the beautiful; see NE 3.6.1115b12-13: “…for the sake of the
beautiful, since this is the end that belongs to virtue.” See Sachs, NE, p.
49, n. 61. “Measure, proportion and harmony are in the nature of things
and we have a direct responsiveness to them that orients us in the world”
and “Measure, Moderation and the Mean,” The St. John’s Review, vol.
46, no. 2 (2002): 9.
19
“The supreme arts of temperance, of justice and wisdom, as they are
acts of judgment and selection, exercised not on good and just and
expedient only, but also on wicked, unjust, and inexpedient objects, do
not give their commendations to the mere innocence whose boast is its
inexperience of evil, and whose truer name is...simpleness and ignorance
of what all men who live aright should know.... The ancient Spartans, at
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their festivals, used to force their Helots to swallow large quantities of
raw wine, and then expose them at the public tables, to let the young
men see what it is to be drunk. And though I do not think it consistent
with humanity or with civil justice to correct one man...by corrupting
another, yet we may, I think, avail ourselves of the cases of those who
have fallen into indiscretions, and have, in high stations, made themselves
conspicuous for misconduct.... In the same manner, it seems to me likely
enough that we shall be all the more zealous and more emulous to read,
observe and imitate the better lives, if we are not left in ignorance of the
blameworthy and the bad” (Lives, Demetrius 2.445). As we become what
we do, so we live out what we have become: “...their fortunes carried out
the resemblance of their characters” (2.446).
20
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Physiognomy does not reveal itself in large features, nor character in
great actions. It is in bagatelles [trifles] that nature comes to light. The
public things are either too uniform or too artificial; and it is almost
solely on these [public things] that modern dignity permits our authors to
dwell” (Rousseau, Emile, 240-1).
26
From a Cartesian perspective, this may be taken as an expression of
regret; though in this context it is intended as a conundrum of our onesidedly abstract orientation. (Related to me by Roger Kimball.)
27
The obliqueness of prince-like discretion.
28
See Plato, Apology of Socrates.
29
Levine, ‘I Hate Books,’ or Making Room for Learning, 3.
21
Cp. the pimple on the nose of the Miller (Chaucer, Prologue,
Canterbury Tales).
22
In Plutarch, medicine is frequently the metaphor of the diagnostic
political art—knowledge of “the causes of disorders in the body politic”
(1.609): see 1.215; 2.125, 286, 336, 560, 565, 699.
23
“Marks and indications of the soul,” see 1.337, 469, 479; 2.61, 285,
294, 324, 374, 596. Also see Xenophon, Memorabilia, 3.10.1-8.
24
Nor is he thus a “biographer.” Though he uses both terms, biography
and history, Plutarch is at pains to show that his is of a very specific sort,
unlike what we have become accustomed to expect. The history of these
terms would be interesting to explore.
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Here we see the origin of Montaigne’s and Rousseau’s admiration for
Plutarch. “Those who write lives,” says Montaigne, “are more suited to
me to the extent that they are interested in intentions more than in
results, in what takes place within than in what happens without. That is
why Plutarch is my man” (see n. 6). “Plutarch excels in these very details
into which we no longer dare to enter. He has an inimitable grace at
depicting great men in small things; and he is so felicitous in the choice
of his stories that often a word, a smile, a gesture is enough for him to
characterize his hero. With a joking phrase Hannibal reassures his
terrified army and makes it march laughing to the battle which won Italy
for him. Agesilaus astride a stick makes me love the Great King’s
conqueror. Caesar passing through a poor village and chatting with his
friends betrays, unthinkingly, the deceiver who said he wanted only to be
Pompey’s equal. Alexander swallows medicine and does not say a single
word; it is the most beautiful moment of his life. Aristides writes his own
name on a shell and thus justifies his surname. Philopoemen, with his
cloak off, cuts wood in his host’s kitchen. This is the true art of painting.
In this respect, Plutarch is seeking to reinitiate the Socratic turn back to
the city, though with a specifically ethical intent (see Plato, Phaedo). It is
thus not only modern thought that tends to the excessively theoretical or
abstract. In line with this, he does not read Plato as an “idealist” (see
Dion 2.543-550), but reads the dialogues as embedded in the world (a
cave though it might be) leading thereby to action. As we see as well, he
is not unaware of the precariousness of such an undertaking by
philosophy even here.
30
Consider the problem of equity at NE 5.10.1137b11-32.
31
Just as the modern novel complements the abstractness of modern
philosophy.
32
“Phronêsis is not a speculation about archê and the telos of action as
such; it is not a [theoretical] ethics, not a science, not a hexis meta logou
monon [an active condition according to reason alone] (6.5 1140b28),”
Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 40-2.
33
Hexis is variously translated as habit, disposition, active condition. We
miss what is essential therein if we fail to see it as a developed, if
incipient, mode of activity, an “active having” (Sachs). It is not just a
propensity, predisposition, orientation, or even mere capacity or
potential, but an active state of readiness that manifests itself when
circumstances require, an immanent responsiveness, if you will.
“Intelligence carries over into action,” Aristotle will say later. Consider
the sense of fullness and vitality that comes with growth and discovery, an
inner resourcefulness ready to emerge.
34
What is notable about Aristotle’s classification of the faculties of the
soul is his singling out of a capacity that we today don’t even admit as a
human capacity. It is here claimed to be different in kind from our
general intelligence. Indeed the largest part of Book 6 is dedicated to the
introduction and disclosure of phronêsis. See note 53.
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35
Aristotle presents a different view of the development of character
(“ethics”). His is not a backward looking ethic, a genetic psychology
where one is defined by one’s first beginnings. Human motivation is not
limited to hidden or subconscious sources. Rather, Aristotle’s view is
forward-looking, a growth psychology, an end directed and open to new
possibilities. The future is defining, and not just the past. Character
formation thus supersedes developmental histories, maturity supersedes
“coping mechanisms.”
36
Cp. NE 1.3.1094b22-24: “…it belongs to an educated person to look
for just so much precision in each kind of discourse as the nature of the
thing one is concerned with admits; for to demand demonstrations from
a rhetorician seems about like accepting probable conclusions from a
mathematician.”
37
“Phronêsis is a hexis of alêtheuein [truth disclosing active condition], a
disposition of human Dasein such that in it I have at my disposal my own
transparency. For its themes are the anthopina agatha [human goods].
And it is a hexis of alêtheuein which is pracktike, which lives in action”
(Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 37). Also “Phronêsis dwells in praxis still
more than in logos,” (96) and “Phronêsis is nothing if it is not carried out
in praxis” (115).
38
Who do we think of as having such a “truth disclosing condition”? The
examples Aristotle entertains range from those overseeing a household to
political figures, and in this context he gives the wonderfully ambiguous
example of Pericles, the ruler of Athens at the outset of the Peloponnesian
war (and whose full ambiguity is seen in Plutarch’s account).
39
It is at this point that Heidegger makes his famous observation:
“...Aristotle has here come across the phenomenon of conscience.
Phronêsis is nothing other than conscience set in motion, making an
action transparent. Conscience cannot be forgotten” (Plato’s Sophist, 39).
That phronêsis is not an inferential, reasoning faculty does not mean that
it is an “intuitive” faculty. It is “the other intellectual virtue.” Moreover
phronêsis for Aristotle is not given in its perfection but can and indeed
needs to be developed. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
(New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1982), 278-89; and Ronald Beiner,
Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 72-82.
Earlier Heidegger writes: “For one who has learned to understand an
author it is perhaps not possible to take as a foundation for the interpretation what the author designates as the most important. It is precisely
where an author is silent that one has to begin in order to understand
what the author himself designates as the most proper” (32, 43). Here we
see the origin of deconstruction: the premises of one’s thoughts are often
inexplicit, hidden even from the thinker himself. This would seem to be
an over-reaction to the problem of embedded presuppositions. For it
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would make all science, all knowledge, mysterious, if not meaningless,
where it might only be unreflective (not necessarily wrong). Moreover it
would seem to mean that ‘truth’ ultimately resides in one’s premises.
While our conclusions are only as good as our premises, truth resides in
the author’s developed view as well. A house stands even if we can’t see
its foundations; its strength is evident in the sturdiness of the whole.
40
Gadamer puts this into relief thus: its antithesis is blindness not error
(Truth and Method, 287).
41
Aristotle notes that while it is true, in a certain sense, that “...it is
absurd for anyone to believe that...practical sense is the most serious kind
of knowledge, if a human being is not the highest thing in the cosmos”
(1141a21; also b1)—and for Aristotle we may not be the most important
beings in the cosmos—still, without forgetting the bigger picture, this
faculty remains the most important for human life, lest we not live life
well as a whole.
42
“Phronêsis makes the situation accessible; and the circumstances are
always different in every action” (Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 20); “This
circumspection [mode of circumspective disclosure] isolates that with
which the action, the bringing into being, begins” (32); “Phronêsis is the
inspection of the this-here-now, the inspection of the concrete momentoriness of the transient situation” (112).
43
It is thus a mistake to think of practical insight as the subsumption of
the particular to the universal. For example, Thomas Aquinas: “...we
must say that the practical intellect has a beginning in a universal consideration, and, according to this, is the same in subject with the speculative,
but its consideration terminates in an individual operative thing”
(Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trans. C.I. Litzinger
(Notre Dame, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 1964/1993), 361 (#1132)—
hereafter Commentary). Or again: “...to frame a decree that is simply the
application of universal reason to a particular practicable...” (381
[#1199]). For Thomas practical intellect is thus a subspecies of
theoretical intellect, the act of practical judgment the application of a
universal rule to a specific situation.
Whereas Aristotle says that the uniqueness of phronêsis lies in its simple
apprehension of ultimate particulars, Thomas sees it in the subordination
of specific wisdom to theoretical wisdom. Here we see the beginning of
the loss of phronêsis as a separate faculty with a unique purview and, with
the loss of continuity with the things of our world, the increasing
estrangement and subjectivity of thought (the skeptical spectator), with the
end result that this faculty, phronêsis, is largely eclipsed or lost sight of in
modern thought. All thinking becomes abstract thinking. See notes 31 and
54 above. The alienation of the Cartesian ego is not far behind. This is the
beginning of a much larger study for us. See Burt Hopkins, “Jacob Klein
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and the Phenomenological Project of Desedimenting the Formalization of
Meaning,” The St. John’s Review, vol. 47, no.2 (2003): 65.
44
For Heidegger (Plato’s Sophist, 97) the benefit of experience is the
amount of time to accumulate enough experiences to “dominate the
manifold”—not the time necessary to refine and mature one’s judgment
to the range of possibilities, to weigh their respective worth, to assess the
manifold factors as each adds yet another vector to the complex calculus
of phronêsis.
45
Sachs directs us to De Anima 431a14-18 and b3-10 as well as to NE
1109b23 and 1126b4. Attention to the fundamental role of intellect was
highlighted for me in freshman seminar two years ago by the perspicuous
questioning of Jackson Carpenter, for which I am grateful.
46
Cp. Thomas, Commentary: “However it is not apprehended by that
sense which perceives the species of proper sensibles...but by the inner
sense which perceives things sensibly conceivable. Similarly in mathematics we know the exterior triangle, or the triangle conceived as
singular, because there we also conform to a sensible conceivable singular,
as in the natural sciences...” (384-5 (#1214)); “Prudence, which perfects
particular reason, rightly to judge singular practicable relations, pertains
rather to this, i.e. inner sense” (#1215).
“Aristotle says that we know such things by perception, not the
perception of any one of the five senses, but the sort by which we
perceive that a triangle is the last kind of figure into which a polygon can
be divided (1142a 28-30). This sort of perceiving contains thinking and
imagining, but what it judges, it judges by perceiving it to be so.... “such
things are among particulars, and judgment is in the act of senseperception” (1109b23-4). But this is the calmly energetic, thought-laden
perception, Sachs, “Three Little Words,” The St. John’s Review, vol. 44,
no. 1 (1997): 12, 15.
47
Emile, 203.
48
Aristotle’s formulation of the utter specificity of action: NE
2.3.104b23: “...the ones one ought not, or when one ought not, or in a
way one ought not, or in as many other ways such distinctions are articulated.” See also 2.4.1105a3-35: “...with the things that come about as a
result of the virtues, just because they are a certain way, it is not the case
that one does them justly...but only if the one doing them does them in a
certain way, if one does them first of all knowingly, and next, having
chosen them and chosen them for their own sake, and third, being in a
stable condition and not able to be moved out of it.”
49
Thomas says this beautifully: “...the man who considers the common
features alone will not know how to proceed to action by reason of this
generality,” Commentary, 354 (#1111).
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50
“At 1142a23-27, [it is said] that intellect and practical judgment stand
at opposite extremes, directed at the unarticulated and individual terms
of thought and the ultimate particulars of perception. The two extremes
are now said to be united in the one faculty of intellect, that contemplates
the universals contained in the ultimate particulars, which can be the only
terms for a knowledge of truth. The same activity that holds a particular
thing together is at work on the soul even in perception. Thus the claim
that a single power stands at the root of theoretical and practical knowing
rests on the ultimate conclusions of the highest kind of philosophy, which
are arrived at in Bk. III of On the Soul and Bk. XII of the Metaphysics.
Here that claim asserts the unity of the human being” (Sachs, NE, 114,
n.168). See 1141b15.
51
NE 1113a29-b1; 139b4-5;1143b13-14;1144b30-32; and Sachs, NE,
117, n. 173.
52
By “governing sense”, Thomas reminds us, we mean that which will
allow us to “govern ourselves” above all, Commentary, 377 (#1185).
53
Thus it is the case, Aristotle says, that human excellence cannot be
“...just an active condition in accord with right reason,” as Socrates seems
to say at times, for example in the Meno (though see Gorgias), “but one
that [must actively] involve right reason” (NE 1144b25).
54
This is puzzling. Since choice is rational desire for Aristotle, it is inseparable from action. Yet here it is intellect that is the motive agency underlying action. Our new question: what is the relationship of reason and
desire in Aristotle?
55
“The two highest modes of alêtheuein [truth disclosure] [in Aristotle]
are phronêsis and sophia” (Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 39.)
56
Lest we still think that he is speaking of some merely practical ability
like “cleverness” [deinos], Aristotle once more helps us by making a
distinction. We’re not just speaking about some natural craftiness or
shrewdness. “...Cleverness enables one to do the things that are
conducive to the object one sets down and to achieve it... [However] if
[one’s] object is base, [then this ability] is shameless...” (1144a22-29).
Practical sense is not cleverness, though it too presupposes an ability to
achieve ends.
57
See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 288, and Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist,
25.
57
NE 1.3.1095a1-2.
57
Indeed, this is the virtue of all good conversation (Venkatesh).
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101
Kultur and the Obligations to
Philosophy
Jonathan Badger
Michael Grenke’s translations of Nietzsche’s On the Future of
Our Educational Institutions and Prefaces to Unwritten Works
offer readers of English a previously unavailable view into
Nietzsche’s thought. These works have not received as much
attention as perhaps they deserve, and Grenke’s careful and
astute English rendering of them is likely to change this.
Grenke’s strategy is to capture the subtleties of
Nietzsche’s prose by means of a rather extreme literalism. As
Grenke points out in his preface, this has occasionally
resulted in difficult English, but it succeeds in preserving
Nietzsche’s peculiar punctuation and diction, which are often
“corrected” in commercial translations. Grenke’s translations
offer an utterly reliable reflection of Nietzsche’s phrasing and
word-play. Key terms are flagged with their German counterparts, and there are ample footnotes to qualify the renderings
of ambiguous terms. Grenke has compiled and organized
relevant portions of Nietzsche’s own notes and drafts for
these works, and has included them in appendices for both
books. His approach allows the reader to track the use of
terms through these texts, and he is meticulous and disciplined in his stated aim of leaving the task of interpretation
to the reader. In this respect, these translations are exemplary.
In addition to the translation and a general introduction by
Grenke, each of the items in the Prefaces is accompanied by a
short and illuminating essay. These are written by Mathew K.
Davis, Lise van Boxel, and Grenke himself.
Friedrich Nietzsche. Prefaces to Unwritten Works. Trans. and ed. Michael W
.
Grenke, South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2005. Friedrich Nietzsche. On the
Future of Our Educational Institutions. Trans. Michael W Grenke, South
.
Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2004. Jonathan Badger is a tutor on the
Annapolis campus of St. John’s College.
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Each work emerged as a completed whole in the year
1872, and the two are deeply connected to one other. For
instance, one of the prefaces in Prefaces to Unwritten Works
is called “Thoughts on the Future of Our Educational
Institutions,” and Nietzsche suggests that it be read before On
the Future of Our Educational Institutions (Prefaces, 28).
Both books focus our attention on the individual Nietzsche
calls the “genius,” a luminary who sees beyond the horizons
of his particular time and place. The genius is unafraid to
smash tablets and to propose new configurations for human
community. Nietzsche depicts the genius sometimes as a
philosopher and other times as a poet or “artist” (see below).
The genius is a theme Nietzsche addresses in detail
elsewhere,1 but these two books specifically address the
question of our response to the genius. How should we
respond to the presence of such an individual? Nietzsche’s
view here would seem to be that the presence of the genius—
be he prophet, poet, or philosopher—carries with it a specific
imperative for the rest of us. We are obliged to allow
ourselves to be lifted by genius. How do we do this?
Nietzsche’s answer seems to be what he calls “culture”
(Kultur). A genius’ vision can in principle be transferred into
a group in the form of a culture or “way of life.” This way
can elevate the non-genius far above his natural capacities
and include him in the work of genius. Moreover, the proper
work of the non-genius includes preparing for the next
appearance of genius in the world, and this work is made
possible by the culture, which organizes and ennobles the
activity of the non-genius.
The Prefaces offers a set of meditations on why Kultur is
necessary, and On the Future of Our Educational Institutions
displays a high level thinking-through of what this might
actually mean in practice at the first stage of implementation,
namely at the level of education.
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The Prefaces
Prefaces to Unwritten Works is Grenke’s edition of a work
originally entitled “Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books,”
which was a book handmade by Nietzsche himself and
presented as a gift to Cosima Wagner in 1872, with the
expectation that Richard Wagner would also read it. The care
with which Nietzsche prepared this little volume, clearly
intended for highly regarded readers, should alert us to its
importance as a glimpse into his own conception of his larger
body of work. Many of the themes taken up in the Prefaces
are recognizable from Nietzsche’s published corpus, and we
can clearly see the outlines in it of Nietzsche’s well-known
conceptions of time, history, morality, and art. The
compactness and concision of his presentation, however,
shows us an example of how Nietzsche might have wished his
philosophy to be presented or introduced to intelligent,
educated non-philosophers. This should be of interest to
anyone who aspires to understand Nietzsche.
On first glance the topics of the five prefaces seem quite
disparate. Their titles are:
1. On the Pathos of Truth
2. Thoughts on the Future of Our Educational
Institutions
3. The Greek State
4. The Relation of Schopenhauerian Philosophy to
the German Culture
5. Homer’s Contest
Grenke’s introduction helps us see the common threads
that unify these topics. What most conspicuously emerges is
the theme of culture. Nietzsche views culture as crucial to the
proper development of human life. Modern civilization
seems stunted by either a lack of culture or bad culture.
Nietzsche challenges his readers to foster a new culture of
health, which aims to turn us toward the genius.
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The order that Nietzsche envisions holds the genius in a
place of distinction: he is either the focus or the founder (or
both) of a culture; the culture is an ongoing context in which
the rest of us lead elevated lives as we look toward the genius
and take our bearings in the light of his insight and creation.
Genius alone would seem to be a kind of meaningless dead
end. Authentic genius propagates itself through culture, so
that the entire community can be enriched, and also so that a
new genius can eventually be brought into being.
For Nietzsche there are two classes of genius, “the genius
of wisdom and of knowing,” who is the philosopher, and “the
genius in his universal concept,” who would seem to be the
artist or poet (13, note 1). The question of which of these is
actually primary is complex. In the Prefaces Nietzsche at
times locates the philosopher at the center of culture, while at
the same time he characterizes the artist as one who can
create a culture. It would seem that the two are not easily
separable.
A second unifying thread running through the Prefaces is
the theme of time (8-9). Human beings perceive time as the
annihilator that separates them from their natural vision of
themselves. We love ourselves and our products, and this love
suggests that these things should persist, should be. Time,
however, destroys them. We respond to time metaphysically
through philosophy, art, history, culture, politics, and war.
This second thread turns out to be more fundamental than
the first: culture emerges as a response to the problem of
time.
In the first preface, “On the Pathos of Truth,” Nietzsche
is explicit regarding time as a fundamental problem for man.
We recoil at the specter of everything disappearing into time;
it offends us. One response is to link together the “great
moments” into a chain that runs through the millennia: this
is the “fundamental thought of culture” (22). This rebellion
against time also brings about the notion of “truth.” Truth
stands outside of time, and hence is not subject to its
destructive power. Nietzsche recognizes Heraclitus as an
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exemplar of the genius who explores this kind of truthpositing in a life-affirming manner. Heraclitus, however, is
exceptional in this respect. The general run of philosophers
falls short of “art,” which aims to live, while “knowing”
achieves only annihilation (27). “Truth” is potentially annihilating in that it is indifferent to human dignity and well being:
truth informs us that human life is a short-lived, insignificant
anomaly flickering in a remote corner of an indifferent
universe. Yet truth is necessary in order for us to escape the
annihilation of time. This, it would seem, is the pathos of
truth.
This preface sets out the terms and the tone for the other
prefaces, which explore various aspects of culture, namely,
what is its source, who is responsible for it, and what should
be its proper end.
The next preface, titled “Thoughts on the Future of Our
Educational Institutions,” builds on the previous preface’s
critique of “truth.” Nietzsche here challenges the reader to set
aside his former education so that he might escape into a
position from which he may grasp the “authentic problem.”
Only then can the reader understand the nature of
Nietzsche’s proposal for a radical reformation of education, a
reformation that seeks to establish a culture that takes its
bearings from the greatest achievements of philosophy and
poetry of the past, and that seeks to make ready the
appearance of new geniuses in the future. Nietzsche is not
explicit about what this “authentic problem” is. In his introductory essay to this preface, Matthew Davis persuasively
argues that the “authentic problem” is the problem of truth,
articulated in the previous essay. The pathos of truth is
approached culturally by means of education. The next
preface is on politics, and thus we see a path forming in the
sequence of prefaces: a theoretical insight into the problem of
truth, followed by an educational response, leading into a
formulation of a political structure. This is a practical
response to the unifying themes mentioned above. Time is the
fundamental problem, and it can be mitigated by “truth.”
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Truth is posited by philosophy and given life by means of
culture, which in turn must be established through education
and politics. Philosophy, education, politics. It is striking that
the concern for education is prior to politics.
The next preface, “The Greek State,” tells us that a
consolation for the outrage of time is a species of politics
Nietzsche identifies as “artistic culture,” for which he credits
Plato. He seems here to appropriate and exploit the
Republic’s city in speech for the purpose of illustrating a
highly ordered “artistic culture” that places the genius at the
top and orders all of life according to the insights of the
genius. “Plato’s” completed “state” sought the “ever-renewed
generation and preparation of the genius” (57). The state in
its best form does not view the individual as dignified in
himself, but rather values the individual as an instrument of
genius. The individual is lifted above his natural condition of
moral and intellectual feebleness (and above his fleeting life)
to become part of the work of the genius; each ordinary life
is thus brought into the realm of genius and culture, and
thereby beyond the immediate threat of annihilation.
Nietzsche notices the irony of the fact that the poets are
ejected from this city, which Nietzsche has associated with the
artistic culture, but he also notes quite correctly that the
Republic is a product of “poetic intuition and painted with
bluntness” (57). Further, we must ask how Nietzsche would
account for the fact that “Plato” places the “genius of
wisdom” (the philosopher) at the top of this “state,” when
Nietzsche has identified this genius as derivative from the
“genius in his universal concept” (the artist). Again, he
acknowledges this contradiction, but passes over it quickly,
calling it a symptom of a struggle internal to Plato, who still
suffers from the influence of Socrates. Nietzsche calls his
interpretation of Plato’s “hieroglyph” the “secret teaching of
the connection between the state and the genius” (59,
emphasis Nietzsche’s).
Nietzsche then turns to a practical, contemporary
challenge that emerges from this analysis. To what should his
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contemporary Germans look as they contemplate what a
proper culture would look like? His response to this question
is Schopenhauer. Nietzsche offers no account here of
Schopenhauer’s philosophy; he only notes that he is “their”
(the Germans’) single philosopher in the nineteenth century
(69). He suggests that they begin with the philosopher and
then consider what culture belongs to him.
Nietzsche conspicuously avoids doing this work for his
readers. He challenges them to work out for themselves what
the culture of their time should be, and how they should
derive it from a particular philosopher. Again, strangely,
Nietzsche has selected a genius of knowledge—that is, a
philosopher—for his starting point. Thus, by this point in the
Prefaces a rich set of questions has emerged, and Grenke
intelligently frames many of them in his essay that accompanies this preface (60-4).
The final preface, “Homer’s Contest,” addresses the
culture of combat. We children of modernity have difficulty
affirming any sort of goodness in war. Our desire is for a
world of peace. Nietzsche poses a challenge for us. Our desire
for peace is a desire to escape nature, to escape time and
become eternally at rest. We must ask ourselves if this is
possible or best. Is it a meaningful solution to the annihilating
effects of time?
To get at this question, Nietzsche leads us back through
the horrors of the Trojan war, deeper into the world of the
Homeric gods, and deeper still, back into the primordial
divinities of Hesiod, who describes a reality ruled by the
“children of the night.” This is a world of cruelty, deception,
and death—the fundamental reality. The battles of the Titans,
says Nietzsche, represented a relief from the primordial
condition of chaos and disorder. Battle is “grace” and
“salvation” (83).
Two kinds of strife emerged from this initial condition:
one is merely cruel, seeking only discord, while the other is
jealous and ambitious and seeks distinction and pre-eminence.
This second type of strife is “good” strife; it leads men
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toward excellence and is life promoting, despite its violence.
It is this good strife that Nietzsche says characterizes the
Homeric contests as exemplified at Troy, and this is an answer
to the question why Homeric poetry seems to exult in the
glorious horror of warfare.
In her introductory essay to this preface (70-80), van
Boxel argues that this insight extends to our fundamental
desire to see the world coherently, to render it as intelligible.
Conflict tames the primordial chaos and thereby establishes
measure. Prior to battle, nothing is measured against anything
else; nothing is knowable. Battle is the means to establishing
the measure of one against the other. The greater is established, and thus order is established. Further, the greater
points us toward the good, which we begin to see more
clearly. Through the establishment of measure by means of
combat, the world is rendered not only intelligible but also
moral (77-8).
Nietzsche’s formulation is obscure. He claims that the
pre-Hellenic, Oriental genius envisions a motion out of
primordial chaos and cruelty by means of strife. This motion
passes first through “disgust in existence, to interpretation of
this existence as an expiating punishment, to belief in the
identity of being there [Dasein] and being guilty” (83). The
Hellenes take up this conception and extend it into a vision
of the “good strife”: the life-promoting violence leading to
victory and excellence.
Another feature of this Homeric-Hellenic view is the
conviction that an ongoing subservience to a single master is
undesirable. There will be many geniuses and they must clash
and mix.
[O]ne removes the over-towering individual, [and]
thereby now again the contest of forces awakes: a
thought that is hostile to the “exclusivity” of
genius in the modern sense, but which assumes
that, in a natural order of things, there are always
more geniuses who reciprocally incite [each other]
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to deeds, as they also reciprocally hold [each
other] within the borders of measure. That is the
kernel of the Hellenic contest-idea: it abhors
solitary mastery and fears its dangers; it requires,
as a means of protection against the genius—a
second genius. (89)
Thus, although every gift must disclose itself in fighting,
this is not a call to a master-slave ordering. It is rather a call
to a recognition of the agonistic character of human being
and seeing.
Finally, this view of being suggests that volitional action is
not possible without fighting. For Nietzsche, the Greeks
discover what it means to be free. In the absence of the
contest neither the Greek individual nor the Greek culture
can find measure, and thus cannot direct themselves. The
danger for post-Hellenic civilization is degeneration into the
primal chaos. Without the noble strife there is a sliding back
to cruelty and vengeance. Without ongoing strife and combat
man may not remain properly human.
Nietzsche was conscious that the ideas he formulated in
these prefaces were unfashionable in 1872. They are perhaps
even more unfashionable now. The liberal West has become
quite unified in its preference for individual rights and peace.
Even the proponents of particular war efforts do not defend
war on the basis of its salutary effects on soldiers or culture;
it is regarded as a necessary evil, instrumental for political
and strategic ends. The stated aims of Western military action
are the removal of brutal despots, the elimination of threats
to security, and the restoration of regional stability. However
paradoxical or contradictory, modern war is for the sake of
peace and prosperity. We wage wars to end wars.
Nietzsche challenges a belief so deeply held that it is
perhaps not even recognized as a belief. We modern liberals
do not regard love of peace as an article of faith; it is, rather,
experienced as a recognition of a manifest good. This makes
it difficult to hold Nietzsche’s challenge in front of us.
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It is nevertheless important that we take up this challenge.
If we reject Nietzsche’s claims about war, does this mean that
we reject the Homeric presentation of human life? If we
reject Nietzsche’s vision of the individual’s relation to the
genius through culture, does this mean we must reject Plato’s
Republic? Or can we rest secure in the belief that Nietzsche
offers us flawed readings of these works? Would we say that
our readings of Homer and Plato are superior to Nietzsche’s?
The mastery and power of Nietzsche’s presentation
makes it difficult to dismiss his readings out of hand, but
perhaps we have some room to maneuver. Could it be that
Nietzsche intentionally misrepresents Homer and Plato for
the sake of co-opting them into his project? Or is it that he
emphasizes particular aspects of them for the sake of
shocking their modern readers into seeing that at some point
we must make a choice between our modern prejudices and
our admiration for Homer and Plato? How would we make
such a choice? At the very least this would involve two
considerations: First, we should carefully examine the
opinions that pull us so powerfully toward perpetual peace
and universal autonomy—opinions that lead us not only to
recoil from the realities of war but also to withdraw from the
idea of the genius and the “cults” that follow in his wake;
second, we should read Plato and Homer very carefully—is
there any chance that Nietzsche is right in saying that we tend
to impose modern sensibilities upon them and thereby distort
or obscure their significance?
On the Future of Our Educational Institutions
Nietzsche’s series of lectures delivered at the University of
Basil in the winter of 1872, called On the Future of Our
Educational Institutions, was a public reading of a dialogue
set in an idyllic forest wilderness near the banks of the Rhein
in late summer. The interlocutors are an old philosopher, his
younger companion, and two passionate university students
wielding pistols. A dog also participates in the drama. There
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is in fact a great deal of dramatic action in the dialogue; as
Grenke points out in his introduction, there is “shooting,
shouting, singing, wrestling, a star falling, a torch-lit
procession, a musical signal, and, of course, biting.”
Because the speeches are situated within a drama, we are
challenged to interpret them accordingly. Where do we locate
the voice of Nietzsche? The lector identifies himself with one
of the young students, but the weightiest monologues come
from the old philosopher. Moreover, of the two students, the
“friend” is the more articulate. Finally, as a young academic,
the philosopher’s “companion” seems to occupy the lector’s
social position and professional status at the time these
lectures were delivered.
The central topic of discussion is education. What is it,
and how should it be achieved? What is its relationship to
politics and the “state”? Along the way we encounter the
concept of “culture.” According to the philosopher, many
seem to believe that becoming educated means becoming
“cultured.” What does this mean? Is this something to which
we should aspire? What are the alternatives to it? What is
culture and what is its proper status within a regime?
One of the primary concerns of the dialogue is the
democratization of education, which seems to imply—or at
least coincide with—a trivialization of the activity and the
production of countless subfields of study, all of which fail to
comprehend the greatness of ancient philosophy and poetry,
as well as the greatness of modern German visionaries such as
Goethe. Central to this loss is the deterioration of proper
language study. Contemporary Gymnasium students, says the
philosopher, are not only unable to read ancient Greek in a
way that gives them access to the power of Plato and
Sophocles, but they are also unable to speak and write
German properly. They have sunk to the level of “journalism”
(2.45-57; 3.73).
This newfangled education purports to make students
independent in their thinking, allowing them to eschew
authority and to write about whatever they please, as though
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their untutored inclinations were highly valuable. This
generates a smug and unjustifiably aloof student who remains
uninitiated into philosophy, says the old philosopher (5.1057). These students learn to be contemptuous of authority, but,
says the philosopher, they pay for their “grandiose illusion of
freedom through ever-renewing torments and doubts”
(5.111). Contemporary education indulges the personality
and the particular. It celebrates the individual and his quirks.
Proper education, says the philosopher, “should be purified
from the imprint of the subject and carried out above the
interplay of the times, as the clear mirroring of the eternal
and unchanging essence of the thing” (4.97).
The two students naturally resent this critique and point
out that their Gymnasium education has cultivated them and
given them a taste for science, which they presume to be
clearly good for mankind. The philosopher scoffs at the
proposition, and remarks that he feels “terrified” by this
development (5.105); this scientistic culture has spawned an
industry of degenerate erudition that marks an escape from
authentic life and culture.
A danger the philosopher sees is that, in the absence of
philosophic leadership within the educational institutions,
the students with the greatest capacity grow to despise
themselves under “the unendurable burden of standing
alone” without a true teacher (5.112). Another danger, he
warns, is the seduction of the best students by false gods,
namely, perverse ideological and political movements.
The philosopher is deeply concerned that the state has
taken control of pre-university education to use for its own
insidious ends. The production of serviceable citizens who
are unmoved by greatness is at odds with philosophy’s
interest in education. The old philosopher persuades his little
audience that the purpose of proper educational institutions
is to cultivate the soil in which philosophy can flourish.
These institutions would acknowledge that philosophy is
extremely rare, and requires extraordinary effort. Out of the
multitude of students only a few would be sufficiently
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endowed to participate in the work of the philosophic
schools, of which there would only be a small number in all
of Germany. A small number of teachers would emerge from
this rarified sample of students, and even these would only
serve as laborers in the service of bringing forth the rarest of
breeds, the philosopher himself. Those with “second- and
third-class gifts” can thus be brought to their full potential
and can contribute to the work of philosophy. (4.97)
As we consider this dream, we must remember that this is
not Nietzsche speaking, but a character in his lecturedialogue. This does not mean that Nietzsche does not intend
to advance such a vision of education and philosophy, but we
are obliged, as we are with Plato’s Republic, to hesitate to
conclude that this is Nietzsche’s blueprint for education.
We are encouraged, however, to consider what we think
the proper relationship is between philosophy and educational institutions, and how this relationship stands with
respect to the regime in which we live. Can educational institutions peacefully service both the needs of the nation and the
demands of philosophy (or more broadly, the demands of
genius2)? This raises a more fundamental question for us. Do
we view philosophy as an activity with an imperative? That
is, does it call us and make demands of us? If it does, how
does this call stand with respect to our “individuality,” our
“persons,” and our inclinations about what a good life should
be? Do we view philosophy as merely instrumental to our
individual lives; that is, do we grapple with philosophic texts
only so much as is pleasant and convenient for our personal
inclinations? Do we view philosophy as merely a good
exercise for thinking and talking about difficult matters, for
the sake of a higher quality of discourse in personal life, in
business life, in political life? Is philosophy then merely a
handmaid to the ordinary affairs of life?
It is likely that most of us within the academic traditions
of liberal democracies in the twenty-first century do not
respond with vigorous principled support to the idea of a
�114
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
culture of genius. We tend to believe that the artifacts of
genius are to be read and considered seriously either within
an enterprise of historical inquiry, or with a view toward a
kind of personal enlightenment. Some of us even go so far as
to believe that these notable books can help us navigate the
political and social questions of our own time. It is unusual,
however, for anyone to approach them out of a sense of
service to something else, something higher to which one
feels obliged to subordinate oneself. Academics and their
students dabble in texts that strike their fancy. The old
philosopher of Nietzsche’s dialogue claims that, for the best
students, the consequences of this casual, personal
relationship with genius are confusion, doubt, and selfloathing, as well as an unwarranted arrogance. The alternative he offers is initiation by a teacher into the proper study
of philosophy within a culture that surrounds genius. The
student is brought into a central region of the culture, and
this gives the education authenticity and authority (5.11013). The student is brought into the work of philosophy for
the sake of philosophy.
A question emerges: Are we the servants of philosophy, or
is philosophy an instrument for our “personal” ends? If we
answer in a manner that suggests that philosophy does carry
an imperative, then we must follow that imperative or reject
philosophy. If we follow it, will there be implications not just
for the individual but also for human life generally or at least
for the worldly community within which philosophy
appears?
1
2
See Gay Science, 361; Human, all too Human, 1.126,157-168.
I speak specifically of philosophy here, although Nietzsche’s conception
of the genius would seem to be broader. To be safe we might speak of
“the artist or philosopher.” I frame the issue in terms of philosophy for
several reasons. As noted above, Nietzsche makes the distinction between
“the genius in his universal concept” and “the genius of wisdom,” and we
might take care to preserve this distinction in our general understanding
here. One might reasonably conclude that the proper focal point or
BADGER
115
center of a Kultur would be “the genius in his universal concept,” and
this would not be the philosopher, but rather “the artist.” This, however,
does not appear to be Nietzsche’s application of his terms. He observes
and valorizes Plato’s placing philosophy in charge of the ideal regime; he
names the philosopher Schopenhauer as the best source for a new
German culture; and in On the Future of Our Educational Institutions the
account of the ordering of the institutions comes from the “old
philosopher.” We can therefore speak here in terms of philosophy and its
relation to politics and educational institutions, though we should be
mindful of the subtle relationship between Nietzsche’s “philosopher” and
his “artist,” which a more complete analysis of Nietzsche’s thought would
explore. See Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, for an
explicit account of the distinction, as well as his view that this distinction
is transcended by certain pre-Socratic philosophers.
�116
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
117
Jan Blits and the Virtues
of Commentary
John E. Alvis
The sprightliest thinker of our time once presented a lecture
on the virtues of Jane Austen beginning with a list most of the
audience considered an enumeration of defects: few settings
within unimproved nature, no symbols, tame emotions,
language under restraint, no derangements of plot, no
authorial confidences, predictable outcomes, or unabashed
moral assessments. Implicit in the lecture was a gentle reproof
of the manner of fiction writers well regarded, though, by
comparison with Austen, overwrought, as well as of the taste
of a readership similarly impolite in its avidity for strong
sensations. Timely and welcome, one might suppose, would
be something on similar lines but directed against presently
influential literary critics, too many of whom are, to the
extent permissible by academic conventions, sensationalists.
Yet, since not the least objectionable of the preoccupations of
contemporary critics is their insistence upon telling us more
of other critics than we need to know, offering a corrective by
better practice seems preferable. For that we can applaud the
example set by writers such as Jan Blits in his five books on
Shakespeare, and most recently in his study of Coriolanus.
Blits has the good sense to realize that each of
Shakespeare’s major plays affords material sufficiently
abundant to require book-length treatment for its elucidation. He devotes an entire volume to Julius Caesar (The
End of the Ancient Republic: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar),
another to Macbeth (The Insufficiency of Virtue: Macbeth and
the Natural Order), another to Hamlet (Deadly Thought:
Jan Blits. Spirit, Soul, and City: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Lexington Books,
2006. John E. Alvis is a Professor in the Department of English, the
University of Dallas.
�118
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Hamlet and the Human Soul), and a book on A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (The Soul of Athens: Shakespeare’s A
Midsummer Night’s Dream). His newest volume, Spirit, Soul,
and City: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, is occupied with the play
probably composed last of the group Shakespeare drew out of
Plutarch’s Lives. Confining himself to a single play enables
Blits to do more than is usually done in the way of discerning
connections. One of the more striking of such discoveries
occurs with the discussion of the play’s “two endings.”
Shakespeare seems to have directed his story to one
conclusion with the success of the family embassy that turns
back a vengefully triumphant Coriolanus, yet he ends the play
a second time with the actual slaying of the title character,
since returned to Corioles, the city on behalf of which he had
warred against Rome. Blits makes sense of this peculiarity in
the play’s construction by perceiving the first climax as the
defeat of spirited ambition, and the second as the destruction
of the hero’s soul, his death coinciding with his inability to
see that his insistence upon a virtue unconditional has
continued to the end to make him the victim of conditions set
by meaner souls.
At times the dividend of dwelling upon a single play lies
in detecting overtones of particular words or phrases that
modify each other over wide intervals of text. Such a concentrated focus may also allow leisure for observing differences
in superficially similar incidents, or for developing the implications of certain repeated imagery, e.g. body parts for
members of Rome’s political organism, beast metaphors
applied to opponents, and diseases as figures for political
disorders. The tight focus also facilitates attention to
Shakespeare’s arrangement of incidents into a plot that
conveys dialectical thought by dramatic means. The focus of
the dialectic, announced in Blits’s title, is the relation between
a particular kind of civil society and the distinctive human
type that regime has produced. Coriolanus’s “spirit” and
“soul” have their genesis in his “city,” yet Shakespeare reveals
within his protagonist a persistent conflict with the
ALVIS
119
community that has educated him in spirited ambition and
has by public acclamation conferred his honorific name.
But the chief benefit of Blits’s approach is that by
attending to one play at a time, it encourages the supposition
that each play is a complete and coherent body of thought
rather than an exhibit from which evidence may be extracted
in service of a critic’s thesis. You will notice that the thematic
parts of Blits’s various book titles make use of no words alien
to Shakespeare’s own usage. This is a departure from the
widespread practice of blazoning titles that advertise intent to
examine their subject from perspectives generated by modes
of thought ill sorting with Shakespearean diction. It is
refreshing to readers more used to immodest titles that decry,
say, Hegemony engaged in exploiting the dispossessed, that
promise a Deconstructing of some Ideology, or that propose
to demonstrate Undecideability (sic) vaporizing some Text
hitherto deemed determinable (Marxist powers, ideology,
and writings exempted). Blits’s satisfaction with a
Shakespearean vocabulary for rendering Shakespeare’s
thought permits his audience a less mediated acquaintance
with whatever play he discusses. The critic does not obstruct
so much the reader’s access to the thought of the poetry.
Students complain of teachers who persist in standing
between them and the light emitted from an author. Some
rare teachers know how to remove the impediment, and
come to know as well the happy result that occasionally
follows, that of learning simultaneously with the class. As far
as it appears possible to do so, Blits writes in the way of a
teacher receptive to this lesson.
Spirit, Soul, and City further distinguishes itself by its
organization. Contemporary expectations prescribe for the
commentator a vantage from the heights of which he will
profess to look over the head of the author whose work he
has contracted to elucidate. By preferring a topical division of
his own devising to the progression of action of the poem, he
declares his superiority to his subject. Blits adopts a more
modest but to my mind a more fruitful address to the task. He
�120
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
proceeds as the progression of the play prescribes, following
its development from act to act, scene after scene, line by line.
Conventional Shakespeareans will object to arranging
discussion in this manner and might well dismiss the result as
a mere “commentary.” Readers who seek to understand
Shakespeare rather than tame him might wish for more such
commentaries. From Blits we can collect the useful lesson that
an important dimension of the thought of the play comes into
view once we appreciate the dramatist’s development of
thought by repetition, congruence and incongruence, echo
and dissonance, and progression and retrogression, all of
which one best grasps when interpretive comment adheres to
plot. Never mind that college must caution students not to
peg their argument to the plot. They need not try this at
home. Still, Blits understands, and guides his reader to understand that a Shakespearean play is already a course of imaginative reasoning. Its logic will reveal itself to patient attention
operating consecutively rather than synoptically.
Obviously the risk incurred by such an organization is
that, as some parts of the play may interest us more than
others, a commentary proceeding in accord with the plot may
not sustain a constant interest. In this case, happily, a strong
theme prevents Blits’s commentary from plodding. He never
permits us to lose sight of his principal argument: that the
play examines a Roman republican community in tension
with a hero at once its product and the most serious challenge
to its survival. The book gives us to see something universal,
what one might call an anatomy of the excellences—accompanied by an exposure of the limitations—of spirited
ambition; this in conjunction with scrutiny of a perennial
problem confronted by all civil societies: how to regulate
such outsized souls as are required for defense of a nation.
While a nation must enlist men emulous for honor, it must
also secure justice and due respect for the less strenuous
temperaments these warriors lead in battle and govern during
peaceful interims. To put it another way, Shakespeare’s
Republican Rome rejects both items of advice Aristophanes
ALVIS
121
puts in the mouth of his Aeschylus in Frogs. Shakespeare has
depicted a republic that insists upon rearing a lion within its
walls; yet having done so refuses to permit the lion to rule. In
Shakespeare’s version of Rome’s history, the republic
contrived somehow to survive until the advent of Caesar, or,
alternatively, until the city-state had extended its imperial
dominion as far as it ever would. The explanation for Rome’s
durability may lie in the republic’s ability extemporaneously
to produce at various crises institutions that in their eventual
arrangement answer to the Aristotelian scheme of a mixed
regime balancing every constituent interest with some other.
Blits assists us in perceiving how such a mixed polity can
preserve itself from external threats by breeding ambitious
generals, and yet produce families that will defy their own
blood when the ambition or indignation of such men should
threaten their country.
Blits displays one field of learning not evident from his
previous treatment of Shakespeare’s Rome in The End of the
Ancient Republic. His present work puts to effective use a
knowledge of the precepts and method of classical rhetoric
gleaned from Aristotle, Cicero, Tacitus, and Quintillian. The
benefit comes with his explication of the set speeches of
major characters. Persuasive speech was the operative art of
statesmanship for thinkers of classical antiquity. To understand rhetoric entails grasping the practical implications of
adapting political principle to political circumstance. Blits
understands this significance of rhetoric and thus he understands something essential to what Shakespeare would have
his more serious readers comprehend. Blits also shows a
command of ancient Latin historians more reliable than one
meets in any Shakespearean now writing. In contexts where
other scholars might guess that Aristotle or Cicero may have
crossed Shakespeare’s mind, this study cites appositely a half
dozen classical texts, chapter and verse, as well as such
moderns as Machiavelli, Hobbes, even Hegel, when appropriate.
�122
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Coriolanus seems to be thought of now as impressive
theater, but not comparably impressive when regarded as a
course of thought. It certainly has failed to enjoy the
reputation for philosophic scope or penetration accorded
Lear, Hamlet, and even Macbeth. Possibly the philosophic
substance of the work unfolds to readers themselves habituated to the sort of speculative thought Shakespeare would
have learned in the Elizabethan schools and from the books
favored by his contemporaries. His affinities seem to lie with
the tradition of thinking one discovers in Plato, Aristotle,
Cicero, and Plutarch, classical political philosophy inclusive
of ethical analysis and rhetoric, its practical political
instrument. The title of Blits’s book assumes this tradition by
taking “spirit” to mean thumos (spiritedness, ambition, indignation), “soul” to mean an unstable compound of reason,
spiritedness, with appetitive and aversive passions, and “city”
to mean a civil constitution combining a form of government
with a purpose of promoting a national way of life. Such
thinkers as I’ve mentioned were concerned with understanding the interrelatedness of human character and political
institutions, the latter including religious, educational, and
what in our day are termed “social” or “cultural” assumptions
relating to marriage, family, manners, and pieties. The
presiding questions for this tradition were the proper
ordering of the individual soul together with the ordering of
a regime most conducive to encouraging such souls.
Shakespeare adheres to a similar syllabus with the significant
addition of his concern to understand these issues as they
have been affected both by historical conditions perhaps
unanticipated by pagan classical thinkers—that is to say,
distinctly Christian and modern conditions—and by
challenges to classical thought posed by Machiavelli and
Bacon. This way of thinking, attributed by Locke to “the old
philosophers” and becoming less and less familiar today, Blits
finds congenial. That difference in intellectual training and
disposition accounts for the superiority of the book to other
recent studies of Shakespeare’s Roman plays. This author
ALVIS
123
manifestly understands the mode of thought I have just
described and can therefore come closer than his contemporaries to tracking Shakespeare’s thought. Much closer.
�
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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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2007
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Kraus, Pamela
Brann, Eva T. H.
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Curry, Elizabeth
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Carey, James
Levine, David
Badger, Jonathan
Alvis, John E.
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Volume XLIX, number three of The St. John's Review. Published in 2007.
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The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_49_No_3
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Annapolis, MD
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pdf
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Text
S!JOHN'S
College
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE 2010-2011
(Revised 2/24/ II)
Date
S peal<er
A ugust 27, 2010
Ms. Pamela Kraus
Dean
St. John ' s College
Annapoli s
The Beginning of the
Beginning: Reflections
on Cartesian Method
September 3
Mr. Daniel Harrell
Tutor
St. John' s College
Annapolis
Does Beauty Have a Place
in Liberal Education
September 10
Mr. James Carey
Tutor
St. Jo hn 's College
Santa Fe
Some Reflections on the
Phenomenon of the
Beautiful
September 17
Mr. William Braithwaite
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
On Read ing the U. S.
Constitution as a Great
Book
September 24
(Homecoming)
Mr. Laurence Berns
Tutor Emeritus
St. John ' s Col lege
Annapolis
Dialectic, Virtue and
Recollection in Plato' s
October l
Mr. Peter Pesic
Tutor
St. John 's College
Santa Fe
Hearing the Irrational: Music
and the Development of the
Modern Concept of Number
October 8
Long Weekend
No Lecture
October 15
Mr. Peter Kalkavage
Tutor
St. John 's College
Annapolis
Principles of Motion and
the Motion of Principles:
Hegel's Inve11ed World
October 22
Mr. Ri chard McCombs
Tutor
St. John ' s Col lege
San ta Fe
An Introduction to the Read ing
of Kierkegaard
October 29
Awadagin Pratt
Piano Conceit- Music of
Liszt, Schumann, Chopin
November 5
All College Seminar
No Lecture
Title
ANNAPOL I S · SANTA FE
OFFICE OF
THE DEAN
P.O. Box 28oo
ANNAPOLIS , MARYLAND
2I404
4I0-626-25II
FAX 4w-295-6937
www.sjca.edu
Me no
�November 12
(Parents Weekend)
Mr. Wilfred McClay
The Tocquevillean Moment
November 19
The Western Wind
Vocal Sextet
The Happy Journey: An
American Music Celebration
November 26
Thanksgiving Holiday
No Lecture
December 3
Professor Joan Crist
College of St. Joseph
Chicago
Bonaventure: A Better
Theologian Than Thomas
Aquinas 11
December 10
King William Players
"Who's Afraid of
Virginia Wolfe"
December 17January 9, 20 II
Winter Vacation
No Lectures
January 14, 20 II
Mr. S. Ramachandran
The Value of Life
January 21
Mr. Lauren Brubaker
Tutor
St. John's College
Santa Fe Campus
Wealth, Virtue and
Corruption: Adam
Smith's Moral
Philosophy
January 28
Professor Christian Moevs
Notre Dame
The Metaphysics of
Dante's Commedia
February 4
Long Weekend
No Lecture
Ms. Patricia Locke
The Thousand and One Nights
of Marcel Proust
February 11
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
February 18
Parker String Quartet
Conce11
February 25
All College Seminar
Nietzsche, Truth and
Lying in an Extra-Moral
Sense
March 4-20
Spring Vacation
No Lectures
March 25
Barbara Hanning
The City College of NY
How Opera Began (and
Why It Began in Florence)
April 1
Professor Doug Casson
St. Olaf College
Pity as a Civic Vir1ue in
Sophocles' Philoctetes
April 8
Professor Marina McCoy
Boston College
Pity as a Civic Virtue in
Sophocles' Philoctetes
�April 15
Professor Diana Schaub
Loyola University
Baltimore
Learning to Love Lincoln:
Frederick Douglass's
Journey from Grievance
To Gratitude
April22
Mr. Dylan Casey
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
Fields and Pa1ticles and
Being
April29
King William Players
Performance of Eumenides
(performed in ancient Greek)
May6
Reality Weekend
No Lecture
May 13
Commencement Weekend
No Lecture
�
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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Lecture/Concert Schedule 2010-2011 (Revised 2/24/11)
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2010-2011
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Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 2010-2011 Academic Year.
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Lecture Schedule 2010-2011
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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September 3, 2010. Harrell, Daniel. <a title="Does beauty have a place in liberal education?" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/32">Does beauty have a place in liberal education?</a> (audio)
October 15, 2010. Kalkavage, Peter. <a title="Principles of motion and the motion of principles : Hegel's inverted world" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/35">Principles of motion and the motion of principles : Hegel's inverted world</a> (audio)
January 21, 2011. Brubaker, Lauren. <a title="Wealth, virtue and corruption : Adam Smith's moral philosophy" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/20">Wealth, virtue and corruption : Adam Smith's moral philosophy</a> (audio)
March 25, 2011. Hanning, Barbara. <a title="How opera began : and why it began in Florence" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/30">How opera began : and why it began in Florence</a> (audio)
April 1, 2011. Casson, Douglas. <a title="Stabilizing currency : Locke on money, morality, and natural law" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/23">Stabilizing currency : Locke on money, morality, and natural law</a> (audio) [Schedule lists incorrect title]
April 8, 2011. McCoy, Marina. <a title="Pity as a civic virtue in Sophocles' Philoctetes" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/43">Pity as a civic virtue in Sophocles' Philoctetes</a> (audio)
Contributor
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Kraus, Pamela
Harrell, Daniel
Carey, James
Braithwaite, William
Berns, Laurence, 1928-
Pesic, Peter
Kalkavage, Peter
McCombs, Richard
Pratt, Awadagin
McClay, Wilfred M.
The Western Wind Vocal Sextet
Crist, Joan Frances
Ramachandran, S.
Brubaker, Lauren
Moevs, Christian
Locke, Patricia M.
Parker String Quartet
Hanning, Barbara Russano, 1940-
Casson, Douglas
McCoy, Marina, 1968-
Schaub, Diana
Casey, Dylan
King William Players
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
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Text
The St. John’s Review
Volume 53.2 (Spring 2012)
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.
©2012 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 & Lectures
Aesthetics Ancient and Modern .........................................1
James Carey
Passion and Perception in Mozart’s Magic Flute ...........38
Peter Kalkavage
Socrates, Parmenides, and the Way Out ...........................68
Judith Seeger
Rolling His Jolly Tub: Composer Elliott Carter,
St. John’s College Tutor, 1940-1942.........................97
Hollis Thoms
Reflections
Talking, Reading, Writing, Listening .............................133
Eva Brann
Caged Explorers: The Hunger for Control.....................150
Howard Zeiderman
Poetry
The Love Song of the Agoraphobic ................................177
Elliott Zuckerman
Reviews
Henry Kissinger on China: The Dangerous
Illusion of “Realist” Foreign Policy
Book Review of Henry Kissenger’s China..........................179
Joseph A. Bosco
Everything is One
Book Review of Eva Brann’s The Logos of Heraclitus ......195
David Carl
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�ESSAYS & LECTURES
Aesthetics, Ancient and Modern:
An Introduction
James Carey
The phenomenon of beauty is trans-political, trans-historical
and trans-religious. Whether we are believers or non-believers, we can admire Greek temples, an archaic statue of
Apollo, Islamic calligraphy, a Gothic cathedral, Bach’s St.
Matthew Passion, Hindu architecture, Chinese landscape
painting, a Japanese tea ceremony, and so forth. Our admiration of these things need not be animated by religious belief.
To be sure, they mean incomparably more to those who believe that they are intimately connected with the sacred or divine than they mean to those who deny such a connection. But
the beautiful in art is accessible to all, the beautiful in nature
even more so. We should not be surprised, then, to find some
agreement among the greatest minds as to what beauty is.
It is often pointed out that philosophical inquiry into the
nature of the beautiful did not get designated as “aesthetics”
until the eighteenth century. The inquiry itself is not an exclusive modern concern, however. It was launched by Plato.
His most impressive attempt to shed light on the nature of the
beautiful is not to be found in the Symposium or the Phaedrus, but in the Hippias Major. The Symposium and the
Phaedrus are chiefly concerned with the erotic relation of the
soul to the beautiful. The concern of the Hippias Major is,
on the face of it, more limited: what is the beautiful?
Hippias has come to Athens on a diplomatic mission to
represent the interests of his native city of Elis. He is a well
known sophist. He plays a small role in Plato’s Protagoras
James Carey is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe. A shorter version
of this essay was delivered as a lecture at St. John’s College, Annapolis,
on September 10, 2011. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Thomas
McDonald, in whose soul were uniquely combined intellectual powers
of the highest order with rare loftiness of spirit and refinement of taste.
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and he is the chief interlocutor with Socrates in another dialogue, the Hippias Minor. He has a high opinion of how
much he knows, and he boasts about it without shame. Hippias is, as one of the most careful students of the Platonic dialogues notes, “the great fool.”1 There are other fools in the
Platonic dialogues—Ion and Euthyphro come quickly to
mind. But Hippias is the greatest fool of them all. His limitations in combination with his vanity keep the conversation
with Socrates from ascending to the highest peaks of speculation. But the conversation ascends very high nonetheless,
though to appreciate this the reader has to compensate for
Hippias’s dullness by engaging his own thought with what
Socrates has to say.
There is a rather lengthy introductory exchange between
the two men. It begins with a comparison of earlier sophists
with contemporary sophists. It thereby brushes up against the
theme of wisdom, though without explicitly exploring it. Instead, the introductory exchange centers on the problem of
Hippias’s failure to make money through sophistry on his visits to Sparta, in contrast to his general success in this endeavor elsewhere. At one point, when Hippias claims to have
composed a beautiful speech about the beautiful, Socrates
says that Hippias has reminded him “opportunely” of something.2 Someone, Socrates says, has recently been throwing
him into confusion with the question, “What is the beautiful?” Socrates asks Hippias to help him find an answer to this
question. But his expression “opportunely”—eis kalon—is
not quite serious, since he has used the word kalon, the Greek
word for” beautiful,” or its derivatives seven times in the
opening exchange. Hippias himself used it once in the opening exchange, rather strangely.3 He does not, however, seem
interested in elaborating what he might mean by it, in spite
of the fact that Socrates tacitly invites him to do so by responding with a double echo of the word.4
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Unlike the conversations that Socrates has with Euthyphro and Meno in the dialogues named after them, and, in
particular, unlike the exchange at the beginning of the Republic and the ensuing conversations with Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Glaucon, and Adeimantus, Socrates
himself initiates the conversation with Hippias in this dialogue, as he also does in the Hippias Minor after being invited
to do so by Eudicus. When Socrates initiates a conversation
we must ask ourselves what he hopes to accomplish through
it, that is, why he even engages in it. And it is especially important for us to ask this question when Socrates bothers to
initiate a conversation with someone like Hippias or Ion who
is not already a friend or associate of his and whom he knows
in advance to be limited in philosophic capacity and commitment.
We might think that Socrates is not well acquainted with
Hippias. But right off the bat he appeals to Hippias’s vanity
by calling him “Hippias, the beautiful and wise” and in the
same sentence he refers to a prior encounter with Hippias.
Socrates may be alluding to Hippias’ role in the conversation
reported in the Protagoras, where he does not make a good
impression.5 Is it possible that Socrates thinks that Hippias,
in spite of his limitations, might nonetheless help him achieve
a bit of clarity regarding something about which he is admittedly perplexed?
In response to the distinctively Socratic question, “What
is the beautiful?” Hippias offers three answers. The beautiful
is a beautiful maiden, it is ornamental gold, and it is the
solemn occasion of a funeral. Socrates exposes the deficiencies of these answers. In doing so, he couches his observations in the name of a third party who is not present, someone
who, Socrates says, chastises him about his thoughts on the
beautiful (to kalon). It later appears that this person is Socrates
himself. Socrates, then, presents himself as being in conflict
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with himself about the beautiful. And yet one of the very few
things that he says he is an expert on is erotics.6 So, given
Socrates understanding of the necessary relationship of eros
to the beautiful, we find a tension, to say the least, between
his uncharacteristic profession of expertise and his apparent
confusion about something that falls within the purview of
his expertise, to be even at the center of it.
After disposing of Hippias’s answers to the question,
“What is the beautiful?” Socrates himself suggests three answers. His first answer is that the beautiful is the fitting (or
the appropriate—to trepon).7 This leads to the question of
whether its presence causes things just to appear beautiful or
to really be beautiful. The difficulty here is in the Greek expression to kalon itself. It can mean the beautiful as we today
usually use the word, the aesthetically beautiful.8 But to kalon
can also mean the noble—moral nobility or nobility of character. In the case of the latter there can be a great difference
between being and appearance. Someone could have a noble
character without appearing so, not at first glance anyway.
Socrates himself is the conspicuous example. Nobility manifests itself most conspicuously in those situations that, as we
say, exhibit one’s character. In the case of noble laws and pursuits, the discrepancy between being and appearance is so
striking and of such contention as to lead, Socrates says, to
“strife and battle . . . privately for individuals and publically
for cities.”9 In the case of the aesthetically beautiful, the other
sense of to kalon, there seems to be no difference at all between being and appearance. It would be strange to say that
a landscape or a painting, for example, only appears to be
beautiful but is not really so.
Socrates’ second answer to the question “What is the
beautiful” is that it is the useful (to chrēsimon). And this an-
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swer gets transformed into the claim that the beautiful is the
helpful (to ōphelimon).10 We can perhaps think of the noble
this way, although we can easily imagine situations in which
nobility of character does not help very much, and other situations in which it even brings physical harm to him who exhibits it. It is even less obvious how something aesthetically
beautiful, such as a statue or a sunset, is useful or helpful.
We might get the impression from his first two definitions
that Socrates is interested in debunking the aesthetically
beautiful, which sometimes gets pejoratively called the
“merely pretty.” This impression is dispelled with Socrates’
third and most interesting, definition. Here is what he says:
I think that I have just now found my way out. Observe. If we were to say that what makes us delight
is beautiful—in no way do I mean all pleasures,
but rather that [which pleases] through hearing
and sight—how then would we do in the contest?
I suppose, Hippias, that beautiful human beings at
least, but also all decorations and paintings and
pieces of sculpture, whichever ones are beautiful,
please us when we see them. And beautiful voices
and music in general, discourses and stories too,
produce this same thing, so that if we should answer that bold man [i.e., Socrates’ “critic”] this
way—“Noble one, the beautiful is the pleasant
[that pleases] through hearing and sight”—don’t
you think we would check his boldness?11
We notice a couple of peculiarities in this passage. In the
first place, there is a double chiasmus. Socrates speaks of the
pleasant that comes through hearing and sight, in that order,
at the beginning of this passage and again at the end. The
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pleasures that come through hearing would seem to have
some primacy over those that come through sight. And yet,
in the middle of the passage, Socrates first mentions the
pleasures that come through sight, and afterwards those that
come through hearing. So, though one might infer that
Socrates holds discourses to be more truly beautiful than
sights, the passage above does not support this inference.
Beautiful discourses and beautiful sights are situated on the
same plane here.
In the second place, Socrates includes the human as well
as the non-human in that which can please through hearing
and sight. And he also includes that which pleases without
any logos in the strictly discursive sense of the word, such as
decorations, paintings, sculpture, voices, and music, and that
which does please discursively, such as discourses and stories. He thereby highlights the two senses of to kalon, as
meaning, again, both the aesthetically beautiful and the
morally noble. The morally noble, which pleases us through
a rational consideration of it, and the aesthetically beautiful,
which pleases us through sensation and presumably without
any rational consideration, are intimately connected, so much
so that, again, a single Greek word can mean both. Beautiful
human beings, in particular, can be beautiful in their looks or
beautiful in their character, or both.
We leave the Hippias Major at this point, with some regret. For we shall not follow up Socrates’ ensuing and profound distinction between two types of classes, a distinction
that no lesser a student of Plato than Jacob Klein held to be
the clue to Plato’s understanding of the eidetic duality that is
constitutive of Being itself, a theme that Klein shows is at the
heart of the Sophist and is alluded to in other dialogues as
well.12 Our regret, however, is somewhat assuaged. For Socrates’
claim in the Hippias Major that the beautiful is what pleases
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through sight and hearing induces us to reflect on similar
claims about beauty made in the greatest work on the subject
ever written, Kant’s Critique of Judgment.
The Critique of Judgment is divided into two parts, the
Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and Critique of Teleological
Judgment. We confine our attention to the first part, the principal task of which is to validate the concept of taste as something that can be cultivated, something that can be good or
bad, and something that has the beautiful—and not the pleasant simply—as its primary object.
Early on Kant raises the question of whether in the judgment of taste the feeling of pleasure precedes or follows the
judging of the object.13 One might think that this question
could be decided empirically, simply by paying attention to
the temporal sequence in which feeling and judgment occur.
But the mind moves so rapidly that the question cannot be
answered by empirical inspection alone. It can only be answered by way of an argument. Kant says that the solution
to this problem is the key to the critique of taste. He argues
as follows.
Nothing can be universally communicated except cognition (Erkenntnis) and presentation (Vorstellung), so far as it
belongs to cognition. One can report a certain sensation, say,
that buttermilk tastes good. But one cannot be sure that others
who have also tasted buttermilk will concur in this report. If
a difference of opinion emerges, that is the end of the matter.
On the other hand, an argument, say, a Euclidean demonstration, can be not just reported but universally communicated.
Anyone who sets out to prove, for example, that the base angles of isosceles triangles are equal, can expect anyone else
who is familiar with the preceding definitions, common notions, postulates, and propositions to follow the demonstration. Each step of the argument can be made clear. And if
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someone observing the demonstration discovers a flaw in the
argument, then that discovery too can be communicated. The
reason for this agreement is that, when we communicate our
cognitions to one another, what is individual about us recedes
into the background. We communicate our cognitions simply
as one rational being to another rational being. In doing so
we expect agreement; and if we find disagreement we expect
an argument of some kind in support of it.
We do not communicate our sensations to each other this
way. If I say that the room is warm, and you say that it is cold,
I do not ask you for a demonstration that it is cold. If I find a
certain dessert excessively sweet, and you don’t find it sweet
enough, we do not set out to refute each other. In a similar
way, if I experience something as beautiful, say, the slow
movement from a late Beethoven string quartet, and you hear
it as more boring than beautiful, I do not try to demonstrate
to you that it really is beautiful. An argument establishing
something as beautiful, a definitive argument compelling assent from everyone who can follow the argument, is not possible.
But in spite of this similarity, the experience of something
as beautiful is not just a feeling of pleasure either, though
pleasure is surely bound up with this experience. Kant thinks
that, unlike the feeling of pleasure, the judgment that something is beautiful is universally communicable, at least in
principle. This is possible because the encounter with something beautiful gives rise to a peculiarly harmonious interaction of the understanding, or the faculty of concepts, with the
imagination, and hence produces a state of mind (Gemütszustand) that can be communicated. There is no comparable
harmonious interaction of the cognitive faculties in the experience of something as merely pleasant, such as the scent
of patchouli or the taste of cilantro, about which there can be
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a difference of opinion that is in principle irresolvable.
In the case of a judgment of cognition proper, there is also
a relationship between the understanding and the imagination. The synthesis of the imagination is subsumed under a
definite concept. For example, two events are subsumed
under the a priori concept of cause and effect; the empirical
concept of a plate is subsumed under the pure concept of a
circle; an individual dog is subsumed under the general and
empirically derived concept of a dog. Such subsumption
under a definite concept Kant calls a determinative judgment.
This kind of judgment determines the object as this or that
definite kind of thing. It fixes the object, establishes its
boundaries as it were, and thereby renders it intelligible. The
result is a definite cognition.
In the judgment of something as beautiful, however, the
synthesis of the imagination is not subsumed under a definite
concept. The harmonious interaction of the cognitive faculties that is initiated by the presence of a beautiful object Kant
calls “free play” (freies Spiel). The resultant state of mind can
be universally communicated because it is formed by a free
play of cognitive faculties that we all possess. On the other
hand, this harmonious interaction, precisely as free play, does
not give rise to a definite cognition (ein bestimmter Erkenntis). It is only what is required for cognition in general
(Erkenntnis überhaupt).
That this state of mind is communicable, even universally
so, does not by itself imply that it is actually communicated.
For the latter, taste is also required. And taste is developed
primarily by cultivating a habit of attention to the formal relationships that are present in beautiful objects. These relationships, precisely as formal, cannot be apprehended
through sensation alone—as pleasure can—but must be apprehended by specifically cognitive faculties. And yet, be-
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cause here the imagination is not simply subordinated to the
understanding and placed in its service, but harmoniously and
freely interacts with the understanding, a feeling of pleasure
necessarily arises, as always happens in play.
A judgment that proceeds, not determinatively and by
way of subsuming a particular object (in the broadest sense
of the word) under a given definite concept, but by finding a
universal concept for the particular object is what Kant calls
a reflective judgment. In the investigation of nature determinative and reflective judgments are sequentially made. But
in the experience of an object as beautiful only a reflective
judgment is made, though in reading a work of literature in
particular, determinate judgments prepare the way for the reflective judgment that the work is beautiful. The universal
concept “beautiful,” the predicate of the reflective judgment,
“This object is beautiful,” is an indefinite concept. It refers
only to the way the individual object has of animating the
cognitive faculties into free play.14 The effect of this free play
is a pleasure that we expect everyone who has taste to feel.
To Kant’s argument that, in the encounter with a beautiful
object, the feeling of pleasure is consequent to and founded
on the judging of the object as beautiful, and not vice versa,
one might object that he has only shown what the sequence
could be. He has not shown what the sequence must be. But
Kant would respond that only this argument accounts for the
phenomenon of aesthetic enjoyment. For we do not call all
the things that please us “beautiful”—not by a long shot.
There would, however, be no reason not to do so if pleasure
precedes and founds the judgment that the object is beautiful.
Kant’s argument also makes sense of how one can distinguish between good taste, educated taste so to speak, and bad
or uneducated taste. Most of us recognize that our taste is
more refined now than it was when we were younger. The
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broadening experience of attending to the formal relations
present in beautiful objects enables us to note, appreciate,
and, as a consequence, delight in them. Again, these formal
relations cannot be apprehended by sensation alone, as is the
case with pleasures that are not mediated by judgment and
the cognitive principles that make judgment possible. And
yet, because no definite cognition is involved in a pure judgment of taste, we cannot actually demonstrate that an object
is beautiful, however perfect its formal articulation. What we
say by way of communicating the satisfaction we take in a
work such as the Adagio of Beethoven’s “Hammerclavier”
Sonata or Josquin Desprez’ “Déploration de la Mort de Jehan
Ockeghem” to someone whose musical taste we think is cultivated or susceptible of cultivation, is “Just listen to this.”
Or, in the case of painting by, say, Vermeer, “Just look at
this.”
A beautiful object does not consist of formal relations
alone. It has a material element as well, such as shades of
color or volume of sound. Unlike form, this material element,
which gives rise to what Kant calls the charm of sense, is not
communicable. Two individuals might possess an equally developed and refined appreciation of the formal relations in a
Bach fugue. But one of them prefers to hear a given fugue
played on the piano rather than on a harpsichord, whereas the
other prefers exactly the opposite. The timbre of a harpsichord and the timbre of a piano belong to the matter of the
music. For that reason, the extent to which one pleases more
than the other lies entirely within the domain of individual
preference. But the motivic, melodic, tonal, and structural elements belong to the form of the music. It is these formal relationships that stimulate the free play of the cognitive faculties
and thereby allow for universal communicability.
Formal relations are best apprehended at a distance. We
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can experience little in the way of formal relations through
the sense of touch, and only a little more through the sense
of taste and the sense of smell. Our sense of smell, unlike our
senses of touch and taste, can, of course, apprehend things at
a distance. If it were more developed in us humans we might
be able to smell formal relationships. But as it is, we cannot
do so, certainly not as readily as we can through sight and
hearing. It should not be surprising, then, that we rarely if
ever speak of a tactile sensation, however pleasant it may be,
as beautiful, and the same is true of an excellent meal or a
fine wine. We might say that the layout of a meal is beautiful,
or that the color of a wine is beautiful. But on tasting these
things we do not say, “What a beautiful flavor!” We say instead, “What a delightful flavor!” and maybe even “What a
lovely flavor!” Someone might decide to say “What a beautiful flavor!” just to show that it is possible to do so. But this
is not how we typically speak, however pleasant we may find
tactile, gustatory, and olfactory sensations. The reason seems
to be—and this is what Plato caught sight of—that any formal
relations we might apprehend through touch, taste, and smell
are almost infinitely vague in comparison to what we can
hear in a piece of music or see in a painting, to say nothing
of what we can apprehend in a work of literature.15
There is a further sign that Plato and Kant are right in
their agreement that the beautiful pleases through sight and
hearing uniquely. In the case of touch, taste, and smell, the
pleasure is felt right on the skin, and right on the gustatory
and olfactory organs. One feels a pleasure in or on the organs
of sensation, granted that it can also be quickly suffused
throughout one’s body as a whole. This is not the case regarding the pleasures associated with sight and hearing. On looking at a beautiful painting one does not experience a pleasing
sensation on the eyeball. Nor on hearing a beautiful piece of
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music does one experience a pleasing sensation in the ear.
Regarding music in particular, we can enjoy it up to a
point just by remembering it. A talented and well trained musician can imagine and delight in music he has never heard
before just by reading through a score as though it were a
book. Beethoven composed his greatest works when he was
stone deaf. Schubert did not live to hear a single one of his
symphonies performed. Brahms is reported to have said,
partly in jest but not entirely so, that when he wanted to hear
a really fine performance of the Marriage of Figaro he would
light up a cigar and stretch out on his couch. Many composers
refuse to compose at the piano. They want their compositions
to originate in the imagination, not in their fingers, not even
in their ears.
The distance that separates what is visible and audible
from our eyes and ears enables us to apprehend the visible
and the audible with a measure of detachment. To be sure, a
light can be so bright that it causes a pain in one’s eyes, and
a sound can be so loud that it makes one’s ears hurt. But,
again, the intensity of a light or a sound pertains to sensory
matter, not to form. Form, as such, causes no pain in the sensory organs, and the pleasure it gives rise to does not occur
there but somewhere else. It occurs in the mind.
Kant argues that the satisfaction associated with the experience of the purely beautiful is disinterested. He has been
famously taken to task on this point by Nietzsche.16 If Nietzsche
read the Critique of Judgment, he did not possess the patience
to read it carefully; for Kant very early in that work explicitly
says that “a judgment about beauty, in which the least interest
mingles, is quite partial and no pure judgment of taste.”17 A
judgment of taste can indeed be interested, but to that extent
it cannot be a pure judgment of taste. The judgment of a beautiful human form, for example, is an aesthetic judgment, but
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it is not entirely disinterested. Kant recognizes this, though
Nietzsche seems to think it undercuts Kant’s thesis. Even
when the beautiful is combined with the good, it cannot, according to Kant, be the object of a pure judgment of taste;
and the same is true of what he calls “the ideal of beauty.”18
In Plato’s Symposium Socrates relates Diotima’s saying
dictum that “eros is not of the beautiful. . . . It is of engendering and bringing to birth in the beautiful.”19 However we are
to understand this, Plato seems to recognize, as Kant does,
that eros, being about as interested as interested can be, for
that very reason cannot have the beautiful, simply, as its real
object. The antecedent disinterested contemplation of the
beautiful may well give rise to a consequent interest in, even
a desire for, a certain non-contemplative relation of oneself
to the beautiful, a relation of engendering and bringing to
birth in it. Still, what eros is of is not the beautiful. Instead,
Diotima says, “eros is of the good’s being one’s own always.”
Diotima seems to be saying that, though the good can be
one’s own, the aesthetically beautiful cannot be one’s own.
The delight you take in contemplating the beautiful object in
no way detracts from the delight I take in it. Quite the opposite. Your delight enhances my delight.
The experience of pure beauty gives rise to a disinterested
satisfaction not simply because beautiful sights and sounds,
unlike pleasant tactile sensations, flavors, and odors, are mediated by distance, but because they are thereby also mediated by judgment. The satisfaction bound up with the merely
pleasant, on the other hand, is immediate. No act of judgment
is needed to enjoy the pleasing sensation of a cool breeze on
a hot day. An irrational animal can enjoy tactile sensations as
easily as a human being can. When we call a flower “beautiful,” we do so because of how it looks, not because of how it
smells. After all, one can, and often does, call a flower beau-
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tiful without ever smelling it. One does not, however, call a
flower beautiful without seeing it, however pleasant may be
the scent that comes wafting through the window. The assessment of how a flower looks, of how it is shaped and articulated, is made in an act of reflective judgment, which occurs
so naturally and rapidly that we rarely realize that we are even
making a judgment.
Because the pleasure we take in a beautiful object is consequent to and founded on the judgment that the object is
beautiful, this pleasure bears an analogy to, without being
simply identical with, the pleasure we take in contemplating
moral nobility. As Kant argues, we do not do what is morally
right because of the pleasure that doing so gives rise to. For
we would not experience any pleasure in doing what is
morally right unless we thought that acting this way was good
in itself, regardless of whether it gave rise to more pleasure
than pain or the reverse. Any reduction of moral nobility to
pleasure seeking is as morally obtuse as a reduction of the
admiration of moral nobility to pleasure seeking.20
The remarkable affinity between the pleasure taken in the
beautiful and the pleasure taken in the morally good leads
Kant to speak of beauty as the symbol of the morally good.
Aesthetic education, though by no means a substitute for
moral education, can nonetheless facilitate moral education.
The cultivation of taste elevates one above enjoyment of the
coarser and more immediate pleasures to those refined pleasures that are mediated by judgment. The pleasure that one
takes in contemplating the aesthetically beautiful is then analogous to the pleasure that one takes in contemplating exemplars of moral nobility, and to the pleasure that one can also
take in establishing a measure of integrity in one’s own character. Kant says:
Taste makes possible, without too violent a leap,
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the transition (as it were) from the charm of sense
to habitual moral interest, because it represents the
imagination in its freedom as purposively determinable for the understanding, and so teaches us
to find even in objects of sense a free satisfaction
apart from any charm of sense.21
Thomas McDonald puts this matter well when he speaks
of a teleological function of aesthetic education. It is conducive to developing “a susceptibility to rational determination immanently, working from within and from beneath,
[such] that one’s practical moral determinations not always
be imposed from without or from above.”22 That there is but
one Greek word, kalon, for both the aesthetically beautiful
and the morally noble is not a linguistic accident.23
To return briefly to the Hippias Major, that to kalon
pleases through sight and/or hearing holds true of the morally
noble as well as of the aesthetically beautiful. Moral nobility
can be seen in an act and heard in a speech. Obviously it cannot be touched, tasted, or smelled. Now, Socrates sees that
this formulation, though true and highly significant, describes
a beautiful object only in terms of its effect. He is interested,
however, in more than the effect that the beautiful object has
on the subject. He is also interested in what causes the beautiful object to be beautiful. If we say that the cause of the
beautiful object is itself the beautiful—a possibility that
Socrates briefly entertains—then we are not saying very
much: the beautiful is the cause of the beautiful; cause and
effect are the same. And yet if the cause and the effect are
different, but both are somehow beautiful, we find ourselves
confronted with the so-called “third man” problem: there
must be some third “beautiful” in which the beautiful as cause
and the beautiful as effect both participate; and then some
fourth “beautiful” in which all three participate; and so on ad
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infinitum. The question of what causes an object to be beautiful is a real question. Socrates does not answer it.
Kant, however, does answer this question. The cause of
the beautiful in art—we are not speaking now of the beautiful
in nature—is genius. Kant does not use this word the way we
do. For him it does not necessarily denote someone with an
exceptionally high intelligence, as intelligence is commonly
understood. Newton, he says, is not a genius, and Kant would
certainly not call himself one. Genius names a kind of mysterious spirit that is at work within the artist, assuming that
he is a great artist.24 According to Kant, only an artist can
possesses genius. Newton notoriously moves from one assertion to another without supplying the intervening steps that
logically connect the one with the other. But Newton can fill
these steps in. With much more labor than it cost him we can
fill them in as well. Newton can justify each step in his
demonstrations. If we understand his demonstrations we can
do the same.
Kant maintains that the case is different with the artist
and his art. Mozart, for example, cannot explain why the interval of a sixth at just this point in a melody is exactly the
right interval, and not, say, a fourth. Michelangelo cannot explain how he visualized a captive within an uncut block of
stone, or why he decided to paint the newly created Adam
just as he painted him. The great artist must of course possess
a communicable knowledge of the elements of his craft. And
these elements are teachable. Mozart could teach counterpoint, and Michelangelo could teach the techniques of sculpture and of representing perspective in two dimensions. But
Mozart could not teach anyone, no matter how technically
proficient he was at mastering the rules of counterpoint and
harmony, how to write a “Jupiter Symphony,” or even a comparatively simple but beautiful melody like “La ci darem la
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mano” from Don Giovanni, or the even simpler but equally
beautiful melody from The Magic Flute, “Drei Knäbchen,
jung, schön, hold, und weise.” (The latter melody, in B-flat
major, begins implausibly with five F’s in a row followed by
five D’s in row, and then three B-flats in a row—and yet, for
all its simplicity, I daresay there is nothing more beautiful in
opera.) Similarly, Michelangelo could not teach anyone how
to sculpt a masterpiece comparable to his “David.”
Kant says that to the extent that an artist is animated by
genius he cannot articulate the rules by which he produces
his works of art.25 Genius presupposes technique, but it is not
identical with technique. Genius is an altogether mysterious
force that even the artist cannot account for. Brahms once
said that when he was a young man melodies came to him
while he was polishing his shoes.
This attitude of the artist toward the sources of his inspiration is a familiar one and millennia old. An unnamed goddess is invoked in the third word of the Iliad; an unnamed
muse is invoked in the fourth word of the Odyssey. In Plato’s
Ion, Socrates makes a number of comic observations about
the pretentions of rhapsodes, poets, and soothsayers. While
we are laughing at them, however, we should not overlook a
remarkable observation he also makes that is not so comic:
A great indication [that the god is speaking
through these people] is Tynnichos the Chalcidean, who never made any poem whatsoever
that would be worthy of remembering, but then
[made] the paean that everyone sings, just about
the most beautiful of all lyric poems, simply (or
artlessly—atechnōs) as he himself says, “a discovery of the muses.”26
How did Tynnichos manage to do this? Socrates does not
say. One might say that Tynnichos was visited by genius. If
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so, it was a brief visit. Beethoven, who was in a position to
know, held that genius is always prolific. Beethoven may
have had Bach in mind. He once said, “Bach ought not to be
called Bach (German for “brook”) but Meer (German for
“ocean”).
What is the ultimate source of the beautiful in art? The
twentieth-century German philosopher Max Scheler gave a
blunt and characteristically provocative answer to this question. “The artist is merely the mother of the work of art. God
is the father.”27 So direct a theological answer to this question
is not the only one. Leo Strauss, hardly an unqualified admirer of the fine arts as distinct from the liberal arts, and
highly suspicious of aesthetics, writes in a letter, “[O]nly the
moderns are so crazy [as] to believe that ‘creation’ of a ‘work
of art’ is more worthy of wonder and more mysterious than
the reproduction of a dog: just look at a mother dog with her
puppies . . . .” It is not clear what crazy moderns Strauss has
in mind. Kant, for one, would grant that nature, prodigal in
its production of the beautiful and sublime, is more worthy
of wonder than any work of art. But also worthy of wonder
is the process of artistic production. Strauss recognizes this,
and continues his sentence as follows: “. . . and the force, by
means of which Shakespeare conceived, felt, and wrote
Henry IV, is not Shakespeare’s work, but [is] greater than any
work of any man.”28
Kant is not averse to a theological account of artistic genius, but he is determined, as always, to keep theology at
arms length until compelled by his argument to bring it into
the picture. He entertains the possibility that what is at work
in genius is nature. “Genius is the innate talent of the mind
(ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art.”29 A
bit later Kant says:
In science . . . the greatest discoverer differs only
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in degree from his laborious imitator and apprentice, but he differs specifically from him whom
nature has endowed for beautiful art. . . . The artist
is favored by nature. . . . [Artistic] aptitude (Geschicklichkeit) cannot be communicated; rather, it
is imparted to every [artist] immediately by the
hand of nature; and so it dies with him, until nature endows another in the same way, who needs
nothing more than an example to let the talent of
which he is conscious work in a similar way.30
The way nature works is mysterious. After Mozart died a
lot of attention was directed toward turning his son into “another Mozart.” It did not work. The boy had a very good ear,
and he was taught the nuts and bolts of composition, but he
lacked genius. He was not one of nature’s favorites.
In the above passage Kant indicates that artistic activity,
which cannot be reproduced, can be a way in which artistic
activity gets, not exactly reproduced but further produced,
assuming that talent is present and technique has been mastered. The artwork of an earlier artist can serve as an example
to a later one—not to be copied of course, but to be emulated.
Beethoven’s great piano concertos are not copies of Mozart’s,
not even structurally. But they were in large measure inspired
by Mozart’s concertos. Artistic inspiration is, to be sure, occasioned not only by examples of artistic masterworks.
Beethoven wrote the “Molto Adagio” of his E minor string
quartet under the direct inspiration of the night sky.
The literary critic Eric Heller reports that the great physicist Werner Heisenberg was once speaking with a small group
of English research students on the difference between humanistic studies and scientific pursuits. A grand piano was in
the room, and after the discussion Heisenberg, who was a
highly accomplished pianist, improvised on it a bit. He then
played, beautifully, a Beethoven sonata. When Heisenberg
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finished, he said to those present, “If I had never lived, someone else would have discovered the Uncertainty Principle.
For this was the solution of a problem that had emerged from
the logical development of physics and had to be solved in
this and no other way. But if there had never been a
Beethoven, this sonata would not have been composed.”31
Kant’s claim that genius is an endowment of nature is
problematic. He labored at length to ground and validate the
post-Aristotelian, non-teleological, mathematico-mechanical
concept of nature in his first Critique and in the Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science. Kant construes nature in
these works as simply the complex of phenomena standing
under architectonic laws prescribed to it a priori by the human
understanding. It is hard to see how nature, so construed,
could be the source of anything so inscrutable as artistic genius. The post-Kantian rise of a putatively non-teleological
biology has the effect of making genius all the more inscrutable. One might say that the force that produced, say,
Schubert’s final piano sonatas, his Ninth Symphony, his
Grand Duo for four hands, and his great string quintet (the
last three works all composed in C major, incidentally) was
just a rare and transient anomaly, like a black swan. But this
claim does not adequately account for the taste by which we
are able to appreciate these works, and this taste is not anomalous at all. It is not easy to see how taste for beauty, or even
the capacity for such taste, could have gotten naturally selected for enhancing the survival prospects of the human
species. For, again, the satisfaction bound up with our experience of the beautiful is the effect of a disinterested judgment. The cognitive faculties that are set in free play by the
presence of the beautiful can certainly be placed in the service
of our biological needs. But does their free play serve these
needs? It is one thing to assert that it does. It is something
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else to make sense of this assertion. The nature that gives rise
to genius can hardly be the nature of modern natural science.
It is something whose inner workings in the case of genius
are essentially veiled from view—from the view of the scientist and from the view of the artist as well.
The activity of artistic genius is as mysterious as its ultimate source. Kant understands this activity to be one that is
productive of what he calls, almost paradoxically, “aesthetic
ideas”:
[B]y an aesthetic idea I understand that presentation (Vorstellung) of the imagination that occasions much thinking, yet without any definite
thought, i.e., any concept, being adequate to it, a
presentation that speech, consequently, cannot
completely compass and make intelligible.32
In spite of the last clause, Kant understands poetry to be
the art form that is most impressive in its production of aesthetic ideas. Intelligibility, according to Kant, is constituted
through the understanding’s imposition of concepts on intuitions that have previously been synthesized by the imagination.33 This activity of our understanding is highly selective.
Only a portion of what the imagination has previously synthesized in intuition gets attended to. For us to understand
something, much of the material that the imagination synthesizes has to be passed over and disregarded. It suffices to
think of the controlled experiment, in which the scientist deliberately attempts to eliminate everything from consideration
that is extraneous to the experiment itself.
In the case of writing poetry, something quite different
happens. Kant says that there the imagination “is free to furnish unsought, over and above . . . agreement with the concept, extensive undeveloped material for the understanding,
material which the understanding did not take into consider-
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ation in its concept.”34 Though this activity of the imagination
is not in the service of the understanding’s constitution of an
object, and hence not in the service of acquiring knowledge,
it is still, as Kant says in the preceding quotation, “for the understanding.” In the first place, this activity “quickens the
cognitive powers.” That’s the element of free play, assuming
genius in the artist and a cultivated taste in his audience. But
in the second place, this activity, in the case of poetry especially, provides a kind of “nourishment” for the understanding. “[T]hrough his imagination [the genius] gives life to his
concepts.”35 Let us consider a few lines of poetry to see how
imagination furnishes material for the understanding that is
deliberately ignored by the understanding in its purely cognitive endeavors and typically overlooked in ordinary experience by those of us who are not geniuses.
The rejected lover says, in a poem by Fulke Greville:
Cynthia who did naked lie
Runs away like silver streams;
Leaving hollow banks behind,
Who can neither forward move,
Nor if rivers be unkind,
Turn away or leave to love.36
Banks of a river exposed by receding water are gray,
grassless, and pitted. Warped roots of nearby trees protrude
at random. They are desolate, and anyone can see this. But
to connect this sight with the condition of a lover who has
been abandoned and can neither follow his love nor cease
loving her is the work of genius. It is the production of aesthetic ideas.
Frederick Goddard Tuckerman attends to the phenomena
of nature with all his senses, though he finds little consolation
for grief even in its splendors:
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But not for him those golden calms succeed
Who while the day is high and glory reigns
Sees it go by, as the dim pampas plain,
Hoary with salt and gray with bitter weed,
Sees the vault blacken, feels the dark wind strain,
Hears the dry thunder roll, and knows no rain.37
Thomas Hardy, with a sensibility as cultivated as Greville’s and Tuckerman’s to “undeveloped material normally
passed over,” writes of how others may remember him after
he has died:
If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink,
The dew-fall hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
“To him this must have been a familiar sight.”38
We are accustomed to speak of such things as Hardy’s
“dew-fall hawk” and “wind-warped upland thorn” as poetic
images. But this is an imprecise way of speaking, for they are
not images of anything else. They are the bird and the branch,
not visibly present in this room to be sure, but surely, in their
own way, present in the poem.
In these passages we can see how the imagination provides the understanding with material for, as Kant puts it,
“much thought”—not the kind of thought that is at work in
scientific research and philosophical enquiry, but thought directed to features of human experience in which we take an
interest as mortal beings and not as minds only. Kant understands the taste for beauty to be something unique to man, to
a finite but nonetheless rational being, an animal possessing
both sense organs and intellect.
Beauty is a sensible phenomenon. It is a spatial or temporal phenomenon, or both spatial and temporal. It is for this
reason that, for Kant, the term “aesthetic” can designate fea-
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tures or statements regarding the beautiful and sublime as
well as space and time themselves. In fact, the different art
forms can be ordered in terms of how they work with space
and time. Painting is the most spatial and least temporal of
the arts. A painting can be seen all at once, assuming that it
is not excessively large or curved like a cyclorama. The time
involved in the apprehension of its composition is minimal.
In the case of sculpture more time is required, for one must
move around it to take all of it in. In the case of architecture,
yet more time is required, not only because buildings are
larger than statues, but also because one must enter them as
well as walk around them. In the case of dance we observe
spatial figures themselves move through time. This is true of
theater and also of film, where we must also apprehend
speech. Speech fills time and takes time to understand. In poetry and literature in general the spatial relations referred to
occur only in the imagination of the reader.39 Music is at the
opposite end of the scale from painting. Spatial relations are
absent, though they can be imagined. The formal relations in
music are temporal. And all these different forms can be combined, most comprehensively in opera. Wagner intended his
gigantic music dramas to be unities of all the art forms.
The various art forms can, of course, make man himself
their theme. Kant speaks of the possibility of representing
man at his height in a section of the Critique of Judgment entitled the “The Ideal of Beauty.” The following sentence from
the Critique of Practical Reason can serve as an introduction
to it. There Kant says:
The [moral] law should obtain for the world of
sense, as a sensible nature (as this concerns rational
beings), the form (Form) of an intelligible world,
i.e., the form of a supersensible nature, without
interrupting the mechanism of the former.”40
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It is our consciousness of the moral law that causes us to
regard other human beings to look like something more more
than obstacles to be gotten around or targets of sexual appetite, and causes them to manifest themselves not as things
at all but as persons. The very looks of the phenomenal order
are modified, indeed ennobled, by our consciousness of obligation. In the expression of the human being before us, in
the pressing out of his interior rationality and intrinsic worth
to the surface of his countenance, we behold an end-in-itself
that our consciousness of the moral law commands us not to
treat as a mere means to the attainment of our private ends.
In his treatment of the ideal of beauty in the Critique of
Judgment Kant makes two important distinctions. The first
is between idea and ideal. “Idea properly means a rational
concept [a concept of reason], and ideal the representation of
an individual being, regarded as adequate to that idea.”41
The distinction between idea and ideal is the fundamental distinction governing Hegel’s aesthetics. For Hegel
the idea is the whole dialectically interrelated system of
rational concepts, which he attempts to explicate in his
Science of Logic. According to Hegel, art attempts to make
the idea, which is truth in its purity, immediately present
to sensible intuition. The attempt is never fully successful,
for what it aims at is impossible. Art according to Hegel
necessarily falls short of philosophy. The ideal is for him
only an ideal. On the other hand it really is ideal. The ideal
would be (per impossibile) that the idea be intuitively
present, right there in front of us, rather than accessible
solely through discursive, laborious, and largely abstract
thought, as Hegel argues it must be.
According to Kant, however, the great artist is more
successful at presenting the ideal than Hegel supposes.
The unconditioned, for Kant, is not so much a comprehen-
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sive system of speculative concepts as it is a practical law.
And it is possible to depict a human being as governing himself through this law. Kant makes a distinction not only between the idea and the ideal but also between the aesthetical
normal idea and the ideal. The aesthetic normal idea is the
visible archetype of the species, whether of man or of some
other species. It exhibits regularity and perfect fitness of form
to function, whether of man or animal. The ideal, on the other
hand, “makes the purposes of humanity, inasmuch as they
cannot be sensibly presented, the principle for judging of a
figure [Gestalt] through which, as their phenomenal effect,
those purposes are revealed [offenbaren].”42 According to
Kant, this ideal can be represented only in the human figure,
and it is an expression of the moral.
The visible expression of moral ideas that rule
men inwardly can, to be sure, be taken only from
experience; but to make their connection with all
that our reason unites with the morally good in the
idea of the highest purposiveness—goodness of
soul, purity, strength, peace, and so forth—visible
as it were in bodily expression (as the effect of
what is internal): all that requires a union of pure
ideas of reason with great imagination even in him
who wishes only to judge of it, still more in him
who wishes to present it.43
If we leave aside specifically religious art, with its own
complications and profundities, and limit our attention instead to secular art, two candidates for the ideal of beauty in
painting immediately suggest themselves. One is a portrait
by Rembrandt. But Rembrandt’s portraits, though in the
finest instances surely representing “moral ideas that rule
men inwardly,” do not take their departure from the normal
aesthetic normal idea. Quite the contrary, the individual in
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his individuality is represented—warts and all, as we say. His
face is not the ideal type of our species. A better candidate
for the ideal of beauty is Michelangelo’s sculpture of Lorenzo
de Medici, Il Penseroso (Fig. 1). This
sculpture does not represent the Duke of
Urbino as he really looked, and probably
does not even try to represent him as he
really was. The task of making a statue of
Lorenzo for the de Medici tomb seems to
have served as the occasion for Michelangelo to present, on the foundation of the
normal aesthetic normal idea but rising
Fig. 1:
above it, the ideal of the beautiful as the
Michelangelo,
visible expression of “all that our reason
Il Pensoroso
unites with the morally good in the idea of the highest purposiveness.”
The interest, essentially practical, that we take in the ideal
of the beauty as Kant understands it, that is, as the visible expression of moral nobility, keeps the judgment pertaining to
this ideal from being a purely aesthetic judgment. The same
can be said of the interest we take in beautiful poetry. Poetry,
however so beautiful it may be, to the extent that it treats of
human concerns, cannot be the object of an entirely disinterested satisfaction, and our judgment of it is not a pure judgment of taste. And yet Kant ranks poetry as the highest of the
arts. And so we are led to an unexpected conclusion: loftiness
of beauty and purity of beauty are not identical.
Although the primary focus on of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment is on the beautiful, its secondary focus is on
the sublime. Kant thinks that the beautiful exists not only in
art, but in nature as well, in flowers, gardens, landscapes, and,
of course, in the human figure. Though what Kant has to say
about natural beauty is intriguing, we have restricted our at-
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tention to what he has to say about beautiful art because of
its connection with genius and aesthetic ideas. We turn now
to his account of the sublime, for it too has a relation to the
moral, though one quite different from that of the beautiful
to the moral.
Whereas the beautiful is characterized by phenomenal form,
the sublime in nature is characterized by phenomenal formlessness. Kant divides the sublime into the mathematical sublime
and the dynamical sublime. The mathematical sublime appears
as vastness: a towering mountain, a view from its summit, the
ocean in a still calm, and, most strikingly of all, the celestial
vault on a clear night. The dynamical sublime appears as power:
a cataract of water, flashes of lightening, a violent hurricane,
the ocean in full tumult. We take a certain pleasure in beholding
such things, though only when we behold them from a safe vantage point. If they place us in imminent peril, we are too frightened to take pleasure in them. But why, even if we are not
threatened, do we take any pleasure in them at all?
Kant’s answer to this question is remarkable. The mathematical sublime requires us to recognize that our physical
being is, by comparison, infinitesimally small, and the dynamical sublime requires us to recognize that our physical
being is infinitesimally weak. But at the same time the sublime leads us to recognize that in our moral being we are elevated above the whole phenomenal order. For nothing, no
threat of extinction, not even extinction itself, could cause us
to freely betray our moral principles. Some force of nature,
even a drug, could wreak such havoc on our nervous system
as to impair or even destroy the rationality that is the origin
of our moral principles. But as long as we possess our rationality, and hence our will,44 no external force or threat of force
can compel us to abuse our freedom.
The sublime in art is similar to the sublime in nature. The
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sublime in art, however, cannot be
formless. For then it would not be
art at all, but a mess. In sublime
art, form is placed in the service of
representing vastness and power.
An example of the mathematical
sublime in art would be that part
of the façade of Saint Peter’s
Cathedral that was designed by
Michelangelo (Fig. 2).45 An example of the dynamical sublime in art
would be the first movement of
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, especially that point at which, the
Fig. 2: Michaelangelo,
development having been brought Façade of St. Peter’s Cathedral
to pitch of intensity, the hushed D
minor opening is recapitulated in a blazing and thundering D
major, but in first inversion with an F-sharp in the low bass,
as though the very cosmos were exploding, or fully displaying itself for the first time.
We said earlier that the satisfaction bound up with the
judgment of taste is, according to Kant, disinterested. It is to
that extent unlike both the satisfaction one takes in the merely
pleasant and the satisfaction one takes in morally good—as
different as these latter two satisfactions most definitely are
from each other. The beautiful pleases, but it is not the merely
pleasant. And, though the beautiful can serve as the symbol
of the morally good, it is not the morally good. Nor does a
cultivated taste imply moral nobility, though an aesthetic education can, as we noted, facilitate the task of a moral education.
Aristotle says that the beginning of philosophy is wonder, especially regarding the causes of things. But, he adds,
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we must end in the opposite and the better state, not with
wonder about the causes of things, but with knowledge of
the causes. Knowledge is better than wonder.46 And Aristotle
seems to think that we really can know something about ultimate causes, even if we know them, not as they are essentially and in themselves, but only as the ultimate cause or
causes of what we are familiar with, of what is close at hand,
of what is not first in itself but first for us.
Kant does not think that even this attenuated knowledge
of ultimate causes is available to us. Wonder is not only the
beginning of philosophy. It is itself a kind of end, an end not
replaced by knowledge. Wonder is present in our aesthetic
experience of the beautiful and the sublime, and in a different way it is present in our moral experience as well. Wonder
is bound up even with the longed for, indeed a priori assumed, discovery of special empirical laws of nature and
their interconnection, which is not accomplished by the
human understanding’s a priori prescription of architectonic
laws to a nature in general.47 Like aesthetic experience in
general, wonder is possible only for a finite though rational
being.
Kant speaks of the wonder that emerges from the accomplishment of reason, both speculative and practical, in an impressive passage that occurs near the end of the Critique of
Practical Reason. Part of the first sentence was inscribed on
his tombstone. It is well known and frequently quoted. But
the whole passage should be better known. If the ancient
philosopher Plato often seems to be the most poetic of
philosophers, the modern philosopher Kant often seems to
be the most prosaic. And yet the passage at the end of the
Critique of Practical Reason, which can serve as a conclusion to this introduction to aesthetics, shows that there was
more poetry in Kant’s soul than one might have guessed
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solely from working one’s way along the “thorny paths” of
the Critique of Pure Reason:
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe (Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht) the more often and more steadily reflection
occupies itself with them: the starry sky above me,
and the moral law within me. . . . The former begins at the place I occupy in the external world of
sense; and it broadens the connection in which I
stand into an unbounded magnitude of worlds beyond worlds and systems of systems and into the
limitless times of their periodic motion, their beginning and their continuance. The latter begins
at my invisible self, my personality and exhibits
me in a world that has true infinity, but which is
perceptible only to the understanding, a world in
which I recognize myself as existing in a universal
and necessary (and not only, as in the first case,
contingent) connection, but thereby also in connection with all those visible worlds. The former
view, of a numberless mass of worlds, annihilates,
as it were, my importance as an animal creature,
which must give back to the planet ([itself] a mere
speck in the universe) the matter from which it
came, the matter which is for a short time provided with vital force, we know not how. The latter, on the contrary, infinitely elevates my worth
as that of an intelligence through my personhood,
in which the moral law reveals a life independent
of all animality and even of the whole world of
sense—at least so far as it may be gathered from
the purposive destination assigned to my existence
through this law, a destination that is not restricted
to the conditions and limitations of this life but extends into the infinite.48
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NOTES
Leo Strauss, Letter of February 26, 1961 to Helmut Kuhn, in The Independent Journal of Philosophy 2:1978, 23.
2
Greater Hippias Major 286c5
3
282d6. Cf. fn. 1 in the Greater Hippias, translated by David Sweet in
The Roots of Political Philosophy, edited by Thomas Pangle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 307.
4
At 283a1 and a9.
1
Protagoras 314b10-c8; 337c7-338b2: “meta de ton Prodokon Hippias
ho sophos eipen” ff. Cf. fn. 17 of in Sweet’s translation of the Greater
Hippias, 307.
6
Symposium 177d79-810.
7
Greater Hippias Minor 293e5.
8
The later coinage of the term “aesthetics” emerges for a reason. There
is a special connection between aesthesis, the Greek word for “sensation,”
and beauty. The beautiful, and the sublime too, are present in sensory experience, even if something super-sensible shines through them. For this
reason the expressions “the aesthetically beautiful” and “the morally
noble” can both be used to translate the two distinct but related senses of
the expression to kalon.
9
294d1.
10
295c3 and; d9; 296e2. Note the introduction of power (or that which is
powerful, to dynaton) at 295e5, and the grouping of the helpful, the useful, and “the power to make something good” at 297d4.
5
Hippias Major 297e4-298a8.; Cf. Phaedrus 250d1-e1.
12
Greek Mathematics and the Origin of Algebra, translated by Eva Brann
(Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1968), 79-99.
13
Immanuel Kant, Werke in Zehn Bänden, hereafter Werke, edited by Wilhelm Weischedel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981),
Band 8, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 295-298. (English translation, Critique
of Judgment, translated by J. H. Bernard, (New York: Haffner Press,
1951), 51-54. Pagination for in this translation will hereafter be given immediately following the German pagination and separated from it by a
slash. I have made some alterations in the translation in the interest of
greater literalness.)
11
14
The concept beautiful is nonetheless predicated of the object; it is not
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predicated of the subject. But, for Kant, it is predicated of the object only
because of what it occasions in the subject. And yet the object would not
occasion this effect were it not, in itself so to speak, already characterized
by perfection of composition, simplicity of means and richness of effects,
radiance and mutual illumination of whole and parts or, in the language
of Thomas Aquinas, integritas, consonantia, and claritas (Summa Theologiae 1, Question 39, Article 8, corpus). Kant’s argument in the Critique
of Judgment does not presuppose the particulars of the case he makes for
the a priori constitution of nature via transcendental subjectivity in the
Critique of Pure Reason. On the contrary, beautiful objects, just like special empirical laws of nature, are not deducible from the architectonic
laws of a nature in general that he argues are prescribed to it a priori by
the human understanding. The exact source of the special laws of nature
as such is as mysterious as the exact source of beauty. It remains a problem that, though taken up again in the “Introduction” to the Critique of
Judgment, in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, and in
the Opus Postumum, is never fully solved by Kant. “For who can entirely
draw out from nature her secret?” Werke, Band 8, 316/70.
15
In the case of a really fine wine, one goes so far as to speak of structure,
balance, and bouquet, borrowing terms from architecture and floral
arrangements. Still, one does not call the taste of the wine, but only its
looks, beautiful. The same can be said of fine pipe tobacco. It may look
beautiful in the tin, but no one says that it tastes or smells beautiful.
Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, Section 6.
17
Werke, Band 8, 281/39.
18
Ibid., Werke, 311/66; 314/69. We shall consider the ideal of beauty
below.
16
Symposium 206e1-207a3.
Cf. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1953), 128.
19
20
Werke, Band 8, 462-463/200.
22
From “Thoughts on Kant,” a Friday-night lecture given at St. John’s
College, Annapolis, in the spring of 1979. This lecture, which Mr. McDonald delivered from notes, was recorded, and each library on the two
campuses of St. John’s has a compact disk of it. I listened to the lecture
more than once in gearing up to write the present essay, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in understanding Kant’s project
in its full scope.
21
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“Shakespeare wrote at a time when common sense still taught . . . that
the function of the great poet was to teach what is truly beautiful by means
of pleasure.” Allen Bloom and Harry Jaffa, Shakespeare’s Politics
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964), 6. Kant would say
that this formulation (whether or not it is what common sense taught in
Shakespeare’s time, which one can doubt) gets the relationship between
beauty and pleasure exactly backwards. The function of the great poet is
to teach what is truly pleasant by means of beauty, inasmuch as the truly
pleasant—more precisely what is pleasant to a rational animal as such—
presupposes the recognition that what is under consideration is aesthetically beautiful, or, for that matter, morally noble.
23
Werke, Band 8, 417-420/160-163. This spirit can be thought without
contradiction as being divine in origin.
24
Werke, Band 8, 406-410/151-153.
Ion 543d7-10.
27
Quoted by Gershom Scholem in “Revelation and Tradition as Religious
Categories” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism, (New York: Schocken
Books, 1971), 303.
28
Letter of August 20, 1946, to Karl Löwith. The force that Strauss speaks
of in this clause cannot be easily distinguished, in the case of the genius,
from the “creation” to which he refers, within quotation marks, in the preceding clause.
25
26
Werke, Band 8, 405-406/150.
30
Werke, Band 8, 408/152.
31
Eric Heller, “The Broken Tradition: An Address,” in The Age of Prose,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 31.
29
Werke, Band 8, 413-414/157.
“Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are
blind” (Critique of Pure Reason B 75, Werke, Band 3, 98). “An object is
that in whose concept the manifold of a given intuition is united” (ibid.,
B 137, Werke, Band 3, 139). “It is one and the same spontaneity, which
[in the synthesis of apprehension] under name of the imagination, and [in
the synthesis of apperception, under the name] of the understanding,
brings combination into the manifold of intuition” (ibid., B 162 note,
Werke, Band 3, 155).
34
Werke, Band 8, 417/160.
35
Werke, Band 8, 423/165-166.
32
33
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From Number 56 in “Caelica,” Selected Poems of Fulke Greville, edited
by Thom Gunn, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 85.
36
From Sonnet 5 of the First Series, 1854-1860, in The Complete Poems
of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, edited by N. Scott Momaday, (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 5.
37
From “Afterwards,” in The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, edited
by James Gibson, (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 553. Particularly fine
studies on the poetry of Greville, Tuckerman, and Hardy, among others,
can be found in Yvor Winter’s Forms of Discovery (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1967).
39
On the quite different, even opposed, ways in which great poetry and
great painting stimulate the imagination, see Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s
magnificent study, Laokoon; or, On the Limits of Painting and Poetry
(1766).
38
Werke, Band 6, 156.
41
Werke, Band 8, 314/69. Compare Critique of Pure Reason B 595-598.
For Kant, an aesthetic judgment in the strict sense is singular (Werke,
Band 8, 293-294/49-50). The individual per se is not the concern of science. (Cf. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 81b8: there is no scientific knowledge, no epistēmē, of singulars—though for a possible exception to this
general rule see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1, Question 1, Articles 2-8). But the individual per se is very much the concern of fine art.
One reason why Plato so frequently gets called a “poet” is that he presents
his teaching through the voices of flesh and blood individuals, Socrates
chief among them. Dostoyevsky goes somewhat further in this direction:
“[T]he image of the [Dostoyevskian] hero is inseparably linked with the
image of an idea and cannot be detached from it. We see the hero in the idea
and through the idea, and we see the idea in him and through him. . . . [W]hat
is important is not the ordinary qualifications of a person’s character or actions, but rather the index of a person’s devotion to an idea in the deepest
recesses of his personality.” Mikail Bakhtin, “The Idea in Dostoyevsky,”
in Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, (edited and translated by Caryl
Emerson in Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 8, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 87. Cf. infra, fn. 44.
40
Werke, Band 8, 315/70.
Werke, Band 8, 318/72.
44
“Everything in nature works according to laws. Only a rational being
has the capacity to act according to the idea (Vorstellung) of law, i.e., ac42
43
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37
cording to principles, [and so has] a will.” Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals in Werke, Band 6, 41.
45
See Ralph Lieberman, “Bramante and Michelangelo at St. Peter’s,” The
St. John’s Review 40.1 (1990-91), 1-38. Our Fig.2 is Fig. 37 in Lieberman’s article. He submits it in support of the following perspicuous observation: “Michelangelo’s predecessors at the church, even the most
gifted of them, could merely build big; he solved the problem of St.
Peter’s because he could think big” (35-37).
Metaphysics 982b11-21; 983a12-20. Cf. Plato, Theaetetus 155d1-8.
47
Critique of Pure Reason B 164-165; Critique of Judgment inerke, Band
8, 260- 267/17-25. Cf. fn. 14 supra.
46
48
Werke, Band 6, 300.
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38
Passion and Perception in
Mozart’s Magic Flute
Peter Kalkavage
Mozart leads us deep into the realm of spirits. Dread
lies all about us, but withholds its torments and becomes more an intimation of infinity.
—E. T. A. Hoffman on Mozart’s
Symphony No. 39
This essay is an excursion into the world of Mozart’s Magic
Flute. My focus will be the aria “Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd
schön,” “This image is enchantingly beautiful.” One of the
most exquisite love songs ever written, it occurs early in the
opera and is sung by Prince Tamino as he gazes upon a likeness of Pamina, daughter of the Queen of the Night and
Tamino’s destined Other.
Mozart’s final opera, written in the last year of his short
life, is a musical meditation on large themes: love, friendship,
marriage, the human and the divine, world-order, virtue and
vice, light and darkness, lust, resentment, vengeance, illusion
and disillusionment, hardship, despair, trials, death, and reconciliation—all this in the context of a bizarre fairy tale that
is by turns solemn, light-hearted, homiletic, dire, ceremonial,
and slapstick. The Magic Flute is a magical work that reflects
on magic, especially the magic that is music. It offers us a
perfect opportunity to examine the elements, principles, and
causes of musical phenomena in an admirably distilled and
lucid form.
Peter Kalkavage is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This essay
was first delivered as a lecture at Thomas Aquinas College on 11 November 2011.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | KALKAVAGE
39
The Magic Flute has been called Mozart’s “Masonic
opera,” and so it is. Mozart was a serious Freemason. So was
his librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, at whose Viennese theatre the work was first produced and who was the first to play
the birdman, Papageno. The opera—or rather Singspiel, “play
with songs”—is filled with the ideals, symbols, terms, rituals,
and numerology of Freemasonry.1 The Masonic Three is especially prominent: three flats in the key signature, Three
Ladies, Three Boys, Three temples, and, of course, three
tones in the major triad, which Mozart celebrates in the middle of the Overture and throughout the opera.2 The sovereign
Three is the major triad, which Mozart highlights in various
ways throughout the opera. I say all this now because the Masonic influence, though pervasive, will not be my concern. I
want to focus instead on the power—and, as I hope to show,
the wisdom—of Mozart’s music.
Part One: The Story
The plot of the Magic Flute is strange, to say the least, and
often confusing. Since it may be unfamiliar to some of you,
I will go through it briefly.
Our story begins with Prince Tamino, lost in the dark
wood of C minor and pursued by a giant serpent.3 He carries
a bow but no arrows. Three Ladies who work for the Queen
of the Night slay the serpent and give Tamino a portrait of
the Queen’s daughter, which causes the prince to fall in love
and to express his feeling in the aria we are about to examine.
By this time, he has heard Papageno sing his lusty birdcatcher song. The Queen majestically appears. She tells a sad
story about her daughter’s abduction by Sarastro, and sends
Tamino on a mission to rescue Pamina from this fiend.
Tamino is given a magic flute, and Papageno, now Tamino’s
sidekick, is given silver chimes. The flute inverts the dark
passions of its listeners: its magic turns sadness to smiles,
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cold-heartedness to love. Flute and chimes will protect the
two friends, who are also assigned guiding spirits: Three
Boys who are said to be “young, beautiful, gracious, and
wise.”
In the next scene, we meet Pamina. Her cruel treatment
at the hands of the slaves and the Moor Monostatos (“he who
stands alone”) suggests that Sarastro is indeed a villain and
tyrant. Papageno arrives ahead of Tamino. He and Pamina
become fast friends, as the birdman tells her about his longing
for a mate and the young prince who is on his way to rescue
her. The princess and the birdman sing a graceful 6/8 duet in
E-flat major. It is an ode to marriage. “Man and Woman,
Woman and Man,” they sing, “reach unto divinity.”
This brings us to the Finale of Act I. Having arrived at
the stronghold of Sarastro,Tamino enters the Temple of Wisdom and meets a priest, who tells him he will never achieve
the reward of love and virtue while he burns with death and
vengeance. The priest disabuses Tamino of his false opinion
about Sarastro, who rules in this Temple. Tamino is told that
many of his questions must for now remain unanswered. One
thing he does learn: Pamina is alive.
His spirits renewed, Tamino plays his flute, as wild animals gather and listen, their impulses tamed by the flute’s
warbling. Papageno and Pamina arrive, but before they find
Tamino, Monostatos and the slaves arrest them. Papageno
plays his silver chimes and, for the moment, charms his
would-be captors. Then Sarastro enters, as the chorus sings:
“Hail, Sarastro! He it is to whom we joyfully submit!” Pamina, resolved to tell the truth, confesses her guilt. She gives
Sarastro two reasons for her escape: the Moor’s lustful advances and the sweet sound of her mother’s name. Sarastro
cuts her off. Her mother is a proud woman, he says: a man
must guide Pamina’s heart. Monostatos drags in Tamino, and
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41
he and Pamina see each other in person for the first time.
Monostatos thinks he has earned a reward but is brutally disappointed. Sarastro sentences him to seventy-seven strokes
on the soles of his feet. As Monostatos is led off, the chorus
resumes its song of praise. Tamino and Papageno are then
taken to the Temple of Probation to be purified.
Act II begins with Sarastro’s prayer to Isis and Osiris. He
asks the deities to send the spirit of wisdom to the young couple, along with patience in the upcoming trials. If Tamino and
Pamina succeed, they will have proved themselves worthy of
one another and of acceptance into the priesthood. The male
hegemony will be transformed through marriage. It will incorporate Woman into the ruling class—a bold move on the
part of Mozart and Schikaneder, since women were not allowed to become full-fledged Freemasons.4
Tamino and Papageno go through the first trial together.
They resist the temptations of the Three Ladies, who now appear in their true, demonic form. Meanwhile, the Queen of
the Night comes to Pamina and is similarly unmasked. She
gives Pamina a dagger and commands her to murder Sarastro.5 “The vengeance of hell,” she sings, “boils in my heart.”
If Pamina refuses, her mother will cast her off forever. After
the Queen leaves, Monostatos enters. He has heard everything about the planned murder and blackmails Pamina, who
can save herself and her mother only by yielding to his lust.
When Pamina refuses, Monostatos says: “Then die!” As he
raises the dagger to kill her, Sarastro enters and holds him
back. He dismisses the Moor and reassures Pamina with an
aria that is warm, regal, and deep-sounding. Pamina need not
fear that Sarastro will take vengeance on her mother. In these
sacred halls, he says, vengeance is unknown, and the spirit
of friendship and forgiveness reigns supreme.
Tamino and Papageno must again endure a test: this time
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they must remain silent in the face of all temptation to speak.
Papageno has a comic interchange with an old woman who
brings him water. She is about to reveal her name when a
thunderclap calls her away. The Three Boys come on the
scene and hand Tamino and Papageno their instruments. The
flute attracts Pamina, who arrives to find her beloved sad and
silent. She takes this as a sign that Tamino no longer loves
her. She sings of her despair in a deeply tragic aria, which
sadly mimics the lilting 6/8 rhythm of Pamina’s marriage
duet with Papageno.6
Sarastro tells Tamino that two “dangerous trials” remain.
Pamina is summoned, only to be separated from Tamino, who
goes off to face the test alone. Meanwhile, the old woman returns to Papageno and gets him to promise marriage, at which
point she is magically transformed into Papagena—a female
Papageno! But when Papageno tries to embrace her, she is
led away by an official who tells her that Papageno is not yet
worthy of her. Papageno and Pamina are now paired once
again, but in contrast to their duet, in which they sang joyfully
about the blessings of marriage, this time they sing separately
about their loneliness and despair. Both attempt suicide, but
they are stopped by the Three Boys, who rekindle Pamina’s
hope by informing her that Tamino is waiting for her.
Tamino prepares for his first dangerous trial, thinking that
he must go it alone. He hears Pamina’s voice. “Tamino, stop,”
she calls, “I must see you!” The two Men in Armour—who
gravely warn Tamino about the need to be purified by the
four elements, and to conquer the fear of death—switch to a
jolly tune once Pamina shows up. They tell the pair to enter
the Temple hand in hand. Pamina vows never to leave
Tamino’s side and to face whatever hardships come their way.
“I myself will lead you,” she says, “love will guide me.” She
urges Tamino to play his flute, so that by the power of music
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43
they may “walk joyfully through death’s dark night.”7 After
they endure the tests of fire and water, the chorus greets them
with a song of triumph.
The scene shifts to Papageno. After preventing his suicide, the Three Boys remind Papageno about his magic
chimes. The chimes play, and Papagena appears. The pair
sing a courtship duet suited to their birdy nature. They take
turns repeating the opening syllable of their names—“Pa, pa,
pa”—in a musicalized rendition of panting. They sing about
all the offspring they plan to have.
But a menace looms. Monostatos, the Queen, and the
Three Ladies march on the temple, supported by a threatening
accompaniment in the key of C minor. Thunder and lightning
defeat them, and they are plunged into “eternal night.” The
scene then shifts to the Temple of the Sun, as Sarastro stands
on high, and Tamino and Pamina appear dressed in priestly
vestments. “The sun’s rays,” he says, “drive away the night,
destroy the stolen power of the hypocrites.” At the end, a jubilant chorus hails the two initiates and offers thanks to Isis
and Osiris. “Strength,” they sing, “conquers and crowns, as
a reward, beauty and wisdom with an eternal crown.”
Part Two: The Unfolding of a Song
We love music because of how it makes us feel. We listen to
some works more than others because we want to experience,
again and again, the feelings they stir in us. But feeling is not
primary in music, nor is it always the reason why we listen.
Sometimes we listen to a piece of music because we wish to
hear a quality or perfection that is present in it. The reason
for listening is an active, even strenuous, contemplation
through which we participate in, and unite with, the life and
shape of the musical object—not the emotion the object
arouses.8 Our feelings, in any case, are grounded in, and
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
prompted by, what we perceive in the tones; they are rooted
in what is there in the phenomenon we call music. As we now
turn to Tamino’s aria, I shall make the attempt to say what is
there.
Tamino’s aria is inspired, as we know, by an image of
Pamina, or, as we might call it, given Tamino’s fervent devotional response, an icon. The image is said to be magical,
but it surely needs no magic beyond Pamina’s likeness to enchant the young prince, who sings as if caught up in a dream.
The words to his song are as follows:
This image is enchantingly beautiful,
such as no eye has ever seen!
I feel it, how this divine portrait
Fills my heart with new emotions.
I cannot name this,
yet I feel it here burning like fire;
Could the feeling be love?
Yes, yes, it is love alone!
O, if only I could find her!
O, if she were standing before me!
I would, warm and pure . . . what would I?
Enraptured I would press her to this burning breast,
And forever would she be mine.
Tamino’s words trace out a progression in three stages: first,
he admires a divine image; second, he asks whether the feeling it inspires in him, and which at first he cannot name, is
love, but then affirms that it must be love; and third, he wonders what he would do if the beloved were standing before
him, concluding that he would press her to his breast, and she
would be his forever.
Tamino is doing more in this song than expressing his
feelings. He beholds his inner state and makes it an object of
reflection. He wonders at the power of the magical object that
he perceives and his passionate response to it. He does not
immediately identify his new emotion with love but rather
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | KALKAVAGE
45
reaches that conclusion through inner dialogue and questioning. Mozart’s music perfectly expresses the stages of Tamino’s
response, the meaning of his words, and the motions of his
soul.
The music that accompanies these words is one of
Mozart’s greatest love songs. Young listeners are sometimes
put off by the aria, as if embarrassed by Tamino’s heart-onthe-sleeve outpouring of feeling. It is easy to be condescending toward Tamino, who is young, naïve, and not very bright.
He lacks irony.9 His aria, nevertheless, towers above immature judgment and puts it to shame. As a musical object, a
work of art, the song is gorgeous, brilliant in its shadow play,
and deep. It is also truthful—a faithful rendering of the
human soul in one of its most profound shapes. Do we want
to know what it is like for a young, noble soul to experience
romantic love for the first time? If so, then we should immerse ourselves in the aria—in what tones can tell us about
love.
My musical starting-point is the observation that “Dies
Bildnis” is a precisely formed, perfectly balanced whole.
Tamino is agitated and confused. But his music, though passionate, is restrained, stately, and inward-sounding.10 It expresses his awareness, not just his feeling. The music critic
and writer of tales E. T. A. Hoffmann once said that Haydn,
Mozart, and Beethoven all had the musical virtue of “Besonnenheit.”11 The word means something like rational awareness, sensibleness, being in one’s right mind. Tamino’s aria,
with its beautiful melding of feeling and form, passion and
restraint, is a superb example of this virtue.12
The song is in E-flat major—the solemn, heroic key of
the opera—and has a moderately slow, two-beat measure. It
is scored for strings, clarinets, bassoons, and French horns
(no flutes or oboes). Their sound is like a warm glow ema-
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nating from Tamino’s heart. The aria is in a truncated version
of sonata form. It follows the usual tripartite structure of the
sonata—exposition, development, and recapitulation—inasmuch as its key-area plan goes from tonic to dominant and
then back to the tonic; but there is no repeat of the opening
theme as is customary in the sonata. Unlike song-form, which
is also tripartite, the sonata emphasizes the progressive, forward-moving unfolding of musical ideas. Circularity is
achieved, but only at the end. Along the way, the tones move
in a linear, arrow-like trajectory.13
The opening sound: a tender statement of the E-flat major
triad spelled out in dotted rhythms and played by the strings.
Clearly, the singer we are about to hear—unlike Papageno,
with his bouncy bird-catcher song—is noble. Tamino’s first
utterance is a leap on the words “Dies Bildnis,” “This
image”—a rising major sixth from scale degree 5 up to scale
degree 3 (B-flat up to G). This tonal leap expresses an event
in Tamino’s soul, the passionate wonder inspired by Pamina’s
likeness.14 When his sentence is spoken in German, the accent
is on “schön,” “beautiful”—“Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd
schön.” Mozart’s melody shifts the accent to “Bildnis,”
“image,” leaving no doubt that for Tamino the focus is on
what he sees, on the source and cause of his surging passion.15
After the inspired leap from 5 to 3, the melody gently descends by steps, pausing on degree 4 (A-flat), an unstable degree that tends downward toward 3. The musical phrase
corresponds to the first phrase of the sentence: “This image
is enchantingly beautiful.” As Tamino moves to the second
part of his sentence—“as no eye has ever seen”—he sings a
second rising sixth—from 4 up to 2, A-flat to F. He then descends by steps to 3, the tone to which his earlier 4 was pointing. Whereas the first phrase landed on a tone that was
unstable and “wanted” to move, the second complements the
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first and brings it to rest. The two phrases, thanks to the postponement of the move from 4 to 3, form a single phrase—
not two sets of tones but one coherent movement composed
of two sub-movements.16 The entire phrase is bounded by an
octave that extends from the high 3, to which Tamino leaps,
to the low 3, to which he descends by step.
Mozart’s musical language is that of tonal harmony. This
means that the music is firmly grounded in a tonal center, the
tone to which all the other tones point, and has a background
or underpinning in the movement of what we call “chords.”
We can say that this movement is an accompaniment to the
melody, but it is more precise to say that the harmony is the
structured movement that interprets the melody and reveals
its depth.17 Harmony is present in the two-part phrase we have
just examined. The harmonic movement is from the I chord,
or tonic, to the V7 chord, or dominant seventh, and back again
to I—a musical oscillation. This works because the instability
and tension of the V7 chord has a precise direction: it points
unambiguously to the I chord, in this case the E-flat major
triad. And so, we can regard Mozart’s opening two-part
phrase as the cooperation of melody and harmony, or rather
as the unity of two simultaneous kinds of tension that beget
movement: the melodic tension of individual tones and the
harmonic tension of chords. It is possible to argue that these
directed tensions and their various relations to one another
are the primary object of musical perception, that to listen to
music, at least in the tradition of tonal harmony, is to perceive
not pitches per se but forces—dynamic qualities that manifest themselves in and through pitches and hold the piece
together.18
After the opening phrase, which goes harmonically from
I to V and back again, the tones open up and move forward.
This effect is due largely to the harmony, which, having so
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far confined itself to I-V7-I, now moves to the IV chord, or
subdominant, a chord that signals the “away” move in a tonal
journey, as well as a certain leisureliness and lessening of harmonic tension. Tamino moves from the picture to his inner
state: “I feel it, I feel it, how this divine portrait fills my heart
with new emotions.” As he says “I feel it, I feel it,” he sings
appoggiaturas on “feel”—B-natural to C, then A-natural to
B-flat. Appoggiaturas are leaning tones, unstable tones on
strong beats, which briefly delay the arrival of a main tone
in the melody. The effect is an increased expressivity, an inflection perfectly suited to Tamino’s word “feel.” The accompaniment echoes the heartfelt leaning tones: as Tamino leans
into his feeling, the entire string section leans as though in
sympathy with him.
Right after his appoggiaturas, Tamino speaks of his heart,
“Herz,” and the new emotions that have been aroused in it.
He expresses an outburst on “Götterbild,” “divine portrait,”
with a second dramatic leap, this time from B-flat up to Aflat, the highest tone of his song. The interval, a minor seventh, is an even bigger leap than his opening sixth. The
melody here outlines part of the V7 or dominant-seventh
chord. The music does not resolve this tense chord, which
points to the tonic, but rather stresses it and lingers on it.
When the tonic chord finally arrives, it is not the end of
the previous phrase but the beginning of a new one. Now past
his initial outburst, Tamino retreats to a calmer, more inward
mood as he completes his sentence: “fills my heart with new
emotions.” The accompaniment is measured and lovely, like
the gentle strumming of a guitar: bass note, chord / bass note,
chord. The harmony takes us on a little musical journey, as
the melody above begins and ends on scale degree 1, that is,
E-flat. The sequence of chords here—I6, IV, I6/4, V7—arouses
the expectation that the tense V7chord will resolve to the
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tonic, which would fit with the E-flat, or scale degree 1, in
the melody. But this does not happen. When Tamino sings
his E-flat on “füllt,” “fills” (which in German closely resembles “fühlt,” “feels”), the harmony subverts the expected closure. It interprets this E-flat as part of a dissonant diminished
seventh chord based on A-natural. The tones seem to have
gone off course.
We have here a so-called deceptive cadence: we expect
the cadence to reach its end, but the harmony takes a detour
at the last minute and puts instability (in this case, extreme
instability) in place of stability. This creates tension and the
need for continued movement—for a repeat of the formula
that will finally reach its destination. This is in fact what happens. The unexpected and darkly passionate diminished-seventh chord is an applied dominant (or secondary dominant).
This is a dominant that tenses toward a chord other than the
tonic, in this case, to the V7 chord of E-flat: a B-flat dominant
seventh chord. As Tamino rises up stepwise to his E-flat on
“fills,” the tones fill the measure with a mounting passion.
On this word, three kinds of musical tension unite in a single
chord: deceptive cadence, applied dominant, diminished seventh chord. Tamino’s unassuming E-flat in the melody does
not reveal the depth of the word he sings or of the passion it
expresses. But the harmony does: it interprets Tamino’s Eflat and releases in it an unexpected possibility.19 This harmonic inflection of a melodic tone recalls what Wagner said
about harmony in general: that it is “the first thing that fully
persuades the feeling as to the emotional content of [the]
melody, which otherwise would leave to it something undertermined.”20 The more we perceive the structure and detail of
this flawless movement of tones when Tamino first sings the
word “fills:—this marriage of melody and harmony—the
more intimately we move with it, know it for what it is.21
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Right after the deceptive cadence, the first violins, as if
inspired by Tamino, sing rising phrases that form a gentle
two-part wave: up and down, higher up and down. Their
tones outline the degrees of the B-flat7 chord, to which the
diminished-seventh chord was pointing. With this move, the
tones regain their direction in the musical journey.
The dominant seventh chord spelled out by the first violins gently leads Tamino to repeat his sentence, this time with
musical closure. Again he sings his passionate rising sixth
from B-flat to G on the words “mein Herz,” “my heart,” and
then goes even higher—to his A-flat. He ends his phrase with
a smooth 3→2→1. The harmony here traverses a complete
cycle or journey, at the end aligning itself with Tamino’s Eflat: I, ii6, I6/4, V7, I. I observe in passing that this conventional
symbolism, which is admittedly useful for analysis, conceals
the true phenomenon, which is not a succession of separate
tone-stacks but rather a continuous movement of closely related phases: starting-point (I), stepping away (ii6), preparing
to point back (I6/4), pointing back (V7), and being back (I).22
Moreover, the cadence formula is not tacked on but grows,
as if organically, from what has come before. Not a device
that merely stops movement, it is a true telos, the gratifying
completion of Tamino’s opening 16-measure period.
Throughout my discussion I have emphasized musical
tension. Indeed, the Greek word for tone, tonos, derives from
the verb tenein, to stretch or strain. Tonal music makes sense,
even to the untutored ear, because we directly perceive the
continuity and the whole formed by the interrelation of musical tensions. Precise expectations are aroused, postponed,
and ultimately fulfilled. Tonal harmony may thus be characterized as erotic, as constituting a musical universe animated
by a desire or longing that is present in the tones themselves.23
That is perhaps why the tones can arouse longing in the per-
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ceptive-passionate listener. In the tones we hear the strains
of our souls: the music gives them coherent shape and represents them as objects for our contemplation.24
Right after his opening 16-measure period, Tamino
pauses, as clarinets in gentle thirds take us into a new section
of the exposition. Here the music changes key from E-flat to
B-flat, from I to V. This is a standard move for a sonata-form
piece in a major key. But it is not an imposition of a prefabricated abstract schema. It is rather an organic, natural continuation of musical movement. I and V are intimately
related: they are neighbours on the circle of fifths. Also, V is
the harmonic degree that points to I. Finally, in the music of
Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, V functions as a sort of
counter-pole—an opposite that competes with I for tonal supremacy.25 In our present case, we should note, above all, how
E-flat is dislodged and B-flat established as the new tonic.
The upper clarinet goes from G to F, that is, from 3 to 2 in E
flat, and then repeats the F. Had it gone from G to F and on
to E-flat, the key of E-flat would have been maintained:
3→2→1. It is the emphasis on 2 that subtly begins to move
the harmony from I to V. It blocks the move to E-flat as scale
degree 1, and begins to set up F as degree 5 of our new key,
B-flat. The appearance among the tones of A-natural, scale
degree 7 in the B-flat scale, solidifies this move.
Earlier, Tamino sang his appoggiaturas and the orchestra
followed. Now the reverse happens. The upper clarinet introduces a new musical strain, which Tamino follows, as if inspired by it. “I cannot name this,” he sings, “yet I feel it here
burning like fire” (“Dies Etwas kann ich zwar nicht nennen;
doch fühl ich’s hier wie Feuer brennen”). In imitation of the
clarinet, Tamino begins on his high G (now scale degree 6)
and descends stepwise. His gently undulating phrase ends
with a leaning tone (C-sharp leaning into D) on the word
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“nennen,” “name.” He then repeats the phrase, with a slight
variation, on the words “yet I feel it here burning like fire.”
The harmony is simple: oscillation between the tonic (now
B-flat) and the dominant (now F).
A brief transition in dotted rhythms, played by clarinets
and bassoons, takes us to Tamino’s first question, which he
stresses by singing it twice: “Could the feeling be love?”
(“Soll die Empfindung Liebe sein?”) Both phrases end on
tense chords: the first on an applied dominant (the V7 of V),
the second on the dominant of B-flat (an F major triad). This
harmonic tension—this upward-tending interrogative gesture—is reflected in the melody. Tamino’s first utterance of
his question outlines the B-flat triad and ends on an E-natural,
a tone foreign to B-flat (the F at the top of the triad becomes
a leaning tone to the E). His second utterance begins with a
downward leap from G to B-flat (the inverse of his opening
sixth) and ends on the unstable scale degree 2. The E-natural
with which Tamino ends the first utterance of his question is
especially affecting: “Could this feeling be love (“Liebe
sein”)?” The chromatic E-natural (highlighted by the preceding F as leaning tone), the applied dominant of which it is a
part (C7), and the florid notes of the first violin all sound as
though a light were beginning to dawn, as though the question “Could this be love?” was more than just a question. The
anticipation of the answer is heightened by the brief interlude
played by the clarinets. Their rising phrases in dotted rhythms
give Tamino his cue. His “Ja, ja!” completes the sequence of
upward melodic gestures.
Tamino answers his question: “Yes, yes, it is love alone,
love, love, it is love alone.” He utters the word “Liebe,”
“love,” four times in all—three times with an expressive leaning tone and once with a climactic flourish called a “turn.”
At the end of his first phrase (right after “Ja, ja!”), Tamino
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sings a straightforward 3→2→1 (D→C→B-flat) on the word
“allein,” “alone” or “only.” But the harmony undercuts the
stability of his final B-flat with a deceptive cadence. Instead
of V→I, we get V→VI, where VI is a minor chord. Musically, this is a subtle way of extending the phrase and producing the need to move on. Also, the minor VI adds a gently
dark inflection and fervor to the word “allein.” But the deceptive cadence may also suggest, in this case, that Tamino’s
certitude is doubtful, that he is still in the dark about what he
is feeling, just as he is ignorant of what it really means to
love.
As Tamino repeats his sentence (“It is love alone”), he
dwells on “Liebe” and makes it into its own musical phrase
in three parts: first a leap that gently descends by step, then
this same phrase repeated, and finally an embellished ascent
to a high G. The chord on this G is a dramatic diminished
seventh chord that points to the F major triad, the V of B-flat.
Both melody and harmony are at this point up in the air, begging for resolution. The eighth-note rest that follows heightens the suspense. After the rest, tension is released, as Tamino
completes his sentence: he drops more than an octave to an
F and proceeds by step to B-flat, scale degree 1, this time supported rather than undercut by the accompanying harmony.
The cadence, embellished by a turn played by the first violins,
brings the section to a close. It provides the release that the
preceding deceptive cadence had postponed.
We now enter the development or middle section of the
aria. I think you will agree that although not much time has
passed, much has happened. We have perceived the unfolding
of a musical idea that expresses the unfolding of Tamino’s
enraptured soul: music has given us access to the soul that
words alone cannot give. That the tones are embarking on a
new large section of the piece is signalled by a pronounced
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shift to quicker rhythms in the accompaniment. The tonal
drama now has more forward momentum. Up to this point,
it has been pretty much a matter of beautiful phrases in starts
and stops. This new section as a whole, this middle of the
aria, is the point of maximum tension—the crux of the tonal
drama. As we put ourselves into this extended moment of
mounting tension, we are unsure of where the tones will go.
How will the tones end this section and lead into the recapitulation? How will the recapitulation resolve all the tensions
that have built up in the course of the song?
The quicker rhythms in sixteenth- and thirty-second notes
are played by the strings. The winds enter with a recurring
pattern of syncopations or offbeat rhythms. Underneath this
dense rhythmic complex, the bass viols provide support with
a persistent B-flat in sixteenth-notes (a so-called pedal point).
They are the quickened pulse and heartbeat of this part of
Tamino’s music. Mozart brilliantly adds yet another rhythmic
element that heightens tension: he has the first violins surge
upward in thirty-second-notes grouped in quick pairs, followed by a rapid succession of appoggiaturas. These leaning
tones then take over and become the principal theme of the
violins. They are like little flutters of the heart produced by
heightened expectation. All the rhythms together form a complex musical image of the surging yet reflective passion that
leads Tamino to his second, more pressing question: “O, if
only I could find her! O, if only she were standing before me!
I would, warm and pure . . .what would I?”
The melody here begins as a stepwise ascent, which
Tamino then repeats, from B-flat, that is, scale degree 1, to
the high A-flat. Could this A-flat be hinting that we are already on our way back to the home key of E-flat major, or is
it just part of an applied dominant? When Tamino sings the
A-flat to complete his sentence “O, if only I could find her,”
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he outlines three-fourths of the dominant seventh chord that
points to E-flat (the pitches he sings are A-flat, F, and D). But
the harmony does not go to E-flat. The tones seem to be
caught in a region of harmonic indeterminacy, which is highlighted as Tamino repeats the same phrase with the same harmony. As he approaches his second question, he breaks the
pattern and sings a perfect fourth from C up to F on “ich
würde” (“I would”), then another perfect fourth from B-flat
up to E-flat on “würde” repeated. The repetition alone suggests that Tamino is suspended in mid-thought by the indeterminacy of his feelings and intentions. His melodic
indeterminacy is echoed and strengthened by the accompaniment, which here plays mysterious, dusky sounding measures with a flurry of chromatic appoggiaturas. When Tamino
sings “warm and pure,” he uses a warm-sounding G-flat on
“warm.” The harmony interprets this G-flat as part of a diminished seventh chord on A-natural, scale degree 7 of Bflat. This chord points to the B-flat major triad. The tones
seem to have found their direction, their tonal center, in scale
degree 1 of B-flat. But as Tamino now utters his second question (“what would I?”), he ends his phrase by falling a major
sixth from F down to the A-flat an octave below the A-flat
we heard earlier. The gesture is an anticlimax, coming as it
does after Tamino’s three dramatic rising phrases: two ascents
to A-flat and one to G-flat. The gesture suggests a momentary
deflation—rising confidence that is suddenly at a loss. The
low A-flat blocks the reassertion of B-flat as key. It is part of
a B-flat7 chord, the dominant seventh of E-flat major, our
home key. Tamino’s question “What would I?”, melodically
a deflating fall from F to A-flat, finds a fitting harmonic expression in an upward gesture of incompleteness—an unresolved V7 chord that leaves this entire section of the aria
hanging.
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The intense anticipation that has built up is further emphasized by the full measure of rest that follows. It is the
longest, most dramatic pause in a song full of pauses. The
soundless measure is no mere absence. It is an active nonbeing—the tense non-being of eros, that greatest and most
potent of all human tensions, the tension music seems
uniquely suited to express.
Once again, the orchestra leads the way, as the bass viols
play a constant E-flat in sixteenth notes and the violas play
an oscillating figure called an Alberti bass in thirty-second
notes. This confirms that the B-flat7 on which Tamino’s question ended was indeed the V7 of E-flat. We have returned to
the home key, and the recapitulation has begun. In this final
section of his song, Tamino, with rising self-confidence, answers his second question: “I would press her to this burning
breast, and forever would she be mine.” The harmony is refreshingly determinate. We know where we are—firmly
planted in E-flat major—as the harmony oscillates repeatedly
between I and V7. We are hearing a tonal homecoming.
Tamino’s melody is straightforward: first, a little melodic
wave that starts on a B-flat and rises to E-flat through an appoggiatura on F—“ich würde sie” (“I would her”)—then the
same melodic phrase repeated—“voll Ent-zü-cken” (“enraptured” or “utterly thrilled”). His next phrase, which begins
similarly, introduces a pattern of skips and ends on a chromatic D-flat: “an diesen heißen Busen drücken” (“press to
this burning or heated breast”). The E-flat to D-flat on
“drücken,” “press,” captures the act of pressing. This chromatic tone tenses forward. It conspires with the tones in the
accompaniment to form a I7 chord, that is, the E-flat major
triad with D-flat as a destabilizing seventh. The I7, which interprets and deepens Tamino’s D-flat, is an applied or passing
dominant that pushes into the final phrase of the aria: “und
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ewig wäre sie dann mein,” “and forever would she be mine.”
Tamino repeats this final phrase five times in all, three
times with the upbeat “und” (“and”) and twice without. The
phrases without the “und” have greater urgency and are allowed to begin on the crucial word “ewig,” “forever.” The I7
chord on “drücken” tends toward an A-flat triad, the IV
chord, or subdominant, in E-flat major. But as Tamino moves
to his first utterance of “and forever would she be mine,”
Mozart substitutes the ii6 chord, which plays the same role as
IV in the harmonic cycle—the moment of stepping away and
preparing for the dominant. Why the substitution? No doubt
because the ii chord, being minor, has greater warmth. On
this ii6 chord, which lasts an entire measure, Tamino sings a
smooth ascent to his high A-flat. He then drops to D, scale
degree 7 in E-flat, by way of a leaning tone. The first violins
second this lovely melodic phrase. The D is part of the chord
played by the strings: the V7 of E-flat. The music pauses on
this tense dominant chord.
Then, something familiar returns: the calm measured
phrase from the exposition, where Tamino sang the words
“fills my heart with new emotions.” The first appearance of
this phrase ended with a deceptive cadence on a diminished
seventh chord (on the word “fills”). Mozart repeats that cadence here. But whereas in the exposition Tamino ended his
second phrase serenely on scale degree 1, here, at the corresponding moment, he bypasses the E-flat and leaps to a high
G on “mein.” This is the measure in which phrases with
“und” switch to phrases without it. This change quickens the
movement of the song. It also produces an elision on the
tones G, E-flat, and C that allows Tamino to combine “mine”
and “forever” in the single phrase “mine forever.”
Tamino goes on to stress the degrees of the E-flat major
triad in a smoothly flowing phrase that seems destined to land
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on a low E-flat, that is, scale degree 1. But at the last moment
he leaps from low F (scale degree 2) to the G a ninth above
on the word “mine”— and then overtops the G with an A-flat
on “ewig.” This is the most dramatic moment in the aria, as
Tamino intensifies his previous elision, his musicalized,
heartfelt dream of eternally possessing his beloved. Tamino
sounds very heroic and confident here. He sings his signature
G a lot, as though this single tone, scale degree 3, embodied
the whole of his passion. When he gets to the last restatement
of his phrase, the melody emphasizes the tones of the E-flat
major triad. He leaps, for one last time, to his signature G—
this time, significantly, on the word “sie,” “her.” This G is
not a stable degree of a chord but an appoggiatura tending toward F, scale degree 2. Tamino, in other words, does not
merely stress the pronoun that refers to Pamina with a high
note; instead he puts his whole heart into the word and leans
toward his beloved. Having reached high G, the tones now
descend to E-flat, scale degree 1, by step, with the assistance
of D, that is, scale degree 7: 3→2→1→7→1 (“sie dann
mein”). A straightforward cadence affirms closure: IV, I6/4,
V7, I.
The entire orchestra ends the piece with a brief, noblesounding coda composed of two complementary phrases. The
phrases are the tonal expressions of the two complementary
sides of Tamino’s nature, as it is revealed in the aria: the first
heroic and forte, the second tender and piano, a recollection
of the fervent E-flat chords with which the song began.
So ends my journey through Tamino’s aria. I have tried
to be faithful in speech to what is there in the tones. I have
not, of course, captured all that is there. No one could.
Mozart’s music, like all great music, is inexhaustible, and
every act of listening brings new discoveries. I have tried to
present the aria as a wondrous object—a time-structure—that
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comes to us and is welcomed by our musically receptive
souls. This time-structure “speaks” to our passion and our
perception, just as the enchanted portrait, a visual or spatial
form, “speaks” to the soul of Tamino.
I have placed special emphasis on tonal tension, and on
directed tension as the possible ground of coherence and
unity in tonal music. To listen to Tamino’s aria—his strain of
musicalized longing—is not just to hear coherence from one
moment to the next. It is to hear the tension at work in the
whole: in the overall form that unfolds in time, by analogy
with organic growth. The exposition is an ordered accumulation of tension. The development section extended and
heightened that tension; it expresses Tamino’s point of maximum anticipation and perplexity. Of all three sections, it is
the one that most has the character of an arrow. The recapitulation takes us home, reaffirms E-flat as the central key, recalls part of the music from the exposition, and brings the
whole time-structure to perfect balance and resolution. It does
all this by accumulating its own tensions, with which the
tones move swiftly and urgently to a satisfying close.
To listen perceptively to the aria, to hear what is there, is
demanding. It takes effort and study. I would like to suggest
that behind all the complexities, a simple scheme prevails.
The melody, as we know, begins with a rising sixth to a G,
scale degree 3 of E-flat major. The entire piece may be heard
as the attempt by 3 to reach 1 through the intermediation of
2: G→F→E flat. Recall that the first key change came about
because the first clarinet played 3→2→2 rather than 3→2→1.
This facilitated the transformation of 2 in E-flat into 5 in Bflat. The rest of the piece—key changes and all—exploits and
further develops this move to 2.26 The completion of the move
3→2→1 in the overarching scheme takes place only at the
end, only after the recapitulation has affirmed E-flat, not
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merely as the key of the final section but as the governing
tone of the entire aria. Only at the end of the journey do we
really have the beginning.
Part Three: Wisdom
My account of Tamino’s song would be incomplete if I did
not talk about Pamina, the enchanting object of Tamino’s
love. Pamina is the focal point of the opera. Of all the “good”
characters, she endures the greatest and most prolonged sufferings: her mother’s absence, the stern tutelage of Sarastro,
the violent advances and blackmail of Monostatos, and the
revelation of her mother as a demon bent on a murder Pamina
herself is ordered to commit. Finally, she suffers despair over
what she thinks is lost love, and is almost driven to suicide.27
Pamina is also an exalted figure in the opera. It is she who
most embodies what is new about the new order. It is she, a
virtuous woman, who gives the lie to all the negative things
said about women in the opera. Sarastro told her that a man
must guide her heart. This is true, in a sense: Tamino gives
Pamina’s heart its proper object and bearing. But in the last
two trials, it is Pamina who guides Tamino, as love guides
her. Finally, it is Pamina who reveals that the magical vocation of music is not to gain power over others, or merely to
amuse oneself, but to ward off the fear of death.
When Pamina joins Tamino for the final trials near the
end of the opera, the two face each other in more than the obvious sense. They now see each other clearly for the first
time. There is mutual recognition. This recognition is mirrored, or rather enacted, in the complementary phrases the
lovers use to sing each other’s names: “Tamino mine! O what
happiness!” “Pamina mine! O what happiness!” The string
of monosyllabic German words that the lovers sing to each
other—“O welch ein Glück”—is both simpler and more con-
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crete than this English translation. A more accurate rendering
is: “O what a stroke of good fortune!” Tamino and Pamina
are not referring to a subjective state or feeling, but to an
event, to something wondrous that has just happened and that
presents itself to their perception: the arrival and the presence
of the beloved. The phrases they sing are two halves of a little
musical circle or period in F major. When Pamina sings
Tamino’s name, she does so with a rising major sixth—the
same interval with which Tamino’s soul rose up in response
to Pamina’s image. But this is not mere repetition. The sixth
at the beginning of Tamino’s aria was the sound of passion
that aspired but did not know itself. It had shadows. Pamina’s
sixth is different. It is pure, luminous, and rationally aware.
It has “Besonnenheit,” and in more than the strictly musical
sense.28 Pamina’s sixth is the enlightenment and perfection of
Tamino’s. It is the sublime moment in which passion, now
perceptive, finds its purpose.
When Tamino first responded to the magic that was Pamina, his love was mediated by an image. He asked himself
what he would do if the beloved were standing in front of
him. That moment has arrived, for here stands Pamina, not
as image but as solid reality. Tamino’s first rush of love was
itself a kind of image and dream, a first step in the soul’s journey from erotic striving and heroic aspiration, through painful
disillusionment and trials, to the moment of enlightenment,
when images are seen for what they are, and when the lover,
having transcended mere feeling, now grasps what love really
is. Pamina is the Other in and through whom Tamino can
know himself as the man who loves Pamina, not as a possession but as partner. He can see who he is in the eyes of the
beloved because the sound of her rising sixth, as she sings
his name, shows him how. Her sixth, her love in musical
form, is his unfailing guide.
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Pamina is more than Tamino’s beloved, more than a symbol of virtuous womanhood (her mother in redeemed form),
more even than the first Woman Ruler of a new order based
on marriage and reconciliation. She is Tamino’s wisdom, and
the wisdom—and true magic—of Mozart’s Magic Flute.
NOTES
1. For an exhaustive study of the Masonic elements in Mozart’s opera,
see Jacques Chailley, The Magic Flute, Masonic Opera, trans. Herbert
Weinstock (New York: Knopf, 1971). Chailley finds Masonic meaning
even in the number of notes used in individual phrases. His analysis
makes the plot more coherent but ultimately distracts us from Mozart’s
music.
2. Chailley makes the interesting observation that there were originally
five Ladies, in keeping with the Masonic number for the Female, and that
this was reduced to three due to “necessities of casting” (109-110).
3. “[T]he key of C minor throughout Die Zauberflöte is nearly always
connected with death or the threat of death.” From Erik Smith, “The
music,” in Peter Branscombe, W. A. Mozart: Die Zauberflöte, Cambridge
Opera Handbooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 130.
4. During Mozart’s time there existed ancillary Masonic lodges that accepted women—so-called “Lodges of Adoption”—but the members of
these lodges were barred from the loftier honors and duties open to men
(Chailley, 74-79).
5. The Queen explains that killing Sarastro is the only way she and her
daughter can retrieve the “seven-fold Circle of the Sun,” which Pamina’s
father, at his death, gave Sarastro. She recalls, resentfully, that the father
wished to give the magical object to the “manly” care of Sarastro and refused to entrust it to “your woman’s spirit.” In the Queen’s resentful mind,
the murder of Sarastro will topple the dominance of the Male and assert
the supremacy of the Female.
6. Pamina’s aria is in G minor, the key her mother used to tell the story
of her daughter’s abduction. It is also the key Papageno will use when he
prepares to commit suicide. Charles Rosen observes the following: “In
all of Mozart’s supreme expressions of suffering and terror—the G minor
Symphony, Don Giovanni, the G minor Quintet, Pamina’s aria in Die
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Zauberflöte—there is something shockingly voluptuous.” The Classical
Style, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1997), 324-5.
7. It is here that Pamina reveals the history of the flute, which her father
carved, amid thunder and lightning, from the heart of a thousand-yearold oak.
8. See Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, translated by Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986). Hanslick famously attacked
the “aesthetics of feeling”: “to induce . . . feelings in us is not the task of
music or of any other art. Art first of all puts something beautiful before
us. It is not by means of feeling that we become aware of beauty, but by
means of the imagination as the activity of pure contemplation” (4). Unfortunately, Hanslick’s dichotomy makes it impossible to understand the
musical bond between feeling and contemplation, or, in the terms of this
essay, between passion and perception.
9. Kierkegaard (or rather one of his personae) criticizes Tamino, who
compares poorly with Don Giovanni, Mozart’s fully developed embodiment of music as eros: “As a dramatic character, Tamino is completely
beyond the musical, just as in general the spiritual development the play
wants to accomplish is a completely unmusical idea” (“The Immediate
Erotic Stages or The Musical-Erotic,” in Either/Or, translated by Howard
V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 2 vols. [Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1987], Vol. I, 82.) The Magic Flute is musically deficient, it would
seem, because “the whole piece tends toward consciousness,” that is, toward the clear daylight delineation of good and bad, or the ethical. It celebrates marriage, which “is absolutely unmusical” (ibid., 83). In these
assertions, Kierkegaard (or rather his alter ego) seems unaware of the
subtly dark, erotic side of the noble characters in Mozart’s fairy tale. See
note 3 above.
10. Ingmar Bergman’s film portrays Tamino accurately as he sings this
aria. The actor gazes lovingly at the picture and, at one point, presses it
to his heart. The singer performs the song not as though he were seeking
the admiration of an audience, but as an internal, musical-erotic meditation. Even his high notes, which sound properly heroic, retain this inward
quality.
11. Hoffmann defends Beethoven against the charge that he doesn’t know
how to control himself as a composer: “In truth he is fully the equal of
Haydn and Mozart in rational awareness, his controlling self detached
from the inner realm of sounds and ruling it in absolute authority.”
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(“Beethoven’s Instrumental Music,” in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, edited by David Charlton, translated by Martyn Clarke [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989], 98.) Mozart’s own affirmation of this
virtue appears in a letter to his father. Explaining his reasons for a certain
key change in the Abduction from the Seraglio, Mozart writes that just as
“passions whether violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of
exciting disgust,” so too “music, even in the most terrible situations, must
never offend the ear, but must please the listener, or in other words must
never cease to be music.” (The Letters of Mozart and his Family, translated and edited by Emily Anderson [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1966],
Vol. II, 769).
12. The Queen, too, in her most hysterical moments, sings in a way that
is orderly, lucid, and musical. She is always a pleasure to hear. In Mozart’s
universe, even the Queen exhibits “Besonnenheit”—though, admittedly,
she pushes the envelope.
13. For the authoritative treatment of sonata form, see Charles Rosen,
The Classical Style (cf. note 4 above). For a revealing account of “circle”
vs. “arrow,” see Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay
on the Origins of Musical Modernity, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007. Berger argues that whereas the music of Bach presents time
as a self-enclosed, circular image of eternity (“God’s time”), that of
Mozart affirms an arrow-like progression that imitates “the temporal disposition of events” (179). Circle and arrow are central metaphors for Victor Zuckerkandl, who stresses the arrow-like movement of counterpoint.
He acknowledges, however, that the classical sonata combines “chain”
(arrow-like succession of phrases) with “circle”: “The whole [of a movement] is symmetrical: A—B—A; but within each section [exposition, development, recapitulation] the chain principle is dominant” (Victor
Zuckerkandl, The Sense of Music [Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1959], 96).
14. It is tempting to compare Tamino’s rising major sixth with the most
famous rising sixth in all of music—the minor sixth at the very beginning
of Tristan and Isolde. What do these sixths show us about the nature of
eros? Do they point to two different kinds of erotic love? Or are they two
sides of the one passion we call eros?
15. For a fuller discussion of Mozart’s shift of accent in the Magic Flute,
see again Erik Smith’s essay in Branscombe, Magic Flute, 120-124 (cf.
note 2 above).
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16. Hanslick stresses the perception of movement in music in his famous
definition of music’s content: “The content of music is tonally moving
forms” (The Beautiful in Music, 29). He does not, however, speculate on
the cause and nature of this movement.
17. On harmony as the third dimension of depth, see Victor Zuckerkandl,
The Sense of Music, 171-179. Throughout this essay, I use the term
“chord” loosely and without much reflection. It is in fact not easy to say
what a chord is, and hence what it means for harmony to be the movement
of chords. At one point in his discussion, Zuckerkandl asks: “Where is
the chord?” He answers: “the chord is not in the tones but, in a sense,
above them, more immaterial than the tones themselves” (ibid., 184). This
leads him to the fascinating assertion that a chord is “something like an
idea—an idea to be heard, an idea for the ear, an audible idea.”
18. The theory of tones as “dynamic qualities” is that of Zuckerkandl,
who develops the theory in three amazing books: The Sense of Music,
Sound and Symbol, and Man, the Musician (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959, 1956, and 1973 respectively).
19. It is worth noting that a deceptive cadence is not a sudden, disruptive
shock, but rather a musical surprise that makes sense to the ear. The reason is that the unanticipated chord has at least one tone in common with
the chord we expect. In the most common deceptive cadence, the V7 chord
goes to VI, which has two tones in common with the I chord. In the present case, the deceptive chord—the diminished-seventh chord built on Anatural—has in it the two tones common to I and VI (C and E-flat), but
adds the destabilizing tones A-natural and G-flat. That this tense unexpected chord arrives so naturally, and just as naturally leads to the V7 of
the key of E-flat, points to the marvelous fluidity and ordered freedom of
harmonic movement.
20. Wagner on Music and Drama, selected and arranged by A. Goldman
and E. Sprinchorn (New York: Da Capo Press, 1964), 214.
21. The psychologist Géza Révész writes the following about the musical
listener: “He is able to follow the composer’s intentions, even at times to
anticipate them. It is also characteristic of the musical person to sink himself into the mood of the music, and achieve a relation to it that has an effect on his whole spiritual being. He experiences the art work so inwardly
and so profoundly that he feels as though he were creating it” (Introduction to the Psychology of Music [New York: Dover, 2001], 133-134).
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22. One especially problematic aspect of the usual chord notation is that
it implies but does not emphasize the motion of the bass. The various
“positions” of triads—root, first inversion, second inversion, etc.—are
really ways of composing a bass line. In the present case, where the
chordal progression is I6, IV, I6/4, V7, vii5/6 of V, V7, the bass has a beautifully continuous ascent: G to A-flat to B-flat to B-flat repeated to C to D,
and finally to the E-flat, the root of the E-flat triad that begins Tamino’s
complementary phrase and the harmonic progression that culminates in
the perfect cadence to the 16-measure period. A good way to hear this
bass line, this voice in its own right, is to sing along with it.
23. Zuckerkandl, following the music theorist Heinrich Schenker, calls
this Tonwille, the will of the tones.
24. Schopenhauer is perhaps the only philosopher who attempts to explain
the intimate connection between music and the human self, and to explicate the classical idea according to which music is a form of imitation.
Music, he argues, is a copy of the will that is the source of all representation. This will, to which we are tragically enslaved, is an urge or desire
that is incapable of being satisfied. In music, we hear this urge as pure
striving detached from particular objects. This removal of determinate
objects permits us to enjoy the pleasant, aesthetic contemplation of the
tragic source of all things, and of ourselves. Through this enjoyment, we
gain momentary refuge from the suffering and curse that is human life.
See The World as Will and Representation, translated by E. F. J. Payne
(New York: Dover, 1969), Vol. I, 255-267, and Vol. II, 447-457.
25. See Charles Rosen on this point: “The greatest change in eighteenthcentury tonality, partly influenced by the establishment of equal temperament, is a new emphatic polarity between tonic and dominant, previously
much weaker” (Rosen, The Classical Style, 26). I have borrowed the term
“counter-pole” from Zuckerkandl, who uses it to characterize the role of
scale degree 5 in the major scale (The Sense of Music, 26).
26. The “history” of F in the piece tends to support my suggestion: the
initial emphasis by the clarinet at the first key change, the continued emphasis of F in the melody that follows, the peak of Tamino’s “Ja, ja!” and
the appoggiaturas that follow, the Fs that appear in various roles in the
development, and the appoggiatura Fs at the beginning of the recapitulation, which lean temptingly to E-flat, as if asking other tones to help it
make a final convincing close. (The harmonic move from II to I occurs
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in the second Act, where the key of F major, with which the Act begins,
returns right before the E-flat Finale.)
My suggestion about 3→2→1 as the underlying structural principle
derives from Heinrich Schenker’s notion of the Urlinie or “primordial
line.” See his Free Composition, translated and edited by Ernst Oster
(New York: Longman, 1979), 3-9.
27. Branscombe notes another important aspect of Pamina’s suffering:
“Without the advantage accorded to Tamino and Papageno of knowing
about the trials to be undergone, she survives her own trials”
(Branscombe, Magic Flute, 217).
28. Pamina shows her capacity for straight speech when Sarastro appears
at the end of Act I. Papageno anxiously asks her in C minor: “My child,
what now shall we speak?” The harmony intensifies his anxiety with the
extremely tense augmented sixth chord, an applied dominant to the V on
which the question hangs. Pamina responds with a soothing move to C
major: “The truth, the truth, even if it were a crime.” Charles Rosen observes that when Pamina sings “the truth,” “the music takes on an heroic
radiance unheard in opera before then” (Rosen, Classical Style, 319).
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Socrates, Parmenides, and the
Way Out
Judith Seeger
Before I begin, I would like to warn you that you must not
expect this lecture to present a definitive interpretation of
Plato’s Parmenides. Indeed, I am so far from being an expert
on Plato that I am somewhat amazed to find myself here behind the podium, where experts usually stand on Friday
nights. Furthermore, the Parmenides is perhaps one of Plato’s
most difficult dialogues—a fact that, curiously enough, gives
me comfort, for I have yet to hear or read an unambiguously
persuasive interpretation of it. In any case, as you know, the
lecture itself is only part of these Friday-night events. If I succeed in opening a discussion in which we all can participate
and learn, then I will have accomplished something. My goal,
you see, is modest.
The talk will consist of the following sections. First, I will
summarize the story for you, drawing your attention to the
character of the interlocutors as it is revealed through their
words and through the narrator’s observations. I will explore
in particular the character of young Socrates, and I will also
give some attention to Plato’s portrayal of Parmenides as
compared with what we know about the philosopher Parmenides. Then, I will consider the fundamental questions
raised by the dialogue, which are, I believe, put most succinctly: “What is philosophy?” and “Is philosophy possible?”
Finally, I will suggest that the dialogue not only raises these
questions, but also answers them favorably, though in such a
Judith Seeger is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This lecture
was originally delivered on January 20, 1995.
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way that we are forced to look beyond the words themselves
and compelled to pursue the answers. That is, we are invited
to engage in philosophy ourselves.
I don’t remember where I was when I first read every dialogue of Plato’s, but I do remember where I was when I first
read the Parmenides. The year is 1990. It is the afternoon of
the day before seminar. I am sitting in my living room on the
dark blue loveseat between two windows. My back is to the
west wall, and, looking up, I can follow the sun’s slow sinking by observing the lengthening patches of brightness (cold
brightness, because it is a January afternoon) on either side
of me. They stretch toward the opposite wall, then reach and
start to climb it. Dust motes, drifting lazily in the sunbeams,
begin a crazed dance as the furnace fan kicks on. When the
fan goes off, the dance subsides.
Do you get the impression that I was having trouble concentrating on my reading? Actually, it was maddening. When
I reached the end of the assigned reading (which is partway
through Parmenides’ argument for the existence of the One,
after which we jump directly to the final statement) and managed, out of respect for the other dialogues in the volume, not
to pitch the book against that same wall the sunlight was
climbing, I was convinced that I had just read a very old joke,
which I was possibly the first one ever to “get” (for otherwise
why would we be wasting our time reading it?), but which
wasn’t really very funny. I was relatively new to philosophy.
But it seemed to me that Plato had been pulling our collective
leg for a long time.
That seminar conversation, and the one the following
year, when I read the dialogue for the second time, helped a
little; but neither one dispelled my conviction that the dialogue was, at best, seriously unbalanced, a feeling which became only more acute when one of my seminar co-leaders
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dismissed the last sentence of the dialogue as “nonsense.”
Parmenides concludes (in R.E. Allen’s translation): “Then let
this be said, and also that, as it seems, whether unity is or is
not, both unity and the others are and are not, and appear and
do not appear to be, all things in all ways, relative both to
themselves and to each other.” To which young Aristotle, who
has been Parmenides’ chosen interlocutor during the exercise,
replies “very true” (166c). Recall, also, that this particular
Aristotle, as we are deliberately told in the dialogue, later became one of the Thirty Tyrants, whose crimes Socrates speaks
about in the Apology (32d).
So Parmenides’ display of dialectical fireworks in the second part of the dialogue seems to be nonsense, and possibly
dangerous nonsense, to boot, if someone who is as thoroughly persuaded by it as young Aristotle seems to be grows
up to be a tyrant so ruthless as to try to implicate innocent
men, including Socrates, in the murder of other innocent men.
(Cf. Republic 537e-539d, on the dangers of teaching dialectic
to young men). Nonetheless, Parmenides’ dialectical exercise
follows an impressive presentation of young Socrates in the
beginning of the dialogue. Plato shows us what appears to be
Socrates’ first, sincere, if perhaps somewhat naive, account
of the Forms. And he shows us Socrates exploring one of the
difficulties raised by the concept of Forms: the so-called
problem of participation. Thus, a fundamental tenet (perhaps
the fundamental tenet) of Socratic and Platonic thought is
paired with what appears to be closely reasoned gobbledygook. This presents us at the outset with a formidable
dilemma. The Parmenides, like many other Platonic dialogues, but perhaps more blatantly than most, seems to have
a split personality, to be composed of two parts that fit together uneasily at best.
The problem of unity in this dialogue, then, part of which
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is at least ostensibly about the One, is striking, even on the
level of its organization. Questions arise which, like the problem of participation itself, will simply not go away. What is
the nature of this exercise Parmenides calls a “devious passage through all things” (136e), without which he claims the
mind cannot attain to the truth? How are we to read it? There
are several possibilities. One is that Parmenides’ tedious
“gymnastic,” with its nonsensical conclusion, is so far from
being a legitimate means of searching for truth that we might
read it as Plato’s example of exactly what not to do if you
want to pursue philosophy. The sort of reasoning we scornfully call logic-chopping comes to mind. In this reading, Parmenides is the consummate sophist, who can manipulate
words to mean anything he wants, with the inescapable outcome that ultimately they can mean nothing at all. If this Parmenides is really supposed to represent the philosopher by
that name, the sense of such an interpretation would be that
the older man has not only been displaced but has also been
made to discredit himself. He becomes an old fool, who
would be dangerous if we were foolish enough to take him
seriously.
There are, nonetheless, problems with this reading. It
does not take into account the care Plato apparently lavished
on this dialogue, or the respect with which Socrates seems to
regard the older philosopher. Parmenides claims that the exercise he performs regarding the One is necessary for
Socrates’ philosophic maturation; and young Socrates, so far
as we know, remains present and attentive throughout (although at least a few of the members of my preceptorial on
Parmenides thought that surely he must have silently departed—at least, that is what they would have done). It seems
not unreasonable to suppose that Socrates is learning something necessary, and before we decide that this necessary
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something is how not to proceed, the dialogue deserves a
closer look. So let us return to the first part of the dialogue to
examine its setting and characters and try to determine who
this Socrates is, who this Parmenides is, what the one might
have to learn from the other, and what we might have to learn
from it all.
The part of the dialogue before Parmenides begins his exercise comprises only a bit more than a third of the entire
piece. It is immediately evident that the dialogue is set in a
“present” which is very remote from the conversation among
Socrates, Zeno, and Parmenides that it recounts. Though we
are given no date, we may assume that all the participants in
the original conversation are dead, including Socrates, if only
because, had Socrates been alive, Cephalus, who is the firstperson narrator of the entire piece, would certainly have gone
directly to him rather than to a man who had acquired the
conversation second-hand. In the “present” (which is itself
actually a “past” recounted by the primary narrator to unnamed listeners who become us, the readers), Cephalus and
some of his fellow-citizens who are interested in philosophy
have come to Athens from Clazomenae in Ionia. They have
made this journey because they have heard that someone in
Athens has memorized that long-past conversation, and they
would like to hear it. This Cephalus, by the way, is not the
Cephalus of the Republic, a man who, you will recall, was
not sufficiently interested in philosophy even to stay in his
own home when Socrates was brought there (331d), much
less to go out of his way to seek out a dialogue from the distant past.
The opening scene of the Parmenides is, nevertheless,
reminiscent of the beginning of the Republic, both in the
name of its narrator and in the first sentence, which recalls
Socrates’ narration of his descent into the Pireaus. Cephalus
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begins, “When we arrived at Athens from our home in Clazomenae, we met Adeimantus and Glaucon in the Agora”
(126a). Unlike Socrates in the Republic, Cephalus is not
forcibly detained by eager questioners. Instead, Glaucon and
Adeimantus (who are those once-young men of the Republic)
welcome him cordially, and he tells them he has come to ask
a favor. He would like for them to take him and his friends
to their half-brother, Antiphon (who is also Plato’s halfbrother), who, he hopes, may be persuaded to recite from
memory the conversation held by Socrates, Zeno, and Parmenides that Antiphon learned from a student of Zeno’s
named Pythodorus, who was present at that encounter many
years ago. Antiphon—who was once sufficiently interested
in philosophy, if not to practice it, at least to memorize an exceedingly complex conversation—is now more interested in
raising horses. The others come upon him instructing a smith
how to make a bit. At first, Antiphon is reluctant to comply
with their request, for reciting the conversation will be, as he
says in words later nearly echoed by Parmenides himself, an
arduous task. But he finally allows himself to be persuaded
to perform, as Parmenides will later in the dialogue (and did,
earlier in time).
Since Antiphon was not present at the conversation he is
about to relate, he gives his listeners Pythodorus’s account.
As Pythodorus told it, Zeno and Parmenides once came to
Athens for the Panathenaia festival, and stayed outside the
walls in Pythodorus’s house. Parmenides was elderly at the
time, quite gray, and distinguished-looking. Zeno was about
40 years old, tall and handsome. It was said that Zeno had
been Parmenides’ favorite; the suggestion is of an erotic relationship. We do not know the age of young Socrates, but
the dialogue emphasizes that he was very young, though
older than Parmenides’ interlocutor Aristotle. Socrates, at the
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beginning of Pythodorus’s account, has been listening to
Zeno read a treatise, of which we readers hear nothing, for
Pythodorus had heard the treatise before, and, evidently not
caring to hear it again, enters the house with Parmenides only
after Zeno has finished reading. Socrates asks Zeno to read
the beginning again, and Zeno does; but the second reading
serves only to emphasize the utter unimportance of Zeno’s
text, for the narrator does not give it to us, even though he is
now present. We hear instead only Socrates’ summation of
it, which is this: “If things are many, then it follows that the
same things must be both like and unlike, but that is impossible, for unlike things cannot be like or like things unlike”
(127e). Zeno agrees that this summary is accurate, and
Socrates presses on: “Now, if it is impossible for unlike things
to be like and like things unlike, it is also impossible for there
to be many things; for if there were, things would undergo
impossible qualifications. Isn’t that the point of your arguments, to contend, contrary to everything generally said, that
there is no plurality? And don’t you suppose that each of your
arguments is a proof of just that, so that you believe that you
have given precisely as many proofs that there is no plurality
as there are arguments in your treatise? Is that what you
mean, or have I failed to understand you?” (127e). It appears
that Socrates is baiting Zeno, suggesting that he has become
mired in the contradiction of providing many arguments to
prove that there is no such thing as many. But Zeno, again,
graciously concedes that Socrates’ estimation of his work is
correct. Since innuendo did not work, Socrates now attacks
outright. Addressing not Zeno but Parmenides by name, he
accuses Zeno of saying much the same thing as Parmenides
himself while misleading his readers into thinking he is saying something different. Parmenides remains silent, and again
Zeno, clearly stung, replies, but quite mildly considering that
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he has just been accused of a kind of cheating. He protests
that this particular treatise was, in the first place, the work of
a young man written in a spirit of controversy, not of an older
man zealous for reputation, and, in the second place, that it
was stolen from him and published without his consent.
Though the effect of these disclaimers is less to enlighten us
than to cause us to wonder why he is reading the discredited
treatise of his youth now that he is older and presumably
knows better, Zeno continues to agree that Socrates did not
misrepresent his thesis. Parmenides, meanwhile, makes his
presence increasingly felt by saying not a word.
Socrates has tried both innuendo and direct accusation in
what appears to be an unsuccessful attempt to draw first Zeno
and then Parmenides into discussion. He plunges on. The paradox of unity and multiplicity raised by Zeno has a simple
solution, Socrates claims. The answer is the Forms, which
exist alone, by themselves. If someone could demonstrate to
him that Forms could change, that would be amazing,
Socrates asserts. But it is not at all remarkable that other sorts
of things should share contrary characteristics. Socrates uses
himself as an example. In order to say that he is many, that
is, partakes of multitude, all anyone would have to do would
be to consider his front, his back, his upper body, his lower
body, and so on. If, on the other hand, someone wanted to
say that he partakes of unity, that person would need only
consider him one of the seven—but remember that only five
are named—present at this particular conversation (129d).
With regard to the changeable things we perceive, plurality
and unity depend, in effect, on how you look at them. There
is no genuine paradox in this, only a manipulation of language. The tone of Socrates’ speech is aggressive. He seems
to be implying that Zeno is either a liar or a fool.
I have tried to capture something of Socrates’ tone in this
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summary. He has, of course, expounded his opinions at much
greater length than I just have. If you were reading it your
impression would likely be that this brash young man has indeed gone too far: he’s smart all right, but he is also rude and
offensive. That is, evidently, the feeling the reader is supposed to have, because suddenly we are recalled to Pythodorus, who, Antiphon says, expected Zeno and Parmenides
to become angry, and was surprised when instead they
glanced at each other from time to time as Socrates spoke and
smiled as if in admiration. Now, for the first time, Parmenides
speaks, and his words reveal that young Socrates, in flailing
away at Zeno, has been, in effect, setting himself up. Young
Socrates is about to meet his master.
First, Parmenides blandly commends Socrates on his talent for argument; then he asks if he himself was responsible
for the distinction between Forms and the things that partake
of them. Parmenides does not give Socrates time to reply to
this question, so I suppose we do not really know the answer.
Instead, he immediately becomes more specific. Is there, he
asks Socrates, a likeness apart from the likeness we possess?
Is there One? Is there Many? “Of course.” Then what about
the just, the beautiful, the good, and all such things? “Yes.”
Then are there Forms for such things as man, fire, and water?
Socrates has no answer. Within three simple exchanges, Parmenides has reduced him to a state of perplexity, that condition of ignorance which is discomfiting to say the least,
because anyone who is aware he is in it also knows that he
must escape from it, and there is, at least as far as Socrates
can see at this point, no way out.
This is a most important moment, for it is evidently the
first time that Socrates has realized that he is in the state to
which he will later try to reduce all those with whom he
speaks. The force of this image of aporia, recalling Zeno-
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phon’s use of it in the Anabasis (III.1.11-13), is of a desperate
need to escape from imminent danger, to find a pathway to
safety where none is apparent. If Parmenides had stopped
here he would have accomplished quite a lot, but he is not
yet finished with young Socrates. What about certain other
things, he asks, vile and worthless things, like mud, dirt, and
hair? At first Socrates seems to have returned to firm ground.
Not at all, he answers, in his previous assured manner. That
would be impossible. But then he stumbles a bit, driven to
face the abyss, I think, both by the questions of a man he
clearly respects and by a characteristic honesty as remarkable
as the intelligence and talent for argument he has already
demonstrated. “Still,” young Socrates says, “I sometimes
worry lest what holds in one case may not hold in all, but
when I take that stand, I retreat, for fear of tumbling undone
into depths of nonsense. So I go back to the things we just
said have characters, and spend my time dealing with them”
(130d). This is no way to escape from aporia. It may very
well be that there is a significant difference in kind between
justice, say, and hair, but a simple assertion of that difference
is not sufficient to make it so, and Socrates knows it. He is in
this position, Parmenides says, because he is still young and
philosophy has not yet taken hold of him. When he is older
and more experienced he will despise none of these things.
Now he still pays too much attention to what people think.
This reply is problematic for a sympathetic reading of
Parmenides, if it implies that he considers mud, dirt, and hair
equal in kind to justice, beauty, and the good. I do not think
that he does, if only because he calls them particularly vile
and worthless, but we will consider this further when I explore the question of who this Parmenides is. Whatever the
reading, it is clearly not Parmenides’ intent here to explore
what sorts of things have Forms. Rather, simply by raising
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the question, he has done this bright young know-it-all the
immense favor of reducing him to a state in which he has
been forced to admit perplexity and doubt, a state which we
know (because we have read dialogues in which the older
Socrates partakes, dialogues that were composed before this
relatively late one) is absolutely necessary for him to recognize if he is to understand that he is in danger and must search
for a way out—that is, he must pursue philosophy. At this
point in young Socrates’ education, concentrating on such
ideas as justice, virtue, and the good is a retreat, in so far as
it represents a failure to face the real dilemma inherent in the
notion of Forms. Furthermore, Socrates has confessed that
fear of falling into nonsense has caused him to turn away
from questions that had occurred to him before his encounter
with Parmenides. Parmenides, then, has forced the young
man to admit, first, that, despite his intellect and talent for argument, he is in a perilous situation; second, that he must
search for a way to escape from this danger; and, third, that
his fear has led to intellectual cowardice and laziness.
Whether there actually is a possible way of escape remains
to be explored, and this is the question to which Parmenides
immediately turns his attention.
Assuming with Socrates that Forms exist even though we
are not yet sure which of the things we perceive has a Form,
Parmenides directs the conversation to the problem of sharing. This in turn raises the dilemma of participation, which,
in its most general expression, has to account for the relationship between the Forms and the things that partake of them.
The effect of this conversation will be to reduce Socrates
once again to perplexity, and it will lead to a difficulty that is
more fundamental than the question about which of the things
we perceive partake of Forms. Parmenides readily agrees
with Socrates that there are unalterable Forms, but, through
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questioning, he compels Socrates to admit (and readers to
see) that if we cannot discover a relationship between the
things we see and the Forms—that is, if we cannot find a way
to escape from deceptive change into the reality of the absolute—there can be no knowledge and, hence, no philosophy.
How, Parmenides asks Socrates, can there be any relationship between the things we see and the Forms of which
they partake? More specifically, how can a Form be at once
in itself and in the others (that is, the things that partake of
it) without being separate from itself? Socrates has an ingenious solution to this problem: It might be like a day, he says,
which is in many places at once yet not separate from itself.
“Very neat,” replies Parmenides, flattering the young man,
“you mean like a sail spread over many persons at once.”
“Perhaps,” responds Socrates, apparently sealing his doom
in the discussion, since a sail really does not seem to be like
a day at all. Unlike a day, it is a material object, capable of
being cut into pieces, a characteristic Parmenides will exploit
in his refutation of the idea. Why does Socrates accept the
substitution? Is he being polite? He wasn’t very polite to
Zeno, but he obviously has more respect for Parmenides. Did
he succumb to the older man’s flattery? For whatever reason,
Socrates, perhaps with some reluctance, accepts the sail in
place of the day. Parmenides then raises the paradox of divisibility, with an argument that irrefutably concludes, to put
it briefly, that other things cannot partake of Forms either as
parts or as wholes. Next he raises the difficulty of infinite
regress. Using largeness as an example, he obliges Socrates
to agree that when we look at a number of things that are
large we believe there is the same Form of largeness in all of
them, and thus believe that Largeness is one. But then don’t
we need yet another largeness by which that one largeness
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can appear large, and then another, and another? The search
for the last largeness will never end. Socrates, trying to escape from this infinite regress, suggests that Forms are
thoughts (noēma, a word that is rare in the Socratic dialogues); but Parmenides parries that for a thought to be true
it must be a thought of something that is, and Socrates, if he
is not to be trapped in relativism, is compelled to concede.
Perhaps, then, he replies, the Forms exist in nature as paradigms, which other things resemble and imitate. But if this
is so, Parmenides counters, the Form must resemble the object that resembles it, in so far as that object resembles it, and
thus a third “entity” is called into being: that by participation
in which like things are made like. Again we are faced with
an infinite regress, a hall of mirrors.
All of these arguments, none of which Socrates can refute, lead to what Parmenides calls the greatest difficulty of
all: If we maintain that the Forms are separate, independent
beings, we are in danger of having to concede that they cannot be known, and the consequence of that is that there is no
way out of our difficulty. Aporia becomes absolute; philosophy is impossible. If this is our condition, Forms may or may
not exist; if they exist, they may have their nature relative to
themselves, and the things we perceive may have their nature
relative to themselves. But if the Forms and the things among
us have no relationship to each other, Parmenides and
Socrates agree that we can have no knowledge of truth. Put
another way, we cannot know any of the Forms because we,
by our nature, cannot partake of absolute knowledge. The
gods, on the other hand, by their nature, would have absolute
knowledge, but that would make no difference either to us or
to them, for if there is no connection, no path, between the
transient and the absolute, the gods could know our world no
more than we could know theirs, and we all might as well go
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raise horses.
This is not to say that Parmenides has given up. He asserts twice (133c and 135d) that there are ways out of this
dilemma, which are open to people of wide education and
ability who know how to seek them. Further, Socrates clearly
possesses the considerable natural gifts that will allow him
to seek a way out, and perhaps eventually to teach others to
do so. Parmenides knows this because he heard Socrates discuss these questions with young Aristotle the day before, and
he observed his noble and divine impulse toward argument
(logos), as well as his refusal to discuss problems in terms of
visible objects, appealing instead always to absolutes. The
problem is that Socrates is trying too soon, before he is properly trained. He must exercise and train himself in an art that
the many call idle talk if the truth is not to escape him. Parmenides approves of Socrates’ attention to the things that are
rather than the things that merely seem to be. But he claims
that Socrates lacks rigor; he must learn to examine the consequences that follow from each hypothesis, for example,
“should you hypothesize if likeness is, or if it is not, what
will follow on each hypothesis both for the very things hypothesized and for the others, relative to themselves and relative to each other” (136a). The same procedure must be
followed for anything that may be hypothesized as being and
as not being, and as undergoing any other affection whatever.
Before looking at the exercise in more depth, let us return
to several questions raised in the segment of the dialogue I
have just summarized. I would like, in particular, to explore
the characters of young Socrates and of Parmenides, as they
are presented in the dialogue, and the problem of participation as it is framed here, with the consequences it has for the
pursuit of philosophy.
Let us look first at Socrates. Much is made in the dialogue
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of the fact that he is young. Parmenides has remarked upon
his youth, and Pythodorus, too, as quoted by Antiphon, observes that he was very young. He seems in his interchanges
with Zeno to be exhibiting some of that controversial spirit
of youth to which Zeno, speaking of himself, alludes.
Socrates’ attacks on Zeno show that he has mastered argument; but his remarks are glib and aggressive, the over-confident assertions of someone who (in a contrast that could not
be more striking with the older Socrates) knows it all. Young
Socrates, a sort of philosopher warrior slashing away with a
sword of words, does not hesitate to take on the leading
philosophers of the day. Though it is not used, the word thumos (in the sense of spirit, heart, will) comes to mind. And,
as we have seen, both Zeno and Parmenides are delighted.
This is surely not because of the easily-avoided swipes
Socrates is taking at Zeno in his apparent wish to replace him
in the great man’s affections, but rather because of his eager
desire for logos and his conviction that there are absolutes.
Socrates is a young man of great gifts in dire need of a lesson
in directing those gifts if he is to find the true way of philosophy. And who better to give the lesson than Parmenides?
I know that this is a tricky question, for the character of
Parmenides in this dialogue is problematic. Respected commentators have argued that this Parmenides cannot be intended to be the philosopher by that name because the real
Parmenides could not possibly have spoken in the way this
Parmenides does; but I, at least at this point in my study, am
compelled to follow the more direct route of believing that
Plato meant this Parmenides to represent the great philosopher, while, of course, writing the character to suit his own
purposes.
Many of you probably have not read Parmenides’ poem
on being, and I do not have time here to give more than the
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briefest of summaries of a work which is very hard to summarize, both because of its inherent difficulty and because it
has survived only in widely scattered fragments and quotations which have been stitched together, leaving great gaps.
Parmenides of Elea would have been born around 515 BCE,
if we use Plato’s dialogue (about whose date, of course, we
can only conjecture) as a way of estimating his birth date. He
wrote a poem in the archaic hexameters of Greek epic poetry
whose first-person narrator is a youth of great thumos who
has undertaken a sort of mystic journey. Well-guided horses
pull the youth in a chariot whose axle glows and whistles
with heat along a wide road leading out of darkness into light.
Maidens, identified as daughters of the sun, escort him along
the road and through a mighty doorway into the abode of a
goddess. The maidens then persuade the goddess to give the
youth two accounts, one of which has been called the Way
of Truth and the other the Way of Seeming.
The Way of Truth states that being is and non-being is
not, and that only being can be thought or learned. Being has
certain characteristics, which the goddess lists for the youth:
It is ungenerated, imperishable, whole, single-limbed, untrembling, complete, indivisible, changeless, held in limits
by the chains of justice. Most mortals, she continues, do not
realize that only being is knowable; instead they wander, twoheaded, lost along the well-trodden but misdirected way,
thinking, mistakenly, that they can name and know opposites.
This mistaken way is the Way of Seeming, and its relationship to the Way of Truth is not completely clear in the poem.
What is clear is that being is one and absolute (though finite)
and that it can be truly known, while non-being, as it does
not really exist, cannot be known or even thought.
Now this is not quite the doctrine that Parmenides upholds in the dialogue. The Parmenides of the dialogue does
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still maintain the fundamental principle of the poem, namely,
that only absolute being can be known. Nonetheless, by accepting without question Socrates’ notion of Forms, he has
allowed multiplicity into being. So if the Parmenides of the
dialogue is the Parmenides of the poem, he has changed at
least part of his understanding of the nature of being. Furthermore, in the dialogue he raises that fundamental difficulty
which young Socrates has apparently not considered fully,
namely, the relationship of Forms to the things of this world.
This difficulty, as Parmenides sees it, has two parts. One part
is the question of which things in our world participate in
Forms, and the other concerns the nature of that participation.
The Parmenides of the dialogue is very concerned with the
relationship between seeming and being, a relationship which
is truly problematic in the poem, where, after stating that only
being can be known, the goddess provides a surprising
amount of information about seeming things, particularly
heavenly bodies and sex. Remember that we have no way of
knowing how much of the Way of Seeming has been lost, and
its reconstruction is particularly difficult because the fragments are so short and puzzling. If there is any connection
between the Way of Truth and the Way of Seeming in the
poem, we have to devise it ourselves; it is not given to us. In
fact, we have already seen that the poem tells us as plainly
as it tells us anything that one way is true and the other is
false.
So the poem and the dialogue concur that only being is
absolute and knowable, but in the dialogue we have a Parmenides who, unlike the author of the poem, has, in the first
place, accepted a plurality of absolutes (that is, the Forms)
and who, in the second place, considers the relationship between those absolutes and seeming things to be of utmost importance. Furthermore, he engages in an exercise that takes
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the form of dialectic, an interchange of a sort entirely absent
from the poem, whose young man remains silent, listening
(in a way reminiscent of Socrates’ encounter with Diotima in
the Symposium) to the teachings of the goddess.
These are three undeniably significant differences between the Parmenides of the poem and the Parmenides of the
dialogue. Our conclusion might be that these are different
men. It seems more fruitful to say that Plato has taken the
fundamental questions raised by Parmenides in the poem and
pushed them in the direction he felt they had to go if the approach to knowledge was to be anything other than a
metaphorical journey leading to a mystical vision. Who better
than the great philosopher himself to give his blessing to such
an enterprise, and to anoint young Socrates as the spirited
youth, the young hero, capable of pursuing it, if only he can
summon the courage to undertake such an arduous task? The
dialogue, in effect, resurrects the venerable authority and has
him declare, with Zeno’s approval, that Socrates is his true
heir.
Parmenides passes his legacy to Socrates in five ways.
First, the great philosopher who first asked the question
“What is Being?” has accepted the Forms as the answer to
that question. Second, he has repeatedly complimented young
Socrates on his ability and divine inclination toward logos.
Third, Parmenides has, by his questioning, forced Socrates
to recognize that he is in a state of aporia, by raising the question of the status of such things as mud, dirt, and hair—which
the author of the Way of Truth could never have valued any
more than Socrates ever will. Fourth, he has shown the young
man a possible way out of his aporia by instructing him in
the method that he will later adopt, that is, dialectic. And,
fifth, he has given him a demonstration of the courage that
young Socrates showed he lacked when he admitted he was
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afraid to face the possibility that mud, dirt, and hair might
partake of Forms.
Parmenides demonstrates courage to Socrates when he
allows himself, despite a fear that he voices several times, to
be persuaded to undertake the exercise of exploring the consequences, both for the One and for the others, of the existence and of the non-existence of the One. This is the most
difficult part of the dialogue to read. I have already raised one
possible interpretation: that the exercise is intended to
demonstrate how not to proceed if we are seeking truth. The
consequence of this reading, however, is that Parmenides becomes a buffoon, and I do not believe the dialogue supports
that contention any more than do later mentions of the
philosopher in the Theatetus, where Socrates, an old man
himself, refers to the nobility of Parmenides’ “reverend and
awful figure” during the encounter we are discussing (183e),
or in the Sophist, where, even though Father Parmenides is
killed by his own Eleatic follower, Socrates remembers the
magnificence of the arguments he employed in that long-ago
meeting (217c). Even allowing, as we must, for the possibility of irony, it is not at all clear what purpose would be served
by making a buffoon of the philosopher who first conceived
of being as unchanging and as capable of being known. More
consistent with the raising of Socrates into true philosophy
is the reading that makes Parmenides into a revered elder,
aware of his own limitations, but still able to inspire a spirited
youth to carry on the journey that, for an old man like himself, has become just another run around the track. No longer
a youth pulled by well-guided horses, but rather like an old
horse himself, Parmenides is nonetheless capable of recognizing a worthy heir and guiding him to pursue philosophy
along the correct route.
As I have observed, the novelty of the dialogue with re-
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spect to Parmenides’ poem as far as the practice of philosophy is concerned is the introduction of dialectic. Parmenides
in the dialogue has already shown a dialectical bent uncharacteristic of the poem in his questioning of Socrates. This
questioning is suggestively juxtaposed with Zeno’s reading
of an old essay—an essay that the author himself, when challenged, repudiates. And when Parmenides agrees to perform
his exercise, it is dialectical rather than expository; that is, it
is unlike the teaching of the goddess in Parmenides’ poem.
He then chooses the youngest one present, that is, young Aristotle, to be his interlocutor, giving three reasons. First, the
youngest will give least trouble; second, he will be most
likely to say what he thinks; and third, his answering will give
the older man a chance to rest. The first and third reasons indicate that Parmenides’ primary interlocutor in this exercise
will really be himself. This locates his demonstration of the
method closer to exposition than to dialogue. But the second
reason is interesting insofar as it recalls Socrates’ demonstration with the slave boy in the Meno; like the slave, who has
no reason to hold back from Socrates’ questioning, young Aristotle possesses a kind of pure outspokenness, a kind of fearlessness, that tends to be smothered by conventional thought
as a person ages. We can see that even the gifted young
Socrates has already fallen prey to convention if we read the
“perhaps” with which he accepts Parmenides’ substitution of
a sail for the day as a grudging acceptance of a substitution
he does not really admit. Whether he is being polite or he is
responding to the flattery Parmenides has just lavished on
him, Socrates, who contradicts Zeno so freely, seems unable
to contradict the admired older man.
The exercise itself is extremely difficult to read and understand, but it is carefully organized. (This is a feature that
is not evident in the truncated seminar assignment). Par-
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menides has said that he will consider the consequences both
for the One and for the others of the hypotheses both that the
One is and that it is not (135e-136c and 137b). I will repeat
the tangled conclusion he reaches:
Then let this be said, and also that, as it seems, whether
unity is or is not, both unity and the others are and are not,
and appear and do not appear to be, all things in all ways,
relative both to themselves and to each other (166c).
It is, as I said earlier, possible to read this as a demonstration
that nonsense is the only possible outcome of this particular
method of reasoning. In contrast, some commentators have
claimed that Parmenides’ exercise has indeed answered the
questions of participation that he raised in the first part of the
dialogue. Constance Meinwald, for example, argues ingeniously that it is possible to make sense out of the final statement, essentially (though, of course, this follows a complex,
book-length argument) by reading the verb esti, “to be” as
existential in some occurrences and predicative in others.1
According to this reading, the exercise would have explored
the possible pitfalls of language in general, and of that troublesome verb in particular. I would like, however, to argue
for a third interpretation. I believe that Parmenides has answered the questions he has raised, but that the answer is so
deeply buried that its very hiddenness begs to be explored.
Let us begin to do this by looking at the organization of the
argument in the light of Jacob Klein’s “Note on Plato’s Parmenides.”2 As its title suggests, Klein’s piece is no more than
a brief observation. The concern of the note is the “indeterminate dyad,” mentioned by Aristotle in the Physics and
Metaphysics.3 Aristotle’s contention is that the indeterminate
dyad was the substitute for the single “unlimited” or “indeterminate,” and, further, that this dyad consisted of “the Great
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and the Small.” Aristotle observes that the indeterminate dyad
is never explicitly mentioned by Plato. Klein believes, however, that there is a clear, if oblique, allusion to it in the Parmenides, specifically in Socrates’ apparently casual remark,
following Pythodorus’s observation that “many” others came
with him to hear Zeno’s reading. I mentioned earlier that
there were, in fact, seven men present at this conversation,
of whom only five are named. Parmenides also calls our attention to the group, without, however, numbering it, when
he agrees to engage in his laborious pastime. Klein suggests
that this equation of “many” with “two” is deliberate, and
that it is a veiled but unmistakable reference to what Aristotle
called the indeterminate dyad. Klein continues:
Zeno’s lecture (composed in his youth) was meant to show
that the consequences which flow from the assumption of
multiplicity in this world are even more absurd and ridiculous than the consequences which flow from the derided
Parmenidean assumption that “the One is” (128d). The
thesis of multiplicity, in Zeno’s presentation, seems to
imply the absence of unity, just as Parmenides’ assumption
divorces the One entirely from any multiplicity. It is noteworthy that, in the dialogue, Parmenides himself unfolds
before his listeners—young Aristotle acting as his dialectical partner—the contradictions involved both in the assumption and in the rejection of the “One” as the one and
only archē. There is an imbalance between Zeno’s thesis
and Parmenides’ performance: the denial of multiplicity is
not subjected to any scrutiny. What is lacking is a discussion of the consequences which flow from an explicit rejection of the many (cf. 136a).
Instead we are led by Parmenides and Aristotle to the
threshold of the insight that the root of the contradictions
concerning the “One” taken by itself is precisely the nonadmittance of another archē responsible for the “Many”
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and correlated with the “One.” The dialectic of the “One”
cannot avoid bringing this other archē, the “Other,” into
play. But its role within the framework of the dialogue is,
as it were, illegitimate. Still, its power is there, conspicuously, though silently present. The two undetermined men
in the audience represent it. They embody the elusive “indeterminate dyad” itself. This is their mimetically ironic
role.4
The structure of Parmenides’ exercise supports Klein’s
interpretation. Precisely what is lacking is what Klein has
called scrutiny of the denial of multiplicity. The structure of
the exercise is relatively simple.5 With one exception, it is divided into four sections, which follow Parmenides’ stated
plan. Two segments of the exercise consider (each one in two
parts) the consequences for unity and for the others if unity
exists. The other two (also each in two parts) consider the
consequences for unity and for the others if unity does not
exist. The opening argument, however, stands alone. Parmenides’ initial assumption is that the One is not Many. Of
course, young Aristotle agrees, for if anything is obvious, it
is that one is not many. Nevertheless, the outcome of this assumption is disastrous. Parmenides concludes that if the One
is not Many “then it cannot be named or spoken of, nor is it
an object of opinion or knowledge, nor does anything among
things which are perceive it,” and young Aristotle concurs
that none of those things can be true of unity (142a). Well, if
the One is not not-Many, does it then follow that the One is
Many? This is the balancing argument, which is missing. It
seems so absurd. There is no way in our everyday language
that the one can be many. There is no speakable way out of
this perplexity. And this is perhaps the crux of the indeterminate dyad, the manyness in the one that cannot be named but
which must somehow exist if we are to be able to link the
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Forms with the things of this world, that is, to practice philosophy. There is, then, a missing argument (and it could not
be otherwise, for the argument cannot be made with language
as we know it)—a fact that becomes apparent only when we
step back from the words and look at the structure of Parmenides’ exercise. This missing argument, necessarily absent,
is the one for the indeterminate dyad, the multiplicity within
the One, to which the presence of two unnamed men in the
first part of the dialogue points.
Let us look briefly once again at the principal questions
that the dialogue has raised and, I believe, answered. The first
is “What is philosophy?” In this dialogue Socrates is located
firmly within the Parmenidean tradition with respect to the
question of the nature of being: Only unalterable being is true
and knowable, and the philosopher seeks to know the truth,
that is, being. The second question—“Is philosophy possible?”—is no less important for human beings who would
seek to know. For if there is no way out of our perplexity—
and there is no way out unless the things we see can be related
to the things that are—then we are trapped in the world of
change, and the questions that philosophy raises are inaccessible to us. This is the difficulty with which Parmenides is
principally concerned in this dialogue; and the dialogue
shows us, if we know how to look at it, that there is a relationship between the things that are and the things that seem
to be. There is, in other words, a way out. That way is what
Aristotle called the indeterminate dyad, the multiplicity
within the One, and it must be sought in the dialogue as a
whole.
Let us return to the puzzling last sentence of the dialogue.
What are we to make of the stupendously unsatisfying conclusion to Parmenides’ exercise? If it is true that the dialogue
is seeded on various levels with covert allusions to the un-
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named and unnamable indeterminate dyad, the nonsensical
end of the dialogue may be a truly thumping clue that there
is a meaning here, and that the actual words are not where it
is to be found. This is a reading that takes us outside the text,
where we meet Socrates, who is, as it were, “in on it,” for he
is the one who alludes to the indeterminate dyad by mentioning that there are seven men present. Would Plato be capable
of performing such a trick—for our benefit, of course? I think
so. There is duality everywhere you look in this dialogue; and
furthermore, it is a duality that by its very ostentatiousness
implores us to attempt to forge a simple unity of it. Plato does
not coddle his readers, for one of his points is that philosophy
is hard work. We must be alive to the difficulties of reading
at every level of his intricately composed mimetic texts.
In conclusion I would like to recall a conversation I had
during a paper conference with one of the students in my Parmenides preceptorial, Adrienne St. Onge. She was troubled
by what she feared was an implication that only the young
had the spirit necessary to pursue philosophy. The initiate in
Parmenides’ poem is, after all, a young man, and in the dialogue, the point is made again and again that Socrates, the
spirited one, is very young. Zeno, a member of the generation
before Socrates, is frozen in time. Rereading old, repudiated
treatises, he is going nowhere. Indeed, if the significant difference between youth and age is the difference between zeal
for controversy and zeal for reputation, there is nowhere to
go. Parmenides, a member of the generation before Zeno’s,
provides an example that is not much better, comparing himself both to an aged lover and to an old racehorse reluctantly
running around in circles—that is, once again, going
nowhere. But as we talked we began to realize that this is the
beauty of the posthumous setting. Cephalus has come to
Athens because of what Socrates later became. And we read-
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ers know what Socrates became because we have read dialogues written earlier, but situated later in his life. We know
that Socrates never lost his desire for philosophy. We know
that he never confused truth with mud. Plato contrives to have
the venerable philosopher anoint and assist his heir, and what
that heir has become we already know.
Still, the “present” of the dialogue is troubling. It is true
that men have come from Clazomenae to hear the conversation, but the state of philosophy after Socrates’ death seems
perilous. I doubt that we ever expected Glaucon and
Adeimantus to become philosophers; but Antiphon, who in
this dialogue is the closest link to Socrates’ time, is shown
instructing a smith to make a bit for a horse. I can’t help but
read this as a discouraging allusion to the well-guided horses
pulling the young man’s chariot toward the light of truth at
the beginning of Parmenides’ poem. Antiphon is not a man
of philosophical desire or spirit. The text, as he recites it, is
trapped in time, as dead as Zeno’s treatise.
So is it only exceptional people who can become philosophers? We have Socrates, who surpassed his mentors, and
Plato, himself, who by implication may have surpassed
Socrates. But now what? The dialogue assures us that philosophy is possible, but it does not suggest that it is easy. On
the contrary, the philosopher must possess unending desire,
unusual intelligence, and divine devotion to truth. This is all
the more reason to wonder if Plato deliberately planted in his
dialogues hints that would not be accessible to the many,
those who despite everything and will always persist in traveling the wide and well-trodden, but wrong, way. Plato will
not do our work for us, for if he did we would not be moved
to philosophy. Both in this dialogue and more explicitly in
the Phaedrus, he warns us of the danger of dead texts. To
have meaning, the writing must somehow live. For more than
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two thousand years we have been trying to tease meaning out
of Plato’s texts, and the Parmenides has been among those
most resistant to our efforts. Manifestly, Plato would not expect such endeavors to lead everyone to philosophy, but insofar as our search for meaning has led us to seek a way out
of our perplexity, we have engaged in the only philosophy
Parmenides and Socrates (and, I think, Plato) would agree is
real: the living search for a path to knowledge.
NOTES
Constance Meinwald, Plato’s Parmenides (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991).
1
In Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays (Annapolis: St. John’s College Press, 1985), 285-87.
2
3
For references see Klein, 285.
4
Klein, Parmenides, 287.
I owe a debt of thanks to a student, Darcy Christ, for making this
clear to me.
5
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Elliott Carter at St. John’s College
Tutor, 1940-1942
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Rolling His Jolly Tub:
Composer Elliott Carter,
St. John’s College Tutor,
1940-1942
Hollis Thoms
Away went he out of town towards a little hill or
promontory of Corinth called (the) Cranie; and
there on the strand, a pretty level place, did he roll
his jolly tub, which served him for a house to
shelter him from the injuries of the weather.
—Rabelais
Elliott Carter, now one of America’s foremost living composers, was a Tutor at St. John’s College from 1940 to 1942.
This was a turbulent time both for the College and for Carter.
The College was still in the process of phasing out the “old”
curriculum and was trying to establish the “new” Great Books
curriculum. Then, just after the last students under the old
regime were graduated in 1941, World War II began to coopt
college-age men for the war effort. In Carter’s life, his recent
marriage, together with the lingering effects of Great Depression, made it imperative for him to secure an academic
position. At the same time, he was transforming his compoHollis Thoms is a composer and researcher from Annapolis, Maryland,
who received the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts degree from St. John’s
College in 2006. Many thanks are due to individuals at St. John’s who
facilitated research for this paper: Chris Nelson, President; Catherine
Dixon, Library Director; Cara Sabolcick, Public Service Librarian, Daniel
Crowe, Registrar; Jacqueline Thoms, Assistant Registrar; Eric Stoltzfus,
Music Librarian; and Mark Daly, Head of Laboratories. Thanks also to
Dr. Philip Allen, who edited the first draft.
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sitional practice, casting off traditional influences, and moving
in a radically new musical direction. The story of Carter’s
time at St. John’s is the story of two interlaced experiments:
the College’s experiment in higher education, and Carter’s
experiment in finding his vocation as a composer.
Elliott Carter, 1908-1940
Elliott Cook Carter, Jr. was born in New York on December
11, 1908 to lace-import businessman Elliott Cook Carter, Sr.
and his wife Florence, née Chambers. The young Elliott was
intended to succeed his father at the lace-import firm. As he
grew, however, his musical talents and interests led him away
from business and toward a career in music. The elder Carter
was openly contemptuous of such an impractical scheme
(Wierzbicki 2011, 5-6). But Clifton J. Furness, music teacher
at the Horace Mann School where Carter studied from 1920
to 1926, recognized and encouraged his student's talent. He
took the teenage Carter to avant-garde concerts, exposing him
to new music by composers such as Bartók, Ruggles, Stravinsky, Varèse, Schoenberg, and Webern. And he introduced him
to many New York musicians and composers, including
Charles Ives, the eccentric millionaire businessman and experimental composer. Ives often invited Carter to join him
and his wife in their Carnegie Hall box for performances by
the Boston Symphony, which, under the leadership of Serge
Koussevitzky, commissioned many new works by living
composers. Ives became a musical and intellectual role model
for Carter (Wierzbicki 2011, 7-9).
The distance between the younger Carter’s ambitions and
his father’s continued to grow during these years. When
Carter was sixteen in 1925, his father took him along on a
business trip to Vienna, where all his attention was focussed
on trying to acquire all the currently available scores of
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Schoenberg and Webern. Carter remembers going with his
father to a performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring,
which the father summed up with “Only a madman could
have written anything like that.” Yet that performance was
one of the experiences that inspired the young Elliot to become a composer (Edwards 1971, 40, 45).
So, contrary to his father’s wishes, Carter decided to
study music at Harvard. Ives wrote a letter of reference in
which he pointed to Carter’s artistic instincts:
Carter strikes me as rather an exceptional boy. He has
an instinctive interest in literature and especially
music that is somewhat unusual. He writes well—an
essay in his school paper—“Symbolism in Art”—
shows an interesting mind. In don’t know him intimately, but his teacher in Horace Mann School, Mr.
Clifton J. Furness, and a friend of mine, always
speaks well of him—that he’s a good character and
does well in his studies. I am sure his reliability, industry, and sense of honour are what they should
be—also his sense of humor which you do not ask
me about (Schiff 1983, 15-16).
He intended to major in music at Harvard in the fall of
1926, but lasted only a semester in that program. He remained at Harvard, however, but opted to spend his undergraduate years working on a degree in English literature. The
Harvard music department was not to his liking, since it
would have nothing to do with the new music in which
Carter was interested. Carter said that he “would have been
glad if somebody at Harvard had explained to me what went
on in the music of Stravinsky, Bartok and Schoenberg, and
had tried somehow to develop in me the sense of harmony
and counterpoint that these composers had” (Wierzbicki
2011, 11).
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Carter enjoyed his English literature experience, but, as
with music, he went further than the traditional literature offerings, which stopped with reading Tennyson. He preferred
reading more avant garde authors such as Gerard Manley
Hopkins, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, T. S.
Elliot, e. e. cummings, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence,
Gertrude Stein, and others. In addition to studying classics,
philosophy, and mathematics, he also studied German and
Greek—which, in addition to his fluency in French, made
him quite proficient in languages. Carter spent his undergraduate years pursuing the broadest possible education, for he
saw music not merely as a technical study, but as an art form
embedded in and intimately connected with the liberal arts.
He, did, nonetheless, participate in more traditional musical
activities during his time at Harvard, taking instruction in
piano, oboe, and solfeggio at the Longy School. He sang
tenor in the Harvard Glee Club and in a Bach Cantata Club.
He also spent time studying the scores of the past masters,
taking full advantage of the vast holdings of the Harvard
music library (Wierzbicki 2011, 15-19).
Carter’s youthful interest in the new music can be seen
in the repertory of works he performed with his old music
teacher Clifton Furness in a joint piano recital in Hartford,
Connecticut on December 12, 1928: the program included
pieces by Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, Arnold Schoenberg, Francis Poulenc, Alfredo Casella, Gian Francesco
Malipiero, Henry Gilbert, Charles Ives, Eric Satie, Paul Hindemith, and George Antheil (Schiff 1983, 15).
After Carter graduated, he went on receive an MA in musical composition at Harvard, because, when Gustav Holst
came as a visiting composer and Walter Piston returned from
studying in Paris, there was a new interest in contemporary
music at Harvard, so that Carter felt more at home in the al-
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tered the musical environment. Piston recommended that
Carter go to study with the well known teacher of composition Nadia Boulanger at the École Normale de Musique de
Paris, and Carter did so from 1932-1935. Carter’s fluency in
French made Paris a natural choice; and because both Piston
and Aaron Copland, whom Carter knew and admired, had
studied with her, he felt that it was a reasonable thing to do
(Wierzbicki 2011, 20-21).
Despite persistent financial worries while in Paris—his
father did not approve of the plan and cut his allowance in
half, though his mother continued to supplement the allowance—Carter thrived as a student of Boulanger, whom he
remembers with admiration for the way she illuminated both
the past and the future of music:
The things that were most remarkable and wonderful
about her were her extreme concern for the material
of music and her acute awareness of its many phases
and possibilities. I must say that, though I had taken
harmony and counterpoint at Harvard and thought I
knew all about these subjects, nevertheless, when
Nadia Boulanger put me back on tonic and dominant
chords in half notes, I found to my surprise that I
learned all kinds of things I’d never thought before.
Every one one of her lessons became very illuminating. . . . Mlle. Boulanger was a very inspiring teacher
of counterpoint and made it such a passionate concern
that all this older music constantly fed me thoughts
and ideas. All the ways you could make the voices
cross and combine or sing antithetical lines were
things we were involved in strict counterpoint, which
I did for three years with her—up to twelve parts,
canons, invertible counterpoint, and double choruses—and found it fascinating.” (Edwards 1971, 50,
55. Emphasis added.)
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Then also, when I was studying with Mlle. Boulanger
I began for the first time to get an intellectual grasp
of what went on technically in modern works. I was
there at a time when Stravinsky, who was of course
the contemporary composer she always admired
most[, was also in Paris]. . . . The way she illuminated
the details of these works was just extraordinary to
me. . . . I met Stravinsky, because he used to come to
tea at Mlle. Boulanger’s. . . . [W]hat always struck
me every time I heard Stravinsky play the piano—the
composer’s extraordinary, electric sense of rhythm
and incisiveness of touch that made every note he
played a “Stravinsky-note” full of energy, excitement
and serious intentness” (Edwards 1971, 51, 56. Emphasis added.)
Boulanger’s attitude toward music matched his own: in
his daily lessons, composition as a craft was combined with
composition as in the context of the liberal arts. Carter spent
three years studying with Boulanger, and as a result of her
tutelage, he gained both the musical craftsmanship and the
self-confidence to produce compositions that he considered
worth preserving. It was only “after Paris” that Carter “could
begin to compose” (Wierzbicki 2011, 24).
After his return from Paris, Carter immersed himself in
musical activities, groups, and composing, first in Boston and
then in New York. He wrote a number of choral works including one called “Let’s Be Gay,” a work for women’s chorus and two pianos based on texts by John Gay. It was written
for, and performed by, the Wells College Glee Club in the
spring of 1938, which was led by his friend Nicolas Nabokov,
who was to figure again in Carter’s career a few years later
(Wierzbicki 2011, 25).
The Great Depression made it impossible for Carter to
find a secure job, but he was able to become a regular con-
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103
tributor to Modern Music, a journal that had been founded in
1924 as the house organ of the New York-based League of
Composers. In the process of writing thirty-one articles and
reviews for the journal, he gained familiarity with current
compositional activity in New York, and he developed the
skills of a professional music critic (Wierzbicki 2011, 26-27).
In addition, he was hired as a composer-in-residence for
the experimental ballet company Ballet Caravan, formed in
1936 by Lincoln Kirstein, whom Carter had met in Paris. In
that same year, Carter wrote the piano score of a ballet for
the company, called Pocahontas, which premiered in 1939.
In June of 1940 the New York Times announced that an orchestral suite drawn from the ballet had won “the Julliard
School’s annual competition for the publication of orchestral
works by American composers.” This prestigious award finally launched Carter’s career as a composer at the age of 31
(Wierzbicki 2011, 27).
Shortly before the premiere of Pocahontas, on July 6,
1939, Carter married Helen Frost-Jones, a sculptor and art
critic, whom he met through his friend Nicolas Nabokov.
With the possibility of a family now on the horizon, Carter
redoubled his efforts to find employment. At Aaron Copland’s suggestion, he applied in the spring of 1940 for a
teaching position at Cornell University. Cornell was actively
considering him, but the school was not in a hurry to hire.
Carter, on the other hand, wanted a position for the fall. So
instead he accepted an offer to teach music, mathematics,
physics, philosophy, and Greek at St. John’s College in Annapolis (Wierzbicki 2011, 28).
The offer from St. John’s was also due to Carter’s friend
Nicolas Nabokov, who recommended Carter after himself
turning down the offer of a position for 1940-1941. In a letter
to Stringfellow Barr dated June 22, 1940, Nabokov ex-
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plained, first, that he could not accept the position for that
year because his wife was expecting a child and, since they
lived in Massachusetts, it would be too inconvenient to move
or to commute between the arduous new job and his family;
second, that the compensation offered at St. John’s College
was not adequate for him to take care of his new family; and
third, that he could not in good conscience leave Wells so
soon before the beginning of the fall term.
In declining the position, Nabokov recommended a substitute: “Mr. Elliott Carter of whom I spoke to you the other
day and more extensively to Mr. Buchanan would in my opinion fit perfectly into the St. John’s place of education. . . . Mr.
Carter as you will see from his curriculum vitae and the enclosed articles is a very thorough, serious and reliable man
and I recommend him to you very highly. . . . [H]e is very
anxious to undertake the job.” He suggested that Carter could
substitute for him for during the coming school year, and then
Nabokov himself would come to St. John’s the following
year. Nabokov did indeed arrive at St. John’s the following
fall to take over the teaching of music; but Carter did not
leave. Instead he spent a second year at St. John’s teaching
Greek, mathematics, and seminar (Nabokov 1940).
Carter’s decision to accept the position at St. John’s could
not have been easy to make. He was just beginning his career
as a composer, trying to develop a distinctive creative voice
in challenging financial circumstances, which were made
even more challenging by his recent marriage. This was certainly a turbulent time in his life.
He was to join the St. John’s community at a turbulent
time in its own history. The college had recently launched an
educational experiment unprecedented in American higher
education, the success of which was far from certain. The
prospect of teaching at the third oldest college in the nation
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105
(the direct predecessor of St. John’s, King William’s School,
was founded in 1696, after Harvard in 1636 and William and
Mary in 1693) might have seemed a more stable position than
anything the young composer could find in New York, but he
would soon discover a great deal of unstable dissonance in
the community he was to join.
St. John’s College in 1940: Turbulence
In 1937, St. John’s College found itself at a crossroads. In addition to a severe financial crisis, the physical plant was in
deep disrepair. A weak Board of Governors and Visitors had
appointed three new Presidents within nine years in an attempt to find someone who could remedy the situation. All
three had failed, however, and the College had lost its accreditation status with the Middle States Association of Colleges
and Schools. Demoralized faculty members were leaving.
(See Murphy 1996 and Rule 2009 for the facts in this section.)
The stronger members of the Board decided to take drastic action. They named Robert Hutchins, President of the University of Chicago, who had long been involved in attempts
to revive the liberal arts, to chair the Board. The Board also
hired two colleagues of Hutchins’ from the Committee on
Liberal Arts at Chicago as President and Dean, Stringfellow
Barr and Scott Buchanan. Their charge was to effect a complete transformation from a traditional college curriculum to
a radically “old” Great Books curriculum. There would no
longer be the traditional options leading to specialized degrees; the faculty would no longer teach only in their areas
of expertise, but in all areas of the curriculum; the college
would no longer participate in intercollegiate sports; there
would no longer be fraternities on campus.
Instead, the completely renovated curriculum, known as
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the “New Program,” consisted of two seminars (discussion
groups) per week on one of the books on the prescribed reading list, five tutorials (small classes) per week in mathematics, five language tutorials per week, at least one three-hour
laboratory period per week, and at least one formal lecture
per week. (Barr 1941, 44.)
In order to effect the change, the New Program was
phased in over a four-year period. Students entering in the
fall of 1937 were allowed to choose which curriculum they
would pursue. Thereafter, all incoming freshmen entered the
New Program. Carter arrived in the 1940-1941 school year,
the last year of the unsettled transitional period, at the end of
which the last graduates under the old curriculum were
awarded their degrees alongside the first graduates under the
New Program. By Carter’s second year, 1941-1942, the New
Program had completely replaced the old curriculum.
Clearly, the board was taking a risk by instituting such an
innovative and untried curriculum, and the risk paid off
slowly. On 1937 there were twenty freshmen who entered in
the New Program; in 1938, forty-six; in 1939, fifty-four; and
in 1940, when Carter arrived, there were ninety-three. The
total number of students held steady at around 170 during the
first four years, so the transition seemed relatively painless
from the enrollment point of view. But the exodus of faculty
members continued, since quite a few were not prepared to
give up their specialties to become co-learners along with
their students in an environment of cooperative learning in
all the liberal arts.
In his quarterly report to the board of April 1939,
Stringfellow Barr described the sort of student and the sort
of tutor that would thrive in the New Program. The students
would have to be able to think clearly and imaginatively, read
the most diverse sorts of material with understanding and de-
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107
light, distinguish sharply between what he knows and what
is mere opinion, have an affinity for first-rate authors and an
aversion to second-rate authors, derive great pleasure from
exercising his intellect on difficult problems, and desire to be
a thoughtful generalist rather than a highly proficient specialist. The tutors, on the other hand, would have to transcend
divergent intellectual backgrounds, be clear expositors, imaginative artists, and cooperative fellow seekers, know how to
teach and learn through discussion, and, above all, be intellectual treasure-hunters.
For unquestionably, the treasures our authors had
written were for our generation partially buried. We
needed men who wanted to help our students dig
them up. The best that we could do, the best indeed
that could be done, was to call for volunteers, volunteers for the treasure hunt, remembering for our comfort that this treasure hunt has never wholly ceased
during the intellectual history of our Western civilization (Nelson 1997, 52-59).
When Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan recruited Elliott Carter they were looking for a “treasure hunter.” They
found in him a kindred spirit who transcended intellectual
narrowness, thought clearly, and was an imaginative artist.
Their relationship continued long after all of them had left
St. John’s. Years later, in 1962, when Barr was invited to
nominate Elliott Carter for an honorary degree at Rutgers
University, Carter replied from Rome in a letter that testifies
to their enduring friendship. (Barr was affectionately called
“Winkie” by his close friends. Carter, 1962.)
Dec. 18, 1962
Dear Winkie —
I am sorry to say that I will not be back in New York
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until July — I do thank
you very much for thinking of me in connection
with the honorary degree
from Rutgers but again I
must beg off — to my sorrow — because as usual
my work seems to have
taken over and dictated
the plan of my life for me
— and I must stay here
until I finish my Concerto
— Merry Xmas and
Fig. 1: Letter to Scott Buchanan
Happy New Year to you (St. John’s College Library Archive,
and Tak [?] — And thanks
Barr Personal Papers, Series 2,
Box 10, folder 20)
for the suggestion Sorry
not to be able to accept it —
Affectionately, Elliott
1940-1941: Tutor and Director of Music
In the college catalogue of 1940-41, Carter was listed as
Tutor and Director of Music (St. John’s College Catalogue
1940-41). His responsibilities included supervision of the entire music program. According to the college newspaper, The
Collegian, which ran a long article in October about the upcoming year’s music program, Carter would plan and schedule a series of six concerts by visiting artists; he would give
a lecture the week before each concert to discuss the works
on the program; he would organize and direct student instrumental ensembles to appear in recitals and accompany the
Glee Club; he would conduct the Glee Club, which was to
rehearse three times per week and give numerous recitals during the year; he would lead a music discussion group on Saturday mornings for interested students; he would lead a
counterpoint, harmony, and composition class for interested
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students; he would supervise concerts of recorded music four
times per week; he would prepare the music room in the late
afternoon each day for students to listen to recorded music
(The Collegian, Oct. 19, 1940).
Carter seems to have taken to these duties enthusiastically, if the pictures in the 1941 St. John’s College Yearbook
give any indication. In the faculty section of the yearbook
there is a picture of Carter working assiduously at his desk,
and in the Glee Club section there is a photo of him directing
the singers with deliberation. The yearbook also provides a
positive evaluation of Carter’s work with the Glee Club over
the year:
The aims of the Club are primarily to foster competent group singing (not necessary concert competency), to gain a better understanding of choral music,
and . . . to let the ear hear what the voice does. To date
the criticisms received from the two mid-winter
recitals give encouragement to the feeling that the
Glee Club is headed in the right direction. Studies,
scholarship work, and talents turned toward other
interests have naturally
taken their toll of the initial
roster, but there still remains a group large
enough to work with the
music under consideration.
The members are from the
three lower classes, which
means that their return next
fall will leave only the task
of inducting freshmen and
learning new songs; this is
Fig. 2: Carter’s four-part setting
indeed a strong incentive
of “St. John’s Forever”
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for the club’s continuation and success (St. John’s
College Yearbook, 1941, 30).
And the work Carter did with the music program was indeed quite varied. For instance, on Saturday, December 20,
1940, the Glee Club performed, at the request of Scott
Buchanan, on the St. John’s College monthly radio broadcast
from WFBR in Baltimore. On that occasion they sang “St.
John’s Forever,” arranged especially by Carter for the broadcast. (A copy of this arrangement can be found in the St.
John’s College Music Library.) They also sang at “Miss
Alexander’s Christmas Party” on December 18. And Carter
assisted in making the musical arrangements for the end-ofterm variety show That’s Your Problem, which showcased the
vaudeville talents of both students and tutors (The Collegian,
Nov. 13 and Dec. 13, 1940).
When the first performance of the year’s concert series
was announced, The Collegian took the opportunity to explain the purpose of the lectures that Carter would give in
preparation for each concert:
While Mr. Carter plans to discuss primarily the program for each concert, the entire lecture series will
form a course in music appreciation. As Mr. Carter is
himself a talented musician, the course affords a
unique opportunity in musical education (The Collegian, Nov. 1, 1940).
The Collegian also reviewed each concert, and while the performances were sometimes panned, sometimes praised, there
was no criticism of Carter’s work in organizing the series and
lecturing on the pieces performed.
Things went less swimmingly with some of Carter’s other
duties. The counterpoint, harmony, and composition class
that had been announced in October was “on the verge of collapse” at the start of the second term because of waning at-
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tendance. The Saturday morning music discussion class was
considered to be “somewhat irregular”; nevertheless, in January the group had just finished an analysis of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and was starting to study Beethoven’s
Diabelli Variations (The Collegian, Jan. 31, 1941). In February it was announced that, “at the request of a small group
of students,” Carter would be offering a new class in eartraining and sight-singing on Saturday mornings (The Collegian, Feb. 14, 1941).
Taking into account the addition of this new class,
Carter’s teaching schedule for his first year at St. John’s
looked like this:
Elliott Carter’s Teaching Schedule, 1940-41
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
4-6
Sunday
Music
discussion
and ear
training
10-12
2-3
Saturday
Counterpoint
Music
Music
Room
Room
Music
Room
Music
Room
Counterpoint
Music
Music
Room
Room
Recorded Glee
Music
Club
Recorded
Music
Glee
Club
Glee
Club
6-7
7-8
Recorded
Music
In addition to his teaching hours, it seems that Carter was
responsible for writing several manuals relating to musical
studies during the fall 1940 term. Not surprisingly, he authored a “Manual of Musical Notation” explaining how to
read and write music, which was no doubt intended for the
use of students in his various music classes. But his name is
also attached to several manuals of musical studies that were
part of the Freshman Laboratory curriculum: “Musical Intervals and Scales,” “The Greek Diatonic Scale,” and “The Just
Scale and Its Uses” (Schiff 1983, 336). Another manual exists
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for a fourth laboratory unit called “The Keys in Music,”
which, though unsigned, must also have been devised by
Carter, because the musical examples are written in his distinctive musical script. (All the documents mentioned in this
paragraph can be found in the St. John’s College Library
Archives.)
All these manuals demonstrate Carter’s understanding of
the integration of music with the rest of the curriculum of the
New Program. The “Manual of Music Notation,” for instance, likens music to language, and musical notation to linguistic writing systems.
Musical notation is the method used to represent
graphically the patterns of sound which are the basis
of music. Like the writing which represents the language of words, it serves man to overcome his lapses
of memory by maintaining a more permanent record
and aids him in the transmission to other men of the
work of his mind as well in art as in thought.
The simplest kind of notation of music sounds indicates in a general way the prolongation or shortening
of the vowels of words and also the rise and fall of
the voice while it is sounding them (Carter 1941, 1.)
The comparison between music and language was a favorite notion of Scott Buchanan’s, and Carter seems to have
agreed with him. It is likely that the two discussed the matter
before Carter wrote this manual. There is a record from this
period of Buchanan’s thoughts on music—a three-page outline of the topic “Music” dated November 8, 1940 that shows
clear parallels to Carter’s formulation. The first page of the
outline contains these notes (Buchanan 1940, 1):
Voice—noise
Words
3 Dimensions of Words
Pitch
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113
Time
Accent-Rhythm
Other Dimensions
Expression
Music Without Words
Measurement and Words
Verbal Analogies
Figures of Speech
Metaphor
Simile
Analogy
Allegory
It appears that the two men were in agreement that music is
one of the writing and reading disciplines in the liberal arts
tradition, and that this view needed to be expressed somehow
in the New Program.
If Carter’s music-notation manual links the study of
music to the study of language, his laboratory manuals even
more clearly link it to the study of mathematics and physics.
In 1939-1940, the year before Carter’s revision of the music
element in the laboratory program, there was only one music
laboratory exercise during the entire year, and the text of the
manual for that exercise was a mere five pages that described
the design of a simple, two-string sonometer (sounding
board), gave instructions for duplicating Pythagoras’ experiments on musical ratios, provided directions for creating various musical scales, and posing questions to be answered in
laboratory reports. Carter’s four laboratory units brought the
total number of manual pages devoted to musical topics up
to sixty-eight, and the experiments he devised demonstrate a
wide-ranging knowledge of early music theory and mathematics. The lessons covered Pythagoras’ experiments, Euclid’s division of the canon, the music of Plato’s Timaeus,
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and Kepler’s notions of the musical relations among the planets; he had the students create eight- and thirteen-string
sonometers to explore the discovery and historical development of musical intervals, modes, scales, melodies, harmonies, and chord progressions from the most ancient
tunings through the experimental temperaments of the
Baroque and early Classical period to modern equal temperament. (The sonometer
in the accompanying
photo is located in the
St. John’s College
Music Library.)
Moreover, these
lessons were coordinated with the readings that students
were doing in matheFig. 3: Carter’s Sonometer
matics tutorial and seminar. According to the teaching schedule, the Freshman music
laboratories would have occurred during the fifteenth through
the eighteenth weeks of the school year, that is, probably in
December and January. These units therefore would have followed previous laboratory studies of physical phenomena
dealing with rectilineal angles, areas, weights and measures,
light, lenses, and circular motion, and mathematical studies
of polygons, simple ratios, compound ratios, and simple
quadratic equations.
Virgil Blackwell, Carter’s personal assistant, calls the two
years at St. John’s the “lost years,” because they have not
been much discussed by Carter’s biographers. He also told
me that Carter had a good laugh when he saw the image of
the sonometer I had sent via email (personal communication,
Nov. 6, 2011); he remembered that “the students made the
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115
sonometer” (personal communication, Nov. 8, 2011). These
remarks indicate that Carter approached the teaching of the
music laboratories in the participatory, exploratory, experimental spirit of the New Program. He and his students would
investigate the most complex concepts of tuning by means
of the sonometers they built with their own hands, by applying bridges, weights, rulers, wires, nails, rubber mallets,
bows, and resin to manipulate string lengths in an effort to
discover the mathematical underpinnings of the auditory phenomena.
While Carter thus set the foundations for the mathematical study of music at St. John’s, his initial designs began to
be modified in the very next school year. Since the program
of study at the college has always been under continuous revision, the music labs too went through changes over the
years, until Carter’s original contributions were all but forgotten. His four laboratory exercises lay neglected in the library archives, together with the drawings of the eight- and
thirteen-stringed sonometers. The seventy-year old sonometer, discovered some years ago in a basement storage room,
was tucked away as a curious relic in a corner of the music
library, its purpose and origin unknown.
1941-1942: Tutor of Greek, Mathematics, and Seminar
In the 1941-42 school year, Carter’s friend Nicholas Nabokov
arrived at St. John’s to take over the duties of Director of
Music. Nabokov expanded the music program considerably.
While the Glee Club continued, he added two new vocal
groups: a chamber choir and something called the “Vespers”
group. He also started a chamber ensemble and a community
orchestra.
Since Carter had relinquished his responsibilities to
Nabokov, he then took on the regular teaching schedule of a
tutor at the College. Initially it was difficult to determine ex-
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actly what he taught during his second year. After seventy
years, the original records of teaching schedules and tutor assignments had been lost. But the current Assistant Registrar
at St. John’s, Jacqueline Thoms, recently discovered some
ledgers detailing all the classes attended by each Senior in
the graduating class of 1945 during their four-your career, together with the names of their tutors. By compiling the
classes that these students attended during their Freshman
year, it was possible to identify the classes Carter taught during the 1941-42 school year, and the number of students in
each of his classes (Ledger 1941-42).
This research confirms the facts that were already known
about Carter’s teaching that year. He taught Freshman Greek,
Freshman Mathematics, and his four Freshman Laboratory units
when they came up in December or January. In addition, he coled a Freshman Seminar with fellow tutor Bernard Peebles.
Elliott Carter’s teaching schedule 1941-42
Monday
9-10
Greek
Tutorial
9 students
Tuesday
Greek
Tutorial
9 students
Wednesday
Greek
Tutorial
9 students
Thursday
Greek
Tutorial
9 students
Friday
Greek
Tutorial
9 students
10-11
11-12
Mathematics Mathematics Mathematics
Tutorial
Tutorial
Tutorial
9 students
9 students
9 students
Mathematics Mathematics
Tutorial
Tutorial
9 students
9 students
12-2
Laboratory
Freshman
Exercises 15-18
2-5
5-8
8-10
Seminar with
Peebles
18 students
Seminar with
Peebles
18 students
Although Carter’s responsibilities as Director of Music
were no doubt heavy, his responsibilities as a tutor were even
heavier. In addition to facilitating discussion in his Greek and
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Mathematics tutorials, he also had to set up, prepare, and lead
the laboratory exercises for the students. All these classes also
required him to read and respond to short papers and reports,
and to devise and correct occasional quizzes. In his Seminar
he had to complete the extensive required readings from the
Great Books, moderate the two-hour long seminar discussions twice a week, read longer papers, and conduct oral examinations. In addition, he also would have spent considerable
time advising students individually on their classwork, and
helping them to write, revise, and complete the required essays.
One can get an idea of the sheer amount of reading Carter
had to do for seminar alone from the schedule of readings
from the 1940-41 school year, which would not have changed
much during the following year:
September 26
September 30
October 3
October 7
October 10
October 14
October 17
October 21
October 24
October 28
October 31
November 4
November 7
Homer, Iliad, 1
November 11 Aeschylus, Choephoroe, Eumenides
Homer, Iliad, 2-4
November 14 Plato, Charmides, Lysis
Homer, Iliad, 5-10
November 18 Plato, Symposium
Homer, Iliad, 11-16
November 21 Herodotus, History, 1-2
Homer, Iliad, 17-24
November 25 Herodotus, History, 3-5
Plato, Ion, Laches
November 28 Herodotus, History, 6-7
Homer, Odyssey, 1-8 December 2 Herodotus, History, 8-9
Homer, Odyssey, 9-16 December 5 Plato, Gorgias
Homer, Odyssey, 17-24 December 9 Plato, Republic, 1-2
Plato, Meno
December 12 Plato, Republic 3-5
Plato, 3 works
December 16 Plato, Republic, 6-7
Plato, Phaedo
December 19 Plato, Republic, 8-10
Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Christmas Vacation
January 6
January 9
January 13
January 16
January 20
January 23
January 27
January 30
February 3
February 6
February 10
Plato, Cratylus
Plato, Phaedrus
Sophocles, 2 works
Aristotle, Poetics
Sophocles, 2 works
Euripides, 3 works
Plato, Parmenides
Plato, Theatetus
Plato, Sophist
Hippocrates, 4 works
Hippocrates, 5 works
February 13
February 13
February 20
February 27
March 3
March 6
March 10
March 13
March 17
March 20
Plato, Philebus
Plato, Timaeus
Aristotle, Categories
Aristotle, Prior Analytics
Aristotle, Posterior Analytics
Aristotle, Posterior Analytics
Aristotle, Posterior Analytics
Thucydides, History, 1-2
Thucydides, History, 3-4
Thucydides, History, 5-6
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Spring Vacation
March 31
April 3
April 7
April 10
April 14
April 17
April 21
April 24
April 28
Thucydides, History, 7-8
Aristophanes, 3 works
Aristophanes, 3 works
Aristotle, Politics, 1-4
Aristotle, Politics, 5-8
Plutarch, 5 works
Plutarch, 3 works
Nicomachus, Arithmetic 1
Nicomachus, Arithmetic, 2
May 1
May 5
May 8
May 12
May 15
May 19
May 23
May 26
May 29
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
Euclid, Elements, Bks. 5, 10, 13
Aristarchus, Sun and Moon
Aristotle, Physics, 1
Aristotle, Physics, 2-3
Aristotle, Physics, 4
Archimedes, Works (unspecified)
Lucian, True History
(Barr Buchanan Series III, Curriculum in Motion, December 1940,
Box 2, Folder 25, St. John’s College Library Archives)
As we have seen, Carter’s remarkable education prepared
him well for his duties as a tutor at St. John’s. Nevertheless,
the new experience of teaching Freshmen, the pace of the curriculum, and the many hours spent meeting individually with
students must have kept him extraordinarily busy.
1940-1942: Elliott Carter, Composer
According to Virgil Blackwell, Carter says that his choral
work In Defense of Corinth was written during his time at St.
John’s College, and that he began working on the sketches
for his Symphony No. 1 immediately after leaving the college,
when he and his wife moved west to Arizona and New Mexico. Both works relate to our consideration of Carter’s career
at St. John’s.
In Defense of Corinth for speaker, men’s chorus and
piano four hands, was commissioned by the Harvard Glee
Club and performed by them on March 12, 1942, with G.
Wallace Woodworth conducting (Schiff, 329). The work has
many similarities to Stravinsky’s Les Noces, Schoenberg’s
Moses and Aaron, and Orff’s Carmina Burana. It is based on
a passage from “The Author’s Prologue” to Book Three of
Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais (14951553). The text could be construed as a satirical commentary
on militarism and a mockery of war-hysteria. Carter’s work
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119
was composed close to the bombing of Pearl Harbor on
December 7, 1941. The satirical attitude toward war displayed in the piece did not, however, carry over into Carter’s
personal life: he attempted to enlist in military service as soon
as the United States entered hostilities, as did many of his St.
John’s students over the next few years. Because he had terrible allergies, however, he was rejected for active duty on
health grounds. Eventually, from late 1943 until June 6, 1944
he worked as a musical advisor for the U. S. Office of War
Information (Wierzbicki 2011, 29).
Whatever his personal political feelings, Carter’s In Defense of Corinth is a musical metaphor for his situation as
composer in a world made mad by war. The work is divided
into three distinct sections. In the first section, a speaker and
male chorus use the spoken narration, speech-song, and full
singing of a speaker and male chorus join with a four-hand
piano accompaniment to build up musical textures in imitation of the building up of the Corinthian war effort against
Philip of Macedon:
Everyone did watch and ward, and not one was exempted from carrying the basket. Some polished
corslets, varnished backs and breasts, cleaned the headpieces, mail-coats, brigandines, salads, helmets, morions, jacks, gushets, gorgets, hoguines, brassars and
cuissars, corslets, haubergeons, shields, bucklers, targets, greaves, gauntlets, and spurs. Others made ready
bows, slings, crossbows, pellets, catapults, migrains or
fireballs, birebrands, balists, scorpions, and other such
warlike engine expugnatory and destructive Hellepolides. They sharpened and prepared spears, staves,
pikes, brown bills, hailberds, long hooks, lances, zagayes, quarterstaves, eesleares, partisans, troutstaves,
clubs, battle-axes, maces, darts, dartlets, glaives,
javelins, javelots, and truncheons. They set edges upon
scimitars, cutlasses, badelairs, backwords, tucks,
rapiers, bayonets, arrow-heads, dags, daggers, mandou-
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sians, poniards, whinyards, knives, skeans, shables,
chipping knives, and raillons. . . . Every man exercised
his weapon. (Rabelais 2004, 265.)
Accompanying this relentless concatenation of weaponry, the
musical elements continue to pile up, steadily getting louder,
sharper, more percussive; the voices progress to confused
speaking and shouting, reaching a climax in pure noise.
Fig. 4: In Defense of Corinth holograph score
(Library of Congress, ML96.C288 [Case])
The brief second section is a quieter setting in which the
main character, Diogenes, seeing everyone around him so
hard at work making war while he is not employed by the
city in any way, contemplates what he should do. Surely this
must reflect Carter’s state of mind at the time: unable to join
the war effort because of his allergies, he finds himself surrounded by young men, including his students, preparing for
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121
and leaving for war. Like Diogenes, he must have been contemplating his situation, and what he should do next.
In the third section Diogenes, in a moment of sudden
awakening, is roused and inspired by the war effort going on
all around him. He leaves town, goes toward a little hill near
Corinth called Cranie,
and there on the strand, a pretty level place, did he roll
his jolly tub, which served him for a house to shelter
him from the injuries of the weather: there, I say, in a
great vehemecy of spirit, did he turn it, veer it, wheel
it, whirl it, frisk it, jumble it, shuffle it, huddle it, tumble it, hurry it, jolt it, justle it, overthrow it, evert it, invert it, subvert it, overturn it, beat it, thwack it, bump
it, batter it, knock it, thrust it, push it, jerk it, shock it,
shake it, toss it, throw it, overthrow it, upside down,
topsy-turvy, arsiturvy, tread it, trample it, stamp it, tap
it, ting it, ring it, tingle it, towl it, sound it, resound it,
stop it, shut it, unbung it, close it, unstopple it. . . . And
then again in a mighty bustle, he . . . slid it down the
hill, and precipitated it from the very height of Cranie;
then from the foot to the top (like another Sisyphus
with his stone) bore it up again, and every way so
banged it and belabored it that it was ten thousand to
one he had not struck the bottom of it out. (Ibid.)
This text is set with hocket imitation and short fugue-like segments, piling the words on top of one another, so that the result is quite similar to the raucous first section. And also like
the first section, it undergoes a steady crescendo until it
reaches a thundering climax.
At this point, the final section begins. The narrator speaks
the last few lines quietly:
When one of his friends had seen, and asked him why
he did so toil his body, perplex his spirit, and torment
his tub, the philosopher’s answer was that, not being
employed in any other charge by the Republic, he
thought it expedient to thunder and storm it so tempes-
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tuously upon his tub, that amongst a people so fervently
busy and earnest at work he alone might not seem a loitering slug and lazy fellow. (Ibid.)
It is not too far-fetched to imagine that Carter may have seen
himself in the role of Diogenes, and that composing this wild,
raucous piece was Carter’s way “tormenting his tub” in order
to avoid being seen as doing nothing while everyone around
him was consumed by the war effort. There is certainly no
doubt that the atmosphere on campus after the declaration of
war resembled the situation in Rabelais’ Corinth. The preparations for the war were both pervasive and intrusive. There
were military exercises on campus, information poured in
about military employment opportunities, new classes appeared on the mechanics of gasoline engines and the electronics of radio devices (The Collegian, various issues from
1942). Periodic lectures about the causes and progress and
status of the war were offered, and a rash of military enlistment by the students so depleted enrollment that by the war’s
end there war great concern that the St. John’s might have to
close its doors. In Defense of Corinth certainly reflected the
conditions that surrounded Carter while he composed the
work, and no doubt reflected his inner state as well.
Carter’s second major work of 1942 is his Symphony No. 1,
which he completed in Santa Fe, New Mexico, about six
months after leaving St. John’s. In the sketches for this work,
which are housed at the Library of Congress along with holograph score and the revised score from 1954 (Carter 1942),
it seems that Carter is again playing the role of Diogenes tormenting his tub; this time, however, the tub is the Symphony.
The 184 pages of sketches show beating, battering, slicing,
compressing, enlarging, twisting, and transforming of apparently innumerable musical ideas from all three movements
in the finished piece. There is an explosive vitality combined
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123
Fig. 5: Sketches for Symphony No. 1
(Library of Congress ML96.C288 [Case])
with a restless energy in the musical handwriting, which
seems almost thrown onto the pages in instants of creative
inspiration.
What is more, this material is not limited to musical notations. The sketches fall into ten categories: 1. Fragments of
one to many lines, some crossed out; 2. single-line drafts
worked out and developed; 3. two-part piano reductions of
sections in progress, for playing at the piano; 4. fair copies
of two-part part piano reductions, including one of the entire
first movement, 5. reductions of three to five parts, for working out complex ideas; 6. larger orchestral reductions with
instrumentation noted; 7. full-score drafts with instrumentation noted; 8. verbal notes, such as “add a few dotted
rhythms” or “avoid too many accents on the first beat”; 9.
letter designations for the various motives and themes, such
as “A,” “B,” “C,” and so forth; 10. verbal notes on the se-
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quential organization of musical elements within a section.
Out of all these disparate elements, Carter fashioned an
elegant, hand-copied full score of 149 pages on December
19, 1942. In this pre-xerox, pre-computer era, it must have
taken a considerable amount of time just to write out such a
meticulous manuscript. And if one adds to that the amount
of time that was clearly devoted to beating the tub while inventing, revising, discarding, reworking, drafting, and redrafting the thousands of sketches, it seems plausible to think
that Carter began working on the symphony while still at St.
John’s. Blackwell, however, indicated that Carter was “adamant”
about the fact that he began working on the piece only after
leaving St. John’s. If that is correct, then the explosive creative
energy displayed in the sketches suggests that his compositional urge had been suppressed by his intellectual and instructional responsibilities at St. John’s, so that once those
responsibilities were lifted, his musical imagination was able
to generate ideas profusely.
The Symphony No. 1 is a Janus-faced work, looking backward toward the influence of slightly older contemporaries
like Roger Sessions, Roy Harris, and Aaron Copland, but also
forward toward traits that would become characteristic of
Carter’s style—cross-accents and irregular groupings of
rhythms, interplay of tonal centers, fluidity in the shaping of
musical motives, a transformational approach to motivic development, evocative orchestral coloring (particularly in the
use of woodwinds), and simultaneous balancing of dissimilar
ideas (Schiff 1983, 117-121). The Symphony already shows
the continuous ebb and flow from sparseness to complexity,
from delicacy to brutality, from quietness to cacophony, from
simple textures to convoluted contrapuntal intricacy that
would appear fully developed in his masterpiece, the Concerto for Orchestra of 1969. One can see in the sketches and
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125
hear in the music that 1942 was a time of compositional turbulence for Carter. He must have been bursting with competing ideas from old and new sources, all pushing him toward
discovering his unique artistic voice. Whatever attractions
the undeniably novel environment of St. John’s held for him
as a curious, intelligent, inquisitive, and liberally educated
thinker, he must have felt that, in his heart, he was essentially
meant to be a composer. What else could he do but leave, so
that the potential composer within him could become actual?
Epilogue: Elliott Carter, Composer and Liberal Artist
In the years just after leaving to pursue his composing career,
Carter wrote two essays that relate to his tenure as a tutor at
St. John’s. The first, “Music as a Liberal Art” (Carter 1944),
which was written only two years after he left the college,
discusses the decline of music as a liberal art in America. Citing the fundamental importance of musical training in Plato’s
Timaeus and Aristotle’s Politics and Poetics, Carter laments
the fact that music has become a specialized and technical
discipline, divorced from the connection it once had to the
other liberal arts. At St. John’s, however, he says, “music has
actually been taken out of the music building. It is no longer
the special study of the specialist, of the budding professional. Instead it is examined in the classroom, seminars, and
laboratories, in an effort to give it a working relationship with
all other knowledge” (Carter 1944, 105). After describing in
greater detail the relations between music, mathematics, philosophy, and physics in the St. John’s curriculum, Carter
maintains that
[w]hen the student sees the interconnection of all these
things, his understanding grows in richness. And since
today no widely acepted esthetic doctrine unifies out
though on the various aspects of music, such a plan at
least conjures up the past to assist us; it helps to raise
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
the various philosophical questions involved. In one
way or another these questions must be considered, for
it is not enough to devote all our efforts to acquiring
the technical skill essential to instrumentalists, composers, and even listeners. There must be good thinking
and good talking about music to preserve its noble rank
as a fine art for all of us, and the college is one of the
logical places for this more considered attitude to be
cultivated. (Carter 1944, 106).
As we have seen, Carter’s view of music education was
deeply attuned to the experimental approach being taken at
St. John’s. This alignment must have made his teaching in
the New Program a meaningful and rewarding experience for
him, and this article is evidence of how highly he regarded
the method of musical studies at St. John’s.
The second article, “The Function of the Composer in
Teaching the General College Student” (Carter 1952), reveals
a second aspect of Carter’s understanding of music as a liberal art. While it is certainly true that reconnecting music to
the other liberal arts provides students with a more profound
understanding of music than specialized musical instruction,
it is also true that connecting the other liberal arts to music
provides students with a more profound understanding of
their own inner life than specialized instruction in any discipline. In this article, Carter discusses the difference between
the “outer-directed” man, whose primary focus is on adapting
his inner life to the demands of society, and the “inner-directed” man, who primary focus in on adapting the demands
of society to his individual conscience and imagination. Both
the teaching scholar and the teaching artist, according to
Carter, are trying to “preserve that liveliness of the individual
mind so important to our civilization” (Carter 1952, 151). But
they go about it in different ways.
On the one hand, the teaching scholar of the general
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127
music student aims for the “all-embracing, the dispassionate
view of his subject” and “tries to find a harmonious and rationally explicable pattern in the past and present.” By contrast, the teaching artist is “only occupied with those aspects
of music most important to him as an individual”; his goal as
an artist is to create unique artworks that can move his audience and possibly shift societal demands. In short, he teacher
treats music objectively, the artist, subjectively. This basic
difference in attitude toward the subject gives rise to a difference in emphasis that marks the gulf between teaching
scholar and teaching artist: the scholar highlights the “pastness of the past,” and communicates to students the impassive
historicity of the subject matter, whereas the artist highlights
the “presentness of the past,” and communicates to students
the pliability of the past as material for the reshaping powers
of the creative individual. Carter admonishes higher education for its preference for teaching scholars, who give students “scraps of information” about the past; he praises the
teaching artist for “constantly trying to find a more powerful
method of making his students more culturally alive,” by reshaping the past into a living and vital present (Carter, 1952,
153-154). At present, Carter emphasizes,
we have got to help our students to realize that to enjoy
the arts creatively and imaginatively will be far more
rewarding to them as individuals in terms of stimulating vividness of thought and feeling, quickness of understanding, and ingeniousness in dealing with new
problems—far more rewarding than the mere passive
enjoyment which most mass-produced entertainment
invites (Carter 1952, 155).
The contemporary serious composer must be able to engage
students in the “presentness of the past,” must be able to absorb the musical past, sublimate its essence, and recast it into
new shapes that speaks movingly to the present while at the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
same time embodying what was most enduring in the music
of the past.
At this point in the article, Carter once again describes
the music program at St. John’s. Because the college wanted
to move away from the teaching scholar’s approach to music
toward a teaching artist’s point of view, “they called in a composer on the hunch that he would grasp the idea more than
other members of the musical profession, and a plan was
worked out from which it was hoped that students of widely
different musicality could make contact with art” (Carter
1952, 156). It was hoped that students might attain “esthetic
awareness” by studying music under the guidance of a composer, who could help the students see beyond the “pastness
of the past” to the “presentness of the past” by showing them
music history and the masterworks of the great composers
through the contemporary lens of his actively creative perspective.
But the teaching artist is not limited to exhibiting his
works to his students. On the one hand, by means of his compositions, the teaching artist “can give life to and express all
those things which, at best, he can but poorly indicate with
words.” On the other hand, “sometimes verbal teaching, that
is, the articulation of the principles and ideas he strives to
embody in his works, is a valuable part of his development
as a composer; and in this case he can be a useful member of
the academic world” (Carter 1952, 158). In this last circumstance, the artist can bring his students along into the internal
aspect of his creative process, and possibly stimulate them to
develop their own creative powers.
In this essay, as in much of his music, Carter seems to be
trying to hold together two complex and somewhat contradictory themes. It is simultaneously true not only that the
composer is the best teacher when he is writing music and
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129
indirectly teaching others, but also that his students, and the
composer himself as well, also benefit from his talking about
music and directly teaching others. The two truths conflict.
The working composer must be somewhat solitary; he must
spend time away from others pursuing his personal creative
projects. The teaching composer must engage in communal
life; he must bring “presentness to the past” by speaking with
others about listening to, performing, and creating music. For
the teaching artist, this counterpoint of competing activities
can enrich and deepen his creative life. But no one can do
both at the same time.
For Carter, his two years at St. John’s as a teaching artist
seem to have stimulated his already intense creative drive—
so much so, that he found it necessary to stop teaching in
order to focus on his art. Over the years, he has returned to
the role of teaching artist often, giving innumerable workshops, coaching prospective composers in academic and nonacademic settings, lecturing and writing essays about music
education for academic audiences. One could argue that it
was Carter’s decision to join the faculty at St. John’s that provided the opportunity for him to become an extraordinary
teaching artist, and that it was his decision to leave St. John’s
that provided the opportunity for him to create the many enduring artworks through which he could reach an ever widening circle of students with his teaching. Without both coming
and going from St. John’s, Elliott Carter could not have become Elliott Carter.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blackwell, Virgil. 2011. Personal email messages to and telephone conversations with the author in November.
Buchanan, Scott. 1940. “Music,” three-part handwritten note dated November 8, at Harvard University Libraries, MS Am 1992, No. 1547.
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Carter, Elliott. 1941. “Manual of Music Notation.” St. John’s College Library Archives.
———. 1942. Sketches for Symphony No. 1, Library of Congress Performing Arts Manuscripts, ML96.C288
———. 1950. The Defense of Corinth. Library of Congress Performing
Arts Manuscripts, ML96.C288
———. 1944. “Music as a Liberal Art,” Modern Music 22:1, 12-16.
Reprinted in Else Stone and Kurt Stone, The Writings of Elliott Carter
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 105-109.
———. 1952. “The Function of the Composer in Teaching the General
College Student,” Bulletin of the Society for Music in the Liberal Arts
College 3:1, Supplement 3. Reprinted in Else Stone and Kurt Stone, The
Writings of Elliott Carter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977),
150-58.
———. 1962. Personal letter to Scott Buchanan. St. John’s College Library Archive, Barr Personal Papers, Series 2, Box 10, folder 20.
The Collegian. (St. John’s College newspaper.) Various issues, 19401941, 1941-1942. Maryland State Archives, St. John’s College Special
Collection, MSA 5698.
Edwards, Allen. 1971. Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds: A Conversation with Elliott Carter. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
Ledger 1941-42. Large format class ledger. St. John’s College Registrar’s
Office Archives.
Murphy, Emily A. 1996. “A Complete and Generous Education”: 300
Years of Liberal Arts, St. John’s College, Annapolis. Annapolis, Maryland:
St. John’s College Press.
Nabokov, Nicholas. 1940. Letter to Stringfellow Barr, June 22, 1940. St.
John’s College Registrar’s Office Archive.
Nelson, Charles. 1997. Stringfellow Barr: A Centennial Appreciation of
His Life and Work, 1897-1982. Annapolis, Maryland: St. John’s College
Press.
Rabelais, Francois. 2004. Five Books Of The Lives, Heroic Deeds And
Sayings Of Gargantua And His Son Pantagruel, translated by Sir Thomas
Urquhart and Peter Motteux. Whitefish, Montana: Kessinger Publishing.
Rule, William Scott. 2009. Seventy Years of Changing Great Books at St.
John’s College. Educational Policy Studies Dissertations. Paper 37.
http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/eps_diss/37
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131
Schiff, David. 1983. The Music of Elliott Carter. New York: DaCapo
Press.
St. John’s College Catalogue 1940-41. St. John’s College Registrar’s Office Archives.
St. John’s College Yearbook, 1940-1941, 1941-1942. St. John’s College
Library Archives.
Stone, Else and Kurt. 1977. The Writings of Elliott Carter: An American
Composer Looks at Modern Music. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Wierzbicki, James Eugene. 2011. Elliott Carter. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
OTHER RESOURCES LOCATED AT ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
In the St. John’s College Library Archives
Photo of Elliott Carter at desk
Musical programs from 1940-41
Carter’s Five Laboratory Manuals :
“Musical Intervals and Scales” (Laboratory Exercise 15, 1940)
“The Greek Diatonic Scale” (Laboratory Exercise 16, 1940)
“The Just Scale and Its Uses” (Laboratory Exercise 17, 1940)
“The Keys in Music” (Laboratory Exercise 18, 1940)
“Manual of Musical Notation” (1 March, 1941)
In the St. John’s College Music Library
Carter’s sonometer
Carter’s four-part setting of “St. John’s Forever”
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�REFLECTIONS
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Talking, Reading, Writing, Listening
Eva Brann
I imagine that on Parents’ Weekend there might be some parents attending this once weekly occasion when the college assembles to hear
a lecture. By its very name, a lecture is read—but read out loud, delivered in the writer’s voice. Thus, the sequence goes: I thought, I
wrote, I read, I speak. Although this is the principal way of teaching
at institutions of higher education, it is a curious one. Here at St.
John’s, we show our respect for the possible profit we might derive
from it by requiring our students to come to a lecture every Friday
night—just when, elsewhere, it is prelude-time to party night. And we
express our suspicion of lecture-hearing by asking students to listen
to a lecture—but only once a week. So this one weekly hour of just
sitting and listening is mandatory, and about as enforceable as a
mandatory evacuation before a storm. (This simile appears here because this lecture was written in the dark during Hurricane Irene.)
The attendance that we do take utterly seriously is presence in
class—seminar above all. In seminar, no speeches are delivered. Instead we talk, in turn, to one another. So rather than call my lecture
“Speaking, Writing, Reading, Listening,” I have substituted “Talking”
for “Speaking.” Talk seems to denote a more conversational, almost
social mode of speech, less formal, more spontaneous, more participatory. And yet our seminar is a mandatory, scheduled class, with prescribed texts. Is that a setting for talk?
So I would like to think in public about our modes of being together, about the how and what of this college as a community of
learning. Since we, the tutors, collude with our students in making
them a little impatient with being talked at, I’ll sneak around that resistance, which I share. I’ll snaffle their good will (old books on rhetoric called this formal beginning of a speech the captatio benevolentiae,
This lecture was delivered at St. John’s College in Annapolis on the Friday
of Parents’ Weekend, November 4, 2011. Eva Brann is a tutor and former
Dean of the College.
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“the capture of benevolence”) by speaking about talking itself and
what it entails.
Your children, our students, will probably have told you now and
then that parents don’t know anything. Freshmen, on the other hand,
know everything. They are fresh, unimpaired in spirit—and also, perhaps, somewhat fresh in a now obsolete meaning of the term: cheeky.
Sophomores know a little less; their class name means “wise fools,”
as their knowledge of Greek will tell them; it is a combination of
Greek sophon, “wise” and moron, “foolish.” Juniors and the college
elders, the seniors, have reapproached their parents and become almost perfect in ignorance.
I am, in fact, being serious. The members of this community of
learning are not ashamed to own up to their own ignorance; indeed
we think better of this thoughtful confession than of a profession of
expertise. It’s why the teachers here call themselves “tutors,”
guardians of learning, rather than “professors,” authorities of knowledge, and it is why our students are to some degree our fellow-learners. Thus we are apt to think of even the most positive, content-replete
learning as a specification of our ignorance. It’s a fancy way of saying
that all our learning starts and ends in questions— a point to which I
will return as we go along. So this acknowledged ignorance is not
false humility, but a confident, even competent, way to conduct a college. Yet, of course, sub specie aeternitatis, “under the aspect of eternity,” as the philosophers say, we are, as limited beings, all
equal—equally diminutive before the infinitely distant ultimacies we
long for. This is cause enough for some personal modesty and even
occasional dejection.
I’ve been saying “we,” meaning the college of students and tutors.
Now I’ll mean mainly the tutors when I say that, although there’s
probably nothing we all agree must be true, there is something we all
agree must be done. Some of us, perhaps even most, think that the
Appearances before our senses bespeak a Being behind them; some
of us suppose there is a Ground in which all nature is rooted; and some
of us believe there is a realm of Divinity above us. Others see no reason to agree to any of these. But we all agree that, in regard to our ignorance about matters of most persistent importance to human beings,
we are close to our students, and that we are therefore guardians of
learning rather than transmitters of doctrine.
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We have a model for this unteacherly mode of teaching, presented
to us in the writings of Plato: Socrates. Not all of us, particularly freshmen, take to him. He describes himself now as a gadfly, stinging a
sluggish horse into wakefulness, now as a demon mediating between
earth and heaven (Apology 30e, Symposium 202d, ff.). So he is both
irritating and elusive. One moment he argues like a sophist, that is to
say, a trickster of the intellect; another moment he intimates his most
genuine relation to truth. He is both bully and benefactor. So when he
declares, often and insistently, that he is ignorant, we must suspect
irony. “Irony,” eironeia, is the Greek word for dissembling, pretending
to be what one is not. What then is this Socratic ignorance, which in
some of us engenders trust precisely by causing dis-ease?
We’ve all come across genuine inarticulate cluelessness, truly
dumb ignorance—though I think it is fairly rare in human beings. Socratic ignorance, on the other hand, is anything but dumb; it talks, and
that makes all the difference. For example, in the first philosophical
work our students read together, Plato’s dialogue Meno, Socrates
blames himself for knowing “nothing at all” about human excellence
(71b). That is why he can genuinely ask: What is it? But look what
this question involves. First of all it is an admission, actually an assertion, of self-knowledge. People who ask, know what they lack.
They know what they don’t know. Acknowledged ignorance is important knowledge about ourselves.
And second, it is a very precise negative knowledge of what we
are asking after. The word “comprehend” comes to mind; it means
“to get, to enclose, in one’s grasp.” Human thinking is wonderfully
prehensile. It can get at, wrap itself around, something it does not yet
really “get” in the sense of “understand.” In this dialogue, Meno is
Socrates’ “interlocutor,” which is learned Latin for “conversational
partner.” I use the term here because Meno—who, as we know from
other sources, was as bad a man as you’ll never want to meet—can’t
really be a partner, and certainly not a participant, in the sort of searching conversation Socrates cares about. In fact he tries to forestall such
talk by producing a clever argument. He has the clever ignorance that
defines human badness for Socrates. This obstructionist argument
turns that very wonder of question-asking, which I’ve described as
our ability to wrap our thought around what we haven’t yet got, into
an obstacle: If you know something why would you ask about it? If
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you’re ignorant of it, how would you recognize it if you did get it?
Socrates has a reply that has resonated down through the ages; it
bears on the essential character of talking, and I’ll come to it soon.
Meanwhile, there’s a third aspect to questions, shown in their very
asking. We ask ourselves in inner speech, but in the world, and in that
little world, the seminar, we ask each other. This asking presupposes
a sort of trust: the trust that we will be comprehended and met halfway
by our fellow learners. For a question is a sort of appeal: “Share my
perplexity; help me.”
A fourth trait of asking is one that Socrates, who claims to know
so little, claims to know for sure: To inquire, to seek by questions, to
search for what one does not know—that makes us better, braver, less
lazy than giving in to Meno’s clever sophism (86b-c).
And finally a fifth feature, which sounds odd but is central. I
know of only one subject in which Socrates claims outright to be an
expert: He says of himself that he “knows nothing else than matters
of love” (Symposium 177d). There are in the dialogues several examples of a wonderfully illuminating word-play: love, eros, and questioning, erotesis, sound very much alike (Symposium 199d, Phaedrus
234c); they are almost homonyms. The love in which Socrates is an
expert is the longing for knowledge, the “love of wisdom” which is
the English translation of the Greek word philosophia. But this longing, this pressure of desire is exactly what you might call the question-feeling. It transfigures apparently insoluble problems into
beckoning mysteries, where by a mystery I mean an ultimate problem
that attracts energizing reverence rather than dispirited resignation.
Our students’ much misused word “awesome” applies here, for once.
Thus genuine asking is the expression of a desire. For Socrates—
and for all of us—such question-desire is always close to real human
love. In fact Socratic love has a great penumbra of intermingling
loves, among them the affectionate delight that elders feel for the
young, the fond respect that colleagues—at their best—feel for one
another, and, best of all, that lifelong care which develops between
students who have spent many a night talking together. It’s a tutor’s
delight to hear the selfless admiration in the voice of a student who
tells of having found such a partner—admiration together with a very
proper and surely life-long pride in having accomplished such a
friendship. Here is half a line from Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” which, in
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Beethoven’s setting, our Freshman Chorus often sings:
Wem der grosse Wurf gelungen
Eines Freundes Freund zu sein. . .
One who’s managed the great fortune
To become a true friend’s friend . . .
such a one is entitled to join in this ode to joy.
Schiller has it just right: Friendship is an effortful accomplishment
resting on great good luck. This school is its propitious setting: In the
talk that is a questioning, friends are found.
Aristotle, Plato’s true—that is to say resistant—pupil says
brusquely: “[Socrates] asked, but didn’t answer, for he claimed not to
know” (On Sophistic Refutations, 183b7).
Now ironic Socrates is surely unsettling, but no-nonsense Aristotle is often more so. Does he mean it? If I take him at face value,
then he is certainly wrong. Socrates does answer, probably always,
though often not in explicit words. His questioning doesn’t lead to the
levity of easy skepticism.
He does often begin by “questioning.” Light-minded talk about
higher education tends to fall into two camps. One camp thinks that
this education happens when authorities pour expertise into mostly
recalcitrant pupils. The other camp thinks this education occurs when
academics incite all too willing students to “question,” that is to test,
with the implicit intention of refuting, received wisdoms. Socrates
often does begin by showing that people’s opinions are wrong-headed
or incoherent, and, above all, not their own thought but some received
doctrine confidently proclaimed to the world but negligently adopted
within the soul. That is questioning in the somewhat hostile sense; it
is “interrogation.” But it is only done in order to clear the decks for a
second, more gracious question-asking, by which what ordinary people are really after is confirmed. Socrates is a horsefly to the lazy, to
wake them up, but a winged love-god to those ready to be impassioned.
I said Socrates gives answers. About present human life he proposes himself as a model that says to us, “Live to learn, and learn to
leave life, to be dead” (Phaedo 61c ff.). What he means, I think, is
this: Devote some of your time every day to reaching for what is behind, beneath, above the world we live in. Here many thoughtful peo-
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ple part company with him—and our students often do, understandably. About ultimate things he offers only working conjectures and
hypotheses, which he leaves to his companions to take up. And indeed
that is what happened; the thinking generations took him up. Alfred
North Whitehead—it figures here that an emigrant to America is
speaking to you—says that “the European philosophical tradition . . .
consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” (Process and Reality, Ch.1,
Sec.1)—and that means largely Socrates as Plato pictured him speaking. I am about to leap into that two and a half millennia-long footnote
for help in thinking more precisely about our kind of talking.
Each seminar starts with a question, asked by a tutor. Framing
seminar questions is the one expertise a tutor might be said to develop.
Such a question might well have much thought behind it, but it shouldn’t be an invitation to guess the tutor’s pet theory. It could be a wideopen admission of puzzlement, but it shouldn’t be mushily vague. It
might take off from an inconspicuous but significant detail of the text
but it shouldn’t run the conversation up the creek of a side issue.
Why start with a question rather than, say, a tutorial interpretation? A question is, of course, the very embodiment of a teaching
mode devoted to eliciting thought rather than delivering thought-products. The reason lies in the five features of question asking I’ve mentioned, the most pertinent of these being that questions solicit
responses by evincing trust in the willingness and ability to respond
in those addressed in the question mode.
What then is responsive talk? Here I’ll go into the footnote mode.
In the Middle Ages, certain thinkers developed the notion of “intentionality.” In fact it had come to Europe through the Arabic philosopher Avicenna (c. 1000 C.E.). Most good ideas have their comeback
time, and intentionality has been brought back in modern times. It’s
probably not wrong to say that its beginning is in Socrates’ passion
for this question: What is it that is knowable in our ever-changing, illusion-rife world, and how is it that words can convey what things
are?
Intention is both a characteristic of thinking and a capability of
speaking (where it is called “imposition”)—one that we can ascribe
to nothing else in the world or out of it. Its meaning is the action of
“stretching towards,” of reaching for something. Its descriptive name
is “aboutness,” the action and the result of something laying itself
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about, of “comprehending” something. Perhaps words show more of
the stretching, reaching-toward motion, while thoughts are more like
embracing, enclosing structures.
Take an example of what intentional aboutness isn’t: a wrapped
gift. The gift paper is distinguishable from the box of nougats—and
so you can unwrap the candy—but it’s also of the same kind, material
stuff. What you can’t do is put the gift-wrap about your affectionate
wishes, as you can’t wrap your sentiments around the nougat—except
poetically. Now think a thought. Let’s not be particular about its exact
nature—whatever we mean when we say that we have something in
mind—an object, a relation, an idea, an interpretation—any thoughtthing. Then ask yourself, Can I unwrap my thinking from the thought?
When I say that I am thinking a thought, is my thinking separable
from the thought? Or it is rather that thinking (that is, a form of the
verb for which thought is the noun), is the same as the thought, so that
when I think of something, intend it, attend to it, my mind becomes
that thing? Do thinking and thought become one? If that’s what happens, then which element wins out—the mine-ness of my thinking or
the object-ness of the content? Do I taint it with my prejudices, do I
rectify it to my standards, or do I let it be what it is? When I think, it
is often about a material object in a worldly environment. What aspect
of things comes to or into my mind—a mental, quasi-visual image,
some ideal essence, or just their use? In what way, as I attend to the
world of objects, do they tend toward me? When my talk is for real—
that is, when it is about something—how do I begin? How do I get
my thoughts to collect themselves in words? Or does my acquired language in fact produce the mental state that feels like thinking, and by
its very grammar give me the sense that there are mental objects? How
are my words about objects? Do these offer labels that present themselves for me to read off insofar as I know the vocabulary of the world,
or do my words tend out from me to the objects, throwing from my
mind an ideal sort of lasso, a thinking-noose, that will cast itself about
them and snaffle them in a mental shape suitable for my mind?
This long litany touches the Socratic mysteries, which, I have
said, he started on their way along with some conjectured elucidations.
Not that, after all, it matters much who began. These questions, at
least, are now ours.
Questions about thinking and speaking must surely be central to
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the education of human beings, who, as even animal ethologists are
willing to admit, are the only animal that can ask questions rather than
solicit reactions. But my main point here was to establish one sure
thing about talking—that it has the capacity of aboutness, which turns
out to make a piece of life like the seminar possible to begin with.
Now in the world at large there is much talk that has the aspect
of serious, even sophisticated, meaning but that, like many a hard-tocrack nut, has no kernel. So too, in the seminar, there is twaddle—
quite a lot of it.
Twaddle has in fact a sort of squatter’s right in the seminar. Concern for spontaneity and respect for potential make us leery of suppressing it too soon. I can think of three kinds of seminar twaddle.
Some among us are so eager to capture attention that they utter words
before they have collected a thought. Others are so abashed by the insufficiency of their speaking that they go on for quite a while after
they have finished; in the hope of amending their fault they make it
worse. This happens to us all and is easily fixed. We just have to become aware of it, as we do of any minor habit.
The third kind of twaddle goes much deeper. All worthwhile activities have their specific nullifications, and twaddle is the negation
of intentional talk. It is the consequence of a curious negative ability
that human beings have: the ability to fashion well-formed sentences
that express none of their own thinking, but that sound comfortably
explanatory. Here is an inevitable example from the first freshman
seminar: Why is Achilles so unassuagably angry when Agamemnon
takes his woman away? Student answer: Because he feels dishonored,
and “in the culture of that time honor was important.” Tutor’s overt
follow-up question: What do you know more about, the culture of the
time of Homer’s epics (this time happen to be a fictional composite
of times) or about Achilles? Tutor’s suppressed internal question: How
did this most murky of notions—culture—come to seem like a handy
explanatory principle to generations of students? Equally silent answer: Because Socrates’ notion of opinion is so right. We all share in
the remarkable inclination to find satisfaction in surrendering our
minds to enticing terms of thought without reaching for the intended
thought itself. “Culture” is the most perfect cover-all, the universal
wet-blanket for glimmers of penetrating thought.
A somewhat impatient tutorial response to twaddle is thus, What
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are you talking about? And generally, what are we talking about in
seminar?
Books. We prepare for seminar by reading assignments, and then
we bring our readings to class. For my part, I don’t care how the readings are delivered. If students find graven stone tablets their medium
of choice, let them bring those, or if e-books, let them bring those,
provided they don’t get diverted and distracted by appended applications, and provided they can find their place. After all, one reason we
center seminar on books is so that we may all be on the same page.
Let me interrupt myself here for an observation. Our faculty recently had a long discussion about the question: Should e-books be
permitted in seminar? We sensibly decided to leave it up to the tutors.
In last year’s freshman seminar I was expecting an invasion of electronic tablets. Not a one of them appeared. Word was that upperclass
members were discouraging them as not in our spirit. The world’s
opinion is that the young thrive on novelty; the truth as I’ve experienced it is that, having found a place to cherish, they become its radical conservatives. I have much sympathy. The material book—be it
of papyrus, parchment, paper—has, besides its sensory pleasures, one
great advantage: it’s all there at once in real space. This is a handy
representation of one important characteristic of a text: it’s an all-present whole; it exists simultaneously with itself.
And now that I’ve used the word “text” let me explain this slightly
pretentious term. I use it, first, because it is broader than “book,”
which is usually composed of words. But we read, in a broad sense,
also compositions of notes (musical scores) and books containing
more diagrams and symbols than words (mathematical texts).
Moreover, “text” reminds us of two etymologically related words:
“textile,” a woven fabric, and Greek techne, “skill, craft.” Books are
artfully crafted, carefully coherent artifacts.
Well, not all books. The tutors of this college are pretty much at
one in thinking themselves not so much entitled as obligated to discriminate between great books and lesser books. St. John’s College
is, unpopular though that term may be with terminally egalitarian
souls, a great books school. Let me say right away that the not-sogreat but good books, as well as the mediocre ones, and even the outright shoddy stuff—all these have their saving graces. The best policy
is to read some of everything. (When I was a little girl I developed
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for a while a passion for reading product labels, especially the fractured instructions written by people for whom English was a second
language.)
But together we read great books, because, to use a gross
metaphor, these are the ones you can sink your teeth into, the ones
that stick to your ribs. There are statable criteria for them, of which
I’ll mention the ones most pertinent to the life of the seminar: Great
books are usually self-sufficient, so that no background information
or annotation is absolutely necessary to getting absorbed in the text;
the best context for them is another great book—perhaps, but not necessarily, its chronological predecessor.
Second, a great book, approachable as it is on one level the first
time around, is inexhaustibly new, so that on opening it a fifth time
you ask yourself, “Could I have read this before? Where was I, to miss
so much?”
Third, such books are endlessly artful—sometimes beautiful from
shapely depth and something ugly with significant contrivance.
And fourth, great truth-seeking texts of reflection are full of imagination and great imaginative works of fiction are full of reflection.
The former present universals corroborated by particular instances,
the latter represent particulars coruscating with universal application.
Thus philosophy and fiction go hand in hand. Take, for example that
famous first sentence of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike;
each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” What is it but an
applied version of Aristotle’s dictum in the Nicomachean Ethics:
“There are many ways of going wrong but only one way which is
right” (1106b28)?
So such texts are what seminar talk appears to be about. To prepare for seminar we all read the same book—students for the first, tutors for the umptieth time. Reading is, for us, a silent, solitary activity.
I say “for us”; Augustine in his Confessions (c.400 C.E.) tells with
amazement how his beloved bishop, Ambrose, read. As his eyes
moved down the page, “his heart sought out the meaning but his
tongue remained silent” (VI, 3). It was an inestimably great revolution,
this inward relocation of the written word, which, among other things,
made possible summary reading both divorced from and unconcerned
about precise wording. We are the heirs of this revolution.
This preparatory reading we do is a curious business, then. New
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readers actually mouth the words; more mature ones read silently but
subvocalize the text laryngeally; others let the writing glide directly
into the mind. They get the thought, but see rather than hear the words.
They register whole sentences through the eyes and turn language, the
business of the tongue, into sight-seeing, the work of the eyes. However they do it, they now have in their minds and hearts the words and
thoughts of someone else.
Our texts, then, are writings, for the most part. And surprise, surprise! Books are written before they are read. How does writing come
about? Here is how I do it myself and imagine it for others: Writing
comes after talking, in two ways. First, in my own personal history I
learned to speak way back, effortlessly, but to write later, with difficulty. I also know that in the larger history of human beings, writing,
especially the kind that records the sound of speech, alphabetical writing, did not, in fact, come to Greece until the late eighth century
B.C.E. (where in my early years as an archaeologist I had a chance to
publish some of the earliest graffiti—that is, scratched letter-words).
Second, before and as I write, I talk to myself, because speech is the
concretion of thought; it collects its misty pressure into concise sentences and utters them in sensory shape. It’s often said that the primary
purpose of speech is “communication.” The evidence seems to me
otherwise. I imagine that most of us say to ourselves in the course of
our day hundreds of words for every word we say to others. Speech
certainly begins that way. Listen to what students of child development call “jargoning,” that sweetest, most melodious gibberish of late
infancy, which issues from a lonely crib. Whether it is the antecedent
of adult twaddle or carries mental meaning no one knows.
This internal speech is what we write down. In “paper conferences” with students tutors can’t do better than to persuade them that
it is this talk with themselves that they ought to record, without dulling
rectification in the interest of a risklessly pompous formality. An author—the word means an originating “augmentor”—is a recorder of
an inner speech that improves upon the banal ordinariness of a relaxed
inner life by saying something original, either in the sense of “neversaid-before” or in the sense of going to the origin of things—or both.
This is practically a definition of what the authors of our great books
accomplish. They are the masters of pouring thought into the mold of
inner speech and of turning that mold out onto the expectant paper.
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I must add here that, although you’d scarcely believe it, both
claims—that books have authors and that speaking comes before writing—have been disputed in the later part of the last century. The former claim, that there is no originating authorship, is disputed because
whatever is said has been pre-shaped by predecessors and will be reshaped by readers. The latter claim, that writing precedes speaking,
is disputed on the ground (too sophisticated for presentation here) that
writing has a character more original than speech and in fact, subsumes it.1
Reading presupposes writing, and writing poses at least two dangers. The one I’ve just touched on is that in the interest of liberating
our students from being possessed by the opinion of others we in fact
subject them to four years of others’ very powerful opinions. Another
way to put this is that even—or especially—the devoted study of
books is not direct thinking, immediate aboutness. It runs the danger
of producing a commentator’s soul. I mean that to study books is not
quite the same as to think about things; it is to be attending to a secondary sort of aboutness. By thinking in a primary way I mean appropriating the cry of early modern scientists: “To the things
themselves!”—without mediating texts.
The other danger, really the complement of the first, is set down
in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus. Socrates tells approvingly of an Egyptian king who refused the gift of writing because, he said, those who
put trust in writing will learn to forget how to go into themselves to
recollect the truths within. Writing will then turn out to be no medicine
for memory, but merely a reminder (272c ff.). Writing is external
memory; we call on it to remind us now and then of baggage we do
not care to keep always with us. Whatever is readily accessible as a
filed record becomes storable stuff, a bit of fractured fact, related to
living thought as a cellophane-wrapped fish filet is to a frisky live
fish. It becomes information, which is as apt to wreck as to rectify
judgment. I think this is an up-to-date version of Socrates’ misgivings
about writing. However—you might call this Platonic irony—this
condemnation of writing is delivered to us in the most ravishing piece
of philosophical writing I know of, the work that drew me into phi1
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967),
Chapter 2. Derrida, the author of both claims, at one point instituted a suit
for plagiarism. Imagine!
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losophy as a graduate student. Evidently Plato thought of a way to
overcome the rigidification of writing—by incorporating conversation
into the text. We extend this trick by incorporating books into a living
dialogue, the seminar.
How do we then mitigate these drawbacks? Well, we get together,
come out of studious privacy, to talk with each other. In universities,
“seminar” means an advanced study group under the leadership of a
professor. Papers are written, read, and discussed. It is a place of
earnest, highly disciplined speech. Our seminars are serious, but perhaps not earnest, or at least not dead earnest, but live earnest—lively.
Walk through our corridors on seminar nights, and if you don’t hear
hilarity issuing from behind this or that door, you may conclude that
we’ve turned into the sitting dead, like the ancestral mummies the
Incas brought out to sit at their feasts. For laughter is the explosive
expulsion of breath that follows from having one’s equanimity pleasantly pinpricked by an acute incongruity—the result, in other words,
of a startling insight.
Laughter is the grace note of our seriousness. To be sure, the
books lie before us, well used, even marked up (which is why we
should buy, not borrow, seminar books), and they are the first focus
of our attention. But that is also a misapprehension. Books, texts, are
occasions, not ends. We don’t live in but through books. That formulation would be mere verbiage, were there not a way of study that
stays strictly with the text and in it. For instance, in graduate study,
say, in English or philosophy, all the student’s effort is really invested
in the text. The goal is to know the text accurately, to be acquainted
with scholarly opinions about it, to work out its arguments in detail,
all the while setting aside questions of truth-telling and personal illumination.
We encourage a different kind of reading—more direct, and if
you like, somewhat naïve. Because the author wrote about or expressed something, we feel entitled to pass through the text to that
something. We find it plausible sometimes to ask “What did the author
have in mind?” and sometimes “Does this representation agree with
our experience of life?” and sometimes “Can I corroborate this claim
in my own thinking?” Not that we ignore the literal words in their artfulness—not at all—but we regard them as a sort of come-on to catch
and hold us to the text until it gives up its meaning.
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Let me give an example from the freshman seminar that was
going on while I was writing this lecture —a wonderfully lively seminar. We asked: “Do the Homeric gods, in all their irresponsible levity,
look the same to Homer as to his heroes, does he have access to a view
of Olympus, transmitted to him by the Muses, that none of his humans
have?” We asked: “Is it in accord with our experience that gentle,
thoughtful Patroclus is transformed into a wildly impetuous warrior
just by wearing Achilles’ armor?” We asked: “Can we follow Socrates
in his claim that truth already lies in us and can be retrieved, ‘recollected,’ as he says, by the right questions?”
So to sum up our sort of reading: We pay careful attention to details for the sake of the text’s—the author’s—intentions, and we pay
attention to these for the sake of world and life. That effort requires
skills, namely, the arts of reading in the broad sense, the liberal arts.
We have the corresponding tutorials, where we practice dealing with
thought-laden words in the language class and with thought-structured
symbols in the mathematics class. We add to these the latest of the
liberal arts to appear on the scene, the art of making nature speak in
numbers; for that we have the laboratory class.
I’ve now talked in turn about talking, reading, writing. Now
comes the high point: listening. Among the boons of living within a
study program like ours—one that is stable and changes, though
steadily, yet slowly—is that truly new experiences can come to us tutors. For our students, it’s all new anyhow. By contrast, when so-called
innovation, that is, deliberate variation, is the universal background,
we may indeed be stimulated by novelty—the ever-diminishing frisson accompanying continual variety—but we can scarcely experience
newness, which is the poignant sensation of a substantial accession—
a real expansion of our psychic holdings. Under the influence of continual novelty our mind, as Shakespeare so tellingly puts it, “Like to
a vagabond flag upon the stream, / Goes to, and back, lackeying the
varying tide, / To rot itself with motion” (Antony and Cleopatra,
1.4.45-47).
Thus it was that through our way of acquiring truly new insights,
I belatedly discovered a philosopher—as it happens the very first one
whose writings we have. He was born around 540 B.C.E. I had often
glanced over, but had never made my way into, his sayings. He thinks
in aphorisms, that is, terse revelations. The most enticing one of these
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begins in this way:
Listen not to me but to the logos . . . (Heraclitus, D50).
Logos is one Greek work all our students are apt to have something
to say about. It had dozens of uses and more than one central meaning:
word, speech, saying, thinking, reason, ratio. Heraclitus’s saying goes
on to tell us what we must, in turn, say when we listen to the Logos,
the Logos with a capital L. This Logos is the principle that governs
everything, and it has something to say to us. I won’t go into the entirety of the world-informing thought that the Logos utters to Heraclitus, but I’ll attend to the first part of it. I think it has, and is meant
to have, several meanings—a fact that governs many of Heraclitus’s
sayings and makes reading him so pleasurably difficult. One of these
sayings, the one just quoted, is, as it were, made to be the principle of
our seminar. I’ll retranslate it:
Listen not to me but to my intention.
The civility of the seminar, expressed in our addressing one another by last names together with the honorific Ms. or Mr., goes much
deeper than a mere form of address. It makes for respectful distance.
It means listening past personalities to the thought-gist of our speaking. It enjoins us to try to hear what our fellow speakers intend us to
hear, even if we have to hear past the words they are actually, and
perhaps ineptly, saying. Of course, we take in each other’s looks, mannerisms, gestures. It is, after all, through these that the human being
to whose intention we are to listen appears to us. Of course, the “me”
Heraclitus wants us to listen past is unavoidably up front. We all, particularly tutors, whose business it is to form impressions of the candor,
seriousness, and preparation of speakers, observe the physical façade.
Any student who imagines that tutors don’t know, by such observations, whether they’ve done their seminar reading or are improvising—be it brilliantly, be it twaddingly—is living in cloud-cuckooland. The tutors’ version of Heraclitus’s injunction is the prospective
principle of hopeful pretense: Listen for the intention, for what the
speech is about, listen to all the speeches extendedly and intently, until
they are about something; help students frame what they mean or find
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out what they intended to say by evincing a staunch faith (even against
all evidence) that they did mean or intend something. What is for Heraclitus a call to hear the speech of Thought—capital T—itself, is for
us a pedagogic principle: Give respect even before it is due, so that it
may become due. Advise students with tacit benevolence as Hamlet
does his mother with demonstrative bitterness: “Assume a virtue if
you have it not” (Hamlet, 2.4.162). For Aristotle teaches that virtues
are acquired by being practiced before they are truly possessed (Nicomachean Ethics 1103a-b).
So also should students listen to each other in the Heraclitean
mode: Suppress animosities and aversions, go for the significant gist
in one another’s talk. The question “Did you mean . . . ?” is helpful
respect made audible.
After all, the seminar was intended to bring us out of the isolation
of studious reading and the rigidity of recorded, written speech, and
to introduce responsiveness into the life of learning. The underlying
hypothesis here, which we hold to through thick and thin, is that to be
human is, given a chance, to be intelligent. Now intelligence has this
feature, one that has been the millennial preoccupation of thoughtful
people: What we each think with is our very own intelligence—which
makes us interesting to one another—and that what the intellect is
about is common to us all—which makes it possible for us to hear one
another to begin with.
In my hurried summary of the liberal arts and the tutorials devoted
to them I left out the music tutorial and the chorus. Among the Greeks,
music stands near the apex of the liberal arts; it is the prime mode of
praising God for the Hebrews; and it stands close to theology for certain Christians. (See, e.g., Plato, Republic 530d ff.; Psalm 33:3;
Luther, “On Noble Music”). Our president recently put music at the
center of his convocation address, and then, to confirm his words, the
college sang. For as we are rightly called a talking college so we are
surely a music-making community. As words are to our thoughts, so
is music to our feelings. Without music our program would be radically incomplete; we would be neglecting the affective root of our nature, our sensibility, and our passions. We have been called a severely
intellectual college, and this could be an accusation rather than a compliment, if we did not also have a place in the program for cultivating
the very sense, hearing, that both takes in linguistic utterances ad-
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dressed to the intellect and also hears tonal structures calling to our
passions. In the music tutorial we learn how passions are informed by
number, not by the merely quantitative but by the wonderfully qualitative mathematics of tones in a scale. Moreover, we consider how
sounds and words respond to each other, and we attend to a relation
of sensation and thinking which we expect to carry over into all our
learning—that tenacious thinking is replete with feeling, that steady
passion is contoured by thought, and that the sensory surface itself,
be it conduit or last stop, is deeply questionable.
And finally, in Chorus, we are the singing college. In talking we
face toward each other and speak to each other, turn and turnabout,
vice versa—that is the very meaning of con-versa-tion. But we sing
with rather than to each other, and we do it mostly not in turn but simultaneously. We are together in the presence of something we are at
once hearing and doing, receiving and producing; we are absorptive
and responsive, listening to ourselves and to our fellow choristers. It’s
like hearing a heavenly lecture, for that’s how I imagine the angels
listen.
And that is the end of this merely earthly lecture, addressed to the
parents over our student’s heads, so to speak, but really meant for
them. So thank you all for listening.
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Caged Explorers:
The Hunger For Control
Howard Zeiderman
To achieve happiness and freedom you must desire
nothing else but what is entirely in your control—
and that is only your own thoughts and opinions.
—Epictetus, The Manual
The letter’s return address had a name, the letters MHC, and a number
next to it. I had no idea what it meant, but it was obvious from the
carefully lettered envelope and handwritten letter that great effort was
spent preparing it. The letter was a strange and bold request. It would
lead me to the gates of the Maryland House of Corrections, a high
medium/maximum security facility, the flagship of seven prisons surrounding a place in the Maryland landscape called Jessup, only a few
miles from Fort Meade, the home of the National Security Agency.
My first contact with the Maryland House of Corrections had occured sometime earlier, when I had received a request for some Touchstones materials to be distributed during an information fair at a
prison. Twice a year, the organizations that assist prisoners arrange
some contact with their families, and the many self-help programs
that are designed to encourage prisoners present their information in
a large activity area. Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, violence prevention programs, parenting advice, various Christian and Muslim ministries, and even the Junior Chamber of
Commerce send representatives with brochures. Touchstones is a program originally designed for pre-college students of all backgrounds
to overcome their passivity and enable them to collaborate and explore. It uses short seminal texts to initiate discussions in which students transform their thinking and their behavior toward others and
themselves. Since at that time my work with Touchstones was primarily in schools, I sent the first high school volume of texts along with
Howard Zeiderman is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, and President
of the Touchstones Discussion Project. This account is dedicated to the memory of Brother Robert Smith, who wished that it be shared with the St. John’s
College community.
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the accompanying guide explaining how leaders should utilize these
materials. I thought nothing of this until two months later when I received the letter.
The letter was from Marvin, a prisoner serving, he said, “life plus
30.” The language was simple and direct. “Dear Professor,” the letter
began, “I’ve been looking at your books. They’ve been in the Legal
Clinic office for a while. Two days ago I started reading them. First I
was confused. But now I see how the leader’s guide can help you run
the meetings. But we need someone to help us get started. Would you
come meet with us? I talked to a few of the guys. We all think this
would be good here. Nothing they give us here makes any sense. But
last night six of us were sitting around. I read out loud the story about
the old man asking for his dead son back. And we talked about it. We
were thinking about it. How brave the old man was to face his son’s
killer and what pain he felt.” I was startled as I read his account of a
text in our Volume I—a text from Homer’s Iliad, in which the old king
Priam begs the young warrior Achilles for the return of the dead body
of his son Hector. He went on to say he hoped we could talk about
how such a program might work in a prison.
Though I was stretched in my commitments with Touchstones’
efforts in public schools, with my normal teaching at St. John’s, and
with an executive group of investment bankers, CEOs, lawyers, and
journalists up in New York, I couldn’t think of a sufficient reason to
say no. In addition, I knew of a pilot program that had been tried at
the New Mexico State Penitentiary, where the ghastly riot had occurred in 1981. I was intrigued by the idea of working with prisoners,
and I had hoped we could find a location closer to home
Each type of group we work with is unique. Each group brings
specific talents to the program as well as specific needs. Each new effort is therefore a collaboration. The program that Marvin reviewed
was designed for high school students, both for the gifted and for those
who couldn’t read. For that reason, it was a good first step. It seemed
wrong not to answer the request.
But in spite of my desire, I was hesitant. I was influenced by what
the media reported about prisoners. I had the images of countless
movies and memories of the hostages at Attica in my imagination. I
remembered the atrocities, the disembowelments, at the New Mexico
prison outside of Santa Fe. I’m afraid I must admit that often in the
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early days I went into the prison because I couldn’t think of a way to
avoid going in without embarrassing myself. So in September of 1995,
I took the thirty-minute drive to Jessup and entered a vast structure
that from a distance looked like an ancient nineteenth-century Liverpool textile mill, but on closer inspection was revealed to be a fortress
designed to keep two worlds entirely separated from one another. It
was a Tuesday evening when I crossed the barriers of double steeland-glass doors and razor wire to meet the nine men who would embark with me on the exploration of a world that none of us knew
existed. I was reminded of Plutarch’s description of England as seen
by the Romans before they crossed the water from Gaul: a land that
existed only in myth and legend. Over the next two years we would
take the first steps together into unknown territory.
I would later realize that my entry on that day was remarkably efficient. My name was listed on a count-out document at the first control booth and I was moved quickly through sets of double doors
where I saw chains, handcuffs, and shotguns in a glass-enclosed watch
area. I walked nervously past interrogation rooms and holding cells
to what was called the Main Control Area: a large, cubical, steelbarred enclosure filled with guards. Unlike other such enclosures in
the prison, this one contained the only exit to the outside world. A corrections officer announced through a loudspeaker that we were leaving
the cage—which, ironically, was the Main Control Area—and entering the actual prison. We were now on the inside, surrounded by tiers
of cells and the sound of the movement of a thousand men. I was escorted by a guard up a flight of stairs past a hundred men descending
from their cells. At moments I was lost in the crowd, but with great
effort I moved upstream through the confusing mass of people. After
a brief and nervous wait at a landing, a metal door opened into a large
space, perhaps thirty by seventy feet, in which another guard sat at a
small desk.
The meeting took place in a small room at the edge of this large
activity area where we would eventually hold all our sessions, amid
the 100-decibel noise of the prison and the rival claims for space of
the Nation of Islam and the Jessup Jaycees. Around the open area were
a number of these rooms, allocated to the use of various prisoner organizations. There was the writer’s club, the prisoner newspaper, the
Colts—a sports club whose allegiance now focused on birds—Orioles
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and Ravens—instead of horses. There were the rooms for AA and NA,
and the fifteen-by-ten-foot area where men who had expressed themselves through crime now used brushes and paints. We met in the room
of the most important prisoner organization—the Legal Clinic. This
was where the men came for advice from other more experienced prisoners on how to represent themselves, since, whether guilty or innocent, their previous defenses had rarely warranted the name.
It was significant that we met here, since this was where prisoners
most felt the distance between themselves and the world outside the
walls. This was where they experienced most acutely their helplessness in the subtle labyrinth of our society’s legal system. Five of the
men I met were the high priests of this order. They were the officers—
present and past—of the Legal Clinic. They held the keys to helping
others at least attempt to control their futures. The four others were
equally important. They were presidents of other prisoner organizations. These were all older men, men who had somehow survived the
years of indignity and abuse and isolation. The youngest was in his
late thirties, and all but one were serving at least one life sentence,
whereas most were serving multiple such sentences either concurrently or in succession. These were men for whom prison was to be
their world and not merely an interlude before reinserting themselves
into ours.
I was clearly nervous as I entered, and they had me sit in a part of
the small room where I was no longer seen by the guard in the main
area. The meeting began awkwardly. I thought they knew what they
wanted from my visit, but in fact some were only vaguely aware of
why they were meeting. Marvin began by having us go around the
room and state who we were. I said I was a teacher, and others spoke
briefly about themselves. They never said it explicitly, but each said
enough for me to infer that I was sitting with nine men convicted of
murder, in a small room concealed from a guard. When we finished,
Marvin took the lead again. “Why don’t you tell us about the program,” he said in a voice filled with suspicion. I had thought that he
would be my ally in this alien world but his tone was distant, as if he
now wished to appear that he had played no part in my coming into
the prison. From the introductions, it became clear that half were invited to this meeting to hear about the program for the first time. I
could see a couple of the men whispering to one another and even
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heard one ask—to no one or to all—why I was there. Rather quickly
the roles had become reversed. Instead of being asked to come to respond to their request, it seemed that I had to convince them that they
should become involved.
I could feel control slipping away from me. Perhaps it was implicitly a test to see if one more white volunteer could offer something
they really wanted, or perhaps it was an exploration they were undertaking to find out what they needed. When they asked me to describe
the program, I did a very poor job. I kept speaking in ways that were
either too abstract or too rudimentary. I hoped to interest them in probing the conceptual presuppositions and biases of our culture though I
didn’t describe it in quite those words. Such an exercise hardly moved
them, however, since their incarceration incorporated the presuppositions and biases of our culture. Of all the men I met in prison, very
few asserted their innocence. Yet most felt that they were political
prisoners—prisoners on account of our country’s politics stretching
back to the very origins of the European conquest of the New World.
They didn’t offer this as an excuse, but merely reported it as a fact.
They saw their crimes as pretty much along the lines of infractions
against their masters on the plantations. Nor were they particularly
engaged by the prospect of increased skills. The skills they needed
were quite specific, and it wasn’t clear how Touchstones could help
them overturn a conviction.
While I was speaking, becoming more uneasy as I felt their eyes
glued to me, a short, heavily tattooed prisoner interrupted. “These
guys,” he said, referring to the authors of the texts in the collection
he had in his hands, “are all white.” I was taken aback by his claim.
In regard to the specific volume I had sent in, he was correct. I again
started trying to explain that this program was very different from
classes they had in school and that the Eurocentrism of this particular
collection of texts wouldn’t affect what we discussed. But they looked
skeptical. The meeting seemed to be going nowhere until Marvin
looked up from fingering the book of readings. “It could help us think
for ourselves,” he said calmly. “That’s something they can’t control.”
Immediately, I could see their faces change as if they finally heard
something that might be useful or even important. “You think that?
Say more,” said Lee, the president of the Legal Clinic whose great
knowledge earned him the respect of everyone in spite of a terrible
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stutter. “Yeah, it’s like when we talked about that dead guy. That Trojan. And you asked us how we would mourn a friend. There was no
one to tell us who was right and what to say. We were all thinking.” A
few of the most senior nodded agreement and the others—even the
tattooed critic—seemed to concur. That remark finally penetrated to
the core of their concerns. Perhaps Marvin had sensed this in the description of the discussion format. Perhaps these experts in the omnipresence of arbitrary control sensed an opportunity for the first time
to undertake the pure act of thinking. Perhaps my own inability to supply an answer allowed them the leisure to determine what they needed.
In their eyes, I was no longer a professor or a teacher of the kind they
had previously experienced. I was merely a technician who could help
them create the structure through which their own thought would take
shape.
“Thinking for yourself” was not an offhand expression for them.
Within that phrase was lodged the full intensity of their suffering. In
prison, all control and initiative was stripped from them. After one session in which we discussed a passage from Martin Luther King’s Letter
from Birmingham City Jail and why we need the stability of laws,
Eddie, a lifer who had served 25 years, took me aside out of the hearing
of the others. “Here you’ve got to be careful. Yeah, even you. They
change the rules every day. And they never tell you. That way they
control all of you.” To supply the desperate need they felt to establish
a realm in which they were not entirely passive, they had two options.
He took me further aside as if to confide a great truth about his life.
“We try to fight it. We work out with weights in the yard or in the gym.
That way we at least control how we look. Or we control the fags and
the slaves.”
A rigid hierarchy of keepers and kept transects the prison. The
keepers tell the kept what to do, how to act, and what to think. The
thoughts of the kept are as imprisoned as their bodies, since the constant pressure of others establishes a tyranny that overrides the distinctions between guard and prisoner. Control in its rawest form flows
everywhere in the prison, and it was their horror at this that these men
felt our programs might transform. The task was now clear: to go
about establishing the conditions for prisoners to reassert their freedom, their ability to become human again, by bestowing significance
on their lives through the mere act of thought.
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By the end of the meeting certain things had been settled. I had
committed to coming in every Friday evening for two hours, though
we never had that much time. Security always dictated how long it
took to enter. Sometimes I would be held in a control area for an hour
only to be told the paperwork couldn’t be found. This was always exasperating; however, when I once complained to the group about it,
they just laughed. Roderick, one of the older prisoners, explained,
“We were hopin’ it would happen. It’s good for you. It’ll help you understand something about here.” From then on I sometimes even savored the delays, because they revealed in a trivial and temporary way
what the prisoners experienced continually. I began to grasp what it
meant to be no longer a person but only a thing. These men had no
control over their lives. I too felt that lack of control every time I entered the facility. It was as if I had entered another world in which I
had no standing and no say about what might happen to me. It was a
separate world, dimly lit, and chaotic. Anything could happen in those
dark passageways as I walked past the correctional officers and groups
of prisoners. My only security was the hope that it wasn’t worth their
effort to interfere with me.
Control as it is implemented and experienced in our prisons is a
uniquely modern construct. In contrast to ancient prisons, our prisons
reduce prisoners to beasts through control and dehumanization. Although ancient prisons were dark and oppressive places where vermin,
neglect, and disease dominated, prisoners were not dehumanized.
Those vast ancient structures held people of various sorts, often in accommodations that suited their relative rank. Prisoners still retained
respect, and, in some cases, the accoutrements of their position in society. The ranks the prisoners held were part of them and could not be
stripped from them whatever their crime or infraction. This began to
change as religion and science struggled for our souls. Prisons, in a
temporary compromise, became penitentiaries, places where fallen
human beings would do penance and assert their humanity again.
These prisoners were not yet considered fundamentally different from
those who would confess their sins in prayers during church services.
The distinction was only that they required a more intense regimen of
prayer in places where there were fewer distractions from the work
of their salvation. As religion lost its primacy to scientific technology,
however, the penitentiary became the house of correction.
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Some of the group, a few who had served over forty years in prisons in many different states, could actually remember this change.
Once, when we were considering a drawing as a text, we suddenly
heard the story first-hand. The text was a drawing by Kathe Kolwitz,
Prisoners Listening to Music. The three prisoners depicted are skeletal, with hollow eyes—and all seemingly gripped by something. The
session was not going very well, and I regretted trying to use a text
that connected too vividly with their situation. A number of the
younger members were clearly repulsed by the drawing. When I asked
why a few who often spoke were being silent that evening, Larry answered. “It’s scary looking at them. I don’t want that to be me.” As he
finished, another prisoner, Craig, a man almost seventy years old who
first served time more than fifty years before, laughed. “You don’t understand nothing. They’re not dying. They’re gettin’ past their
hungers. It’s the music that makes them pure—like angels. Listen—
when I was young down south we had a chaplain. Every day he would
play music for us. Old music, beautiful. At first we couldn’t listen to
it. We never heard nothing like it. Sometimes a song would last a long
time, no words. But then we started to love it. We would listen like in
the picture, and we’d remember things. And we’d cry. Sometimes you
could hear ten men cry. And sometimes the priest would cry too. We
were all together in it. But then he retired and a new chaplain came.
He was different. He wanted us to see the doctors and counselors, the
caseworkers. They would ask us questions about ourselves and make
us go to classes, programs. They were working on us and the music
ended. It was different. It was them against us.” Correction, as Craig
sensed, is entirely different from penance.
This is one reason why the allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic, one of the most powerful Touchstones readings for any group,
is especially fertile in a prison. The status of the modern prison as its
own self-enclosed world became explicit during a discussion about
this text. It is the story of people who are themselves prisoners in a
barely illuminated cave, and who believe that the shadows they see,
cast by objects that move behind them, are reality. Eight weeks into
the program I decided use this text to encourage the prisoners for the
first time to speak explicitly in the group about their own situations
as prisoners. For a while they argued about details of the allegory, but
finally Thomas, a serious and highly intelligent prisoner, moved the
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discussion to their own reality. He started to consider how a freed prisoner from Plato’s cave who saw the reality outside would communicate, if he were to reenter the cave, with those who were still
underground. To make his point about the difficulty of communication, he began to describe his own return to prison. “When I came
back in,” he said, “I thought I’d find my old friends, and I’d talk to
them. But I couldn’t. Nothing I said made any sense. I had to learn a
new language.” Ken, who had been silent, agreed. “Nothing here
makes sense out there. Nothing you would do out there works in here.
It’s like going from earth to Pluto. They make us into aliens, animals,
and then they wonder why we end up coming back to the barn.”
It was into this highly controlled and dehumanizing space that I
had entered in response to an appeal from nine lifers attempting to
reestablish themselves as men who had committed crimes rather than
as members of a separate species, a criminal class. Like the priest who
played the music and cried with his prisoners, perhaps like Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima crying for himself as much as for them, I was
joining them on a journey we would have to undertake together.
Soon, the nine men decided to involve another ten so we would
have a group of about twenty. They had to explain our goal to the others as best they could. The goal was a rare one in the prison. I would
undertake to turn over control of the program to them so they could
spread the program throughout the facility. In short, I wasn’t—like
other teachers or volunteers—coming to do something for them.
Rather, I would try to make it possible for them no longer to need me.
That is what all teachers want, but here it was essential that they not
feel indebted to me. The program would only work if they felt it was
also theirs—that they had collaborated in its creation. However, I
knew that it would be as difficult for me to surrender control to them
as it would be for them to accept it. I created the program they would
learn. I felt I knew better than they what would work and what structure was best. Yet to succeed I would have to enable them to collaborate with me actively in shaping the program for prisons. I was
worried that I might not be able to achieve this act of surrender. And
would they be able to forget who I was and allow me to be involved
without feeling I was judging them, that I was the expert and therefore
in control of the situation? Here we were touching on some of the
deepest issues of our culture, issues that pervaded both the prison and
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also our own lives—questions about the need for control, the fear of
surrender, and the very ownership of one’s words.
Every discussion group confronts the same set of barriers to a
genuine collaborative activity. There are always initially the issues of
control, power, and expertise. This initial stage is followed by competition among groups or individuals—in other words, factions—who
struggle with each other to assert dominance. The next barrier is the
problem of listening without imposing our own thoughts on one another. After overcoming these impediments, there is the effort one
must make to evolve a type of leadership and responsibility that is
shared among all the participants. These issues raise the most complex
human problems and questions irrespective of culture. The culture determines how the group approaches these problems, but not what the
barriers are.
In addition to these problems, there are others that characterize a
group as a unique collection of people immersed in a specific institutional or social environment. These problems concern all of us in some
measure, but specific groups face certain peculiar problems that pervade their lives and their circumstances. They have special expertise
in dealing with the particular problems they must continually face,
problems that the rest of us share to a lesser and more occasional extent. They can therefore become a resource for us all as they struggle
in the discussion environment to overcome the barrier that uniquely
affects them and shapes their lives. The prisoners had their own specific and complex needs, needs that centered on the issue of control
and their attempt to overcome the passivity imposed by their violent
and arbitrary environment. They had a hunger for control. But in order
to create a genuine group, they would have to transmute this desire
into a form that enabled them to surrender control in its customary
forms. It was with regard to such issues that they could most clearly
be a resource for others.
Prisoners also certainly need the intellectual skills and the skills
of cooperation to better equip them to enter society as employable
people. The needs expressed by these prisoners, however, had a different urgency. These nine men were to spend their lives in prison,
and their needs dealt not with the future but with the environment in
which they all lived. Their needs were threefold.
The first involved the fact that MHC, like all prisons, was over-
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crowded. There was a certain freedom of contact and movement simply because there was not enough space to keep prisoners separated.
This mobility, of course, increased the possibility of collisions among
prisoners or gangs of prisoners. Through spreading Touchstones in
the prison, the men aimed gradually to change the environment where
they all lived. A modest success was recounted one evening after one
of the discussions. We had just discussed the opening scene of Ellison’s Invisible Man, in which the “invisible” narrator collides with a
white man and comes close to killing him. During the session they
had mostly considered their prejudices, their assumptions about one
another. But near the end of our time, Alan, a white man, spoke up
more personally about James, a black man who sometimes attended
our sessions. “This happened yesterday. I was on line at lunch, carrying my tray. James was in front of me. Don’t know how, but I bumped
into him. His lunch fell. Three months ago he would have hit me hard,
maybe killed me. But he didn’t, and we cleaned up the mess. And
other people gave him some of their food. That’s never happened here
before.” Lee, one of the leaders, seemed to speak for all of them, when
he commented on this incident. “They try to make us savages. And
before we started talking to one another, we used to believe them.” In
short, their startling goal was to humanize their world—a world in
which they were viewed, and viewed themselves, as barely human.
Their second need involved a peculiar paternal attitude toward
the younger men. These men were old timers, men who had survived
years of abuse and indignity from guards and other prisoners. They
knew how to remain alive. They were the wisest of the wise. Each of
them was unique, and the only image that captured their stature for
me was a comparison with the Greeks and Trojans of the Iliad: Ajax,
Sarpedon, Patrocles, Achilles, and Hector. These men hoped to influence the young ones, seventeen-to-twenty-five-year-olds, who came
for two or three years and then graduated, as if they had attended a
college course in how to commit crimes. These young felons never
grasped that they too might spend their lives behind these walls. The
group of lifers felt that speaking directly wouldn’t work. They hoped
that their words would carry more weight after having worked together in these more neutral, though important, discussions.
The third need was the one that affected each of them most intimately. It wasn’t just a matter of their environment or a concern for
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those who would follow the paths these men regretted having themselves pursued. Rather, it was the sense that they too, even in these
hostile and precarious and dehumanizing conditions, were capable of
contemplating the deepest issues that confront all of us. This became
vivid to me and to them one Friday evening. The text was a short passage by Kant on morality. He claims that we are moral only when we
act from duty and not because we want to. Most of the group considered him crazy. They gave example after example of helping others—
family, friends, even enemies—because of pity or affection. Finally
Sam interrupted. “You guys really don’t get it. He’s saying that what
you’re talking about is only like eatin’ when you’re hungry. That’s no
big deal. It’s only when it’s hard, when it hurts, and you do it anyway
that you can respect yourself. Then you know you’re a man.” As he
spoke, I and others nodded in agreement. The intensity of Sam’s
thought, exploring an idea that no one had been able to consider, enabled me and others to take Kant’s claims more seriously. In these
sessions they felt they could finally exercise control over their own
thoughts—they could, as Sam did, think for themselves. This they
sensed would once again make them fully human in their own minds
and capable of respecting themselves as well as others.
The task that we set ourselves was to create a group of about ten
discussion leaders, each of whom would eventually be able to conduct
groups for other prisoners. The ultimate aim for the men was to involve as many prisoners as possible in the programs and to make these
discussions part of the ongoing life of the institution. In addition, a
collection of texts was to be selected and tried out for use both in this
prison and possibly in others as well. In this program and the other
programs I have designed, the texts are understood as tools, as touchstones. Though they are sometimes—like the Kolwitz drawing—specific to particular groups, most texts selected, like Ellison’s or Kant’s,
touch so deeply on our habits, our expectations, and our past cultural
and historical inheritance that they are useful for a wide variety of
groups. In the case of the prison population, we needed to determine
which texts would enable the participants to consider the issues of real
concern to them. At the same time, the process should not force them
into areas that they would only want to approach in their own time.
So it became necessary both to explore the problems these leaders
would face and to understand why certain kinds of texts were used.
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In other words, for the men to learn to lead a group, they would have
to grasp, to a certain extent, the underlying structure of the program.
The men in the group were therefore a core of nine who had committed to the project together with a varying group of others who
would join only as participants. These latter were sometimes known
to the other participants, though prisoners sometimes appeared for one
or two meetings who were not known to the main participants. In certain cases we knew that prisoners were asked to attend in order to inform prison officials and to monitor what was happening. I never
knew who these other occasional participants were. I never knew if
they were sent to disrupt the session, either by another prisoner organization that objected to what was happening, or by the prison administration, or simply by another prisoner who might be angry at one
of the participants or upset by the idea of changing the status quo of
the institution. Uncertainty is built into the nature of the discussion
process, and these visitors exacerbated the uncertainty surrounding
our work. This ongoing uncertainty also made it clear to me that, in a
real discussion, no one is ever in control. Both participants and leaders
are dependent on one another. And consequently a genuine discussion
cannot be an event that is isolated from the environment or culture or
organization in which it occurs.
The first stage of our work was to give the men the experience of
genuine discussion. I used texts from the Touchstones series, nine
graduated volumes ranging from works for third- and fourth-graders
up through high schoolers and beyond. These volumes, especially
those of the middle and high school series, are also perfectly suitable
for adults. In a school setting, the volume a group uses is rarely a function of reading level, since the program can be done orally, but is
rather a matter of experience with discussion. In high schools, our
goal during the first year of participation is for the participants to understand each stage of the process itself and, after twenty to twentyfive sessions, to begin conducting the classes themselves. This became
the model for our prison group. Each session was filmed, the video
was copied, and one of the copies was returned to the men. A typical
session would involve my passing out a text which was read aloud,
followed by preparatory individual and small-group work. The whole
group would then reunite, and I would lead the discussion. This would
last about fifty to sixty minutes. Then I would break the discussion,
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and for the last thirty minutes we would analyze what had occurred.
This was the procedure we followed week after week. Often the
analysis of the discussion process would revert to the text or revive
the topic of the main discussion. Once, after a discussion of the short
essay “About Revenge” by Francis Bacon, one of the prisoners named
James interrupted an argument between two very assertive men about
whether there had been dominance in the session. “Hey,” he asked in
an innocent tone, “did anyone take revenge during the meeting?” For
a few moments no one responded, though a number of eyes turned to
Michael, the man James had seemed to address. Then Lee acknowledged that he had been tempted to respond to what he had taken as a
slight—but didn’t. Finally, Michael spoke up. “I did. What Vaughn
said rubbed me wrong and I thought he knew that—so I went at him.
It was stupid.” The group then recurred to the text on revenge: Michael
and Lee discussed how they had reacted in different ways, why one
tried to get even while the other didn’t, and how they felt about their
actions.
This sort of event was common in the post-discussion analysis
sessions. The process of the discussion freqauently echoed the text.
In order for this to happen, texts must be selected that exemplify the
structures and attitudes of our society and institutions. The discussion
then becomes a unique kind of cultural exploration, in which the presuppositions of the culture can be made visible, and new forms of
thinking and behavior can be explored.
The entire history of slavery was continually present in the prison.
Jessup, like most American prisons, is filled primarily with black
men—the descendants of slaves once again in something very like
slave quarters. Not only are their cramped cells and chains reminiscent
of slavery, but, as the states increasingly involve prisons in various
commercial enterprises, we are once again witnessing the use of what
is essentially slave labor. The entire drama and stage setting of incarceration duplicates the four hundred year history of slavery on this
continent. Slavery and the complete lack of control over one’s decisions, one’s future, and one’s life were clearly the issues that should
be probed by these men. They have an expertise that the rest of us
don’t have and yet sometimes need in our own lives—an expertise in
surviving while facing the passivity imposed on us.
It is part of the aim of these discussions ultimately to enable the
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participants to discuss the most vital and volatile issues. But no one
is prepared to undertake this without the skills that the program develops. It is only quite late in the process that texts are dispensed with
and topics themselves confronted. When that occurs prematurely, the
result is mere conflict, or a series of monologues. It requires great discipline to undertake a genuine discussion of what one cares deeply
about. Thus, though slavery was at least one of the main concerns of
this group, its discussion as a topic would not occur until much later.
We would approach it through the mediation of specific texts until the
group became more skilled. Every group has certain issues like this,
and these will come up in the process itself, in the experiences the
group has in their lives, and in the institutional structure within which
they live.
I therefore selected texts at various stages which would push aspects of the issue of slavery to the surface. The choice of a passage
from Epictetus’s Manual was a first attempt. The passage is a terse
statement of stoicism, a very abstract claim about slavery and freedom
which holds that we are all enslaved, and that only by desiring what
is completely and entirely in one’s control could anyone be free.
Epictetus goes on to claim that only our thoughts and opinions are entirely in our control. This, he argues, is because all people for whom
we might feel love or affection and all property we possess or desire
could be lost through some unpredictable event. The discussion of this
text occurred about two months into the program.
The group was large that Friday night—about thirty—so the
shape of the arrangement of chairs had departed far from from the
customary circle into a very elongated ellipse. The configuration of
the chairs often plays a key role in a discussion, since everything in a
format like this has significance. I wanted to modify the shape of the
ellipse and make it more uniform but I hesitated. I always felt I should
accept the circumstances that presented themselves in the prison as
much as possible. Whether one manipulates the seating arrangement
depends on the setting, the group, and the leadership role. Leading a
discussion is not a uniform task. There is not one model that all must
adhere to in every situation. The goals remain the same across groups
of the same kind but how one achieves them can vary considerably.
I was at pains to make few demands on the situation and on the
men in it. I didn’t wish to be perceived as part of the organizational
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structure that moves them from place to place. When a prisoner would
run the group, he would exercise much more control and direction
than I did. It makes sense for that approach since he needs to demarcate himself as an expert in the initial phases whereas I wanted to minimize that status. This is the great issue confronting this effort to create
a genuinely collaborative activity. People want an expert who will
take control and yet wish to be free of that very desire. So the question
is how one should share leadership and authority. That of course is a
problem that will face all of us in every aspect of life. These discussions therefore are a laboratory in which the new directions to be pursued in our society can be explored and worked out.
I sat on the long side of the ellipse where I could best see all the
men. Many of them were new. There were three foci to the discussion.
One group was led by a large man named Karem, who sat at one of
the endpoints of the major axis—a dominant place in such a configuration. Karem agreed with Epictetus. He contended that the prison had
enslaved his body but his mind was free. He argued that they couldn’t
enslave that. “No one can chain my mind,” he boasted. “Though my
body is locked in this sewer, my mind can roam everywhere.” He
spoke in such a forceful way that many men, in spite of themselves,
agreed. Kevin, on the other hand, violently disagreed. The officers
didn’t just control his body. By controlling that, they controlled him.
They determined when he could move and where he could be. And
these decisions controlled his life, his desires, his thoughts, and his
dignity. While Karem held that he still felt free, Kevin vividly described what had happened to all of them—a need to urinate while
waiting somewhere in the prison. “And,” said Kevin, “they take their
damn time. They know what’s happening. They can read our faces,
and we’re forced to humiliate ourselves. They turn us into children or
animals.” Kevin went on to claim that such an indignity can happen
at any moment, and that to deny one’s feelings about it is not to be
free but rather to be less than human.
Karem tensed at this point. It was as if someone had said the
words that exactly characterized the situation all of them were in, and
which they were all striving to change by their own efforts. Sometimes
it is difficult to lead a discussion because what is said grips everyone
with the reality of the lives of some of the participants. Even with experienced leaders, when a discussion becomes intensely personal to
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the participants, it is difficult for the leader to focus on the long-range
goals of the project. Here I was listening to a discussion of Stoicism
by people who weren’t merely speculating and imagining what it
would be like to practice it. These were people whose very survival
and sanity often depended on their living that way. Some people in
that room were in fact stoics and could speak to Epictetus as if they
were colleagues. on the same path. Others knew well the temptation
of stoicism; perhaps they had tried it and abandoned it.
It is this aspect that gives such power to discussions that are designed to use text and experience to echo one another. This productive
tension between the experience of the group and the text reveals how
such discussions differ radically not only from education in the traditional sense—in which an idea or text is explored and but also from
therapy—in which what is at issue is the experience of the particular
participant. In discussion, personal experience is mediated by a text
that is often the seminal source of a concept or institutional structure;
yet, because of the difference betwwen text and personal experience,
the participants can view themselves from a distance. In fact, this very
issue itself came up in the discussion on Epictetus and soon became
the main focus. One of the men—Eddie, a former Black Panther who
was a lifer but always proclaimed his innocence—brought this home
to all of us. “None of us are free. We’re all enslaved,” he said, breaking
into a brief moment of silence between Kevin and Karem. “And not
just those like us in prison. Yeah, we’re held in place by bars and wire,
but that’s not all. Our minds themselves are enslaved. And not just
ours, Howard’s too and everyone out there. Our thoughts aren’t our
own. They’re just the ones we grew up with. How can we be free when
how we think is our prison?”
This took everyone aback. Everyone realized this was an important thought that we would have to continually consider and struggle
with. Eddie’s remark defused the tension between Karem and Kevin
by revealing how this issue of our slavery was the struggle we all had
to face. The men bounced all these ideas around as if they were in a
three-sided tennis match. No one changed an opinion, but each gave
the others the chance to speak. And this session was decisive for the
group because they finally recognized, as Eddie implied, that I had
nothing more to offer on this subject than they had, and in fact less.
After an hour I broke off the discussion so we might evaluate what
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had just happened.
In order to encourage people to emerge briefly from the prisons
in which Eddie claimed we were all captive, I wanted the men to
spend time with prisoners they didn’t know. I asked the men to count
to four and get into small groups according to number. That would effectively separate friends from one another, and I instructed them to
consider what they felt were the strong and weak points of the discussion. When these groups reported their analyses, most of the groups
agreed. They felt there had been a presentation of views but no discussion. As Vaughn said, “no one changed an opinion, and no one
looked at what they themselves were saying. We were just stating our
minds.” But Thomas responded: “That isn’t so terrible. At least we
could finally say what we really thought. And the rest of us listened
even if we didn’t react. That was important. Others listening—we get
some dignity that way,” he claimed. A number of men agreed.
But then Karem, who had been listening with a clear expression
of discomfort, interrupted. “But that means you need others to be free.
And how could this Epictetus be right about being free in your
thoughts when we need one another for our own self-respect? And
don’t you need self-respect for freedom?” It was there in the metadiscussion that the real discussion finally occurred. It was when they
had made the claims of stoicism visible to themselves in their very
activity that they could seriously consider the implications. The discussion did in fact act as an experiment for discerning new forms of
activity.
There was no official status in my position, and the men received
nothing for their participation. There was nothing concrete they would
gain. I therefore had no power to bestow anything obviously useful
or valued in that environment. The men came because they were allowed to think. The excitement of thinking and knowing that they too
were capable of this activity drew them into the group. They weren’t
here to learn from a book but to explore, together with me, both themselves and this new terrain we were bringing into being. Discussion
is possible only when there is no agenda. I had no agenda in terms of
the conclusions we would reach or the paths we would take, though I
clearly had a goal. I wanted to tailor the program to this institution.
This meant I would try out texts, and explore the means by which I
could turn over the responsibility for the program to these men. Often
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they would ask me about our other programs and I would tell them
about the possibilities and the difficulties we faced in the program
with Palestinians in Gaza, or indentured children in Haiti, or CEOs at
the Harvard Club, or middle school students, or senior citizens, or
plebes at the Naval Academy, or my students at St. John’s. I think it
was very important to these men to realize that what they were doing
was identical in some of its fundamental principles with attempts
being made throughout the world by people who were willing to risk
high levels of uncertainty to undertake the effort to change themselves.
It was the start of a sort of community where, we—there in the
bleak activity area of a nineteenth-century prison, in the third floor
private meeting room at the Harvard Club in Manhattan, in senior citizen centers, and in Haitian churches—were taking steps to explore a
world which, though continuous with strands of all of these disparate
worlds, nonetheless revealed glimpses of other forms of life and new
ways of being and thinking. It happened sporadically, but often
enough to hint at the outlines of a new possibility. The men knew that
they were exploring in an unfamiliar territory of human experience.
The trips to space were not the successors of the trips of Columbus
and Magellan. Those early explorers needed to change their fundamental conception of their world in order to make room for what they
saw. The astronauts merely solved the comparatively trivial problem
of how to get from one visible and relatively known place to another,
though the scale of their journey was immense. The problem we faced,
on the other hand, was not going from here to there, but from now to
then. It was exploration into a future that would no longer be a consequence of our pasts.
These men serving life sentences for serious crimes felt part of
the small bands of people making these journeys, and they sensed they
were bringing a perspective that was uniquely theirs but necessary to
all the others. This sense, I think, caused them to hae some respect for
me, in spite of the fact that I was merely one more among them—although I knew a bit more than they did about sketching a rough map
of our explorations, and had an instinct for recognizing apparent harbors that were only the temptations of sirens. Neither I nor they, however, could give a detailed account of this new terrain. Sometimes I
thought we were on solid ground and in a familiar region, when suddenly the ground would open up and I found myself, as in the con-
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ventional dream, falling endlessly with nothing to grab onto. And then,
just as suddenly, the scene would change, and I could see that we were
in a bucolic valley and the sense of falliing had been an illusion. I constantly had to seek my bearings along with the men, and that made
vivid the reality of our mutual dependence.
Up to this point I had led the discussions, selected the texts from
the Touchstones series, and designed the meeting format. But since
our goal was for the core group to develop the skills necessary to lead
discussions with other prisoners, I knew at some stage I would have
to turn over the responsibility to them. I must say I kept postponing
the step. I kept worrying that I hadn’t communicated enough to
them—and this remained a concern despite my understanding that one
cannot prepare for every eventuality in any complex activity, let alone
in a genuine discussion, which, if properly engaged in, changes from
moment to moment with a life of its own. Nonetheless, I also recognized that these were merely excuses I was using in order to avoid
surrendering control, and I was finally able to overcome my resistance
because of what the prisoners were able to do. We were approaching
the stage of the program in which the group must begin to observe
and judge itself.
In all the programs I have developed, the text, the experience of
the participants, and the dynamical issues arising in the process all interpenetrate and echo one another. To prepare the way for self-judgment and self-criticism of the group we first discussed a worksheet
that asked the men questions about how they judged others on first
meeting them. They were asked if they did so at first glance by clothing, by posture, or by eye-contact. In a prison, judging correctly at
first meeting is very important: one needs to be able to distinguish between a newcomer who poses a threat and one who does not.
Two men sharply disagreed on the best way to make such judgments. Idrus asserted it was by the person’s posture, whereas Eddie
focused on the eyes as the most revealing trait. This exchange went
on for a few minutes, and we could see Eddie becoming increasingly
impatient. Idrus was wearing dark glasses and Eddie, annoyed, finally
said what he had been thinking: “What’s behind those glasses?” In response Idrus tensed, started to rise, but then remained seated and
replied. “You’ve known me here for twenty years and you’ve never
seen that.” The moment was explosive and I quickly moved to the text
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for that day to re-establish control. They reconsidered this issue of
self-observation and self-judgment by discussing two self-portraits of
Rembrandt, one in which he concentrates on his eyes, and another in
which he elaborates his clothing while the eyes are in almost impentrable darkness. The discussion got past that moment of tension to
consider how Rembrandt had changed the manner in which he depicted himself.
The next week, Idrus—the prisoner who had shaded his eyes for
twenty years—came to the session without his dark glasses. We were
all stunned. All of us spoke haltingly as the session began, hardly able
to absorb the momentousness of his action. He had taken such a monumental step that I felt I should follow suit. I immediately changed
what I had planned for the session, and resolved that I would surrender
control to the group the following week. To begin that process immediately, I decided to explore with them what we would discuss in the
next session; that is, I began encouraging them to think through the
issues involved in leading a group.
A discussion leader always comes to a session with a goal. The
goal can be a topic that is essential for the group discuss, or a problem
the group must overcome—such as dominance by a few—or an opportunity for the group’s development, or a part of the text that seems
particularly important. The leader might well have to surrender this
goal immediately if it becomes clear that the group will not go along
with it, or that they are ready for a different goal. In this case it was I,
the group’s leader, who was finally ready for something more significant.
After almost a year of hesitation, I was finally ready to collaborate
with them, to surrender control. I therefore asked them to consider
what topic we as a group should discuss. For an hour they suggested
various subjects but the main one was “What is God?” Some claimed
that this was far too personal and sensitive too discuss, others claimed
that the group was capable of attempting it. Some then claimed it
wouldn’t be a discussion where one might change one’s mind. Instead
they would simply state their opinions, indifferent to what the others
might say. But in spite of their reservations, they were willing to attempt it. At the end of the session we chose a text that we could use
to focus our exploration, a selection in a Touchstones volume: the
story of the sacrifice of Isaac from the book of Genesis. The session
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had been so penetrating in examining what constituted a discussion,
what role texts can play in channeling the exploration, and how to
avoid having it turn into an empty ping-pong match of quotations and
scattered opinions, that I also decided the next session for the first
time would be led by one of the prisoners.
I could have chosen any of the group, but Michael volunteered.
A thirty-five-year-old prisoner, he had been serving a life sentence
since the age of fourteen when he was sentenced as an incorrigible
offender. Michael began quietly. He asked: “What sort of God would
make such a request?” There was silence for a few moments and then
first Eddie and then Thomas and then Lee all plunged into the discussion to shed light on the mystery of God’s purposes. For ninety minutes, Michael led a discussion on the difference between sacrifice and
murder and the role of God in our lives with a group of men all of
whom had either committed murder or were at least convicted of it.
And they identified even more closely with Abraham. As another of
the prinsoners, Vaughn, pointed out, “We here must constantly ask
ourselves just what Abraham must have asked himself during that
three-day trip to Mt. Moriah: why me, God, why me?” Though there
was a text, it was impossible to tell whether this was a textual or nontextual discussion. They had finally achieved that intermediate point
in which the distinction breaks down. The following week we spent a
good part of the session discussing what had occurred and whether
their expectations were satisfied. Had it been possible to discuss these
subjects or were they simply presenting monologues? Everyone
agreed that their worst fears had not materialized. In fact, the discussion was a great surprise even to those who expected that we would
be able to pursue it. As one of the men said, “It was like a wheel, it
just moved round and round.”
These men were discussing the issue most personal to them—the
murder of another human being. Yet they had the discipline to depersonalize their own experience and allow others to participate in a discussion. They could surrender control of what was most intimate, and
yet at the same time they never made it an abstract discussion. They
were able to fuse a textual exploration with one in which their own
experience lent credibility to their comments.
The session on the sacrifice of Isaac was a decisive moment for
the group. It was a great success, far greater than I or they or anyone
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could have imagined. They felt that with some advance preparation
one of them had been able to conduct a session. It was in fact a session
on a topic—what is God?—that most felt they wouldn’t be able to
handle. But even more, it was a discussion of the very crime for which
they were serving life sentences. The discussion was thoughtful and
probing, without self-pity and without avoidance of self-examination.
Once we began this process we decided to continue. The next week
we decided we would have another leader and would go in rotation
until each of the nine men had practiced with this group. This was a
major step. I also thought it was better to allow the leader to know in
advance and for him to be able to select the text and the approach.
The next volunteer was Vaughn, who had played a very strong role in
the last discussion. Michael, who had led the discussion, had the best
sense of how to keep himself out of the way. I knew others would have
more difficulty.
It is always a challenge to lead a group. Leading has little to do
with whether you enjoy discussions yourself. In fact often the worst
leaders are precisely those who want to be participants. However,
there is no one model for conducting a discussion. One has to discern
one’s strengths and determine how to use them in the new environment. Vaughn’s great strength as a participant would in fact, I expected, cause him problems as a leader. There was great seriousness
and intensity in Vaughn. In a discussion he often took the group to
new levels by his passionate thinking about a problem. In the Abraham
discussion, when the discussion was becoming fragmented, Vaughn
focused it on what we all knew we should talk about. He imagined
Abraham during those three days journeying with Isaac. He uttered
what everyone in the group was asking about Abraham and about
themselves, “God, why me, why me?” It was Vaughn who could suddenly transform a meandering route into one of deep engagement. As
one prisoner at a different prison said of a discussion on the Iliad, at
some point it left the streets of Troy for those of Baltimore. Vaughn
could effect that translation too. But this very power could also cause
problems.
It is wonderful when a participant deepens a discussion. But when
a leader does it, the group can become dependent on his enthusiasm
or it can become defensive and even go into opposition. A leader must
show that he respects others and feels that the issues they have raised
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are serious. Vaughn, however, was not generally attentive to the needs
of others in the group. He was not vain at all, but simply so engaged
by the question or topic that he would lose a sense of where the others
in the group were in their thinking. Each of the men had different
kinds of issues they would have to face as leaders, but Vaughn’s was
one of the most difficult. He would have to subordinate his own ideas
and help others to bring out theirs. He would have to surrender control
of the content and focus on his responsibility to others. If anyone had
to learn service it was he. My difficulty at the time was that I had to
let him choose the text.
What he selected startled me, and and was even more troubling
than the fact that he would lead the discussion. It was a piece by an
eighteenth-century ex-slave about what owning slaves does to the
slave owner. In one sense it was potentially useful because it at least
took a perspective that the group would not immediately relate to, but
would have to infer. But because it touched so directly on the topic of
slavery, it seemed beyond the ability of this group—much more so
than the question about God. I was amazed that this was the text chosen, yet I had resolved that I would do nothing to change it. They had
to learn to select texts for a specific group at a specific time in their
evolution and this was at least a start. And I had to learn to surrender
my position and become a participant in the group. Though I was convinced that the discussion would fail, I hoped we could analyze it afterward in order at least to decide why it failed. The analysis would
present an opportunity to explore the role of texts and how one selects
them.
I decided I would sit next to Vaughan, thinking that I might be
able to control, at least to some extent, how much he spoke. Though
the previous week had been so disciplined, this discussion collapsed
within moments. The first question took us far from the text into a
dispute about why white people enslaved black people. All the issues
surrounding enslavement and abuse came up immediately, and the
group could hardly sustain any exchange at all. Within minutes I
sensed that we were near an abyss. The few white men in the room
tried to speak, but were not taken seriously. Some got up and left the
circle, angry at what was happening. Most eventually returned and sat
down again, however, since there was no place else for them to go.
Even the others began to attack one another. All the alliances that had
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developed over time broke down. I felt I had no idea where we were
going, no idea whether the group could hold together for the hour or
whether I would have to break it off if they allowed me. At that moment I was certain that all the effort of the past year had been wasted,
and the apparent progress had been an illusion. The session became
electric when a prisoner nicknamed “Shaka” said that in 1975 he was
born a slave in Baltimore and his life would be devoted to becoming
free. I remained silent, unable to speak after my one contribution was
ignored.
After an hour, Vaughn suddenly broke off the conversation, saying we had to move on. I was relieved that we had all survived this
experience, and was ready to pack up and depart feeling that I had
failed in this entire effort. But before I could close out the session, in
a very steady voice Vaughn asked each person to reflect on the activities of the previous hour—what were the strong and weak points, was
it a discussion, was it a success or a disaster, and how could it have
been improved? I was startled both at what Vaughn had attempted at
this stage and also at how the men responded. They were very circumspect and considerate in their comments. Both the white prisoners
and the black prisoners spoke calmly about what had transpired, and
they were even able to discuss the reason why some had felt compelled to leave the circle. At the end of the main discussion I hadn’t
expected that we could ever revive the discipline they had attained
the previous week. But during the analytical conversation everything
changed. The men began to reflect on other aspects of the issue once
they no longer felt that they were expected to defend their respective
races.
After about fifteen minutes during which they considered how
Vaughn had conducted the session, someone abruptly broadened the
issue. Stuttering, Lee asked whether anyone had ever tried to enslave
someone in the prison, or even whether that had happened during the
discussion. There was a long silence and I could see many moving
nervously in their chairs. Finally Thomas acknowledged both. And
within moments, as if finally given the freedom to speak openly, all
entered the discussion as if they were no longer just the victims but
also the perpetrators. They began to describe the complexity of their
emotions as slave owners. They recounted how when they first enslaved someone on the tiers they felt a power and sense of victory.
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They no longer felt imprisoned but human again. But then they began
to feel the enslaved person to be a burden. Instead, only the free prisoners interested them. Their slaves were servile, willing to say or do
anything they felt would ease their lot. These men here, all of whom
were acknowledging themselves as slavers, wanted respect. They said
they didn’t want it from their slaves but from others—from one another. All felt that the moment they enslaved someone his respect was
worthless and their own self-respect diminished. And others would
not respect them for such pointless conquests. After their first moment
of euphoria, they said they felt debased and less human. And they
began acting that way. It was through reflecting on themselves and
their discussion that the text Vaughn had chosen was finally explored.
As I drove back to Annapolis that evening, I finally had occasion
to reflect on what I had just experienced. In the prison I had encountered the genuine reality of a critical section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit—the section on Lordship and Bondage. Unlike the
obscure and illusive abstractions in the Phenomenology, the prisoners
had actually lived through the failures described so speculatively by
Hegel. They too, as Hegel points out about all of us, felt the deep and
fundamental urge to be recognized as human, to be acknowledged as
beings who were different from the rats and insects that populated
their world. And they struggled for this even in their most heinous
acts. These men, enslaved by their past and by their world, used others
in their attempts to break free; they tried to display their humanity
through acts of conquest; they were willing to die in order to assert
themselves as lords over a cell block or over a part of the yard. And
in the moment of success, in the moment of attaining complete control
over a space and its inhabitants, they acknowledged feeling their sense
of themselves slipping away into emptiness. In addition, the very men
whose submission and recognition was meant to guarantee their own
mastery and control showed to them the futility of seeking that recognition. By succumbing, the vanquished prisoners showed that they
couldn’t appreciate what the victor truly was, and therefore couldn’t
offer genuine acknowledgement and recognition. And so the victors
began to recognize themselves as slaves even in their moment of conquest. In Hegel’s story of the progress of human consciousness toward
complete self-awareness, the master who conquers is a dead end. The
story continues through the trials and struggles of the slave. And it is
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self-discipline that points the way to Hegel’s all too joyous conclusion
at the end of what he called the path of despair.
Here too was despair, here in these yards and in the echoing corridors—and yet these men had showed a self-discipline that I hadn’t
expected of them. They had gone farther than I could have imagined,
farther than I could go myself. They no longer needed a text to mediate
themselves. For a brief hour, they had raged about their pain and anger
and humiliation, and then, in a remarkable display of self-awareness,
they reflected objectively on their own strengths and weaknesses.
Though the road they had taken was not directed toward Hegel’s auspicious culmination of history, their exercise of self-discipline had
nonetheless revealed the path to the self. As Shaka—who considered
himself a slave even though he had been born in 1975—said, it was
in these discussions that he found his voice for the first time. These
men had attained more than anyone could give them, something that
any act of bestowal would itself destroy. These men had to find their
own voices. They had to surrender the idioms of their age and class
and race and gender, and for the first time risk hearing themselves.
Together they had to break free from the prison that, as Eddie pointed
out, they and I and all others inhabit. These prisoners thanked the discussions for making that possible. Perhaps that was true, but it was
also true that they had created the discussions. The discussions weren’t
there waiting for them. And suddenly I realized what it meant for me
to surrender control. The most that I had been able to do was to set
the stage for acts of courage that I could admire, but might never have
the privilege to display. I left the prison realizing that for a brief moment I had seen, in men confined to cells for their entire lives, a
degeree of mutual respect and recognition—of freedom—that the rest
of us rarely achieve.
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POETRY
The Love-Song of the Agoraphobic
Elliott Zuckerman
O sing a song
of standing alone
on the steppes of central Asia
and celebrate when thinly dressed
the stark surrounding white
of arctic ice.
Tell me these are Patagonian seas
and I’ll sing louder.
Have you noticed that the deck-chairs
tame the ship-board
by cutting off the terrible full circle?
Every market-place
is emptiness.
I cannot count the ears
of the endless rows
in the Iowa of my imagination.
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Henry Kissinger on China:
The Dangerous Illusion of
“Realist” Foreign Policy
A Review of Henry Kissinger’s On China.
New York: Penguin, 2011. 608 pages, $49.95.
Joseph A. Bosco
Henry Kissinger, an avid student and admirer of the “realist” statecraft
of Machiavelli, Metternich, and Mao, is viewed (not least by himself)
as the archetypical practitioner of Realpolitik in America’s foreign
policy establishment. His latest memoir, On China, describes how he
and Richard Nixon established American relations with the People’s
Republic of China in 1971-72, after nearly a quarter-century of mutual
isolation, suspicion, and hostility. He touts the China opening as
demonstrating the putative success of their “pragmatic” and “non-ideological” approach, and he makes the case with his customary erudition, aplomb, and Churchillian use of the English language. The book
is also a richly detailed account of the personal and sometimes philosophical interactions among the four key players: Nixon, Kissinger,
Mao Zedong, and Zhou-En-lai.
In an earlier book, Kissinger wrote that the China initiative
“marked America’s return to the world of Realpolitik.”1 Despite
China’s horrific human rights record and aggressive behavior since
the Communists took power in 1949, Washington sought rapprochement, convinced that it was “central to the establishment of a peaceful
international order and transcended America’s reservations about
China’s radical governance.”2 Kissinger can justifiably claim at least
partial results in one important objective of the strategy—relations
with Moscow: “[T]he Nixon Administration managed to create a
major incentive for Soviet moderation” that led to a brief period of
detente and a series of strategic arms control agreements,3 though it
Joseph A. Bosco served as China country desk officer in the office of the Secretary of Defense, 2005-2006, and previously taught graduate seminars on
China-Taiwan-U.S. relations at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service.
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was soon followed by one of the most fraught periods in Soviet-U.S.
relations.
But pursuit of the other immediate goal sought by the NixonKissinger diplomacy—China’s cooperation in terminating the Vietnam War on “honorable terms” for America—ended in ignominious
failure. “We made the withdrawal of our military forces from Taiwan
conditional on the settlement of the Vietnam war.”4 Kissinger blames
the outcome in Vietnam on Congress’s unwillingness to enforce the
Paris Peace Treaty. He says that he and Nixon foresaw Hanoi’s “massive violations” of the Treaty, but he signed it nevertheless because,
if necessary to ensure compliance, the use of air power to enforce the
agreement was never ruled out, either in the minds of members of the
Nixon Administration or in its public pronouncements.5 Obviously,
Hanoi was not deterred by the administration’s warnings that “we will
not tolerate violations of the Agreement.”6 As North Vietnam’s main
army forces poured over the 17th Parallel into the South, the Treaty
collapsed along with South Vietnam. Kissinger earned a Nobel Peace
Prize for having negotiated the agreement along with North Vietnam’s
Le Duc Tho, who declined the Prize.
Hardheaded realism requires that the overall China engagement
policy be examined over the long-term. Did it attain the peaceful international order Kissinger described as its goal? In this regard, the
results of Kissinger’s Realpolitik with China—which Nixon enthusiastically endorsed but also regarded as a “strategic gamble”—may
well be judged as one of the greatest miscalculations in American
diplomatic history.
Kissinger, of course, does not see it this way. He seems still to
revel in the momentous negotiations that shook the world, even
though its aftershocks grow increasingly ominous as time goes by.
The Shanghai Communiqué, drafted by Kissinger and Zhou En-lai,
was the seminal document in the new Sino-U.S. relationship. It clearly
stated the premise of the U.S. position: “[I]mproving communications
between countries that have different ideologies . . . lessen[s] the risks
of confrontation through accident, miscalculation, or misunderstanding.”7
Kissinger looks back with satisfaction over the ensuing four warfree decades, during which he continued to play influential roles—
often simultaneously—as a successful commercial entrepreneur in
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China and as an unofficial strategic adviser to both the American and
Chinese governments. His personal longevity, intellectual vigor, and
ongoing involvement in international affairs have enabled him to consult on an intimate basis with each of the four men who have led China
since the creation of the People’s Republic (and now with Xi Jinping,
the designated fifth-generation leader), as well as with the eight American presidents who have largely carried out Kissinger’s policies. “Despite occasional tensions . . . [i]n the forty years since [the Communiqué]
was signed, neither China nor the United States has allowed the issue
[of human rights] to interrupt the momentum of their relationship.”8
Yet during that period the United States and China have experienced their third Taiwan Strait Crisis; several dangerous clashes at
sea; the EP-3 incident; two separate nuclear threats against American
cities by Chinese generals; Beijing’s undermining of American objectives on nonproliferation, on North Korea, and on a range of rogue
state issues; and China’s creation of an alternative development model
that violates international standards of accountability, transparency,
and good governance. Kissinger’s massive volume does not do justice
to these events, where it mentions them at all. To demonstrate how
far U.S.-China relations have progressed since the historic opening,
Kissinger writes: “Nixon had to overcome a legacy of twenty years
of American foreign policy based on the assumption that China would
use every opportunity to weaken the United States and to expel it from
Asia.”9 He gives short shrift, however, to China’s contemporary demands, backed by their historically unprecedented military strength,
that the U.S. curtail its activities in international waters like the Taiwan
Strait, the East China Sea, the Yellow Sea, and the South China Sea.
He sees Chinese “triumphalist” rhetoric as unreflective of official Chinese policy and merely a hypothetical danger. At a recent meeting
with South Korea’s defense minister, which occurred too late for inclusion in On China, the chief of the People’s Liberation Army’s general staff, General Chen Bingde “issued an unusual and caustic tirade
against . . . America’s hegemonic attitudes toward other countries.”10
Such Chinese accusations are not unusual, never having disappeared
despite Kissinger’s rosy assessment of the achievements of the Shanghai Communiqué. Given the longevity of such Chinese views of
Washington’s motives, coupled with China’s economic and military
surge, it is no wonder that, thirty years after his historic opening,
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Nixon worried, “We may have created a Frankenstein.”11 Kissinger,
however, remains untroubled over his role in establishing and perpetuating the framework for U.S.-China relations, and unconcerned about
what that undertaking has produced. James Clapper, the Director of
National Intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2011
that China now presents “the greatest mortal threat” to the United
States.12
On China, together with the author’s extensive promotional interviews for the book, may well be Kissinger’s last concerted attempt
to establish a favorable historical record for the landmark oopening
to China. It is certainly a vigorous defense of Realpolitik in the crucible of U.S.-China relations. But even on its own realist terms the
book ultimately fails in its mission of vindication. This is partly because the story is not over and indeed is worsening as China’s economic and military power continue to grow. But the evidence of
long-term strategic failure is now sufficient to conclude that Nixon’s
strategic gamble has already failed—nearly a half-century after the
opening, the two powers should not still be seriously contemplating
scenarios for going to war with each other. But we are.
The issue that had always stymied Sino-U.S. relations until the
Nixon-Kissinger overture was the status of Taiwan. As Kissinger approvingly recalls, Washington initially lost interest in Taiwan after
Mao’s Communists defeated the Nationalists in 1949, during which
the U.S. remained on the sidelines. “Having conceded the mainland
to Communist control and whatever geopolitical impact this might
have, it made no sense to resist Communist attempts to occupy Taiwan.”13
Secretary of State Dean Acheson and General Douglas MacArthur
effectively reflected that thinking in late 1949 and early 1950, when
they publicly delineated U.S. strategic interests in Asia and excluded
both Taiwan and South Korea from America’s security perimeter. In
his book, Kissinger criticizes Acheson’s National Press Club statement
in January, 1950: “To the extent deterrence requires clarity about a
country’s intention, Acheson’s speech missed the mark.”14 Actually,
Acheson was, if anything, too clear in indicating, as MacArthur had
done a month earlier, that Washington did not intend to use military
force to defend Taiwan or South Korea. No wonder, then, that Kim
Il-sung, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong thought they had a U.S. green
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light to pursue aggressive unification. But after North Korea’s attack
on South Korea converted hypothetical danger to stark reality, a
shocked foreign policy establishment changed its perception of the
Asian Communist threat: “When American policymakers came faceto-face with an actual Communist invasion, they ignored their policy
papers.”15 President Truman mobilized a United Nations defense of
South Korea and sent the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait to prevent a Chinese attack there, frustrating Mao’s openly stated intentions
to do just that. As Kissinger put it regarding the Korean War, “The
United States did not expect the invasion; China did not expect the
reaction.”16
After the war ended in a military and negotiated stalemate, President Eisenhower signed Mutual Defense Treaties with both South
Korea and Taiwan in 1954. The U.S. military presence maintained the
peace for the next decade and a half. Nevertheless, Kissinger expresses disdain for the sterile Sino-U.S. impasse over the island’s status that kept the two governments isolated from each other during that
period: “China would discuss no other subject until the United States
agreed to withdraw from Taiwan and the United States would not talk
about withdrawing from Taiwan until China had renounced the use of
force to solve the Taiwan question.”17 At that point Nixon and
Kissinger entered the scene wielding the sword of Realpolitik. They
cut the Gordian knot—simply acceding to China’s position. Washington informed Beijing that the Seventh Fleet—the primary obstacle to
a Chinese attack on Taiwan—was leaving the Taiwan Strait forthwith
and all American forces would be withdrawn from Taiwan in stages.
The fact that these commitments were made even before the start
of the official Sino-U.S. dialogue violated one of the Nixon-Kissinger
realist admonitions against making advance concessions and appearing overly eager to please. “We have a tendency to apply our standards
to others in negotiations. We like to pay in advance to show our good
will, but in foreign policy you never get paid for services already rendered.”18 As Nixon instructed his adviser, “We cannot be too forthcoming in terms of what America will do [by saying] we’ll withdraw,
and we’ll do this, and that, and the other thing.”19 But U.S. actions
had already conveyed the impression that Washington craved the rapprochement far more than did Beijing. Any fair-minded realist would
have to say that this impression weakened American negotiating lan-
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guage, strategic clarity, and deterrence in perpetuity. As Kissinger
takes justifiable pride in noting repeatedly, seven subsequent administrations have followed the Nixon-Kissinger approach. For more than
four decades, consequently, Beijing has taken full advantage of that
Western indulgence, deriving the benefits from the international system while enjoying wide latitude in its domestic and international behavior.
Kissinger has presented confusing, and even contradictory, accounts of the origin of the Sino-American “understanding” on Taiwan
established during Nixon’s historic meeting with Mao. In On China,
he writes: “[A]fter decades of mutual recrimination over Taiwan, the
subject in effect did not come up” except for some sarcastic banter
about Chiang Kai-shek.20 A few pages later, he reaffirms that “Mao
had omitted any substantive reference to Taiwan.”21 To bolster this
point, Kissinger reports his own conversation with Mao a year after
the Nixon meeting: “[T]o remove any element of threat Mao explicitly
delinked the issue of Taiwan from the overall U.S.-China relationship.”22 Although Mao warned that he did not believe China and Taiwan would be able to effect a peaceful transition,23 as far as
China-U.S. relations were concerned, “Mao made his principal
point—that there were no time pressures of any kind.”24 Mao also told
him, “I say that we can do without Taiwan for the time being, and let
it come after one hundred years.”25 Kissinger explains that Mao actually had two principal points of equal importance: First, “that Beijing
would not foreclose its option to use force over Taiwan—and indeed
expected to have to use force someday.”26 Second, “for the time being
at least, Mao was putting off this day.”27
Kissinger’s account of the Mao-Nixon the discussion in On China
is consistent with Nixon’s own description of the meeting in his 1978
memoir.28 Inexplicably, however, Kissinger told the story quite differently in two books he wrote between Nixon’s Memoirs and his own
On China. In 1979 and again 1994, Kissinger put Mao’s talk of delay
in Taiwan’s demise not in a one-on-one meeting with him, but in
Mao’s meeting with Nixon, at which Kissinger was also present:
“[T]he Chinese leader wasted no time in assuring the President that
China would not use force against Taiwan: “We can do without them
for the time being, and let it come after 100 years.’”29 In these earlier
accounts, Kissinger saw Mao’s statement to the President as a mani-
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185
festation of large-minded statesmanship: “Mao asked for no reciprocity for the assurance America had been seeking for twenty years.”30
Whichever version is accurate, Kissinger’s perception that Mao
was making a major unilateral concession is astoundingly innocent.
Nixon and Kissinger had already given Mao the quid for his quo—a
commitment to withdraw U.S. forces on and near Taiwan. Indeed,
they had already given Mao much more. Kissinger remarks that
“Nixon and his advisers . . . deemed diplomatic contact with China
essential” and, as early as 1969, had publicly committed the United
States to defend China’s independence against a Soviet attack—a
unique security guarantee from an American president to a hostile
Communist government.31 Moreover, Kissinger did not even seem to
regard Taiwan as a strategic bargaining chip. He once expressed bemused incredulity to Mao that China would wait so long to take Taiwan: “Not a hundred years,” he remarked. Mao responded: “It is hard
to say. Five years, ten, twenty, a hundred years. It’s hard to say.”32 Despite the shifting target dates, Mao’s comments about Taiwan consistently made clear that China would use force to take it: “[W]e are
going to fight for it.”33 So, Nixon and Kissinger, the two hardheaded
practitioners of Realpolitik, knowingly traded a concrete action China
wanted—permanent U.S. withdrawal from Taiwan—for a vague and
temporary expression of the action Washington had sought—China’s
commitment not to use force against Taiwan. It is worth noting that
on none of the occasions when Mao affirmed China’s intention to attack Taiwan did Kissinger raise any question or objection. Nor did he
suggest that the United States would feel compelled to defend Taiwan
on the basis of its “interest in a peaceful settlement” as stated in the
Shanghai Communiqué. Nixon, Kissinger, Mao, and Zhou, who might
be called the Gang of Four Realists, all understood that American public opinion and the U.S. Congress would not tolerate abandonment of
Taiwan to Communist China at that time. After a decent interval, however—in Nixon’s expected second term—the deed would be done.34
China would get its “full meal.” While Nixon shared wholeheartedly
in that original Realpolitik cleverness, his view significantly evolved
as Taiwan itself moved from dictatorship to democracy; unlike
Kissinger, he concluded that democratic Taiwan is now permanently
divorced from Communist China. (See discussion below.)
On China suffers from surprising historical inaccuracies and glar-
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ing omissions on some pivotal events in China-U.S. relations.
Kissinger recounts the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis, which began in July
1995 when China fired missiles toward Taiwan to protest a U.S. visit
by Taiwan’s appointed president, Lee Teng-hui. China then conducted
military exercises in the Strait during the period leading up to Taiwan’s
parliamentary elections in December. Chinese officials, clearly intent
on avoiding North Korea’s 1950 miscalculation, put the crucial question directly to their American counterparts during a November visit
of Assistant Secretary of Defense Joseph Nye: How would the U.S.
respond if China attacked Taiwan? Here was an ideal opportunity for
supposedly realist Washington to provide the strategic clarity and deterrent message Kissinger found lacking in Acheson’s Press Club
speech.
But Nye, even as he cited that earlier Korean experience, answered equivocally: “We don’t know and you don’t know; it would
depend on the circumstances.”35 Understandably wary of signaling an
Acheson-style green light, Nye erred in failing to red-light China’s
ambitions by a plain commitment to Taiwan’s defense. Instead, he
gave China a yellow light—what came to be known as “strategic ambiguity”—and it worked for that moment as China decided to proceed
with caution for the time being. When asked the same question by
American interviewers weeks later, Defense Secretary William Perry
enthusiastically adopted Nye’s statement, and it has been Washington’s official stance ever since. Curiously this pivotal incident does
not appear in On China, and neither Nye nor Perry is mentioned in
the book. Equally surprising is Kissinger’s failure to note the extraordinary threat conveyed by a Chinese general to an American scholar
at that time: “You care more about Los Angeles than about Taiwan.”36
Within a month of Nye’s statement, the Nimitz carrier group
passed through the Strait—the first such transit in the 23 years since
Nixon had removed the Seventh Fleet. After China protested, Washington explained that this passage was merely a weather diversion,
not a warning or a signal of commitment to Taiwan’s defense—
thereby undermining the impact of “the most significant American
show of force directed at China since the 1971 rapprochement.”37
Kissinger fails to note the missed deterrent opportunity for the United
States: having sent the ships through the Strait, it could have reminded
Beijing matter-of-factly that no U.S. explanation or Chinese indul-
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gence was required for the exercise of America’s freedom of navigation rights in international waters.38
Kissinger’s account also misstates the date and context of the
Nimitz Taiwan Straight passage. He places it not in December 1995,
when it actually occurred, but three months later in March 1996, prior
to Taiwan’s first presidential election, when China tested the U.S.
again by resuming its missile firings across the Strait. On that second
occasion in March, President Clinton deployed both the Nimitz and
the Independence to the area. But when Beijing threatened a “sea of
fire” if the ships entered the Strait, they changed course and avoided
the Strait. As a result, Washington’s attempt to signal deterrence was
trumped by Beijing’s message of counter-deterrence. This compounded the garbled strategic signals in December. A former senior
U.S. official who had been in office at the time later described the
1995-96 confrontations as the Clinton administration’s “own Cuban
missile crisis,” and said they had “stared into the abyss.”39 Kissinger
uses similar language to describe the crisis: “Approaching the
precipice, both Washington and Beijing recoiled.”40 But his failure to
note the mismanaged U.S. messaging during this critical period is surprising given his lifelong career focus on the roles of ambiguity and
clarity in international diplomacy generally and in the famously complex and nuanced U.S.-China relationship in particular.41
Nor does he remark on the significant lessons China learned from
the tense episode. According to subsequent Defense Department reports on China’s military power, after 1996 Beijing resolved to develop the capacity to deter or delay U.S. intervention in any future
Taiwan crisis. It has done so by deploying a formidable arsenal of
“area denial” and “anti-access” weapons, including advanced attack
submarines and the world’s first ship-killing ballistic missiles.
Kissinger takes no notice of these ominous developments. Nor does
he mention the existence of the congressionally mandated Pentagon
reports on China’s dramatic military advances.42
On China also ignores President George W. Bush’s abortive attempt in 2001 to restore the clarity of America’s commitment to Taiwan’s security that prevailed from 1950 until the Nixon opening to
China in 1972. The president said he would do “whatever it took” to
defend Taiwan now that it had become a democracy.43 Shocked China
experts within and outside the administration scrambled to walk that
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statement back, restoring the ambiguity of the earlier, presumably
safer policy. But it was the attacks of September 11, 2001 that put the
Taiwan issue on the back burner as Washington managed to convince
itself that Beijing was now on the same side with the U.S. in the war
on terrorism, counter-proliferation, and even controlling North
Korea’s nuclear ambitions.
Notwithstanding Kissinger’s omissions and historical errors, On
China offers an illuminating account of the similarities and differences
between Kissinger and Nixon on China policy. The two clearly agreed
on the compromises and ambiguities that enabled the China opening.
They also agreed that their successors should continue the engagement
policy because abandoning it would entail seriously adverse consequences. They parted company, however, over the future of Taiwan
and the attendant prospects for Sino-U.S. conflict.
Nixon recalled how “the Shanghai Communiqué negotiated by
Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai brilliantly bridged the differences
between the two governments.”44 But he also wrote:
Realistic reappraisals of U.S. relations with Taiwan,
and of the relations between the governments in Beijing and Taipei, are overdue. . . . The situation has
changed dramatically since then. . . . China and Taiwan publicly have irreconcilable differences. The
separation is permanent politically, but they are in
bed together economically.45
He advocated that the two sides simply accept their mutual dependency, and he also recommended that the United States strongly support
Taiwan’s membership in international economic organizations. He
exhorted Washington to “begin extending to Taiwan government officials the diplomatic courtesies that the leaders of one of the world’s
major economic powers deserve.”46 And he expressed optimism for a
long-term peaceful outcome: “The Chinese will not launch a military
attack against Taiwan as long as Beijing knows such an attack would
jeopardize their relations with the United States.”47
Kissinger assesses the situation differently. He still believes, as
Nixon did, that the “ambiguous formula” he inserted in the Shanghai
Communiqué was masterful: “ambiguity is sometimes the lifeblood
of diplomacy.”48 Unlike Nixon, however, Kissinger believes that
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China will use force against Taiwan unless it accepts “peaceful reunification through peaceful means,” as Premier Wen Jiabao put it to
President Bush in December 2003.49 But Kissinger recalls a 2001 conversation with President Jiang Zemin, in which he mentioned the possibility of military action against Taiwan. Kissinger took the remark
seriously enough that he “felt obliged to reply to this threat of force”
by saying, “In a military confrontation between the U.S. and China,
even those of us who would be heartbroken would be obliged to support our own country.”50 Kissinger did not predict that the U.S. would
in fact defend Taiwan, and he makes clear in his book that he doubts
it will: “The crucial competition between the United States and China
is more likely to be economic and social than military.”51 Given the
state of Sino-U.S. economic interdependence and the dramatic increase in China’s military power, it is unlikely Kissinger would find
a U.S. defense of Taiwan more palatable today than it was in 1949,
when the PLA was a lot weaker. This is why he has publicly urged
Taiwan to exercise the “peaceful” option and come to terms with Beijing before China feels compelled to resort to force. This is also the
reason Kissinger warns Washington about continued arms sales to Taiwan: “It would be dangerous to equate [China’s] acquiescence to circumstance with agreement for the indefinite future.”52 Nixon believed
that war over Taiwan could be avoided by self-interested Chinese selfrestraint; Kissinger believes that peace can be assured only if Taiwan
and the United States accept Taiwan’s unification with China—
thereby consummating the deal he made with Zhou En-lai in 1972.
“[The] series of ambiguities [that] sustained much of normalization
for forty years . . . cannot do so indefinitely.”53
It may be that Kissinger has fallen victim to the ancient realist
principles he admires in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, teachings that anticipate Realpolitik in emphasizing “subtlety, indirection, and the patient accumulation of relative advantage.”54 This sort of approach
involves “building a dominant political and psychological position,
such that the outcome of a conflict becomes a foregone conclusion,”55
for “strategy resolves itself into a psychological contest” that sometimes requires “subterfuge and misinformation.”56 Like Sun Tzu,
“Mao believed in the objective impact of ideological, and above all,
psychological factors.”57 Mao and Zhou applied these principles
adeptly in their interactions with Nixon and Kissinger, and their suc-
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cessors have continued the tradition. For example, despite his dissatisfaction with Washington’s continued arms sales to Taiwan, Deng Xiaoping skillfully managed his relations with Washington so that, as
Kissinger concedes, “the People’s Republic achieved another decade
of American assistance as it built its economic and military power.”58
Kissinger also uses On China to warn against too much emphasis
on China’s human rights record. Once called “the American Metternich,” Kissinger espouses the realist position that national interest
must be based on seeing the world as it is, not as we would like it to
be, and certainly not with an over-emphasis on human rights and democratic values (which he calls crusading moralism) important as they
are to America’s national identity. The best way to influence China
on human rights, he informed Fareed Zakaria in a recent televised interview, is to leave it to himself and a few others who have earned the
trust and confidence of China over the years and can broach the subject in private rather than embarrassing its leaders in public. But the
record of the past forty years reveals that his realist approach has proved
to be decidedly unrealistic. That is because, contrary to Kissinger’s
teaching, the counterpoint to realism is not always idealism or excessive morality. Clearheaded pursuit of the national interest can also be
clouded by sentimentality, wishful thinking, illusion, grandiosity, even
self-delusion. Kissinger long ago convinced himself that he and Chinese leaders shared a hard-nosed pragmatism based on mutual selfinterest. “I could not have encountered a group of interlocutors more
receptive to Nixon’s style of diplomacy than the Chinese leaders.”59
He was comfortable in his assumption that the Chinese perceived their
own self-interest as he believes he would have seen it if he were in
their place. So he constantly projected onto Beijing his views of their
self-interest. It is a variation of a phenomenon Kissinger often decries:
American diplomats sometimes contracting what has been called clientitis. They become the policy captives of the countries to which they
are posted and end up advocating that government’s views to Washington instead of the reverse. But Kissinger, with characteristic intellectual complexity, takes clientitis to a new level. He sympathetically
presents to his American audience not merely the official Chinese position, but also his own imaginary conception of what the Chinese position would be if they were as rational as he is. Kissinger has written
that in “our opening to China . . . [o]ur objective was to purge our for-
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eign policy of all sentimentality.”60 It may be that he and Nixon only
replaced one form of sentimentality with their own, though Nixon,
unlike Kissinger, apparently recovered his perspective enough to predict a future Taiwan free of Chinese Communist domination.
Some passages in On China suggest Kissinger’s knowing psychological susceptibility to China’s advances. Kissinger fully recognizes how “Chinese statesmen historically have excelled at using
hospitality, ceremony, and carefully cultivated personal relationships
as tools of statecraft.”61 His chapter on the history of China’s relations
with the outside world contains an interesting passage from the Han
Dynasty: “For those who come to surrender, the emperor [should]
show them favor [and] personally serve them wine and food so as to
corrupt their mind.”62 A few hundred pages later, Kissinger describes
the lavish banquets his Chinese hosts bestowed on him—and includes
in his book a photograph showing Zhou En-lai using his chopsticks
to place food on Kissinger’s plate.
Whether Kissinger has been beguiled and seduced by a series of
Chinese leaders, or has merely invested so much of his life in vindicating the original flawed Sino-U.S. understanding that he can no
longer deviate from his own orthodoxy, the consequences are the
same. Or perhaps the explanation for Kissinger’s vulnerability to Chinese influence is more geostrategic and less psychological. Intellectually and professionally, Kissinger’s, and Nixon’s, strong anti-Soviet
background doubtless predisposed them to align the United States
with China, Moscow’s chief adversary at the time. (“The enemy of
my enemy is my friend.”) Kissinger probably exaggerated his own
neutrality when he described the debate within official national security and foreign policy circles over which way American policy should
tilt. He recalls that there were “Slavophiles,” “Sinophiles,” and those
who advocated Realpolitik. “Not surprisingly,” he writes, “I was on
the side of the Realpolitikers.”63 Richard Nixon’s seminal thinking on
the need to open relations with China was set forth in his October
1967 article in Foreign Affairs, in which he wrote: “[W]e simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there
to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates, and threaten its neighbors.”64
When, in 1994, Kissinger reviewed the consequences of his approach to China, he concluded that “[t]he certitudes of physical threat
and hostile ideology characteristic of the Cold War are gone.”65 But
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three years earlier, Deng Xiaoping—supposedly the un-Mao, who had
already ordered China’s military to “shed some blood”66 in Tiananmen
Square—gave fair warning of what lay ahead for the world: “hide our
capacities and bide our time.”67 Given the present state of Sino-U.S.
relations, the danger of conflict over Taiwan, North Korea, the South
China Sea, Beijing’s essentially subversive role on proliferation and
third world governance, and a myriad of other issues, it is fair to ask:
Who are the true realists?
As he again surveyed China-U.S. relations recently in the context
of increasing Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea and elsewhere, Kissinger warned: “Care must be taken lest both sides analyze
themselves into self-fulfilling prophecies.”68 The problem is that there
has been too little reflection and fresh thinking in the West regarding
Communist China’s long-term motives. We are now being forced, belatedly, to reexamine long-held premises and assumptions. Kissinger’s
On China provides abundant evidence of the reasons why reassessment
is needed—now more than ever.
NOTES
1. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1994), 724.
2. Henry Kissinger, On China, (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011), 447.
3. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 719.
4. Kissinger, On China, 249.
5. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 696.
6. Ibid.
7. Joint Communiqué of the People’s Republic of China and the United States
of America, February 28, 1972, reprinted in Richard Nixon, Speeches, Writings, Documents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 225.
8. Kissinger, On China, 272.
9. Ibid., 216.
10. Miles Yu, “Inside China,” The Washington Times, July 20, 2011.
11. William Safire, “The Biggest Vote,” The New York Times, May 18, 2000.
12. Testimony of James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, before the
Senate Intelligence Committee, March 10, 2011.
13. Kissinger, On China, 119.
14. Ibid., 125.
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15. Ibid., 129.
16. Ibid., 132.
17. Ibid., 159.
18. The Diane Rehm Show, Interview with Henry Kissinger, WAMU-FM,
April 7, 1994. Emphasis added.
19. Kissinger, On China, 266.
20. Ibid., 258.
21 Ibid., 279.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., emphasis added.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 280.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset
and Dunlap, 1978), 561-564.
29. Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979), 1062; and Diplomacy, 727. Emphasis added).
30. Ibid.
31. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 723-724.
32. Kissinger, On China, 307.
33. Ibid.
34. Kissinger, On China, 271. “[Nixon’s] intention, he affirmed, was to complete the normalization process in his second term.”
35. Joseph Nye, The Boston Globe, February 7, 1996, 6.
36. William Perry, The New York Times, January 24, 1996, 1.
37. Ibid., 476.
38. After China complained about a Strait transit by the Kitty Hawk in 2007,
Admiral Timothy Keating, the Pacific Commander, replied: “We don’t need
China’s permission to go through the Taiwan Straits. It is international water.
We will exercise our free right of passage whenever and wherever we choose
to.” “Sino-American Showdown in Taiwan Strait: Chinese Navy Confronted
USS Kitty Hawk,” Global Research, January 16, 2008. Kissinger does not
mention the incident.
39. Off-the-record Washington speech by a former U.S. official.
40. Kissinger, On China, 477.
41. Kissinger is decidedly ambiguous on the role of ambiguity in statecraft,
at least as it is practiced by others. Critical of Acheson’s lack of deterrent
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clarity in 1950, he takes great pride in his own “one China” formulation in
the Shanghai Communiqué, which could be a model of ambiguity as “the
lifeblood of diplomacy.” But then he criticizes President Reagan’s Third
Communiqué on Taiwan arms sales because it “is quite ambiguous, hence a
difficult roadmap for the future.” Kissinger, On China, 383.
42. See, e.g., Annual Report to Congress: The Military Power of the People’s
Republic of China, 2005, Office of the Secretary of Defense.
43. David E. Sanger, “U.S. Would Defend Taiwan, Bush Says,” The New York
Times, April 26, 2001.
44. Richard Nixon, Beyond Peace (New York: Random House, 1994), 133.
45. Ibid., 134. Emphasis added.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Kissinger, On China, 356.
49. Ibid., 492.
50. Ibid., 484.
51. Ibid., 525.
52. Ibid., 385.
53. Ibid., 356. To Chinese readers of Kissinger’s book, the title words On
China may look very much like “One China.”
54. Ibid., 23.
55. Ibid., 26.
56. Ibid., 29.
57. Ibid., 101.
58. Ibid., 386.
59. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 726.
60. Kissinger, White House Years, 191.
61. Kissinger, On China, 237.
62. Ibid., 21. Emphasis added.
63. Kissinger, White House Years, 182.
64. Richard Nixon, “Asia After Vietnam,” Foreign Affairs, 46.1 (1967): 121.
65. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 835.
66. The New York Times, June 4, 2010, 1.
67. “Deng Initiates New Policy ‘Guiding Principle,’” FBIS-CHI-91-215,
quoted in Kissinger, On China, 438.
68. “Avoiding a U.S.-China Cold War,” Henry A. Kissinger, The Washington
Post, January 14, 2011. See also “Our Fraught Place with China,” Joseph A.
Bosco, The Weekly Standard, January 21, 2011.
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REVIEWS
Everything is One
A Review of Eva Brann’s The Logos of Heraclitus: The First Philosopher of the West on
Its Most Interesting Term. Philadelphia: Paul
Dry Books, 2011. 160 pages, $16.95.
David Carl
The Greeks had but one word, logos, for both speech and
reasoning; not that they thought there was no speech
without reason, but no reasoning without speech; and the
act of reasoning they called syllogism, which signifieth
summing up the consequences of one saying to another.
—Hobbes, Leviathan I.iv.14
What is the relationship between what we say and what we think, or
how we think? In her new book Eva Brann demonstrates that these
questions are among the oldest (and most interesting) questions taken
up by Western philosophy, and that they find their origin in the Logos
of Heraclitus. This Logos, however, is not initially something spoken,
but something heard, and much hinges on the content and the nature
of Heraclitus’s hearing.
What Heraclitus heard was the Logos, for the Logos speaks (is a
Speaker) and the philosopher is one who hears. Heraclitus is “that
aboriginal listener to the Logos” (87).* But this is the beginning of the
mystery, not its solution; and teasing out the implications, the ambiguities (or ambivalencies), the paradoxes and possibilities of what the
Logos says is the primary task of Ms. Brann’s book. How exactly did
he hear what the Logos said? To whom or what was he listening? How
did he learn to hear so well? And how will he share, across the centuries, the timeless truth of what he heard?
Brann begins her account of Heraclitean hearing by introducing
us, by means of an analysis of Raphael’s School of Athens, to the figDavid Carl is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
*
Page numbers in parentheses refer to Eva Brann’s Heraclitus.
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ure of Heraclitus, and briefly relates the history of logos, as distinct
from the Heraclitean Logos. She then turns her attention, over the
course of four closely reasoned pages, to a detailed consideration of
a two-line fragment from Heraclitus’s lost treatise known as On Nature, D-K 50:1
To those hearing not me but the Saying, to say the same is
the Wise Thing: Everything [is] One. (16)
Through consideration of etymological detail informed by an imaginative intimacy with the history of Western philosophy and literature,
an understanding of this fragment emerges which highlights the stakes
of Heraclitus’s hearing: the Logos is a “Wise Thing,” and it is wise
for us to have knowledge of it “since it governs the relation of all
things to everything” (19). As we will see, the key word in this understanding is “relation.”
Seeing as Hearing
In the next sections of her book, Brann leads her reader towards an
appreciation of how the Logos both embodies and reveals the unity
“of all things to everything.” She first shows us that Heraclitus is particularly interested in the within and without of the cosmos, and that
he looks within in order to understand the without: “no one has ever
listened harder to the Logos within!” (87). This is not an unconscious
mixing of metaphors: this looking that is a form of listening is part of
the essential doubleness of Heraclitus’s thinking—a doubleness which
is as apparent in his form and style as it is in the content of his writing.
Brann’s discussion of fragmentation (“his inherent fragmentariness
entails a certain philosophical completeness” [93]), metaphor, and
Heraclitean punning is illuminating in this regard.
Twenty-five hundred years after Heraclitus composed the writings
we know as his Fragments, Wallace Stevens observed that “[t]he
world about us would be desolate except for the world within us,”2
and “it is a violence from within that protects us from a violence from
without.”3 Brann shows us that this salutary tension between the
within and the without, together with Stevens’ notion of violence, is
essential to the way Heraclitus listens to the Logos. Indeed, as we will
see, salutary tension is at the heart of Heraclitus’s understanding of
the cosmos.
His hearing will constantly merge with metaphorical forms of see-
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ing, for Heraclitus pays a great deal of attention to the physical world
around him. (“[O]f what there is sight, hearing, learning—these I
honor especially” [75].4) Moreover, the Logos he hears “is not audible
to the ears but to the soul” (76), nor is the cosmic Fire he sees visible
to the physical eye. For Heraclitus the eye and the ear are both
metaphors for forms of knowing, namely, listening and seeing. There
is deliberate, salutary tension in a mixed metaphor, and the harmony
at the core of Heraclitus’s view of nature is driven by tension—the
kind of tension that goes into stringing a bow or tuning a lyre. This is
why Heraclitus says that “[a]ll things come to be by strife” (106).5
Because of this strife, wrestling is another illuminating metaphor
in Heraclitus’s “tautly vital, twangingly alive, strainingly static cosmos”—a cosmos “locked in inimical embraces” that displays “a mode
of being that is a harsh, ever-unfulfilled striving” (90). On the way toward understanding how Heraclitean harmony (“there is a Unity relating Everything and All Things” [18]) arises out of this notion of
strife and tension, Brann treats us to insightful observations about Heraclitus’s relationships with Aristotle, Parmenides, Pythagoras and the
Milesian “proto-physicists”; she discusses the importance of metaphor
and ratio (“the Greek name for ratios is logoi, and logoi are the cosmic
unifying relations” [124]); she interprets Heraclitus’s notion of Fire
(“that pervasive quasi-material that allows all the elements to enter
into quantitative ratio-relations with each other” [44]); and she delves
into the etymological details of Heraclitus’s Greek in a revealing and
delightful way that is free of pedantic stodginess.
Ratios and Fire are both ways of putting things into relation with
one another. Relation “bonds two terms without merging them” (38),
and this is the key to understanding Heraclitus’s notion of the Logos.
Brann’s claim is a radical one, startling and yet compelling: she suggests that Heraclitus not only pondered what made “the multifarious
world one” (perhaps an inevitable question for a philosopher), but also
went on to posit that The Logos (as distinct from logos) was “all at
once the relater of all relations, beyond and within them, a maker of
the world-order and himself that order, a world governor, and also the
world—a doer, a sayer, and perhaps himself a listener” (42). Thus
Brann reveals the extreme possibilities of a Heraclitean “world-order,”
an order that is coherent and unified—a (contentiously) harmonious
and beautiful order—but also mysterious and enigmatic, for “non-
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sensory logoi govern the sensory world” (43). It is consequently an
order that demands a careful listening. But how do we listen to the
non-sensory? By developing the faculty that is capable of hearing
what Thinking itself has to say, both to us and about itself.
At this point Heraclitus sounds like something of a mystic. But
Brann’s book grounds Heraclitus’s thinking so firmly and compellingly in the context of musical ratio, chemistry, and physics that
the potential vagaries of mysticism are firmly left behind (“I don’t
think so ultimately uncompromising a philosophical physics ever
again comes on the scene” [89]). More importantly, Brann shows us
how Heraclitus’s thought transcends such distinctions as “mystic/rationalist” or “poet/philosopher” by taking us behind the screen of such
divisions. “One : Everything” [21] is the ultimate expression of the
Heraclitean philosophy. Heraclitus speaks to us from a time before
the distinctions between philosophy, science, and religion had been
so starkly delineated. For Heraclitus, investigating the cosmos was
the work of an entire human being, and understanding it required an
understanding of how “One : Everything” makes sense. This understanding requires us to grasp the relationship between the human and
divine as well as between man and nature. Thus Brann’s book ranges
through discussions of painting, sculpture, music, mathematics, theology, poetry, philosophy, and physics to reveal the prismatic aspect
of Heraclitus’s thought. It is not mysticism, but a way of thinking that
precedes the division between mysticism and rationalism. It is not science, but a mode of inquiry that antedates the schism between science
and philosophy.
Fire
Not surprisingly, in Brann’s account Fire is the key to the Heraclitean
system. What is surprising is how coherent a picture of the cosmos
Brann reveals behind the enigmatic darkness of Heraclitus’s fragments. Aristotle may have called him, “the obscure one,” but for
Brann the Heraclitean view is unified and eminently comprehensible
because it is rational. And because it is rational, it is measurable. The
measurability of everything is at the heart of Brann’s radical interpretation of Heraclitean unity, and it is Fire which makes this possible:
“Fire enables the Logos to inform the cosmos with the most determinate relationality thinkable, that expressed in number-ratios” (63). For
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a long-time reader of Heraclitus, this claim hits like a stunning revelation. Suddenly the possibility of a coherent Heraclitean system
emerging from those “darkly oracular sayings” (68)—sayings that
Socrates claimed it would require a Delian diver to understand6—
seems not only possible, but positively inevitable. Through her discussion of ratio and measure Brann carries us down to the bottom of
Heraclitus’s dark sea, and she reveals the hidden treasures buried
there.
Brann’s account of the Heraclitean notion of fire has something
in common with the following lines from Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia:
Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within
us. A small fire sufficeth for life, great flames seemed too
little after death, while men vainly affected precious pyres,
and to burn like Sardanapalus, but the wisedom of funerall Laws found the folly of prodigall blazes, and reduced
undoing fires unto the rule of sober obsequies, wherein
few could be so mean as not to provide wood, pitch, a
mourner, and an Urne.7
Browne would have agreed with Brann’s description of fire’s double
nature “as being one element among elements and as acting like a
principle through them all” (69). Again we see in “One : Everything”
a union of poetic imagery and suggestiveness with a deep philosophic
insight into the nature and workings of the cosmos.
Other revelatory (and controversial) statements in Brann’s book
include the claims that he is the first philosopher in the West as well
as the first physicist (that is, the first to give an account of the conservation of matter); that he is the “discoverer of transcendence” (99);
that scholars have deformed a central aspect of Heraclitus’s thought
be replacing the ratio aspect of his thinking with various forms of the
copula “is,” thereby misunderstanding the importance of relation to
the Logos; and that he is not the infamous and perplexing philosopher
of flux many of us have long considered him to be—especially those
of us who formed an early impression of Heraclitus from our encounters with Nietzsche.
Tension vs. Flux
Brann’s argument that Heraclitus is not a relativist is easy enough to
accept. That he is also not the enigmatic philosopher of flux, however,
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is a more disconcerting, but equally well-supported thesis of Brann’s
book.
Brann does not resolve all of Heraclitus’s “paradoxes and contradictions” (68), nor would she care to; for paradoxes are “the expressions precisely adequate to his world-order” (86). Moreover,
“Heraclitus speaks paradoxically because that is how the world is”
(88). Paradox is a form of verbal and logical tension—and tension,
for Heraclitus, is the source of harmony. Tension is “Heraclitus’s most
remarkable physical notion” (78), and this notion replaces the more
familiar notion of Heraclitus’s flux. It is tension that makes the fundamental ratio “One : Everything” cohere. Brann explores the idea of
this unifying tension through discussions of war and wrestling, music
and harmony, punning, paradox, and metaphor.
In a consideration of the way in which Heraclitus uses metaphor
(helpfully set out in contrast to the way Homer uses metaphor), Brann
observes that “Heraclitean aphorisms are meant to be unsettling”
(71)—but not therefore unintelligible. Unlike Homer’s often consolatory or comforting metaphors, Heraclitus employs metaphors that
highlight the “antagonistic opposition” (72) of his terms. Understanding how Heraclitus’s metaphors express this antagonistic opposition
helps us to comprehend the role that tension-dependent harmony plays
in the overall ratio-based ordering of the cosmos. (The famous image
of stringing the bow and the lyre in D-K 51is a perfect example of
this sort of metaphor.)
The cosmic ordering based on the ratio “One : Everything” is the
touchstone to which Brann’s book constantly returns. However far her
reasoning or examples wander, she always comes back to this fundamental way of understanding how tension holds the Heraclitean account of the cosmos together, and how the “pervasive mutuality of
force is the principle of oneness—of coexistence in a force-community” (79).
“The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.”8
And at times the book does wander far, but it is a wonder-full wandering. Brann’s book, divided into five sections of unequal lengths,
considers the figure of Heraclitus, the history of logos, Heraclitus’s
unique Logos, the afterlife of the Logos, and the Soul of Heraclitus.
Along the way, and especially in the “afterlife” section, there are brief
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but fruitfully provocative accounts of Euclid, Homer, John the Evangelist, Nicholas of Cusa, Descartes, Galileo, Newton (she calls Newton’s Third Law “the dynamic formulation of Heraclitus’s world”
[79]), wrestling, war, Hegel, Baudelaire, Heidegger, the coining of
money, logic, Force, matter, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Zoroaster, Plotinus, and perhaps most surprisingly of all, co-author of The Federalist
James Madison.
Brann’s claim that Madison’s theory of faction (developed in The
Federalist, No. 10) is Heraclitean and that therefore “the Founders’
classical liberalism . . . honors the Heracliteanism of the world” (121)
may be the most delightfully audacious moment in the book. Yet she
presents her case with such calmly reasoned grace that even her most
spectacular suggestions seem obvious. It had never occurred to me,
before reading Brann’s book, that there was such a thing as “the Heracliteanism of the world,” and certainly not that it found expression
in the Founding Fathers’ notion of liberalism. But her argument presents us with convincing reasons for both hypotheses.
In the “afterlife” chapter, Brann considers not so much the disciples of Heraclitus as those figures who have contributed to the ongoing development of the Heraclitean Logos, figures like Plato, Aristotle,
Hegel, Nietzsche, and Madison. I would like to briefly consider another such figure here—an author who may never have read a word
of Heraclitus and yet whose work seems to express in twentieth-century terms the “Heracliteanism of the world” that Brann reveals in the
works of earlier writers and thinkers.
The connection with Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa was suggested to me by a footnote in which Brann says that Heraclitus was
one who “declined to travel—except within himself” (151). I was reminded of a passage from Pessoa’s mysterious prose work The Book
of Disquiet. Pessoa refers to himself as a “nomad in my self-awareness”9 and exhorts his reader to be “the Columbus of your soul.”10
And he also wrote of the Logos: “there are also, in prose, gestural
subtleties carried out by great actor, the Word, which rhythmically
transforms into its bodily substance the impalpable mystery of the universe.”11 Pessoa’s “great actor” is a descendant of Heraclitus’s Logos,
performing the Heraclitean act of transforming “impalpable mystery”
into “bodily substance.” Even the fundamental ratio “One : Everything” finds expression in Pessoa’s writing:
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And so, in order to feel oneself being purely Oneself, each
must be in a relationship with all–absolutely all–other beings, and with each in the most profound relationship possible. Now, the most profound relationship possible is that
of identity. Therefore, in order to feel oneself being purely
Oneself, each must feel itself being all the others, absolutely consubstantiated with all the others.12
Reading this passage in light of Brann’s emphasis on relationality as
the key to understanding Heraclitus’s view of the cosmos one is reminded of D-K 10: “Out of everything one and out of one everything”
(56).
One and/or Many
One of the most intriguing parts of Brann’s book is her account of the
relationship between Parmenides and Heraclitus—a relationship that
will be characterized by tension, and thus ultimately be more Heraclitean in its nature than Parmenidean. These thinkers are usually understood as presenting us with a clear choice: being or becoming.
Brann’s reading is more nuanced, and if her book deprives us of the
romantic notion of Heraclitus as the wild philosopher of chaos and
flux and the bête noire of formalists, systematizers and the methodologically hidebound (“the picture of Heraclitus as the philosopher of
ultimate instability, of radical mutability, is just ludicrous” [100)]),
then she gives us something much richer in return.
By rejecting the picture of Heraclitus as “a fluxist all the way
down” (102) and as a “philosophical whirling dervish” (104), Brann
allows his thinking to enter into provocative relation with that of Parmenides. Brann places Heraclitus and Parmenides “into a time-and
space-indifferent dialectic” (102). While Heraclitus will appeal to
those who “are gripped by the strife-locked unity of the physical cosmos” (102) his view is nevertheless no longer presented as an either/or
alternative to Parmenidean being. Instead Brann poses for us what
may well constitute the most interesting question of Western philosophy: What is the relation between Logos and Being? Tracing the
forms that this question has taken in epistemology, metaphysics,
ethics, and aesthetics over the past 2,500 years would be a massive
undertaking, but Brann opens the question up for us in a few pages,
starting with the provocative claim that “Being is largely mute sub-
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stance, Logos mostly talkative relationality” (103). Brann finds common ground for Heraclitus and Parmenides in the claim that “they
both see the same, a Whole, an All, a One, and search out its nature”
(104). The nature of this “One” is different for each of them, but the
fact that they are both intent on searching out the nature of what is
and how it is unites them in a common philosophic endeavor.
Whether what is is Being itself or the tension-unifying Logos
(“the Logos works in self-opposing ways” [106]) is a millennia-old
philosophical question. By analyzing brief passages from the two writers and focusing on their uses of pan, “all,” and panta, “everything,”
Brann reintroduces her reader to the timeless immediacy of philosophical investigation.
Soul
Throughout her book, Brann reveals Heraclitus as psychologist,
philosopher, poet, proto-chemist, and physicist (“the first modern scientist” [46]). In the unity of these various modes of inquiry the fundamental ratio of the Logos, “One : Everything,” is embodied in his
own work. Brann constantly revisits Heraclitus from the different perspectives that characterize his work: the human side, the cosmic side,
and the divine overview that unifies the immanent and transcendent
aspects of the first two perspectives.
The final chapter of The Logos of Heraclitus sums up, steps back,
and takes a swing at what, along with Logos and Being, may be the
most perplexing of Western philosophic categories—that of Soul.
Brann’s distinction between logos—what, at the human level, is
“the more or less thoughtful utterance of our mind and its mindfulness”—and Logos—“which is divine but perhaps not a nameable
deity” and which “governs and pilots the cosmos” (123)—reminds
us that in terms of the ordered relations that constitute and govern
the cosmos it is the Logos “as cosmic fire” that makes sense of the
“One : Everything” relation, even when it comes to understanding
the relation between the human and the divine. Even here some form
of rigorous measurement is possible.
At the end of her book, Brann returns to her thesis that “Logos is
both nature and its language, and it expresses itself in measures”
(125). All ratios are forms of measurement, and measurement is an
essentially scientific way of approaching the cosmos. She raises the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
question that has been looming since we first heard of Heraclitus’s
enigmatic hearing: “how does Heraclitus himself come to know and
understand this language?” (126). In exploring this question, Brann
suggests an answer to the question, “What is the soul?” Her answer
begins with D-K 101: “I searched myself.” Heraclitus’s searching
ranges across the dual realms that Stevens referred to as “the world
about us” and “the world within us,” because for Heraclitus there is
no understanding that does not encompass and unify these worlds.
There can be no distinction between outer and inner; harmony requires
tension, but not chaos; unity requires conflict, but not dissolution.
“Heraclitus walks the ways of his soul, which are boundless,” and
Brann is our guide on this exploration of “the never-ending ways of
an enormously capacious inner place” (126). She offers us a conception of the soul as “a mirror of the cosmos”; yet the journey she leads
us through remains mathematical and grounded in measurement (“this
world soul is a concatenation of compounded ratios” [127]), so that it
avoids the abyss of vague mysticism. There is no flabbiness in this
inner journey. If Heraclitus is to remain a mystical thinker he will have
to do so on the most rigorous of terms, and only by unifying mysticism
with a scientific account of the cosmos—another unifying tension in
Heraclitus’s thought.
Personal Knowing
Heraclitus’s accomplishment—the most radical form of fulfilling the
Delphic injunction to “know thyself”—is open to anyone. Unlike Parmenides, he was not specially chosen to be a unique human passenger
in a god’s chariot. Heraclitus’s conveyance is not a magic carpet; it is
rigorous introspection aimed both at self-knowledge as a form of cosmic awareness and at cosmic understanding as a form of self-knowing.
This is serious thoughtfulness, engaged, sustained, and maintained.
Thoughtfulness by means of the Logos is available to anyone, as Heraclitus says in D-K 113: “Common to everyone is thinking.” Brann
points out the pun on xynon, “common,” and xyn nooi, “with mind,”
that appears in several of Heraclitus’s fragments (129-30). In D-K
107, he excludes only those with “barbarian souls” from participation
in this common cognition, for they are “the speechless souls of those
who are incapable of hearing and agreeing with the Logos and of employing logoi, rational expressions” (76).
�REVIEWS | CARL
205
Brann’s investigation of Heraclitus is witty, personal, insightful,
and scholarly; but she remains on guard against the pitfalls of traditional academic scholarship. She is right to interpret D-K 40 as saying
that “heaps of learning lead to knowing everything and nothing. It
drowns out the Logos” (27). And she is also right to approach Heraclitus as she does: as a fellow eavesdropper and co-conspirator in his
investigations rather than as a stuffy academic parading out an impressive knowledge of Greek grammar and the Western tradition to
show us how much she has read. Brann’s book does not drown out
the Logos; it strives to clear a space for its greater resonances. Her
take on Heraclitus is a personal one, and therefore an intimate and revealing one. The Logos of Heraclitus shows us by example how to be
“keenly and extensively observant” (27), and leaves us, as inspired
and excited readers, to determine for ourselves the quality and nature
of what we see and what we hear.
There is an overarching perspective from which “human beings
have the life of divinity within them” (136). “Gods may always have
some touch of mortality in their nature and humans may become immortal in time” (82). This is the most inclusive perspective that Brann
reveals to the reader, a perspective from which the paradox of fathoming man’s relation to the divine and the relation of divinity to the
human are equally puzzling, and equally necessary to our own fullest
self-understanding. Attaining this perspective is the task of the Heraclitean philosopher, the person determined to understand how “everything is one.” But Brann does not rest content with mere understanding.
The final fragment to which she turns her attention completes the
bridge between saying (a form of the logos) and doing (a form of
being). “What does it mean to do true things?” she asks (138). This is
the note on which Brann chooses to end her book, the note that completes the hearing of Heraclitus, who learned how to listen to the cosmos. But he learned to listen in order to do what? That question
remains to be taken up by the reader.
NOTES
1. The fragments of Heraclitus’s text, which survive mostly in the form of
quotations in the works of later authors, were compiled and numbered in Die
Fragmente der Vorskratiker, translated by Hermann Diels, edited by Walter
Kranz, Vol. I (Berlin: Weidman, 1903; reprint of 6th ed., Munich: Weidman,
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
1992). This book has become the standard text for citing the fragments, which
are usually referred to by “D-K number”; for instance, the passage cited here
is known as D-K 50.
2. Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1942), 169.
3. Ibid., 36.
4. This is Brann’s translation of D-K 55.
5. Brann’s translation of D-K 8.
6. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, trans. Robert Drew
Hicks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925; reprint with an introduction by Herbert Strainge Long, 1972), II.22.
7. Thomas Browne, Hydrotaphia, Urne-Buriall; or, A Brief Discourse on
the Sepulchrall Urnes lately found in Norfolk (London: Henry Brome, 1658),
80-81.
8. Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Richard Zenith (New York:
Penguin, 2001), 112.
9. Pessoa, Disquiet, 101.
10. Ibid., 400.
11. Ibid., 198.
12. Fernando Pessoa, Always Astonished, translated by Edwin Honig (San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 30.
�
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Pastille, William
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Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Arnaiz, Deziree
Sachs, Joe
Carey, James
Kalkavage, Peter
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 55.1 (Fall 2013)
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.
©2013 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
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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.
��Contents
Essays & Lectures
Tocqueville’s Worst Fears Realized? The Political Implications
of Ralph Waldo Emerson’sTranscendental Spiritualism .............1
Bryan-Paul Frost
“At the Very Center of the Plenitude”: Goethe’s Grand Attempt
to Overcome the 18th Century; or, How Freshman Laboratory
Saved Goethe From the General Sickness of his Age ..................40
David Levine
Special Section: Justice
Editor’s Note .....................................................................................70
The Actual Intention of Plato’s Dialogues on
on Justice and Statesmanship .......................................................71
Eva Brann
Reflections on Justice in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov..............................................................80
Chester Burke
Peaceniks and Warmongers: The Disunity of Virtue
in Plato’s Statesman......................................................................89
Peter Kalkavage
Raskolnikov’s Redemption ...............................................................99
Nicholas Maistrellis
Justice in Plato’s Statesman ............................................................110
Eric Salem
Reviews
Getting to Know Kierkegaard Better
Book Review of Richard McCombs’s
The Paradoxical Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard. ..............119
James Carey
Plato’s Political Polyphony
Book Review of Plato: Statesman,translated by
Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem. .........................134
Gregory Recco
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
�Tocqueville’s Worst Fears Realized?
The Political Implications of
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
Transcendental Spiritualism
Bryan-Paul Frost
It’s fitting that James Cameron’s “Avatar” arrived in theaters
at Christmastime. Like the holiday season itself, the science
fiction epic is a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess
wrapped around a deeply felt religious message. It’s at once
the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and the Gospel According to James.
But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, “Avatar” is
Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism—a faith that
equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious
communion with the natural world. . . .
If this narrative sounds familiar, that’s because pantheism
has been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation
now. It’s the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he
went dancing with wolves. It’s the metaphysic woven
through Disney cartoons like “The Lion King” and “Pocahontas.” And it’s the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose
mystical Force “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the
galaxy together.”
Hollywood keeps returning to these themes because millions of Americans respond favorably to them. . . . A recent
Pew Forum report on how Americans mix and match theology found that many self-professed Christians hold beliefs
about the “spiritual energy” of trees and mountains that
would fit right in among the indigo-tinged Na’Vi.
As usual, Alexis de Tocqueville saw it coming.
—Ross Douthat, “Heaven and Nature,”
New York Times, December 2009
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville delivered a blunt
verdict on the increasing popularity, in democratic countries, of pantheism: “Among the different systems with whose aid philosophy
Bryan-Paul Frost is the Elias “Bo” Ackal, Jr./BORSF Endowed Professor of
Political Science and adjunct professor of Philosophy at the University of
Louisiana at Lafayette.
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seeks to explain the universe, pantheism appears to me one of the
most appropriate to seduce the human mind in democratic centuries;
all who remain enamored of the genuine greatness of man should
unite and do combat against it.” For a writer whose moderation and
nonpartisanship are well known, these remarks are a heavy indictment indeed. Why did Tocqueville believe that pantheism is both
so alluring and so debilitating to democratic peoples? And whom
precisely did he blame for the seduction? The second of these questions is easier to answer. Tocqueville singles out the Germans and
the French for introducing pantheism into philosophy and literature, respectively. The editors of one of the most recent translations
of Democracy in America indicate that Tocqueville probably has
in mind philosophers such as Leibnitz, Fichte, and Hegel, on the
one side, and writers such as Alphonse de Lamartine and Edgar
Quinet, on the other side.1
Since Tocqueville found the democratic urge to be particularly
strong in the United States, one is naturally led to wonder whether
there might not be some American authors whose writings exhibit
the same worrisome tendencies. This paper will enlarge on Tocqueville’s critique by studying an American essayist who, probably
unwittingly, revealed in more concrete detail the full extent of Tocqueville’s fears about pantheism: Ralph Waldo Emerson.
At first glance, Emerson seems an unlikely mark for such a
charge. After all, in such inspirational essays as “Self-Reliance,”
he seems to champion “human individuality” and greatness, and
is a severe critic of majority tyranny, intellectual apathy, and the
slavish pursuit of wealth and reputation—all of which Tocqueville
too denounced as unhealthy extremes to which democracy is prone.
On the other hand, Emerson was also a founding member of, and
chief spokesperson for, the American Transcendentalist movement,
and his religious convictions had strong strains of Neoplatonic and
pantheistic spiritualism. Emerson’s transcendentalism had no little
impact on his political and ethical writings: indeed, his unique
brand of spontaneity, intuition, and creativity was based upon an
individual hearkening to the voice of God within him, a God that
permeated all nature and with the aid of whom one sought to act
in conformity with one’s unique calling. Emerson’s thought, it
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | FROST
3
turns out, despite its apparent support for individual greatness, rests
on spiritual principles that eventually corrode, and ultimately undermine, both genuine human nobility and healthy democratic
ethics. In what follows, we will attempt to uncover the political
implications and effects of Emerson’s spiritualism—a spiritualism
whose basic tenets, as the preceding epigraph makes clear, are still
very influential today.
Easy Answers, Unmoored Souls:
The Debilitating Effects of Pantheism and Fatalism
Tocqueville’s brief treatment of pantheism (DA 2.1.7, 425–26) occurs as part of his discussion of the “Influence of Democracy on
Intellectual Movement in the United States.” The purpose of this
section is to articulate how the mind of a democratic people is influenced and shaped by democracy itself. This is an especially important topic in relation to democracy; for, as Tocqueville points
out earlier in the book, democrats rely only on their own reason
when judging or evaluating, and not on such factors as age, experience, tradition, class, and so on—precisely because, as egalitarians, they bow to no superior authority (DA 2.1.1, 403–4). One
might say this about the philosophic method of Americans, who
closely follow Cartesian precepts, Tocqueville says, without ever
having read Descartes themselves: in America, Je pense, donc je
suis means “I am the only one who can be relied upon to judge
things which are of concern to me.”
Of course, Tocqueville knows that democrats are not all
equally capable of making wise and informed decisions on their
own, and they will thus turn to sources of authority and intellectual
devices that will not offend their pride or undermine their fundamental belief in equality. In fact, Tocqueville argues, democrats
turn to an anonymous but omnipresent public opinion to supply
convenient answers and ready-made beliefs. He identifies the
source of this behavior in what he calls “the theory of equality applied to intellects”: “The moral empire of the majority is founded
in part on the idea that there is more enlightenment and wisdom in
many men united than in one alone” (DA 1.2.7, 236). Indeed, democrats are particularly susceptible to rely on and trust public opin-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ion inasmuch as egalitarianism isolates and atomizes individuals
from one another; consequently, to go against public opinion leaves
one feeling small, feeble, and helpless (DA 2.1.2, 408–9). Moreover, Tocqueville explains why democrats have a tendency for general ideas and over-simplifications: these tools make thinking and
judging easier, even if they inevitably compromise accuracy. This
ease in thinking passes for skill, and so, overlooking the sloppiness
introduced by generalities, democratic peoples become prouder of
their intelligence even as they become lazier in their thinking (DA
2.1.3 and 4, 411–16).
Tocqueville notes, however, that there is at least one area in
which dogmatic or fixed opinions and general ideas are salutary
for democratic peoples, namely, in matters of religion. Religion
provides the necessary counterweight to the ill effects of individual
isolation or atomization and love of material pleasure—the twin
dangers to which democrats are most prone. By raising one’s mind
to the heavens, and by inculcating duties to one’s fellows, religion
imposes obligations and responsibilities that are contrary to the desires democrats would likely pursue if left to themselves (DA 2.1.5,
417–19). It is in this context that Tocqueville turns to pantheism,
and in this context it appears to be the culmination of his critique
of democratic thought.
Democrats are attracted to pantheism for two principal reasons.
In the first place, pantheism feeds the democratic prejudice to reject
all traditional sources of authority and rely exclusively on one’s
own reason. As everyone is part of the same, undifferentiated
whole (God included!), no claim to superiority or authority can
hold: human particularity or individuality is obliterated in universal
homogeneity. But it is precisely the elimination of particularity or
individuality that, while being so attractive to democrats, is also
so dangerous. Democrats are further atomized and enfeebled as
everyone is swallowed up in the whole, which encompasses all
Being. As Tocqueville explains: “As conditions become more
equal and each man in particular becomes more like all the others,
weaker and smaller, one gets used to no longer viewing citizens so
as to consider only the people; one forgets individuals so as to think
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | FROST
5
only of the species” (DA 2.1.7, 426). We are, quite literally, withdrawn into our own little world, and this leaves democrats all the
more susceptible to the crushing and deadening weight of public
opinion: indeed, public opinion might become ever more despotic
as pantheism takes hold, for there is nothing—not even God Himself—that can stand as a bulwark against its dictates and demands.
To use language Tocqueville will use later in part 2 of the same
Volume (DA 2.2.2, 482: “On Individualism in Democratic Countries”): while democracy fosters the creation of atomized and isolated individuals, pantheism then eliminates the particularity of the
individuals thus created.
In the second place, pantheism appeals to the desire for unity,
general ideas, and single-minded explanations—indeed, it satisfies
this desire as no other religious or philosophic doctrine can. By reducing all Being—God and man, visible and invisible, change and
continuity—into a single whole, which alone is eternal and true
and real, democrats generate remarkably crisp, easy, and pleasing
answers when it comes to those first questions about human existence which trouble the soul (cf. DA 2.1.5, 418). By the same
token, however, this easy solution has deleterious effects on the
(already limited) intellectual capacity of democratic peoples: pantheism “nourishes the haughtiness and flatters the laziness of their
minds” (DA 2.1.7, 426) in the same way as all general ideas do.
But pantheism is more problematic than this. By collapsing the
material and immaterial world into a single whole, pantheism inadvertently collapses, or even eliminates, the tension between the
duties and obligations we owe to others and to heaven, on the one
hand, and the earthly desire for material well-being and pleasure,
on the other hand. Tocqueville is hardly so sanguine as to believe
that this tension could ever be overcome. He cautions religions that
they should neither try to uproot the desire for well-being (the implication is that this desire is generally stronger than the desires
proper to religion) nor try to provoke unnecessary conflicts with
generally accepted public opinions. Nevertheless, by keeping this
tension alive and well, democratic society is able to enjoy the salutary effects of religion and avoid the spiritual degradation to which
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
democracy is prone. In sum, pantheism both exacerbates the worst
effects of what Tocqueville describes as “individualism” and undermines the salutary effects of religion on a democratic people.
One peculiar aspect of Tocqueville’s discussion is that it is not
quite clear whether pantheism is a philosophic doctrine or a religious system, or both, or neither. Tocqueville describes pantheism
as both a “doctrine” and a “system,” and in the latter case, he once
indirectly implies that it is a “philosophic system.” He never states,
however, that it is a “religious” doctrine or system. Nonetheless,
Tocqueville also seems to oppose pantheism to philosophy per se,
as when he says that the “Germans introduce [pantheism] into philosophy,” and that “[a]mong the different systems with whose aid
philosophy seeks to explain the universe, pantheism appears to me
one of the most appropriate to seduce the human mind in democratic centuries” (DA 2.1.7, 425–26). Could it be that pantheism is
a sort of secular religion, a sort of middle ground between Christianity and atheism? And if this is true, then would not the growing
strength of pantheism be one indication that a people are moving
away from religion properly speaking? In this respect, it is important to note that Tocqueville concludes the chapter preceding his
discussion of pantheism, “On the Progress of Catholicism in the
United States,” with this prediction:
It is one of the most familiar weaknesses of the human
intellect to want to reconcile contrary principles and to
buy peace at the expense of logic. Therefore there always have been and always will be men who, after having submitted some of their religious beliefs to an
authority, want to spare several others and let their
minds float at random between obedience and freedom.
But I am brought to believe that the number of these
will be smaller in democratic than in other centuries
and that our descendants will tend more and more to
be divided into only two parts, those leaving Christianity entirely and others entering into the bosom of the
Roman Church (DA 2.1.6, 425).
To the extent that pantheism is not a religion—to the extent that pantheism signifies the near absence of true religious conviction—then
a people embracing pantheism will be prone to moral and political
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | FROST
7
servitude, as Tocqueville tried to show a bit earlier in the text.
When religion is destroyed in a people, doubt takes
hold of the highest portions of the intellect and half paralyzes all the others. Each becomes accustomed to having only confused and changing notions about matters
that most interest those like him and himself; one defends one’s opinions badly or abandons them, and as
one despairs of being able to resolve by oneself the
greatest problems that human destiny presents, one is
reduced, like a coward, to not thinking about them at
all.
Such a state cannot fail to enervate souls; it slackens
the springs of the will and prepares citizens for servitude.
Not only does it then happen that they allow their
freedom to be taken away, but often they give it over.
When authority in the matter of religion no longer
exists, nor in the matter of politics, men are soon frightened at the aspect of this limitless independence. This
perpetual agitation of all things makes them restive and
fatigues them. As everything is moving in the world of
the intellect, they want at least that all be firm and stable in the material order; and as they are no longer able
to recapture their former beliefs, they give themselves
a master (DA 2.1.5, 418).
Since pantheism appears to loosen religious sentiment, the widespread acceptance of this “doctrine” among a democratic people
might well indicate that they are becoming enervated and susceptible to bondage in the form of political salvation. Thus, although
Tocqueville claims that new religions cannot be easily established
in democratic times (for no one is willing to submit to an “intellectual authority” which is “outside of and above humanity” [DA
2.1.2, 408]), pantheism can be established, precisely because the
source of its belief is not outside of humanity, but within it, and
because it is not really a religion as Tocqueville understands the
term.
We can round off our consideration of Tocqueville’s ideas
about the effects of democracy on the thought of its citizens by
looking briefly at his discussion of the tendencies of democratic
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
historians, a topic he said he would discuss at the beginning of the
chapter on pantheism. Democratic historians, he says, are prone to
underestimate or ignore the role of particular causes—that is “great
men”—in the course of history. He finds the root of this tendency
in democracy itself.
When . . . all citizens are independent of one another,
and each of them is weak, one finds none who exert a
very great or above all a very lasting power over the
mass. At first sight, individuals seem absolutely powerless over it, and one would say that society advances
all by itself—by the free and spontaneous concourse of
all the men who compose it (DA 2.1.20, 470).
Historians who adopt this attitude tend to think that history has a
sort of inevitable motion that cannot be regulated by human
agency.
When any trace of the action of individuals on nations
is lost, it often happens that one sees the world moving
without discovering its motor. As it becomes very difficult to perceive and analyze the reasons that, acting
separately on the will of each citizen, in the end produce the movement of the people, one is tempted to believe that this movement is not voluntary and that,
without knowing it, societies obey a superior, dominating force (DA 2.1.20, 471).
Such a force seems nearly impossible to resist, and belief in it leads
first to the conclusion that human freedom is illusory, and then to the
deduction that individuals are not responsible even for their own actions, let alone for the actions of their nation.
Even if one should discover on earth the general fact
that directs the particular wills of all individuals, that
does not save human freedom. A cause vast enough to
be applied to millions of men at once and strong enough
to incline all together in the same direction easily seems
irresistible; after having seen that one yields to it, one is
quite close to believing that one cannot resist it (DA
2.1.20, 471).
If the notion of such an irresistible force were to gain widespread
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currency in the thought of a democratic people, society would simply grind to a halt due to the general belief that no one is strong
enough to take any action that matters, any action that can push
back against the tide of history. The very possibility of human
greatness would fade out, because the freedom that nourishes that
possibility would no longer present itself to the mind.
Historians who live in democratic times, therefore, not
only deny to a few citizens the power to act on the destiny of a people, they also take away from peoples themselves the ability to modify their own fate, and they
subject them either to an inflexible providence or to a
sort of blind fatality. . . .
If this doctrine of fatality, which has so many attractions for those who write history in democratic times,
passed from writers to their readers, thus penetrating the
entire mass of citizens and taking hold of the public
mind, one can foresee that it would soon paralyze the
movement of the new societies (DA 2.1.20, 471–72).
In summary: Tocqueville understood that living in democratic
times could lead to modes of thought that would be highly detrimental, both for the freedom of the individual and for the freedom
of the whole people. In particular, the doctrines of pantheism and
fatalism dispose people to subservience: the first because it enhances individualism and weakens the moral force of religion; the
second because it eliminates the feeling that the individual has any
agency in, or responsibility for, the course taken by events. If Tocqueville is right, then anything that assists the spread of pantheism
and fatalism will present a danger to democratic societies.
Emerson’s Transcendental Spiritualism
In order to understand the political implications of Emerson’s spiritualism, and to see if that understanding leads to precisely the
consequences that Tocqueville feared, it is first necessary to lay
out Emerson’s views on transcendentalism, in particular, and on
Christianity, in general. Our effort here will be focused on showing
that Emerson’s spiritualism is remarkably similar to Tocqueville’s
pantheism.
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Although Emerson is often referred to as one of the principal innovators of American Transcendentalism, in his essay “The Transcendentalist” (1843), he denies that transcendentalism is a new or
original school of thought. In fact, he says, the roots of transcendentalism—which he also calls idealism—are as old as thinking
itself, and it is one of only two modes of thinking.
As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects,
Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on
experience, the second on consciousness; the first class
beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say,
The senses give us representations of things, but what
are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealist
on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration,
on miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of
thinking are both natural, but the idealist contends that
his way of thinking is in higher nature. He concedes all
that the other affirms, admits the impressions of sense,
admits their coherency, their use and beauty, and then
asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that
things are as his senses represent them. But I, he says,
affirm facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts
which are of the same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to doubt; facts which in their
first appearance to us assume a native superiority to
material facts, degrading these into a language by
which the first are to be spoken; facts which it only
needs a retirement from the senses to discern. Every
materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never
go backward to be a materialist (RE 81).2
Whereas a materialist (e.g., John Locke) acknowledges the independent existence of an external world accessible through sense
impression and confirmed through experience, a transcendentalist
or idealist (e.g., Immanuel Kant) privileges his own consciousness
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and intuition, arguing that the “external world” is mental or spiritual, and is only apprehended or revealed through an individual,
self-conscious mind. The transcendentalist does not dispute that
objects are perceived by the senses; rather, he questions whether
sense perception is an accurate, complete, and final representation
of the object in itself.
After arguing that the materialist’s confidence in the solidity
of facts and figures is ill founded, Emerson makes the following
comparison:
In the order of thought, the materialist takes his departure from the external world, and esteems a man as one
product of that. The idealist takes his departure from his
consciousness, and reckons the world an appearance.
The materialist respects sensible masses, Society, Government, social art and luxury, every establishment,
every mass, whether majority of numbers, or extent of
space, or amount of objects, every social action. The
idealist has another measure, which is metaphysical,
namely the rank which things themselves take in his
consciousness; not at all the size or appearance. Mind
is the only reality, of which men and all other natures
are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history,
are only subjective phenomena. . . . His thought—that
is the Universe. His experience inclines him to behold
the procession of facts you call the world, as flowing
perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded centre in himself, centre alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all things as having a
subjective or relative existence, relative to that aforesaid
Unknown Centre of him (RE 82–83).
While Emerson’s transcendentalist appears at first glance to be
wholly sovereign and self-determined, he is also open to influences
or forces from without—albeit influences of a certain sort:
The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of
spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light
and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. He
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wishes that the spiritual principle should be suffered to
demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications
to the state of man, without the admission of anything
unspiritual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal. Thus the spiritual measure of inspiration is the
depth of the thought, and never, who said it? And so he
resists all attempts to palm other rules and measures
onthe spirit than its own (RE 84).
In order to develop a more detailed image of the transcendentalist, we must attempt to concretize Emerson’s elliptical remarks
about “spirituality.” What—or who—is this “Universe” which
“beckons and calls” the transcendentalist from inactivity “to
work,” which issues him the “highest command,” and with which
he seeks some sort of “union” (RE 91 and 95)? Emerson refers to
this deity or highest principle in a variety of ways with no discernable difference in meaning: in the essay “The Over-Soul” (1841)
alone, he uses the terms “Unity,” “Over-Soul,” “the eternal ONE,”
“Highest Law,” “Supreme Mind,” “Maker,” “Divine mind,” “Omniscience,” and “God” quite interchangeably. All of these terms
seem to refer to a transcendent spiritual force that permeates and
animates all existence—both human and non-human nature, organic and inorganic—and that binds and unites everything together
in a pure and sublime oneness or wholeness.
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.
Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise
silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and
particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this
deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is
all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing
seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one (RE 237).
Every individual is contained within this whole, and although the
ultimate source of both our being and the whole is unknown or hidden, before its power our soul is laid bare and we are revealed for
who we are.
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The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the
present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is
that great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the
soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-Soul,
within which every man’s particular being is contained
and made one with all other; that common heart of
which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which
all right action is submission; that overpowering reality
which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains
every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his
character and not from his tongue (RE 237).
13
Our communion with and access to this deity is through our own
soul, which Emerson states is neither an “organ,” nor a “function,”
nor a “faculty”: the soul is the unpossessed and unpossessable
“background of our being” which transcends time and space. If a
man is the “facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good
abide,” the soul would be a light shining from within or behind this
facade, illuminating all and giving direction to our will and intellect; and when we allow the soul to “have its way through us,” intellect becomes genius, will virtue, and affection becomes love (RE
238–39).
The perception and disclosure of truth in and through the
soul—“an influx of the Divine mind into our mind”—is what
Emerson calls “revelation.” Although revelation varies in both its
intensity and character—from the transfiguring to the tepid, from
the prophetic to the prosaic—all persons have the capacity to be
so moved, and all persons who are so moved belong to the same
general class of individuals, whether they be a Socrates or a St.
Paul. One reason for this vast resemblance among “prophets” is
that the “nature of these revelations is the same; they are perceptions of the absolute law” (RE 243–44). Unfortunately, the precise
content of this law is not articulated—indeed, it cannot and should
not be articulated. Revelation does not occur through words, nor
does it respond to our questions.
Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The popular notion of a revelation is that it is a telling of fortunes. In
past oracles of the soul the understanding seeks to find
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answers to sensual questions, and undertakes to tell from
God how long men shall exist, what their hands shall do
and who shall be their company, adding names and dates
and places. But we must pick no locks. We must check
this low curiosity. An answer in words is delusive; it is
really no answer to the questions you ask. . . . Men ask
concerning the immortality of the soul, the employments
of heaven, the state of the sinner, and so forth. They even
dream that Jesus has left replies to precisely these interrogatories. Never a moment did that sublime spirit speak
in their patois. To truth, justice, love, the attributes of the
soul, the idea of immutableness is essentially associated.
Jesus, living in these moral sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes, heeding only the manifestations of these,
never made the separation of the idea of duration from
the essence of these attributes, nor uttered a syllable concerning the duration of the soul. It was left to his disciples to sever duration from the moral elements, and to
teach the immortality of the soul as a doctrine, and maintain it by evidences. The moment the doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is already fallen. . . .
These questions which we lust to ask about the future
are a confession of sin. God has no answer for them.
No answer in words can reply to a question of things
(RE 244–45).
We must apparently rest content with Emerson’s assurances that,
if we “forego all low curiosity” and live in the infinite present of
today, these questions will somehow be answered or resolved
through the silent workings of the soul. The key to existence is an
almost child-like innocence, simplicity, and authenticity, complete
honesty with oneself and with others, utter openness to the OverSoul and consequently all creation through it; being insincere, sophistic, or double in any way indicates disharmony in the soul and
distance from God.
These remarks naturally raise the question as to whether
Emerson’s deity is a caring or providential being. To begin with,
in what sense would one pray to this entity? Certainly, Emerson
does not understand prayer in any ordinary or traditional sense.
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He describes his notion of prayer in “Self-Reliance”:
In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which
they call a holy office is not so much as brave and
manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign
addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses
itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and
mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular commodity, anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life
from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a
beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes
dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As
soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He
will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the
farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the
rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true
prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends
(RE 147–48).
Those who pray or beg to attain some selfish end (material goods
or worldly success) falsely assume a separation between themselves and the divine; those who express regret or recite creeds display an “infirmity” of the will or intellect (RE 148). Properly
speaking, prayer is the act of a healthy, self-reliant individual contemplating or celebrating the existence of God within his soul, and
it can be manifested in the simplest actions.
Nonetheless, Emerson’s deity is more than a transcendent spirit
animating existence, for he also affirms that God the “Maker of all
things and all persons stands behind us and casts his dread omniscience through us over things” (RE 242–43). This supreme creator,
however, is not the God of the Old Testament, but the divine mind
or soul of Plotinus and the Neoplatonists: the world is an emanation
or overflow from the divine mind; all creation is contained within
this whole, and all the variety in nature is encompassed within this
unity (RE 18ff., 118–19, 252ff., 293). Although the divine maker
can apparently choose to inspire specific individuals, and although
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he sent Jesus into the world (albeit not in the sense of his being the
son of God), God does not perform miracles in any ordinary or traditional sense of the word. Christianity’s moral doctrines and not
its miracles are what move Emerson to belief, and the attempt to
convert others through miracles is a spiritual abomination: genuine
conversion comes through genuine instruction, and this is strictly
a matter of free internal acceptance, without any external compulsion whatsoever (RE 67–69, 106–8, 237). The greatest miracle of
all would seem to be the shattering and transfiguring beauty of the
universe as well as the immutable natural laws that govern its operation. At all events, whatever the precise character of this personal and mystic union with the Over-Soul, it seems ecstatic,
ineffable, and utterly compelling; it is much more a matter of the
heart than the intellect; and it does not rely on traditions, institutions, and rituals.
Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the
soul. The simplest person who in his integrity worships
God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of
this better and universal self is new and unsearchable. It
inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing
to man, arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place,
effacing the scars of our mistakes and disappointments!
When we have broken our god of tradition and ceased
from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart
with his presence. . . .
Let man then learn the revelation of all nature and all
thought to his heart; this, namely, that the Highest dwells
with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind,
if the sentiment of duty is there. But if he would know
what the great God speaketh, he must ‘go into his closet
and shut the door,’ as Jesus said. God will not make himself manifest to cowards. He must greatly listen to himself, withdrawing himself from all the accents of other
men’s devotion. Even their prayers are hurtful to him,
until he have made his own (RE 248–49).
Although much more could certainly be said about Emerson’s transcendentalism, it seems clear from this overview that, at least from
Tocqueville’s perspective, Emerson’s “religious” system or doc-
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trine exhibits precisely those characteristics Tocqueville had described about pantheism: the material and immaterial world is encompassed in an undifferentiated unity or whole to which we are
inextricably and inexplicably linked.
Having briefly discussed Emerson’s transcendentalism, let us
now turn to the question of whether it exhibits some of the dangerous characteristics that Tocqueville feared. Does Emerson’s
spiritualism, for example, nourish “the haughtiness” and flatter
“the laziness” of our minds in the same way that all general ideas
do? A strong indication is Emerson’s doubt, in “The Over-Soul,”
about whether everyday language can capture the deity’s essence:
Every man’s words who speaks from that life must
sound vain to those who do not dwell in the same
thought on their own part. I dare not speak for it. My
words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and
cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold!
their speech shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal
as the rising of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane
words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven
of this deity, and to report what hints I have collected
of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law (RE 237–38).
Clearly, Emerson thinks that language, unaided by divine inspiration, cannot convey divine insights. In fact, he suggests in the Harvard Divinity School Address of 1838 that the very attempt to
communicate religion has an inherently corrupting effect. Historical Christianity, for example, has fallen away, he says, from the
true message of Jesus.
Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. As it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the
doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells,
with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus.
The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no
preferences but those of spontaneous love (RE 68).
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Similarly, in “Self-Reliance” (1841) he also faults “all philosophy”
in its attempt to inquire into the divine source of such entities as
life, being, justice, and the soul.
We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes
us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When
we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we
ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul
that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its
absence is all we can affirm. Every man discriminates
between the voluntary acts of his mind, and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary
perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that these things are so,
like day and night, not to be disputed (RE 141–42).
It would seem that certain subjects are off-limits to philosophical
speculation because to communicate one’s findings profanes the
subject matter and is thus a sacrilege. Ultimately, Emerson’s religious understanding might be ineffable or untranslatable because
it rests on an entirely individual, and therefore inherently subjective, communion or experience. Emerson’s religious system or
doctrine is sweepingly comprehensive, but he relieves us from having to think about its specifics by cutting off all philosophic discussion. Thus Emerson forces his spiritual ideas to be extremely
simple and general.
But it is precisely this generality which, while appealing to
lazy minds, also leaves people without any real answers to those
fundamental questions of human existence that Tocqueville sees
as critical in religious dogma. Without answers to those questions,
democratic intellects expose themselves to all sorts of dangers. Although Emerson claims that questions concerning the immortality
of the soul, providence, and the afterlife are not properly asked of,
or answered by, his deity, Tocqueville has warned us that the democratic soul will become enervated or even paralyzed over time by
seeking answers to all these deep questions, and then become ripe
for political and moral enslavement.
Indeed, one wonders whether Tocqueville would even consider
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Emerson’s spirituality to be a religion at all inasmuch as it refuses
to provide answers about primary questions. At the very least, by
collapsing the tension between the material and immaterial world,
Emerson seems to have undermined what Tocqueville sees as the
salutary effect of religion on a democratic ethos, namely, promoting duties to others and limiting the unbridled pursuit of wealth.
Of course, there is nothing in Emerson’s spiritualism that encourages the opposite tendencies, and Emerson says on more than one
occasion that the mere pursuit of wealth is slavish. Nevertheless,
absent any sort of “divine sanction” or “divine punishment” to
deter those who might be tempted to forego their obligations to
others, one wonders how Emerson’s transcendentalism, over the
long run, could fully support a healthy democratic ethos when
democratic passions run so clearly in the opposite direction.
Unitarian Christianity
This assessment of Emerson’s spiritualism needs some amplification. After all, Emerson was (however briefly) a Unitarian minister,
and therefore his rather “unorthodox” transcendentalism must be
understood in the context of his more “orthodox” Christianity. Certainly any complete account of Emerson’s religiosity must give
due weight to his understanding of Christ and Christianity; but, as
we shall see, even when this is taken into account, it is difficult to
reach conclusions that differ much from our previous assessment.
Let us begin with Emerson’s sermon called “The Lord’s Supper,” delivered on Sunday 9 September 1832, in which Emerson
argues that a close reading of the New Testament indicates Jesus
never intended the Eucharist to become a permanent institutional
ritual of the Church; and even if he did intend it, the ritual is actually harmful to the genuine religious sentiment Jesus intended to
instill (RE 99–109).3 But even aside from these claims, Emerson
finds the most persuasive case against the Eucharist in the aversion
which he has to the symbolism of the bread and the wine, which
he refers to as “the elements”:
Passing other objections, I come to this, that the use of
the elements, however suitable to the people and the
modes of thought in the East, where it originated, is
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foreign and unsuited to affect us. Whatever long usage
and strong association may have done in some individuals to deaden this repulsion, I apprehend that their use
is rather tolerated than loved by any of us. We are not
accustomed to express our thoughts or emotions by
symbolical actions. Most men find the bread and wine
no aid to devotion, and to some it is a painful impediment. To eat bread is one thing; to love the precepts of
Christ and resolve to obey them is quite another.
The statement of this objection leads me to say that
I think this difficulty, wherever it is felt, to be entitled
to the greatest weight. It is alone a sufficient objection
to the ordinance. It is my own objection. This mode of
commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is
reason enough why I should abandon it. If I believed
that it was enjoined by Jesus on his disciples, and that
he even contemplated making permanent this mode of
commemoration, every way agreeable to an Eastern
mind, and yet on trial it was disagreeable to my own
feelings, I should not adopt it. I should choose other
ways which, as more effectual upon me, he would approve more. For I choose that my remembrances of him
should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him
as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship,
and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do those
whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a
moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of
love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true
commemoration (RE 106–7).
Because every religious ritual has the potential to impinge upon
the autonomy and independence of the soul—upon its freedom to
choose the manner and method of worship—no ritual or form can
ever be declared inviolate and sacrosanct.
Freedom is the essence of this faith [i.e., Christianity].
It has for its object simply to make men good and wise.
Its institutions then should be as flexible as the wants
of men. That form out of which the life and suitable-
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ness have departed should be as worthless in its eyes
as the dead leaves that are falling around us (RE 108).
To hold onto outmoded rituals is to betray the very purpose of
Christ’s crucifixion, for Jesus was sent to deliver mankind from
religions in which ritual forms are more important than personal
transformation.
That for which Paul lived and died so gloriously; that
for which Jesus gave himself to be crucified; the end
that animated the thousand martyrs and heroes who
have followed his steps, was to redeem us from a formal
religion, and teach us to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul. The whole world was full of idols
and ordinances. The Jewish was a religion of forms; it
was all body, it had no life, and the Almighty God was
pleased to qualify and send forth a man to teach men
that they must serve him with the heart; that only that
life was religious which was thoroughly good; that sacrifice was smoke, and forms were shadows (RE 108).
In the end, Emerson himself will judge the worthiness of all traditional ceremonies, conventions, and customs—even those that
Jesus might have specifically ordained.
Emerson’s departure from the traditional institutions and doctrines of Christianity is even more pronounced in his Harvard Divinity School Address, in which he identifies two fundamental
errors in the administration of the Christian church. He describes
the first in this way:
It [historical Christianity] has dwelt, it dwells, with
noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The
soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand
to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love. But by this eastern monarchy of a Christianity, which indolence and
fear have built, the friend of man is made the injurer of
man. The manner in which his name is surrounded with
expressions which were once sallies of admiration and
love, but are now petrified into official titles, kills all
generous sympathy and liking (RE 68).
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The Church’s obsession with the personality of Jesus distorts and
vulgarizes his teaching by claiming that he was the son of God.
Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He
saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by
its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived
in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to
what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates
himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take
possession of his World. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, ‘I am divine. Through me, God acts;
through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see
thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.’ But what
a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the
same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no
doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by
the Understanding. The understanding caught this high
chant from the poet’s lips, and said, in the next age,
‘This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill
you, if you say he was a man.’ The idioms of his language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the
place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes (RE 67–68).
The Church fails to understand that Jesus was a prophet not because he was divine, but because he alone saw the divinity of all
men. 4
The second great error of the Church is a consequence of the
first: by regarding Jesus and his message as an historical figure
who established the religion in the far distant past, the living spirit
is extinguished from present worship. By failing to make the soul
in all its glory the foundation of religious instruction, contemporary
preachers (unintentionally, to be sure) smother the joyous temperament in their congregations that characterizes genuine piety. This,
in turn, corrodes the faith of the nation as a whole. Rehearsed rather
than inspired, doctrinaire rather than personal, formal rather than
uplifting, monotone rather than celebratory, “historical Christianity
destroys the power of preaching, by withdrawing it from the ex-
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ploration of the moral nature of man” (RE 73). Emerson offers his
auditors a vivid sampler of the sorts of “moral” subjects whose absence in American churches causes people to think twice about
participating in public worship:
In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me,
is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that
the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he
is drinking forever the soul of God? Where now sounds
the persuasion, that by its very melody imparadises my
heart, and so affirms its own origin in heaven? Where
shall I hear words such as in elder ages drew men to
leave all and follow—father and mother, house and
land, wife and child? Where shall I hear these August
laws of moral being so pronounced as to fill my ear,
and I feel ennobled by the offer of my uttermost action
and passion? The test of the true faith, certainly, should
be its power to charm and command the soul, as the
laws of nature control the activity of the hands—so
commanding that we find pleasure and honor in obeying. The faith should blend with the light of rising and
of setting suns, with the flying cloud, the singing bird,
and the breath of flowers. But now the priest’s Sabbath
has lost the splendor of nature; it is unlovely; we are
glad when it is done (RE 71).
The power and the beauty that Emerson demands from vital religion are missing from most modern Christianity.
What does Emerson recommend to repair this situation?
I confess, all attempts to project and establish a Cultus
with new rites and forms, seem to me vain. Faith
makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own
forms. All attempts to contrive a system are as cold
as the new worship introduced by the French to the
goddess of Reason—to-day, pasteboard and filigree,
and ending to-morrow in madness and murder. Rather
let the breath of new life be breathed by you through
the forms already existing. For if once you are alive,
you shall find they shall become plastic and new. The
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remedy to their deformity is first, soul, and second,
soul, and evermore, soul (RE 77–78).
Emerson thus does not advocate the creation of “new rites and
forms” but the spiritual reinvigoration of those forms already at
hand. As for the current generation of preachers, they must stride
forward in a spirit of fierce independence from all traditional authority, maintain the most rigid personal integrity and virtue, and
be open to the sublime wonder and limitless potential in man—
which is the true gospel of Christ, and is as alive today as ever (RE
75–78). Emerson’s views were so unorthodox that many of the faculty members at Harvard publicly denounced the speech. He was
not invited back to speak at his alma mater for some thirty years.
Two features of Emerson’s heterodox Unitarianism are particularly significant in the context of the questions we are pursuing.
First, his absolute reliance on his own judgment exemplifies the
practice he recommends to everyone: the individual alone is the
sole judge in matters of religious doctrine and form. What the individual determines to be satisfactory is necessarily so, and that
judgment is sufficient in itself. Second, Jesus’s fundamental message, according to Emerson, fully supports transcendentalism (and,
we maintain, pantheism): we are to find and worship the god within
all of us.
What sort of religious reform could proceed from Emerson’s
appeals? He may have wanted spiritual revival within the Church,
but achieving that revival on his terms would require the rejection
of so many aspects of traditional, orthodox Christianity that one
wonders just what sort of “church” would remain. All things considered, Emerson’s iconoclastic Unitarian Christianity imparts a
unique flavor to his pantheistic spiritualism, but since it remains
pantheism at bottom, it still promotes the dangerous effects that
Tocqueville feared.
The Individual as Supreme Lawgiver
The foregoing discussion has concentrated on the first aspect of
the Tocquevillian critique of Emerson’s spiritualism—how its generality and simplicity flatters the democratic intellect. We must
now ask about the second aspect: What effect does Emerson’s spir-
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itualism have on individuality and the capacity of individuals to
remain free? We approach this question by examining Emerson’s
teaching about the source of individual actions and judgments—
especially moral and ethical judgments.
Throughout his writings, Emerson insists that the transcendentalist is a self-legislating individual: there is no law or commandment that is unconditionally binding upon him. And there is no
institution—no government, no church, no society—that is worthy
of his respect and allegiance unless, as is said in “The Transcendentalist,” it “reiterates the law of his mind” (RE 83). The transcendentalist’s conduct is not governed by deliberation or experience,
but by intuition, spontaneity, and trusting one’s instincts—even, it
seems, when one can give no rational account of them. Only spontaneous action—which is receptive to and motivated by the
prompting of the divine voice within—is genuinely obedient to
God. By becoming the channel through which the divine makes itself manifest, we shed all gross vanity and pretension while simultaneously solidifying and strengthening our own character.
A little consideration of what takes place around us
every day would show us that a higher law than that of
our will regulates events; that our painful labors are unnecessary and fruitless; that only in our easy, simple,
spontaneous action are we strong, and by contenting
ourselves with obedience we become divine. Belief and
love—a believing love will relieve us of a vast load of
care. O my brothers, God exists. There is a soul at the
centre of nature and over the will of every man, so that
none of us can wrong the universe. It has so infused its
strong enchantment into nature that we prosper when
we accept its advice, and when we struggle to wound
its creatures our hands are glued to our sides, or they
beat our own breasts. The whole course of things goes
to teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance
for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the
right word. Why need you choose so painfully your
place and occupation and associates and modes of action and of entertainment? Certainly there is a possible
right for you that precludes the need of balance and
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wilful election. For you there is a reality, a fit place and
congenial duties. Place yourself in the middle of the
stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom
it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth,
to right and a perfect contentment. Then you put all
gainsayers in the wrong. Then you are the world, the
measure of right, of truth, of beauty (RE 176).
By keeping our soul open to the ebb and flow of the Over-Soul,
we will be made privy to the truth; we will become genuinely
moral by attentively listening to the poetry of our own heart, which
is itself a reflection of the poetry of the universe and its animating
spirit. Emerson replaces the ancient injunction “know thyself” with
“trust thyself,” because the latter contains or is the means to the
former (RE 133).
Emerson’s celebration of individual intuition, integrity, and
spontaneity is stated perhaps nowhere more succinctly and powerfully than in his most famous and inspirational essay, “Self-Reliance” (1841). Like Moses, Plato, and Milton, we must learn to
heed the flash of genius when it ignites within us, trusting, almost
child-like, that God has a purpose in our work and that divinity
does not traffic in counterfeit forms. But if God urges us to listen
to our heart, society does not, and the more we become accustomed
to the ways of the world, the more our native light of genius grows
dim (RE 132–34). Two problems arise from this tension between
God and society: conformity and consistency. Regarding conformity, he considers it nearly impossible to resist:
[T]he discontent of the multitude [is] more formidable
than that of the senate and the college. It is easy enough
for a firm man who knows the world to brook the rage
of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid, as being very vulnerable themselves. But when to their feminine rage the indignation
of the people is added, when the ignorant and the poor
are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies
at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it
needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it
godlike as a trifle of no concernment (RE 137–38).
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Regarding consistency, Emerson downplays its importance, and
argues that sincerity, over the long run, will exhibit its own logic
and integrity: “Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing” (RE 139).
Emerson highlights these two problems because they, more
than anything else, undermine the self-trust necessary to act spontaneously or instinctively. Self-trust is the source of all spontaneous
and ingenious action.
The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who
is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a
universal reliance may be grounded? . . . The inquiry
leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of
virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.
We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all
later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last
fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find
their common origin. For the sense of being which in
calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not
diverse from things, from space, from light, from time,
from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously
from the same source whence their life and being also
proceed. We first share the life by which things exist
and afterwards see them as appearances in nature and
forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that
inspiration which giveth man wisdom and which cannot
be denied without impiety and atheism (RE 141–42).
To those who might argue that overstressing individual self-reliance
in this way could well have injurious effects on society’s necessarily
collaborative structures—such as government and the family—and
could delude a person into committing atrocities in the name of “intuition” and “spontaneity,” Emerson’s response in this essay is unaccommodating: So be it.
I remember an answer which when quite young I was
prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont
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to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the
church. On my saying, “What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?”
my friend suggested—“But these impulses may be
from below, not from above.” I replied, “They do not
seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I
will live then from the Devil.” No law can be sacred to
me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names
very readily transferable to that or this; the only right
is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what
is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence
of all opposition as if every thing were titular and
ephemeral but he (RE 135).
Emerson holds that we must give expression to the unique incarnation of the divine within us. We must not continue to be the predictable herd animals that we are at present: conformity—not
self-reliance—is the real threat to a vibrant political and civic life.
Indeed, ignoring the divine voice within us, since it is the sacred
source of all life and wisdom, is true atheism and impiety. Self-reliance thus turns out to be God-reliance—if by “God” is meant the
divine voice within as you interpret it (RE 141–45).
It is here, with all probability, that Tocqueville would find the
most dangerous implications of Emerson’s spiritualism: he forthrightly rejects any moral guidance that comes from without and demands that individuals judge for themselves. Of course, it is
precisely this celebration of individual autonomy that causes many
to classify Emerson as a staunch “individualist”—not in Tocqueville’s derogatory sense as applied to someone withdrawn into
himself, but in the complimentary sense of someone who, opposing
mass opinion and fashionable trends, stakes out his own ground.
Emerson is certainly aware, as we have seen, of the force exerted
on the individual by majority opinion. But he does not believe, as
Tocqueville does, that individuals left to be their own moral legislators and lawgivers become atomized and isolated in society, leaving them more susceptible to the tyrannizing and homogenizing
effects of public opinion. To Emerson’s mind, individuals must rely
on themselves rather than on traditional sources of authority if they
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are going to be genuinely moral and have the strength to withstand
mass opinion.
Notwithstanding Emerson’s contagious optimism, one question persists throughout his discussion of the individual as judge
and executor of his own laws: How does one distinguish between
inspiration and madness? Even if we are all part of a greater whole,
what standard can be employed to determine whether someone has
correctly “received” and spontaneously acted upon the moral law?
Why could someone not simply claim that his subjective experience points to an entirely different philosophical system than
Emerson’s? How would Emerson refute such a claim?
In the first place, Emerson suggests that everyone knows the
truth of what he is saying in the depths of his own heart. If we
would be honest with ourselves, if we would return to our better
thoughts and listen intently to the sublime whisperings of the soul,
we would understand as he understands, and act authentically as
he acts authentically.
If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave
to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not
selfishly but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest,
and mine, and all men’s, however long we have dwelt
in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day?
You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as
well as mine, and if we follow the truth it will bring us
out safe at last.—But so may you give these friends
pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power,
to save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their
moments of reason, when they look out into the region
of absolute truth; then will they justify me and do the
same thing (RE 146).
In the second place, Emerson refers several times to a moral sense
or sentiment in all men which commands and forbids actions, and
which is rooted in or is coextensive with the Divine Mind. But while
Emerson acknowledges the existence of a conscience, it neither
seems to be in command, nor are its laws capable of articulation. For
Emerson, the moral universe is accessible by all of us subjectively,
but it cannot be formulated into any sort of objective ethical code:
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The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the
presence of certain divine laws. It perceives that this
homely game of life we play, covers, under what seem
foolish details, principles that astonish. The child amidst
his baubles is learning the action of light, motion, gravity, muscular force; and in the game of human life, love,
fear, justice, appetite, man, and God, interact. These
laws refuse to be adequately stated. They will not be
written out on paper, or spoken by the tongue. They
elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly
in each other’s faces, in each other’s actions, in our own
remorse. The moral traits which are all globed into
every virtuous act and thought—in speech we must
sever, and describe or suggest by painful enumeration
of many particulars (RE 64).
And finally, in the third place, Emerson claims that spontaneous
action is so compelling that its example almost compels imitation:
by being law unto oneself, one becomes a universal legislator.
A healthy soul stands united with the Just and the True,
as the magnet arranges itself with the pole, so that he
stands to all beholders like a transparent object betwixt
them and the sun, and whoso journeys towards the sun,
journeys towards that person. He is thus the medium
of the highest influence to all who are not on the same
level. Thus men of character are the conscience of the
society to which they belong (RE 331).
If this is true, however, it is hard to square with Emerson’s insistence on autonomy. How can individuals be true to themselves by
following someone else’s law? If the law were universal, then it
would make sense to follow the example of a virtuous person. But
this contradicts Emerson’s belief in the individual divine voice that
speaks to each person uniquely.
By having us be our own lawgivers, by asserting that “[o]ur
spontaneous action is always the best” (RE 264), is Emerson not
unwittingly advocating indulgence in our worst passions? In the
essay called “Circles,” he tries to defend himself against this
charge:
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And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader
exclaim, you have arrived at a fine Pyrrhonism, at an
equivalence and indifferency of all actions, and would
fain teach us that if we are true, forsooth, our crimes
may be lively stones out of which we shall construct
the temple of the true God!
I am not careful to justify myself. . . . But lest I
should mislead any when I have my own head and
obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am
only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on
what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if
I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle
all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane;
I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at
my back (RE 260).
This very convenient disavowal of setting an example sidesteps
the effect of Emerson’s teaching on others; he does not want to
take responsibility for the behavior that might be unleashed or justified by his doctrine of self-legislation. Not everyone’s spontaneous impulses and private intuitions would lead to the sort of
fortunate and moderate choices that Emerson seems to make.
If we return now to Tocqueville’s democratic man seeking
moral guidance in an egalitarian society, we see that Emerson has
nothing to offer him. The evaporation of human individuality in
the Over-Soul, the directionless invocation to look to one’s own
inner divinity, and the refusal to take responsibility for one’s example in the world all leave democratic man in the lurch. It is no
wonder that he turns to public opinion for moral guidance.
The Ambiguity of Politics
One way to temper the debilitating effects of majority opinion, in
particular, and the spiritual trajectory of the principle of equality,
in general, is through political activity. Over and over again, Tocqueville shows us how civic engagement at the local level can help
to cure the ills to which democracy is prone. In respect to the particular issues of this essay, civic participation and institutions help
to prevent our slide into individualism. We are unable to withdraw
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into our own world of family and friends when we must take part
in various community activities. Civic engagement also tempers
our rage for general ideas: when we are practically engaged, we
see the necessary limitations of such ideas. Emerson, however, in
many ways discourages political activity—and perhaps necessarily
so. The rapturous inner life of the transcendentalist likely makes
all political activity seem paltry and pale.
In “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson observes that these individuals are both solitary and lonely. They are solitary because nothing that society can offer appeals to them: whether it is popular
entertainment or commercial competition, they see most of what
excites society as little more than drudgery and thoroughly degrading in comparison to their talents. They are lonely because the
human fellowship they seek is so acute and fervent that few persons could satisfy or endure the demands of such a relationship:
tolerating neither frivolity nor hypocrisy, they are seen by most
persons as rude, shallow, or simply ridiculous (RE 87–90). But if
Emerson’s transcendentalist is indifferent toward such things as
the accumulation of riches and wealth, so too is he indifferent toward politics in almost all its manifestations. From the great political debates of the day to the building of empires to the prospect
of rule, the transcendentalist finds little in this petty arena to tempt
him from his solitude.
But their solitary and fastidious manners not only withdraw them from the conversation, but from the labors
of the world; they are not good citizens, not good members of society; unwillingly they bear their part of the
public and private burdens; they do not willingly share
in the public charities, in the public religious rites, in
the enterprises of education, of missions foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the temperance society. They do not even like to vote. . . .
What you call your fundamental institutions, your
great and holy causes, seem to them great abuses, and,
when nearly seen, paltry matters (RE 90).
Emerson does not deny that there are great and holy causes—albeit
far fewer than most imagine—but by the time a potentially worth-
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while cause reaches the political arena, it has been prepackaged and
predigested for public consumption. Since the transcendentalist attitude is a blanket critique of political life, Emerson rightly concludes
that this outlook will strike society as threatening. The disdainful
aloofness from the world of those who hold such beliefs, together
with their willingness to abjure the public burdens that make community possible, seem like a direct accusation of society; and society
will not remain indifferent, but will retaliate against this challenge to
what it holds dear. But despite the fact that society treats these individuals as outcasts, and despite the fact they seem to perform no useful occupation, Emerson insists that they are the moral touchstones
by which to judge whether “the points of our spiritual compass” are
true. Society therefore has an interest in them and a duty to “behold
them with what charity it can” (RE 95).
To the extent that Emerson hopes to improve American society,
he directs his appeals for moral reform at the individual and not the
group: there is little or no salvation through political activity unless
the individual himself has first been spiritually transformed. In the
essay “New England Reformers” (1844), he points out two problems
in attempting the former before or without the latter. First, all political reforms tend to be partial:
I conceive this gradual casting off of material aids, and
the indication of growing trust in the private self-supplied powers of the individual, to be the affirmative
principle of the recent philosophy, and that it is feeling
its own profound truth and is reaching forward at this
very hour to the happiest conclusions. I readily concede
that in this, as in every period of intellectual activity,
there has been a noise of denial and protest; much was
to be resisted, much was to be got rid of by those who
were reared in the old, before they could begin to affirm and to construct. Many a reformer perishes in his
removal of rubbish; and that makes the offensiveness
of the class. They are partial; they are not equal to the
work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault
on the kingdom of darkness they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and
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power of benefit. It is of little moment that one or two
or twenty errors of our social system be corrected, but
of much that the man be in his senses (RE 406–7).
In another way the right will be vindicated. In the midst
of abuses, in the heart of cities, in the aisles of false
churches, alike in one place and in another—wherever,
namely, a just and heroic soul finds itself, there it will
do what is next at hand, and by the new quality of character it shall put forth it shall abrogate that old condition, law, or school in which it stands, before the law
of its own mind (RE 408).
Emerson here disparages piecemeal efforts at social change as futile or misguided given the enormity of the task. By contrast, “a
just and heroic soul” will be able to abolish the old condition
through the force of his character and actions in the here and now.
Second, reformers overestimate the power of associations or
numbers. Groups are no better or worse than the individuals who
make them up, and unhealthy individuals make unhealthy groups:
indeed, the more united and efficacious a group is politically, the
more it will require its members to compromise their unique individuality, forcing out those of superior talent (RE 407–10).
These new associations are composed of men and
women of superior talents and sentiments; yet it may
easily be questioned whether such a community will
draw, except in its beginnings, the able and the good;
whether those who have energy will not prefer their
chance of superiority and power in the world, to the
humble certainties of the association; whether such a
retreat does not promise to become an asylum to those
who have tried and failed, rather than a field to the
strong; and whether the members will not necessarily
be fractions of men, because each finds that he cannot
enter it without some compromise. Friendship and association are very fine things, and a grand phalanx of
the best of the human race, banded for some catholic
object; yes, excellent; but remember that no society can
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ever be so large as one man. He, in his friendship, in
his natural and momentary associations, doubles or
multiplies himself; but in the hour in which he mortgages himself to two or ten or twenty, he dwarfs himself below the stature of one (RE 408–9).
Thus, Emerson’s aim is not political but private, an attempt to
unify our presently disharmonious souls. “The problem of restoring
to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption
of the soul” (RE 38). “This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of
the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man” (RE
55–56). How this domestication will occur without radical political
changes (e.g., in the education system [cf. RE 410–11]) is not clear.
In sum, it would seem that Emerson’s rapturous spiritualism casts
a long shadow over politics and political activity: civic engagement
is neither an Aristotelian fulfillment of our nature nor a Tocquevillean means to maintain its health.
A Corrective to Democratic Historians
In conclusion, it is necessary to point out that there is at least one
area where Emerson’s philosophy is in harmony with Tocqueville’s,
namely, in his deep appreciation for the power of great individuals
and individual action. In his essay on Abraham Lincoln and the
Emancipation Proclamation, or in his address commemorating the
anniversary of the end of slavery in the British West Indies, one
does not read about immutable and unseen forces propelling men
ahead on the unstoppable current of history. In this respect, at least,
Emerson’s celebration of the individual is the same as Tocqueville’s.
Nonetheless, this celebration of individual initiative and independence is coupled with yet another potentially worrisome aspect
of Emerson’s writings. Just as he conceives the individual as the
standard in judging the rectitude of an action and the worth of an
institution, so too he conceives of the new American nation as a
standard in judging its own needs. America must emancipate itself
from the tyrannizing effects of a slavish veneration of the “mind
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of the Past” (RE 46)—especially Europe’s aristocratic past—in all
its incarnations: history, philosophy, art, architecture, and literature.
Although this call for originality can already be seen in the opening
paragraph of Emerson’s first book Nature (1836), perhaps the most
stirring expression of this sentiment is his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa
address, “The American Scholar” (1837), which Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes called “our intellectual Declaration of Independence”
(RE 3, 846). The moment some form of the past is declared perfect
or inviolate, then the present generation will atrophy and cease
thinking and creating—it will become a satellite of the past rather
than its own solar system. The genius of an age is lost when it passively accepts the dogmas of the past and does not actively seize
upon and articulate its own creative principles: “The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized [sic] now for two hundred years”
(RE 47). Indeed, we must not subordinate our own thinking to the
thinking found in books:
Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be
sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar’s
idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is
too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of
their readings. But when the intervals of darkness
come, as come they must—when the sun is hid and the
stars withdraw their shining—we repair to the lamps
which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to
the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we
may speak (RE 48).
Books should be used to guide the scholar back to the light of his
own inspirations.
Emerson is not rejecting the past outright. His frequent praise
of past philosophers and authors and poets demonstrates this. Instead, he wants to challenge what he calls the backward—that is,
conservative—tendency of all institutions to defend some ancient
authority and to use this as an excuse for not moving forward.
The soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth, or
creates. In this action it is genius; not the privilege of
here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every
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man. In its essence it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop
with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say
they—let us hold by this. They pin me down. They
look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his
hindhead: man hopes: genius creates (RE 47).
37
The past must come alive for the present and speak to its concerns
and circumstances. If it fails to do this, then it need not be studied
and must not be revered. Discard the relics of the past or reanimate
them—if Greece or Rome or Constantinople or Paris or London
do not speak to us, we need not worry: someone or something else
will (RE 115–17, 120, 130–31, 140, 150–51, 272–73).
Emerson sees some encouraging signs of intellectual liberation
in the growing prevalence of “the near, the low, the common” as a
new subject of literature (RE 57). He saw that contemporary writers and artists were beginning to expand the range of their interest
beyond traditional high subjects to include the more mundane:
The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the
philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life,
are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a
sign—is it not?—of new vigor when the extremities are
made active, when currents of warm life run into the
hands and the feet. I ask not for the great, the remote,
the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is
Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the
low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the
antique and future worlds. What would we really know
the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the
pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the
glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body;
show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me
the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the
polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and
the shop, the plough, and the ledger referred to the like
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cause by which light undulates and poets sing; and the
world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumberroom, but has form and order; there is no trifle, there
is no puzzle, but one design unites and animates the
farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench (RE 57–58).
Because the lowest objects are bursting with the same sublime soul
as the highest, they can be made the focal point of a literary and
spiritual renaissance appropriate for this new era and new nation.
At the end of the day, Emerson applauds the fact that the same
egalitarian political movements, which both raised the “lowest
class in the state” and gave new dignity and respect to the “individual,” are now fostering an appropriate egalitarian literature (RE
43, 57–58). Emerson here reveals what Matthew Arnold calls his
remarkable “persistent optimism” (RE 846) in the potential of each
and every individual to become a fully realized human being: he
repeatedly affirms that all men have “sublime thoughts” (RE 76);
that all possess a “native nobleness” (RE 242); that all are wise;
that all are latent prophets; that all have the potential greatness of
George Washington and Julius Caesar; that all carry within a
“miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal
History” (RE 267). Even genius is less a matter of innate ability
and more a matter of art and arrangement, and of giving free reign
to the divine, which is in all of us (RE 411ff.). As Henry David
Thoreau rightly said in his journals about his friend: “In his world
every man would be a poet, Love would reign, Beauty would take
place, Man and Nature would harmonize” (RE 847). We are left to
wonder, however, whether Emerson’s suspicions of the past, coupled with his new emphasis on “the near, the low, the common” in
literature will, over time, help to sustain his celebration of genuine
human greatness, or eventually undermine and distort it in a predictable but unhealthy democratic fashion.
NOTES
1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. and trans. Harvey
C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000), 425–26, hereafter cited in the text as DA, followed by volume,
part, chapter, and page number. In general, I have used this translation
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throughout, although I have checked it against the French original for accuracy. See also the four-volume, bilingual, historical-critical edition of
the same, ed. Eduardo Nolla, trans. James T. Schleifer (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010).
2. References to Emerson’s works are from The Essential Writings of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library,
2000), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as RE. All emphasized
words in quotes are contained in the original. For details on his life and
times, readers may consult with profit Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson:
A Biography (New York: Viking Press, 1981).
3. Emerson was ordained as the Unitarian pastor of the Second Church
of Boston in 1829. In June 1832, his grave reservations concerning the
sacrament of communion reached a crescendo, and he asked the Church
if he might stop administering it in its present form. After considering his
petition, the members of the Church were unable to grant it. Because
Emerson would “do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart” (RE
109), he judged it best to resign as pastor, and he stated his reasons for
doing so to the congregation in the sermon we are about to discuss. Although Emerson continued to give sermons to various churches throughout his life, his service at the Second Church was his first and last
appointment as a permanent pastor.
4. Emerson also suggests the likely cause of this error. It was only natural
that a soul as “great and rich” as Jesus’s, falling among a “simple” people,
was bound to overwhelm them. They were thus not able to see that Jesus’s
true message was that they needed to discover and make manifest the gift
of God in their own soul and not that Jesus was the son of God Himself
(RE 69). Given the simplicity of the “primitive Church,” Emerson is very
hesitant to adopt any of its doctrines or practices. The early Christians
not only refused to shed their “Jewish prejudices” but they were rarely
enlightened by the example of Christ himself. Emerson thus concludes
that “[o]n every other subject succeeding times have learned to form a
judgment more in accordance with the spirit of Christianity than was the
practice of the early ages” (RE 105).
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“At the Very Center of the Plenitude”:1
Goethe’s Grand Attempt to Overcome the 18th Century;2
Or,
How Freshman Laboratory Saved Goethe
From the General Sickness of his Age
We have failed to restore to the human spirit
its ancient right to come face to face with nature.
—Goethe3
Nature has become the fundamental word
that designates essential relations . . . to beings.
—Heidegger4
Goethe teaches courage . . . that the disadvantages
of any epoch exist only to the fainthearted.
—Emerson5
1. Incidental Thoughts, Fruitful Life
To everyone: Welcome! To our freshman in particular: a special
Welcome!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: We know him first as a poet and
playwright—seniors will read his Faust next week. Yet there is another Goethe that is less well known but who, from his own point
of view, is of equal, if not greater consequence,6 the Goethe who
spent his life studying nature—botany, zoology, geology, meteorology, theory of color—and is known, in this regard, for his work
in morphology. I would like to speak about this lesser known
Goethe tonight.
There are two subtitles to this evening’s lecture “At the Very
Center of the Plenitude.” The first is given to it by Friedrich Nietzsche, the second, my own curious invention. The first is “Goethe’s
Grand Attempt to Overcome the 18th Century.” As we will see,
from Nietzsche’s perspective Goethe was a philosophical thinker
of the highest order who inherited, as we all do, ideas from previDavid Lawrence Levine is a tutor and former Dean at St. John’s College in Santa
Fe, New Mexico. This lecture was originally presented as the annual Dean’s
Lecture to open the thirty-seventh academic year at the Santa Fe campus.
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ous generations and thinkers, ideas that he thought were ill conceived and needed to be rethought. Thanks to these ideas, we had
become, according to Goethe, “blind with seeing eyes.”7
Similarly the second subtitle, “How Freshman Laboratory
Saved Goethe from the General Sickness of his Age.” This clearly
reflects our unique studies here at St. John’s. Here too we see
something of greater moment than we might first have seen. Here
we will have a chance to see that his life’s work studying nature—
as seen in the paper that we read in freshman laboratory—has a far
greater significance than just “science,” great though this is in its
own right.8 For Goethe the study of nature was the necessary antidote to a growing tendency—“sickness” he called it—that needed
to be countered for the sake of our lives and health.
Goethe’s thinking, though philosophical, is not systematic, and
that means there’s no one place where his deepest thinking is to be
found. Just the opposite, his profoundest thought is to be discovered throughout his works, and not just in his major works, but
minor ones too, often just jottings here and there, on slips of paper,
in the margins of books, the corners of newspapers, in brief letters,
in short wherever occasion found a suitable surface for pen and
ink to secure for a time his emergent thoughts. These were often
then collected into “maxims and reflections,” sometimes inserted
as the thinking of one of the characters of his novels, sometimes
collected under his own name.
These occasional thoughts will provide much of the material
for tonight’s talk. But incidental thoughts are not necessarily insignificant thoughts.9 Not unlike flotsam and jetsam, thoughts appear throughout our day. Are these daily musings ‘distractions of
the moment’ or ‘disclosures of moment’? Such irrepressible
thoughtfulness and imagination gives added dimension to the thin
linearity of time. A day punctuated by the wondrous, sparked by
light, is not just another day. Daily discovery is meat not spice,
nourishment, not just flavoring. And its joy is invigorating. The
mundane is thereby transformed. Thinking happens.
One such collection of thoughts is a book of selected conversations by his secretary Johann Peter Eckermann, a man of no
small talent, who took it upon himself to record for posterity per-
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sonal conversations he had with his world famous employer during
the last nine years of his life. These are intermittently and imperfectly recorded, often self-conscious, sometimes seem contrived,
and are frequently without a definite outcome. There we find observations about passing acquaintances, deliberations about the
wine list for the evening dinner, plans for journeys to be taken, personal estimates about famous and not so famous authors and statesmen, latter-year reflections and regrets about his youthful writings,
plans for the reconstruction of the local theater that had burned
down, conversations with his patron the Grand Duke of Weimar,
observations about his wife and children, expressions of hope and
disappointment about friends, frustrations about works of his that
had been overlooked or were under appreciated. But throughout
the rich array, there emerge as well recurrent themes and persistent
questions of consequence.
The same author mentioned above, Nietzsche, says the following: “Apart from Goethe’s [own] writings, and in particular
Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann, the best German book
there is, what is there really of German prose literature that it would
be worthwhile to read over and over again?”10 “The best German
book there is,” worth “reading over and over again”? Hardly on
the face of it.
Though perhaps prone to hyperbole and “philosophizing with
a hammer,” Nietzsche was not prone to misrepresentation. What
could he mean by such exaggerated praise? Perhaps what is remarkable is not the book per se, but what is portrayed therein? Perhaps what is notable is not its ultimate literary value—the book is
not on our program—but the attempt to record a life that is in no
way ordinary? Indeed, even through Eckermann’s eyes we glimpse
new possibilities for a human life that aspires to what is extraordinary, a fullness of possibility rarely seen. We glimpse a paradigm
of a fully engaged, ever creative, wholesome fecundity. In short,
we see philosophy as a way of being in the world, not as a book
bound between leather covers.
2. “Everything Nowadays is Ultra”
In 1825, late in life, Goethe wrote a letter to his friend, the composer Zelter, in which he reflected on the character of life as it had
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come to be lived in their lifetime:
Everything nowadays is ultra, [he writes] everything is
being transcended continually in thought as well as in action. No one knows himself any longer; no one can grasp
the element in which he lives and works or the materials
that he handles. Pure simplicity is out of the question; of
simplifiers we have enough. Young people are stirred up
much too early in life and then carried away in the whirl
of the times. Wealth and rapidity are what the world admires. . . . Railways, quick mails, steamships, and every
possible kind of rapid communication are what the educated world seeks but it only over-educates itself and
thereby persists in its mediocrity. It is, moreover, the result of universalization that a mediocre culture [then] becomes [the] common [culture].
He then adds ruefully: “We and perhaps a few others will be the
last of an epoch that will not soon return.”11
According to Goethe, a radical transformation of our way of
being has taken place: 1) a change in the character of human thought
and action, 2) a change in our knowledge of ourselves, 3) a change
in our sense of place, and finally, 4) a change in the character and
efficacy of education.
“Everything nowadays is ultra”: As early as the beginning of
the nineteenth century, what was coming to characterize human
life—and thereby change the face and depth of human experience—was the speed (die Voloziferishe) at which life was lived, a
hitherto unheard of, dizzying and disorienting pace such that young
people—but not only—could only be caught up in “the whirl of
the times.” “Being caught up” means living some other life than
one’s own, being inauthentic.
“Railways, quick mails, steamships”: Ever faster communication changes the lived dimensions of life: time quickens, distance
collapses. There is no delay between an event and its hearing. “It’s
as if we were right there.” A leisurely walk is replaced by a carriage
ride, thereafter by a train ride, then a jet plane, and now by . . . a
transporter (or at least in our imaginations). The wait for “news”
from the pony express, a telegram, a phone call, a pager continues
to shrink. Our e-mail pings or our blackberry vibrates: we hear about
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an event “as it happens” no matter the distance. Life, in short, is lived
in fast forward. Goethe asks “Who can possibly keep up with the
demands of an exorbitant present and that at maximum speed?”12
This matter of life’s ever accelerating pace in not a philosophically indifferent one for Goethe. “The greatest misfortune [Unheil]
of our time,” he says elsewhere, “which let’s no thing come to
fruition, is that one moment consumes the next.”13 While the speeding up of things may assist us in “keeping informed” and “staying
in touch,” it also subtracts from other essential dimensions once
thought definitive of human life. It makes certain things more difficult, if not impossible, specifically those things that take time, for
example, those that require slow assimilation and acclimation,
above all human learning and experience. It takes time away from
thoughtful reflection and other possibilities of human carefulness.
For time and leisure (skolē) are the proper gestational home of reflection, philosophy and human care.
We hear too that our thought processes are affected: “everything is transcended in thought [as well as in action].” We have
somehow been made to think differently. We live at a new level of
abstraction, beyond the immediate, simple, obvious, primary
world, such that we no longer even understand “the element in
which we live.” What could this mean?
And most curious of all, Goethe says “No one knows himself
any longer.” How is this even possible? Elsewhere he says: “Learning fails to bring advancement now that the world is caught up in
such a rapid turnover; by the time you have managed to take due
note of everything, you have lost your self.”14 Are we not always
the same no matter our circumstances?
Education too is thereby affected. It is suggested that we might
even become “over-educated,” mis-educated, that education itself
has become, somehow, distorted. He reflects: “For almost a century
now the humanities have no longer influenced the minds of men
engaged in them.”15 Rather than distinction, we have mediocrity;
rather than a high culture, we have an ordinary one. What then of
the rewards of “perspective,” “balance” and “excellence” once
thought the outcome of an ennobling education?
The “whirl of the times” has only accelerated many, many fold
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since 1825. The author could not possibly have envisioned the pace
at which we live our lives today. To be sure, on first hearing, one
might be inclined to take the above observations as the grumbling
of a man seeing the world pass him by (empty biographism). We
might, however, also take this as notice to think better about the
character of our lives in our ultra-ultra world.
3. “The General Sickness of the Age”
Life is our lot rather than reflection.
—Goethe16
Goethe’s exclamation that “nowadays . . . no one knows himself
any longer” clearly needs further consideration. How could this
be? Don’t we know ourselves?
Throughout the modern disciplines—the physical sciences,
history, even poetry and literature—was a growing trend, evident
to Goethe, to what he called “subjectivity.” Juniors and seniors will
remember, in the Discourse on Method, Descartes’s identification
of the “ego” as the primordial truth about which we alone can be
immediately “certain.” The immediate evidence of this self-intuition then provides the standard of truth for all else, now thought
true only if “clearly and distinctly” conceivable to us. Odd though
this may sound, this new self-certainty leads to our world being
reconceived as “the external world,” about which we can now have
only a small measure of certainty and that of its radically stripped
down mathematical qualities. To be sure, this made a “modern science” of such a world possible, yet it gave us a new definition and
sense of self that was problematic.17 This excessively polarized and
reduced view of the ego as “subject”—understood as standing
“over against”18 some bare objective world—is what Goethe meant
by “subjectivity:” polarized, withdrawn, exiled to its own interior
world, and thereby alienated from any sense of world in which it
could feel itself integrated or at home.19
For Goethe the consequences of this influential (nay, fateful)
redefinition of self are nowhere better seen than in his own vocation, poetry. We have all heard the caricature of the modern “romantic” poet: a suffering recluse, retreating to his Paris garret,
whose only truth is his inner pain. But for Goethe there is, unfor-
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tunately, an element of truth to be found therein: He observes: “All
the poets [today] write as if they were ill and the whole world were
a lazaretto [leper colony]. They all speak of the woe and misery of
this earth and the joy of a hereafter: all are discontented. . . . This,”
he adds, “is a real abuse of poetry.”20 “I attach no value to [such]
poems.”21
From Goethe’s perspective, “whoever descends deep down
into himself will always realize he is only half a being,”22 and being
half will discover there limited resources for creativity. “A subjective nature has soon talked out his little internal material and is at
last ruined by mannerism [that is, excessive affectation],”23 he
notes regretfully. “Such people look at once within; they are so occupied by what is revolving in themselves, [that] they are like a
man in passion, who passes his dearest friends on the street without
seeing them.”24 With reduced openness to the world around them,
they have become “blind with seeing eyes.” This excessive onesidedness, and consequent risk of self-absorption, Goethe named
“the general sickness of the present age [heutigen Zeit],”25 and led
Doctor von Goethe to his famous diagnosis: “What is Classical is
healthy; what is Romantic is sick.”26 Sick? Unhealthy, unproductive, foundationless, and ultimately untruthful. We lose our fullest
selves.
Goethe thus found himself standing at the point of the divide
where, for all our efforts to think about each separately, subject
and object were being ever more pulled apart. This experiential
breach was of fundamental concern because, when either is overpolarized—when the soul is diminished as an isolated, worldless
ego (psyche), res cogitans or when the world is diminished as external, even foreign, barren res extensa—both subject and object
are diminished for want of their natural correlate. If I may indulge
in a somewhat dramatic image: like a man standing between two
horses pulling him apart, Goethe found that—for the sake of
health27—he had everything he could handle to keep himself and
the world whole.28
Goethe himself thus resisted being “caught up in his time;”
he was not a “romantic.” As he said, “my tendencies were opposed
to those of my time, which were wholly subjective; while in my
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objective efforts, I stood alone to my disadvantage.”29 His “objective efforts”? How could he resist the subjective tendency?
4. “The Element in which we Live”
In all natural things there is something wonderful. . . .
So we should approach the inquiry . . . without aversion,
knowing that in all of them there is something
natural and beautiful.
—Aristotle30
Surprising though it may seem to some, the answer is nature. Thus
it is apt that the Goethe we first meet is not the poet but the Goethe
who spent his whole life researching “the element in which we
live,” that is researching into nature. It is this “objective” involvement that saved him from the excesses of his—and our—time, not
to mention giving him “the most wonderful moments of his life.”31
So, what is nature?—OK, a simpler question.—What is a
plant? Which grammatical form best names its being, a noun or a
verb (or a gerund, a verbal noun)? By plant do we intend a static
state or an activity alive with change, something that has grown or
some process of growth?32 Clearly we need to name both—form
that is also in the process of self-formation. “Growth is the point
of life.”33
For us here in the Southwest, sumac, oak, aspen, pinõn, mallow and mullen are different kinds of plants. The principle at work
is the same throughout the stages of the life cycle of a mallow, for
instance, from seedling to flowering, fructifying plant. Hence we
name it one thing—a mallow—despite all these various stages and
differing formal manifestations.34
But it is not only this individual plant that is before us, so is
the species “mallow,” and even further so is the kingdom “plant,”
and these, as Goethe will insist, not as abstract concepts in the mind
but somehow in the living instance itself. Thus Goethe sought to
account for plant life as such, despite the dizzying fact that they
take infinitely many and wondrously different shapes. Sumac,
aspen, mallow are in “inner essence” still “plants.”35 What is
needed in this view is to identify the unifying principle at work
(not “underlying”) in each and every form at whatever stage of
growth and complexity they might be. But how to do so? And how
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to find a language that captures this universally active principle of
forms forming themselves?
To do so Goethe had to depart radically from his contemporaries and from their analytical approach. But in so doing this departure brings him closer to us. We can see this at the outset of the
Metamorphosis of Plants that we read in freshman laboratory,
where he appeals, not to results of the latest scientific journals, but
to our own untutored experience. He begins: “Anyone who has paid
a little attention to plant growth. . . .”36 This means that we, ordinary human beings, still have access to a realm of primary significance, one not to be diminished as “pre-scientific,” if what is
meant thereby is “pre-insightful.” Rather we, you and me, have
deep access into what is before us.37
Indeed he is critical that, with all our education and learning,
we may on the contrary be closing ourselves off from this primary
level of our experience. He often referred to a passage in one of
his early plays to illustrate this eclipse of experience by theory:
[A]s it is said in my Goetz von Berlichingen, that the
son, from pure learning, does not know the father, so
in science do we find people who can neither see nor
hear, through sheer learning and hypothesis. Such people look at once within; they are so [pre-] occupied by
what is revolving in themselves, that they are like a
man in passion, who passes his dearest friends in the
street without seeing them. [Rather] the observation of
nature requires a certain purity of mind that cannot be
disturbed or preoccupied by anything. . . . It is just because we carry about with us a great apparatus of philosophy and hypothesis, that we spoil all.38
“Like a man in passion”: Ideas, no less than passions, can take hold
of our minds, preventing us from seeing what might otherwise be
evident and thereby preventing us from attending to our primary
experience.39 So overwhelming are our present-day theoretical preoccupations that—in one of his most shocking statements of all—
Goethe claims that we no longer even concern ourselves with
nature. “That nature, which is our [modern] concern, isn’t nature
any longer,” he says.40 Extraordinary!
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What has been lost, in Goethe’s view, is a sense of the wholeness of wholes and the interrelatedness and integration of all things,
in short, Nature (capital N). This loss is the necessary consequence
of any approach wherein wholes are but “by-products”41 of uncoordinated, underlying, isolated forces and elements (“matter in the
void”). Looking at things in terms of their parts—elements, simples, particles, atoms—analytical ways of thinking stumble in the
face of the Humpty Dumpty problem: how to put the whole back
together again.42 If we begin with parts, we end up with reconstituted conglomerates, aggregates, bunches, but the wholeness of
things, the integral reality, remains a secondary phenomenon, a
mystery, if not an accident.43 Here too we’ve become “blind with
seeing eyes.”
Juniors are soon to read and seniors will remember Descartes’s
famous experiment with the wax at the end of Meditations II. There
Descartes places a piece of fresh bees wax near a burning candle,
whereupon it melts and loses its original color and smell, texture
and shape (i.e. primary as well as secondary qualities), that is loses
all its original properties but res extensa, mere extension (though
this changes too). This experimental method is designed to bring
us to see what is “elemental” (if not fundamental). Descartes then
proceeds to claim that by “an act of intuition of reason” he—and
we—would know this transmogrified, charred lump in front of us
to be the same thing as before his infernal experiment. He asks,
who would not so conclude thus? (Aristotle, for one) Well . . . if
that were a plant, and not an amorphous hunk of bees wax, who
would concur with Descartes that what remains is the same as what
was put to the flame?44
The analytical flame dissociates or separates what originally
was together. It “kills.” So this method.45 The disfigured, deracinated, blackened carcass of the plant is anything but, the living
whole, nowhere to be found. The mass of matter lying before
Descartes is “the same” only if life and death are not different, and
if form is not an active principle but a derivative by-product. With
this “lethal generality”46 we lose—and lose sight of—“the spirit of
the whole,” as Goethe would say. For this reason, he claimed as
well that the modern approach—subjectively predisposed to take
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the objects of our experience in such a reduced way—loses its
claim to “objectivity.”47
The question for Goethe—and for us—is whether and how we
can recover the whole. Is it still possible to begin elsewhere, think
differently such that the whole is retained along with its manifold
parts? Can we yet begin where we naturally begin, with what is
“first for us” (Aristotle), with integral wholes?
5. Our Ancient Right
The spirit of the actual is the true ideal.
No one who is observant will ever
find nature dead or silent.
—Goethe48
Goethe thus sought “another way,” in order, as he said, “to restore
to the human spirit, its ancient right to come face to face with nature.” 49
He asks: “What does all our communion with nature amount
to . . . if we busy ourselves with analyzing only single portions,
and do not feel the breath of the spirit that dictates the role of
every part and restrains or sanctions all excess through an immanent law?”50 Thus “phenomena once and for all must be removed
from the gloomy empirical-mechanical-dogmatic [torture] chamber [Marterkammer],” he said, “and [be] submitted [rather] to the
jury of [common human understanding].”51 But how are we to do
this, to return to “common human understanding”?
Since apparently we can live in more than one world, Goethe
makes his bid—“naively” yet knowingly52—to reclaim nature as
our home-world. “If we are to rescue ourselves from the boundless multiplicity, atomization and complexity of the modern natural sciences,” he says, “and get back to the realm of simplicity,
we must always consider [this] question: how would Plato [or
any non-modern] have reacted to nature, fundamentally one
unity as it still is, how would he have viewed what may now appear to us as its greater complexity?”53 We need to remove what
“now” stands in the way.54 We need somehow to shuck off our
modern predisposition to see all things as artificially reconstituted55 and see our world, rather, as one might whose vision was
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not so refracted. But how?
Mindful that “the first stages of a discovery leave their mark
on the course of knowledge,”56 Goethe first seeks to reorient us.
To begin with, “anyone who has paid a little attention” has to acknowledge that our primary and original experience of things is
otherwise than we’ve been brought to conceive. “In nature,” he
said, “we never see anything isolated: everything is in connection
with something.”57 Any account, then, of our experience must
begin here with the unity and interrelatedness of all things.
Herein lays Goethe’s unified field theory: “I abide by what is
simple and comprehensive,” he says.58 (This he also calls his
“stubborn realism.”59)
As we heard, a certain kind of undisturbed purity of mind—
clarity, breadth of survey, attention to manifest differences—is
the pre-requisite to any genuine openness. In the garden, along a
path, in the laboratory, we need first to see the things themselves,
to recognize the ways and means that the plant [or whatever our
object] uses,”60 “to follow it carefully through all its transitions,”61 in short, “to follow as carefully as possible in the footsteps of nature.”62 “In the process,” he says, “we become familiar
with certain requisite conditions for what is manifesting itself.
From this point of view everything gradually falls into place
under higher principles and laws revealed not to reason through
words and hypotheses, but to our intuitive perception [Anschauung] through phenomena.63” In this way, our relationship to
things is not at first “speculative,” but what Goethe calls “practical,” that is grounded in the concrete experience of individuals
and the real.64 (Here have we a model of openness and extreme
care that will serve us well, not only in the laboratory, but
throughout our work at the college.)
Given this, given observation that is undertaken with a “truly
sympathetic interest,”65 a remarkable transformation can then
begin. We can be moved to insight. In an often quoted passage
from the Introduction to his Outline of a Theory of Color, Goethe
addresses this process of natural ideation. He writes:
An extremely odd demand is often set forth but never
met . . . that [bare] empirical data should be presented
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without any theoretical context. . . . This demand is
odd because it is useless to simply look at something.
Every act of looking [naturally] turns into observation, every act of observation into reflection, every act
of reflection into the making of associations: thus it is
that we theorize every time we look carefully at the
world. The ability to do this with clarity of mind, with
self-knowledge, in a free way, and (if I may venture
to put it so [he adds]) with irony, is a skill we need in
order to avoid the pitfalls of [modern scientific] abstraction.66
Nature converses with us. Like any organic transition, thought is
the natural and continuous outgrowth of its prior condition, the
fruit of concrete experience. As such we are naturally led to a
higher integration through “the practical and self-distilling
processes of common human understanding.”67 “We theorize every
time we look carefully at the world.”
When we are able to survey an object in every detail,
grasp it carefully and reproduce it in our mind’s eye [he
reflects, then] we can say we have an intuitive perception [Anschauung] of it in the truest and highest sense.
We can [rightfully] say it belongs to us.... And thus the
particular leads to the general [as well as] the general
to the particular. The two combine their effect in every
observation, in every discourse.68
As much as we take the lead in inquiry, then so too are we led
by what we are inquiring into. Experience is bi-directional. Subject-object; object-subject. True sympathetic observation results
in the recapitulation in our summary imagination of the originating principle. The object becomes for us as it is in itself. In this
way the object “belongs” to us as much as we, in communion, belong with it. Our natural correlation is thereby reestablished, the
Cartesian subjective reduction of experience is offset, if not reversed, and a kind of renewed originality is returned to human experience, widening and opening our purview69, whereby we might
be thought once again to come “face to face” with nature. Our ancient right is thereby restored.
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6. The Original World
. . . the sublime tranquility which surrounds us
when we stand in the solitude and silence of nature,
vast and eloquent.
—Goethe70
A living thing cannot be measured
by something external to itself.
—Goethe71
This reunion of observer and world—we should say union—is possible because of a unique human faculty—one out-rightly denied72
or at least overlooked by other modern thinkers—but to which
Goethe again and again returns our attention. As we read: “When
we are able to survey an object in every detail, grasp it carefully
and reproduce it in the mind’s eye, we can say we have an intuitive
perception of it in the truest and highest sense.” This capacity for
concrete, summary “intuition,” intuitive perception, Anschauung,
is our faculty for experiential wholes wherein the actively unifying
principles at work in the world manifest themselves. Deny it and
we have no wholes. They are not deduced, inferred, or synthesized.
We do not have to go beyond or behind73 the phenomena to see
these at work. These are made known to us at the level of our primary experience. We “see” them.
There’s a famous story: At a meeting of the Society for Scientific Research in Jena there was a “fortunate encounter” between
Goethe and the poet Friedrich Schiller—whose poetry at the time
Goethe thought too romantic, too subjective. Goethe sought to explain to him his own attempt to articulate such a principle whereby
the natural plenitude of plant life might be accounted for. His
“idea” was, he admits, “the strangest creature in the world,”74
wherein the whole range of plant formation might be seen as
“stemming” or “derived” from an aboriginal form that was in this
regard the formal progenitor of the whole kingdom. Goethe named
this the Urpflanze,75 the original or originary plant.76
Schiller’s first response to this suggestion reflected his philosophical background, in particular his indebtedness to Kant. “This
is not an observation from experience,” he said, “This is an idea.”77
Schiller could not see what Goethe claimed he saw. He was disin-
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clined—as we may be—to grant that this was anything but a “regulative idea” constructed by reason to help it organize its experience, not a principle at work in the world organizing the
phenomenal array of plant forms. It was merely an idea, merely
“subjective.” For him and for Kant, it couldn’t be anything more,
as in their view phenomena are themselves constituted by consciousness and are thus not things in themselves.
Convinced, rather, that he had identified the objective generative source of all plant forms, Goethe replied: “Then I may rejoice
that I have ideas without knowing it, and can even see them with
my own eyes!” For Goethe, perception and reason, as moments of
a natural process, are not disparate faculties, but continuous. Thus
this, and all other Ur-phenomena, immanent and at work throughout our experience, are real and hence must be available to us on
the primary level of common human understanding.78 He wonders:
“Why should it not also hold true in the intellectual area that
through an intuitive perception of eternally creative nature we may
become worthy of participating spiritually in its creative process?”
He thus insisted that he could see with his eyes something to which
others seem to have become blind.79 (Despite this fundamental difference, the two became close friends.)
But more needs to be said about this “strangest” of all creatures
that holds, in Goethe’s words, “the secret of the creation and organization of plants” (or any family of phenomena). As we mentioned earlier, Goethe’s interests were vast and not restricted to
botany; he also did research in osteology or bone formation. Indeed
it was Goethe who discovered the role of the intermaxillary bone,
the missing link that allowed zoologists to connect man and ape
anatomically. In a passage from his work On Morphology, we see
most clearly the point of origination of his thinking concerning Urphenomena:
The distinction between man and animal long eluded
discovery. Ultimately it was believed that the definitive
difference between ape and man lay in the placement
of the ape’s four incisors in a bone clearly and physically separate from other bones. [Goethe provides the
link.] . . . Meanwhile I had devoted my full energies to
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the study of osteology, for in the skeleton the unmistakable character of every form is preserved conclusively and for all time. 80
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The developmental history of an organism is not past; rather the
history of successive generational transformations is preserved
and encapsulated in the fullness of any present form. Just as osteogeny can now be seen to recapitulate phylogeny, so more generally can any such morphological account. This “pregnancy”81
of the present form allows of a new kind of thinking to uncover
the Ur-principle at work, a reverse thinking that “traces the phenomena [back] to their [empirical] origins.”82 (This is the first
methodological principle of the new science of morphology83).
In another context he reflects on this Ur-principle, now also
called an “archetype”: “an anatomical archetype will be suggested here, a general picture containing the forms of all animals
as potential, one which will guide us to an orderly description
of each animal.”84 The Ur-principle is thus a kind of omni-potential in conversation with its environment and out of which the
whole polymorphic metamorphosis issues. “All is leaf.” As such
these are not ideas in the usual sense of Plato or Kant, neither
separate nor abstract. Rather they are like ideas in enabling us to
give an account of the unifying principles at the origin of the
plenitude. They are like ideas, as well, in that they might serve
as a kind of “formula” providing a way to generate new forms—
if only in imagination.85 The “derivation”86 is not of hypothetical
but real possibilities. Though they are more like the eidos in Aristotle, an active principle embodying the manifold fruitfulness
of nature, here however “the secret of the creation and organization” of the family of forms. (He sometimes called it entelechy.87)
Thus whatever the family of phenomena—botany, osteology, geology, meteorology, color—Ur-phenomena emerge. We
come to see the unifying principle, the spirit “that dictates the
role of every part and restrains or sanctions all excess through
immanent law.” From this “empirical summit,88” all things can
be seen as unified. Thus we have order out of chaos,89 integration where we might otherwise have discontinuity. The plenitude is comprehended.
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Therefore when you pick up Goethe’s Metamorphosis of
Plants to read, or any of his other writings on nature, do not close
yourselves off when hearing its foreign language, rather attempt
to hear its new voice and direction for the understanding of nature, “the element in which we live.” Whether, indeed, Goethe
has bequeathed us a fruitful path by means of which our ancient
right might be restored or whether it is but a false portal, is for
each of us to determine for ourselves.
7. Against Self-knowledge
Everything that liberates our mind
without at the same time imparting
self-control is pernicious.
—Goethe90
Where are we, then, in the midst of all this? Is there a lesson to be
learned about ourselves from this “other way of studying nature”?
As we’ve seen there are two unities that are reestablished by
Goethe’s way of thinking: there’s the unity of wholes that had been
fragmented, and the unity of observer and world that had been
alienated. Let us think more about the latter.
This unity of observer and world means that, like any organism, man cannot be known, nor know himself, apart from his
world—his environment— which sustains him and of which he is
an integral part. Given the polarized, inauthentic, and diminished
sense of self that is the consequence of the divorce of the “ego”
from its world in modern thought, it is understandable, then, that
to Goethe “no one knows himself any longer.” This led him to his
famous—if at first shocking—remark concerning the Delphic oracle: “I must admit,” he said, “that I have long been suspicious of
the great and important sounding task: ‘know-thyself.’ This has always seemed to me a deception practiced by a secret order of
priests who wished to confuse humanity with impossible demands,
to divert attention from activity in the outer world to some false
inner speculation.”91 Self-knowledge—or what we take to be
such—can be misleading, indeed disabling.
But how can we make it truthful . . . and enabling? As we
would expect, for Goethe the success of our efforts to know ourselves depends on the degree to which we are willing to extend
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ourselves beyond ourselves. “Man is by all his senses and efforts
directed to externals—to the world around him ,92” he stresses, and
thus “the human being knows himself only insofar as he knows the
world; he perceives the world only in himself and himself only in
the world.”93 This brings to mind his earlier observation: “Whoever
descends deep down into himself will always realize he is only half
a being;” this thought was then completed with “let him find . . . a
world . . . and he will become whole.”94 In short, that we might be
drawn out of our overly self-polarized existence, we need to
reestablish ourselves once again as worldly beings, fully engaged
with and in our natural correlate “the outer world.”
Thus he answers the question “How can we learn self-knowledge?” in this way: “Never by taking thought but rather by action.”95
This reply should not surprise us, for it was our history that our very
attempts to think about ourselves and the world brought us to this
unnatural polarization. Thus it is “activity in the outer world” alone
that is necessary to restore a balanced polarity and healthy equilibrium. We see this in Goethe’s own “objective activity”:
Without my attempts in natural science, I should never
have learned to know mankind [including himself] as
it is. In nothing else can we so closely approach pure
contemplation and thought, so closely observe errors
of the sense and of the understanding, the weak and
strong points of character. All is more or less pliant
and wavering . . . but nature understands no jesting; she
is always true, always serious; always severe . . . the
errors and faults are always those of man. The man incapable of appreciating her, she despises; and only to
the apt, the pure and the true, does she resign herself
and reveal her secrets.96
Here we see Goethe learning lessons from nature that once were
thought the fruit of introspection and the study of the human sciences. The book of nature, as other texts, can serve as an occasion
for self-reflection. “The apt, the pure, and the true” learn about
themselves and other human beings as they self-critically open
themselves up to new fields and methods. The earlier passage, “For
almost a century now the humanities have no longer influenced the
minds of men engaged in them;” comes to mind. It is followed by:
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“it is a real piece of good fortune that nature intervened, drew the
essence of the humanities to itself and opened to us the way to a
true humanitarianism from its side.”97 The study of nature can thus
be a liberating study, freeing us from the burden of blinding conceptions and enabling us to return to our original worldliness
wherein we, once again, can open ourselves to our fullest possibilities. In this way, the study of nature is properly a liberal art.
8. The Grand Attempt
Where do we meet an original nature?
Where is the man with strength to be true,
and to show himself as he is?
—Goethe98
Finally, certain questions emerged earlier about our modern way
of life. How are we, given the “demands of an exorbitant present,”
not to get “caught up” in the whirl of our times and to reclaim a
sense of productive leisure? For Goethe the answer is . . . nature,
whose rhythms, it was once thought, could not be accelerated, and
through our study of which intimations of timeless self-sameness
might prove a refuge and shape our own being in the world. How
are we to regain a footing “where everything is in flux of continual
change”? Here too, the answer for Goethe is nature, our home
world, whose inherent lawfulness, as evidenced in the unities of
life forms, can thus provide a secure base upon which to take our
next steps. How are we to know ourselves more completely? Nature is especially needed here to offset our tendency to over selfinvolvement and to return us to our original fullness of being. And
how are we to educate ourselves more truthfully? Since modern
education only brought us, in Goethe’s view, to become “blind with
seeing eyes,” he sought in nature a complement—not to mention
an antidote—whose truthfulness would bring us “to see with seeing eyes” that fullness of view, perspective and measure that is the
proper fruit of serious study. Our question: can our own sustained
reflection on these questions, beginning with freshman laboratory,
lead to lessons such as these as well?
By way of conclusion I would like to quote Nietzsche one last
time. Toward the end of his life (1889), he himself tried to capture
in one of his aphorisms “the European event” that was Goethe.
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This distillation lives up to his well-known boast that he “wrote
whole books in one sentence,”99 though in this case he is somewhat
more loquacious, for it took him a whole paragraph to epitomize
this extraordinary life:
Goethe—not a German event but a European one: a
grand attempt to overcome the eighteenth century
through a return to nature, through a going-up to the
naturalness of the Renaissance, a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century.—He bore within him its
strongest instincts: sentimentality, nature-idolatry, the
anti-historical, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary. . . . He called to his aid history, the natural sciences,
antiquity, likewise Spinoza, above all practical activity;
he surrounded himself with nothing but closed horizons; he did not sever himself from life, [rather] he
placed himself within it [that is, “at the very center of
the plenitude”]; nothing could discourage him and he
took as much as possible upon himself, above himself,
within himself. What he aspired to was totality; he
strove against separation of reason, sensuality, feeling,
will (—preached in the most horrible scholasticism by
Kant, the antipode of Goethe); he disciplined himself
to the whole, he created himself. . . . Goethe was, in an
epoch disposed to the unreal, a convinced realist; . . .
Goethe conceived of a strong, highly cultured human
being, skilled in all physical accomplishments, who,
keeping himself in check and having reverence for
himself, dares to allow himself the whole compass and
wealth of naturalness, [one] who is strong enough for
this freedom. . . . A spirit thus emancipated stands in
the midst of the universe with a joyful and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only what is separate and individual may be rejected, that in the totality everything
is redeemed and affirmed—he no longer denies. . . .
But such a faith is the highest of all possible faiths: I
have baptized it with the name . . . Dionysus.—100
Those who’ve read more widely in Nietzsche will recognize this
last act of baptism as extraordinary: there is no higher, nor deeper,
nor more original mode of being for Nietzsche than this aboriginal
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and creative life force that he identifies in the person of Goethe:
1) this rare independence from it’s times, 2) this extraordinary, if
circumspect, positivity, 3) this unlimited and deep interest in all
things, 4) this secure groundedness in practical, concrete reality,
5) this insistence on our original, primary experience, 6) this noble
distance from suffering, 7) this incomparable sense of measure,
and of course 8) this Olympian courage. If not Dionysus, then what
name or word would be appropriate?
Goethe and Nietzsche saw that we moderns have a hard choice
before us: between disaffection and engagement, between cynicism101 and wonder. Goethe somehow was able to affirm life, to
say YES!102
So we ask you tonight to consider this figure, how he might
move you to “discipline yourselves to the whole” and summon the
natural fecundity of your inherence.
And we ask you tonight “to place yourselves within life,” to
seek out what is primary and original and, daring to speak the language of discovery, to speak “poetically.103”
And we ask you tonight to “make time” for thoughtfulness,
that you transform the mundane with the joys of daily discovery,
that your life be rich and your days not ordinary ones.
One last comment: Eckermann observed that even until
Goethe’s last days (that is, into his eighty-third year), he was continually learning. May this be so for you as well.
Thank you.
NOTES
1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, #337; also
#664 (hereafter MR). Given as the annual Friday night “Dean’s Lecture”
to open the thirty-seventh academic year at St. John’s College, Santa Fe.
See MR #864. This talk is a further development of work begun in 1986
(see Levine, “The Political Philosophy of Nature, A Preface to Goethe’s
Human Sciences,” (hereafter Political Philosophy) Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 11 [1986]: 163-178). It was Thomas McDonald who introduced me to the work of Eric Heller and Karl Löwith, and all three
who introduced me to the depth of Goethe’s thinking; my debt to them
continues. For the ambiguity and greatness of Goethe’s “grand attempt,”
see Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, trans. John Ox-
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enford, (London: E. P. Dent, 1951 [1850]) (hereafter ECK), October 20,
1828.
2. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Hammondworth: Penguin, 1968 [1889])
(hereafter TI), 102.
3. “Analysis and Synthesis” (hereafter AS), in Goethe, Scientific Studies,
(hereafter SS), ed. and trans. Douglas Miller, Vol. 12 of Goethe: The Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 48. The publication of this collection of Goethe’s disparate scientific works has
provided a new occasion for further reflection about his “grand attempt.”
4. Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence and Concept of Phusis in Aristotle’s Physics B, 1,” in Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998) (hereafter Phusis), 183.
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Goethe; or, the Writer,” in Representative Men
(New York: Marsilio, 1995 [1850]), 195.
6. ECK January 4, 1824, May 2, 1824, February 18 and 19, 1829.
7. ECK February 26, 1824.
8. ECK March 1, 1830.
9. Outline of a Theory of Color (hereafter OTC), in SS, #743; see also
note 21.
10. Nietzsche, “The Wanderer and His Shadow,” in Human all too
Human, A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdate (Cambridge:
University of Cambridge Press, 1986) Vol. II, Part II, #109, 336.
11. Letter to Zelter, June 7, 1825; in Löwith, Karl, “The Historical Background of European Nihilism,” “The Fate of Progress,” Nature, History,
and Existentialism, and Other Essays in the Philosophy of History
(Evanston, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1966) 4, 156-7; From Hegel
to Nietzsche, the Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1964), 27-8, 177-181 (hereafter HN); also
MR #480.
12. MR #474.
13. MR #479.
14. MR #770.
15. HN, 226.
16. “The Enterprise Justified,” in On Morphology, SS, 61.
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17. The ego or modern self is doubtful of all but bare existence, where
even the externality, the worldness of the world, is in question.
18. For an interesting reflection on the problem of the subject-object polarity, see Heidegger, Phusis, 188.
19. A modern irony: man is least at home in a world of his own conception.
20. ECK September 24, 1827.
21. ECK September 18, 1823. By contrast, all of Goethe’s poetry was insistently “occasional,” that is objectively motivated: “The world is so
great and rich, and life so full of variety, that you can never want for occasions for poems. But they must be occasioned [poems] [Gelegenheitsgedichte]: that is to say, reality [Wirklichkeit] must give both impulse and
material. A particular event becomes universal and poetic by the very circumstance that it is treated by a poet. All my poems are occasioned
poems, suggested by real life, and having therein a firm foundation.” A
radically different orientation and tone is apparent here. See also January
29, 1826 and MR ##337, 393, 119.
22. MR #935.
23. ECK January 29, 1826: also MR #1119.
24. ECK May18.24.
25. ECK January 29, 1826.
26. MR #1031; ECK May 2.1829.
27 .A comparison with Nietzsche is appropriate here.
28. ECK March, 14, 1830; also December 21, 1831; and “Significant
Help Given by an Ingenious Turn of Phrase” (hereafter ITP), in SS, 39.
29. ECK April 14, 1824; also “The Content Prefaced,” (hereafter CP) in
On Morphology, SS, 67, and HN, 6-7.
30. On the Parts of Animals, I.v. 645a16, 19-27.
31. Fortunate Encounter (hereafter FE), SS, 18.
32. “The Germans,” Goethe notes, “have a word for the complex of existence present in the physical organism, Gestalt [or structured form] . . .
[whereby] an interrelated whole is identified, defined, and fixed in character. But if we look at all these Gestalten [all these forms], especially organic ones, we will discover that nothing in them is permanent, nothing is
at rest or defined—everything is in flux of continual motion. This is why
the Germans frequently and fittingly make use of [another] word Bildung
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[formation] to describe [both] the end product and what is in process of
production as well.” “The Purpose Set Forth,” in On Morphology, SS, 63.
33. ITP, 40.
34. CP,. 69; also Eric Heller, “Goethe and the Idea of Scientific Truth,” in
The Disinherited Mind (hereafter Heller) (New York: Meridian, 1959), 10.
35. Metamorphosis of Plants (hereafter MoP), in SS, 60, 67.
36. MoP, 76.
37. OTC #743.
38. ECK May 18, 1824; also January 17, 1830.
39. This is the “modern cave.” We may not be disposed at first to include
the philosophers among the “opinion makers” parading above and behind
the chained onlookers in Plato’s cave (Republic VII). But they are wordsmiths and as such we are indebted to them for our language and lenses
as well; see also Hegel, “Preface,” Phenomenology of Spirit, trans, A. V.
Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), #33, 19-20: “In modern
time the individual finds the abstract ready made . . . . Hence the task
nowadays consists . . . in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity
so as to give actuality to the universal and impart to it spiritual life.”
40. MR #1364.
41. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, II.
42. “These attempts at division also produce many adverse effects when
carried to an extreme. To be sure, what is alive can be dissected into its
component parts, but from these parts it will be impossible to restore it
and bring it back to life.” See “The Purpose Set Forth,” in SS, 63. The
natural plenitude is now compounded exponentially by the analytical dissolution or decomposition of wholes; cp. Heidegger’s characterization
that the original “atomic bomb” is to be found here in our modern analytical disassociation or explosion of all things into bits, parts and particles. See Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poety, Language, Thought,
trans. Albert Hofstader (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 168.
43. And thus the diminished reality of those who think that a home is
bricks and mortar, and humans their chemical makeup.
44. Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, II, AT, 19-34. How
someone could even think this is worth further thought.
45. A science that had given up trying to explain our experience was simply incomprehensible—not to mention infuriating—to one so firmly
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rooted in the actual (“at the very center of the plenitude”). “The Extent to
Which the Idea ‘Beauty Is Perfection in Combination with Freedom’ May
be Applied to Living Organisms,” in SS, 22; also ECK September 2, 1830;
see also Goethe’s longstanding debate with the Newtonian school and their
tendency to substitute secondary for primary phenomena; OTC ##176,
718.
46. “The Enterprise Justified,” in On Morphology, SS, 61.
47. In this regard one might want to compare Goethe’s and Nietzsche’s
respective attempts to “stave off the nihilistic consequences of modern
science” See David Lawrence Levine, “A World of Worldless Truths, An
Invitation to Philosophy” (hereafter Worldless Truths)in The Envisioned
Life: Essays in Honor of Eva Brann (Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2008), 163.
48. OTC #158.
49. AS, 48.
50. ECK September 2, 1830; also Heller, 16.
51. MR #430: gemeine Menschen verstand (not “common sense”); cf.
“Empirical Observation and Science,” (hereafter EOS) SS, 25.
52. “Naively”: see Levine, Political Philosophy, 163-78.
53. MR #664; also ECK January 29, 1826: “People always talk of the
study of the ancients; but what does that mean, except that it says, turn
your attention to the real world.”; see also OTC #358. Yet as we shall see
Goethe is not an ancient but seeks to carve out a middle position between
ancient and modern science. While there is deep agreement with Aristotle
about our experience of nature in terms of wholes, there is disagreement
about what is eternal. In making form eternal, Aristotle, he said, was
prone to “precipitousness.” By contrast, for him it is the process, not the
form, which abides. “Everything is in flux of continual motion.”
54. “There is no worse mistake in physics or any science than to treat secondary things as basic and . . . to seek an explanation for the basic things
in secondary ones” (OTC #718). It’s as if we were “to enter a palace by
the side door” and thereafter base our description of the whole on our
first, one-sided impression. See “General Observation” (hereafter GO),
SS, 42 and OTC, 160); also, #177, 716 and its application to the “grievous” Newtonian error at #176.
55. See Heidegger, Phusis: “The act of self-unfolding emergence is inherently a going-back-into-itself. This kind of becoming present is phusis.
But it must not be thought of as a kind of built-in ‘motor’ that drives something, nor as an ‘organizer’ on hand somewhere, directing the thing.
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Nonetheless, we might be tempted to fall back on the notion that phuseidetermined being could be a kind that makes themselves. So easily and
spontaneously does this idea suggest itself that it has become normative
for the interpretation of living nature in particular, a living being has been
understood as an ‘organism.’ No doubt a good deal of time has yet to pass
before we learn to see that the idea of ‘organism’ and of the ‘organic’ is a
purely modern, mechanistic teleological concept, according to which
‘growing things’ are interpreted as artifacts that make themselves. Even
the word and concept ‘plant’ takes what grows as something ‘planted,’
something sown and cultivated” (195), and “But is not phusis then misunderstood as some sort of self-making artifact? Or is this not a misunderstanding at all but the only possible interpretation of phusis, namely,
as a kind of techne? This almost seems to be the case, because modern
metaphysics, in the impressive terms of . . . Kant, conceives of ‘nature’ as
a ‘technique’ such that this ‘technique’ that constitutes the essence of nature provides the metaphysical ground for the possibility, or even the necessity, of subjecting and mastering nature through machine technology”
(220).
56. GO, 42.
57. ECK May 12, 1825; also AS, 48.
58. ECK April 11, 1827.
59. FE p. 20.
60. “The Influence of Modern Philosophy,” (hereafter IMP) in SS, 28.
61. MoP #77.
62. MoP #84.
63. OTC #175.
64. EOS, 25.
65. OTC #665. There are times when Goethe seems to anticipate Husserl’s
phenomenological approach, in particular in “The Experiment as Mediator Between Object and Subject” [hereafter EMOS], in SS, 16, and IALO,
22, where the rigor and thoroughness of something like “eidetic variation”
seems to be proposed. The question is living form: “We cannot find
enough points of view nor develop ourselves enough organs of perception
to avoid killing it when we analyze it,” that is, multiple adumbrations
may give us a kind of whole but at the risk of rendering the outcome a
‘mental composition’ (as in Kant). It would be interesting to see how
Husserl and Heidegger treat life in its original vitality. See also OTC #166.
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66. “Preface,” OTC,. 159. We’ve taken the liberty to add the specification
“modern scientific” to abstraction. Throughout his OTC Goethe addresses the problems of scientific cognition and its tendency to excessive
abstraction (##310, 716, 754, and p. 162). For Goethe, as for Hegel, this
tendency is consequential and reckless. See note 52.
67. EOS, 25.
68. “Polarity,” in SS, 155; OTC #175; Letter to Herder, May 17, 1778 (in
Heller, 10).
69. OTC #732 (“expanded empiricism”).
70. “On Granite,” in SS, 132.
71. “A Study Based on Spinoza,” in SS, 8.
72. Despite Kant’s denial of such a human faculty in his Critique of Teleological Judgment, Goethe found a window of opportunity. He wrote that
Kant had “a roguishly ironic way of working: at times he seemed determined to put the narrowest limit on our ability to know things, and at
times, with a casual gesture, he pointed beyond the limits he himself had
set.” The passage in Kant that Goethe alludes to reads thus: “We can . . .
think [of a kind of] understanding which [unlike our discursive one
is] . . . intuitive, [and] proceeds from the synthetical-universal (the intuition of the whole as such) to the particular, i.e. from the whole to the
parts. . . . It is here not at all requisite to prove that such an intellectus archetypus is possible, but only that we are led to the idea of it—which too
contains no contradiction—in contrast to our discursive understanding,
which has need of images (intellectus ectypus) and to the contingency of
its constitution.” However, Goethe then drew the opposite conclusion:
“Why should it not also hold true in the intellectual area that through an
intuitive perception of eternally creative nature we may become worthy
of participating spiritually in its creative process?” he wonders. “Impelled
from the start by an inner need, I had striven unconsciously and incessantly toward primal image and prototype, and had even succeeded in
building up a method of representing it which conformed to nature. Thus
there was nothing further to prevent me from boldly embarking on this
‘adventure of reason’ (as the sage of Konigsberg himself called it).”
“Judgment through Intuitive Perception” (hereafter JIP), in SS, 31-2; also
EMOS, 11-17. Cf. Kant’s “aesthetic normal idea” in Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment, §17.
73. OTC #177; if we deny this faculty of intuitive perception we have no
real wholes.
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74. Letter to Herder, May 17, 1787: “I am very close to discovering the
secret of the creation and organization of plants. . . . The crucial point
from which everything else must needs spring. . . . The Urpflanze is to
be the strangest creature in the world. . . . After this model [visual formula] it will be possible to invent plants ad infinitum, which will all be
consistent...would possess an inner truth and necessity. And the same law
will be applicable to everything alive” (Heller, 10). Also OTC #175, “Polarity,” in SS, 155.
75. Urpflanze is often translated as “symbolic plant.” While this rendering
might be helpful if we keep a strictly Goethean notion of symbol in mind
(as in MR #314), this translation more often misdirects us if it suggests
to the reader either a mental abstraction or a literary device. Rather it
seeks to embody the manifold fruitfulness of nature “in potential” (“Outline for a General Introduction to Comparative Anatomy, Commencing
with Osteology” (hereafter GICA), in SS, 118).
76. “All is leaf.” MoP #119; OTC #120.
77. FE, 20; ECK November 14, 1823.
78. Letters to Schiller, February 10, 14, 1787 (in Heller, 20).
79. Hegel too—who otherwise was well disposed to Goethe’s project, indeed helped Goethe see how it fit into the larger scheme of the development of ideas—Hegel too nevertheless failed to see the Urpflanze as
anything but an abstracted archetype (See Hegel, The Letters, trans. Clark
Butler and Christiane Seiler [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1984], 681-711; HN, 11).
80. CP, 68-9. And we read in the Metamorphosis of Plants of the calyx
that it “betrays its composite origins in its more or less deep incisions or
divisions.”
81. ITP, 41.
82. OTC, 166. This may sound like ‘deconstruction,’ yet we would have
to consider whether it represents a true break with analytical thinking, as
Goethe seeks to do here.
83. CP, 69. Just as it led to his “discovering” the Ur-principle of the plant
kingdom, so Goethe is led in his other studies to “postulate” one for the
mammal family: “In the process I was soon obliged to postulate a prototype against which all mammals could be compared as to points of agreement and divergence. As I had earlier sought out the archetypal plant I
now aspired to find the archetypal animal; in essence the concept or idea
of the animal.”
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84. GICA, 118.
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
85. Letter to Herder, May 17, 1787; OTC #175; “Polarity,” 155.
86. ITP, 41 (“ . . . my whole method relies on derivation”).
87. Aristotle’s eidos is not subject to metamorphosis. On the other side,
in Darwin the metamorphosis of form is not an unfolding of immanent
form but the haphazard “evolution of species” and creative adaptation on
the part of active wholes becomes “random selection.” See note 51. My
thanks to John Cornell for his helping me think this through.
88. OTC, #720.
89. OTC, #109.
90. MR #504.
91. ITP, 39. Also “If we take the significant dictum ‘know thyself’ and
consider it, we mustn’t interpret it from an ascetical standpoint. It does
not by any means signify the kind of self-knowledge advocated by our
modern hypochondriacs, humorists, and ‘Heautotimorumenoi’ [self-torturers], but quite simply means: pay some attention to yourself, watch
what you are doing so that you come to realize where you stand vis-à-vis
your fellows and the world in general. This needs no psychological selftorture; any capable person knows and appreciates this. It is good advice
and of the greatest practical advantage to everyone (MR, #657).” He objects only to those isolating tendencies of the subjective sciences and psychologies that are heir to the fateful alienation, if not divorce, of the ego
from the world.
92. ECK April 10, 1829.
93. ITP, 39.
94. MR #935; the whole passage reads “let him find a girl or a world, no
matter which, and he will become whole.” This is typical (see Eric Heller,
“Goethe in Marienbad,” in The Poet’s Self and The Poem, (London:
Athione Press, 1976).
95. MR #442 (“Try to do your duty and you’ll soon discover what you’re
like.”); also ##770, 935; ECK January 29, 1826.
96. ECK February 13, 1829.
97. HN, 226; also ECK October 18, 1827: In a conversation with Hegel
about the potential for modern sophistry of the “dialectic disease,”
Goethe says: “Let us only hope that these intellectual arts and dexterities
are not frequently misused, and employed to make the false true and
the true false. . . . The study of nature preserves me from such a disease.
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For here we have to deal with the infinitely and eternally true, which
throws off as incapable everyone who does not proceed purely and honestly with the treatment and observation of his subject. I am also certain
that many a dialectic disease would find a wholesome remedy in the
study of nature.”
98. ECK January 2, 1824; also March 12, 1828.
99. TI, #51.
100. Ibid., #49; cf. MR #864.
101. ECK January 2, 1824; letter to Zelter, June 18, 1831 (in HN, 27).
102. See also ECK January 24, 1825, October 12, 1825; February 1, 1827;
October 18, 1827; February 12, 1827; MR ##191 and 1121. See Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, passim. This affirmation is what Nietzsche found most admirable, indeed he was envious of this, for it was not
available to him. See “Afterword: Goethe and Nietzsche,” in Levine,
Worldless Truths, 163-65.
103. “A More Intense Chemical Activity in Primordial Matter,” SS, 137.
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Special Section:
Justice
Editor’s Note
In November of 2012, O. Carter Snead, Professor of Law at Notre
Dame Law School and Director of the Notre Dame Center for
Ethics and Culture, invited five tutors from St. John’s College in
Annapolis to speak at the Center’s thirteenth annual fall conference
entitled The Crowning Glory of the Virtures: Exploring the Many
Facets of Justice.
The following five papers were delivered on a panel session,
together with a sixth: “The Relevance of Lay Views on Punishment
to Criminal Justice” by Christopher Slobogin, Professor of Law
and Psychiatry at Vanderbilt Law School. A greatly expanded version of the paper was published the following month: Christopher
Slobogin and Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, “Putting Desert in its
Place,” 65 Stanford Law Review 77 (January 2013). The article can
be accessed online at the following URL:
http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/sites/default/files/
Slobogin-65-Stan-L-Rev-77.pdf
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The Actual Intention of Plato’s
Dialogues on Justice and Statesmanship
Eva Brann
71
Cicero famously said of Socrates that he was the one who brought
philosophy down from heaven to earth. This must be some other
Socrates than the one of the Platonic dialogues, perhaps
Xenophon’s of the Memorabilia. After all, even the comic Socrates
of Aristophanes’s Clouds is a meteorologist, a watcher of the heavens, though he does it hoisted up in a basket, butt up. Of course,
he is a sky watcher, since that is where the vaporous and loquacious
Clouds—Aristophanes’s comic version of the Forms—are to be
found. Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that
Socrates connected earthly matters, such as politics, to the invisible
heavens, the realm of the forms.
There are three Platonic dialogues overtly and extendedly concerned with politics. The first, the second longest of all the dialogues, is the Republic, in Greek Politeia. It bears the subtitle,
added in antiquity, “On the Just.” The second is the Statesman, in
Greek Politikos; its ancient subtitle was “On Kingship.” And the
third, the Laws, Nomoi in Greek, subtitled “On Legislation,” is by
far the longest.
In the Republic Socrates is both narrator and main interlocutor.
In the Statesman he is the originating occasion of the dialogue but
not a participant. He sits it out as an auditor, perhaps at times somewhat skeptical; the leading speaker is a visitor, or stranger, from
Elea, Parmenides’s hometown. Finally, the Laws don’t even take
place in Athens but in Crete, and Socrates doesn’t appear at all,
though there is an anonymous visitor, a stranger from Athens. Who
doubts that the Laws is a work of practical politics, in fact the
mother of constitutions? As the Athenian says: “Our logos . . . is
of cities, and frameworks and law-giving” (678a). Perhaps we
might even say that the farther Socrates is from a dialogue the more
it is merely earthly.
When I speak, in my title for this brief talk, about “The Actual
Intention” of the first two of these dialogues, I imply that in them
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all is not as it seems. Here is Rousseau’s opinion of the Republic,
taken from the first book of his Émile: “Those who judge books
merely by their titles take this for a treatise on politics, but it is the
finest treatise on education ever written.” And, indeed, the central
books of the ten that comprise the Republic are taken up with the
ontology, the philosophical framework, that must underlie education, and with the ensuing education itself. To be sure, the education discussed is that of the philosopher kings who will found and
maintain that best Politeia, the civic framework with which the Republic is concerned (473c).
And yet again, neither this civic framework for the best city,
which will be superintended by the philosopher kings, nor its justice is actually the intended topic of the Republic. For recall that
this city is devised as a model writ large of the soul (368d), a model
from which we can conveniently read off the nature of individual,
internal justice. The book we call the Republic rests on are two
tremendous assumptions: One is that political frameworks—not
only the best but even more strikingly the worst—are analogous
to, enlarged projections of, the soul. And the other, even prior one,
is that the soul ought to be our first topic of inquiry, and it is only
on the way to it that we discover political ideals: Psychology absolutely precedes Politics; Souls make States.
Thus it would be a fair argument to say that the particular political justice which is generally understood to be the peculiar contribution of the Republic is, in fact, a civic construction meant in
the first instance to incorporate a notion appropriate to internal,
psychic justice. For the three castes of the best city are delineated
in such a way that the famous definition of justice as “doing one’s
own business,” which falls out from the community’s constitution,
is applicable to the soul as Socrates conceives it. In other words,
the just city is built from the first to be an enlarged soul.
Let me outline how Socrates makes it work. These castes are
functionally defined, each by its own specific task within the city.
Moreover, they form a hierarchy of command and responsibility
such that any one caste’s transgression is in fact rebellion, factional
strife. Such internal dissension is, however, nearly the worst fate—
as any Greek knew or should have learned in the course of the
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Peloponnesian War (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 2.82)—
that could befall a political community, because it is the prelude to
tyranny. To reiterate: for Socrates, the maladjusted and dysfunctional soul is the antecedent cause of political evil.
It is to me an unresolved problem whether Socrates was in politics the anti-egalitarian he is sometimes accused of having been.
In his demeanor, and what matters more, his conversations, he
seems as populist as possible, not much impressed by smart young
aristocrats about to go to the bad, like Critias, Charmides and Alcibiades; moreover, in the Republic he says of a democracy that
it’s “handy for searching out a politeia” (577d)—which happens
to be what he himself is doing right then, down in the city’s most
democratic district, its harbor. The solution to the problem depends
on how we look at the kallipolis, the “fair city” that he’s found or
made: Is it and its justice a serious political proposal, on a par in
earnestness with Aristotle’s Politics in antiquity or Locke’s, Montesquieu’s, and Rousseau’s works at the beginning of modernity?
In view of the motive for the constitution of Socrates’s city, that is
a reasonable question.
To lend my exposition some specificity let me give you the
briefest reminder of the model city, both as best and as paradigmatic for the soul—and let me once more anticipate the result: The
human soul too will be a hierarchy of functional parts, and it too
will sport the virtues displayed by the city, now operating in individual human beings much as they did in the community.
At the bottom of the city’s castes, then, are the craftsmen and
tradesmen whose business it is to perform their particular work
well and profitably, and to attend just to those assignments and no
other. Beyond that, they are pretty free and prosperous, and thus
satisfied. They are without a specific caste virtue other than competence, for they are driven by appetite rather than character. But
they are the class for the particular operation of the most encompassing virtue, justice. Justice is the virtue of the part and the
whole, of each part doing its own thing and thereby preserving the
integrity of the whole. (Temperance is another non-specific virtue,
that of agreeableness in the sense that each caste is accepting of its
position in the hierarchy.)
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The middle caste consists of the warriors who guard the city,
and it is the training ground of kings. This caste is defined by their
spiritedness, and it is the locus of honor, the source of a soldier’s
satisfaction through danger. These warriors do have a particular
virtue, courage.
The ruling caste is comprised of the philosopher kings, whose
virtue is wisdom and in whom the intellectual part, thoughtfulness,
dominates. Their satisfaction is the highest; their happiness is subject to interruption by the duties of governing. This hardship is,
however, alleviated by their affection for the young they teach—
and by a more selfish fact: that the city is essentially set up to protect philosophizing, one of quite a few signs that all is not as it
seems in this Republic.
There are certainly some other odd, even bizarre, aspects to be
observed in this political device. Its strict hierarchy of command
is inverted in respect to prosperity; the lowest caste, the craftsmen
and merchants are the rich ones, the warriors are allowed no
wealth. At the end of the books on the construction and the deconstruction of this city, we’re told outright that it is “a model laid up
in heaven” for anyone to look at who “wishes to found himself;
he’ll practice its politics only and no other” (592b; italics mine).
In other words, we really have all along been participating in soulconstruction rather than city-construction. But oddest is the notion
that the governors of this “fair city,” the philosopher kings, don’t
want to rule it—indeed, this reluctance is a criterion of fitness.
In fact, the education is set up so as to cancel political ambition—indeed, to capture the love of future kings for another realm,
to alienate them from the earthly city. For they are to have a carefully graduated program of learning, elevating them beyond the
world of appearances into the world of forms, the world of pure
trans-earthly being. That’s why Cicero’s dictum that I began
with—about Socrates bringing philosophy down for the heavens
to the earth—sounds so, well, inept.
In particular, the study that is the capstone of the education,
that levers the learner into this world of being and drags him out
of the terrestrial slime, is dialectic (531 ff.), of which more in a
moment. Now for Socrates—to the astonishment and disgust of a
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practical statesman like Jefferson, who waded contemptuously
through the “whimsies” and “nonsense” of the Republic (to Adams,
July 15, 1814) – the study of supra-worldly forms, of beings, is the
proper foundation for government. This is especially the case insofar as statesmanship is concerned with the virtues of justice, temperance, courage, and wisdom. For obviously, to properly locate
these in the city, in the civic community, it is necessary to know
them. But to know them is not a matter of empirical research but
of dialectical (that is, ontological) inquiry, a matter of the study of
beings as beings, the study of Being itself. So the education does,
after all, have a political purpose—if we agree that ethics, the inculcation and preservation of virtue, is the end of the polis and its
politikoi, the civic community and its statesmen. I do not think any
contemporary citizen, attached to our Madisonian tradition, can
really agree—nor wholly disagree—and that is one of the many
reasons why the Republic is indispensable to political inquiry. For
it raises the question of justice in this original way: Is justice in the
sense of the Republic, as the proper adjustment of the faculties of
the soul—in particular the ready subordination of the lower parts
to reason—the condition for political unity and civic peace? From
this question falls out a whole slew of problems: Can we commit
ourselves to a psychology of faculties such as those involved in
the Socratic psychic constitution? And if so, is the adjustment of
the functions and their subordination to reason a persuasive analysis of psychological soundness? And if so, does it follow that the
adjustment is a political—or even a social—task? And if so, can a
democracy produce government wise enough to accomplish these
psychic adjustments, to induce virtue?
Before going on to the Statesman, I want to return to Rousseau:
Is the real business of the Republic indeed education, rather than
politics? Socrates never says so explicitly, nor can he, since the
program there presented is not just an education for leadership
loosely speaking, but very specifically the education of kings—
and, as Socrates makes very clear, of queens (540c). It is an education very specifically geared to the Republic’s polis—although
it will, amazingly, become the general model of higher, liberal education, lasting until the middle of the last century.
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Nevertheless, I think Rousseau is right. Indeed, some aspects
of this “fair city” have been politically and socially realized: the
equality of men and women and (to some extent) the community
of marriage partners and children. But by and large it has remained,
blessedly, “a pattern laid up in heaven,” for it has its repulsive aspects. Its educational program, on the other hand, has, as I said,
cast loose and become viable even in a democracy, because what
is nowadays called its elitism is not an intellectually integral part
of this kind of learning. In fact, the college where my two translation partners and I teach, St. John’s College, is a remarkably close
incarnation of it, and it revels in its intellectual egalitarianism. That
is one more element in an argument that political justice is not the
actually intended topic of the Republic.
So now to the dialogue called The Statesman, a conversation
to which Socrates only listens. Here, at one point, things become
startlingly explicit. Near the very middle of the conversation the
stranger makes an announcement under the form of a rhetorical
question asked in that throwaway tone that alerts the reader of dialogues to a crucial turn. It concerns the ostensible search for the
true statesman. “Has it been proposed,” he asks, “for the sake of
this man himself rather than for our becoming more dialectical
about all things” (285d)? And the answer is: plainly for learning
to think dialectically. We thought we were learning about governing well; it turns out we are involved in a logical training exercise
using a universally applicable technique—dialectic, the expertise
of dividing and collecting subjects by terms.
Socrates is, once more, not a participant in this conversation,
and this dialectic is not quite his dialectic. His dialectic was a way
by which apt students, through being questioned cleverly and answering carefully, had their opinions, their mere assumptions
about the way things are, demolished and then reconstituted, so
that they might be led up into a solid knowledge of the true
sources of these things. It was, in short, an ascending way of learning. The stranger’s dialectic is a method that works the other way
around. From a tacitly assumed overview of the whole, the accomplished dialectician makes divisions (diaireseis). When he has
arrived at what will in later time (when this method has turned
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77
into the technique of classification) be called the “lowest species,”
he goes back up, making a collection of terms. These add up to a
definition. Many of our students begin by thinking that that is
what Socrates does when he philosophizes—he makes definitions.
Of course a collection of terms is not what Socrates looks for
when he asks, say, the question, “What is justice?”—but it is a
preparation for an answer.
Is definition-making, however, what the Elean Stranger believes to be the profitable end product of the dialectic for which
the statesman is only an example? No, nothing so unsubtle, as I’ll
try to show in a minute.
Not that this more subtle use of division is likely to have satisfied the auditing Socrates. We three translators of the Statesman
express this sense of his skepticism by our assignment of the last
speech of the dialogue. Someone says: “Most beautifully . . .
you’ve completed for us the kingly man, stranger, and the statesman.” Now the stranger’s interlocutor in the Statesman is a young
man who is also called Socrates. There is some question among
scholars whether the older or the younger Socrates speaks this valedictory line. We thought our Socrates, the older one, couldn’t have
thought it, and so he didn’t say it.
Here is what the stranger does with the dialectical art of division. First, the whole dialogue is a composition of divisions. To
see its handsome design, that of a tapestry, it is helpful to work
through its dialectical episodes and the way they are sewn together,
like the pieces of a figured robe. The beauties of this dialogue are
not imaginatively visual but logically structural; this text is a texture. But this cloaklike characteristic is not just a stylistic formalism. It signals that this new dialectic is a craft that produces
practical results. Its physical exemplification, and the great
metaphor of the dialogue, is weaving, cloak-making in particular.
And making intertwined, protective, enveloping compositions
turns out to be the royal art, the discerning and composing craft of
the statesman. This is no transcendentally derived wisdom, but a
technical expertise. For the subject of the Statesman, as contrasted
with the Republic, is unambiguously political; it is concerned with
human herds. However, from the vantage point of the king of
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crowds, of herds, the internal relations disposing the soul of an individual human being, which are the concern of the Republic, recede; they lie below the royal oversight. And with that distance
diminishes the interest in justice, which was, after all, the right relation of the soul’s parts. So justice is indeed no big concern of the
statesman, be it of the man or of the dialogue named after him.
So the statesman, who is, thus, not a philosopher king but an
expert ruler, sees each soul from afar as displaying one permanent
characteristic. My colleague Peter Kalkavage will point out the exceedingly interesting consequences for statesmanship of what he
discerns and what, again as a consequence, true statesmanship must
be. It is, its royal denomination notwithstanding, an expertise much
closer, I think, to our idea of politics than the philosophical rule of
the Republic.
Then what happens to the stranger’s startling claim, with
which I began my remarks on the Statesman? How can the dialogue’s real purpose be an exercise in dialectic when it will be
shown to be so precise and practical a doctrine about managing
multitudes?
Well, the Statesman is neatly reflexive. It is, one might say, a
self-reentrant dialogue. For by relentless dialectical division the
stranger establishes the precise location of the statesman in the
whole economy of crafts and sciences, materials and products,
regimes and rulers, virtues and vices. And in the course of doing
that, he is indeed also giving a lesson in the method of division to
young Socrates. It may even be that his teaching actually has more
effect on a finer young man who is also present, a second silent
listener, one of old Socrates’s two favorite partners in inquiry,
namely Theaetetus (the other being Glaucon in the Republic).
Then here’s the denouement: The art of dialectic, the ability
to distinguish perspicaciously the parts of any subject, an art for
which weaving is a very precise figure, is the true statesman’s expertise. Statesmanship, then, is the craft of setting up a civic
framework, a loom upon which the citizens of various temperaments, here the warp and woof, are interwoven into a cloaklike
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texture, which represents at once the body politic and its protective cover, as if to say that a well-interlaced citizenry will wrap
itself in its own constitution for security.
On this conclusion old Socrates may, after all, have smiled.
For among the Greeks weaving is always a women’s art, and that
women might match men as rulers is a teaching of his Republic.
So ends the Statesman, a dialogue that sets forth a doctrine of governing which requires an expertise for which participation in the
dialogue is itself the training.
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Reflections on Justice in Fyodor
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
Chester Burke
The last book of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is entitled
“A Judicial Error” because Dmitri Karamazov, the eldest Karamazov brother, is incorrectly found guilty of murdering his father Fyodor. Nearly all the spectators in the packed courtroom are stunned
by the verdict, despite the fact that most of them had assumed that
Dmitri had indeed committed the murder. Only his brother
Alyosha, his recently captivated love Grushenka, and his other
brother Ivan are certain of Dmitri’s evidence—Alyosha, because
of the innocence on Dmitri’s face when he said he hadn’t done the
deed; Grushenka, because “Dmitri isn’t the sort of man who would
lie” (683);* and Ivan, despite his loathing of Dmitri, because he
visits Fyodor’s illegitimate son Smerdyakov the night before the
trial and forces him to confess to the murder. Later that night,
Smerkdyakov commits suicide. Ivan’s testimony becomes worthless when, suffering from brain fever, he goes mad on the witness
stand, claiming that the only witness to this stunning revelation is
the Devil.
The first chapter of this final book is entitled “The Fatal Day.”
In the paragraph that concludes the previous chapter, Alyosha says
to himself, “Yes, with Smerdyakov dead, no one will believe Ivan’s
testimony; but he will go and testify . . . God will win!” (655) Having heard these three powerful words, “God will win,” the reader
is thrown into the human drama, that is, the trial. How can the truth
emerge from such a gigantic public spectacle, in which every one
of the participants has entered with his private opinions and passions? Dostoevsky characterizes the spectators, standing “in a
closely packed lump, shoulder to shoulder” (657), as having been
* Page references are to Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov,
trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Strauss
& Giroux, 2002).
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81
enflamed by impatience. The women favor Dmitri’s acquittal and
the men, many of whom have been personally insulted by Dmitri,
wish to see him punished. The prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovich, trembles at having to oppose a famous Petersburg defense attorney,
whom he feels has overshadowed him since their younger days in
Petersburg. He believes that everything is at stake in this trial, both
for himself and for Russia. Fetyukovich, the famous defense attorney, exudes an air of confidence. The reader may feel a little uneasy
when Dostoevsky describes his eyes as small and inexpressive:
“his physiognomy had something sharply birdlike about it, which
was striking” (660-61). The material evidence with which the
reader is so familiar, wrenched from its living context, is on display
in the middle of the courtroom.
The prosecutor, known for (and sometimes ridiculed for) his
passion for psychology, puts together an account that seems to
make sense of all the facts, even though the defense attorney, having digested the situation with astonishing rapidity, is able to discredit many of the witnesses. Readers take delight in this passage,
because they have previous knowledge of these witnesses and the
ugliness of their souls. The prosecutor tells the compelling story
of Dmitri finishing “a poem” (717) that culminates in the murder
of his father, the stealing of 3,000 rubles, and running off madly to
find his lover Grushenka, only to relinquish her to a man who
abused her as a young girl. The defense attorney then accuses the
prosecutor of writing his own novel, of being a psychological poet
whose psychology is two-pronged and therefore equally capable
of proving a given statement of fact and its opposite. He masterfully shows that only the totality of the facts— and not a single
one of them in isolation—speak against his client.
Though he claims to demonstrate the limitations of psychology, the defense attorney is in fact a far better psychologist than
the prosecutor. He argues persuasively that there was no money,
no robbery, and no murder—at least no murder committed by
Dmitri. Seeing far deeper into Smerdyakov’s soul than most, the
defense attorney gives good reasons why Smerdyakov could have
killed his natural father.
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Only the reader has the privilege of having witnessed Dmitri,
filled with loathing in front of his hateful father, pulling out a brass
pestle from his pocket—and then not using it. Why didn’t Dmitri
kill his father? “God was watching over me then,” Dmitri used to
say afterwards. This is another reference to a divine intervention
that seems to have no place in a court of justice. (Recall Alyosha’s
“God will win!”) Due to Fetyukovich’s skill in destroying each
part of the whole accusation, there is, however, a reasonable chance
that Dmitri will either be released or at worst given minimal punishment. But in the chapter entitled “A Sudden Catastrophe,”
Dmitri’s spurned lover Katya, ready to sacrifice her honor for his
brother Ivan, who has just been carried out of the court suffering
an attack of brain fever, comes forward with a letter from Dmitri
that she has been withholding. She presumably intends to use the
letter to save Dmitri, despite the fact that he has stolen 3,000 rubles
from her—the entirety of which she thinks he has spent in a single
drunken binge with her rival Grushenka that night before the murder. In this letter, written just two days before the murder, Dmitri
says that he will get hold of the money he has stolen from her, even
if he has to rob and kill his father to do so. The reader knows that
Katya asked Dmitri to send these 3,000 rubles to a relative in
Moscow, though she fully believed at the time that he would spend
the entire sum on Gurschenka. Two other facts must be remembered: 1) before the events of the novel, Dmitri lent Katya 5,000
rubles to cover up a financial indiscretion committed by her father;
2) Dmitri (who did not in fact steal the 3,000 rubles from his father)
spent only half of Katya’s 3,000 rubles during his wild night with
Grushenka. He retained the rest in a packet tied around his chest,
uncertain whether to return the unspent half to Katya (thus removing half of his disgrace), or to keep it for the opportunity of running
off with Grushenka.
It is only natural that the reader should be confused by the intricate adding and subtracting of monetary sums. Dostoevsky, always in need of money himself, deftly uses sums of money to show
how human beings struggle to regulate equality, honor, pride, and
justice among themselves.
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But back to the letter. This suddenly revealed document, an
apparent blueprint of the murder, gives “mathematical significance” (619) to the prosecutor’s case. And though the words
“mathematical significance” are a clear signal to readers of Dostoevsky that whatever is certain in this way is certainly not true, it
is equally certain that a jury will be very unlikely to yield a verdict
of not guilty in the face of such evidence.
Aware of the difficulty of achieving a verdict of not guilty, and
despite having just produced his own “demonstration” that there
was no money, robbery, or murder, Fetyukovich (whose name in
Russian suggests the words “jerk, drip, sourpuss”) addresses the
jury, changing his tone and his approach: “I have it in my heart to
speak out something more to you, for I also sense a great struggle
in your hearts and minds. . . Forgive my speaking of your hearts
and minds, gentlemen of the jury, but I want to be truthful and sincere to the end.” “I do not renounce one iota of what I have just
said, but suppose I did, suppose for a moment that I, too, agreed
with the prosecution that my unfortunate client stained his hands
with his father’s blood” (741).
This begins the second part of Fetyukovich’s summary to the
jury. Dostoevsky entitles the chapter “An Adulterer of Thought,”
without any comment on this astonishing title. Since the corpse of
a father is the only fact in the case that could speak against his
client, Fetyukovich tries to show that Fyodor was not at all a father.
He masterfully summarizes the most poignant scenes in the novel
in order to paint Fyodor in the worst possible light. He shows why
it would have been completely natural for Dmitri to have beaten
and killed his father (who is in truth not a father) with the fatal pestle (which the reader knows was not even the real murder weapon)
without intention or premeditation. “Such a murder is not a murder.
Such a murder is not a parricide, either. Such a murder can be considered parricide only out of prejudice” (747). The attorney then
invokes a passage from the gospel according to Matthew, and compares Dmitri’s plight to that of Christ. The most terrible punishment, but the only one by which Dmitri’s soul will be saved, would
be for the jury to overwhelm him with mercy. Only then would
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Dmitiri— horrified by his deed—which, according to the defense
attorney’s earlier argument, Dmitri had not done)—realize that he
was guilty before all people.
Fetyukovich “adulterates thought” by fabricating a dangerous
novel (“novel upon novel,” shouts the prosecutor [748]), a concoction that is all the more wicked because it is a false image of Father
Zosima’s teaching. And, more important, it is the opposite of what
Dostoevsky has spent his whole life attempting to articulate. Only
the prosecutor, “breathless, inarticulate, confused” and “shaking
with emotion” (748), has the courage to respond. Of course his response will receive no sympathy from the mass of spectators, especially the mothers and fathers, who have amazingly enough
become enraptured by the words of the adulterer. Though the prosecutor is vain and beaten down by a failed life, though his superficial psychology prevents him from understanding the motives
and actions of the human beings right in front of him, he knows
with certainty that one cannot kill and not kill at the same time,
that one cannot praise and immortalize a man who murders his father, and that a false image of Christ and religion have been fabricated by his talented competitor. The reader is easily irritated by
the just response of this pathetic man (the prosecutor will himself
die soon after the trial) to a powerful and dangerous speech that is
arguing for a new understanding of human justice, one that includes a notion of mercy which could only be found in God or in
the heart of an individual human being.
I have pointed out that Dmitri, the prosecutor, and the defense
attorney have all been accused of acting out novels. By his subtle
but powerful use of chapter titles, Dostoevsky himself takes the
harshest stance toward the defense attorney. The Russian word for
“adulterer” (or “fornicator”) is a variation of the word for “lover.”
Fetyukovich, who claims to be able to feel “invisible threads that
bind the defense attorney and the jury together,” whom everyone,
including himself, expects to pull off some kind of miracle by proving Dmitri innocent when he is guilty, ends up by “proving” Dmitri
guilty when in truth he is innocent. His call to regenerate not only
Dmitri but also Russia herself is met with rapture and enthusiastic
weeping among the spectators, and the reader too is likely to be
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sympathetic. When he pleads with the jury to show mercy to
Dmitri even if he did kill his father, he shows himself not to be a
seeker of truth but to be unjust—indeed, an adulterer of thought.
He is unjust because he portrays Christ as an enlightened and compassionate liberal rather than the Son of God, who died in order to
save human beings from the power of sin.
We can detest Fyodor Karamazov in the depths of our souls.
We can pity the children that he brought into the world. We can
wish that he were dead and wonder why such a man is alive. But
we cannot excuse the man who killed him. That man, Smerdyakov,
hangs himself from a nail on his wall with a brief note saying that
he alone is responsible for his own death. This extreme isolation
is what Dostoevsky sees as the dreadful future of a world that denies God. Instead of hanging an icon or image of God on the wall,
we will end up destroying ourselves. Dostoevsky the novelist, committed to real justice and truth, cannot allow the jury to be won
over by this adultery of thought, even though what results is a momentary injustice in a court of law. By entitling the next chapter
“Our Peasants Stood Up for Themselves,” he shows that he is
pleased that the peasants (who comprise half of the jury) are not
seduced by this highest and ultimately most dangerous form of seduction. Though their verdict was incorrect, the peasants understood a deeper truth and rightly stood up for it. Their hearts rejected
false novels.
But the real novel ends several months after Dmitri receives
his sentence. It ends with the burial of a ten-year old schoolboy,
Ilyusha. Dmitri had gravely insulted Ilyusha’s father, a retired and
drunken officer known as the Captain, by dragging him out of a
tavern and across town, pulling him by his wispy beard. Desperate
to provide for his family—his wife and older daughter are crippled
and ill—the Captain was employed by Fyodor, assisting him in
shady financial dealings. One of them was to buy up Dmitri’s
promissory notes so as to bring him to financial disgrace. Seeing
his father publicly humiliated, the young Ilyusha begged Dmitri to
forgive his father, “rushing up to everyone asking them to defend
him, but everyone laughed” (192). When Ilyusha’s schoolmates
heard about the incident they teased him mercilessly. The next day
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he angrily threw stones at them, but he himself received a great
blow to the chest. He came down with a fever, and died two days
after Dmitri was sentenced for the murder he did not commit.
Given Dostoevsky’s masterful juxtaposition of scenes and
events, it would be easy to connect Dmitri’s punishment with the
death of this young boy. As the proud and angry Katya says to
Alyosha, “Dmitri committed a rash and unjust act, a very ugly act”
(193). She commissions Alyosha to give a large sum of money to
the Captain in recompense for this act. The attempt at justice (in
truth Katya, herself recently injured by Dmitri, considers herself a
fellow sufferer) does not work at first. The Captain initially takes
the money, imagining a way out of abject poverty for himself and
his miserable family. But suddenly, shaking and tearful, flings
down the money at Alyosha’s feet. He will eventually take not only
this money, but much more from the generous, though proud,
Katya. But his son will nonetheless die and the doctors will not be
able to cure his family.
It was not unlikely that the previously consumptive Ilyushka’s
life would have been short. But that is not the point. All of us are
continually doing harm to our fellow human beings. While it does
not seem possible that any system of justice could regulate the
damages, we humans are always trafficking amongst one another,
exchanging goods and money in an attempt to achieve some kind
of fairness.
“Each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most
of all” (289). This puzzling statement, lying powerfully in the
background of the novel, is said repeatedly by Father Zosima
throughout the novel. I have tried to show that Fetyukovich’s version is a dangerous adulteration of this claim. Dmitri, Ivan,
Smerdyakov, and even Alyosha can be held responsible for the
death of their father. Yet only one human being killed Fyodor and
it is the responsibility of the legal system to find and punish that
human being. Dmitri had previously thrown his father to the floor
and brutally kicked him, suspecting that Fyodor was hiding
Grushenka from him. Though drunk, he had written the damning
letter. Ivan had tacitly given Smerdyakov permission to kill Fyodor
by leaving town on the day of the murder; even worse, he had spent
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much of the night before his departure listening for sounds in the
house, unconsciously anticipating and desiring that someone would
come and kill his dreadful father. Alyosha, distracted by the death
of his hero Zosima, and overwhelmed with grief by the dishonor
of Zosima’s rotting corpse, had forgotten to keep in contact with
Dmitri. But Smerdyakov, having spent his entire life serving a family whose members he despised—except for Ivan, whose respect
he craved—understood the character of these Karamazovs, at least
in its baser aspects. He was able to set up a scenario in which it
would be possible for him to kill Fyodor, who trusted him, and
then steal the 3,000 rubles for which Dmitri had claimed he would
risk all. With this money, Smerdyakov imagined that he could start
a new life. And only Ivan could get Smerdyakov to confess—Ivan,
who, though he hated bitterly both his father Fyodor and his
brother Dmitri, had a conscience deeper than he himself knew.
During their conversation about the murder, Smerdyakov comes
to understand the emptiness and dishonesty of Ivan’s thoughts,
though he understands nothing of Ivan’s heart. And in that understanding about his former idol, he gives up on life, which had never
offered him anything but pain and misery. Smerdyakov—far cleverer and wiser than even the most observant reader could suspect—
sees that Ivan is more like his father than any of the brothers.
The chain of responsibility is endless. Grushenka says in
court, “It all happened because of me” (682)—claiming responsibility both for Fyodor’s and Dmitri’s falling in love with her.
Shortly thereafter, she says of Katerina, who had tried to charm
her out of loving Dmitri, “She is the cause of everything” (683).
And at the time of Dmitri’s arrest, Grushenka, hearing that Dmitri
had supposedly killed his father, had cried, “I am the guilty one,
first and foremost, I am the guilty one!” (457)
But everyone gets the problem of justice wrong, precisely because it is impossible to see clearly into the heart of another
human being. Father Zosima immediately understands the danger
looming before the Karamazov family in the first chapters of the
novel. That is why he bows before Dmitri and encourages Alyosha
to look after him. But Zosima cannot control the outcomes stemming from human nature. He can only preach “active love”—a
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difficult and profound concept derserving of another talk—and he
can pray.
While I do not claim that the following is a solution to the
problem of human justice, I’d like to end this talk with a quotation
from Father Zosima:
If it were not for Christ’s Church, indeed there would
be no restraint on the criminal in his evildoing and no
punishment for it later, real punishment, that is, not a
mechanical one . . . , which only chafes the heart in most
cases, but a real punishment, the only frightening and
appeasing punishment which lies in the acknowledgement of one’s own conscience (64).
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Peaceniks and Warmongers:
The Disunity of Virtue
in Plato’s Statesman
Peter Kalkavage
89
I want to begin by saying how my theme is related to justice. Plato
and Aristotle often connect justice with wholeness. And it is wholeness—the whole of virtue and the whole of a political community—that is very much at issue, and at risk, in Plato’s Statesman.
Perhaps at risk as well is the wholeness of logos or discourse.
Plato’s mysterious stranger from Elea delights in division. In
the Sophist he uses the method of dividing genera or kinds to pin
down the elusive professor of wisdom. In the Statesman he uses
this same method, with some modifications, to show the genuine
statesman and king “naked and alone by himself” (304a). But the
stranger isn’t all about logic. Like Socrates, he enjoys images of
all sorts and regularly avails himself of their curious power to illuminate. In the Statesman, soon after the great myth about reversed
becoming, the stranger announces the need for paradigms in inquiry.
He tells young Socrates that they would do well in their search if
they came up with a paradigm that would, in its small and humble
way, help to reveal the magisterial form, the eidos, of the true king
(277d).
This paradigm, as we soon hear, is weaving (279b). Politics is
the master-art that weaves together all the other arts in the city and
bends them to its high purpose. But it is not until late in the dialogue, almost at the end, that the precise meaning of the paradigm
is explained. The true statesman, we discover, knows how to interweave courageous and moderate types of souls. To use the language of the paradigm, he combines the warp or hard woollen
threads, which resemble courageous natures, with the woof or soft
threads, which resemble moderate natures. Properly combined,
these human threads produce “the web of statesmanly action”
(311B). This web is the wisely constituted polis—the beautiful end
of politics conceived as a productive art.
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But the path to this beautiful end requires an account that the
stranger calls “somewhat astonishing”—astonishing because it
proceeds from the view that virtue is not a happy unity, in which
different portions of virtue are “friendly” to one another, as the
many say and as Socrates suggests in other dialogues. On the contrary, virtue has within it, and seems even to be defined by, a war
between courage and moderation. The stranger is unsparing in his
formulation. The two virtues, he says, “have a deep-seated enmity
toward one another and maintain an oppositional faction in many
of the things that are” (306b). The stranger, we must note, does not
ask Socrates’ question: What is virtue? Instead, he posits an opposition between two forms of virtue. This opposition, more than anything else in the dialogue, defines the political art.
To illustrate his point, the stranger urges young Socrates to consider the two forms (eidē) that come to light when we praise things
for their beauty—various doings and makings, whether of bodies
or of souls (306c). We praise things that manifest “keenness and
swiftness.” These can be the things themselves or their images—
the swift movement of a runner, for example, or a vase painting
depicting such a runner. The name for what underlies such praise
is andreia, “courage” or “manliness.” This is the form we are admiring when we praise the keen and the swift.
But we also praise what the stranger calls “the gentle form of
generation.” We praise as beautiful those actions and thoughts that
are quiet, modulated, slow, and careful. The name for this form is
orderliness or composure, kosmiotēs (307b) It refers to moderation
as the virtue of keeping things measured and undisturbed. We think
of things like a smooth transition in a piece of music or a soothing
tone of voice. To sum up, we are thoroughly contradictory in our
praise of beauty. We praise as beautiful those things that have a
manly look, and we also praise the look that is opposed to manliness. Furthermore, we blame as ugly both what is opposed to manliness and what is opposed to the opposite of manliness, that is,
what is opposed to moderation. We do all this, we should note, not
because we are inept but because beauty itself is self-opposed.
Shifting now from things that display opposed virtues to the
very natures of courage and moderation, the stranger refers to these
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as “looks [ideas] destined . . . to be split apart in hostile faction.”
He then turns to the people who have these natures in their souls,
not by choice or upbringing but by nature (307b-c). Faction is here
described as a feud between warring families. Members of each
family judge the beautiful and the good solely in terms of their
family virtue, and hate members of the other family simply because
they are in the other family. This love of Same and hate of Other
blinds each family to the common, if problematic, eidos of virtue
that both families share. Each family, by virtue of its virtue, is blind
to the virtue and beauty of the other. As a consequence, members
of neither family really know their own virtue, since they do not
know why and in what manner their characteristic virtue is beautiful and good. Because of this blindness and the mutual hate it engenders, the two families, though they live in cities, may be said
to occupy, in Hobbes’s phrase, a pre-political “state of nature” with
respect to virtue.
As if this situation weren’t bad enough, the stranger goes on to
say that the family feud between noble types is child’s play compared with the disease that is “the most hateful of all for cities”
(307d). It is here that the stranger shows why the two forms of
virtue, and the two opposed types of soul, constitute the central
problem of politics. Indeed, he demonstrates the urgent need of the
political art in the Reign of Zeus, the era in which the world has
been abandoned by its divine shepherd and guide.
The stranger gives a devastating portrait of what happens to
cities that fall prey to the ethos of peace at any cost. He refers, paradoxically, to the eros for composure (307e)—the only appearance
of this word in the dialogue—as if to say: “Look at these people,
young Socrates. To themselves they seem all calm and reserved,
but in fact they have a disordered desire for order. Why, they are
as crazy as a man in love!” Perhaps there is also the suggestion
that eros, for the stranger, is to be associated with what is soft or
tender rather than with the sort of tough love that Diotima describes
in the Symposium (203c-e). In any case, because of their unmeasured love of order, these people slip unwittingly into an unwarlike
condition and raise their children to be similarly unwarlike. The
condition spreads through the city like an infection and becomes
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more virulent with each generation. Since unmixed moderation
cannot accommodate itself to the aggression of an enemy, cannot
rouse citizens to display a decisive and manly spirit when this is
needed, the city eventually loses its freedom and becomes enslaved.
The very same result awaits the macho city that wants war at
any cost and is driven by thymos, spiritedness, rather than eros.
The rage for courage leads citizens and rulers to be constantly tensing up their cities for opportunities to display what they wrongly
take to be the whole of virtue. Before too long, the city that idolizes
courage eventually picks a fight with the wrong adversary, an
enemy it can’t vanquish, and so is vanquished in turn. Like the
peace-loving city, the war-driven city ends in destruction and slavery (308a).
Now we normally think of faction, stasis, as the strife between
two parties within a single city. But the stranger’s view in the present context is very different. The political problem par excellence
is, for him, not violent heterogeneity (for example, champions of
oligarchy vs. champions of democracy) but virtuous homogeneity,
the idolatry of one of two opposed virtues, either courage or moderation. To be sure, there is faction in its usual sense within the
form of virtue. This is the eidetic situation, known only to the
philosophic statesman. But the real-life political problem occurs
when the two naturally opposed virtues are not simultaneously
present. Hence, as the stranger sees it, the devastating political outcome of the principle “likes attract and opposites repel” is enacted
on the stage of inter-polis relations, when a city suffers destruction
at the hands of another city rather than from internal discord. The
stranger is surely not unaware of the evils of faction in this latter
sense—the horrors, for example, that Thucydides describes in the
case of Corcyra (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War,
3.82). But for the stranger this is not the central political problem,
which has its source in the eidetic opposition between the beautifully tough and the beautifully gentle that pervades “many of the
things that are.” The problem is not vice, or human nature simply,
or intense disagreement over which regime is best, but virtue,
which is by nature turned against itself.
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We might try to make sense of the stranger’s unsettling account
by citing Aristotle’s distinction between natural and ethical virtue,
the latter being guided by the intellectual virtue of phronēsis or
practical wisdom, which allows the virtuous individual to avoid
excess and deficiency by perceiving the mean (Nichomachean
Ethics, 6.13). This is helpful to an extent, but it takes the sting out
of the stranger’s insight into why virtue is a problem. The stranger
would no doubt agree with Aristotle’s opinion that virtuous dispositions, when left to themselves, are dangerous, and that they
need practical wisdom in order to be reliable virtues. But far more
important to the stranger is the primordial dyad of courage and
moderation—the dyad that defines the task of the political art.
That task is not how to interweave a multiplicity of virtues in order
to make them one but how to unite two naturally opposed virtues
so that they may complement rather than repel one another and
contribute their distinctive powers to the political web. These are
toughness and flexibility, quickness and caution, forcefulness and
grace.
It is tempting to say that the problem of politics, for the stranger,
is that of knowing how to interweave the male and the female
forms of ethical beauty. It is true that each virtue, by the stranger’s
account, must apply to both men and women. How else could one
trait come to dominate a city’s population through marriage and
procreation? Nevertheless, the manliness of courage strongly suggests as its correlate the femininity of moderation. If we admit this
sexual distinction in the case of the two virtues, it becomes interesting, to say the least, that the paradigm for political wisdom in
the dialogue is the feminine art of weaving. This may be Plato’s
way of showing that, of the two opposed virtues, moderation, as
the love of order and peace, is closer than courage to justice and
wisdom. It may also show Plato’s philosophic preference for
music over gymnastic, since weaving engages in deft material harmonization. In good statesmanship, as in philosophy, grace trumps
force to become the greatest force of all. This is true even for our
tough-minded, methodically rigorous stranger, who tells young
Socrates that the statesman and good lawgiver knows how to instil
right opinions in others “by the muse of kingship” (309d).
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The stranger proceeds to outline the education and nurture that
will generate the needful thing—the artful synthesis of virtuous
opposites in a coherent political whole. This whole, this web, in
order to be beautiful, requires beautiful threads that have been previously prepared by means of a subsidiary art. Statesmanship, like
all compositional art, is elitist: only the best materials will do. And
so, there must be an artful way to determine who is fit for an ethical-political education, and who is not. This consists in observing
children at play in order to see which ones show signs of a virtuous
disposition, whether of courage or moderation. The stranger lays
special emphasis on those who prove to be uneducable. He describes them as “violently driven off course by a bad nature into
godlessness and arrogance and injustice” (308E-309A). The political art, here seen in its harsh and decisive aspect, casts them out
“by punishing them with death penalties and exiles and the greatest
dishonors.” And those who “wallow in ignorance and much baseness” are put into the class of slaves.
The stranger at this point explicitly connects the union of manly
and moderate natures with the intertwining of warp and woof
(309b), in effect closing the paradigm-web he began to weave earlier in the dialogue. The city, in order to be a durable garment suited
to the protection of all those it embraces, needs both kinds of
human threads: the hard and the soft. This unity of opposites requires a two-tiered system of civic education that produces two
sorts of “bonds”—one higher, one lower. The higher bond is said
to be divine, since it applies to the part of the soul that is “eternalborn,” the part that thinks and holds opinions. The lower, human
bond is marriage, which applies to what the stranger calls “the animal-born part,” that is, the part of the soul that has to do with bodily desire. The bonds are produced successively: first the higher,
then the lower. Once the higher bond of right opinion is in place,
the stranger asserts, the lower one isn’t difficult to bring about
(310a). This optimism presupposes that the divine bond is strong
enough to overcome the greatest of all human drives—the erotic
attraction that human beings have for one another and that connects
them, as we hear in the Symposium, with the striving for immortality (207a).
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The higher tier of the educational process aims at inculcating
“genuinely true and also steadfast opinions about beautiful and just
and good things” (309c). These opinions are implanted in both
types of noble individuals. In other words, the inculcation of “one
opinion about what’s beautiful and just and good” supersedes the
idolatry of a single virtue and overcomes the natural impulse to
welcome one’s like and shun one’s unlike. Moderate and courageous individuals will share the opinion that it is good for the city
that they mingle, and bad if they don’t. In other words, they will
learn to respect, if not love, a virtue higher than either courage or
moderation—the virtue of justice. They will believe that they and
their respective virtues are threads that must be woven together to
form the political web.
I note in passing that the education the stranger describes is
based entirely on the cultivation of habits and right opinion. There
is no philosophic education for guardians, no turning of the soul
from becoming to being, as there is in the Republic. The stranger’s
version of a city in speech may be the work of a philosophic statesman, but it does not appear that this statesman, though possessing
kingly science, is in fact a king in this city.
The stranger dwells on how the higher sort of education, which
aims at the divine bond, tempers the excess in the two opposed
virtues. If a manly individual takes hold of true opinions about
what is good and beautiful and just, he will “grow tame and in this
way be most willing to commune with just things.” Without these
opinions, he will degenerate into a beast (309e). Similarly, the
order-loving individual who holds these same true opinions will
become “genuinely moderate and intelligent,” and the one who
doesn’t will rightly be called simpleminded or foolish. The establishment of these true opinions takes place through laws and customs that apply only to those naturally suited for an ethical
education. This education, the stranger asserts, is the “drug” prescribed by the ever-vigilant art of politics. It is the antidote for onesided virtue.
At last we reach the stranger’s account of marriage, the “human
bond” implanted by the political art. This bond, though lower than
the other, is crucial, since the city’s continuance and well-being
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depend on procreation through sexual union. We should recall that
it is not courage and moderation per se that bring about political
downfall but rather the gradual build-up and concentration of a single virtue through sexual generation over the course of time. As
the stranger approaches his culminating definition, he gets down
to the nitty-gritty of why people marry. He dismisses those who
marry for wealth or power and focuses on those whose care is family and children. These are the people who marry, or who arrange
the marriages of their sons and daughters, for the serious (if wrong)
reason that they always choose partners who are of their own family when it comes to virtue and eschew members of the opposite
family.
The political art counteracts this error, goes against nature, by
compelling members of each “family” to overcome their natural
repugnance for the other and to marry against type. This will prevent the spread of a single trait by producing hybrids that combine
both virtuous types. The stranger does not say what home life will
be like for married opposites, nor does he care. The only thing that
matters, from a political standpoint, is that the virtues are mixed
rather than kept separate. Of course, genesis in the Reign of Zeus
is unpredictable: there will always be children whose nature reduplicates that of, say, a courageous mother rather than a moderate
father. And so, the political art must exercise perpetual vigilance
and continually oversee marriage and sexual union. The war on
nature must go on.
The needful union of opposed virtues must be enforced at the
highest level of the city—that of the rulers. The stranger acknowledges that it is possible for one individual to have both virtues
(311a). The monarchic city must choose this sort of individual as
its supervisor. If more than one ruler is required—if the city is aristocratic—then the ruling class must have both kinds of virtuous individuals. The reason is that moderate rulers are cautious, just, and
conservative, but they lack, the stranger says, the needful acuity
and vigor, which would be supplied by the courageous among the
ruling class. The stranger ends his “astonishing account” of virtue
on a negative note: “And it’s impossible for all things having to do
with cities to turn out beautifully in private and in public when
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these characters [courage and moderation] aren’t present as a pair”
(311b).
Only one thing remains: the final definition of the web that is
produced by the true statesman’s knowledge. Will this web, as the
stranger glowingly describes it, ever be woven in deed as it is in
speech? From the stranger’s perspective, it does not matter. The
goal was to define statesmanship solely in terms of the statesman’s
knowledge or science, apart from whether he actually rules,
founds, reforms, or advises (259b).
What, then, does the statesman know? Not, it seems, how to
lead individuals to virtue, but how to temper the virtue they already
have by nature. The statesman’s wisdom is the wisdom of defence.
That is why the stranger tends to dwell more on bad things to be
avoided and feared than on good things to be sought and aspired
to. Politics is a defensive art. It is embodied in the web that ends
the dialogue. Strange to say, when we finally find the statesman
“naked and alone,” he turns out to be a maker of garments, which
earlier in the dialogue were placed in the class of defences (279c280a). He is the maker of the web that is both the body politic and
the political cloak that defends the otherwise naked city from its
enemies, the virtuous from their monomania and wrong marriages,
and all its inhabitants from exposure and need. Perhaps most of
all, the political web protects the city from the ravages and uncertainties of time. A good garment is one that wears well. It must
protect us from seasonal extremes. The same is true of the political
garment, which must defend the city not only during the winter of
war and its discontents but also during the summer of peace, prosperity, and inattention.
In Plato’s Statesman, politics appears in its true light only when
it is seen in the context of the stranger’s cosmic myth about the
Reign of Kronos and the Reign of Zeus. The myth compels us to
judge the tension-riddled, endangered life we have now by contrasting it with an earlier peaceful life that ended in disappearance
rather than old age and death, that had no sex or sexual desire, and
that needed neither politics nor clothes. The myth discloses what
is most needful for beleaguered humanity in this our Reign of
Zeus—the era that depends on the god-like statesman and shepherd
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because it can no longer depend on a kindly nature and a caretaking
god.
I suspect that the world for the stranger is, like virtue, fundamentally incoherent. Strictly speaking, there is no kosmos, no permanent world-order that grounds the inherent goodness of the
virtues. Instead there are two opposed cosmic eras, two opposed directions of becoming, and two opposed forms of human life and
human nature. In the Reign of Zeus—that is, in the realm of politics—the “condition of ancient disharmony,” the tendency toward
degenerateness that is woven into the very constitution of the world
on account of its bodily being, asserts itself (273c). That is why we
need the Promethean powers of method and art—to make order
where there is no order. In the Statesman—one of Plato’s fascinating experiments in post-Socratic philosophy—Plato tempts us to
consider the grounds and implications of this modern-sounding
world-view.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES
Raskolnikov’s Redemption
Nicholas Maistrellis
99
The narrative of Crime and Punishment is very straightforward.
An impoverished university student named Raskolnikov plans and
commits a murder. The murder accidently turns into a double
murder. There follows a sequence of incidents and conversations
that reveal the turmoil this act causes in the soul of the criminal.
Through two conversations with a young prostitute named Sonya
the murderer finally confesses his crime, first to her and then to
the authorities. Finally there is an epilogue in which we are told
that Raskolnikov is sentenced to a period of imprisonment in
Siberia. Sonya follows him to Siberia. Remarkable things happen
to him there.
Of all the four great novels of Dostoevsky–Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov—it is only
in this one that Dostoevsky creates a sustained dialectic with the interior life of one and only one character. Crime, on the other hand,
is a theme in all the novels, but it’s only in this one that Dostoevsky
focuses single-mindedly on unfolding the nature of crime, together
with its causes and effects in the human soul. This makes it particularly relevant to the theme of this conference. However, Dostoevsky is not as interested in criminal justice as he is in the effects
of crime, first on the soul of the criminal, and finally, on the whole
human community. This doesn’t mean that he ignores justice. In
fact, the question of Raskolnikov’s debt to society occupies a large
part of the book, especially in the interrogation of Raskolnikov by
Porfiry Petrovitch, the investigating detective who suspects very
early in the book that Raskolnikov is the murderer, and in the conversations with Sonya, the prostitute who befriends Raskolnikov.
Considerations of justice are a dialectical moment in the unfolding
of crime, and not the highest moment. By “dialectical moment” I
mean that the claims of justice are gathered up and form part of the
transformation of the redeemed criminal. These dialectical moments
cannot be the highest moment of the transformation.
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Now, the claims of justice could be said to be satisfied when
the criminal is punished. But Dostoevsky is not interested in punishment as retribution. He thinks it is ineffective. He is interested
in punishment only in so far as the demand for it arises in the criminal himself, and results in his redemption. The highest moment
is when the criminal acknowledges his crime and asks for forgiveness from the whole human community. Thus, Dostoevsky’s treatment is “psychological,” if it is clear that by psychology one does
not mean a putative science of the soul, but an attempt to get to
know another human being. In his notebooks on Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky makes the extraordinary claim that it is the
crime itself that makes Raskolnikov a moral being. “His moral development begins from the crime itself; the possibility of such
questions arises which would not have existed previously.”1 It is
impossible in a short paper to do more than give a sketch of this
theme, and even this sketch will focus on only a few incidents.
Let me begin with Dostoevsky’s account of crime. The commission of a crime, for him, is a sign that the criminal has separated
himself from his fellow human beings. It is not the crime that separates the criminal, but some transformation in his soul which
causes him to focus his attention entirely on himself. Such transformations are hard to discern. Often, even those closest to the
criminal are puzzled about what is going on. Even the criminal
himself is not fully aware of what is moving him. He becomes surprised at his own behavior. I think this is Dostoevsky’s reason for
believing that ordinary punishment is useless in reforming the
criminal. Since the criminal has separated himself from society, he
feels that the power of society is arbitrary and that the freedom he
has given himself precisely by his separation from his fellows
makes retribution merely another act of violence equivalent to his
own. He both resents the power of society and despises it. Redemption cannot come from actions done to the criminal; it has to
arise in his own soul.
The whole novel takes place over the span of two weeks, and
the crime occurs at the end of Part I, about three days into the action. In the days leading up to the crime, Raskolnikov has stopped
going out. He has stopped seeing his friend Razhumikin, and has
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stopped communicating with his mother and sister. He has also
stopped tutoring students. He has no income. He hasn’t paid his
rent for a long time. He spends most of his time sleeping in his
room—a horrible garret. He eats only when Natashya, the caretaker, brings him something. He is withdrawing from the world.
On the very first page of the novel, the narrator says, “He was so
immersed in himself, and had isolated himself so much from everyone that he was afraid not only of meeting his landlady, but of meeting anyone at all.”2 Very soon, however, we are introduced to an
ambiguity in Raskolnikov. At the beginning of the second chapter
of Part I, we are told that he “was not used to crowds. . . . But now
something suddenly drew him to people.”3 This is the first indication of the doubleness in Raskolnikov’s soul. He separates himself
from others, but he cannot do it with his whole soul. Later we will
learn that it is this doubleness that makes redemption possible.
The sequence of events in Part I leading up to the murder is
very important to Dostoevsky’s dialectic, so I will take some time
going over them. On the first day, Raskolnikov wakes up, goes out,
and almost immediately visits the pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna,
whom he is planning to murder. He pretends he wants to pawn
something. Dostoevsky carefully reveals to us Alyona’s poisonous,
grasping character. This visit is a rehearsal of the murder, so the
murder is committed twice in his soul. He assures himself of the
rightness of what he is planning by reminding himself of Alyona’s
wickedness. By this he shows the conventional side of his character, which he despises. He then decides that he wants to be with
people, and decides to go to the tavern. There he enters into conversation with Marmeladov, a civil servant and a drunkard who is
deliberately destroying his own life and his family’s life. Raskolnikov helps bring him home and meets his consumptive wife and
hungry children. Marmeladov is the father of Sonya, the fourteenyear-old prostitute with whom Raskolnikov falls in love. When he
departs, Raskolnikov leaves behind, without saying anything, most
of his money. The narrator makes it clear that Raskolnikov’s own
generosity at this moment is unintelligible to him. He returns home
and goes to sleep.
The next morning, he is given a letter from his mother that re-
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counts in great detail her numerous trials, including the decision
by his sister to marry someone despicable in order to escape
poverty. While reading the letter, the narrator tells us, his face was
wet with tears, but when he finishes, “it was pale, twisted convulsively, and a heavy bilious, spiteful smile wandered over his lips.”4
Raskolnikov returns to wandering around town, and he encounters a drunk girl whose disheveled clothing had clearly been
thrown on her by those who had made use of her before turning
her out on the street. She is being followed by a middle-aged, welldressed man whose intentions are obvious. Raskolnikov’s first impulse is to help her. He yells at the man, and calls to a nearby police
officer for assistance. He gives the officer some money for a taxi
to bring the girl home when they find where she lives. The narrator
then tells us, “At that moment it was as if something stung Raskolnikov, as if he had been turned about in an instant.” He immediately says to the police officer, “Forget it! What do you care? Leave
her alone. Let him have fun. . . . What is it to you?”5 Raskolnikov
now identifies with the presumed violator.
He then continues his frantic pilgrimage through St. Petersburg, and finally collapses in complete exhaustion under some
bushes, where he falls asleep. He dreams a terrible dream: He is a
boy walking with his father and they witness a peasant beating his
horse to death, accompanied by cheers from the crowd. He tries to
stop the peasant, but he cannot. He asks his father to explain, but
he only replies that it is none of their business. When Raskolnikov
wakes up, he exclaims, “Thank God it was only a dream!” followed almost immediately by “God! But can it be, can it be that I
will really take an axe and hit her on the head and smash her skull
. . . slip in the sticky warm blood, break the lock, steal, and tremble,
and hide, all covered with blood . . . with the axe . . . Lord, can it
be?”6 He has now identified himself not with the helpless witness
of the slaughter but with both the murderer and the victim, and he
is horrified. He continues walking and inadvertently discovers by
means of an overheard conversation that Alyona’s sister Lizaveta
will not be in their apartment at a certain time on the next day. He
takes this as a kind of presentiment, and the narrator tells us, “He
was not reasoning about anything, and was totally unable to reason;
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but suddenly felt with his whole being that he no longer had any
freedom either of mind or of will, and that everything had been
suddenly and finally decided.”7
On the next day, the third day, he kills Alyona with an ax. Unfortunately, Lizaveta comes home unexpectedly, and he has to kill
her too. He hurriedly and inexpertly steals some things and returns
to his apartment. He falls asleep again. He sleeps for a very long
time.
This is the account of Raskolnikov’s actions before, during,
and after the crime. The main thing I want to point out is Raskolnikov’s extraordinary ambivalence: he affirms the crime and yet is
horrified by it. He rejects human contact and yet seeks it. He weeps
for his mother and sister, yet he is filled with spite, and so on. He
cannot affirm anything in himself whole-heartedly.
Dostoevsky has structured the crime quite deliberately. In the
first place, he makes Alyona an unsympathetic victim. She is
greedy and selfish, and looks it. He does not want our confrontation
with the issue of crime to be sentimentalized by feelings of pity
for the victim. On the other hand, Lizaveta is a sympathetic character. We find that, although simple-minded, she is kind. In fact,
she is friendly with Sonya. Raskolnikov murders her purely for the
sake of concealment. So the disunity in Raskolnikov is mirrored
in the victims. Also, it is essential to the narrative that there is no
evidence against Raskolnikov. Through an improbable series of
circumstances, and in spite of his own blunders, Raskolnikov escapes undetected from a building filled with people, and manages
to hide what he stole before he is searched. Dostoevsky makes it
clear that all this is purely by chance, and even in spite of Raskolnikov doing things that could make it more likely that he would
be suspected. Dostoevsky has, in fact, constructed something like
a controlled experiment in which all variables except for the feelings and reactions of the criminal are controlled. If Raskolnikov is
to be found out, it would have to be by some action of his own.
We are ready now to consider the crime from Raskolnikov’s
point of view. He initially gives two reasons for the crime: first, he
needs the money to advance his career; second, he needs the money
to help his mother and sister. He understands both to be humani-
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tarian reasons. He is a very able man, and if he could advance his
career, he could do valuable work for mankind. He is a very able
man, and if he could advance his career, he could help his mother
and sister—and especially, he could prevent the unfortunate marriage of his sister, which she is clearly undertaking for financial
reasons. Contrasted with this is the fact that Alyona is a terrible
person, who not only has done nothing good for anyone but, in
fact, has done untold harm. Her death would be a blessing. Underlying these reasons is the idea that for the sake of humanity higher
human beings can transgress ordinary moral and civil laws. In fact,
Raskolnikov accepts the idea that great men do this all the time.
His recurrent example is Napoleon. In fact, Raskolnikov apparently
wrote an essay, which had been published, on this theme. Dostoevsky does not give his readers the opportunity to read it.
Up to this point in Raskolnikov’s internal dialectic, he considers himself a great man like Napoleon or Isaac Newton, a superior
person who needs to sacrifice ordinary conventions for some
higher good. But the conduct of the crime continually speaks
against this. The theft was botched because he didn’t take the time
to find the large cache of money in the apartment. He hides and
keeps the money and jewels he did manage to steal, ostensibly because it would be too dangerous to spend the money or sell the
jewels, but it is clear that its presence horrifies Raskolnikov because it reminds him of what he did. It becomes increasingly clear
that the reasons given for the crime do not come close to revealing
what is in his soul, or what he thinks is in his soul. This comes out
most decisively in what he says to Sonya during their second conversation:
“I tormented myself for so many days: would Napoleon
have gone ahead or not? It means I must already have
felt clearly that I was not Napoleon . . . . I endured all,
all the torment of this babble, Sonya, and I longed to
shake it all off my back: I wanted to kill without casuistry, Sonya, to kill for myself, for myself alone. I
didn’t want to lie about it even to myself! It was not to
help my mother that I killed—nonsense! I did not kill
so that, having acquired means and power, I could become a benefactor of mankind. Nonsense! I simply
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killed—killed for myself alone—and whether I would
later become anyone’s benefactor, or would spend my
life like a spider, catching everyone in my web and
sucking the life-sap out of everyone, should at that moment have made no difference to me! . . . And it was
not the money above all that I wanted when I killed,
Sonya; not the money so much as something else. . . .
I know all this now. . . . Understand me: perhaps, continuing on that same path, I would never again repeat
that murder. There was something else I wanted to
know; something else was nudging my arm. I wanted
to find out then, and find out quickly, whether I was a
louse like all the rest, or a man? Would I be able to step
over or not! Would I dare to reach down and take, or not?
Am I a trembling creature, or do I have the right—”
“To kill? The right to kill?” Sonya clasped her hands.8
105
What did Raskolnikov mean here when he says that he committed the crime entirely for himself?
The question of freedom was very important to Dostoevsky,
and especially the claim that the only way for a human being to affirm his freedom is through the commission of a crime for its own
sake. It is present in one way or another in all four of his major
works. Think, for example, of Nikolai Stavrogin in Demons. Dostoevsky takes this idea very seriously, and, in fact, affirms its truth
in some way. It is freedom that Raskolnikov is seeking, First, he is
seeking freedom from the bounds of social conventions, and also,
most importantly, from what he considers his own sentimental tendencies. This is why he has to separate himself off from other
human beings, why this separation is the source of crime. I do not
believe that Dostoevsky is saying that all criminals have motives
exactly like those of Raskolnikov, but I do think that some separation from mankind is at work in all criminals. Dostoevsky is particularly interested in exploring what happens when someone tries
to do this deliberately. After he commits the murder, Raskolnikov
is still torn, but now the stakes are much higher than before. Now
he has to see if he has the fortitude to affirm his crime, not as a
project, but as his deed. This affirmation would be the sign that
he was in fact a superior being, a free man, and not an ordinary
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criminal. But he discovers very quickly that he cannot affirm his
crime as he wishes. Sentimental regrets plague him. He becomes
ill, and experiences an almost overwhelming desire to confess. It
is this desire to confess which that exposes him to the interest of
the police. He now begins to feel regret for what he has done, but
this is not the regret the reader might expect. He does not regret
that he has done something wrong; he regrets that he cannot wholeheartedly affirm his crime. Of course, there is a part of him that
does regret the crime profoundly, that knows that he has done a
terrible thing; but it takes the the entire rest of the book for Raskolnikov to acknowledge that this other part is truly himself, and not
internalized convention. The doubleness we have seen in Raskolnikov’s behavior is now revealed as a doubleness within himself.
Through our own ambivalence, which is revealed to us as we read,
Dostoevsky shows us that this doubleness is not peculiar to Raskolnikov, but is true of us as well.
The novel proper ends with Raskolnikov’s confession, once to
Sonya, and once to the police. He has two conversations with
Sonya: the first is a rehearsal of his confession; the second is his
actual confession. This behavior mirrors the commission of the
murder. The confession to the police also has a doubleness about
it. He goes to the police station to confess, but at the last moment
runs out of the station. When he sees Sonya looking at him from
the street, he returns to the police station and confesses. The novel
ends with Raskolnikov’s confession, but the motive for it ambiguous. Is Raskolnikov finally filled with true remorse and the desire
for repentance, or is he confessing because he has failed to live up
to his own view of the murder and himself? Is he simply acknowledging his failure to affirm his crime? The novel inclines us to the
latter account, but it is hard to be sure.
In the Epilogue (which, by the way, does not appear at all in
Dostoevsky’s notebooks), we are told the Raskolnikov was sentenced to eight years hard labor in Siberia. Dostoevsky makes it
clear that both spirits in Raskolnikov are still at war during his imprisonment. The narrator tells us that Raskolnikov was suffering
not from remorse at the crime he committed, but from “wounded
pride” at the fact that he had to confess in order to find “some peace
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for himself.”9 But this was not repentance. “He did not repent of
his crime.”10 By the end of the Epilogue, however, he does repent.
How does this happen? I only have time here to give a bare sketch
of this transformation.
The first and most fundamental element of the change is his
love for Sonya. This love began almost from the moment he first
met her. This love was not intelligible to him. In fact, it annoys
him, and he tries to get rid of it, but it is clear, whether he likes it
or not, that she is what ties him to life itself. In Siberia, she becomes indispensible to him.
A second element in the change arises after an extraordinary
experience he undergoes while in Siberia. He discovers that all his
fellow prisoners, who have had much harder lives than he, love
life. “He looked at his fellow convicts and was amazed at how they,
too, all loved life, how they valued it! It precisely seemed to him
that in prison they loved and valued it even more, cherished it even
more than in freedom.”11 This experience, combined with his realization of the depth of Sonya’s love, brought about his transformation. Retributive punishment did nothing to heal his soul; but the
experience of living with dangerous, desperate men who nevertheless loved life made him whole again. This experience makes him
realize the meaning of the murders he committed: they were acts
against life itself, and thus against all human beings. In some
wholly mysterious way, this experience allows him to discover the
love of life in himself.
Let me end with a brief epilogue: a story of retribution and
penance related by my friend and colleague, Howard Zeiderman,
in an essay about the educational work he has been doing the last
fifteen years with prisoners at the maximum security prison in Jessup, Maryland. A group of prisoners were discussing a drawing as
a text:
The text was a drawing by Kathe Kolwitz, Prisoners
Listening to Music. The three prisoners depicted are
skeletal, with hollow eyes—and all seemingly gripped
by something. The session was not going very well and
I regretted trying to use a text that connected too
vividly with their situation. A number of the younger
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members were clearly repulsed by the drawing. When
I asked why a few who spoke often were silent, Larry
answered. “It’s scary looking at them. I don’t want that
to be me.” As he finished, another prisoner, Craig, a
man almost seventy years old who first served time
more than fifty years before, laughed. “You don’t understand nothing. They’re not dying. They’re gettin’
past their hungers. It’s the music that makes them
pure—like angels. Listen—when I was young down
south we had a chaplain. Every day he would play
music for us. Old music, beautiful. At first we couldn’t
listen to it. We never heard nothing like it. Sometimes
a song would last a long time, no words. But then we
started to love it. We would listen like in the picture,
and we’d remember things. And we’d cry. Sometimes
you could hear ten men cry. And sometimes the priest
would cry too. We were all together in it. But then he
retired and a new chaplain came. He was different. He
wanted us to see the doctors and counselors, the case
workers. They would ask us questions about ourselves
and make us go to classes, programs. They were working on us and the music ended. It was different. It was
them against us.” Correction, as Craig sensed, is entirely different from penance.12
NOTES
Fyodr Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for Crime and Punishment (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1967), 64.
1
Fyodr Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1993), 3.
2
Ibid., 11.
Ibid., 39.
5
Ibid., 49.
6
Ibid., 59.
7
Ibid., 62.
8
Ibid., 419
9
Ibid., 543.
3
4
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10
11
Ibid., 544.
Ibid., 545.
109
Howard Zeiderman, “Caged Explorers: The Hunger for Control,” The
St. John’s Review 53.2 (2012): 157.
12
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Justice in Plato’s Statesman
Eric Salem
Ordinary politicians love to talk about justice, and to go on—and
on—about all the just things they have done, are doing, or mean to
do in the future. We see it all the time—just turn on the television,
especially in an election year. But what about the genuine article,
the true politikos, the statesman who possesses genuine political
science and who practices or could practice the genuine political
art? What role does justice play in such a man’s thinking and doing
and speaking?
A selective glance at our tradition suggests that justice plays a
very large role indeed. Consider, for instance, our own founding
documents—certainly works of statesmanship of a very high order.
The Constitution bluntly proclaims in its preamble that one of its
purposes is to “establish justice.” And the Declaration declares,
among other things, that governments exist for the sake of justice—that “governments are instituted among men to secure” the
rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Or consider the
Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s prolegomena to the Politics: his
treatment of justice is longer by far than his treatment of any other
virtue, and second in length only to his two-book treatment of
friendship—a topic that, for Aristotle, is itself deeply intertwined
with matters of justice and political life. Or to move a little closer
to our chosen topic, consider the Republic, Plato’s most famous
book about political affairs: all of Book I is devoted to justice, and
the inquiry into the goodness of justice that begins in Book II is
based on the assumption that an investigation of a well-constituted
city is bound to come across justice—because well-ordered cities,
like well-ordered souls, always contain it. In other words, all of
these texts suggest that a fairly deep connection exists between
politics and justice, and between thinking about justice and thinking about politics.
Suppose, then, we turn as novice readers to Plato’s Statesman,
which purports to be an inquiry into the nature of the statesman,
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the politikos, and the nature of his art or science, politikē. Given
the sketch we have just seen, we might expect the dialogue to contain a series of acute reflections on the relation between justice and
the true science of politics. We might even expect the Stranger
from Elea to take up again the question that Socrates had wanted
to pursue further at the end of Book I of the Republic, the “Socratic” question, “What is justice?” In fact we get nothing of the
sort. We get a strange, vast myth about the cosmos; we get an extended—some might say over-extended—account of weaving and
its attendant arts; we learn that men as herd-animals closely resemble pigs, on the one hand, and chickens, on the other. But we hear
next to nothing about justice.
To begin with, there is no extended discussion of justice in the
Statesman—no discussion of what it is or whether it’s good or bad
or anything else. As a matter of fact, justice-words, that is, words
cognate with Greek word for justice, turn up only about thirty times
in the entire dialogue. (In the Republic such words turn up more
than two hundred times in Book I alone.) What’s more, only about
half those appearances have the moral and political connotations
that we ordinarily associate with the word “justice.” In fact the
Greek word for justice, dikaiosunē, the word that is so central to
Socrates’s inquiry in the Republic and Aristotle’s inquiry in the
Ethics, does not appear in the Statesman at all. The word injustice
does turn up, once, but it refers, not to a tendency in citizens that
needs to be corrected, but to a disqualification for citizenship altogether. As for the remaining cases in the dialogue where justicewords are used with moral or political meaning, most are
disappointingly conventional, while the most interesting or promising phrases appear to come out of nowhere.
What are we to make of this peculiar state of affairs? Does
the relative rarity of justice-words in the dialogue point to a deep
divergence between the Stranger’s approach to politics and human
affairs and the approach of Socrates? Do considerations of justice
simply not play a major role in his thinking about politics? Do his
interests lie elsewhere? Or, on the contrary, is the Stranger’s thinking about politics shaped by a distinct conception of justice, but
one that leads him to employ the language of justice sparingly?
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In the end I want to suggest that the Stranger’s thinking about
politics is in fact profoundly shaped by a certain conception of justice—a peculiar one, to be sure, but perhaps no more peculiar than
the one Socrates lays out in the Republic, and perhaps not so very
different from it either. But I mean to approach this conclusion in
a rather roundabout way, by first considering seriously the possibility that the Stranger is just not very interested in justice and that
his lack of interest is reflected in his thinking about the science of
politics. My hope is that this indirect approach will force out into
the light what is distinctive about his understanding.
If the Stranger is not interested in justice, what is he interested
in? Almost any page of the Statesman—or the Sophist—gives us
the answer: the arts and sciences, including his own science or art
of division. In the Phaedrus, Socrates calls himself a lover of collections and divisions, and elsewhere in the dialogues he makes
constant use of analogies with the arts. But the Stranger goes much
further: he seems to see the whole human world as an interconnected array of always-multiplying arts, the sorting out of which
into their more or less natural divisions is one of the philosopher’s
prime tasks. Angling and sophistry, louse-catching and generalship,
doctoring and potion-making—all these arts and at least fifty more
make their appearance somewhere in the Sophist or Statesman.
The Stranger’s myth, his cosmic vision, helps us to understand
this remarkable proliferation of arts and the Stranger’s acute interest
in them. During the age of Saturn, we enjoyed a carefree life under
the care of the gods. With no regimes and no families, we lived on
the fruits that sprang spontaneously from trees and bushes, talked
with the animals, slept naked on the grass and woke up every
morning feeling just a little bit . . . younger. But that time is long
past. This is the age of Zeus. The world has grown harsh, the gods
have withdrawn, and we grow old. We have been left to our own
devices, and those devices, the first fruits of our new-age thinking,
are the arts. Men need food; the arts of agriculture and herding and
hunting (including the art of angling) must be developed. Men need
shelter from winter cold and summer sun, from the animals that no
longer like us and from . . . other men. The arts of wall-making and
house-building, shoe-making and armor-crafting, rug-making and
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wool-working must come on the scene. This list could go on: along
with needs arise desires. Every need or desire demands a new art,
and every new art demands a new sub-array of subordinate arts to
provide materials to be worked up and tools to work with.
Atop this dizzying array of arts is a kind of art of arts, an überart, if you will. For man the artisan is also man the herd animal,
and the human herd, like all herds, needs to be tended and managed. This art or science of herd management as applied to the
human herd is . . . statesmanship. Its task is neither simple nor easy.
It must rule over the other arts and sciences, deciding which ones
are to be learned and to what degree. To retain its purity of purpose,
it must keep itself separate from the arts most akin to itself, the arts
of persuasion and generalship and judging. Under certain circumstances it must engage in lawmaking. But its most difficult task
has to do with the noblest natures under its sway. Just as nature left
to itself, and permeated by the Other, seems to give rise to deception, and thus to sophistry (including the sophistry that masquerades as statesmanship), so too, human nature left to itself seems to
give rise to two distinct and opposed temperaments: courageous
natures and moderate natures. Left to themselves, these natures
tend to separate from each other and, in the end, degenerate into
self-destructive factions. To combat this most dangerous of threats,
the statesman must become a master weaver, a webmaster of the
spirit and of the body too; he must find ways to knit together the
lives of the city’s noblest natures. For only thus can the city become
and remain a self-bound, self-sufficient whole.
This would seem to be a good time to ask what place, if any,
justice has in this picture of politics and political life. The obvious
answer seems to be: a place that is important, but rather small and
decidedly subordinate. Human herd management would seem to
differ from other forms of herd management in this: all herding involves giving commands, but members of the human herd, especially in the age of Zeus, seem to need explicit commands or
prescriptions, explicit rules, to govern their communal life. These
rules, which allow men in cities to get along with one another, constitute justice. Now from the point of view of citizens, especially
artisan citizens going about their daily, commerce-driven lives,
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such rules—we call them laws—might seem to be the most important manifestation of the political art. But they are in fact only an
imperfect and secondary manifestation of that art, in part because
they are riddled with imprecision, and in part because, as we have
already seen, the first business and real work of the political art
lies in the weaving together of courage and moderation. It would
be a mistake, according to this account, to think of justice as a
virtue, just as it would be a mistake to think of justice as something
high, a criterion that the political art has to look up to as it goes
about its business. Justice is nothing high or deep or fancy; it is
nothing but the set of rules, invented by the statesman, that allow
us to lead reasonably decent lives in an unfriendly world.
Is this account of justice in the Statesman adequate? Does it,
as we say, do justice to the Stranger’s view of justice? There are
certainly a number of passages in the dialogue that lend credence
to it. For instance, at one point the Stranger makes it very clear that
the power of the judge is separate from, and sub-ordinate to, the
art of the statesman. Then he asks if the judge
has any power more far-reaching than, in matters
pertaining to contracts, that of discerning the
things ordained as both just and unjust by keeping
in sight whatever is laid down as lawful and which
it received from a law-giver king (305b).
It looks here as if justice is simply identical to the legal, as it
is defined by the law-giving king—that is, the statesman. This language of contracts also turns up a bit earlier, in the course of the
Stranger’s critique of law and its lack of precision, when he speaks
of those who “supervise the herds with respect to the just and their
contracts with each other” (294e). Once again justice seems to be
equated with the contractual obligations defined by the law—and
the baseness involved in dealing with matters of justice, its distance
from real statesmanly activity, is underscored by the re-introduction of the language of “herds.” The text of the Statesman also
lends support to the thought that justice is not a virtue: there is no
place in the dialogue where the Stranger states or even implies that
it is the statesman’s task to instill justice or anything resembling
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justice in the souls of his citizens. The closest we get is the suggestion very near the end of the dialogue that moderate natures
tend to be more just than courageous ones, but this does not seem
to be a matter of education, and in any case, “just” in this context
seems to mean “cautious and therefore inclined to follow the law.”
The meaning of “just” here is perfectly compatible with passages
that identify the just with the legal; it simply means “law-abiding.”
Are we to conclude, then, that justice has no meaning in the
Statesman other than a set of rules laid down by the statesman in
his law-making capacity, and then turned over to a subordinate
power? We might have to reach this conclusion were it not for a
handful of odd passages where the Stranger seems to be pointing
us in a different direction. Let me briefly go over three of them. In
the first, the Stranger argues that rulers in “the correct regime” can
do anything, including banishing and even killing inhabitants, “so
long as they make it better from worse and preserve it as far as
they’re able by using science and the just” (293d). In the second,
which comes just as he is beginning his critique of law, the Stranger
notes that law “could never, by having comprehended what’s most
excellent and most just, command what’s best” (294a-b). And in
the third, the Stranger claims that:
there is no error for thoughtful rulers, whatever
they do, so long as they guard one great thing, and,
by at all times distributing to those in the city
what’s most just with intellect and art, both are
able to preserve them and make better men from
worse as much as possible (297a-b).
These passages share several features in common. In all of
them, the just is linked to, and subordinated to, the good —either
the good of the citizens or the good of the city. In addition, the just
is paired with, or at least linked to, thought in some form—science
in the first passage, comprehension in the second, and intellect and
art in the third. Finally—and most important for the issue we are
considering—in all three passages the just in these passages simply cannot be identified with what is lawful or what is defined
by the law. In the first passage, the just seems to function as a
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criterion or standard at least co-equal with science; according to
the second, the just cannot be comprehended by law; and in the
third, the just arises directly from intellect and art, without the
mediation of law. Clearly then, justice or “the just” has more than
one meaning in the Statesman and in the Stranger’s mind. But exactly what does it mean in this second set of passages? For instance, what does it mean in the peculiar phrase “science and the
just”? We can’t look to the immediate context of the phrase for an
answer. In all three passages the language of justice seems to come
out of nowhere.
To answer this question we need to take a step back. I mentioned earlier that there are a number of places in the Statesman
where the language of justice is used with a meaning that is nonmoral and non-political. Let me add that, with one exception,
which I’ll get to later, every appearance of this language before the
“science and the just” passage falls into this category. Now in all
of these earlier appearances, “just” and “justly” have a specific
meaning and specific range: they are used to characterize speech
or thought; and they refer to correctness or precision or aptness of
thought or speech, as when we say, in English—as I did a little
while ago—that we want to do justice to someone’s thought or that
someone has gotten something “just right.” Now it is “precisely”
this meaning of justice that I think we must import, and are meant
to import, into the passages in question. The intellectual quality
that the Stranger prizes most in his own science of division—the
ability to divide well, to find a “part” that is also a “form” (262b263b)—is also the quality that defines or gives meaning to justice.
Thus when the Stranger says that rulers in the “correct regime”
must employ “science and the just,” “the just” is not being introduced here as an extraneous criterion that comes out of nowhere.
It rather refers to the exactness or precision of application that is
implicit in the very notion of science—in this case, the science of
statesmanship. Or again, when the Stranger faults the law for failing to comprehend what’s most excellent and most just, he is simply faulting the law’s characteristic lack of precision: because laws
are necessarily universal, they cannot help but miss what is best
here and now and must be inexact in their attainment of it. It should
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come as no surprise, then, that the Stranger keeps referring to the
“correct” or “most correct regime” where we would probably say
“best regime”—the best regime is, for him, “precisely” the regime
in which precision or correctness is the ruling principle.
There is another way to formulate this thought in the language
of the dialogue. At the very center of the Statesman there is an extended discussion of the art of measurement, and at the very center
of that discussion, the Stranger introduces, without much explanation, the phrase “the precise itself.” Why? It turns out that the very
existence of statesmanship—in fact the very existence of all the arts
that generate something—rests on the existence of something called
due measure. All the arts aim to achieve or produce some good.
Sometimes they miss the mark: they fall short of or exceed their
aims. But when they bring about the goods they aim at, they attain
what the Stranger calls “due measure.” At such moments, when
they get things just right, when they arrive at due measure, the precise itself is present. But what holds for the other arts holds for
statesmanship as well. Whenever the statesman, aiming at the
preservation or improvement of his city or its citizens, brings about
this good, he attains due measure, and in attaining due measure,
he participates in the precise itself. But if I am right in thinking
that, in at least a select number of passages in the dialogue, the just
coincides with what is correct or precise, then at such a moment
the statesman can also be said to have achieved justice. To achieve
the good is to achieve justice.
This brings me to my final point. I want to bring what I have
just said to bear on the most important activity of statesmanship:
the weaving together of courage and moderation. I mentioned a little while ago that there is one passage early on in the dialogue
where the language of justice is not used to refer to precision of
thought. It occurs in the myth. Interestingly enough, precision is
also mentioned but here refers to precision in the movement of the
cosmos. The claim is that when the cosmos is first allowed to move
on its own, it moves with precision, but over time, because of the
bodily aspect of the cosmos, it gradually winds down. Everything
beautiful in the cosmos comes from its composer, while everything
“harsh and unjust” has its source in this “fellow nursling of
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primeval nature” (273b-d). Of course this is a myth and we have
to be careful about what we extract from it. Still, I cannot help but
think that the Stranger is here positing something like a primal
principle of disorder, a principle that is always at war with beauty,
with precision of movement, with the very notion of a cosmos, that
is, an ordered whole. That he associates this principle with harshness and injustice suggests that this principle is at work in the
human world as well: the city is an attempt to found something
like a human cosmos in the face of primal disorder, primal imprecision, primal injustice. The ordinary arts that ground ordinary life
within cities are one aspect of this cosmos-formation. Each is an
attempt to bring forth due measure within some specific context;
each is an attempt to wrestle with its material’s resistance to being
given proper form. But the greatest of such attempts is the effort
of the statesman to bring forth due measure in and through his
weaving together of courage and moderation. Justice in the primary
sense, then, is not to be found in law-making or judging in accordance with law. Nor is it to be found in the accomplishing of this
or that good thing for the city. It is found right here, in the overcoming of primal injustice, primal resistance to having a city at all.
We might think of it this way: In the Sophist, the Stranger suggests
that being is not rest, or motion, or some third thing. He suggests
instead that being is the belonging together of rest and motion. But
within the sphere of politics, courage corresponds to motion and
rest to moderation. Where, then, and what is justice? It is not something present in the soul of the courageous man, nor something
present in the soul of the moderate man. Nor is it some third thing
hovering over the two. Instead, justice in the primary sense is present whenever the statesman, by thinking precisely and achieving
due measure, keeps the primal dyad from falling asunder; it is there
both in and as the belonging together, the being woven together,
of courage and moderation.
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Getting to Know Kierkegaard Better
119
A Review of Richard McCombs’s The Paradoxical
Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2013. 244 pages, $36.00.
James Carey
On first looking into Kierkegaard, the student who has already read
around in the history of philosophy or has limited his studies primarily to twentieth century philosophy, whether analytic or “continental,” is likely to find himself puzzled at several levels. He may
have heard that Kierkegaard is both a Christian and an existentialist, even a founder of existentialism, and he might be interested to
find out how one man can be both of these things at once. Or,
doubting that one man could be both these things at once without
being confused, he might be inclined to shrug him off. But then he
may also have heard that Heidegger was profoundly influenced by
Kierkegaard and that Wittgenstein declared him to be a “saint.” So
he sets out to get a better sense of who Kierke-gaard is and what
he is aiming at. After reading the first few pages of, say, Fear and
Trembling, he comes quickly to recognize that he is in the presence
of an original and incisive thinker. But he also encounters obscure
arguments and formulations that seem more colorful than illuminating. And sooner or later he runs up against assertions about the
relation of Socrates to Christianity that seem naïve at best, perverse
at worse. He begins to suspect that Kierkegaard, for all his undeniable brilliance, is in full control of neither his intellect nor his
imagination. After reading a relatively accessible book such as
Philosophical Fragments he might turn to Concluding Unscientific
Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (the latter book four times
the length of what it is advertised as a “postscript” to) in hopes of
finding a resolution to some of the perplexities in which the former
James Carey is a tutor and former Dean at St. John’s College in Santa Fe,
New Mexico.
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work left him. Instead, he finds himself by turns beguiled and exasperated by an art of writing that is both concentrated and ironic.
He is not sure whether he is being led towards the truth or being
manipulated. And if he has not done so sooner, he begins to wonder
exactly what Kierkegaard intends by presenting some of his books,
but then not all them, under pseudonyms, and in particular why one
book is presented as written by Climacus and another by anti-Climacus. Can all Kierkegaard’s books be understood as expressing
his own thoughts? Can any of them be understood as expressing
his own thoughts? Not knowing how to find an answer to these
and related questions, the student may decide at this point to postpone engaging with the full sweep of Kierkegaard’s project until
later on, more or less indefinitely later on.
Needless to say, not all who have struggled with Kierke-gaard
at some stage of their studies fit the above profile. But some—I
suspect quite a few—do fit it. After reading through one or two of
Kierkegaard’s books and probing around in a few others, they will
profit immensely by stepping back from his oeuvre and reading
Richard McCombs’s The Paradoxical Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard. Those who have read a larger number of Kierkegaard’s
books will profit immensely as well. I for one can say that there is
a not a single question I have asked myself about Kierkegaard over
the years that McCombs’s carefully argued and beautifully written
book does not answer, clearly, comprehensively, and convincingly.
The title of McCombs’s book expresses his general intention,
which is to show that Kierkegaard is a rational thinker and that he
employs paradox in the service of reason. What Kierkegaard calls
“subjectivity” McCombs calls “paradoxical rationality.” The
provocative conclusion of McCombs’s study is that paradoxical
rationality reaches its perfection not in knowledge, either theoretical or practical, but in faith. In this review I will highlight only a
few of the observations that McCombs makes en route to this conclusion.
In Chapter 1, McCombs considers evidence in favor of the
view the Kierkegaard is an irrationalist and then evidence in favor
of the view that he is a rationalist. He argues, persuasively, that the
preponderance of evidence is in favor of the latter view. When
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Kierkegaard directly or through one of his pseudonymous authors
affirms what he calls a contradiction, he means not a flat-our logical absurdity but rather “a tension or an unresolved opposition”
(13).1 And, as Kierkegaard sees it, “when the believer has faith,
the absurd is not absurd—faith transforms it” (22). Kierkegaard’s
Climacus calls the Incarnation a contradiction. But, as McCombs
points out, to show that such a thing is an irresolvable logical contradiction “one would need a thorough understanding of the
essence of God and of temporal, finite human existence” (13).
Kierkegaard is aware that this understanding is not at our disposal.
The appearance of irrationality is only feigned by Kierkegaard. It
is a pretense in the service of a pedagogical aim. “The human
model for Kierkegaard’s incognito of irrationalism is Socrates. If
Socrates ironically feigned ignorance in the service of knowledge,
Kierkegaard ‘goes further’ and ironically feigns irrationality in the
service of reason” (2). He “creates Climacus specifically to address
and appeal to philosophical readers . . . in order to find such readers
‘where they are’ and to lead them to subjectivity” (5). Where philosophical readers “are” is not simply in their thinking but in their
existing. There is, it should go without saying, more to existing
than thinking.
Near the conclusion of this chapter, McCombs offers a perceptive analysis of the limitations of Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling. This author attempts to
show to philosophical readers who regard faith as a demotic substitute for knowledge, or as a station that gets aufgehoben on the
way to absolute knowing, that genuine faith, as exemplified by
Abraham, is in fact rare, awesome in the exact sense of the word,
and more difficult to achieve than any knowledge we humans can
attain or pretend to. But Kierkegaard also subtly leads his readers
to see that Johannes de Silentio can, or rather will, only admire
faith. He will not attempt it. Faith is a task—a task that Silentio
evades (24). Faith is, moreover, not merely a task but “a difficult,
dangerous, strenuous, and painful duty, and human beings will do
virtually anything to evade such a duty” (30). In Fear and Trembling, “Kierkegaard first tries to get readers to admire the greatness
of faith, and then breaks the distressing news to them that the faith
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that they admire is an absolute duty.” Kierkegaard has “constructed
Fear and Trembling so ingeniously that interpretation of it unexpectedly and disconcertingly turns into self-examination” (31).
In Chapter 2, McCombs argues that subjectivity or paradoxical
rationality is, like all rationality, consistency. It is consistency not
just of thought, however, but of the whole person. “To be subjective means consistently to relate oneself, the subject of thinking,
to what one thinks. It is to think about life and action, most of all
about one’s own life and action, and to strive to feel, will, and act
consistently with one’s thoughts” (35). Not everyone who prides
himself on the consistency of his thinking aims at this more comprehensive consistency. For example, a person who holds in his
thinking that everything is determined—whether by the will of
God, physical mechanism, or the apparent good—and that the future is thereby fixed, nonetheless deliberates and acts, as all human
beings must, on the assumption that the future is not fixed and that
how it turns out depends in some measure on one’s choices. Such
a person is not wholly rational no matter how impressively his theory holds together qua theory merely.2 His speculative thinking,
however consistent it may be in itself, is inconsistent with his practical thinking. Kierkegaard’s subjectivity is not so much the opposite of objectivity, an inner and private domain as distinct from an
outer and public one, as it is the whole of rationality. Subjectivity
comprehends objectivity as a part, assigning it its altogether legitimate, though limited, role within a properly integrated life of reason. Subjectivity, for Kierkegaard, is integrity.
It is “Kierkegaard’s belief that thinking is unavoidably interested.”(37). Objective thinkers frequently claim to be disinterested.
But they are wrong. For objectivity is not without an interest: speculative reason (which could be called, somewhat misleadingly, objective reason) is interested in the true, just as practical reason
(which could be called, also somewhat misleadingly, subjective
reason) is interested in the good. Pursuit of the true and pursuit of
the good are two pursuits of one and the same reason.3 As McCombs later points out, interest derives from interesse, literally,
“to be in between” (155). Human reason is in between the temporal
and the eternal. It moves teleologically from the temporal toward
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the eternal, as it moves teleologically from the conditioned toward
the unconditioned and from the finite toward the infinite.
Subjective thinkers have a better appreciation of the wholeness
of reason, its teleological orientation toward both truth and goodness, than do objective thinkers. Kierkegaard suspects that many
who take pride in their commitment to objectivity use the search
for knowledge “as a way to delay or to evade ethical action” (45).
He also thinks that, “because the human will is free, the rationality
of human beings—his own included—is always precarious” (75).
This is true of speculative reason no of less than of practical reason.
McCombs speaks of the “shaky foundations” of logic and its “liability to perversion” (60). In my view, logic per se—certainly its
indemonstrable but self-evident first principles, such as the principle of non-contradiction—is sound.4 But logical principles and
rules of inference, unimpeachable in themselves, can be used to
deduce questionable conclusions from questionable premises. In
that way logic can assist one in rationalizing the satisfaction of certain desires that, unlike the desire for integrity in thought and action, are not intrinsic to reason and are often at odds with the telē
of reason. “When these desires are threatened by the strenuous requirements of ethics, they fight back with astonishing cunning and
sagacity, by co-opting the powers of logic for specious reasoning
and self-deception” (60). And So McCombs rightly recommends
“rectifying [not logic itself but] one’s use of logic” (65).
In Chapter 3, McCombs distinguishes between traditional negative theology, which he understands to be primarily theoretical,
and the negative theology of Climacus, which he understands to
be primarily practical. “Climacus thinks that if anything has priority in salvation it is or would be love and not knowledge” (87).5
This chapter contains helpful accounts of the Kierkegaardian conceptions of resignation and guilt-consciousness, and of
Kierkegaard’s arresting formulation that “to need God is a human
being’s highest perfection” (88-89; on resignation see also 106).
Of course, from the perspective of Christianity all human beings
need God. The perfection of humanity consists then not in the need,
simply, but in the recognition of the need and the follow-through
on what it ultimately entails: “reverence, awe, adoration, worship,
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or as Johannes de Silentio calls it, ‘fear and trembling’” (88-89).
We naturally desire perfect happiness; but for Kierkegaard perfect
happiness is “the good that is attained by absolutely venturing
everything” (95), for it is “essentially uncertain” (98). McCombs
concludes this chapter with a reflection on how Kierkegaard understands the relation between the good and one’s own good. There
is no “tension” between them: “one most truly loves the good by
loving one’s own good in the right way” (99).6
In Chapter 4, McCombs shows what Kierkegaard means by
simplicity. It is “translating one’s understanding . . . immediately
into action” (101). Just as McCombs discloses limitations, which
Kierkegaard intends his readers to recognize, in Johannes de Silentio’s admiration, absent imitation, of faith, so he discloses limitations in Climacus’s conception of “hidden inwardness.” Climacus
recognizes that there is something wrong with flaunting one’s efforts at becoming a Christian. But, McCombs notes, “going out of
one’s way to look ‘just like everyone else’” while “being very different from most people in one’s heart” can stand in the way of
“witnessing the truth and thus risking suffering and persecution”
(112; cf. 117-118; 124). In Chapter 5, McCombs continues the critique of Climacus he initiated in Chapter 4, with the focus now on
the limitations of indirect communication and its need to be complemented by direct communication. By expressing himself so
obliquely and paradoxically, Climacus runs the risk of detaining
the reader in the process of interpretation so that he fails to undertake the practical tasks that it is Climacus’s main intention to urge
him toward. McCombs intends this chapter as a criticism of Climacus, not necessarily of Kierkegaard. But because “Kierkegaard
never explicitly addresses some of the vices or weaknesses of indirect communication” (115), McCombs concedes that perhaps
Kierkegaard “is not adequately aware of its pitfalls and shortcomings” (117). As the chapter progresses, criticisms of Kierkegaard
himself come to replace criticisms of his pseudonymous author.
Though Kierkegaard recognizes that his position is one of faith and
not knowledge, his employment of indirect communication does
not allow much room for serious confrontation with thoughtful criticisms of Christianity. McCombs goes so far as to express a con-
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cern that if Kierkegaard not only does not know where the full truth
about Christianity lies—and no believer can claim to know—but
is actually wrong about where the full truth lies, he “bears responsibility for risking the ruination of many lives” (131). More direct,
and less indirect, communication would go a long way toward reducing this risk. It would leave the reader greater freedom to make
a responsible decision for or against faith, being more cognizant
of both the case for and the case against, in light of the very little
that we humans are actually capable of knowing beyond the
shadow of a doubt.
In the first five chapters of his book McCombs occasionally
speaks to some of the initially mystifying albeit intriguing things
that Kierkegaard says about Socrates. In Chapter 6 and 7, and also
in part of Chapter 8, he treats Kierkegaard’s interpretation of “the
figure of Socrates” thematically. McCombs makes, I think, as wellinformed and cogent a case as can be made for the coherence of
Kierkegaard’s understanding of Socrates.
In Chapter 6, McCombs shows how and why Kierkegaard
presents Socrates as embodying “climacean capacity,” which is the
capacity “to be a climber over boundaries and a transgressor of
limits” (134).7 “[T]he climacean capacity is a power of synthesizing an eternal, infinite, universal, and absolute ideal with or in the
temporal, finite, particular, and relative aspects of oneself and one’s
everyday life, which is to say that the climacean capacity is a capacity for subjectivity” (154). “Human beings seem to be finite,
temporal, particular, and conditioned animals. And yet they also
seem to be able to conceive, however inadequately, the infinite,
the eternal, and the unconditioned.” (157).8 As Kierkegaard sees
it, “Socratic ignorance is an essential component of faith and Christianity” (135). According to the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the Philosophical Fragments misrepresents Socrates “as an
objective thinker, whereas he was really a subjective thinker”
(139). Climacus recognizes that “if one could not discover one’s
incapacity before God, then neither could one exist as a being who
attempts to live in time according to an eternal ideal” (147). “[T]he
god is ‘present just as soon as the uncertainty of everything is
thought infinitely’” (151).
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Whereas in Chapter 6 McCombs focuses on Kierke-gaard’s
understanding of Socrates’s ascent, in Chapter 7 he focuses on
Kierkegaard’s understanding of Socrates’s downfall. Kierkegaard
finds this downfall expressed in a striking passage from the Phaedrus. There Socrates confesses that he does not know himself.9
And so he investigates himself rather than other things in order to
find out whether he happens to be a monster (thērion) more multiply-twisted and lustful (epitethymenon) than Typhon or a gentler
and simpler animal having by nature a share in a certain divine and
non-arrogant (atyphon) allotment.10 As Kierkegaard interprets this
passage from the Phaedrus, “‘he who believed that he knew himself’ becomes so perplexed that he cannot decide between utterly
opposite self-interpretations.” This is the “downfall of the understanding.” Kierkegaard, through Climacus, suggests that Socrates
actually willed this downfall (162-163).
On first hearing, this suggestion sounds like Kierkegaardian
hyperbole. But, if the will is the appetite of reason,11 then human
reason is naturally propelled by its own appetite toward truth, including, paradoxically, the truth that human reason is not capable
of answering all the questions it naturally proposes to itself.12 In
the case at hand, Socrates’s will propels his reason toward selfknowledge; but the knowledge he attains is that he does not have
complete self-knowledge. It is in this way that Socrates wills the
downfall of his understanding. The will moves reason to the discovery and acknowledgment of its natural limits. This is not a merely
negative development, however. For “to will the downfall of reason
is to transform and perfect reason” (163). As McCombs writes in
an earlier chapter, “[T]he power of reason comes to light in the act
of becoming aware of its weakness” (69).
This transformation and perfection is not of theoretical reason
alone, but of practical reason as well (cf. 211).13 The standard interpretation of the downfall of reason is that it results in “an openness or receptivity to a divine revelation of truths that exceed the
capacity of natural reason” (164). McCombs thinks that this interpretation is correct as far as it goes. But he thinks that it does not
go far enough, for it places stress only on the theoretical consequences of the downfall. As McCombs argues, it has practical con-
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sequences as well. “The thing that falls in the downfall of the understanding is the whole human capacity to achieve the highest
human end—an eternal happiness, which includes not only joy, but
wisdom and goodness as well. Consequently, the downfall is a disavowal of the pretentions that one can become good, wise, and joyful on one’s own, a rejection of the determination to rely only on
oneself in striving for one’s highest end” (165).
The disavowal of these pretensions results indeed in an openness to revelation. According to Christianity, there is a revelation
of truths regarding action: how to become truly good through repentance, on the one hand, and through cultivating love of God
and neighbor, on the other. And there is a revelation of truths regarding being as well: that God is a Trinity of persons, without the
slightest compromise to his unity but as its perfection through the
unqualified love that unites the three persons, and that one of these
persons became incarnate in order to save us from sin and call us
toward fuller and fuller participation, through love, in the divine
nature.14 “[O]ne accepts revelation not in order to become a better
philosopher but in order to become a better person” (165).
It should be noted that Socrates’s qualification in the Phaedrus
that he does not “yet” know himself implies that he has not simply
given up on the possibility of attaining complete self-knowledge.15
Furthermore, any openness to revelation that he might have arrived
at is, in the absence of actual revelation, an openness only to the
possibility of revelation.16 But until and unless Socrates does attain
complete self-knowledge, he cannot definitively know whether all
so-called choice is merely a case of being determined by the apparent good, more precisely by the apparent best;17 or whether, instead, man is capable of radically free choice and
self-determination, including the abuse of radically free choice and
self-determination that is sin. The crucial issue, then, is whether
Socrates has any inkling of sin. Though “Climacus claims that neither Socrates nor anyone else can be aware of sin without revelation” he nonetheless “portrays Socrates as suspecting his sinful
condition” and “as suspecting that he is misrelated to the divine
owing to Typhonic arrogance” (167-168; cf. 175). Plato surely expects the reader of the Phaedrus to remember that Typhon was, as
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McCombs says, “an arrogant, violent, and defiant enemy of the
gods.” Moreover, with his hundred heads, he was “presumably not
even friendly to himself” (167). A monster like Typhon cannot be
happy.
We noted earlier that the interest of reason lies in its being between the temporal and the eternal, and that it moves teleologically
from the temporal toward the eternal. According to Kierkegaard, it
cannot reach its ultimate telos without supernatural assistance. This
assistance becomes available only when the eternal, at its own initiative, becomes temporal “in the fullness of time.” In what Christians
believe to be the historical event of the Incarnation, a synthesis of
the eternal and the temporal is achieved in deed and not just in
thought. The Incarnation is for Kierkegaard the paradox (146); it is
the absolute paradox (219).
Assuming both (1) that neither complete self-knowledge nor
complete knowledge of the whole and its ground is humanly possible, and (2) that one has heard the Gospel of Christ, Kierkegaard
thinks that only two responses to what one has heard are possible:
faith, which is not knowledge,18 and offense, which is not doubt. Offense is “a delusion of rational autonomy”—deluded because human
reason has limits and thus is not “self-sufficient.” Offense is “unhappy self-assertion”—unhappy because one asserts oneself on the
basis of what one knows, deep down, is insufficient knowledge of
oneself. In the human being there are “two elements in tension with
one another: a desire for happiness and a desire for autonomy or selfsufficiency.” These elements are incompatible, and “one or the other
of them must fall. Faith . . . is the downfall of the desire for self-assertion, while offense is the downfall of the desire for happiness”
(176-177).
In Chapter 8, McCombs further explores the consequences of
Kierkegaard’s conviction that there are no “public demonstrations of
the answers to certain crucial questions: Is there a personal God who
created and maintains the world? Does a human being have an immortal soul? Is there a best life for human beings?” (184) If by “public demonstrations” Kierkegaard means rationally accessible
demonstrations, it can be countered that there are such demonstrations, pro and contra, on these and related matters, particularly in
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medieval theology and in the reaction of modern philosophy against
medieval theology. There has indeed never been universal acceptance
of either theological or anti-theological arguments. But then there
has also never been universal acceptance, not even by the greatest
minds, of many philosophical arguments, such as, for example, the
divergent arguments regarding the scope of human knowledge (think
of Hume and Hegel), the relation of acts of thought to the objects of
thought (think of Plato and Husserl), the relationship between the
good and the pleasant (think of Kant and Mill), and the authority of
reason (think of Aristotle and Heidegger). It is likely that there is no
“public demonstration” on these matters because the public is insufficiently perceptive to follow the arguments. In considering a disagreement between great philosophers, say, the disagreement
between Locke and Leibniz on how much our knowledge arises from
the senses, one has to consider the possibility that one of the two
thinkers penetrated closer to the root of the matter than did the other.
It seems improbable that there will ever be universal acceptance of
most philosophical and theological demonstrations. But that does not
mean that these demonstrations are not rationally accessible.
That theological and philosophical demonstrations are so controverted might not be due solely to different capacities for clear
thinking. McCombs highlights Kierkegaard’s conviction that character cannot be easily separated from the quest for knowledge.
“[D]esires, fears, emotions, actions, and habits have an influence
on what and how a person thinks, or on what a person can see,
understand, know, or become aware of. In other words, some desires, habits, emotions, and actions are conducive to truth, and
some are inimical to it” (192). McCombs illustrates this claim by
referring to the limitations of Meno and Ivan Karamazov. “[T]he
deep thinker must be a spiritual knight with the strength and
courage to think terrible thoughts that others cannot endure to
think” (193). One terrible thought, of course, is that, even if there
is a first cause or ground of our finite existence, it takes no interest
in us and how we live our lives. But an equally terrible thought is
that we have deceived ourselves into thinking that we know this
to be true when we do not, and cannot, know any such thing. Both
terrible thoughts have to be explored.
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McCombs writes, “It is hard to believe that a person who
often lies to himself about his own actions and qualities, about the
actions and qualities of other people, and about his social and personal relations to other people will be honest when he tries to answer the most important philosophical questions” (194; cf. 65).
The examined life does not consist exclusively, or even primarily,
in the reading and discussion of philosophical texts. Most of all it
requires ongoing self-examination, including especially the examination of conscience that is needed to check the self-deception
that is at the root of sin, including the sin of vanity, especially intellectual vanity (cf. 215). McCombs recognizes that not all intellectual endeavors are equally compromised by corrupt character.
Corrupt character has little effect on “cognition of scientific, mathematical, and linguistic truths.” But corrupt character can pervert
“cognition of human nature and the best life for human beings”
(202). Anyone who is attempting to live a wholly rational life,
whether he is a believer or a nonbeliever, stands under an obligation of ongoing and unrelenting self-scrutiny.
On Kierkegaard’s understanding of the close connection between theory and practice, McCombs writes, “Seeing for oneself
requires acting for oneself…by one’s own self-activity, at one’s
own risk, and on one’s own responsibility. In short, autopsy requires autopraxy” (198). One gains humility, and thereby overcomes doubt through “the bitter method of trying to imitate Christ
and failing” (215). Humility is notoriously misunderstood, and
caricatured as well. McCombs corrects the common misunderstanding: “a meek and beaten-down milksop does not have the audacity to believe. . . . Honestly admitting one’s utter weakness
before God takes the greatest human strength. . . . [O]nly heroes
of the spirit have the audacity to believe . . . what pride cannot
tolerate and therefore willfully ignores: namely, a supreme being
to whom humans ought utterly to subordinate themselves” (215).
In humility, self-transcendence overcomes irrational egoism and
self-importance.
Kierkegaard’s project, like Pascal’s and Dostoyevsky’s, is obviously based on the assumption that the existence of the Biblical
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God cannot be definitively disproven. But some philosophers have
advanced arguments, not subjective but objective arguments,
aimed at definitively disproving the existence of God, especially
as one who freely reveals himself. So a non-Kierkegaardian, but
not anti-Kierkegaardian, task remains for the theologian. First to
examine these arguments dispassionately to assess their cogency;
and then, if they are found to be less than absolutely compelling,
to expose their limitations. For if a man thinks—let us assume,
thinks altogether innocently—that the concept of Christ as true
God and true man, both together, is a logical contradiction, then
exhorting him to imitate Christ is pointless. There is still a lot left
for the theologian to do at the level of objectivity.
McCombs ends his book by raising a question that some readers will have already asked themselves: has Kierkegaard merely
conscripted Socrates into his project? McCombs answers in the
negative. “[T]here are many passages in Plato’s dialogues in
which Socrates professes ignorance, self-blame, suspicions of his
own monstrosity, repentance, and in which he warns against a
self-justifying egoism that undermines truth and justice. Together
these passages seem to constitute a solid basis for a responsible
interpretation of Socrates as a thinker who willed the downfall of
his own understanding because he suspected something very like
sin” (218). McCombs supports this answer with references to the
telling texts. One might object that he has cherry picked the passages that support the Kierkegaardian interpretation of Socrates.
But all interpretations of Plato that aim at taking the dialogic form
of his teaching seriously have to come to terms with everything
that is said and happens in the dialogues, including occasional observations of Socrates’s that do not fit with preconceived notions
of what Platonism is supposed to be. The passages that McCombs
cites in support of Kierkegaard’s Socrates are not more salutary
and comforting than passages one might cite in support of someone else’s Socrates. On the contrary, they are among the most startling and disconcerting passages to be found in the entire Platonic
corpus. It is the singular, though by no means the sole, merit of
McCombs’s study that it forces many of us, just when we thought
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that we, with the assistance of our teachers and our friends, might
have finally gotten a relatively firm grasp of what Socrates is up
to, to take a fresh look at the enigmatic figure through whom Plato
presents his teaching.
NOTES
1. Unless otherwise noted, numbers in parentheses after quotations refer
to the pagination of The Paradoxical Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard,
even where the sentence quoted is Kierkegaard’s and not McCombs’s.
2. Determinism cannot be known, definitively and beyond the shadow of
a doubt, to be true. As David Hume has shown, the proposition, “Every
event has a cause,” is not an analytic judgment. It follows a fortiori that
the proposition, “Every event has a cause outside itself,” which is the thesis of determinism, is not an analytic judgment. It can be denied without
contradiction. The thesis of determinism is not self-evident; and any attempt to demonstrate it begs the question.
3. This is also the view of thinkers as different as Thomas Aquinas and
Kant.
4. Cf. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 71b20-35; 72a26-31; 72b19-2;
90b19-100b18; Metaphysics 1005b6-1006a10; 1011a7-13.
5. Kierkegaard seems here to be close to Gregory of Nyssa, who understands the supernatural end of man to consist not simply in a reposeful
intellectual vision of God, but in infinite and yet unimpeded progress,
progress in love especially. Gregory interprets the claim that we are called
to become partakers of the divine nature (koinōnoi theias physeōs—2
Peter 1: 3-4) to imply theosis, i.e., becoming more and more like God.
This goal, perfect love, can be infinitely approached by man, starting even
in this life, but never attained once and for all, even in the next life. Perhaps surprisingly, Kant similarly understands immortality of the soul to
consist in infinite progress. See Critique of Practical Reason Part 2, Bk.
2, Ch. 2, iv.
6. McCombs draws attention (199) to a remarkable statement made by
the Athenian Stranger in Plato’s Laws: “Truly the cause of all errors
(aition . . . tōn pantōn hamartēmatōn) is in every case excessive friendship for oneself ” (731e3-5). If Plato is expressing his own thought here,
it is not easy to see how he could have held, as some seem to think he
held, that the good is essentially one’s own good, understood narrowly
as one’s own sweet pleasure.
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7. As McCombs notes (173), it is likely that Kierkegaard selected the
pseudonym “Johannes Climacus” (Greek, Iōannēs tēs klimakos, literally,
“John of the Ladder,” the name given to a twelfth century Christian monk
and saint, who wrote The Ladder of Divine Ascent) with an eye on the
“ladder of love” described in the Symposium.
8. Whatever share irrational animals have in the eternal, there is no reason
to think that they conceive of the eternal, much less concern themselves
about it.
9. Phaedrus 229e8.
10. Ibid., 229a3-a8. McCombs notes that the name Typhon can be translated “puffed up” (167). On the difficulty of complete self-knowledge,
consider the qualifier eis dynamin at Philebus 63c3.
11. Aristotle, De Anima 432b5-8 and 433a8-31; Thomas Aquinas Super
Sent., lib. 2 d. 30 q. 1 art. 3, ad 4. Summa Theologiae 1-2 q. 6, introd.; q.
8 art. 1, co.; q. 56 art. 5, ad 1; ibid., 3 q. 19 art. 2, co.; Kant, Critique of
Practical Reason, Book 1, Ch. 1, Theorem 3, Remark 1.
12. See the first sentence of the “First Preface” of Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason.
13. Here Kierkegaard parts ways with Kant. Consider the qualification
in the sentence cited in the previous note: “in one [!] species of its cognition.”
14. Cf. note 5 above.
15. See pō at 229e8 and eti at 230a1.
16. An inability to refute, and hence a consequent openness to, even the
bare possibility of revelation would situate the philosopher qua philosopher in an untenable position, at least according to Leo Strauss: Natural
Right and History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953). 75.
Cf. “Reason and Revelation” (appended to Heinrich Meier’s study, Leo
Strauss and the Theological-Problem, trans. Marcus Brainard [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006] 150, 176-177; “Progress or
Return” (in Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity,
ed. Kenneth Hart Green [Albany: State University of New York Press,
1997], 117, 131. On this crucial point, however much they otherwise differ, Strauss and Kierkegaard are in essential agreement: opposition to
faith cannot consistently be based on an act of faith, or on anything resembling faith.
17. Gorgias 466e2; Meno 77d8-e3.
18. John 20:29.
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Plato’s Political Polyphony
A Book Review of Plato: Statesman. Translated by
Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem. Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2012. vii + 166 pp.
$10.95.
Gregory Recco
Continuing the work begun in their previous two translations of
Plato,* Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem have now
translated Plato’s Statesman. In addition to the translation, the volume includes an introduction, a glossary, an interpretive essay, and
two appendices. The introduction situates the dialogue in the context of Plato’s works, both dramatically and conceptually, announcing its main themes and connecting it with other
works—particularly its immediate dramatic predecessor, the
Sophist, and its thematic siblings, the Republic and the Laws. The
translation contains footnotes that provide pertinent literary or cultural background, references to other dialogues, and pointers to the
attached glossary when particularly important words or ideas first
appear. The glossary, like those in the earlier translations, is organized into meaning-clusters, groups of related or associated words
that together make up one important conceptual unit of the dialogue. The selection and discussion of these words, then, constitutes a work of interpretation—or at least the preparation of
material for such a work—and gives the translators a natural opportunity to discuss the rationale behind their English renderings
of important Greek terms. After the glossary comes a substantial
essay on the whole of Statesman, a thoughtful recapitulation and
reflection that presents a systematic and thorough survey of questions raised in the dialogue. Finally, the appendices: the first
*Plato: Phaedo (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 1998) and Plato:
Timaeus (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2001).
Gregory Recco is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
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graphically presents an overview in word and image of the practice of weaving which forms the dialogue’s most densely intertwined “paradigm,” or model, of the work of statesmanship; the
second unravels and graphically portrays the various heuristic
“divisions” by which the Stranger investigated questions of definition in the Sophist and here seeks the politikos, or statesman.
The translation is of very high quality—a fact that will likely
not surprise readers of the team’s previous two efforts. To describe
its excellence I must make some preparatory remarks about what
a translation is, who Plato is, and how Plato ought to be translated.
And I must discuss the particularities (or rather peculiarities) of
the Statesman.
The art of translation possesses, in a particularly pronounced
degree, a feature that characterizes all arts: What directs the activity
of artists is not their own wishes and ideas, but the necessities of
the work to be done. Becoming the practitioner of an art involves
a kind of surrender to something alien, namely, the determinacies
of the product and the conditions of its production. In translation,
this relinquishment of authority is especially evident in the very
nature of the work, which consists of transplanting a thought that
belongs to someone else from its native home into the foreign soil
of another language while keeping it intact and alive. Because the
translator does not create the being of that which he translates, his
excellence consists in his ability to let the thought of another shine
forth unimpeded and unaltered.
Plato’s thought poses special challenges to the prospective
translator, because the dialogue form in which it predominantly
resides gives it a uniquely amorphous character unparalleled anywhere else in Western literature. Because of their polyphonic conversational style, the dialogues of Plato give no authoritative
indication of how they are to be interpreted, no explicit endorsement of some message, so that it is quite difficult to say just what
Plato’s thought actually is. Without some definite notion of how
to deal with this difficulty, the choices and judgments that the
translator must make run the risk of being severally ad hoc and,
taken together, inconsistent. But in the dialogues themselves Plato
is completely silent about this difficulty. Faced with this apparent
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authorial dereliction, it is tempting to conclude with a kind of misplaced strictness that the phrase “Plato’s thought” signifies but
does not refer, as Heraclitus nearly says of the oracle at Delphi.
But this is the counsel of despair, and it leaves out the third leg of
Heraclitus’s saying: the oracle, who does not speak, but gives sign,
does not conceal. Something similar must be said of Plato. Even
cursory comparison of the dialogues uncovers themes that recur
with some frequency. Longer acquaintance reveals how generous
Plato can be to the careful reader, who discovers that the cracks
in the surface form a pattern, so to speak. The latter point deserves
fuller and more literal articulation, both on its own terms and because it is so often overlooked—which leads to bad interpretation
and consequently to bad translation.
Many of the dialogues take on the outward form of a “Socratic”
conversation, with one dialectically more experienced person taking the lead and questioning another in what seems to be a more or
less directed way, so that the latter gradually takes on views suggested by the former. But the inner truth of the dialogues is that
they are documents bearing witness to the event of thinking, paradoxically more akin to Thucydides’s record of a great event than
to Hippocrates’s scientific investigation of the causes of sickness
and health. The dialogues are not treatises of Socratic dogma thinly
disguised as conversations, but more or less dramatized presentations of what it looks like to think. I say “dramatized” because, as
I hinted above, that is where Plato’s artistry lies: this is his real
work, which is also something like the work of a translator.
Plato’s art is to show us the event of thinking, by dramatically
portraying what it looks like when it happens among human beings, in both its grandeur and its modesty. To say that thinking is
such and such, or has such and such characteristics, is perhaps a
fairly idle and undemanding pursuit, but to show it—that is, to
make manifest through a single instance the structure of intelligibility that informs it and gives it life—is an accomplishment of an
exceedingly high order. Somehow the dialogue must both be a conversation and exhibit “conversationality.” Not surprisingly, the investigation of how conversing ought to take place in order to get
at truth is one of those recurring themes that give the dialogues of
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Plato their distinctive mark. But the exhibition of thinking as such
occurs in several other, less immediate, ways. To note just one,
briefly, let me point out the structure of errancy and return, or wandering and recapitulation.
In the Statesman, as in the Sophist and so many other dialogues, the tentative answers given to the guiding questions are
forever turning up inadequate, coming unmoored as they are jostled by fresh contenders that look no less promising, even if they,
too, ultimately fall apart. This is especially evident in the bewildering multiplicity of “definitions” that fail, by the very fact of
their being multiple, to hem in or pin down the sort of men being
sought in these two dialogues. The various ways in which the dialogues can acquaint us with perplexity, and thus make us feel
thought’s errancy, are probably familiar to many readers. No less
important, however, is a dimension of thought that tends to belong
less to the one questioned than to the one doing the questioning:
to put a name to it, the dimension of redemption, of making up for
what has gone wrong by noticing how it has gone wrong. The dialogues are chock-full of bad arguments, wrong turns, and dead
ends. But these errors never just lie there. They stand out, and and
were made to stand out by their author. Plato calls on us to respond
more adequately than Socrates’s interlocutors and to consider how
an attentive and active questioner might help things move forward
from there. Giving us the opportunity to become better at thinking
is a great gift that is squandered by dogmatic interpretations (and
the translations founded on them), for they can see only the degree
to which the things said in the dialogues do not form a very compelling body of theory, even as they tantalizingly hint at one.
Brann, Kalkavage, and Salem understand quite well both this difficulty and other difficulties related to Plato’s portrayal of the
drama of thinking; their understanding guides their choices and
contributes greatly to the excellence of their translations.
In general, Plato’s artistry exists on the level of style, in the
nuances of diction and register, metaphor and allusion, that reveal
the character behind the thought, and give us something further to
think about when the resources of the argument turn out to be insufficient to answer all our questions. In the case of Socrates, this
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is well known and acknowledged, though less so for his interlocutors: it is a commonplace to mock their “dialogue” as merely a series
of more or less undifferentiated assents. The characters in Plato who
are generally considered to be well drawn are usually the ones who
disagree, and they are considered better drawn the more vehemently they disagree with Socrates (like Callicles and Thrasymachus). The Statesman has neither of these advantages: its main
speaker is the somewhat opaque Stranger from Elea, and its main
respondent is the somewhat colorless Young Socrates. Not a very
promising circumstance for the translation that seeks to reveal a
Plato who is a master of style. It is the particular excellence of this
translation that it is able to show us a Plato who is at work in his
accustomed ways even in these changed circumstances.
The translation is above all else trustworthy. If a word or
phrase jars (such as Socrates’s having “mixed it up” with Theaetetus on the previous day [258a]), consulting the Greek reassures
(perhaps he is meant to sound relatively informal compared with
the Stranger or perhaps he wants to recall the Stranger’s mixing of
the eidē). Words whose polysemy is troublesome are rendered consistently, in a neutral and readable way that has no axe to grind.
Instead of translating most replies as “Yes, Socrates,” the translators make the responses both differentiated and differentiable, an
absolutely invaluable aid to the close reader who is keeping watch
over the fitness of the interlocutor’s responses. The Stranger’s
humor, which verges, it is no exaggeration to say, on aridity, appears in all its understated, deadpan glory. Picture the face of a very
serious old man intoning these words: “The king at least is manifest
to us as one who pastures a certain horn-shorn herd” (265d). Even
when the syntax becomes tortuous, the translation remains not only
readable, but even speakable. What is perhaps most impressive is
that the translation’s readability does not come at the cost of overly
interpretive (or inventive) construal. Heidegger said approvingly
of Kant that he left obscure what is in itself obscure. In this rendering of the Statesman, it should be said that what is puzzling in
the original remains so in translation, but because of what is said,
not because of any obscurity in how it is said. The translation’s
simultaneous readability and faithfulness (in the fullest sense of
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that word), coupled with its generous and thoughtful supplementary materials, strongly recommend its use for classroom study by
serious students, with or without some knowledge of the Greek. It
should also be of interest to, and useable by, any sort of serious
reader at all. In contrast to the translators’ earlier editions of the
Phaedo and the Sophist, this one clearly distinguishes the functions
of the Introduction and the Essay, placing the latter, appropriately,
after the dialogue itself. The “Essay” pithily and unpretentiously
raises questions that cut to the very heart of the dialogue, questions
about the nature and possibility of rational politics, and questions
about the very identity of philosophy. No mere “student edition,”
this; the Plato scholar, too, will find much here that advances serious thinking.
�
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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
Frost, Bryan-Paul
Levine, David
Burke, Chester
Kalkavage, Peter
Maistrellis, Nicholas
Salem, Eric
Carey, James
Recco, Gregory
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Volume 55, Number 1 of the The St. John's Review. Published in Fall 2013.
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 57.1 (Fall 2015)
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
Allison Tretina
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, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401-1687.
©2015 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
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ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing
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Current and back issues of The St. John’s Review are available online at
http://www.sjc.edu/blog/st-johns-review
��Contents
Essays & Lectures
World Without Time ..............................................................1
Eva Brann
Dwelling in the Land of the Confessions..........................................15
Michael Brogan
“In Want of a Wife”—or a Husband—in Pride and Prejudice.........33
Susan Paalman
“Please, Don’t Eat the Swans”: My Revolution in Romania............56
Louis Petrich
Dante’s Beatrice: Between Idolatry and Iconoclasm........................84
Gabriel Pihas
Poem
THE EXTINCTION of SPECIES...................................................117
Marlene Benjamin
Reviews
Education and the Art of Writing
Book Review of Christopher Bruell’s Aristotle as Teacher:
His Introduction to a Philosophic Science ..............................120
James Carey
Book Review of Eva Brann’s Unwilling: An Inquiry into the Rise
of the Will’s Power and an Attempt to Undo It ............................149
Matthew Linck
��ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
1
World Without Time
Eva Brann
Here is a theory of time. It is neither new to me nor new in the
world. I formulated it for publication in 1999* and had it
formulated for me, so I could make it my own, sixteen hundred
years ago by Augustine in 399 C.E. and some three quarters of a
millennium before that by Aristotle, post-335 B.C.E. There is a
certain advantage in revisiting old thoughts, although they have
become second-nature and have lost the footloose feel of thinking
that is yet on the path to discovery: these long-held notions have
also sloughed off some of their complexity and are more
amenable to summary.
The theory is, first, that time is not a being, a thing, or a
substance in the world, nor does it operate as a power, a force,
or a destiny in our life. It has no external existence, and all speech
attributing reality to it is unwittingly metonymic, meaning that
the word “time” is used by a sort of obtuse poetry for processes
that have better names of their own.
The theory has a second element, namely that it would be a
better world, and we would be better off, if more people thought
that time was unreal and spoke accordingly.
Before closing in on the gist of this theory, I want to
acknowledge an intelligent resistance that a listener might feel
arising within. If you have a notion proposed to you as true and
are immediately told that it is also beneficial, shouldn’t you rear
up and resist as a matter of principle? Don’t we keep ourselves
honest by tinting our glasses grey? Isn’t a truth that comes
Eva Brann is a tutor and former Dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Maryland. This lecture was delivered at the Symposium on Time held
at Belmont University in Nashville, TN on September 23, 2014.
*Eva Brann, What Then Is Time? (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1999.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
embellished with utility very suspect? Of course it is, because it
might be nothing but a Pollyannaish optimism, a self-pleasing
thoughtless this-is-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds” optimism.
What I’ll be proposing has behind it a sense that demands more
reflection. I call it “ontological optimism.” Ontology is the
account of being. The very notion of Being requires a
complement: Appearance. The true Being of which true
philosophers strive to give an account comes to our attention as
opposed to what only appears or is merely incidental. The two
greatest philosophers of classical antiquity, Plato and Aristotle,
were ontological optimists. They do not in the least think that
everything within this world is always for the best, but they do
think that its sources, be they at work from beyond or within, are
wonderfully good and therefore attractive to our knowledgehungry souls.
I’ve briefly set out a reason for not foreclosing on a proposed
truth because it is beneficial to believe it – although in the later
history of inquiry into the nature of things there will be those who
make pessimism – a sense that things are as bad as possible – the
test of truthfulness, because the way things are is in truth ugly.
To deal with this split in the human sense of the world requires a
lifetime’s conversation. For now, I’ll posit a guarded optimism.
There is a second misgiving that a canny listener might have:
Does every truth want announcing? Shouldn’t prudent people
suppress some parts of what they feel compelled to believe? I’ll
give an example with major consequences. Our Declaration of
Independence claims that “all men are created equal” in respect
to “certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness.” Just read Lincoln’s speech on the Dred
Scott Decision (1857) for his sense – a true believer’s sense – of
the vulnerability of the document’s basic assertions, assumptions
that have by now become even more questionable for us. For the
Declaration grounds our equality in a common divine Creation,
and that is no longer a faith to be taken for granted. Is the
questionableness of the ultimate equality of human beings, then,
a proper subject for public inquiry? Not on your life – not in
principle and surely even less in fact. Some topics have to be left
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
3
alone if we’re to live together. When you hear some of my claims
about time you might wonder if time isn’t such a topic.
Of course, I’m speaking tongue-in-cheek, precisely because
I think that a public reflection on the reality of time might lead
to a revision of some current mantras which seem to me humanly
deleterious, whereas the doctrine of equality seems to me
humanly beneficial. And also, in all candor, because the kind of
ontological reflection I mean to put before you is in fact very
unlikely to be of major consequence to the world – though I share
with all speakers at academic symposia a secret desire to be
dangerous.
So I’ll barge on, telling first what time is not, and then what
it is insofar as it is anything, and finally why an affirmation of
its unreality, of a world without time, is advantageous to life.
First, What time is not: Look into the world and try to detect
time. Our environment is full of time-telling, but the thing told
is never in evidence. David Hume’s consequence-laden
observation was that we never actually see a cause, only a
constant conjunction of events. So also with time: We never
observe it, only changes in space. Time is told either by location
in space or by counting in . . . what? Wouldn’t the natural
completion of that phrase be “counting in time?” That’s circular,
to be sure, though in fundamental thinking circularities are often
revealing, because they display ultimate involvements. In this
case how we catch something bears on what it is.
Second, then, What time is: Basically time-instruments are
in the analogue mode. Timaeus, in the Platonic dialogue named
after him, says that what we call time is “a certain movable image
of eternity . . . an eternal image going according to number” (37d
ff.). Time is an “image of,” or is analogous to, eternity because it
is everlasting and has neither beginning nor end. It is a mere
image because it appears as change, and so it doesn’t achieve the
undifferentiated nowness of eternity; it is movable as traversing
circular distances. Its generating and telling instruments are the
visible heavenly bodies. In other words, the heavens both are and
tell the time of the world; they are both cosmic time that goes on
forever and a heavenly clock that needs no rewinding. The
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
watches most of us wear on our wrists are in turn made in the
heavens’ image; they are analogues of the circular motion of the
sun (as it appears to us) or of the earth (as Copernican theory
persuades us). Whether the time-piece is cosmic or miniscule, it
tells time by an indicator, sometimes a heavenly body, sometimes
“a hand” moving over a portion of a circle’s circumference. So
even a little ladies’ watch is an analogue of the cosmos. There
are also in our day digital time-pieces that involve counting and
will open a can of worms. I will speak of them later. One
difference between analogue and digital clocks comes across in
a preference for the round watchface as expressed by a friend of
mine who said: “I want to know what time it is, but I also like to
see what time it isn’t.” Analogue watches tell time in terms of
the everlasting revolutions of the heavens together with the
conventional divisions of the human day.
Aristotle picks up on the “going” of the image “according to
number” – or so it seems, when we read Book 4 (chaps. 10-14)
of his Physics (which contains his account of time) in
juxtaposition with the Timaeus. Probably he clued it out himself.
In any case, he puts motion together with number to spectacular
effect – the first instance I know of in any writing of time being
effectively undone as a something. He doesn’t say: “I’m first; this
is a conceptual revolution.” He would much rather make his
thinking persuasive by presenting it as a tweaking of thoughtful
predecessors. Yet, in brief, he has discovered that time is
incidental to change. And since he thinks that all change is at
bottom locomotion (chap. 7.7), this means that time is attendant
on motion from place to place. Moreover, this motion is
numerable. For although it is continuous, it is divisible into even
measures at any of the points of the trajectory of a mobile object.
Every motion, of course, implies a moving object which
generates, one might say, a path, whose diagram is an open or
closed orbital trajectory. Then time is the counted collection of
all the measured linear units: 12 (EST), for example, is the
counted number of dial-measures in which the sun reaches high
noon, the zenith of its orbit, from a fixed starting point opposite.
Or 13 (years) is the number of the sun’s yearly circuits on the
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
5
ecliptic, the day after which a young Jew is said to be a man. For
motion to be thus countable, it needs to have a recognizable
“before and after”: here before, here now, here thereafter. Thus
Aristotle defines time in this way: “Time is the number of motion
with respect to before and after.”
Here, we might think, Aristotle has gotten himself into deep
trouble. “Before and after” are, after all, primarily time-words:
past and future divided by a non-time, a span-less, point-like
“now.” Thus rewritten, “Time is the number of motion counted
according to the progress of time” doesn’t sound very helpful.
But Aristotle has a perfect defense: For him every motion that is
not violently unnatural is a development of potentiality from
implicitness to fulfillment. Therefore every motion – sublunar
ones that begin and end and heavenly motions that never cease –
every single motion has discernible phases even before time is
brought in. So “before and after” can indeed be pre-temporal, as
are the implicit stages of a development.
But there is a more serious stumbling block, and I will make
a gift of my book on time to anyone who removes it for me in
Aristotle’s terms. He emphasizes that time is the counted number,
not the counting number (4.2). So if I say “twelve o’clock high”
I mean the twelve counted path-segments of the sun’s motion,
not my counting thereof. But Aristotle is also quite clear about
the fact that there can be no counted number without a counting
consciousness. (Aristotle, of course, says “soul,” and so should
I, though the word is at present proscribed, and “consciousness”
is de rigueur, I think principally because it is from Latin and has
three syllables and seems less naïve than “soul,” which is from
good Old English and has but one.)
So the counted motion, which is time, requires a counting
soul. Here is the problem: The counting soul does not just beat
with a steady pulse: one, one, one. . . . That’s what the digital
watch does, thereby electronically causing a prescribed series of
numbers to appear on a spatially moving dial. The soul actually
recalls the pulses accumulated. Its numbering is ordinal: first,
second, third. It saves bygone pulses in their order and projects
future ones, and it is present, here now, at each moment of
�6
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
counting. But if it is counted motion that is time, then the
counting soul is pre-temporal. What then is the substrate of its
serially ordered activity? Aristotle, in making time external and
incidental, something that is found in nature only as a mere
measure, has also made human counting an enigma. What name
shall we give the psychic development that directs ordered,
ordinal, counting?
One reason why Aristotle has effectively reduced time to
nothing in itself is that it is in its conceptual structure dramatically
unlike its representational analogue, the linear path, the
visualizable trace, of a mobile object. The time-line segment
before the now, called “the past,” is gone, erased; the future time
path is not yet and invisible; the now is analogous to a point
which has, as Euclid says, no parts and “in” which nothing can
exist. If you cast yourself into time, you’re done for; there is no
time span in which to exist – though plenty of spatial extension
in which to move.
Here’s an interesting addendum to the Aristotelian difficulty.
It is taken up and solved more than two millennia later in his own
terms by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason (1787) – not the
enigma of existence, namely, what span time’s “no-longer” and
“not-yet” leave for us to be in – but time’s particular relation to
counting. Recall that Kant thinks that all our experiences, whatever
appears to us in an eventually apprehensible way, already comes
directly formatted temporally and spatially. But this forming frame
is, so to speak, amorphous and beneath awareness. It needs to be
brought together (in Greek, “synthesized”) with thinking, with the
understanding. Kant assigns to the imagination the mysterious
work of joining intuition and understanding, distinctionless time
and a determinating concept. Kant thinks that this latter is the
concept of quantity, and that when intuited time is made
determinate by quantity, counting is the result. The way I put it to
myself is this: Time makes its appearance in consciousness by a
kind of pulsing that is a now-counting: now1, now2, now3 . . . , or
one, two, three. . . . This analysis seems to me true to experience.
Sheer temporal awareness seems to be a kind of pure enumeration
of beats – it may actually be our heart-beat felt as a pulse, the
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
7
throbbing of our arteries following the pumping of the heart. What
makes a span of time, time lived through, is having laid up that
cardinal count in memory, where it becomes ordinal: first beat,
second beat, third beat. Thus the mere beating turns into a first,
second, third moment of remembered past.
So Kant solves the problem by bringing time totally within
the consciousness of a “subject,” that is, a thinking I. Time is not
soul-numbered motion entering into the world from outside, but
number itself arises as a conceptualizing of intuitional time
within the subject. But then, so does everything within the reach
of our comprehension arise within me, the subject; this
elucidation of time is bought at the price of near-total subjectivity.
Moreover, the deep origin of time as a form of our sensibility,
though in us as subjects, is not for us as knower: The grounds of
the possibility of our experiential knowledge are not within our
experience. Thus one might say that for Kant, too, aboriginal time
is a non-being, not a knowable something – that inferred ghost
which he calls a noumenon.
Third, What time is insofar as it is anything: So I’ll leap back
through the ages to Augustine, who seems to me the greatest
phenomenologist of time, that is, the finest observer of the
internal experience we have of it, and the first analyst of its
elements.
That is not just my opinion. The most comprehensive and
acute work on time in modernity that I know of, Husserl’s On the
Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (1893-1917), is
essentially an acknowledged elaboration of Augustine’s own
answer in the Confessions to his famous phrasing of the enigma
of time: “What, then, is time? If nobody asks me, I know; if I
want to explain it to someone who asks, I don’t know” (10.14).
Augustine allows that we all know time as an experience,
sometimes an acutely and deliciously painful one: Here’s
Shakespeare, Augustine’s rival in time-consciousness:
Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do till you require.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour
When you have bid your servant once adieu. (Sonnet 57)
Who among us has not spent a world-without-end hour sitting
by the telephone? Who is not acquainted with the swift “time’s up”
of dense experience, short in felt duration, long in remembrance,
or the dragging “are we done yet?” of bored disengagement, endless
as a happening but miniscule in memory? Or the brute standing still
of time in pain? Or the relative pace of experienced time that
Rosalind describes in Shakespeare’s As You Like It:
Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I’ll tell
you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal,
who Time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal.
(3.2, 299-302).
That’s the experience described – but now to the experience
explained. How does it arise? Here is Augustine’s answer, which
I’ll frame as a diagram for you to envision.
Imagine a horizontal line of indefinite length. It represents
all the world’s simultaneous motions, its goings-on, from the
stars’ revolutions to the mosquitos’ dartings. For Augustine, the
Christian, the line must have a beginning, Creation, and an end,
Judgment Day. In God’s omnisciently comprehensive sight it is
all there at once. But human beings experience it as an extension.
Imagine a second vertical line, best drawn orthogonal to the world
line, and moving along with it. The moving point of crossing is
an “origin.” It represents our mind, existing now, in contact with
the world and borne along by its motion. So it is not really a
mathematical point but a living moment in a moving world. Later
writers, beguiled by Aristotle’s analogy of the temporal now to
the spatial point of no extent, will see the need to call it the
“specious present.” But it is not a specious – that is, pretend –
present, at all, but a real psychic event, albeit a mystery.
Where then in this diagram is past and future? The vertical
line represents, as I said, the mind. And the mind has, as Augustine
puts it, distentio – its lengthening, its existence, its longitude, we
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
9
might say. Diagrammatically, it extends above and below its
origin, its moment of existence, its contact with the world. The
part of the vertical below the moment of existence in the present
world represents a build-up of memory-moments, deeper and
deeper in the soul, lower and lower on the upright.
Next, all the moments of memory are connectible by parallel
oblique lines to the world line that the mind has traversed. If we
imagine the forward motion of world and human being
progressing toward the right, then the world line to the left of the
origin represents motions and events left behind in the past, and
each of our true memories down on the “distention” of mind
connects to, projects on, a receding point to the left part of the
world’s motion line. Of course, scrambled connections (crossed
projections) and false memories (wandering projections) can
occur. That is how we have a past; the past is a stack of nows
now in our distended minds – and all one now in God’s collected
mind.
Likewise with the future: Think of it as all the plans and
expectations, further and further away from the present, rising
upward on the upper half of the mind’s line and projectible by
parallel-oblique lines onto the future motions of the world.
That there is in fact a past, though for us only partially and
only indirectly recoverable and real only in memory, is common
belief; whether there is in fact a real future and how our plans
and expectations bear on it is a great theological problem – in
fact, the problem of free will. But this much Augustine shows
clearly and, I think, truly. He says that we must speak of “a
present of bygones, a present of presences, a presence of future
things” (11.2), and continues: “For some such there are in the
soul, and I do not see them elsewhere. The present of things gone
is memory, the present of things present is sight, the present of
things future is expectation” (11.20, 28). In my words, time is
entirely the effect of memory and expectation. Insofar as time is
anything, it is a so-called epiphenomenon, an idle, ineffective
affect supervening on the real operations of memory and
expectation.
But no – “idle” is an inadequate word for our potent sense of
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
time, which is to be understood as our sense of our mind’s
longitude, its present lengthening into the before and after of the
now of our existence – and of course that fact underwrites,
overwrites, potently affects our life.
So now I can zero in on a sense of time that seems to me both
spurious and deleterious. It is time not as an internal enlargement
of existence but as an external being or force. Continuous time,
thought of as being in the world, may be conceived as a
continuous stream bearing things along, an absolutely primal,
equable flow (of what? we may ask) that is unaffected by
anything else in the world; this is Newton’s absolute time
(Principia [1686], First Scholium). You may even hear it, as
Shakespeare (once again) makes Hamlet speak of one who “only
got the tune of time,” a hum conveying its “most fond and
winnowed opinions” (5.2, 183). You may figure it as a linear,
open-ended, unbounded mere going-on, or as a closed, everrepetitive, bounded cycle. In these metaphors, the laws of motion
apply indifferently whether time is run forwards or backwards.
Or you may imagine the continuous temporal substrate as
directed by a forward arrow, a principle of unidirectional change
or development that prohibits reversal. This sort of time is not,
one might say, “when-neutral”; you might call it change in the
abstract, or the substrate of embodied change. In all these forms,
some sort of quasi-event or pseudo-motion is imagined as
continuous.
The other metaphor, the second figurative way of imagining
time is, on the other hand, continual: The now, the present,
continually divides the stream of time into gone-by and not-yetarrived, into past and future. Thus time breaks into a lost past and
a not-yet-gained future around a continually new-event-now. This
new-now nullifies the past as living; it leaves the passed-away
past, so to speak, set in stone. It is, quixotically, both hard-andfast and intangible: You can’t change it – or so they say. It is
indeed, often literally, set in stone; for instance, epigraphy is the
discipline of deciphering inscriptions, often found on marbles.
Its watchword is saxa loquuntur, “the stones speak.” But does
that really mean you can’t change it?
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
11
For consider that these testimonials are not past, not in the
past. They are in the present, and we must make of them what
we can – or will. This curious circumstance, that the past is real
only in the present, might be thought of as the incarnation of the
memory that Augustine calls “the present of things gone.” You
can see that a thoughtful consideration of the past opens a can of
worms. What is memory, the storage house of time-expired
presences? How invulnerable to change is the memorial past?
What about that secondary, often public, memory that is built up
from present testimonials of past events? What is more
changeable than the past – perhaps even transformable into the
present?
But this can of worms is replaced by a bucket of serpents
when it comes to the future. For who would doubt that except for
a God-inspired prophet, no one can have the future in mind? The
future, by the very meaning we attach to it, cannot provide us
with any testimonials; it hasn’t happened. All we have are our
hopeful or fearful expectations, dim intimations of blessings or
harms to come, and uncertain conjectures, projections of our past
experiences embellished with change-vectors, their rates and
directions of change, and, above all, an impetenetrability made
less or more pliable by our weak or resolute will. The will is the
human force whose very name announces future-directedness,
by means of which we take hold in our minds of the yet-to-be
and try to bring it about in the world to our satisfaction. To be
sure, we may make vivid pictures of the future, but closer
examinations will show that they are, depending on our mood,
imaginary recollections from a golden age, or over-the-top
distortions of present trends. But they are not images of originals
that reside over there in the future – for there’s no there there.
Fourth, and finally: World without time: You can probably
tell from my tone, that my desire to cancel time has much to do
with the damage that can be done to us by the notion of a real
future. Let me now enumerate three elements of a theory that
presents time as unreal in the world, as not thing-like, not forcelike – a theory by now surely exposed as part of a program of
resistance to certain ways of life. Then I will complete my talk
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
by fleshing out briefly these refusals to cooperate with “time.”
So then, my three recalcitrances: (a) to the past as passed away,
bygone; (b) to the present as mere passage, transition; (c) to the
future as an imperative power.
(a) Insofar as the past is the span of time behind us, if time is
something real, those spans are really dead, and their relics are
mummies, either to be carefully prepared, with ointments of
honey or baths of vinegar, to live the museum life of the
embalmed departed, or to be discarded upon that notorious
rubbish heap of history as no longer “relevant” to our time, the
present. Thus, for those of a venerating temperament, the past
becomes a silent tomb near which they sit rigidly in worship. For
others, whose dispositions long for change, the past is a spent
force, a deadweight on their innovative energy. To neither party
is the past, if it is anything, the time-proof treasury that houses
all our inheritance of thought and imagination, once human
memory has reluctantly let go of what is too delicate, or
cheerfully chucked out what is too trashy, for prolonged life. But
how the past is properly present to us is a tricky and timely
subject for another day. So much can be said in a sentence:
Unless we want to cut ourselves out of humanity’s will and
remove ourselves as beneficiaries of its estate, we had better give
up thinking of the past as having a date of expiration.
(b) Those who feel the past as a march of obsolescence are
in fact consigning their personal present to mere transition. For
the life-principle of obsolescence is innovation, and innovation
is not the heart-stopping or mind-boggling perpetual newness of
an imagination-arousing work or a truth-revealing theory or a
potent device. Newness is ever-fresh and invulnerable to obsolescence, because it is not a mere time-marker, a mere date-stamp,
on the work of art or on the discovery of an explanation, or on
the invention of a contrivance. Newness is rather inherent to these
wonders insofar as they break into the ordinary course of ongoing life and enhance or redirect it. Time cannot stale its infinite
variety.
Innovation, on the other hand, is systematic, intentional novelty,
willful newness. In the innovative mindset (this is a derogatory
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term: fully alive people don’t have mind-sets), small novel
differences often trump great solid worth. People succumb to the
persuasion that “we live in a time of change,” giving to time an
independent power, as if it were an accelerator that puts life in
overdrive without the need of my foot on the figurative pedal –
a vehicle racing through each present to the next, a car in need
of a factory recall. Otherwise put: People accept that they live in
“a time of . . .” and that it is prudent to “get with it,” to clue out
what this time-tyrant commands and to do it – in our case, to
treat each moment of life as just a bridge to the next novelty. But
there is no such time-potentate. There are only people willing to
go along – not, to be sure, with the non-existent times, but with
what each person thinks the others think, or whither his or her
option-dissipated likes weakly tend. What a humanly actual
present – I am tempted to say, a time-less present – might be,
what, in short, it means actually to exist, is, once again, worth a
long conversation.
(c) So then, finally, the future, the chief and least existent
venue of real time. You all know the vocabulary of futurepossessed people. Some say: “The future is here” – really absurd
speech; if it’s here it’s too late. They might have meant: Be
proactive! Clue out what is coming and preempt or prevent it.
The original meaning of “prevent” was “go before,” as in the
Psalm 18, in which David is fearfully imagining: “The sorrows
of death compassed me about: the snares of death prevented me.”
He means “came before me, confronted, me” (18, 5). In that
sense, the anticipation of the future, in literally “foregoing” it,
also “prevents” it; it forecloses the future. Human beings are
surely entitled, even required, to prevent the future in the sense
that by anticipating their version of it they’ll bring it about or
keep it from happening – as long as they understand that they are
going towards something, an “it,” that is not there to meet them.
How we think about our plans makes a great difference: whether
we justify our intentions as accepting, managing, and yes,
serving, what is coming at us in the false, even craven, belief
that there is a real future; or whether we, believing the Future
(capital F) to be a false reification, a confusion between an
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abstraction and a reality, make ourselves think now, in our
present, about what is best and most desirable and also humanly
possible – and then do that.
And, once again, there is endlessly more to say about the
future. But instead of pursuing it, I will end with this observation:
Being future-recalcitrant is the very opposite of being reactionary,
for the non-existence of the future – or at least our ineradicable
ignorance of it – is the very condition of our practical freedom.
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Dwelling in the Land
of the Confessions
Michael Brogan
It’s surprising that a lover of wisdom should lavish as much attention on the particulars of his own life as Augustine does in the
Confessions. While any number of philosophers before him had
sought to live by the maxim inscribed in Apollo’s temple at Delphi—gnōthi seauton, know thyself—none known to me had
taken this as a directive to reflect on the contingencies of his own
biography, let alone publish his thoughts on such intimate matters
as a vexed relationship with his mother, a childish loathing of
school, a troubled sexual history, or an enduring tendency to
overindulge at the dinner table. In the Phaedo, Plato does have
Socrates recount how he lost his youthful enthusiasm for the
study of nature (96a-100a), but in their exclusive attention to the
evolution of his philosophical orientation, these autobiographical
remarks hardly compare with the astonishingly inclusive narrative of a sinner’s wandering path to God that Augustine gives us
in the Confessions. Socrates, his account of his “second sailing”
notwithstanding, lives out the Delphic command not by brooding
over his individual history or unique identity but by enlisting dialogue partners in a collaborative search for the truth of those experiences potentially shared by us all in virtue of our common
humanity. To oversimplify a bit, he’s interested not so much in
who he is as in what he is, not in this individual man called
Socrates but in what it means to be a human being in general.
Even more pronounced is the contrast between Augustine
and Plotinus, the thinker who perhaps exercised a greater influence on him than any other pagan writer. The Neoplatonist’s disregard for merely individual selfhood is memorably captured in
the testimony of his disciple Porphyry, who writes that “Plotinus,
Michael Brogan is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
This lecture was first delivered on November 22, 2013.
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the philosopher our contemporary, seemed ashamed of being in
the body. So deeply rooted was this feeling that he could never
be induced to tell of his ancestry, his parentage, or his birthplace.”1 No mere quirk of temperament, this reticence is governed by Plotinus’s overriding ambition to identify completely
with the incorporeal intellect in its capacity for timeless contemplation of the divine One. It’s this aspiration that motivates his
refusal to share even the bare facts surrounding his origins as an
embodied self.
For all that he owes to the self-effacing Platonic sage, however, Augustine himself has no qualms about directing his gaze
and ours to the particular circumstances and events of his unique,
unrepeatable, and still-unfolding life. Quite to the contrary, he
writes in the confident hope, reiterated at several key points in the
Confessions, that by reflecting on that life, seeking out the narrative threads that bind it into a unity, he and his readers might be
drawn ever closer to the eternal, divine truth. But how does a lover
of wisdom—one, moreover, as indebted to Neoplatonism as Augustine acknowledges himself to be—arrive at a hope like this
one? How is it that he comes to see his embodied, time-bound existence as no mere image to be forgotten as quickly as possible in
the ascent to its divine original but as something worthy of the
most serious and sustained attention?
Now, one approach to the question immediately comes to
mind. As an orthodox Christian believer, the author of the Confessions fully accepts the doctrine of the Word made flesh. God
himself, on this account, took on all the characteristic features of
human finitude: he was born of a particular woman at a particular
time and place, spoke a particular language, practiced a particular
religion, lived in relationship to particular human others—we
could extend forever this list of “accidents” that individuate the
incarnate beings that we ourselves are and that Christians believe
God in Jesus became. While some of these properties and rela1. Porphyry, “On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of His
Work,” in Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (New York:
Penguin, 1991), cii.
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tionships are undoubtedly less important than others, who are we
to scorn the whole lot of them if God himself has deigned to take
them on? Who are we to be “ashamed of being in the body” if the
Creator of all things, of corporeal substances no less than of the
spiritual, saw nothing shameful in becoming incarnate? If the humanity of Jesus Christ, indeed his very flesh and blood, is indispensable to our salvation, shouldn’t we at least have second
thoughts about renouncing our own humanity, or attempting to locate it exclusively in a disembodied intellect that manages to shed
the burdens of finitude?
But of course these are very big “ifs”— too big, I think, for a
community like ours whose conversation appeals to no higher authority than natural reason. While Augustine believes he can find
in the writings of the Neoplatonists themselves the doctrine of the
Word that was with God and that was God, not even he claims to
apprehend the incarnation of that Word on any basis other than
faith. My ambition tonight is to see how far we can go toward
making sense of the intensely personal approach of the Confessions without appealing to postulates drawn from sacred doctrine.
While I suspect that Augustine’s unprecedented way of applying
the Delphic maxim becomes fully intelligible only against the
background of his specifically Christian commitments, we might
nevertheless begin to understand the peculiar strategy he employs
in the Confessions by considering the deficiencies that come to
light there of a philosophy conducted in a wholly impersonal key.
However dazzling a glimpse it may afford of the eternal truth,
Neoplatonic introspection, we shall see, fails to open out onto
what Augustine calls “the way that leads not only to beholding
our blessed fatherland but also to dwelling therein” (7.20.26).2
PART I
Before examining their limitations, however, I want to begin by
briefly considering why the “books of the Platonists” (7.9.13)
2. All Augustine quotations are from The Confessions of St. Augustine,
trans. John K. Ryan (New York: Doubleday, 1960).
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were attractive to Augustine in the first place. His study of them
comes directly on the heels of his disillusionment with the
Manicheism he had been espousing for the better part of a
decade. Disheartened by the moral and intellectual bankruptcy
he has found even among the elite members of that sect, he has
also come to reject their sharply dualistic vision of good and evil
as coeternal principles locked in cosmic combat. Such a view, he
concludes, is irreconcilable with his dawning certainty that God
must be beyond all change, corruption, or violation. Nothing can
harm a divinity worthy of the name, and this means that God
could have no compelling reason to engage in battle with eternal
forces of darkness. In fact, such forces are no more than the figments of an overheated mythic imagination: for together with
being immutable, God is by nature infinite; it makes no sense,
therefore, to posit a reality that would constrain in any way his
power to implement his perfectly good will.
With his Manichean convictions thus in tatters, Augustine
finds himself not so much freed as unmoored, drifting toward a
radical skepticism that, for all its philosophical plausibility, can’t
possibly quiet the clamor of his restless heart. It is in this state
that he becomes newly open to the possibility of reconciling with
the Catholic Christianity in which his mother attempted to raise
him, an orthodox faith which, largely due to Bishop Ambrose’s
brilliant preaching on the allegorical sense of the Old Testament,
he has ceased to disdain as the bastion of simple-minded literalism. He realizes, for example, that our being in God’s image need
not entail that he be confined to a body like ours, as the Manichees
had mocked the Catholics for allegedly believing. At this stage,
however, Augustine finds he can do no better than replace such
anthropomorphism with a less crude but no less materialist notion
of God, now imagined as a subtle body extended throughout infinite space, permeating and exceeding a created world conceived
on the analogy of a sponge submerged in a vast sea (7.5.7). To
think in this way, he realizes, commits him to the absurd view
that an elephant, for example, must contain more of the divine
presence than a sparrow, yet he remains frustratingly unable to
understand God or anything else in nonmaterial terms. He writes:
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“Whatever was not extended over, or diffused throughout, or
compacted into, or projected up to definite measures of space, or
did not or could not receive something of this kind, I thought to
be completely non-existent” (7.1.2).
It’s this crucial error that the books of the Platonists enable
him to overcome, not simply by introducing him to an impressive
theory of incorporeal being but by showing him a path leading
to nothing less than a direct experience of the purely spiritual,
first within his own soul and ultimately in the divine being itself.
Taught to shun the external and direct his gaze inward, he eventually catches sight of what he calls the “unchangeable light”
above the mind. After ascending beyond bodies and the power
to perceive them and onto the soul’s rational faculty of judgment,
he says that in realizing its own mutability, this reasoning power
raised itself up to its own understanding. It removed its
thought from the tyranny of habit, and withdrew itself
from the throngs of contradictory phantasms. In this way
it might find that light by which it was sprinkled, when
it cried out, that beyond all doubt the immutable must be
preferred to the mutable. Hence it might come to know
this immutable being, for unless it could know it in some
way, it could no wise have set it with certainty above the
mutable. Thus in a flash of its trembling sight it came to
that which is. Then indeed I clearly saw your “invisible
things, understood by the things which are made” (7.17.23).
Many of you will no doubt recognize the final sentence here
as a citation from Paul’s Letter to the Romans (1:20). By quoting
Scripture, however, Augustine does not mean to imply any essential difference between the experience he is recounting and
the one described by Plotinus and his disciples. As in the writings
of those philosophers, the inward turn of Confessions 7 corresponds to a movement away from absorbed attention to the particularities of the material world and toward the timeless,
intellectual contemplation of the “unchangeable light” at the
source of all finite things. That eternal light is one and the same
for Plotinus as for Paul, for Augustine as for you or me. If our
highest good is indeed to gaze upon it, it’s understandable that a
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thinker like Plotinus would regard attending to those things that
differentiate us individuals, the temporal accidents of birth and
biography, as at best a distraction from our true calling. In the famous treatise known as “On Beauty,” Plotinus insists that what
we ought to be doing is chipping away like sculptors at everything exterior to the eternal light within us. “Do you see yourself,
abiding within yourself, in pure solitude?” he asks.
Does nothing now remain to shatter that interior unity, nor
anything external cling to your authentic self? Are you entirely that sole true light which is not contained by space,
not confined to any circumscribed form . . . ? Do you see
yourself in this state? Then you have become vision itself.
Be of good heart. Remaining here you have ascended aloft.
You need a guide no longer. Strain and see.3
But what if “straining” isn’t enough? What if “remaining
here” proves too difficult? For all the serene confidence that
marks Plotinus’s writings, even he and his disciples sometimes
seem to acknowledge the impossibility of simply willing the soul
to arrive at and persist in its transcendent vision. Porphyry, for
instance, claims to have had the experience just once, in his sixtyeighth year,4 and while Plotinus says that for him “it has happened often,”5 he also characterizes it as something that comes
“suddenly” (exaiphnēs)6 upon a soul that is all too quickly sent
back down into the comparative dullness of mere discursive reason.7 Now, I suppose it’s possible (thought personally I doubt it)
that if Augustine had experienced nothing worse than this inevitable slide from nous to dianoia, from pure contemplating to
the difficult labor of thinking things through, and if, moreover,
he had found some way to reconcile the suddenness of the introspective vision with Plotinus’s confidence in the sufficiency of
3. Enneads 1.6.9, in The Essential Plotinus, trans. Elmer O’Brien (Indianapolis: Hackett , 1964 ), 43-44.
4. Porphyry, “On the Life of Plotinus,” cxxii.
5. Enneads 4.8.1.
6. Enneads 6.7.34.
7. Enneads 4.8.6.
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effort (“straining”) to bring it about, he just might have remained
content with what the books of the Platonists were able teach
him. But as he recounts in such compelling detail in the Confessions, his rapturous and reassuring vision of the unchangeable
light is followed almost immediately by a plunge back into currents of temptation that prove to be just as irresistible as they had
been before. No transformation of his life ensues, no conversion
or reorientation of his misbegotten aims and ambitions follows
upon the ecstatic experience that liberates his mind. “I was borne
up to you by your beauty,” he confesses, “but soon I was borne
down from you by my own weight, and with groaning, I plunged
into the midst of lower things” (7.17.23). In other words, the
tyranny of habit reasserts itself immediately, and he succumbs to
old patterns of feeling and acting despite seeing them more
clearly than ever as obstacles in the way of his deepest desire.
The good he approves unreservedly in his mind he fails to pursue
with an undivided heart; unable to do what he wants, he does the
very things he hates.
How depressing! Wouldn’t we like to think that even a pale
approximation of a vision like the one Augustine reports would
have a profound effect on the way we live our lives? Wouldn’t it
be easy to love the truth and to do it if we were only certain what
the truth was? But this is just the sort of comforting illusion that
Augustine indulged in until his ecstatic vision deprived him of
what he calls “that former excuse, in which I used to look upon
myself as unable to despise the world and to serve you because
knowledge of the truth was still uncertain to me” (8.5.11). Now,
approaching thirty years of age, he has attained the certainty he’s
long been seeking, and yet he discovers that he is just as enthralled
to his old, enervating habits as he ever was. Able to see the truth,
he still cannot draw near enough to bask in its radiance.
If we are at all persuaded of the authenticity of his testimony—influenced, perhaps, by an uncomfortable awareness of
our own failures to translate insight into action, to do the truth
we know—we have reason to wonder whether any mere vision,
however dazzling, can set us on the sure path to the good. Understanding alone is perhaps not enough to overturn long-settled
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habits of self-indulgence, indolence, and despair, no matter how
irrefutable the evidence becomes that these are precisely what
keeps us from the happiness we seek. To use one of Augustine’s
favorite images, it’s as if we can become enchained to ways of
life we know to be toxic to our souls. He writes:
For in truth lust is made out of a perverse will, and when
lust is served, it becomes habit, and when habit is not
resisted, it becomes necessity. By such links, joined one
to another, as it were—for this reason I have called it a
chain—a harsh bondage held me fast. A new will, which
had begun within me, to wish freely to worship you and
find joy in you, O God, the sole sure delight, was not
yet able to overcome that prior will, grown strong with
age (8.5.10).
Now, we call “habits” those dispositions to feeling and action
that come to be in us as a result of repetition. What we do habitually we do not because nature compels us or reason convinces
us but simply because we have done likewise in similar situations
time and again in the past. Here’s a trivial example. I’m in the
habit of drinking a cup of coffee first thing every morning. I don’t
remember making a deliberate choice to start doing this, but if
ever I did, it must have been a long time ago: at this point in my
life, it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that deliberate choice
of any kind becomes possible for me only after I’ve had that first
cup. I suppose if I were to summon my inner resources I could
manage to break a chain now thousands of links long by choosing
to have tea tomorrow instead. After all, it’s not my nature that
determines me to drink coffee, as it is, say, the stone’s nature that
causes it to fall or the fire’s that makes it rise, but merely my
long-settled habit—a practice become second nature, so to speak.
But might there be situations in which this is a distinction
without any practical difference, occasions when second nature
constrains no less than first and habit takes on the character of
compulsion? For Augustine there were, and we need not have
suffered from any of the conventionally recognized “addictions,”
I think, to identify with his experience of habit as an iron chain
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holding him back from goods he has to come to perceive with
incontestable clarity.
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle observes that, unlike
those powers that are in us by nature (e.g., sense perception), the
potencies for which precede our exercise of them, the virtues of
character are like physical or technical abilities in that they come
to be in us only after we have been engaged in the activities associated with them (1103a25f). We become capable of courage,
for example, only by repeatedly doing courageous things, meaning those things the already courageous person does, just as we
become harpists by repeatedly practicing the harp under the tutelage of an accomplished player. As we grow more accustomed
to being at work in them, these activities become easier for us,
more pleasant, we could even say, more “natural” to us.
Unfortunately, though, this is at least as true, and probably
more so, of bad actions as it is of good: as Augustine knew all
too well, a past defined by repeated indulgence in any kind of
excess or deficiency can make a future characterized by strength
of will or self-control, let alone full-fledged virtue, appear entirely out of reach. How I conduct myself today seems largely
determined by what I did yesterday, even when the memory of
this recent past fills me with shame and regret over having acted
otherwise than I knew I should.
I want to turn now to Augustine’s analysis of time to see what
light it might shed on this indebtedness or even enslavement of
the present to the past, and also on the shape that a rehabilitated
future might ultimately take. My hope is that doing this will bring
us a step closer to our goal of understanding the significance of
Augustine’s autobiographical turn in the Confessions.
PART II
Though it would take all night (at least) to do justice to his fascinating and intricate meditation, the basic paradox of time Augustine identifies in Book 11 can be expressed in a few words. It
seems, he observes, that the present is the only time that actually
exists, since whatever the future is, it is not yet, and the past is
no longer. Upon scrutiny, however, the present itself turns out to
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look like nothing more than an extension-less boundary between
those two nonentities, the past and the future. “It flies with such
speed from the future into the past,” Augustine says, “that it cannot
be extended by even a trifling amount” (11.15.20). Hemmed in as
it is on both sides by nonbeing, the reality of the duration-less present itself falls under serious suspicion. Here is Augustine again:
[I]f the present were always present, and would not
pass into the past, it would no longer be time, but eternity. Therefore, if the present, so as to be time, must
be so constituted that it passes into the past, how can
we say that it is, since the cause of its being is the fact
that it will cease to be? (1.14.17, emphasis added.)
Thus it appears that neither the future, nor the past, nor even,
now, the present has a sure hold on being: future and past are not,
and the present is only in so far as it ceases to be. But Augustine
is unwilling to conclude from this that time is mere illusion.
Should we decide that it exists only in a secondary or derivative
sense—a kind of moving image of eternity, as the Timaeus has
it—it nevertheless remains too fundamental to our lived experience, and our ways of talking about that experience, simply to
deny its reality altogether. The task is to try to understand what
time is, if not in itself then at least as it is for us. What we can
say for sure, Augustine thinks, is that the past and future depend
for their being on the present; they “do not exist except as present
things” (11.18.23), he says. It seems no less true, however, that
the present itself cannot be apart from the past and the future, for
what else could provide the present the “space” it needs to extend
beyond the length-less and breadth-less instant that exists, if it
exists at all, only by rushing headlong into non-being?
Characteristically, Augustine looks within himself for a way
beyond the impasse. It’s there, in the soul or the mind, that future
and past things acquire a kind of presence (and therefore being),
as correlates of the mind’s acts of expectation and memory, respectively. It’s also there that present things achieve stability by
being held in attention, an act of the mind that articulates itself
beyond the point-like instant by looking back to a beginning and
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forward to an anticipated end. Whereas on initial reflection time
had seemed to vanish into the nothingness of a not-yet-existent
future, a no-longer-existent past, and a perpetually self-destructing
present, its claim to at least relative being can now be redeemed
so long as we’re willing to pay the price of acknowledging its dependence on the mind’s own activity. The three times, Augustine
says, “are in the soul . . . the present of things past is in memory;
the present of things present is in intuition; the present of things
future is in expectation” (11.20.26). Taken as a whole, time can
thus be described as a “distention of the mind” (distentio animi)
(11.26.33), a stretching or swelling of present consciousness
backward into a remembered past and forward into an anticipated future.
While it’s certainly possible to distinguish memory, expectation, and intuition or attention as three separate acts of the mind,
Augustine’s analysis makes clear that to do this would be to engage in a kind of abstraction. For in our lived experience of
things, memory, expectation, and attention form a single, continuous whole. The mind, he says, “looks forward, it considers, it
remembers, so the reality to which it looks forward passes
through what it considers into what it remembers” (11.28.37). To
illustrate this dynamic, he reflects on the experience of reciting
a psalm he knows by heart. Once he’s formed the intention to recite and is about to carry it out, the psalm, or rather, his recitation
of it, is one of the “things future,” which is to say, it exists for
the mind in the mode of expectation. The ray of consciousness is
pointed forward, so to speak, casting its light over the whole
psalm as something to be brought out into the open as an audible
presence. As the recitation proceeds, the stock of expectation decreases in proportion to memory’s increase, until, having reached
his proposed end, the speaker falls silent and the psalm in its entirety exists by way of its resonance in the recollecting minds of
its hearers.
What happens between the beginning and the end of this
process, namely, the ongoing transferal of expectation’s funds
into the account of memory, corresponds to present time in its
more expansive, non-instantaneous conception. The act of the
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mind responsible for this making present Augustine variously
calls “intuition” (contuitus), “attention” (attentio), and “intention” (intentio). Present consciousness, we come to understand,
doesn’t just passively register a now that arises only to perish (or,
more accurately, arises only by perishing); on the contrary, the
attending or, better, the intending mind plays an active part in the
unfolding of temporal events, as both Augustine’s heavy reliance
on words with tendo—stretch out—at their root, as well as his
pregnant choice of the recitation example powerfully suggest.
About that recitation, Augustine writes:
The life of this action of mine is distended into memory
by reason of the part I have spoken and into forethought
(expectatio) by reason of the part I am about to speak. But
attention (attentio) is actually present and that which was
to be is borne along by it so as to become past (11.28.37,
emphasis added).
It’s worth hearing that again: what was to be is “borne along”
by attention into the past. The Latin verb here is traicitur, a passive
form of traicio, which could also be rendered as “transports” or “conveys.” It combines the preposition trans—“across” or “along”—with
the root verb iacio, meaning “throw,” so we might think of attention as the act of throwing an expected future into a recalled past.
The sense of this would be to emphasize how time for Augustine
is not merely something that we suffer but is also, perhaps even
primarily, something that we ourselves do. It’s hard to know how
to say this: the mind constitutes, enacts, unfolds, or perhaps lives
time, in the transitive sense of an expression like “living one’s
life.” But whatever verb we finally settle on, the crucial thing to
grasp is that the soul itself makes an indispensable contribution
to the experience or even the very being of time in shouldering
an expected future and bearing it along into a recalled past.
If the full significance of this activity does not come entirely
to light in Augustine’s psalm example, what he says toward the
end of Book 11 leaves no doubt about the ultimately moral horizon of his analysis. After describing the temporal process by
which the action of reciting the psalm reaches completion, he as-
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serts that “[t]he same thing holds for a man’s entire life, the parts
of which are all the man’s actions” (11.28.38). (In fact, the scope
can be widened even further to take in all of history, the “whole
age of the sons of men,” though I’ll keep our focus for now on
the life of the individual.) Just as I look ahead in expectation to
the psalm I am about to recite, so too do I project a practical or
moral future for myself, setting about in the present on the task
of converting into a happy memory what is now only an aspiration to act in accordance with my conception of the good. In this
way, “that which was to be is borne along” into the past.
Of course, there are many ways for our moral intentions to
misfire. However completely he comes to rely on God’s grace,
Augustine remains sensitive to the constant vigilance, the intense daily effort required of him if he is to fulfill his divinely
reordered aims. Readers of Book 10 of the Confessions know
that his baptism did not render him immune to the temptation of
taking it easy, of allowing himself to be swept up by the rushing
current of the merely instantaneous now instead of rising to the
challenge of actively living time, that is, of anticipating a virtuous future and then undertaking the arduous task of carrying it
through the present and into the past. “I am a burden to myself”
(10.28.39), he writes, vividly evoking his sense of this labor, the
obligation imposed on us imperfect, temporal creatures not to
while away the time but to strive, with God’s help, to close the
gap between what we are now and what we are called to be.
The difficulty of that task, as our discussion of habit has prepared us to see, seems to be directly proportional to the distance
separating what we will to become from what we have already
been. In other words, the more radically the future we project
for ourselves departs from the past we recall, the harder it is to
bear that future successfully into the present. In the hopes of
deepening our understanding of this phenomenon, let’s return
once more to Augustine’s recitation example. Forming the intention to say the whole psalm from beginning to end involves
calling it up to the forefront of his mind from out of what in
Book 10 he had called “the great cave of memory” (10.8.13).
Only because he has already learned it by heart at some point in
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the past can he now look forward to reciting it in the present.
And this suggests, if the example is as paradigmatic of all temporal experience as I believe Augustine means it to be, that anticipation is itself grounded in recollection, in other words, that
the projected future “borne along” by a present intention is first
assembled by the soul from materials drawn from its past. Augustine makes the point more explicitly in Book 10. Within the
memory, he says,
I encounter myself and recall myself, and what, and
when, and where I did some deed, and how I was affected when I did it. There are all those things which I
remember either as experienced by me or as taken on
trust from others. From that same abundant stock, also,
I combine one and another of the likenesses of things,
whether things actually known by experience or those
believed in from those I have experienced, with things
past, and from them I meditate upon future actions,
events, and hopes, and all these again as though they
were actually present. “I will do this or that,” I say to
myself within that vast recess of my mind, filled with
images, so many and so great, and this deed or that then
follows (10.8.14, emphasis added).
What this passage allows us to see, I think, is that temporal
life, or the activity of living time, is marked by a kind of circularity. In proposing a course of action to myself, I cannot but
rely upon the “abundant stock” of past experiences, either my
own or those attested by others and found credible to the extent
that they are consistent with my own. In other words, before the
anticipated future can be borne along into the remembered past,
the past must first be launched forward into the future as the indispensable material out of which the soul shapes its expectation. Now, this is not to say that in acting in the world we only
ever repeat ourselves, or that the wheel of lived time rotates
around a fixed point. Augustine mentions here that as he deliberates he “combine[s] . . . the likenesses of things” drawn up
from memory, thereby suggesting that the soul enjoys at least
some degree of creative freedom in its activity of conceiving for
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itself a future as something other than an exact replica of its past.
But it’s still no use pretending that a path of total novelty is ever
open to us; the future is inescapably indebted to the past, expectation inevitably takes its stand on the ground of memory.
It’s not hard to grasp that this poses a grave threat to the possibility of the deep and abiding transformation the young Augustine came to recognize as his only hope for happiness. For if
my memory teems with images of a life fundamentally inimical
to the good; if the virtuous examples of others seem too remote
from my experience to be plausible or even attractive models
for me; and if the claims of the philosophers to offer an escape
from time and all its woes have proved too good to be true, then
my desire for the happy life, no matter how firmly rooted in a
clear vision of its reality and goodness, seems fated to go unfulfilled. In their essentially timeless character, transcendent moments of insight, like those Augustine attains by way of
Neoplatonic introspection, are essentially cut off from memory
and expectation, mere interruptions of the circuit of lived temporality. As such, they remain no more than isolated points of
light, like individual stars in a vast night sky—beautiful, to be
sure, but virtually powerless to illuminate the ground beneath
our feet as we stumble along in search of the way that leads not
only to beholding but to dwelling in the land of our desire
(7.20.26; 7.21.27).
Augustine opens a window onto the potentially ruinous dependence of expectation on memory in recounting a conversation he had with himself a few years before his final decision to
seek baptism. Approaching the age of thirty, he looks back with
chagrin at all the time that has passed since his teenage reading
of Cicero’s Hortensius first set him on fire with the love of wisdom. The bitter anxieties and disappointments of those dozen
years have left him more convinced than ever of the futility of a
life given over to worldly ambition. His disillusionment with the
rationalist pretensions of the Manichees and his deepening admiration for the philosophically sophisticated preaching of Ambrose have inclined him, as he puts it, to “fix my feet on that
step where my parents placed me as a child” (6.11.18). He’s
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going to do it, he really means it this time, he’s going to put away
what he calls his “vain and empty concerns” by committing himself fully once and for all to the Catholic Church. Just not yet.
“[T]ime passed,” he says,
and still I delayed to be converted to the Lord . . . I loved
the happy life, but I feared to find it in your abode, and I
fled from it, even as I sought it. I thought that I would be
too wretched, if I were kept from a woman’s arms. I did
not believe that the cure for this disease lay in your
mercy, for I had had no experience with that cure. I believed that continence lay within a man’s own powers,
and such powers I was not conscious of within myself
(6.11.20).
Notice what’s holding him back. Though he has long suspected that the cares imposed by married life are for him incompatible with the spiritual freedom he desperately desires, he also
knows himself well enough to realize that he lacks the strength
to live without the comforts afforded by sexual intimacy. In the
terms of his metaphor, he suffers from a “disease” whose symptoms he knows how to treat but whose cure, he has learned, lies
completely outside his own power to effect. Whether or not we
think it makes sense to diagnose as an illness his inability to commit to celibacy, with a little imagination most of us will be able
relate to Augustine’s predicament here. He knows exactly what
it would take for him to be happy, but bitter experience has convinced him that he’s just not up to the task. Nothing he finds in
the spacious caverns of his memory allows him to envision for
himself a life of genuine health, and without the means to palliate
the symptoms of his disease, he fears that taking up residence in
“God’s abode” would serve only to increase his misery. Thus he
shrinks back from the decisive step, without, however, being able
to resign himself to a future as fatalistically determined by the
past as his own seems certain to be.
Perhaps there is little we can reasonably say about the causes
of Augustine’s ultimate escape from this desperate situation, at
least if we want to keep open the possibility that it was indeed
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God’s grace that finally set him free. I think we can conclude,
though, that whatever it was that finally lifted the terrible burden
from his soul in that Milan garden, the experience he describes
as “a peaceful light streaming into my heart” (8.12.29) would
have been every bit as isolated and ineffectual as his Plotinian
visions of the eternal truth turned out to be had it not become
possible for him to discern the underlying continuity of his past
life of unhappy wandering with the baptized future he was finally
empowered to project for himself. For as his analysis of time has
shown us, to the extent that the present remains divorced from
the past that precedes it, it cannot but have the character of the
instant that is only by ceasing to be, the point-like now that suddenly—exaiphnēs—emerges out of nothingness only to vanish
again just as suddenly. From such an instant, however charged
with divine presence it might be, nothing of lasting, practical significance is likely to follow—nothing more consequential, at any
rate, than the sort of wistful memory and infinite, impotent yearning that threatened to consume Augustine in the wake of his disappointing experiments in Neoplatonic ascent.
In concluding, then, I want to suggest that Augustine’s passionately personal reflection on the events leading up to his final
conversion is intended to recall and thereby reinforce the vital
links between the future opened up to him on that momentous
day in Milan and even the darkest periods of his youthful estrangement from himself and from his God. Though his conversion undoubtedly marks a new beginning, even a kind of rebirth,
it succeeds in doing what impersonal introspection had failed to
do because Augustine is enabled to see it as the culmination of a
process that had begun in him long before. The call he finally answers in deciding to seek baptism is the very same call that had
never ceased resounding in his heart, even when he was desperately trying to drown it out in the frantic pursuit of sensual pleasure, emotional and intellectual titillation, and worldly success. In
looking back on his past, he comes to see that in the anxiety, disappointment, and doubt that marred his life of secular striving,
God himself had been calling him home:
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You were always present to aid me, merciful in your
anger, and charging with the greatest bitterness and disgust all my unlawful pleasures, so that I might seek after
pleasure that was free from disgust, to the end that, when
I could find it, it would be in none but you, Lord, in none
but you. For you fashion sorrow into a lesson to us. You
smite so that you may heal. You slay us, so that we may
not die apart from you (2.2.4).
Augustine meditates on his past in the Confessions to learn
again this lesson of sorrow, which is also, paradoxically, a lesson
of great hope. From out of the caves of his memory he no longer
draws up the despair-inducing confirmation of his own weakness
that had paralyzed him as a young man, but the liberating assurance that God had always been with him, even in the depths of
his sin. Recollections of events in which that divine presence now
seems unmistakable nourish his expectations of future assistance,
giving him the strength to stand firm against present temptation
in the confidence that his conversion will turn out to have been
the decisive event of his life, and not a mere prelude to another
aborted attempt or humiliating failure to change his ways.
But as his unsparing assessment of his present condition
vividly demonstrates, he knows that nothing is guaranteed. To be
sure, conversion to the truth for him comes as a gift, but that
gift—perhaps like all gifts—is profoundly difficult for a creature
with a long history of proud self-assertion to receive. Ever present
is the temptation to refuse or return it in the fatal conviction, born
of pride and despair, that there is no genuine good beyond what
we can obtain for ourselves. The books of the Platonists did nothing to disabuse Augustine of this error. “Strain and see,” they told
him, at once puffing him up by preaching the sufficiency of effort, and casting him down by showing him no more than the way
to behold the blessed country when his heart’s desire was to dwell
therein. The way beyond beholding is a way of humility, and Augustine’s searingly honest examination of his life is his attempt
to walk it.
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“In Want of a Wife”—or a Husband—
in Pride and Prejudice
Susan Paalman
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” (51) This
witty opening sentence of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is
justly well known. The high minded tone of “a truth universally
acknowledged” at the beginning sets up the reader for the prosaic
punchline “must be in want of a wife.” The wit lies in the author’s
tacit acceptance of the universality of human self interest and the
power of that interest to skew what people see to fit their own
desires. People take an interest in another person’s fortune, the
implication seems to be, and in trying to get a piece of it for themselves, in this case through marriage. But rather than acknowledging openly this universal desire for wealth, the world seems
determined to reinterpret its own greed as the fulfilling of the rich
man’s need. The single man of fortune thus becomes the putative
prey for some unmarried woman and her family under the guise
of supplying him with that which he lacks: a wife.
The general implications of the opening sentence are made
particular in the rest of chapter one, which introduces us to Mr.
and Mrs. Bennet. The business of Mrs. Bennet’s life, we are told,
is to get her five daughters married. (7) She is unrelentingly determined in this goal, in large part, as we later learn, because her
daughters will inherit very little from their father, due to an entailed will. As the Bennets discuss Mr. Bingley, newly arrived in
the neighborhood and the “single man” in question, it becomes
clear that Mrs. Bennet cares little for whether Mr. Bingley feels
Susan Paalman is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
This lecture was first delivered on 17 April 2015.
1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations and page numbers are taken from
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (New York: Penguin Books, 1996).
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he lacks a wife, and cares much about securing him and his fortune for one of her daughters. She is not the only mother to partake in this type of self interested plotting. We are told that she
and the other mothers in the neighborhood consider Bingley the
“rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.” (5)
Bingley, single and possessing a fortune, is seen as someone
else’s property himself, as the means to the end of worldly prosperity for some daughter or other. Bingley’s money is to be in
large part the source of happiness for the prospective wife.
Witty as the first sentence of the novel is, there is another way
to read it. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man
in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” (5) If
we take this sentence at face value, it says that everyone understands that the single man’s life is incomplete, that once he has
met his material needs, he must then be looking to meet some
other kind of need, one that can only be filled by a wife. What
sort of a need this might be is left unsaid. In fact, from one perspective, the rest of the novel is an exploration of what the individual lacks, and what each character is looking for in a mate.
We are offered a parade of couples throughout the novel, each
couple having a different basis for formation. They fare better or
worse depending on the wisdom and affections of the people involved.
Both the witty and the direct reading of the opening sentence
fit with the tone of the novel as a whole. On the one hand, Austen
relishes exposing the small-minded follies that often underlie our
lofty aspirations. The humor and economy of word that begin the
novel reappear on every page, often highlighting the ways in
which characters deceive themselves or try to pretend they are
better than they are. On the other hand, Austen gives us some
deeply moving scenes, from Elizabeth’s horrified response to the
knowledge that she has misjudged Darcy and Wickham both, to
Mr. Bennet’s heartfelt plea to Elizabeth not to repeat his own mistake in marrying without esteem, to Darcy’s pure delight when
Elizabeth finally accepts him. The wit and the seriousness succeed one another effortlessly. Perhaps, addressing the question
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of what the individual lacks and what one may desire or need
from a marriage requires both attitudes: both the skewering of
the conceits and follies of human nature and the sincere acknowledgment of our best instincts and our need for one another.
In the main couple of the story, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr.
Bingley’s friend, Fitzwilliam Darcy, Austen depicts characters
who come to know their own weaknesses and find strength
through each other. They endure misunderstanding, miscommunication, and doubt, before finally marrying at the end of the
novel. We are meant to believe that their marriage will be one of
lasting happiness; one in which the needs of each are met, and
met well. Furthermore, we are meant to take joy and pleasure in
the reading of Elizabeth’s and Darcy’s story. But before examining Elizabeth and Darcy any further, let’s take a quick inventory
of some of the other couples in the novel.
The Bennets
Our first view of marriage comes from the Bennets, parents to
Elizabeth Bennet as well as four other girls, including Jane, Elizabeth’s older sister and confidante. The Bennets came to be married, we are told, because of Mr. Bennet’s love of Mrs. Bennet’s
beauty. His desire to live in the presence of physical beauty was
of the first importance to him, and he made the error as a young
man of assuming that her beauty came with a good nature and a
good temper. He was sadly mistaken. Once he realized his mistake, “all his views of domestic happiness were overthrown.”
(198) He was left in a marriage with a foolish and irritable
woman he could not respect, and she was left with a man who
does not love her. Unlike many, Mr. Bennet is wise enough to
avoid the many vices available to unhappy people, but takes
pleasure in his books, in the countryside, and, as depicted in
many scenes in the novel, by teasing his wife almost without
mercy. The more amusement he derives from her gullibility and
lack of understanding, the sillier she gets, until he eventually
grows tired of the game and retreats to his study. The reader too
is amused by their interactions; Austen writes their dialogue with
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a fine ear for the drily comic. As the novel progresses, though, it
becomes clear that there is something perverse about the pleasure
Mr. Bennet takes in his wife’s weakness of mind, and something
frustrating about Mrs. Bennet’s complete inability to understand
him. As a couple, they bring out the worst in each other. Still,
they have five daughters whom both seem to care for. The Bennets have at least found themselves in a stable home with a family, something neither could have produced alone.
The Collinses
The first new marriage in the novel comes after Elizabeth’s closest friend, Charlotte Lucas, becomes engaged to Elizabeth’s
cousin, Mr. Collins, within three days of his having proposed
marriage to, and been rejected by, Elizabeth herself. Elizabeth’s
shock when she learns of Charlotte’s engagement is only exceeded by her dismay at the match. Mr. Collins is a man of the
cloth with a vicarage that is supported by a weathy noble woman,
Lady Catherine. In some ways, he would be considered a very
eligible man. Elizabeth’s rejection of him is based on his character, which is not vicious, but is marked by self serving foolishness. Mr. Collins is “not a sensible man,” (60) we are told, but a
“mixture of pride and obsequiousness, self importance and humility.” (61) Austen plays up his character, detailing a number of
long, pompous, and silly speeches he makes on various occasions, including during his unsuccessful proposal to Elizabeth.
After suffering through and laughing at Mr. Collins and his
speeches, the reader is tempted to agree with Elizabeth that for
Charlotte to link herself to such a man is disgraceful. Elizabeth
is convinced that Charlotte will not be happy in the marriage.
(109) Charlotte, though, sees it differently. She desires “only a
comfortable home,” (108) she says to Elizabeth. Charlotte is
older and less attractive than Elizabeth; her options for a decent
life are limited, she believes. Marriage is the “only honorable
provision for well educated women of small fortune,” and Charlotte sees it as the “pleasantest preservation from want.” (106)
Mr. Collins, as painfully foolish as he is, will give her sustenance
and power in the world, as a man of consequence.
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For his part, Mr. Collins is responding mostly to duty. As a
clergyman with a wealthy and aristocratic patroness, he wishes
to set a good example for his flock, as well as find happiness in
a mate. His rhapsodes on Lady Catherine’s virtues leave no
doubt, though, that his main motive in marrying is to please his
patroness.
In the Collinses, we have a marriage made on social and
worldly grounds: on Charlotte’s side out of her desire for financial independence and on Collins’ out of his duty to his provider.
After their marriage, Elizabeth is forced to admit that both husband and wife are tolerably happy. Collins has married “one of
the very few sensible women who would have accepted him, or
have made him happy if they had,” (152) she says. Charlotte is
intelligent enough to blush at her husband’s foolishness at times,
but knows how to manage him. We are told, “[Charlotte’s] home
and her housekeeping, her parish and her poultry, and all their
dependent concerns, had not yet lost their charms.” (182) Those
are ominous words, perhaps, leading the reader to imagine the
time when the charms have worn off and she is left with such a
husband. We can only hope Charlotte’s children will favor her
more than him, and that she will find whatever companionship
she desires with them.
The Wickhams
The marriage of Mr. George Wickham and Elizabeth’s youngest
sister, Miss Lydia Bennet, comes towards the end of the novel,
after a great deal of suspense. The two had run off together as an
unmarried couple, and taken a lodging together in London. The
crisis of the novel comes when their elopement is discovered and
the Bennets are left to worry while others search out the couple
and persuade them to marry. The persuasion comes in the form
of money and a bought commission in the army for Wickham.
Later, it is revealed that the bribe was financed by Mr. Darcy, out
of several motives, including his own guilt in having covered up
Wickham’s nefarious past. It is interesting that nearly everyone
involved in the matter assumes, on the one hand, that Wickham
and Lydia, once they run off together, must marry; and on the
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other hand, that the marriage will not be a happy one. It was socially unacceptable for a young woman to engage in sexual activity outside the bounds of marriage, and reprehensible for a
young man to seduce such a woman. Once Lydia and Wickham
are assumed to have so engaged, the only course that would retain
their social standing is marriage.
Darcy and Elizabeth, separately, are the only ones to doubt
the wisdom of having Lydia and Wickham marry. Darcy, in fact,
first tries to persuade Lydia not to marry Wickham, and only
works towards their marriage once Lydia convinces him that she
will not leave Wickham. (268) Elizabeth, for her part, expresses
grave misgivings about the match. It is clear to Elizabeth that a
marriage founded upon undisciplined passion will not be a happy
one. Later, the narrator confirms her misgivings by noting the
disarray with which the Wickhams live their lives and the indifference to each other that soon pervades their marriage.
Each of these three marriages was formed with the intention
of addressing some kind of human need or desire: The Bennets’
marriage was formed out of the desire for beauty and fulfilled
the need to procreate; the Collinses looked for financial stability
and social standing and fulfilled social obligations; and the Wickhams married to further Lydia’s desire for importance and to facilitate socially sanctioned sex. With these marriages in mind, let
us turn now to the main drama and involving Mr. Darcy and Miss
Elizabeth Bennet.
Part I: First Encounters and First Impressions
Elizabeth and Darcy do not start off as a likely couple. Their first
encounter is at a neighborhood ball when Darcy, speaking to his
friend Bingley within Elizabeth’s hearing, rejects Elizabeth as a
dance partner, with the stinging and memorable line, “She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me.” (12) Elizabeth
laughs at Darcy to her friends afterwards, repeating the story with
gusto and resolving never to dance with him. Over the next few
weeks, her umbrage at the insult hardens into a profound dislike
based on his proud demeanor. The dislike later turns to something
closer to disgust and hatred when she is told, by the charming
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and attractive Mr. Wickham, that Darcy had denied Wickham his
rightful inheritance from Darcy’s father, out of the ignoble motive
of jealousy.
Darcy, after a brief time of studying Elizabeth for the petty
exercise of emphasizing her imperfections to his friends, soon
begins to find her intriguing. He notices her intelligent expression, graceful and energetic figure, and playful manners. (21-22)
Erotic desire has been ignited: he cannot keep his eyes off her
without an effort. (63) Darcy is not a man to let his passions run
away with him, though. He begins a systematic investigation into
Elizabeth’s character that goes on for several weeks. He starts by
listening in on her conversations with others and continues with
a series of conversations with Elizabeth herself on matters that
range from love poetry, to the duties of friendship, to what it
means for a woman to be accomplished. Darcy, we are told, “had
never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by her.” (46)
Nonetheless, Darcy does not entertain seriously the thought of
marrying Elizabeth at first, because of her relatively low family
connections.
In the response of each to the other, we can discover something of their characters. In Elizabeth’s laughter at Darcy’s insult
to her, we see the value she places on a person’s character above
his worldly status, since she is by no means overawed by Darcy’s
wealth and high social standing. We also, though, see her readiness to laugh at the ridiculous in people, a trait she shares with
her father and one that leads her to have a sharp tongue and something of a sarcastic wit. In her concern for Wickham’s claims
against Darcy, we see her spirited allegiance to justice and kindness. On the other hand, her easy willingness to believe Wickham
without evidence comes from her excessive pride in her ability
to read people: her initial dislike of Darcy is confirmed by Wickham’s accusations and Elizabeth never really doubts that they are
true. We learn later, of course, that Wickham is a liar.
In Darcy, we first see his lack of natural amiability. His refusal to dance when attending a ball and his insulting speech
about Elizabeth, made to Bingley, but clearly within her hearing
and just after he had caught her eye, reveal both a clumsy shyness
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and a prideful disdain for the opinions of others. In his investigation into Elizabeth’s character, though, we see the importance
he places on her substance. Her looks attract him only after he
notices her intelligence and liveliness. The manner and content
of her conversation are what bewitch him. He is very willing to
revise his initial disdainful opinion of her upon further observation. We see Darcy’s pride at work also in his refusal to consider
the possibility of marrying Elizabeth because of her lack of high
social connections. Darcy, as we find out later, was orphaned at
the age of twenty three, and left in charge of fulfilling the Darcy
family’s duties, which are substantial indeed. He takes pride in
his role as the provider of livelihoods, order, and moral example
to the people of Derbyshire.
Darcy reveals his commitment to his family pride in a conversation with Elizabeth, early in the novel. When she comments,
with tongue in cheek, that Darcy must be without any of the usual
follies and nonsense that she is used to laughing at in others,
Darcy responds:
“Perhaps that is not possible for anyone. But it has
been the study of my life to avoid those weaknesses
which often expose a strong understanding to ridicule.”
[Elizabeth replied,] “Such as vanity and pride.”
“Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride – where
there is real superiority of mind, pride will be always
under good regulation.”
Elizabeth turned away to hide a smile. (50)
Darcy, as we see, has “made it the study of [his] life” to eradicate any weakness of character that would make him appear
ridiculous in the eyes of others. His statement indicates the seriousness of his commitment to upholding the honor of the family
name. It also reveals his focus on maintaining the appearance of
strength in the eyes of the world. The difference between avoiding weakness of character for the sake of living a good life and
avoiding it in order that one does not appear ridiculous might not
sound substantial, but it is this same mistake in understanding
that leads Darcy to deny that pride might be a weakness. Darcy,
in pursuing strength of character for the sake of his pride, has
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blinded himself to the potential pitfalls of that same pride. In his
blindness, he has allowed his pride free rein, so that it has outgrown the bounds of a healthy regard for self and family and become excessive to the point that, as the narrator tells us, he “was
continually giving offense,” wherever he appeared. (16) Elizabeth, with her clear sight for the folly of others, immediately sees
and smiles at Darcy’s own self deception that has fostered his excessive pride.
Later in that same conversation, Darcy confesses that he tends
to be resentful of the faults of others, saying, “My good opinion,
once lost, is lost forever.” Elizabeth agrees, with perhaps too
much enthusiasm, that, “Implacable resentment is a shade in a
character.” Darcy responds:
“There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency
to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even
the best education can overcome.”
“And your defect is a propensity to hate everyone.”
“And yours,” he replied with a smile, “is willfully to
misunderstand them.” (51)
Here we have, in a nutshell, Elizabeth’s and Darcy’s analysis
of each others’ faults. Darcy’s self described resentful temper
grates against Elizabeth’s amiability. Her severe irritation at his
complacency about such a fault comes out in her hyperbole: he
has a propensity to hate everyone, she says. Darcy then immediately identifies Elizabeth’s own characteristic fault: that of willfully misunderstanding people.
Darcy and Elizabeth both are under the illusion that their understanding and intellect have led them to lives of rationality and
virtue. Both are deceiving themselves. Darcy is committed to a
path of upholding the family name, but foolishly allows his pride
to bloat into a sense of superiority, telling himself that he has it
under good “regulation”. Elizabeth sees his mistake clearly, but
doesn’t see properly where his pride comes from. She trusts her
ability to analyze people too completely, and comes to believe
her own hyperbolic statement that Darcy is a hateful man, even
while Darcy is falling in love with her. Darcy sees that Elizabeth
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has misunderstood him, but completely misses the extent of her
dislike for him. He seems incapable of seeing the effect his disdainful manners have on others. Their pride and their prejudice
deceive both characters into forming partly true, partly false images of the other that are dependent on their partly true, partly
false images of their own characters.
Neither Elizabeth nor Darcy has the perspective to see clearly
the extent of his or her own faults and mistakes in judgment. Because their own faults are so tied to their image of each other, the
key to knowledge of their defects of character thus lies in each
seeing the truth about the other. But they will never see each other
more clearly without a closer acquaintance than has yet been possible. Darcy’s passion for Elizabeth provides the means for mutual revelation when he finally proposes marriage to Elizabeth.
Part II: The Proposal
By coincidence, on the day Darcy finally proposes, Elizabeth had
just learned from Darcy’s cousin that Darcy had been the primary
force for separating his friend Mr. Bingley, the single man of
good fortune mentioned in the first chapter of the novel, from
Elizabeth’s sister Jane, who loves Bingley. Elizabeth, who has
been in some anguish over Jane’s loss of her beau, is overcome
with anger and distress that Darcy could have had the temerity
to separate the couple, and the coldness of heart to brag about it
to his cousin. Darcy picks this unhappy moment to visit her and
at last tell her plainly what he thinks of her and propose marriage.
In the struggle between his commitment to his family pride and
his attraction to Elizabeth, attraction has won. Pride has not been
completely defeated, though. He proposes with the clear expectation that Elizabeth will accept him, and amid his protestations
of love, Darcy explains also his sense of the degradation it would
be for him to marry someone with such poor connections as Elizabeth. His sense of his superiority is alive and well.
To Darcy’s shock, Elizabeth rejects his proposal. In the following conversation, charged with the barely controlled anger of
both parties, Elizabeth articulates her dislike of Darcy. She levels
two charges at him, her reasons for rejecting his offer. First, he
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has been the means of separating her beloved sister Jane from
the man Jane loves, Mr. Bingley. Second, Elizabeth repeats the
story she had heard from Mr. Wickham, that Darcy had mistreated Wickham by withholding from him the legacy of Darcy’s
father.
Finally, when Darcy continues to press the matter, Elizabeth
articulates her feelings, and in doing so, levels her third charge
at him: “from the first moment, I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain for
the feelings of others, were such as to form that groundwork of
disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immoveable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I
felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever
be prevailed upon to marry.” (164) Darcy, finally understanding
fully her feelings towards him, can only retreat in haste.
Elizabeth cannot tolerate the sort of pride that would consider another human being degraded, simply because of that
person’s station in life. So far, Elizabeth has heard nothing to
change her opinion that Mr. Darcy suffers from this, the “worst
kind of pride.” (159) She still believes that she is right in her
characterization of him and so is ignorant of her own self deception until Mr. Darcy gives her a letter, the next morning,
containing all the things he could not manage to say to Elizabeth in the moment of her rejection of him the day before. It
provides a defense against the charges that he improperly separated Jane and Bingley and that he mistreated Wickham.
(Darcy makes no mention of the third charge Elizabeth leveled
at him, of his chronic disdain for others that laid the groundwork for her dislike of him.) As Elizabeth reads the sordid truth
about Wickham’s mistreatment of Darcy and his attempted seduction of Darcy’s sister, she cannot at first believe it. Eventually, after weighing the evidence, she must admit that Wickham
has lied to her. “Astonishment, apprehension, and even horror
oppressed her,” (173) we are told. The horror must be from
learning how easily Wickham manipulated her, as well as how
thoroughly she has misjudged Darcy. Her extreme reaction re-
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veals just how wedded she is to living a virtuous life. “Till this
moment I never knew myself,” (176) she cries.
Though we don’t hear from the narrator about Darcy’s response to his encounter with Elizabeth and the disastrous proposal, the letter itself gives us a clue. It starts bitterly enough, but
once he starts to write of Wickham, the love Darcy’s father had
for him, Wickham’s profligacy, and his attempted seduction of
Darcy’s sister Georgiana, the writing changes tone to become
more confiding and at times almost tender. Darcy has never revealed this story to anyone who was not involved in the mess already. He shows his bedrock trust of Elizabeth’s character in
giving her this explosive information, but he also shows his continuing care for her. “Here again I shall give you pain,” he writes,
“to what degree only you can tell. But whatever can be the sentiments which Mr. Wickham has created, a suspicion of their nature
shall not prevent me from unfolding his real character. It adds even
another motive.” (169) Darcy believes that Wickham has won
Elizabeth’s heart, at least to some degree. Aside from any jealousy
he may feel, he really does not want her to be taken in by Wickham, as his beloved sister was, almost to her ruin, and as his father
was, until the day of his death. Towards the end of the letter, he
justifies Elizabeth, writing that as she knew neither he nor Wickham before, and as she has a trusting nature, it is understandable
that she would believe Wickham rather than himself. Finally,
Darcy ends the letter with what Elizabeth later calls “charity itself”
(307): “I will only add, God bless you.” (172) Darcy, less than a
day after being humiliated by Elizabeth, is already moving towards forgiveness of her for her unjust accusations. Whether he
is moving towards better self-knowledge remains to be seen.
For Elizabeth, once she comes to terms with the contents of
the letter, she too has changed in her analysis of Darcy. She still
does not approve of Darcy; he has not at all answered her third
charge of his selfish disdain for others. She thinks that he cannot
answer this charge, that his coldness is ingrained in his temperament, and she cannot have any affection for such a man. Still, she
can no longer hate him, and can feel the compliment he has given
her in his love for her.
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Thus, the proposal scene and the letter that follows contain a
strange kind of antagonistic intimacy, as both characters reveal
themselves to the other and experience the shock of encountering
the truth about the other, and thus the truth about their own weaknesses and mistakes. In the context of the spectacular mismatch
of their feelings for each other, they are presented with the choice
of whether to hold on to their incorrect assumptions or to learn
from the encounter.
Darcy, does not simply discount Elizabeth’s rejection as a
sign of her own smallness of mind (as another character, Mr.
Collins, does earlier in the novel, when rejected by Elizabeth).
Rather, he accepts it as the result of a rational woman’s account
of how his character appears to her. Elizabeth, rather than disbelieve Darcy’s account of the Wickham affair in favor of continuing to believe in her judgment of Wickham and Darcy both,
weighs the evidence rationally and comes to decide that Darcy
must have told her the truth. Both Elizabeth and Darcy are at root
honest people; the truth holds more power for them than their
self-regard. Had this been the end of the novel, they would both
have been better off in the increase of their own self-knowledge.
In other words, the solution to the problem of how to see one’s
own faults clearly, while it may require another human being to
interact with, does not seem to require marriage to that person.
Only, in this case at least, a botched proposal.
One can imagine, under other circumstances perhaps, a philosophical friendship developing between Darcy and Elizabeth,
in the way Socrates describes to Callicles in the Gorgias. As
Socrates says, “the person who intends to put his soul to an adequate test, to see whether it lives rightly or not,” must have
“knowledge, good will, and frankness.”2 Socrates expresses
the luck he feels in having found an interlocutor in Callicles
who exhibits these three qualities, since he, Socrates, thinks
Callicles will help him to discover when he has hit upon something true, specifically regarding the best way of life. Though
it is not clear from the dialogue whether Callicles does, in fact,
2. Donald J. Zeyl, Gorgias (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 58.
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have these attributes, it makes some sense that a couple who did
exhibit knowledge, good will, and frankness towards each other
in the pursuit of a better way of life would be in a position to help
each other. As we have seen, both Elizabeth and Darcy have
shown an interest in living rightly. Both have some knowledge
and have proved themselves to be frank with each other. What
would remain is for each to develop good will towards the other.
Such a friendship could be very productive for them. It would
not require marriage, but one could do worse than to marry such
a friend. One could argue that the Bennets, Collinses, and Wickhams all made worse choices than this in their own marriages.
Elizabeth and Darcy do not go this route, though. In fact, it is not
clear at this point in the story whether it would be possible for
them to have such a relationship of knowledge, good will, and
frankness with each other. In the proposal scene, at least, their
frankness was blunt enough to make good will towards each
other difficult to maintain.
Section III: Pemberly
Both Darcy and Elizabeth leave Darcy’s disastrous proposal assuming they will never see each other again. It is not too many
weeks later, though, that Elizabeth finds herself vacationing with
her aunt and uncle in Derbyshire, and touring Darcy’s estate of
Pemberly. As they tour the house, Elizabeth is surprised to hear
the housekeeper’s enthusiastic account of Darcy as sweet tempered and generous hearted since childhood. (206) Elizabeth’s
firmest opinion of Darcy as cold and disdainful is rocked. “Some
people call him proud; but I am sure I never saw anything of it,”
says the servant. “To my fancy, it is only because he doesn’t rattle
away like other young men.” (207)
Elizabeth finds Mr. Darcy’s portrait in the gallery: “she stood
before the canvas on which he was represented, and fixed his
eyes upon herself.” (208) This moment is a turning point for Elizabeth, as she puts herself under the regard of the painted Darcy
with “earnest contemplation.” As his image on the wall smiles
down at her, a smile she remembers its owner to have bestowed
on her more than once, the housekeeper tells her the painting was
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done at the time when his father was still alive. Elizabeth thinks
more clearly about Darcy’s position as master of Pemberly.
Rather than the wealth, beauty, and elegance, she thinks of the
people. She realizes how much power Darcy has to give pleasure
or pain to the many who are dependent upon him, and therefore
how valuable the praise of one of those dependent people is. Elizabeth, with all of her spirited allegiance to justice and kindness,
cannot help but admire someone who does so much good for
those who depend upon him.
The reminder that he was orphaned and given full responsibility of the estate at such a young age, must also give her another
way to account for his previous insulting behavior. Rather than a
man lacking all feeling for others, he is transformed in her mind
into a young man full of feeling, but who has been given all the
weight of Pemberly and the responsibilities of the family name
to bear. Such a man might well fall into the error of excessive
family pride. But such an error can be forgiven, and Elizabeth finally does begin to forgive Darcy his insults to her: “she thought
of his regard with a deeper sentiment of gratitude than it had ever
raised before; she remembered its warmth, and softened its impropriety of expression.” (208)
Further surprises come as Elizabeth and her relatives happen
upon Darcy himself, who has returned from town unexpectedly.
Darcy now has his chance to respond, in action, to Elizabeth’s
third charge against him, the charge that he is full of disdain for
others. He responds well, astonishing her again and again with
his civil behavior, his kind attention to her aunt and uncle, some
of the lowly relatives he spoke so insultingly of in his proposal
to her, and most of all, his lack of pretension towards or grievance against her, after her unfair treatment of him and rejection
of his offer.
Thus begins the renewal of Darcy’s and Elizabeth’s acquaintance, with friendly civility on his side, and astonishment on hers.
Each character has transformed in attitude toward the other. Elizabeth’s state of mind is easier to determine, since we have the
benefit of her point of view in the narrative. She has gone from
hating Darcy towards the beginning of the novel to a cold kind
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of respect since receiving his letter after the proposal. His friendliness towards her at Pemberly leads to something new. “But
above all, above respect and esteem, there was a motive within
her of goodwill that could not be overlooked. It was gratitude.
Gratitude not merely for once having loved her, but for loving
her still well enough to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of
her manner in rejecting him, and all the unjust accusations accompanying her rejection.” (220)
Elizabeth’s gratitude and esteem are the beginning of affection,
as the narrator tells us. (231) This feeling is explicitly distinguished
from the captivation she felt for Wickham at the beginning of the
novel and is marked both by rational accounts to herself of how
well she and Darcy suit each other and by irrational and confused
feelings of repentance and jealousy. (259)
We are given less information about Darcy’s state of mind at
this point. Certainly he has lost his expectation that Elizabeth will
return his feelings, and much of the pride that went along with that
expectation. Whatever he feels for her at this point, it is no longer
opposed to his family pride, but seems to be rooted, as Elizabeth’s
feelings for him are, in gratitude. Later in the novel, Darcy exclaims to Elizabeth, “What do I not owe you!” (308) referring to
the lesson of humiliation she taught him by rejecting his initial
marriage proposal to her. If nothing else, it seems that rather than
looking down on Elizabeth and suffering the pain of his attraction
to her, as he was at the beginning of the novel, he feels in her debt
and is hoping for some return of his affection. This change in perspective must go along with some kind of change in how his desire
for her is oriented.
Esteem, forgiveness, and gratitude are different qualities than
they were starting to possess before their reacquaintance at Pemberly, when their knowledge of virtue and their frankness towards
each other led me to speculate about philosophical friendship. At
this point in the story, their self knowledge has greatly improved,
as has their good will. Their frankness suffers, however: from the
time Elizabeth leaves Pemberly after news of Lydia’s scandalous
elopement reaches her, until nearly the end of the novel, Elizabeth
and Darcy think of each other and wonder about the other’s feel-
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ings, but they do not speak more than a few polite superficialities
to each other. The transformation that leaves Elizabeth wanting
Darcy and leaves Darcy hoping for Elizabeth somehow leaves
them unable to speak to each other.
Section IV: Beyond Education
Let’s go back to Darcy’s comment on temperament from early
in the novel. “There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency
to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best
education can overcome.” (51) We see evidence of defects that
are not overcome throughout the novel: Mr. Bennet’s lack of
moral energy, Mrs. Bennet’s nervousness, Mr. Collins’s servile
pomposity, Mr. Wickham’s deceitful smarminess, Lydia Bennet’s imprudence. When Darcy and Elizabeth encountered the
truth about their own misjudgments, it looked like an improvement for them. At least two of the characters just mentioned,
however, seem to have a good level of self-knowledge. Mr. Bennet comments explicitly and with self conscious irony on his
own ability to avoid facing his obligations, for instance, (249)
and Mr. Wickham is portrayed as wondering how much Elizabeth has been told of his bad behavior. It looks like self-knowledge may not be sufficient to bring about self-improvement.
Darcy’s and Elizabeth’s typical faults, on the other hand,
are nowhere to be seen in the latter part of the novel. Elizabeth,
who suffered from a too quick judgment of others in the service
of her pride and of her enjoyment of laughing at human folly,
does attempt to judge whether Darcy still loves her or not after
she leaves Pemberly. She cannot believe that Darcy, whatever
his feelings, will overcome his scorn of Lydia and his resentment of Wickham enough to engage himself to Elizabeth and
join such a family. She cannot quite stop hoping that her judgment is wrong, though, especially once she hears of his involvement in Lydia’s marriage. (271-272) Her relationship (or lack
of one) to Darcy has become her focus, rather than her ability
to judge people. Her habits of quick decision in the service of
her own pride recede in the face of her care for Darcy and her
pride in him. (272)
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It turns out that Elizabeth’s judgment is wrong in this case. Mr.
Darcy does overcome his admitted resentful nature to the point that
he still wants to marry Elizabeth, though he will become in the
process brother-in-law to Wickham, a man he despises. Wickham’s
outrageous behavior against Darcy and others is apparently no
longer the central focus of Darcy’s attention. Though his opinion
of Wickham has not changed, his attention is rather on how to manage Wickham’s vice in a way that will cause the least amount of
trouble for Elizabeth and her family. Darcy’s transformation is
complete enough that he goes to much trouble, embarrassment,
and expense to find Lydia and Wickham after they elope and persuade them to marry. In other words, Elizabeth’s welfare becomes
central to Darcy and his personal resentment of Wickham is beside
the point.
If Darcy is correct, that “not even the best education” can
overcome temperamental flaws, then something else is at work
in these two characters, something beyond education and more
effective than self-knowledge alone. Whatever is at work, it gives
them a different perspective on what is important, changing their
focus away from their own concerns and towards the welfare of
each other. Though it is clear to the reader that both Elizabeth
and Darcy are willing to commit to a life together after Elizabeth
leaves Pemberly, they are unable or unwilling speak to each other
until almost the very end of the novel. It appears that even when
each character has identified the person who can help him or her
to live a better life they still cannot come together.
Their silence towards each other regarding any issue of importance lasts for several weeks, through the drama of Lydia Bennet’s elopement and engagement to Wickham and through several
visits Darcy makes to Elizabeth’s house once Lydia and Wickham
are safely married and out of town. It is only broken after Darcy’s
aunt, Lady Catherine, interferes by trying to disrupt an engagement that she had mistakenly believed was about to be formed
between them. In attempting to forbid the engagement, she unwittingly gives the two reason to hope that marriage might be
possible. Once hope is kindled, communication and engagement
to marry soon follow.
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In one of the conversations they have after they are finally
engaged to be married, Elizabeth asks Darcy directly why he did
not speak to her when he visited her before their engagement.
“Because you were grave and silent, and gave me no encouragement,” he says. “But I was embarrassed,” she replies. “And so
was I.” (318) At the beginning of the novel, each character suffered from pride to the point that each thought the other was
lower in some way: Elizabeth thought Darcy was devoid of
proper feeling for his fellow man, and Darcy focused on Elizabeth’s socially lower and often foolish family relations. It is one
thing to be playful, angry, or frank with someone who is beneath
you in some way, but quite another to speak plainly to one who
has humbled you, as each does to the other in the proposal scene
and the following letter. The knowledge of their own faults that
they gained from their angry interaction during Darcy’s proposal,
taught them both that they had misjudged and injured the other.
Given the desire each has for the other’s good opinion after their
encounter at Pemberly, neither has the courage to risk the other’s
scorn by speaking openly of his or her feelings. Only once they
have some rational evidence to support their hope for the other’s
regard, via Lady Catherine, do they drum up the courage to speak
plainly to each other.
Once they do reveal their feelings for each other, after Darcy
again asks Elizabeth to marry him and she agrees, their conversation takes an interesting turn. Each of them expresses gratitude
towards the other, confesses having mistreated the other in some
way, and receives forgiveness. Darcy, full of self-recrimination,
declares that he cannot think of his behavior in his first proposal
to Elizabeth “without abhorrence.” “The recollection of . . . my
manners, my expressions during the whole of it is now, and has
been many months, inexpressibly painful to me.” (306) Elizabeth
assures him that she has “long been most heartily ashamed” of
her former words to him. Later, it is Elizabeth’s turn to admit
guilt. “How you must have hated me after that evening?” (308),
that is, after her rejection of his first proposal. The expression is
grammatically worded as an exclamation, but ends with a question mark. Elizabeth is both expressing her conviction of Darcy’s
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justified hatred of her, however short lived, and at the same time
is asking him to reassure her, which he does. In this mutual confession and forgiveness, each accepts the other fully and the past
is oriented and explained in terms of their present relationship.
Once they become engaged to marry, we get a glimpse of
how their relationship will continue to strengthen the virtue of
each. In their final conversation of the novel, Elizabeth playfully
tries to account for why it is that Darcy was ever attracted to her,
and has decided that he loved her for her impertinence, her near
rudeness, to him in their early acquaintance. She says, “Had you
not been really amiable you would have hated me for [my impertinence]; but in spite of the pains you took to disguise yourself,
your feelings were always noble and just.” (317) He made plain
to her in his previous discussions with her that his “abhorrence”
of his own behavior towards Elizabeth weighs on him. In the turn
of one phrase,—“in spite of the pains you took to disguise yourself”—Elizabeth has recast Darcy’s pride and disdain as an attempt at camouflage, as if he were too modest to express his true
noble and generous self. In contrast with this gentle, playful manner of helping him to reconcile himself to his own past, recall her
angry frankness in referring, during his first proposal to her, to
his “arrogance, . . . conceit, and . . . selfish disdain.” (164) She
and he both know that he was prideful to the point of offense,
but now, because of their mutual acceptance, she can use her
own playful manner to show him the way to forgive himself,
through humor, as she has already forgiven him. Unlike her father, who teases Mrs. Bennet almost without mercy, Elizabeth
is using her wit not to undercut Darcy, but to help him let go of
his past mistakes.
In that same conversation, their talk turns to Darcy’s aunt,
Lady Catherine, who had so steadfastly opposed their marriage.
“Shall you ever have the courage to announce to Lady Catherine
what is to befall her?” asks Elizabeth. “I am more likely to want
time than courage, Elizabeth. But it ought to be done, and if you
will give me a sheet of paper, it shall be done directly,” he replies.
(318) In this exchange, Darcy gently refuses to laugh either at
the prospect of Lady Catherine’s dismay over the news of their
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marriage or at the possibility of him lacking the courage to give
her the news. He exhibits the kind of straightforward moral goodness that Elizabeth must have seen so little of in her own parents
and he draws her in to help him by asking her to hand him the
paper he needs to begin. Elizabeth, so used to being the amused
observer of others’ folly is now a partner in the exercise of virtue
in the world. This exercise continues after their marriage, when,
as we are told, they provide better society for Elizabeth’s sister
Kitty, relieve some of the habitual debt that Lydia and Wickham
accrue, educate Darcy’s sister in human relationships, and continue the work of improving the lot of those who depend on the
residents of Pemberly. (321-323)
Like the marriages of the Bennets, Collinses, and Wickhams,
Darcy and Elizabeth’s marriage is formed with social and sexual
union in mind. Unlike for the other marriages, though, Darcy and
Elizabeth do not have a primary motivation, such as social standing or financial stability, for joining with each other. Rather, the
Darcys are re-forming themselves to be better human beings
through their marriage. The self-knowledge they gained after
Darcy’s first proposal to Elizabeth has been joined by the gratitude
and forgiveness felt by each and proclaimed to each other. Within
this relationship of acknowledged acceptance and esteem, they
are able to give each other a new view of how to live well.
What started off bearing some resemblance to a philosophical friendship has turned into something else. As Socrates knew
well, for a relationship of knowledge, good will, and frankness
to exist, each party must be devoted to finding the truth about
the question at hand. As we see depicted in Pride and Prejudice,
though, (and as Socrates doubtless also knew well) people are
rarely if ever fully devoted to finding out the truth on the question of how to live rightly. Pride, passion, and worldly concerns
all get in the way.
In the scene just described, in which Elizabeth playfully recasts Darcy’s former disdainful nature and Darcy invites Elizabeth to help him write to Lady Catherine, each provides the
perspective that the other needs. Rather than frankly declare what
the other ought to be thinking or doing, they demonstrate to each
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other a different way of looking at themselves and the world, simply by being who they are. At the same time, each tacitly invites
the other to join in. In the process, each gains the perspective that
will allow their character defects not to disappear, but to recede
into the background. The gratitude each feels and the forgiveness
each gives make this relationship possible because each values
the perspective of the other more than his or her own pride. Austen
gives us a picture of what marriage can lead to at its best: a transformation of the self into something more and better than what is
possible alone, the result of what “not even the best education”
can give. Elizabeth and Darcy have this sort of marriage.
The Bennets probably could not have reached this kind of intimacy and mutual acceptance, due to the degree of difference in
their temperaments. They might have come closer to it, though,
if Mr. Bennet had not given up on the marriage once he realized
how mistaken he had been in his evaluation of Mrs. Bennet’s
character. The Collinses never desired this kind of relationship:
Mr. Collins is too self important to ever admit anyone else fully
into his thoughts, and Mrs. Collins, Charlotte, is satisfied with
managing him, in return for her social standing as his wife. Their
happiness lies in her ability to manage him without rancor, and
will last as long as Charlotte can continue to tolerate his foolishness with grace. The Wickhams, with their mutual inability
to control their passions, never had a chance at such mutual acceptance, though they were happy for a time with the physical
version of intimacy.
I began this lecture by quoting the sentence that starts the
novel, and considering two interpretations of it: one that rested on
the witty acknowledgement of human greed and self deception
and one that rested on a straightforward recognition of our need
for each other, specifically with respect to marriage. Something
like a synthesis of these two attitudes occurs in the marriage of
Elizabeth and Darcy. Elizabeth, having grown up with Mr. Bennet
as her favorite parent, likes to laugh at human weakness, but has
had little authoritative example in her life of straightforward moral
goodness. Elizabeth benefits from her marriage in having a living
example of steadfast and straightforward goodness in her life.
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Darcy doesn’t laugh at human folly: he shuns it. This became a
problem for him when he himself, because of the folly of his overweening pride, treated the woman he loves with contempt, as he
did in his initial proposal to Elizabeth. He cannot forgive himself
for this behavior without Elizabeth’s example of teaching him to
“be laughed at.” (p. 310) Wit comes in handy when a straightforward understanding of our own failings is overwhelming.
Pride and Prejudice is not a pure social critique, nor a romance, nor a morality tale. It has some resemblance to all of these
genres, though. As we have seen, wit and playfulness, passion,
folly, reason, love of virtue, gratitude and forgiveness are all
deftly woven into the story of Elizabeth and Darcy. In the
process, we are given a glimpse of how one might transcend the
universal faults of self interest, greed, pride, and prejudice, not
by banishing or losing them, which is surely impossible, but by
allowing them to lose their hold over us through intimacy with
another human being who suits us; one we can love, work with,
laugh at and laugh with. It is no surprise that such a possibility,
presented with Austen’s consummate skill and grace, leaves the
reader full of pleasure and joy.
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“Please, Don’t Eat the Swans”:
My Revolution in Romania
Louis Petrich
Even from a simple realistic point of view,
the countries we long for occupy a far larger
place in our actual life, at any given moment, than the country in which we happen
to be. . . . And besides, even from this point
of view, of mere quantity, in our lives the
days are not all equal.
—Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
In late December of 1989, I attended my first Modern Language
Conference in Washington, D.C. I was a graduate student at the
University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought, taking my
time trying not to be impertinent in my dissertation on Shakespeare. If I had my doubts of becoming the sort of scholar that
the members of the MLA would want to make an English professor, I had even more doubts that life could be any better than
I knew it as a student. The authors occupying me in Chicago I
thought contained the world. I went to the MLA Conference to
meet the guardians of English letters and to settle my doubts
about my place in their world one way or another.
I spent one free evening not with the literary scholars in the
hosting hotel, but with my good friend, Mark, who possessed no
knowledge of literature. As a journalist, however, he kept himself
well-informed. At that time, the American invasion of Panama
and the bloody revolution in Romania kept Mark busily flipping
the channels of his television set to catch the latest world events.
Meanwhile, during the days, I was performing a similar ritual at
the conference, traversing from room to room to hear the latest
Louis Petrich is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
57
scholarly developments in my field. That evening, to bring our
two worlds of interest together, I ventured to compare the overthrow of dictatorships happening before his eyes in Panama and
Romania to the overthrow of ethno-phallocentrism taking place
before mine in the Grand Hyatt Hotel. Mark shook his head and
replied that he much preferred to see images of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife shot to death by firing squad than to hear my
reports about the death of the white male author. Then he grew
more serious: “Perhaps you should look for your colleagues and
career where you won’t have to make things like that up.”
Six months later, in June of 1990, I picked up the phone to
hear Mark’s voice triumphantly announce, “You have just gotten
a Fulbright Scholar Award.” This struck me as very strange, since
I had not applied for one. He, however, had just before called the
United States Information Agency to ask if any “Fulbrights” were
presently available for someone with my credentials. The USIA
told him that all positions had been competitively filled months
earlier from applications duly submitted a year in advance—except one, which remained defiantly empty: a lectureship in American literature at the Alexandru I. Cuza University in Iasi,
Romania, supposed to start that autumn.
“But I don’t do American literature,” I protested, “I do
Shakespeare. And where on earth is Iasi, anyway? Did you say
‘Romania’”?
I shuddered to recall that only a week earlier the Romanian
coal miners were reported by the Chicago Tribune to be storming
the streets of Bucharest, chasing down students, journalists, opposition figures, and all those whose trimmed beards made them
look intellectual, to club them into submission or death. Such images were very dreadful and nauseating to consider that summer
as I turned my mind towards Romania and assembled my Fulbright application for quick processing. Quite unprepared for my
destiny—for so this turn became—I would have to learn by trial
and error whether American literature had any power to free Romanian students from the oppression of having lived their lives
pinned under the weight of a rock, mined for that purpose, toppled
only yesterday, but still hard and cruel in its slowly disintegrating
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character. You can be pretty sure, reader, that I am not making
these things up, which were quotidian for millions of people (who
cares to remember them now?), and which, to all my present days
have left a longing and a pattern.
I set foot in Romania one night in September 1990, at the
Otopeni International Airport in Bucharest, where I was greeted
by several fatigued soldiers below our aircraft, their assault rifles
pointing hospitably down at the ground. These “most fierce descendants of Rome” (an epithet still to be heard) had one arm free
to beg for western cigarettes as they conducted me into the dreary
terminal. The first words I spoke in Romania, to the passport control officer, sitting in his compact wooden booth lit by the standard
forty watt bulb, were to inform him that I had come to teach American literature at the University of Iasi. I recoiled slightly at my
own words, realizing that if he knew I possessed no credentials
to teach this subject, he could have me deported as an imposter.
But the controller, not understanding a syllable of English,
stamped my passport perfunctorily and slid it back to me silently.
I had advisedly placed a carton of Kent cigarettes where it would
be the first item encountered upon opening each piece of my luggage to the customs inspectors. They played their parts perfectly,
and I went on, lightened in load, to award myself to that taxi driver
whose face appeared the least unshaven and sooty. He dropped
me at the stately residence of the American Cultural Affairs Officer, Agatha Kuperman, an attractive, red-haired woman of Hungarian descent, whom even the Romanians (long hostile to
Hungarians) considered highly. She embraced me warmly on the
black street, her little white poodle in constant danger of being
trodden by my uncertain feet, and then she chided me for paying
the driver four dollars: “That’s a week’s salary for most Romanians, my boy.” I slept that night in the spare room of her diplomat’s
mansion, listening to the barking of wild dogs that roamed the
dark streets of Bucharest.
Aggie briefed me the following morning at the consulate section of the U.S. Embassy, whose first floor looked like a nursery.
Dozens of Romanian babies were here undergoing the lengthy
process of adoption by their would-be American parents. Some,
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
59
darker skinned, probable offspring of gypsies (suspected of selling
them), and others, physically handicapped or distressed by their
own cries, were all on offer to be wrapped in American arms, carried away in love, and saved. Aggie, who had only two minutes
to put me on guard against two especial dangers I would face,
seized me by the arm to describe how the Chairman of the English
Department once grabbed my predecessor to draw his ear close
and whisper, “You know I can crush you, Sam, I can destroy you.”
He would not have the nerve to manhandle me, she explained,
since he could no longer assume the backing of the Securitate (Romanian secret police). More likely, he would now try to engage
me to his daughter. “I must warn you, particularly, to stay away
from Romanian women.” She sensed my hesitation, and added,
“They are all become whores.” Then she let me go, suitably impressed, to Iasi.
Horia Holban, an English professor from the Alexandru I.
Cuza University, spotted my searching flashlight on the dark platform of the train station on that rainy September evening I arrived
in Iasi, a city of 265,000 people within a goodly jogging distance
of Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, our better tailored, but still great
enemy. Horia had been sent by the Chairman of the English Department to welcome me, just as he had welcomed my Fulbright
predecessors since 1970, equipped for this purpose by being one
of the ten percent of Romanians who owned a car. His windshield
wipers came unhinged as he drove us to my apartment. “How can
you see the road through all the murk and rain?” I asked, hoping
he would pull over to fix the wipers. “I have driven this way many
times before,” he replied. I made a nervous reference to Bernard
Shaw, whom I had heard from my informants was his specialty.
“Yes, I am the Romanian expert on Shaw,” he stated, as he continued to navigate the darkness. Then he asked me to contribute
an article to a literary quarterly he had just founded, called Ethos.
“This will help you to get recognition in America,” he said, evidently made aware of my unpublished status by his informants.
“Perhaps I can come up with something,” I replied, conscious of
the usefulness of his car. As it turned out, his quarterly went defunct after one issue because the price of printing quadrupled. His
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car, however, he kept on running.
My apartment was located on the eighth floor in a block of
flats that looked, like every other block, orphaned from the earth.
Nothing had changed since Horia escorted the first American lecturer to this apartment twenty years earlier. The elevator still
broke down two or three times a week. “Why repair something
permanently when you can employ a man full-time to fix it regularly?” he commented, as we climbed eight flights of unlit stairs
with luggage. “The people steal the bulbs,” he said, “but you will
memorize your steps everywhere, and then you, too, won’t need
a flashlight.”
My apartment comprised two bedrooms, a living room,
kitchen, bath, and like every apartment in the Workers’ Utopia, a
balcony, where the population retired to smoke and dream. “You
can see for yourself that every article has been stamped and inventoried by the University,” Horia announced, as he began the
tour. The same rusty trash can, missing its lid, stood under the
kitchen sink. The same two plates and cracked pot occupied a cabinet, and the same pair of cutlery lay in a drawer, to serve each
generation of American lecturer. My bedroom—a room with a
double bed—felt forbidden but to drafts. “Most of our lecturers
brought along their wives, who helped them to make this more of
a home,” he said, “but I can ask the Chairman to provide you an
extra blanket.”
The water, he explained, as we entered the bathroom, was supposed to appear for a few hours in the mornings and evenings, hot
only every other day. “But it may not always make it up to the
eighth floor. They give us a bathtub so that we can always have
water.” Thus I kept my bathtub filled, with a bucket nearby for
flushing the toilet, and I boiled water in pots for transfer to the
sink. This gave me the ritual satisfaction of reliving an early triumph of civilization—keeping clean on the outskirts of the
Roman Empire. In February, the hot water did not appear for three
weeks. When it finally came back, like a shooting star, the people
left whatever they were doing to take quick advantage. They
seemed to accept chronic deprivations and momentary windfalls
as among the mysteries of life, whereas I attributed human pur-
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61
poses to them, and I talked to myself a lot in anger, pacing from
room to room, hoping that the listening devices were still in operation for the Securitate to hear my accusations of evil.
“A woman named Luminitsa will clean your apartment once a
week,” Horia said, “paid by the university, but you can pay her
more to do extra chores.” Luminitsa was a sweet and sturdy old
woman, who managed to locate an ancient washing machine, missing several pieces, which she employed to make my clothes clean,
but increasingly misshapen. She proved especially helpful in obtaining milk, sold to lines of people as the sun rose. (I never could
abide the practice of standing in lines as if mortality did not matter,
and I would have paid her to stand forever, for me.) In the winter,
Luminitsa stood before my open lit oven, preferring to hold, rather
than to drink the hot tea I offered her. She happened to be present
the morning that the bombing of Iraq began in January of 1991,
and she kept making the sign of the cross three times and mumbling prayers as she went about her lifelong, inalienable work.
His tour finished, Horia handed me a roll of toilet paper, warning me that I would find this item missing from public places and
only sporadically available in the shops. “So carry some around
with you, eat lightly, and use the paper sparingly.” With these
words and a wan smile to indicate he would have liked to be joking, the Romanian expert on Shaw bid me goodnight. I sat at the
table gone crooked on the concrete floor of the living room. I felt
alone, ignorant, hungry, cold, and I was beginning to sense across
the table the company of failure. I thought about supplicating God,
Orthodox fashion, to help me survive in this dark, backstage world
deprived of props, but the Romanians had been doing that for
years. I felt tired, too, and so I let my body take precedence over
the soul’s fears and carry me clothed to bed, where I discovered,
to my surprise, that I slid quickly into a good, long sleep.
Late next morning, after bread and tea, I took a taxi to the
Alexandru I. Cuza University1 to meet with the redoubtable
1. Founded in 1861, the University offered bachelor degrees and doctorates in the natural sciences, mathematics, history, philosophy, geography,
economics, law, and philology. The schools of engineering, medicine,
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Chairman of my department. He looked tussled in his grey suit
and tie, not formidable, not brutish, as his grey eyes, on the lookout everywhere, probed intermittently into mine. He liked to finish my sentences in perfect British English, as if to show that he
knew my thoughts and how to speak them properly. He conducted me to the American reading room, where I would teach
five classes a week of American literature, lasting two hours
each, to first or second-year students in groups of ten to twelve.
I would also supervise the growing collection of books that the
Americans and British had donated or loaned to the department
over the years. “You must be sure to restrict the use of the reading room to students in our department and the English teachers
of Iasi,” he emphasized several times, as if this were the crux of
my assignment. A cubicle adjacent to the reading room would
become my little office. The Securitate used to keep equipment
there to monitor the foreign teachers and students throughout
the building. He gave me the key to a locked cabinet, where I
would store the precious Norton Anthologies of American Literature, the television and video player, and some British and
American movies on video tape. “I keep the majority of video
tapes at home,” he explained, “so that you will not be tempted
to loan them to people who will copy them illegally to sell.” I
was often to discover that Romanian homes secretly contained
little pieces of public property that made their possessors feel a
little less poor, a little less equal.
The Chairman then invited me to his office, where he poured
us some plum brandy and began to drink. He had a story to tell
me, and it would take some time and some help. He spoke of his
imprisonment in the 1950’s for an anti-Soviet remark, and of the
Romanian prejudice against him for being half-Hungarian. He
overcame these adversities to master the English language by
reading Dickens, whose linguistic varieties he knew as an expert,
and Conrad, whose sociological studies of character helped him
and agronomy had separate locations in the city. 20,000 students were
enrolled overall, making Iasi one of the four centers of higher education
in Romania, along with Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, and Timisoara.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
63
to achieve his present position. He had a twenty-three year old
daughter who studied medicine and loved to speak English. He
felt joy when the revolution finally came, freeing him from the
harassments of the Securitate and bringing hope to everyone for
reconcilement with the West. He wanted me to know that he was
a decent man, whose membership in the Romanian Communist
Party had been a necessary concession to his persecutors, and
whose true self, finding it safe to appear only recently, should be
allowed broad margins of deformity. “The worst thing about
communism,” he confessed, “is that it brings out the evil in people.” He poured me some more brandy, but it spilled over my full
glass, for I had not learned to drink at midday with relish. I knew
to be very firm with this man, so I declared my intent to open the
American reading room to the public. The Chairman straightened
his back, narrowed his grey eyes, and said, “If you do that you
will become my enemy. Don’t you know that even the quality of
paper in there is enough to make the people steal the books!” “I
would prefer not to become your enemy,” I said, “but the books
and videos and magazines will be recalled by the American Embassy if you insist.” This was a bluff, but its tone of conviction
succeeded, and he changed the subject by extending an invitation
to dine with him and his wife and daughter some evening at his
home. I accepted the invitation several months later, curious to
find out if Aggie was right about him and his engaging daughter.
She was, alas, right. Wisely, I was prepared to persuade them that
my loneliness was not so dire as they interpreted.
The American reading room had the misfortune to overlook
an athletic field. The steady thuds of soccer balls and the shouts
of all-weathered players made the English of my students sound
as timid as the communists might have wished from the mouths
of their English enemy. Once in a while, the errant ball came
crashing through a window, causing my students, almost all of
them women, to duck and scream, though only for a second or
two. I insisted that the windows be fixed to keep the temperature
of the room above freezing. Nevertheless, during the winter I had
to teach in my overcoat to students shivering in theirs. They
smiled at my wishful handling of the radiators each morning, like
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a witch doctor trying to summon up a ghost. At various times in
the day, a crew of carpenters operated terrifically roaring power
saws in their workshop directly beneath us, and the millions of
powdery shavings that they generated got sucked up into air ducts
that blew them right outside our apt-to-be-broken windows. Our
classes then came to a halt, as a kind of reminder to everyone of
the rights of real work to fill consciousness with its sound and
fury. “All our priorities thus come to dust,” I thought, indulging
a poetic melancholy that seemed better than this grim reality.
The dimness of light in the reading room, to which I also objected, caused the students to marvel again at my notions of normalcy. “Fluorescent bulbs for the ceilings are not to be found
anywhere in the country,” they said, but still I made an official,
stamped request. Two weeks later, someone knocked on the reading room door, timidly stuck her head in, and seeing the students
beckon, approached my side and silently produced from her
apron pocket an incandescent light bulb of the once maximum
forty watts. “But this is not the type I ordered!” I exclaimed. The
students laughed as the poor woman made her noiseless escape,
and I stared at the economical bulb, ever more grateful for those
windows that let in the light and all the world outside not made
to order by man.
It surprised me to learn later that my remark to the cleaning
woman was adopted by the students as a new motto. Henceforth,
whenever life handed them another revolutionary dose of futility,
they would laughingly say, “But this is not the type I ordered.” I
counted this my first success as a teacher of American values, or
rather, my first achievement in an impossible environment of a
common ground of enlightened foolishness.
I asked a student named Dana to act as my assistant in managing the reading room. Industrious, trustworthy, and book-loving, Dana put the shelves in order and maintained the old pretense
of keeping up-to-date records. She was not good-looking, but I
did not want beauty in a woman whose company I hoped would
keep me from becoming lonely. To that end she possessed irrepressible good spirits, which had earned her the nicknames of
“giggles” and “chatterbox.” She somehow got me to join her in
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
65
frequently singing the refrain from a Bob Marley song: “Woman
no cry—everything’s gonna be all right.” Her colleagues generously approved of our unmusical duet, perhaps thinking that a
professor from a society one hundred years ahead must know
whether everything was going to be all right or not.
Dana helped me to decorate the walls of the reading room
with black and white photographs of British contributions to civilization and color pictures of American getaways suitable for a
travel agency. The impression these created reinforced the common Romanian prejudice that the British have culture while the
Americans have fun. The students all acquired a British accent,
while convinced that the Americans were the ones who would
acquire the world, once the Soviets were finished. Why else did
the American flags that we hung on the door of the reading room
keep disappearing? At first I thought that the Arab students tore
them down in hatred (for this was during the first Gulf War), until
several of my students shyly confessed: “We steal them for home
display, to feel less lonely under the weight of liberty.” And so I
obtained more flags from the U.S. Embassy to present to my
thieving learners of the Queen’s English
Thus did I learn to permit some ridiculous activities to occur.
One man, named Serban, visited the reading room every Thursday
to inspect the magazines that the Embassy saw fit to send me:
Time, Newsweek, Cosmopolitan, and Vanity Fair. He had a speech
impediment and wore thick glasses that made him look oafish, yet
he manifested the concentration of a surgeon as he turned the
pages from cover to cover, pausing to copy the addresses he found
for subscriptions, books, merchandise, and especially Caribbean
travel destinations. Some students wanted me to inform Serban
that these advertisements were not meant for someone without
hard currency and a visa. But it struck me that these students were
like this man in being poor and stranded. They, too, visited the
American reading room and turned the pages of books not intended for them in order to find some hope and relief from the
calamity of their birth. He dreamt alone over glossy and scented
photo spreads, and they dreamt with me over the extravagances
of poetry and plays. Besides, among the authors we read there
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were debunkers enough and shipwrecked characters aplenty, but
I shall come to our reading of them soon enough.
Another frequent visitor to the reading room, Nick, age forty,
had somehow earned a black belt in karate in defiance of Ceausescu’s prohibition of the martial arts. He sought books on antiquity. “Your presence here is a sign that Rome has returned to
Romania at last, “ he said, “for America is the one country today
like Rome, the pacifier and lawgiver of nations.” Nick named his
son “Romulus” and chose his middle name to begin with “A,”
so that he would identify himself with the founder of Rome and
the Egyptian sun god, “RA.” By such means he sought to counteract the degrading forces that enslaved people from an early
age by dictating: “You like flowers, don’t you? So dig.”
The American reading room, now supplied with posters of
art and travel, songs and laughter, fragrant fashion magazines,
and impossible dreams, did become an exceptional place. But I
did not realize how original my students must have found it until
I visited a typical Romanian high school, at the invitation of an
English teacher named Nicoleta.
Her pupils rose in unison and saluted me in well-rehearsed
English when I entered their classroom. Then they sat down on
stools beside shared wooden desks whose lowness kept them
hunched over all day, while the blank walls made looking to the
right or left an impertinence. They questioned me about how I
had spent my high school years. “Did you get paid for doing
homework?” a boy asked. I paused at his sincerity, then replied
that I did expect to get paid “in the long run.” They looked at
Nicoleta with satisfaction, as if to say, “We told you so.” “Will
jobs be available for us in America?” another boy asked. Again,
I paused at this candid disclosure of their everyday despair, before answering that jobs of some kind were usually available, but
getting to America would be the difficult part. They nodded their
heads knowingly. They asked me for English books, and I invited
them to the reading room, where they could borrow some. “Our
books are still poisonous,” they said. Nicoleta showed me a textbook of English which included quotations from Hobbes, Locke,
Mill, Dickens, Shaw, and other greats, each followed by Ceaus-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
67
escu’s words of interpretation. “Same ink, same font, same paper,
and therefore,” she said, grimacing, “same genius.” The frontispiece to the book showed Ceausescu’s smiling portrait and his
message to the pupil:
To be a patriot means to spare nothing in order to carry
out the policy of the Communist Party which fully corresponds to the vital interests of the whole nation. This
is amply demonstrated by the economic and social development programme of the Romanian Communist
Party, which derives from a philosophy governed by constant concern for the welfare of man.
His message went on and on in the same pitch—all lies possessing no interest or meaning whatsoever. A physical education instructor cut short my stupefaction by inviting me to a volleyball
exhibition that she had organized on the spur of the moment to
honor my presence in the school. (I felt like a rock star or movie
actor, fawned upon for deeds of nothing.) She put her best boys on
the court, while the rest of the pupils, mostly girls, lined the perimeter of the small gym to watch the match and my reactions to it. The
boys pounded the ball so hard that it flew repeatedly into the girls,
who had no choice but to duck and scream. I recognized, with a
kind of dismay, that my students were once those girls. I clapped
anyway and thanked everyone for a fine performance, at which they
all cheered and looked elated.
As I was about to leave the high school, Nicoleta drew me aside
to an empty room where she unburdened her soul of much worry:
All my pupils know of life is that it gets worse, and all
they have been told of death is that it brings no rewards
or punishments. They will not work for future goods,
since they believe there are none, or for the sake of work
itself, since that would make them the dupes of communism. They want to be happy now, so they dream about
going to America, where they believe happiness is possible. But to get to America they must have dollars, and
the dollar is worth more than our Romanian lei every day.
Where will all this end? Already some of them believe
that they can buy their own souls.
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I tried to recall some brave words that might allay her fears,
yet I was afraid to sound hypocritical, with a pocket full of dollars, backed by God and the United States, in which to trust. I
thought about that Bob Marley song, whose refrain has a distinguished pedigree that includes some lines by a grumpy poet who
knew a lot about souls caught between hope and despair. So I recited them to this sorrowing teacher of English, offering no interpretation, just the citation:
Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
—T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets
For the present, however, my students had many reasons to
duck and scream. They were not the children of glorious Rome,
of whose ruins on the Black Sea they boasted, but of Nicolae
Ceausescu, communist tyrant from before they were born. They
attended thirty-six hours of class per week. (A gap in the schedule
would teach them to skip classes and take to the streets, it was
feared.) The margins had disappeared from their essays (paper
was that precious) as surely as the breadth had gone from their
daily lives. Five of them occupied a dormitory room that would
have housed one or two in America. They put boards across their
laps to serve there as desks. Bread was served them days old.
They slept fitfully to the splattering of bottles tossed from dormitory windows by the disdainful foreign students, and to the
fugitive laughter of Romanian girls who prostituted themselves
to these students to obtain colorful African beads or Arabian
scarves. No residence staff stood on call to help them; no professional counselors guided their development; no student organizations received funding to entertain them. Gypsy fortune tellers
were always on hand for many dubious purposes, but their layers
of colorful dress stank from going unwashed. Students marching
for better conditions on the first anniversary of the revolution
were jeered by envious workers for their “dissipation” and told
to get back to classes. For it was considered a great honor to be
accepted to the Alexandru I. Cuza University. Some students had
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
69
taken the entrance exam for English five years in a row before
passing. They had worked in factories in the meantime.
What could I expect students, suffering these conditions, to
achieve intellectually? When I asked them the meaning of a literary passage, a few whispered to each other in Romanian about
the meaninglessness of so bare a question (devoid of the familiar
theoretical cues that implied the correct theoretical answer), while
most stared down in their laps. Who knows what spiritual
changes gradually occur from looking down all the time? I encouraged them to leap over themselves in boldness of thought,
but they had no practice overcoming themselves, only their conditions. Perhaps I could get them to look up, at least, with the
help of America’s most upward-looking authors, the ones who in
fact had inspired me to study literature for a living.
Ralph Waldo Emerson would provide a logical starting point,
I thought, for the reformation of the neck and spinal posture. But
when I assigned them their first essay on the question, “Why trust
yourself?” I received in writing an apology signed by the whole
class:
We are frightened because it is the first time when an
American teacher hears words spoken by ourselves. This
note is a kind of message we want to send to you, because it has been clearly revealed that we have different
ideas about literature, America, the world, and life. We
should want you to understand our low level of comprehension, concerning various aspects of these things.
Please tell us again, if you don’t mind, what you want us
to write.
I decided at once to read Emerson aloud with them, to manifest the felt meanings of his words, before pressing them again
to write what they felt. I modeled his inspiration vocally, and then
I let them try to partake similarly of it. I heard in their voices,
however, not the tone of empowerment, but alien sounds of discontinuity. These sounds were not, I had to admit, unrelated to
Emerson’s style. Contrary to the spirit of this aphoristic sage, I
condescended to offer them a similar apology about my own low
level of comprehension concerning all aspects of Romanian so-
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ciety, which I found altogether different and a little frightening.
Interpreting my apology in material terms, they offered me their
assistance in performing the ordinary tasks of life, and I gratefully
accepted the offer. Thereafter, I never lacked for help in meeting
the necessities of the body. As for the soul, I made them promise
never to accept in our classes the old pedagogical procedure,
whereby students pretended to learn, professors pretended to
teach, and neither side dared to expose the other as a fraud. “We
shall dare to be true to each other,” we pledged, “taking that as
our way to seek truth.” So once a week, in keeping with the promise, someone in class would summon the courage to ask me,
“What do you think of us, honestly, Mr. Petrich?” And I would
tell them, whatever struck me most at the time. I, in turn, would
ask them what they thought of the American writers I offered
them. And they, in turn, told me what struck them most about
these writers, America, and me.
They told me that Walt Whitman, whom I had hoped would
lengthen their spines with a feeling of democratic power more
pleasingly articulated than Emerson’s, reminded them of their
former communist leaders, who loudly gesticulated on behalf of
the people, listing their accomplishments in fields and factories,
on and on and on.
“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the
reading of a book,” I quoted from Henry Thoreau. “I am one such
man,” I professed to them. Perhaps my students, in the aftermath
of their revolution and by my example, would find in Walden additional incentives to loosen their ties to collective dejection. But
the first chapter, “Economy,” did not overwhelm the Romanians
as it once did me. They did not know what to make of an American author who had solved the problem of life by reducing it to
its lowest terms and living very simply, like a Spartan. “Isn’t that
how we live now, meanly and miserably?” They did, however,
find much to admire in a man who lived alone and wrote such
things as this: “Society is commonly too cheap. We live thick and
are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think
that we thus lose some respect for one another.” They expected
the chapter called “Brute Neighbors” to develop this favorite,
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71
anti-social theme, but were disappointed to discover that in it
Thoreau lauds the heroic self-sacrifices of warring red and black
ants. A writer who cultivates poverty and extols the most communistic of animals made them suspicious of his American credentials and economic wisdom.
Surely, I thought, Thoreau’s great essay, “Civil Disobedience,” would inspire their esteem for the power of a propertyless
individual to take on the slaveholding and war-making collective.
But they were not impressed with Thoreau’s leonine showdown
with the bullying American state. On the contrary, they were impressed by the limits of the American state in punishing him. For
upon his release after one night in jail for not paying his tax,
Thoreau went “giddily to pick huckleberries…and then the State
was nowhere to be seen.” A student named Alina, with silky
blond hair and deep, dark eyes, pointed out that some Romanians
had also spent a short time in prison for political reasons, but after
their release they developed terminal cancer. I learned later that
her brother was among those who thus died, and that only then
was the state nowhere to be seen. “We believe they were irradiated there,” she said. “That way Romania kept fewer political
prisoners in the eyes of the world.” Alina invited me to her home
to meet her father, a poet, and mother, who operated a small bar.
Their son also wrote poetry, which apparently had gotten him in
trouble with the Party. The father read some of their poetry to me
in Romanian and Alina translated, her moist eyes locked to mine
for confirmation of her act of translation in me. They carried their
heavy burden of love with the intoxicating help of verse and
drink. On this occasion, they also had me to help, as I felt my
life’s course dip into their well. How many a man, unburdened
of years or grief, an easy sleeper, has let himself fall into the watery eyes of disconsolate poetry, there to see and embrace an ancient, bitter truth about life. Tragedy, as I now saw it enacted
before me, would have to be given its finest American say to
Alina and her colleagues, in keeping of our promise to be true to
each other.
Among the excerpts from approved American authors that
my students had read in high school were bits of dialogue from
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Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. These excerpts were supposed to demonstrate, of course, the cruelties of capitalism. We
read the whole play. The students were surprised to discover that
the young Willy Loman could have escaped from his unnatural
conditions by following his brother Ben to Alaska in search of
diamonds. “People in America move and start over all the time,”
I told them. “So why doesn’t Willy Loman move to Alaska and
start over?” A serious silence ensued, followed by a few whispers.
Then one of my quietest students from across the hated Soviet
border, a Bessarabian boy of stout physique, deep intonation, and
rudimentary English named Dragos, cited a song then popular in
the Soviet Union. I later witnessed the patrons of a Leningrad
restaurant dance triumphantly to its refrain: “Don’t be foolish
America! Return to us Alaska now!” “Russians believe Alaska
belong to them,” said Dragos, “because true Russians never sell
Motherland.” He asked his colleagues for help with English, who
explained that Alaska cannot be part of the American dream because it is geographically and culturally part of Siberia—rich in
oil and minerals, very beautiful, but awfully hard and far away.
“That why Stalin put Gulag there,” Dragos added. The better part
of the class agreed with him: “Better to die like an American in
an automobile [as Willy does] than like a Russian in the Gulag.”
“So what claims of truth does tragedy have among a mobile
and escapist people?” I asked. “Salesmen and their customers are
mobile and escapist by definition.” I had to explain this because
they did not know what salesmen and customers were. Shopkeepers in Romania, working for the State, did not care whether they
sold anything, and their “customers,” having no choice, had no
care over what to buy. True salesmen, I explained, offer their customers a steady supply of newer and finer objects and projects
as the means to live always better than before. But death will not
find it any more difficult than before to rip from the world people
who secure themselves to more and more new things. So true
peace and happiness are not to be found in the economic activities
of the American nation—at least according to Arthur Miller and
Eugene O’Neill (whose tragedy, The Iceman Cometh, that of a
salesman, we also read)—only a kind of continual distraction
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ending in death of the soul and body. “But do they let you do serious work in America, in the midst of all that buying and selling?” asked a handsome student named Constantine. “They hate
people with brains or talents here. I don’t know how much longer
we can hold out.” He, and others whose ambitions resembled his,
had long been smugglers of their own interdicted souls. (The
black market, as I came to understand, dealt not in cigarettes primarily.) “If only there were real salesmen in Romania,” said Constantine, “to distract us from wanting to jump off a cliff. For forty
years we secretly depended on the West for our vision of the future. And now we are supposed to believe these playwrights that
suicide is better than buying and selling?”
A student named Olivia, whose candid, harmonious face
made me look her way many a time, asked me if I really believed
in the truth of tragedy. I evaded the question, not the face, by saying that the text, whether tragic or comic, creates conviction in
itself. She had long ceased to believe the rhetoric of a professor,
and she knew the power of her face to compel confessions from
a man, so she asked me another question: “Why did you come to
Romania, or was it just a stroke of bad luck?” My grandparents,
I told her and the rest, had come to America from Eastern Europe
at the turn of the twentieth-century. They saw the Statue of Liberty upon arrival, whose picture faced us fixedly in the reading
room. I did not have to explain why they had left their homelands.
But as to why I had come back to live in their country, I said that
the people of Bucharest, in the name of liberty, had recently toppled a seventy foot statue of Lenin, who still exists in storage,
and I wanted to study him there, in safety, and to learn to blow
his mass all to pieces.
The students begged me to suspend the lessons of fine American tragedy. While there was still time to learn from each other,
they wanted me to show them how ordinary Americans, like my
own middle class, mid-western family, experienced the culture
of a proud, free country. Movies, television shows, pop music,
and grocery store magazines would become, apropos of their request, subject to study and discussion in class. This approach felt
like an abomination to a reader of the great books from the Uni-
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versity of Chicago, but I owed it to them to give the most popular
products of American culture a showing and hearing. They were
part of the truth. So to this stage of our learning, I let enter our
presence, comedy—not of the literary kind.
I showed to public audiences in the reading room John
Belushi and Dan Ackroyd in The Blues Brothers. This movie contains the longest car chases on record through the streets of
Chicago and the nine, acne-faced, marching Nazis of the Village
of Skokie (where I grew up). The audience enjoyed the leaps of
dance and musical soul-power, but wondered aloud whether evil
could be laughed and sung away. My first real job, I explained,
was with the traffic engineering department of the Village. It was
my task to help devise a traffic plan that would allow those Nazis
to march on certain public streets, according to their First Amendment right, while minimizing civic disruption and the pain to
Skokie’s many Jews and Holocaust survivors. “My own nextdoor neighbor bore a tattoo on his arm from Auschwitz,” I mentioned. “Did you support their right to march?” they asked.2
“Yes,” I answered, simply. We began a discussion about the comedian’s faith in the power of ridicule, for which exposure is required. “These young men were exposed as idiots by their very
right to public access, and they quickly disappeared afterward,”
I said. “Does that mean that rights and comedy go together?”
someone asked. I had not thought about rights in that way before,
but with premature enthusiasm, I said, “Yes, they do.” Then I
added, more cautiously, “So long as the public audience has the
clear-eyed intelligence to recognize the ridiculous and the strong
hearts to laugh it all the way to scorn.”
I showed the Romanians a “Dirty Harry” detective movie
with introductory remarks by a former American cop. He was
2. Romania had been an enthusiastic ally of Hitler, at first. A serious
pogrom occurred in Iasi in 1941, without German assistance. The Romanian Communist Party always insisted that the persecutions of the
Jews were entirely the responsibility of the previous regime. So my students did not grow up with any kind of Holocaust study beyond the
mere blaming of others.
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then a Fulbright Scholar doing research on the fifteenth-century
Wallachian Prince, Vlad II Dracul, heroic impaler of infidel
Turks.3 “Police in America are not like yours in Romania,” he
said, “because we go after the bad guys—like Prince Vlad II did.”
One woman asked me if I could hear the guns firing away in
Chicago. I showed them Dracula in one of the modern film versions, because “this is all most Americans know about Romania.” The women in the audience felt puzzled to find Count
Dracula, a vampire, portrayed as preferable to the normal men
in the film as a mate. (Their puzzlement was a clue to something
that I should have paid more attention to, as we shall see shortly.)
The movie Reds made the audience feel uneasy by its soft treatment of Bolshevism. Corinna, one of my most sarcastic students,
asked: “So is that what intelligent and hearty Americans in 1920
did with their lives—they ran off to Russia to fight for communism?” Rain Man, however, gave them back the typical Hollywood version of their beloved American dream: sexy women,
fast cars, easy money, and to make them feel warm inside, love
for autistic savants.
The movie Glory, with its stirring depiction of the first black
regiment to fight in the American Civil War, made a deep impression on the Romanians. One man thanked me in tears for
showing it, saying, “You are a lucky country to win that war. The
good side does not have to win, you know.” A doctor in the audience found the movie flawed because the black soldiers were
“on the other side already, too much like the white soldiers.” I
prodded her to say more on this subject. “The movie assumes
what it is supposed to prove, that blacks and whites are equal,”
she said. “Maybe they are equal, but I would like more proof.”
Others in the audience agreed with her. “600,000 Americans died
in the American Civil War over the question of equality,” I
replied. “President Lincoln seemed to think that the magnitude
of carnage in our great civil war was proof—and penance—
enough.” I then summoned the courage to ask them something
3. “Dracul” means “Order of the Dragon.” Vlad II has become known
to us as the vampire, “Dracula.”
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that had been nagging me for a long time. “Why do you think
that 1200 dead on behalf of your own liberation is too much?
Maybe, to prove that you deserve freedom, it is not enough. What
does it take for slaves, black or white, to get to the other side?”
Someone replied that the death toll would have been higher in
Romania had the revolution not been stolen by apparatchiks. “It
is a pity,” I said, “that the suspicion that adheres to former slaves
requires extreme measures to be overcome.” I marveled that they
agreed without reluctance to this terrible conclusion.
The selections from current American television that my parents sent me appeared to my students like scenes from a distant
galaxy. We watched Oprah Winfrey interview fat people who
complained they were victims of size discrimination. My students
memorized the patterns in Cosmopolitan and Vanity Fair, so they
were very discriminating themselves, and having stood for hours
in milk and egg lines, they were not sympathetic to “size oppression.” I also showed them Joan Rivers interviewing the fourteen
personalities of a schizophrenic, all sitting still in one chair, followed by a man who believed he was a woman but had not yet
undergone the operation to make him one. “How do you feel
when you look at yourself naked in the mirror?” asked Joan.
“Very uneasy and distracted,” said the man. Thus did my students
glimpse what ordinary Americans, my own dear family, watched
on TV or at the movies to fulfill their comic destinies.
Since my students wanted to know all about my native city,
which I felt all too eager to show off, I decided to direct them in
a comedy by David Mamet, a favorite Chicago playwright, called
Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974). I chose this play because,
like most people in theatre, I felt tempted to challenge (what I
perceived to be) the unsatisfactory status quo in Romanian society. Though Mamet’s play is physically innocent (not even a kiss
is exchanged), its language admirably fulfills the promise of the
title. I hoped that the racy words, substituting for romantic and
sexual action, would retain their original picturesqueness to a Romanian audience and teach them something about the powers of
language. I wanted to expand for them the possibilities of their
own becoming human under the new dispensation of freedom.
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On such grounds as the above, suitably rendered in academic
jargon, I defended the merits of the play before my up-to-datemongering colleagues. “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” I said,
“is about the construction of society by self-referential language,
the gender-determining parameters of language, and the circulation of diverse social energies through language.” Thus I got the
better portion of my colleagues to overlook the titular theme of
the play, for a while.
One morning the Chairman of the English Department interrupted my class, escorted me into the hall (my students left staring), and began to address me. “Louis, our university is a place
for free inquiry and discussion, and I would support your efforts
to do anything to these purposes, but I read the play and, well,
let me say that we expected something more elevating from a
person as serious as yourself. I can’t agree that this play is worth
doing.” I explained my serious intentions, but he continued to
address me thus: “Between men like us bedroom relations are
normal to discuss, but you have women to think about and your
reputation among the students, who I’m afraid might misconstrue
your purposes.” I admitted that this was a concern of mine, but
that the nature of theatre is self-exposure and risk, and I promised
to conduct myself in a professional manner at all times. Still, he
continued: “I expect that sometime in the future this play could
be done here successfully, for we are not a puritanical people, but
the sexual content is . . . well . . . we’ve only recently had a revolution, and we are not like Americans with sex, we prefer to
keep it private.” I said that my purpose was to show people a certain comic face of America, not to recommend imitation. The
play discourages that. Nonetheless, he continued: “I will not
stand in your way, as you are free to do as you please on your
own time, but I expected you to consult with me as Chairman.
Students are hesitant to offend you, but my position authorizes
me to say that this play is not appropriate for Romania at this
time. Have you thought of other worthy options?” I promised that
I would distribute a program preparing the audience for the content. Then they would be free not to attend or to leave at any time
during the performance—for I was determined to direct the play
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unless my actors proved unable. With that declaration firmly understood, he left me, and I returned to my anxious students to test
whether or not they were ready to undertake Sexual Perversity
in Chicago.
I asked them first what they thought of the pornographic photos that had begun to appear on the front pages of their daily
newspapers. Someone said that as a newly free society, Romania
was obliged to include images of naked women in its newspapers.
Others joked that this phenomena was not pornography, but a
new style of photo-impressionism, since the quality of print was
so poor that the female parts could be discerned only with a
trained eye. The abolition of human distinctions and standards of
taste under communism made me ask them next how the two
sexes in Romania managed to pair off. What were the criteria of
choice? They assured me that although it was very difficult to
conduct a romance without the benefits of leisure and privacy,
the job of mating did get done more romantically than not. The
ugly uniformity of things made female beauty seem a heroic
achievement, all the more alluring and satisfying to possess for
oneself alone. Naturally, I asked them what they thought of the
condoms appearing for the first time in stores. (Ceausescu had
forbidden birth control and abortion, because it was claimed he
wanted more workers.) They replied that a free people should
have condoms available for purchase, but they did not think that
they needed to use them as urgently as the generous donations
from the West implied. Unless referring to gypsies, the students
saw no reason to join the two concepts, “unwed” and “mother.”
Nor did they expect to practice cohabitation before marriage.
There was simply no room for shacking up, and there were no
Romanian role models to exhibit all the smiling ways to sexual
liberation. How, then, would I audition these students to find four
who possessed the colorful vocabularies and wild imaginations
necessary to impersonate sexually liberated, sophisticated, urban
Americans? The Fulbright Scholar who was formerly a cop and
becoming an expert on Romania’s infamous impaler, suggested
that I show a pornographic film to my potential actors: whoever
could provide a voice-over for the action belonged in the play.
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My best female candidate, Sandina, who possessed the kind
of looks appropriate for motorcycles, dropped into a ten second
coma upon reading the title. So I took back the script and handed
it to Carmen. Always a game girl in discussion, she read the first
three short scenes and stated peremptorily: “There are three
scenes I cannot do.” “But there’s no doing involved, just talking,”
I replied. “That’s what I meant,” she said. Roxana, whose tall
boots and angularity made me offer her the part of a brittle feminist, bravely spit out the scripted words—“premature ejaculation”—as an example of the unspeakable. The play was like a
gun filled with blanks to me, but to her the words were real bullets. These women seemed in tacit agreement with Plato’s notion
that the consent to hear or say vulgar words creates an aptitude
to witness or perform vulgar deeds. I began to feel ashamed to
tamper with modesty so deeply felt. I saw that against a background of officially sponsored animality, discrete romantic love
seemed the only civilizing agent left in Romania. To abandon it,
even in play, was to offer universal sway to barbarism, and these
women knew instinctively not to do that. Their innocence appeared a precious achievement in that corrupt and filthy world.
But their unequivocal rejection of the play bothered me all the
same, for what cannot be said also would not be thought, and this
seemed to me a formula for the disappearance of the life of the
mind. To be the virtuous allies of intellectual dullness was to put
themselves in league with my chief enemies.
What finally killed the production was the combination of the
modesty of women with the politics of men. Mihai, my irreplaceable lead actor, withdrew from the play because his father, once
an important figure in the Party, did not want him acting “decadent.” So I decided to direct the students in scenes from Othello
and Romeo and Juliet instead. Shakespeare’s elevated poetry and
aspiring thoughts made even the most prurient and immoral sentiments seem highly delectable to the students, the Chairman, my
colleagues, and the public.
Of all the writers we studied, the students liked Tennessee
Williams the best. Like Shakespeare, he is poetic with his perversities. Moreover, they easily recognized in him their own in-
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herited sense of defeat, along with a perilous attraction to the
victors. I gave them a brief account of Williams’s life, which included the fact of his homosexuality. This caught their attention.
“We were taught that homosexuals sprung up in the decadent
West, like weeds, but that they did not exist in socialist Romania.
Of course we don’t believe much of anything we were taught.”
They were amazed to read Broadway plays written by Williams
forty years earlier that were sympathetic to homosexuality,
fetishism, masturbation, and rape, when only a year ago a Romanian author would have been put in prison for writing one
such play.
We read A Streetcar Named Desire and watched the movie
version starring Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski. Some
women let themselves go in appreciation of Brando’s naked,
sweaty torso: “Would that someone with arms like his might
carry us away, sickness and all, master of this thing called ‘life.’”
Most were disgusted by Stanley’s crudeness, for in Romania
men still greeted women with a bow and a kiss on the hand.
“Why couldn’t Stella have married both a true gentleman and a
one-hundred percent American?” they asked. I tried to explain
that these were incompatible categories to Williams. He believed
in the predestined defeat in America of poetry, refinement, and
old world breeding by the forces of prosaic realism, animal
strength, and new world technology. On this belief his tragicomic vision depended.
Still, some of the women thought they had found their ideal
man, a combination of old and new world types, in Jim O’Conner, the Gentleman Caller from The Glass Menagerie. He is the
long awaited “something,” says Williams, which defeated people
must hope for to go on living. At the same time, and in contrast
with his fantastical role, he is “an emissary from the world of
reality” who brings news of modernity to Laura Wingfield, crippled and deeply secluded in her past. Let me remind the reader
of what happens to Jim and Laura, for as my year in Romania
drew to a close, and the students and I drew ever closer to each
other, I saw in the relationship of these characters a true image
of our own.
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Jim approaches Laura carrying a lit candelabrum and wine, superficially romantic but quite unaware of being the “climax of her
secret life.” She has always loved her image of him, and now she
faces the insupportable reality. Jim wonders what Laura has done
over the years, not knowing the depth of forlorn hope that could keep
her occupied waiting for him. Her problem, he concludes, is an “inferiority complex,” and to effect her cure he offers himself as a
model. This believer in self-improvement, determined to find some
way to get everyone looking up and going somewhere up, prepares
Laura for the future of capitalist democracy by teaching her to dance.
In the process they topple and break her favorite ornament, a unicorn,
but for the moment she accepts the loss as a “blessing in disguise,”
a sign of her return to normalcy. Then he kisses her on the lips to
demonstrate that her attractive powers are real. This startles him. He
realizes that to save Laura from her inferiority complex, he would
have to husband her away from her present circumstances. (For the
paranoia surrounding her nostalgic mother has sealed Laura inside
herself.) Luckily, he is already engaged, so he escapes the love he
evoked in her and the new life he promised. She gives him the hornless unicorn as a symbolic souvenir. It is the consequence of his
clumsy efforts—like those of a tourist—to separate her unique attractions from her hobbling infirmity.
Several of my Romanian “Lauras,” after a year of intense conversations about “literature, America, the world, and life,” bravely
took to telling me how exceptional a man I was to prefer their imperfect English to the pleading beauty of their perfectly painted eyes.
I owed them a return for the love they kept for me all those years,
and in final desperation they let me know how much.
Christiana, a woman of half-looks and whispers in class, invited
me to a student party at her sister’s apartment in May. I attended and
danced with her and the other women, felt her cling to me, let myself
enjoy their uplifted hearts differently, and smelt the residue of a thousand cigarettes in the proximity of their lips. The next day I discovered in a letter that I was Christiana’s only hope of happiness:
I feel more and more that I can’t breathe. Anytime a “decree” can appear in order to destroy, to put off my life.
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Sometimes, when I free myself from this asphyxia, I understand that I have the right to live and to experience
the mystery—the first source of superiority—that I can
breathe stealthily a kind of hidden air. You breathed that
air into me. A bird who flies smack into concrete whenever she tries to rise—that is me, I fear, when you leave.
Others are just under vain illusions, for there’s no laughter at the end of our slope, but stupid death, and there’s
no triumph and no understanding. All is weird, but also
dull and senseless here. It is the season of Goths and lunatics, that’s all. I ask you for help as I shout my love
without fear or shame, my soul defeated and caressed.
I gave Christiana some of my books when I left for home that
summer. She was supposed to become a teacher of English, but
I do not know if that came to pass, or if she is doing well, yet.
She has preferred only my books to keep the contact, I may suppose. A book, as we all should say of the good ones, is a fine
thing to keep in the space between two people who are inclining
to be engaged as one. A book makes it possible to cross that space
and that time in which two people diverge along their courses of
life. I always prefer to keep a good book between us.
Stopping in Vienna on my way back to America, I visited the
Schönbrunn Palace, once the summer residence of the Hapsburg
monarchs. While walking among the splendid gardens and fountains, I encountered a bold sign that read: “Please, Don’t Eat the
Swans.” The words were in Romanian. I remembered the previous summer, as I prepared my Fulbright application while reading
news reports about the Romanian miners sacking the capital.
“Yes,” I thought, “I did have to drag a cane behind me on the
streets at night to puzzle the abandoned dogs who were forming
packs again, learning to act like wolves.” But that is not the main
thing I felt as I beheld those swans and the sign. That year I spent
in Iasi felt even then like an oasis in my mind, and I have often
gone there since to refresh myself. There, in my mind’s eye, I
wonder long at how strangely happy I was to be teaching so awkwardly, freely, bravely even, with the wolves still close at heel
and all my familiar props far distant, to students just learning to
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fly, who let me see into the beauty of their fledgling souls, and
who made me see into mine. My old friend, Mark, the newsman
to whom, in a way, I owe my oasis, is trying to get me to go
abroad again—this time without leaving America—to teach the
poor masses by internet technology all at once, filling their empty
heads with information, entertaining and useful items, and getting
for my pains multitudinous fees. Something in me wants to erect
for us a sign. For the sake of the wonder at living human faces,
composed of the love of the infinite, the profound, beheld in those
faces, I would raise a sign in bold English, the language of America and nearly all the world on the make, to say: “Please, Let Us
Not Eat the Swans Again.”
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Dante’s Beatrice: Between Idolatry
and Iconoclasm
Gabriel Pihas
1. A Response to Two Objections to Beatrice1
Some readers have taken issue with Dante’s bringing together
eros and agape in the character of Beatrice. I will try to show
how concern about the erotic element in his poetry is connected
to other worries about iconoclasm that take shape in the centuries
after Dante. I will first outline the connection between these issues, and then try to defend Dante on both points.
Famously, the protestant theologian Anders Nygren attacked
Medieval Catholicism and formulated a deep separation between
eros and Christian love.2 His reservation about eros has to do with
its self-interested character. That is, his separation of eros from
agape is motivated by a desire to separate our self-love from
agape, and our human nature from God’s nature. According to
Nygren, the new, unique love that Christ taught had nothing to
do with any other love that lets human beings ascend to God; it
had nothing to do, for example with Socrates’s eros in the Symposium. For Nygren, the uniqueness of Christianity lies in the insight that we are not justified by the law and deserve nothing for
Gabriel Pihas teaches at St. Mary’s College of California. This essay
was first given as a lecture at St. John’s College in Annapolis on 2
December 2011.
1. I want to express my gratitude for what this article owes to an NEH
study group on agape and philia in which I participated in 2009 at St.
John’s College, Annapolis. I am indebted both to the group’s discussions
and to the lecture “Agape” that Paul Ludwig delivered at Annapolis
after leading that group, on 9 April 2010.
2. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip Watson (London:
SPCK, 1953). The word agape is commonly translated as “charity” and
I will use the words charity and agape interchangeably.
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our own virtue. 3 We are wretched sinners infinitely distant from
God, and no effort of our own can explain God’s condescension
to us. On our side there is only selfish eros, while agape is an incomprehensible miracle. For Nygren, this unmotivated condescension is the whole of Christian love.4 Some have raised
reasonable difficulties with this position. First, its excessive
harshness makes election too irrational. It leaves an enormous
gap between an unbelievably unmotivated agape and what we
clearly and fundamentally are, namely, desiring beings seeking
happiness.5 His view makes it difficult to understand the many
passages in the bible that seem to suggest our involvement in salvation, like “as many as received him, He gave them power”
(John 1:12). And second, equally importantly, one might add that
this doctrine leaves us swallowed up by God.6 We clearly lose
the dignity of our person at least in this condescension, and perhaps lose our person altogether.
I would like to draw a parallel to this separation of our eros
and agape in what at first might seem a distant sphere, namely,
iconoclasm, or the rejection of sacred art as idolatry. From the
idolatry issue arises a second, and related, objection to Beatrice.
Let me first explain what iconoclasm is, and then come back to
drawing the parallel with eros and agape. Fundamentally, there
are two very reasonable theological concerns behind iconoclasm.7
3. Nygren, 67-9.
4. Ibid., 75-6.
5. In “Agape,” Paul Ludwig argued that over-emphasis on the purely
miraculous nature of agape is one of the major problems with postLutheran accounts of it. Through a reading of New Testament uses of
agape, he argues that Nygren’s claim of a radical divide between classical philosophical strands in medieval caritas and New Testament
agape is exaggerated.
6. For some of these objections see D’Arcy, M.C. The Mind and the
Heart of Love (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 352-5.
7. There are, of course, also political motivations in iconoclasm. For
example, destruction of religious art can express opposition to the political institution of the Church through the objects it claims to safeguard and which are understood to maintain its power and its special
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First, it implies an intention to protect God from our theoretical
misconstruals of his ineffable nature and his unity, and to enhance
our inward respect for God by keeping him above anything down
here that might represent him. Second, it implies a desire to defend popular religion from superstitious religious practice. Interest in images is often connected to popular belief in magic
powers, even those latent in the very materials of the image, the
wood, paint, and stone. So there is something very thoughtful
and pious in iconoclasm. Also, there are certainly many scriptural
authorities for iconoclasm, above all, the second commandment
against graven images. But there is often also a risk of incoherence in iconoclasm. It suggests separating religion from any particular religious practice or institution. This is emphatically the
case for Christian iconoclasm, which is what I want to focus on
in this essay. For Christians, there is more latitude with images
than in other forms of monotheism. The Incarnation itself—the
idea that God became a particular human being in the womb of
a particular human woman, that He suffered and died and is
risen—almost naturally suggests making images of God. The
continual retelling of Christ’s story in pictures for the illiterate is
fundamental to the possibility of transmitting the story. This, in
fact, was part of the very earliest Christian defense of images.
But there is even more than such practical necessity to recommend images. The theology around the Incarnation suggests
a terrestrial reality preserved in transcendence. In the Incarnation
God became flesh, visible flesh. We can draw pictures of the God
who became flesh even if we can’t draw the invisible God. Part
of what is at stake in Christian iconoclastic debates is a concern
stature. The holiness of the icon is a kind of symbol for the holiness of
the Church itself, hence doubts about the sacred nature of the one takes
away political power from the other. This thesis was explored by David
Freeberg in Iconoclasts and their Motives (Montclair, N.J.: A. Schram,
1985). Similar claims about the political significance of iconoclasm in
ancient Israel were made by Joseph Guttman, “Deuteronomy: Religious
Reformation or Iconoclastic Revolution?” in The Image and the Word:
Confrontations in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (New York: Scholars
Press for the American Academy of Religion, 1977), 5-10.
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about representing human nature in the image of God. A picture
of Christ presents our humanity to us. It places God’s uncircumscribed nature in the visible, circumscribed human image. Most
importantly, the image is essential to Christianity because it is an
image in the depths of God himself, since Christ is an image of
God the Father.
Some Christians, like John of Damascus, who defended art
during the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy of the eighth century, saw the artistic image as a sacramentally valuable, low-level
emanation from God. He suggested a chain or ladder of images
of God. On this ladder of emanations we find, at the top, Christ
the image of the Father; then the image of Christ in the Virgin
Mary, then in the saints, and then in man, who is made in the
image of God. Finally, at the bottom are painted images.8 He argued that we should revere the image of Christ as if it were Christ
himself because we mean by the word “image” not the physical
materials of which an art object is made, but rather the original
that the image depicts and participates in—namely, in this case,
Christ’s humanity, something worthy of the highest kind of worship.9 This argument was used many times the Middle Ages, as,
for example, by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica.
Images were an important element in the early Christian debates about Christ’s human nature. With the very first Christians,
Christ was only ever represented symbolically (for example, as
a fish or a lamb), and never in sculptures, but only in paintings.
These early Christians had reservations about images, even
though objects like the Eucharist and the relic already suggest
8. John Damascene, Apologia of St. John Damascene Against Those
Who Decry Holy Images, trans. Mary H. Allies (London: Thomas
Baker, 1898). This ladder of images is described at length in the final
chapter of the trestise, “How Many Kinds of Images There Are.”
9. John compares the question about the image of God to the ordinary
use of images of the king, and to the importance accorded a king’s representatives. The representatives and the images get the same respect
the king gets. This argument was frequently reused in later debates to
defend the “iconodule,” or anti-iconoclast, position.
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Incarnational alternatives to the magic powers of pagan idols that
pave the way for later defenses of Christian art.10 I suggest that
the initial reservations about images might derive from a hostile
social context, and were not expressions of the mature faith: some
of its reservations derived from inherited Jewish practices, some
from a desire to distinguish Christianity from the pagan practice
surrounding them in Rome. Many reservations about images of
Christ derived merely from a need to maintain secrecy so as to
avoid persecution.11 Slightly later, when the persecution of Christians was no longer an issue, images of Christ most often appeared in group scenes telling stories from the New Testament
for the illiterate. But images of Christ appearing by himself, and
not symbolically, begin to become more common after paganism
vanished in Rome in the middle of the fifth century. These images
were often produced to affirm the doctrinal importance of the Incarnation against other heretical understandings of Christ’s nature. At that time a number of heresies circulated, such as the
claim that Christ’s human nature was erased in his divine nature,
or the opposed claim that Christ was merely a human instrument
of God. According to such views, it would not make any sense
to venerate the human image. In contrast, the act of veneration
10. I take this point from Marc Fumaroli, “The Christian Critique of
Idolatry” in Idol Anxiety, ed. Josh Ellenbogen and Aaron Tugendhaft,
trans. Benjamin Storey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 3241. As he points out, in the Eucharist and the relic we find the real presence, not just reminders of God. These new objects will oppose the
pagan demons previously thought to be present within statues and
amulets.
11. My suggestion implies that the way the apostles worshipped was
not always the best way. The iconoclastic Calvin took offense at such a
suggestion (Institutes 1.2.13) . But we see such limitations attributed to
the apostles explicitly in the gospels themselves, especially with regard
to this issue of seeing the image of the invisible God. For example,
when Phillip asks Christ to show him the Father (John 14:8), he is still
in the mode of waiting for the fulfillment of the prophets, and unaware
of what he has before him. (I owe this point to a private conversation
with Marsaura Shukla.)
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of the images of Christ as a man emphasizes that all of his divinity is present along with his visible humanity. Such veneration of
images is thus a way of affirming both natures. This non-symbolic human image was thought to be so important that the symbolic presentation of Christ as a lamb was even expressly banned
in the 600s, and the representation of Christ as a man became not
a possibility but a requirement.12 Opposition to the images was
never simply about the limits of art, or even about religious practice. It involved much more fundamental questions about the nature of the divine. Hence iconoclasm in all of its historical
appearances always involved opposition not merely to the depiction of Christ, but to the adoration of Mary and the saints, in or
out of pictures. Just as Byzantine and Protestant iconoclasts were
suspicious of images, they were also suspicious, for similar reasons, of the adoration of the saints and Mary. This broader context of communion with Mary and the saints is, as we shall see,
directly relevant to Beatrice.
Now I can finally establish the parallel I want to draw with
eros and agape. Unease about an image of Christ’s humanity
and Christ’s humanity itself is similar to the unease felt by the
separators of eros and agape, who don’t want to find self-regard
mixed up with agape. The fear of contaminating agape with eros
is another form of the fear of contaminating the infinite God with
our finite humanity in the images we make. The fear that our
own ascent through eros diminishes God’s condescension in
agape is similar to the fear that any work of our hands diminishes the honor we give to God. Both fears are understandable,
but are generally problematic attempts to eliminate our self-regard in finding our good. Both imply an idea of the supernatural
12. See Edward James Martin, A History of the Iconoclast Controversy
(London: Church Historical Society, 1930; reprinted 1978), 20-21. The
prohibition on the image of the lamb appears in the Quinsext Council,
Canon #82. The claim in that canon is that the human image reminded
us better than the lamb image of the “humiliation of the word of God”
and “his conversation in the flesh, passion…death…and redemption.”
This document is from 692 A.D.
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that wholly effaces our human nature. Both can verge on hatred
of our humanity. Dante offers an alternative Christian view that
does not eliminate self-regard, but attempts to include it, and
that does not simply efface our human nature. According to Nygren’s view, Dante is one of the most representative of all offenders in confusing eros and agape.13 For Dante, the ascent of
eros can complement the descent of agape. Both movements
may even be united in the same soul at the same time, and transformed eros can proportionately reflect agape. So, I will try to
show how different Dante’s literary works are from the more
modern view in respect to the way he brings eros and agape together.
Dante’s writing is also provocative in the context of the
idolatry issue. Like the seventh-century prohibition on the
merely symbolic images of Christ, his work demands a new
level of realism and historical detail. His inclusion of Virgil and
the classical world in combination with his rehabilitation of the
city of man suggest a new dignity in our humanity, unthinkable
in many earlier Christian writers. In fact, one of Dante’s central
aims in writing the Commedia is to take temporal power away
from the Church and establish the dignity of worldly government. But this political innovation is merely the flip side of
Dante’s theological-erotic innovation. The great novelty of
Dante’s political doctrines went hand in hand with the novelty
of making the beloved lady of courtly love poetry into a figure
of religious awe. The beautiful image of Beatrice pointed Dante
toward God, both during her life and after her death. Remarkably, her earthly reality is always preserved in her transcen13. For Nygren’s attack on Dante, see Agape and Eros, 616-620. His
claim is simply that Dante has too many Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian
philosophical elements for him to be Christian. Nygren tries to make
his argument against Dante merely by identifying such elements in
Dante’s thought. Here is not the place to discuss in detail the parts of
Nygren’s book unrelated to Dante, but the radical and problematic contention that Christianity cannot involve any such classical philosophical
elements is central to his broader argument.
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dence, as Christ’s is in the Incarnation.14 This paradox distinguishes Dante’s ideal woman from much more common symbolic or allegorical ideal women. As he himself said, by placing
Beatrice in heaven gazing upon God, he praised her in a way that
no poet had ever praised any woman.15
In fact, no one had ever done it before because it is a very
odd thing to do. With what right could Dante make a beautiful
woman a mediatrix to God? Is he worshipping her as an idol?
Some have said Yes. In the wake of Reformation, Protestant
iconoclasm, and the Index of Forbidden Books, we find a
Catholic editor in Italy, Bartolomeo Sermartelli, who worried
that Dante’s love was simply theologically offensive. In 1576,
about two hundred and fifty years after Dante’s death, in the
first printed edition of his early book, the Vita Nuova, the love
theology was heavily censored.16 All Dante’s scriptural citations
were removed. Passages attributing divine qualities to Beatrice
were deleted or cleaned up. For example, where the text said
that Beatrice offers him salute (salvation), we find instead the
more banal word saluto (salutation). And where Dante says she
generates beatitudine (blessedness), we find the word changed
to felicitá (happiness). The chapter where she is most explicitly
identified with Christ (Chapter 24) was simply deleted. This
censorship was founded on the separation between eros and
agape. This separation underlies the whole history of the ideal
woman in Renaissance literature in this period, from Ariosto’s
14. This well-worn point is familiar to most through Erich Auerbach’s
writings on Dante. See Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular
World, trans.,Ralph Manheim (New York: New York Review of
Books, 2007 and Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature (Princeton: Princton University Press, 2003). The idea originated, for Auerbach and his generation at least, with Hegel. See Auerbach, Mimesis, 191.
15. Dante, Vita Nuova, chap. 42.
16. See Brian Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 20040, 173.
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Angelica, to Cervantes’s Dulcinea, and later to Milton’s Eve.
Although some of these authors would not see themselves as
fundamentally motivated by theological concerns, nonetheless
they were all impressed by the idea that the beloved of the
chivalric tradition was idolatrous. Just as the iconoclast reformers sought to destroy the sacred images, so also certain poets
and novelists at the same time attacked the chivalric view of
love. But they did not limit themselves to this renunciation of
erotic idolatry. They attacked the chivalric view of both love
and arms, that is, they attacked both the ideal women and the
ideals of worldly honor. While we have become used to thinking of such attacks as obvious, Dante opposed them. He affirmed both the transcendence of the ideal woman as well as
the integrity of honor and the worldly political order, when part
of a Christian life. Hence Dante’s adapatation of literary realism
was not a reaction against theology, but an extension of his theological bent.
Unlike Dante’s literary realism, the new literary realism that
some of these later authors pursued, and which became the
foundation for modern realism, was founded on the incompatibility of our terrestrial reality and the manifestation of God.17
These authors begin from the hiddenness of God and of his
providence, rather than with the sacramental idea of nature.
Hence the theological issues that are involved in my defense of
Dante and his challenge to iconoclasm have a relevance that extends to modern literature as well as political and aesthetic theory. I will now present Beatrice as an alternative to this early
modern theology.
2. Beatrice as Christ in Vita Nuova
In the thirteenth century, poets explored the conflict between
17. The other element that distinguishes the two camps is their differing
attitude to pagan poetry. The new realism attempts to end the ancient
epic, which it regards as an ongoing tradition, while Dante is attempting
to revive an epic tradition that per lunga silenzio parea fioco (from long
silence seemed hoarse. (Inferno 1.63.)
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courtly love and religion from a few different angles.18 Guittone
d’Arezzo renounced love poetry and became a monk, writing religious poems against the courtly tradition. He stressed the moral opposition between divine love and the poet’s human lust. Two other
poets who were extremely close to Dante, Guido Cavalcanti and
Guido Guinizelli, although less ascetic and less pious than Guittone,
expressed similar concerns. Cavalcanti worried about the excessive
focus on one’s own, and on the private possession of the beloved,
which were obstacles to the universality of philosophical truth, and
to our good according to reason. He thought that being overwhelmed
by the passion of love divides the soul and implies forgetting that at
which reason aims. Guido Guinizelli’s poetry playfully suggested
that the earthly lady who was object of love and praise was more
than metaphorically divine, and hence was in sinful competition with
God. He saw that the implicit religious elements in the courtly love
tradition, and in poetry itself, were clearly idolatrous. But he never
took the problem very seriously and never sought a resolution to this
problem. In the story of Paolo and Francesca in Inferno 5, Dante
gives his own account of Guinizelli’s problem. But long before writing that canto, the young Dante already writes the Vita Nuova, a book
dedicated to Guido Cavalcanti that addresses all these various objections. As we will see, the Vita Nuova is a miniature of the major
action of the Divine Comedy.
Dante’s love for Beatrice in the Vita Nuova is unusual in that it
is not at all libidinal. Beatrice’s beauty is inseparably bound up with
her moral virtue, and beyond any lust that might make Dante forget
about his highest aims.
“It happened that her image, which was always with me,
gave boldness to Love to rule over [me], but was of such noble
virtue that it never let Love rule me without the faithful counsel
of reason.”19
18. For a thoughtful account of the tradition of vernacular love poetry and
the question of heresy, see Pamela Williams Through Human Love to God
(Leicester: Troubadour Publishing, 2007), especially 9-11, and 76-77.
19. Vita Nuova, chapter 2. E avvenga che la sua imagine, la quale continuatamente meco stave, fosse baldanza d’Amore a segnoreggiare me,
tuttavia era di sì nobilissima vertù, che nulla volta sofferse che Amore
mi reggesse sanza lo fedele consiglio de la ragione.
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So, contrary to Cavalcanti’s objection, Dante is never
blinded or even distracted by physical passion, and never ceases
thinking about God when looking on Beatrice. Dante’s experience of eros begins from the already religiously-infused courtly
love tradition. It is this tradition that explains part of Dante’s simultaneous interest in Beatrice as a beautiful woman and the
non-libidinal character of that interest. From the beginning Beatrice is the courtly domina, his “lady” in the sense of the feminine
form of “lord.” But as we will see, Dante goes further. Exactly
insofar as her image causes Love to overcome his faculties, he
becomes free of libido. Dante addresses Guinizelli’s concerns
by taking the religious element in the courtly tradition and radicalizing it in a most daring way.20 Beatrice is introduced as the
“glorious lady of my mind” (gloriosa donna de la mia mente)
and a young angel. The title of the book, New Life, recalls Paul’s
phrase (Romans 6:3-4) about giving up the old life of sin and
entering into the new life of grace. His meeting with Beatrice is
nothing less than the experience of God’s grace, now in the intimate world of his memory that the book records. Her beauty
is miraculous, and is rooted in the Trinity. The Vita Nuova is frequently compared to contemporary accounts of saint’s lives.
That is the genre to which it belongs. Beatrice’s appearance on
earth is a unique and miraculous event that Dante claims to have
witnessed, and he transcribes it from the book of his memory to
share with those who never saw her.
At the opening of the Vita Nuova, Dante describes his vision
of Beatrice as a beatific vision: “As she passed through a street,
she turned her eyes to where I stood very fearful, and with her
ineffable courtesy, which is today rewarded in eternal life, she
greeted me with great virtue, so much that I seemed to see all the
limits of blessedness.”21
20. For the uniqueness of Dante’s gesture, see John A. Scott, Understanding Dante (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
2004) 16-17.
21. Vita Nuova, chapter 3. [P]assando per una via, volse li occhi verso
quella parte ov’io era molto pauroso, e per la sua ineffabile cortesia, la
quale è oggi meritata nel grande secolo, mi salutoe molto virtuosamente,
tanto che me parve allora vedere tutti li termini de la beatitudine.
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It is difficult to imagine passing a woman in the street and
taking it for beatitude. Dante must have seen the inner meaning
of her beauty as an effect of the Creator, not merely as the beauty
of the creature for its own sake. The beauty appears as an emanation of God much as Neo-Platonic thinkers like Pseudo-Dionysius and John of Damascus might have suggested. Scholars have
focused on a number of more historically proximate potential
sources who followed exactly such theological theories about the
vision of beauty, including Bernard of Clairvaux, Richard of St.
Victor, and Bonaventure.22
Beatrice makes others who see her more like herself, just as
in greeting Dante she will transform him into Love itself. Beatrice has this effect on all who are noble enough to be able to see
her. This is the most unusual thing about Dante’s love for Beatrice. It is the aspect of courtly love that is most obvious from its
name, but least often taken seriously because it is so distant from
us: Dante’s love is shared, public erotic love, not private love.
Dante is the beloved for all Florentine gentlemen. His act of charity lies in his sharing of Beatrice through his poetry with those
non-Florentines, and non-contemporaries, who never saw her
when she was alive. Love of Beatrice becomes universal.
Dante’s love blends eros and charity. In one passage he focuses on the effect on himself of Beatrice’s greeting in the street.
Much of the experience of love in the Vita Nuova is condensed
in this rightly famous passage. In this greeting she presumably
22. See Francesco Mazzoni, Il canto XXXI del Purgatorio (Florence: F.
Le Monnier, 1965). Of course, Aquinas, among many others, also took
up the widespread Neoplatonic doctrines that described creatures as
preexisting in a higher form in God. Other traditional theological avenues for explaining the role of Beatrice might be analogy (see Warren
Ginsberg, Dante’s Aesthetics of Being [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999] 8-13), deificatio (Rosetta Migliorini-Fissi, “La nozione
di ‘deificatio’ nel Paradiso.” Letture classensi. 9-10 [1982]: 39-72), or
we might simply see her as a special revelation, like the phantasms and
sensibles offered to prophets. (See Aquinas, Summa Theologica, q. 12,
a.13: “sometimes phantasms in the imagination . . . and sometimes sensible things are divinely formed.”)
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said salve, which in Italian is the same as the now outmoded English phrase, “save you,” short for “May God save you.” It is a
blessing, it “makes blessed,” just as Beatrice’s name means “she
who makes blessed.” Here is Dante’s description in Chapter 11
of the Vita Nuova of the effect on himself of this greeting or
blessing:
Whenever she appeared anywhere, because of the hope
of her miraculous greeting [mirabile salute] I had no
enemy in the world, instead a flame of charity came to
me that made me pardon whoever had offended me. If
anyone had asked me anything, my answer would be
only, “Love,” with a face dressed in humility. And whenever she was about to greet me, a spirit of love, destroying all the other sensitive spirits, drove out the feeble
spirits of vision, telling them “Go and honor your lady,”
and it remained in their place. And anyone who wanted
to know love could have done so by looking at the trembling of my eyes. And when this most gentle one greeted
me with this greeting, not only was Love not a mediator
that could obscure from me the overwhelming blessedness, but through an excess of sweetness, he became such
that my body which was wholly under Love’s control,
moved like an inanimate mass. So that it appears manifestly that in her greeting dwelt my beatitude, which
greatly exceeded and surpassed my capacities.23
In this important passage, Beatrice’s beauty promises beatitude for Dante in her miraculous greeting. But the charity he
feels is not for her, but for anyone. This is mysterious. In this
23. Vita Nuova, Chapter 11: Dico che quando ella apparia da parte alcuna, per la speranza de la mirabile salute nullo nemico mi rimanea,
anzi mi giugnea una fiamma di caritade, la quale mi facea perdonare
a chiunque m’avesse offeso; e chi allora m’avesse domandato di cosa
alcuna, la mia risponsione sarebbe stata solamente —Amore—, con
viso vestito d’umilitade. E quando ella fosse alquanto propinqua al salutare, uno spirito d’amore, distruggendo tutti li altri spririti sensitive,
pingea fuori li deboletti spiriti del viso, e dicea loro: “Andate a onorare
la donna vostra”; ed elli si rimanea nel luogo loro. E chi avesse voluto
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way Dante makes an implicit distinction between eros for
Beatrice and charity for others. The key to the passage is to understand the relation between hope and charity in the first sentence. The promise of the salute (“greeting”/”salvation”) from
the beautiful creates a hope that is so strong it generates charity. To understand it we have to think that Beatrice’s greeting,
in which she said “be saved,” is so overwhelmingly pleasant
that Dante focuses completely on her and forgets himself. The
self-forgetting is represented as love destroying and expelling
his spirits, here understood as the Galenic spirits that make his
body function. The confidence of this hope elicits generosity
for others. When his hope is this great, he exists beyond himself and can afford to become all charity and humility. He runs
no risk of loss in his charity, because it grows naturally from
his desire for his own good. As Aquinas puts it, charity, or love
of God for His own sake, is the perfection of the imperfect love
that begins in hope for one’s own good.24 This imperfect love
that becomes charity we would call eros. We might also make
this point theologically rather than psychologically, by recalling Virgil’s comment in Purgatorio that love is a good that one
has more of when one shares it (Purgatorio 15.55-7). Dante
wishes to give to others, while also getting for himself. Both
occur when he is taken over by love, becoming more than himself, even at the level of his eyes and his body. It makes his
body and libido wholly inactive, with all his activity focused
in the eyes.
conoscere Amore, fare lo potea, mirando lo tremare de li occhi miei. E
quando questa gentilissima salute salutava, non che Amore fosse tal
mezzo che potesse obumbrare a me la intollerabile beatitudine, ma elli
quasi per soverchio di dolcezza divenia tale, che lo mio corpo, lo quale
era tutto allora sotto lo suo reggimento, molte volte si movea come cosa
grave inanimata. Sì che appare manifestamente che ne le sue salute
abitava la mia beatitudine, la quale molte volte passava e redundava
la mia capacitade.
24. Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II q. 17, a.8: “[Charity] adheres to
God for His own sake; . . . he that hopes [on the other hand], intends to
obtain possession of something for himself.”
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Note in this passage that he becomes charitable toward others
in a way that repeats or extends Beatrice’s charity for him. She
blesses him with this greeting not out of eros, but out of charity.
In contrast, he erotically and selfishly desires her greeting, while
loving others charitably. The charity and the eros operate together
in him without conflict. They have different objects. Eros is for
something he yearns after and contemplates that is above him.
Charity is an effect of his hope for that same object of contemplation, but it is aimed at people at his level or below.25 At this
point we have given an incomplete description of Dante’s account of eros and agape. So far we only have the two loves in
the same soul, provoked by one object, but aimed at different
people. We still have to come to see how the two loves are not
merely non-contradictory, but also more closely intertwined. I
will complete this articulation of eros and agape at the end of
this essay, in connection with Dante’s definition of agape in Paradiso.
Dante’s great discovery in the middle of the Vita Nuova,
which he arrives at with the help of Guido Gunizelli, is that he
must praise Beatrice, not merely describe her effect on him. His
poetry must be about her, not about himself. His blessedness is
no longer in her greeting as it was in the previous passage. His
poetic apprenticeship takes him beyond this. Instead his salvation
is now in his own charitable poetry, in praise of his lady. This
new direction generates the middle section of the Vita Nuova,
which contains many of the greatest poems of the collection. And
yet, it is important that Dante himself saw this apparently selfeffacing attitude of praise as actually self-regarding in a positive
sense. Dante says elsewhere that praising someone who is far
25. Compare Gregory the Great’s account of Jacob’s ladder in the Pastoral Rule, Book 2, Chapter 5. We both ascend and descend on this ladder, ascending in contemplation, and descending to those we minister
to through charity. This division between upward and downward loves
is implicit in the Vita Nuova passage, and frames the treatment of the
contemplative ladder in Paradiso 21-22. Canto 21 deals with upward
movement on the ladder, Canto 22, with downward movement on the
ladder.
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greater than yourself is always a self-interested act, since praise
implies friendship, and friendship implies likeness. Hence to
praise the great is to assert that you are like the great in some
way. (Convivio 3.1.4) The same goes, he suggests, for friendship
with God.
After Beatrice dies, years pass, and he begins to forget her
for a new noblewoman, whom he identifies in the Convivio as a
symbol for philosophy. At the end of the Vita Nuova he repents
this philosophical betrayal, and turns again to the memory of
Beatrice in the final chapters, rising up to heaven where Beatrice
dwells. The sequence in the final few paragraphs of the Vita
Nuova about repenting his abandonment of Beatrice, followed
by ascent to God—this is a tiny draft to be rewritten and expanded in the Commedia. At the end of the Vita Nuova, Beatrice
is described as the object of his soul’s pilgrimage, like the shroud
on which Christ left his features, which pilgrims visit in Rome,
known as the Veronica or True Icon. Dante suggests that the pilgrimage to Rome and his local pilgrimage to Beatrice are ultimately the same. The famous shroud in Rome has power, but,
actually, the local miracle of Beatrice, a woman who is a mirror
of God for the Florentines, is just as good as the shroud. “Christ
comes alive for Dante in Beatrice.”26 Her image transports him
to the good that can fulfill him. As a creature gone to her Creator,
her beauty is an exemplar that is more perfect in God, just as the
features in the shroud are more perfect in the seemingly absent
original face that they let us see. But further, Dante’s poetry itself
has the power to make others feel Beatrice’s beauty without ever
seeing her. His words are as good as sacred relics, like the shroud
with Christ’s features. His poem, like Beatrice, is mediator to
God, not a competitor. At the same time, his writings about her
are in fact even better than the historical Beatrice and even better
than the famous shroud at Rome, in that the writings can be
shared with all who read them anywhere and forever.
26. Christopher Ryan, “The Theology of Dante” in The Cambridge
Companion to Dante, ed. Rachel Jackoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 146.
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3. Beatrice as Mirror of God in Purgatorio
In the Commedia, Dante gives an account of how all of
human life should be understood in the light of eternal reality and
revelation. How could so much have come out of a vision of
Beatrice? Again, why isn’t this idolatry? On a number of occasions, Dante distinguishes what he is doing from idolatry. I will
mention only one.27 In Purgatorio 19, Dante has a dream of the
Siren, who Virgil will later tell him is the symbol for excessive
desire for earthly pleasures:
When geomancers see their Fortuna Major rise in the east
before dawn, rising by a way that stays dark for little
time, a stuttering woman came to me in a dream, crosseyed, and crooked on her feet, with her hands deformed
and pallid in color. I gazed at her; and as the sun comforts
the cold members that the night weighs down, so my
glance made ready her speech, and quickly straightened
her, and the distorted face it colored as love would want
it. Then with her speaking unshackled, she began to sing,
so that with difficulty might I turn my attention away
from her. “I am” she sang, “I am the sweet siren that misleads sailors in the middle of the sea, so pleasant is it to
hear me! I turned Ulysses, eager for his road, to my song.
And whoever gets used to staying with me rarely departs;
so completely do I fulfill him!” 28
The time is indicated by reference to a gnostic astrological
tradition called geomancy. This practice involved connecting pat27. Other prominent treatments of idolatry in the Commedia are Paolo
and Francesca’s idolatry of Amor (Inferno 5), the idolatry of Federick
II by the poet Pier delle Vigne (Inferno 13), and the idolatry of the simoniac popes (Inferno 19). Canto 19 in all three canticles is dedicated
to the idolatry issue in connection with the Church and the pope.
28. Purgatorio 19.1-24. [Q]uando i geomanti lor Maggior Fortuna /
veggiono in orïente, innanzi all’ alba, / surger per via che poco le sta
bruna: / mi venne in sogno una femmina balba, / ne li occhi guercia, e
sovra i piè distorta, / con le man monche, e di colore scialba. / Io la
mirava; e come ’l sol confortale / fredde membra che la notte aggrava,
/ così lo sguardo mio le facea scorta / la lingua, e poscia tutta la driz-
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terns drawn on the earth to constellations in the heavens. So the
setting suggests a kind of superstitious mistaking of earthly and
heavenly. At first the siren is ugly and stuttering, but then Dante’s
gaze makes her articulate and beautiful. We are invited to hear
her initial stuttering in line 19, as well as the balanced fluidity he
projects on her by line 21 (Io son . . . io son, dolce serena / che
marinari in mezzo mar dismago/ tanto son di piacer’ a sentir
piena!). As others have suggested, the power of his gaze to reshape her is an allegory for the power of his imagination to reshape the earthly and make it heavenly, that is, it is an allegory
for the act of idol-making.29 The parallel with Inferno 19 suggests
that the Siren is another development of the whore with seven
heads (lines 108-109), a conflation of images in Revelations that
suggests Rome. Here, as in Inferno 19, the idolatry of the pope
is of special interest. Later in Purgatorio 19, we encounter a concrete historical example of the damage the allegorical Siren can
do in pope Adrian V, who is now purging his own avarice. He
tells Dante that he had at first made the earthly political power
of Church offices the aim of his ascent (19.103-108). Then, when
he rose to its peak and became pope, he finally came to recognize
that no earthly position, no ambition, would satisfy him (109-11).
zava / in poco d’ora, e lo smarrito volto, / com’ amor vuol, così le colorava. / Poi ch’ell’ avea ’l parlar così disciolto, / cominciava a cantar
sì, che con pena / da lei avrei mio intento rivolto. / “Io son”, cantava,
“io son dolce serena, / che i marinari in mezzo mar dismago; / tanto
son di piacere a sentir piena! / Io volsi Ulisse del suo cammin vago / al
canto mio; e qual meco s’ausa, / rado sen parte; sì tutto l’appago!
29. See Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 140-41. The allegory is
a precise response to Virgil’s account of the soul’s perception of and inclination to desirable objects in the previous canto (18. 43ff.). In his account, the imagination takes in outer experience and presents it to us.
Our role in the imaginative presentation of objects in the soul is what
Dante has allegorized with the Siren in Canto 19. The doctrine on counsel and consent that Dante is following here is that of Summa Theologica I-II, qq. 14-15. Aquinas in turn takes it from Augustine’s account of
the imagination in On the Trinity, Books 11-12.
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His mistaken attempt to ascend to the earthly, as if the earth were
above him rather than below, resembles the geomancer’s identification of his earthly image with the heavenly reality at the beginning of the canto. Realizing his error, he quits his post. He is
finally saved, though he must spend time in purgatory weeping
over his attachment to the earth. With his face and body stuck in
earthly mire, he suffers while longing for heaven. Adrian’s tears,
which “mature” his soul in preparation for ascent, atone for his
fascination with the earth, which prevented him from ascending.
His fascination with the earth parallels the hypnosis of the Siren’s
song, which paralyzes sailors in the sea. The hymn Adrian sings
together with the others in this part of purgatory also expresses
this hypnosis as being stuck or adhering, but now with a new
sense: Adhaesit pavimento anima mea! I will suggest at the end
of this essay that, although Dante’s poetry often brings into relief
the transcendent possibilities for terrestrial beauty, Adrian’s tears
for heaven and his hatred for the stasis of purely earthly pursuits
are intended by Dante as emblems of how we should live on earth.
Although in passages like Canto 19 Dante reflects on the dangers of idolatry, in the Purgatorio, rather than backing away from
the Vita Nuova, he explicitly reaffirms it. Dante’s encounter with
Beatrice at the top of purgatory is a clear parallel with the idolatry
of the Siren and raises all of Nygren’s questions about Dante’s
mix of eros and agape. The preparation for Beatrice’s arrival is
perhaps the most daring of all of Dante’s gestures of praise. When
Dante arrives at the Garden of Eden in Purgatorio 28 he sees a
variety of mystical symbols paraded before his eyes. Seven candlesticks lead a procession (the seven gifts of the spirit that illuminate human life). Following these are the books of the Old
Testament, represented by twenty-four elders. Then comes a
Chariot (the Church) pulled by Christ as the Griffin.30 On either
30. I follow the traditional reading of the Griffin, against recent attempts
to interpret it otherwise. For such attempts see Peter Armour, “Dante’s
Processional Vision” in Lectura Dantis: Purgatorio, A Canto-by-Canto
Commentary, ed. Allen Mandelbaum, Anthony Oldcorn, and Charles
Ross. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 336-340.
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side of the chariot are virtues represented as nymphs, while behind the chariot are various men representing the books of the
New Testament. More concisely then, the procession means that
the spirit of God illuminates revelation and the history of scripture, all of which centers on the transcendent moment of Christ’s
coming to earth and leading his Church, uniting the books in the
epochs before and after him. The whole procession is in the form
of a cross, with the two-natured symbol of Christ at the center.
This elaborate procession contains a set of images mostly from
Revelation, which refers the whole scene to the last judgment.
As Charles Singleton emphasized, Dante is witnessing a last
judgment. Even fairly uneducated medieval readers would be immediately aware of this.31
Singleton argued that what makes Dante’s procession different
from the ordinary medieval understanding of the last judgment is
the person who appears in the chariot when the procession stops.
Dante introduces this person as Christ, but it will be someone else.
One of the representatives of the Old Testament sings the phrase
Veni sponsa de Libano (Come, bride of Lebanon), from the Song
of Songs, three times. Then everyone in the procession sings in
31. Many medieval churches decorated with exactly such images of the
last judgment, would have taught Dante’s ordinary readers about the last
judgment in terms of these symbols, and perhaps inspired Dante’s canto.
Most iconographically similar of all to Dante’s procession are the mosaics
in the churches of Santi Cosma e Damiano and the identical ones in the
church of Santa Prassede, both in Rome, where in each case a series of successive arches in the church contain these symbols (the heavenly Jerusalem,
the twenty four elders, the seven candlesticks, the evangelists, etc.). To one
who traverses the space, even merely with one’s glance, the succession of
arches creates the visual effect of a procession in motion towards the end
of the church, where Christ appears in the vault descending to the judgment
seat. Coincidentally, the mosaics of S. Prassede are of particular relevance
for the question of iconoclasm in medieval art. They were done at the end
of the 700s by artists fleeing iconoclast persecution in Byzantium and commemorate the relocation of the remains of martyrs and saints from the catacombs. Byzantine iconoclasts were opposed to the devotion to martyrs as
well as to images. Like Dante’s Purgatorio, the mosaics stress the value of
human beings as mediators.
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response Benedictus qui venit! (Blessed is He who comes!). In its
original context, this phrase “Blessed is He who comes” describes
Christ entering Jerusalem. The Old Testament erotic longing for
the Bride of Lebanon is now to be satisfied with the phrase announcing Christ from the New Testament. Since his readers know
this New Testament verse, and know the iconography of the procession, then it is very clear that these angels are welcoming the
returning Christ, who is arriving at his judgment seat so as to decide who can be received into the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of
God. If we attune ourselves to the force of the scriptural citations
as the last century of scholarship has helped us to do, then we recognize that nothing could have prepared a Medieval reader for
what happened next. The angels quote a verse from Virgil’s
Aeneid, Manibus o date lilia plenis (Give hands full of lilies).32
Anchises voices this phrase at one of the most melancholy moments of Vergil’s poem, “even though it is of no use, let me throw
these lilies over the shade of the dead soul.” All this is overturned
in Purgatorio 30 when angels shower the chariot with lilies, and
in the midst of a delicate rain of flowers, Beatrice appears. Of
course Christ, the “He” in “Blessed is He who comes,” it turns
out, is a she.
Now, including a line from Virgil as a part of the last Judgment is already stretching the bounds of theological propriety,
and it embraces the pagan world in a new way. It transforms and
completes our worldly dignity and our wholly natural desires
rather than effacing them in the moment of revelation. But surprising as it is, this is not the most striking thing about the scene.
If we accept the idea that the ancient inability to redeem death
has been overcome by Christ’s sacrifice, and that it is natural for
Dante to use a bit of pagan poetry to express this thought, then
Virgil’s melancholy has itself been uplifted and transformed into
a moment of grace. His conversation with Statius about his role
in the conversion in Purgatorio 22 might have already prepared
us for that. Rather, it is the appearance of Beatrice that makes
this passage so complicated.
32. Aeneid 6.883-86; Purgatorio 30.21.
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As I said, the procession suggests that the figure who emerges
should be Christ coming down to the judgment seat. Dante has
done everything to make us think this. And of course, only
Christ’s grace could surpass the ancient melancholy and redeem
us from death. But in Singleton’s words, we witness here the Advent of Beatrice.33 In Dante’s case, the person who pronounces
the decision about whether he is received in the heavenly city is
Beatrice. She is at the center of this heavenly procession; she is
the representative of the Judge in this personal last judgment. She
will make Dante confess his sin, and she will be an instrument
of his forgiveness. She appears to him in Christ’s place.34 While
Purgatory was structured by three-part examples from an ancient
source, from the Old Testament, and from the New Testament,
Beatrice’s appearance takes us into a realm beyond the three citations that announce her. She is the revelation at the center of
history.
The Griffin that pulls the chariot is a symbolic presentation
of Christ that leaves Christ a mystery. A similar tactic is found in
33. See Singleton, “The Advent of Beatrice” in Journey to Beatrice.
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 72-85. In the preceding couple of pages I have been trying to re-enact Singleton’s understanding of Beatrice as a Christ figure in such a way as to
represent the theological boldness of the gesture.
34. There is a traditional model for the procession that Dante may
have had in mind. The translator John Sinclair saw Beatrice of the
chariot in purgatory as an image of the Eucharist (for which see the
commentary accompanying his translation of Purgatorio 30 in
Dante: The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio [New York: Oxford University Press, 1939]). In the middle ages, the Eucharist was paraded
through the streets in a chariot in the feast of Corpus Christi at Modena, and Dante might be expecting his readers to think of that. If
Sinclair was right, the poem can be seen as a public procession of
his private vision with a Eucharistic value. The living Beatrice, as I
said earlier, was a public love, a miracle for all the Florentines. And
the Beatrice of Dante’s writings is less private still. The aim of
Dante’s work is to make Beatrice a universal figure available to all
his readers.
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iconoclastic Hebrew illuminated manuscripts in Germany in the
1200s. By making holy people into mythical animals or giving
them animal heads, artists avoided giving a false impression with
a non-fictional, non-arbitrary representation.35 So the use of the
Griffin can be understood as a careful, humble avoidance of idolatry here. But unfortunately Dante doesn’t leave it at that, but
looks at the Griffin in Beatrice’s eyes. Again, Christ appears to
Dante, comes to life for Dante, in the beautiful eyes of Beatrice.
The two natures of the Griffin are mysteriously fused, but in her
eyes he sees alternately one or the other. He says:
Mille disiri piú che fiamma caldi
strinsermi li occhi alli occhi rilucenti,
che pur sopra ’l grifone stavan saldi.
Come in lo specchio il sol, non altrimenti
la doppia fiera dentro vi raggiava,
or con altri, or con altri reggimenti.
Pensa, lettor, s’io mi maravigliava,
quando vedea la cosa in sé star queta,
e ne l’idolo suo si trasmutava.36
In the soul of Beatrice, Dante can see an image either of
Christ’s humanity or of his divinity, but never both at once. Why
does Dante see the Griffin through the eyes of a woman at all?
We might try to evade the problem—as many critics do—and
make Beatrice herself a mere symbol. But our knowledge of the
details of Beatrice’s real existence as a contemporary of Dante
in the Vita Nuova (for instance, her life and death, her family relations) makes such a reading inadequate. Even when she is dead,
35. See Bezalel Narkiss and Evelyn Cohen, “Illuminated Manuscripts,
Hebrew” in Encyclopedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred
Skolnik, 2nd ed., Vol. 9. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2007), 726-735.
36. Purgatorio 31.124-6, “A thousand desires hotter than flame bound
my eyes to the eyes reflecting, that upon the Griffin stayed firm. As in a
mirror the sun, not otherwise the double beast within rayed out, now with
one now with the other nature. Think, reader, if I marveled when I saw
that the thing in itself remained unchanged but in its image changed.”
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her eyes have the flash that distinguishes living, conscious human
beings from dead ones and from statues. In Beatrice the eternal
meaning is reflected in the eyes of a contemporary human being.
She is not just a beautiful object or a symbol, because she is a
subject who loves the Beautiful Itself, just as Dante does. He falls
in love with God through his beloved, who is herself in love with
God. In fact, he falls in love with her precisely insofar as she is
a lover. In being moved by love she reflects the love that moves
her. The reflection of Christ in her loving eyes makes others, like
Dante, into lovers of Christ. (Compare Plato’s Phaedrus, especially 255c-d, where the beloved is seduced by his own deified
reflection in the eyes of the lover.) Beatrice’s role as a lover removes the idolatry from Dante’s love of her. And the reader is
supposed to participate in this same reflection between lover and
beloved by looking at Dante’s love for Beatrice.
To understand why the mirroring of Christ in Beatrice’s eyes
is not idolatrous, we must recall the tradition of the speculum
Dei, the mirror of God. To see God in a mirror is to see God in
an imperfect and limited way, not as he is. The alternation between the two natures of Christ in the appearance of Beatrice emphasizes her limited ability to reflect him. It is all we on earth
can do, as the King James translation of St. Paul puts it, to “see
through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12). This passage from
Paul was cited as an explanation for the vision of Christ in Beatrice’s eyes by the earliest commentators.37 This idea had been
previously deployed in a number of debates. This phrase “mirror
of God” was sometimes applied to the martyrs and saints. Saint
Francis, for example, visibly reflected Christ in the stigmata, and
mirrored his suffering in the sorrow within his soul as well.38
Beatrice’s soul is in the same category with such saints. Her
beauty, but also her charity and her humility, reflects God’s, al37. For example, Dante’s son Pietro Alighieri cites it in his commentary
(1359-64) on these lines.
38. See Bonaventure’s “Life of Saint Francis” in Bonaventure: The
Soul’s Journey into God, the Tree of Life, the Life of St. Francis, trans.
Ewert Cousins (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 305-306.
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though she cannot perfectly express the paradox of the two natures. More generally, any reformed soul is a mirror of God, even
beyond the way in which any human being is made in God’s
image. The importance for Dante’s Commedia of the tradition of
the mirror of God cannot be overstated. As the opening tercet of
the Paradiso puts it, the entire universe is a mirror reflecting
God’s light.
La gloria di colui che tutto move
per l’universo penetra, e risplende
in una parte piú, e meno altrove.39
Moreover, the idea of seeing God through a mirror was part
of the defense of art in the early iconoclastic debates.40 As mentioned earlier, those who staked out positions against images implied opposition to the adoration of saints and martyrs as well as
the Virgin Mary. The idea of the mirror of God that was used to
defend images in the eighth century iconoclastic dispute supplies
a traditional account that explains Beatrice’s role as a saint, and
clarifies how her beauty points to its own pre-existence in God.
And although her reflection of the Divine essence must be qualified, it is nevertheless surpassingly glorious—so much so that
Dante cannot end this canto with a description of her unveiled
reflection of God, but ends instead with the claim that her image
is indescribable (Purgatorio 31.139-145). Beatrice is at the same
time both a defense of images, and a limit to images.
Something similar to Dante’s treatment of Beatrice can be
understood to explain the style of his book as a whole, and it undergirds its literary realism. The eternal meaning of the characters
is presented through attention to personal and historical details,
especially, but not exclusively, in the presentation of Dante’s contemporaries. Rather than provide sterile lexical or philosophical
39. Paradiso 1.1-3: “The glory of him who moves everything penetrates
through all the universe, and reflects in one part more, and less in another.”
40. For the medieval artistic tradition and the speculum Dei, see Emile
Male, “One Hundred Years of Iconoclasm” in Early Churches of Rome,
trans. David Buxton (London: Ernest Bendt, 1960).
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definitions of the sins or virtues of each group of souls, he presents the living stories of souls in their places.41 The concreteness
of such stories challenges the reader with the ambiguities of experience, but they are fruitful ambiguities. The stories suggest
that readers take what is valid in ordinary experience and purify
it, rather than simplifying or disregarding it. We start from where
we are, and ascend dialectically, just as Aristotle does in his
Ethics, arguing his points starting from common opinions and
from experience.
4. Beatrice as Prophet in Paradiso
I will now focus on the limits Dante sets to the vision of God he
can produce through the image of Beatrice and through his poem.
The Paradiso opens with a disclaimer about the limits of Dante’s
poetic powers. Dante says that he cannot express or even recall
much of what he saw in heaven. He alerts the reader that he must
end his journey with a concession to some aspects of the iconoclast’s demands. Although Beatrice’s beauty pre-exists in God,
as an individual she is ultimately merely one part of the Incarnate
God. Only Christ is perfectly “the image of the unseen God”.42
Similarly, Dante’s poem could never perfectly mirror the Incarnation or the Trinity. The sobering distance between Dante and
God in the Paradiso gives the canticle a prophetic character. By
41. It is worth comparing Brunetto Latini’s encyclopedia, the Livres
dou tresor, and his poem, the Tesoretto. Both are extremely similar to
Dante’s work in that they separate out vices and virtues and define them.
Both are works of exile, and both involve narrative accounts of Aristotelian morality and metaphysics. The profound difference is that
Brunetto’s works are purely abstract and allegorical. Their narrative
form is superfluous. They merely offer a lively version of a bird’s eye
view. Nor does Brunetto’s account suffer a genuine transcendent element. The abstract and mundane aspects of Brunetto’s works prompt
Dante to relegate Brunetto to the stale and unfruitful atmosphere surrounding the sodomites of Inferno 15. The key to interpreting most of
the images in that canto is the biblical injunction not to store up one’s
“treasure” on earth, but in heaven (Matthew 6:19-21).
42. Colossians 1:15.
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prophetic I mean looking forward to the fulfillment of justice,
and living in anticipation of contact with a God who is not yet
fully present on earth—that is to say, living in exile.
In order to take on the role of the prophet, Dante must put on
a severity that comports very oddly with love poetry. A prophet
has to live in the desert with nothing more than hope. As Emmanuel Levinas argued, prophecy does not coincide with feminine gentleness in the Old Testament.43 But in the Commedia
Beatrice, a woman, is the source of Dante’s prophecies, beginning in Purgatorio 33 with the chilling condemnation of ecclesiastical corruption in their times. Beatrice is stern and harsh
throughout the Paradiso. Such moments suggest that Beatrice is
not simply an emblem of gentle, generous beauty. Rather, she is
also a figure of anger. She is loved in and for her anger, and her
anger is a sign of her love. For Dante at least, she is, paradoxically, both Church Triumphant and Church Militant at the same
time.
The Paradiso emphasizes the prophetic vein more explicitly
than the other cantiche, and presents us with a number of austere
figures as role models for human life. So, for example, the
paragons of human virtue in Paradiso are monastics like Francis,
whose erotic love of poverty is itself a form of vision.44 Others
are the ascetic contemplatives Peter Damien, Benedict, and the
white-haired Bernard. The non-monastic figures of greatest importance in heaven are either soldiers or kings who sacrificed
themselves for heavenly justice. It may be easy to miss it while
reading the Paradiso, which is filled with beautiful images of
light, refined talk of love, and angelic harmonies, but two of the
highest values in heaven are poverty and spiritual war. Though
the Paradiso rises through the ethereal reaches of heaven, the
Church Militant and the expression of hostility to the earth receive continually greater emphasis. The contemplatives at the
43. See Emmanual Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism.
trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997),
30-38.
44. I take this account of Francis from Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision, 240.
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very top of Dante’s celestial hierarchy are defined as those who
love and minister to their fellow men, and, at the same time,
those who least esteemed the earth. From their height they can
look down on earth, as Benedict did from the dizzying heights
of his monastery atop Monte Cassino. So the starkness of the
Paradiso might not seem in accord with the choice of a beautiful
woman as a guide. But, mysteriously, Dante sees the erotic attraction to God in Beatrice’s eyes as implying a severe and unbending focus on the ugly and bad in the world, and on the need
for correction. As Dante’s vision becomes clearer, he and Beatrice ascend farther and farther above the world, and become angrier and angrier about its corruption. Why should erotic desire
be so at one with the austerity and anger of the prophet? Isn’t
anger thumos, not eros?
The answers to these questions lie in recalling Dante’s situation on earth after Beatrice died. In the Vita Nuova, following
Beatrice’s death, Dante initially reacted properly. He began to
despise the earthly life because it had lost its salute (chs. 32-34).
Beatrice, from heaven, offered him consolation. But a year or so
after she died, Dante turned to the Siren. As Beatrice expresses
it in her description of this episode in Purgatorio (31.44-54), love
should have generated anger against the earthly Siren, against
self-induced hypnosis that creates indifference to ascent. Recall
the image of Pope Adrian V with his face in the dirt in Purgatorio
19, tearfully longing for what is beyond the earth. Dante, like
Adrian, should have recognized all earthly things as lesser pleasures than Beatrice’s grace. He should have risen up to heaven in
pursuit of her after her death, when she had become a purer heavenly creature. Like Adrian, Dante must yearn for what has left
him in permanent mourning. Unworldliness is the proper way of
seeking consolation in the more distant but truly higher good,
rather than finding substitutes in the sirens of the here and now.
Anger at the corruption of the earth, and even indignant disgust
with the earth, becomes then a way of maintaining eros for what
is now absent. Eros and thumos work together. They are not two
separate parts of the soul, but two aspects of a single activity of
the soul. Adrian’s face is pressed into the dirt not only as punish-
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ment, but as therapy. Anger and sorrow imply a love of something
toward which earthly things cannot point him. While Beatrice,
before her death, was an earthly beauty pointing beyond the earth,
after her death she is a creature who has reached her Creator. Although she leaves Dante in mourning, she becomes an even more
effective mediatrix for him. Of course, she does not renounce her
earlier function as the earthly miracle who greeted him. But in
heaven she can complete that work.
The other aspect of the role of the prophet that can only with
difficulty be connected to love of a woman is its public nature.
The prophet is a leader of men and a master of rhetoric, as the
Ulysses canto in the Inferno suggests.45 This issue of public
prophecy and private love complete the picture of agape and eros
in the Paradiso, the true finale of the Vita Nuova. In his meeting
with John the Evangelist, Dante presents the paradox of a private
love for something public and universal that can help us understand his love for Beatrice as a young man.
John, like Beatrice, is a complex case. In his gospel, John’s
status as private friend of Christ is contrasted with the universality
of Christ’s relation to humanity. His gospel portrays a number of
scenes that emphasize how, as a particular human being, even
Christ had a special love for certain people, like his mother, and
like his close friend John.46 But the gospel writer suggests that this
in no way interfered with or reduced Christ’s universal charity.
Because of the complexity of this portrayal, a myth arose that John
had special immortality and was taken to heaven bodily. In Par45. Inferno 26 is structured around the division between the true and
the false prophet. Dante suggests that he mistakes Ulysses for Elijah
initially, and verges on becoming a sort of false prophet himself. From
Ulysses’s story he must learn Paul’s well-known dictum in Corinthians
13 that the power of prophecy without love is nothing. See Giuseppe
Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine
Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 66-106.
46. Above all, the comments about John’s special status in relation to
Christ, and the play with Peter about philia (personal love) and agape
(impersonal love) at the end of the gospel (John 21:15-23) raise questions about the role of the ordinary private individual.
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adiso 25, Dante looks for this body and goes blind. In Canto 26,
John questions the blind Dante about love, asking him why he
loves. Dante replies first with a universal argument. He loves because of the authority of scripture and because of philosophical
arguments. But the apostle seems to ask him the same question
again: Are there other cords that pull you to God, or other teeth of
love that bite you? And Dante replies:
Tutti quei morsi
che posson far lo cor volgere a Dio,
a la mia caritate son concorsi:
ché l’essere del mondo e l’esser mio,
la morte ch’el sostenne perch’ io viva,
e quel che spera ogne fedel com’ io,
con la predetta coscenza viva,
tratto m’hanno del mar de l’amor torto,
e del diritto m’han posto a la riva.
Le fronde onde s’infronda tutto l’orto
de l’ortolano etterno, am’ io cotanto
quanto da lui a lor di bene è porto.47
Immediately after receiving this answer, Dante regains his
sight, now made even stronger. Dante has brought the universal
love of God (agape) into harmony with his own individual love
(eros), transforming his love into the universal one. He is moved
by God’s gift of creation as a whole, by God’s gift of salvation,
and forgiveness, as well as by the hope that these imply for him.
He is erotically concerned with his own good, and with the entire
story of his that he presents in the Commedia, as this passage
47. Paradiso 26.55-66, “All those bites that can make the heart turn to
God are in concord in my love. That the being of the world, and my
being, the death that he underwent so that I might live, and that which
every faithful person hopes, as I, together with the aforementioned living knowledge, they have drawn me from the sea of perverse love and
has put me on the shore of the right [love]. The leaves with which are
leafed all the garden of the eternal Gardener, I love as much as the good
given to them by Him.”
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suggests by returning to the beginning, when he was shipwrecked
like Ulysses on the shoals of the mar de l’amor torto in Inferno
1, and then bringing us right up to the present, when he finds himself on the shore of right love in purgatory. The reference to
leaves is an allusion to a passage in John’s gospel in which Christ
describes himself as an eternal vine:
Abide in me, and I in you. . . . I am the vine, you are
the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it
is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do
nothing. . . . If you abide in me, and my words abide in
you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for
you.48
As part of the vine, Dante is now able to love the garden of
the whole creation and all the leaves, that is, all creatures to
which God has granted the gift of the good. This gift from God
is agape. Dante’s individual love is now perfected in becoming
agape for the other parts of the vine, and his love is now proportionate to the agape that comes down into all the leaves from
God. Dante’s love for himself has now somehow cast a wider net
of love around all creatures that partake in God’s grace. He loves
all the blessed he will meet in the celestial rose, and all those who
are yet to arrive there. Christ’s two commands—love God and
love your neihbor as yourself (Mark 12:30-31)—are now one act
for Dante, an act that springs from what was initially his selflove. For the source of all other loves is rightly directed self-love,
as Dante remarked in the Convivio: lo proprio amore di me medesimo . . . è principio di tutti li altri, sì come vede ciascuno.49
We can now see how the public and universal qualities of
Dante’s love in fact have room for his private and erotic love of
Beatrice. Note how very similar this passage is to Dante’s description of the effect of Beatrice’s greeting on him in Chapter 11 of the
Vita Nuova. In both cases, universal charity comes from hope. Dante
48. John 15.4-7.
49. Convivio 3.5. “[P]roper love of myself . . . is the root of all other loves,
as everyone knows”.
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is exhilarated by promise of God’s creation and God’s sacrifice,
which offers him great expectations. This confident private hope
for his own happiness is transformed into charity for all of God’s
garden. And the more secure he feels in his expectation of happiness, the more he is able to give of himself. The same is true of
Dante’s relation with the beauty of Beatrice in the Vita Nuova. His
self-regarding hope for the promise of her greeting brought the
flame of charity to him, and he became Love. Her beauty humbled
him and effaced his self, even if at the same time, on another level,
his self was actively at work achieving the goal of its own self-love.
In this humility before the Good, the human soul transcends the
merely private.
Dante turns to find Beatrice in Paradiso 31, and is surprised to
see her replaced by the third and final guide, a white-haired old
man. The anti-sensual element is emphatic. St. Bernard might be
beautiful, but he could never be called pretty. And yet, Dante emphasizes the continuity: the severity of Beatrice’s prophetic character is succeeded by the austerity of Bernard. Dante will compare
his vision of the old monk to the Veronica, the same shroud bearing
Christ’s features that he once compared to Beatrice at the end of the
Vita Nuova. This reference also recalls the “idolo” of Christ in the
eyes of Beatrice from Purgatorio 31, which was discussed earlier.
In Dante’s final speech to Beatrice (Paradiso 31.79-90) she has
fully transcended herself; she has become a universal figure for the
blessed. In the Vita Nuova, he made an attempt to love the innermost
meaning of her beauty, that is, the meaning of her beauty in God.
This transcendent element in her beauty now reveals itself to be her
place in the celestial rose as a mere part of a larger divine order. Her
innermost individual meaning becomes transcendent when it is not
separate from anything else in God.
At the outset of Canto 33, Bernard asks Mary to help Dante see
God. He tells her that all those who have been saved throughout
history up to the present day, including Beatrice, now pray for
Dante. This is universal agape, akin to Dante’s newfound love for
all the leaves of the garden—only here it is made explicit that it
works in reverse as well. In this moment of communion which
seamlessly combines agape and eros, not only does he love the
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whole garden, but the whole garden loves him in return. Mary, the
more traditional universal symbol of love, does not compete with
Beatrice as the mirror of God; she is now revealed as the completion
of Beatrice, the more perfect mirror. She resembles Christ more
than any other. Mary initiated Beatrice’s rescue of Dante in Inferno,
and now she finishes her task, turning Dante toward the Original
for which she is merely the image. But even this turn to the Original
in the final lines of the poem is not the end of these mirrors of God.
Christ himself is an image of the Father.
And there is a further image of God implicit in the closing lines.
Although Dante cannot misurar lo cerchio (“measure the circle,”
Paradiso 33.134), he finds himself moved by love sí come rota
ch’igualmente é mossa (“like a wheel that is moved in equal measure,” Paradiso 33.144). The attribution of mathematical equality in
the motion with the word igualmente implies that his motion does
in fact precisely measure the Love that moves him. This equality is
the most perfect correspondence of Dante’s desio and velle to God’s
self-understanding and self-love. In this sense, Dante himself becomes an image of God.50
50. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica I-I q. 93, a.4) enumerates three
forms of the image of God in man: first, that which all have by nature;
second, that which the just have by grace; and, third, that which the
blessed have by glory, the so-called “image of likeness.” In all three
cases, man is in the image of God in that he loves and understands God,
imitating the way in which God’s intellectual nature loves and understands itself. But in the third way, in glory, the blessed have the image
of God in the highest degree, because they love and understand God
more perfectly. Dante’s pair disio and velle achieve this third kind of understanding and love appropriate to those blessed by glory. Thomas’s
reference to God’s self-love and understanding are echoed in Paradiso
33.124-126. This suggests that the three circles of the Trinity are circles
because they represent the self-relation of God’s intellectual nature.
When Dante grasps how the human effigy fits within the circle, he sees
how the human soul can come to resemble God’s self-understanding and
self-love.
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THE EXTINCTION of SPECIES
Marlene Benjamin
To Din
In Memoriam
This is no abstract exercise.
There will be names and places
To tether you, to make you hear and note,
To make you listen and mark.
So mark this:
We live amongst the extinction of species. “Passenger pigeon,
great auk,
Stellar’s sea cow, Schomburgk’s deer, sea mink, antarctic wolf,
Carolina parakeet: all gone.”
I learn this from Quammen’s exhilarating book, which is yet depressingly full of incontrovertible facts,
Called The Song of The Dodo, a great bird also gone extinct.
Quammen was at Oxford with Saul, who was at Brasenose some
15 or so years before you, and who
Recently told me that he had long harbored a desire to meet you
there for High Table fare, a desire
He never satisfied. As for me,
My desire to sit at table with you was satisfied over and over
again across 43 years,
Giving me the singular joy of watching you
Grow from a child to the man you became, whose traits and
habits
Could be traced back to early childish behaviors.
At five, you were insistent on being right, but with a sense of humor
That made your rightness palatable to those who were faced with
Hearing it forcefully directed at their pale and insignificant positions.
“What,” you used to say, “is the point of that?” in mock horror at the
Emptiness of my claims concocted to counter yours.
Marlene Benjamin is Associate Professor Emerita at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. Her book, The Catastrophic Self: Essays in Philosophy,
Memoir, and Medical Trauma, will be released in late 2015 or early 2016.
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At six, you kindly said to me, using my own phrasing to illustrate
the foolishness
Of my arguments, “Now Marlene, we don’t want to hear any
more about bloody California.”
You knew this would kill me with laughter, and it did.
At twenty-five, you gently queried my political explanations to
end the conversation by saying
“Now that sounds like an extremely intelligent position.” Long
pause. “Or does it?”
And what, I ask you now, am I to do without your challenges?
Without your presence?
It is as if an entire species has gone extinct with your death,
Leaving a hole in the natural world that cannot be woven closed.
There are too many frayed edges.
And that is only me. For the damage done to the intimate family
is far worse,
Far more savage an attack on the fabric of the world.
How shall they carry on?
Perhaps they have a memory of your last moments to lean on,
A way to conjure up the finality of your departure and thus, paradoxically,
A way to hold you closer than is given to me.
I don’t know; I wasn’t there.
But I have this: I have what the camera captured in the photograph
On the cover of the Order of Service at your funeral, the picture
I have standing on my dresser
Facing me each morning, showing you (in Wales, is it?) surrounded by your girls – Lily and Molly and Bea;
Smiling at what I believe is Sue behind the camera – or perhaps
it is Mag or Jim or Vinny or Simon –
All of whom stand, for me, invisibly behind you, all of you together
In the shadow of the astonishingly full and lovely life you had, it
seemed, so effortlessly, made.
Looking at you like this is to repopulate the world,
My way to argue against the extinction of species.
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119
However tenuous the argument, for a few moments every day, it
works – even as I know,
And love, that you would challenge my saying so. And knowing
this, the hole,
For some few tremulous moments – as if the air is being beaten
by the concerted breathing
Of all the creatures gone from our world – is somewhat, though
evanescently,
Woven closed.
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Education and the Art of Writing:
Christopher Bruell’s Aristotle as Teacher—
His Introduction to a Philosophic Science.
South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2014.
268 pages, $37.50
Book Review by James Carey
In Aristotle as Teacher—His Introduction to a Philosophic Science,
Christopher Bruell advances an interpretation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics
that pays closer attention to the wording of the actual text than does, as
far as I know, any other study of that work since the imposing commentaries of the Middle Ages. It is also much the most original interpretation
of the Metaphysics that I have ever read.
Bruell has written impressive essays on Leo Strauss, and his fine
study of Plato’s shorter dialogues, On the Socratic Education, shows
the influence of Strauss. So one can call him, with some justification, a
Straussian.1 This is not to say that he necessarily agrees with Strauss
about everything, only that he takes seriously certain themes that were
of great importance to Strauss, such as the rival claims of Greek philosophy and the Bible regarding the possibility of revelation, the root
of morality, and, more generally, what constitutes the best human life.
Strauss is well known for having called attention to the fact—and it is
a fact—that the ancient philosophers, their medieval followers, and even
their early modern opponents often wrote in such a way as to disclose
their deepest thoughts only to their most careful readers while at the
same time presenting on the surface of their texts a teaching that was
more in accord with common opinions, especially opinions concerning
James Carey is a tutor and former Dean at St. John’s College in Santa Fe,
New Mexico.
1. Straussians take the intellectual tradition of the West seriously, read the great
books with exemplary care, and think hard about the things that are most worthy
of thinking hard about. Those of us who are not Straussians can profit greatly
by attending to what they have to say, whether or not we are ultimately persuaded by what they have to say.
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the sanctity of law and the existence and nature of the divine. Philosophers wrote this way because they could not forget the example of
Socrates, who in spite of his civic virtue and the caution with which he
conversed was put to death for being a philosopher by the citizens of a
regime that was democratic and, by ancient standards, generally liberal
and tolerant as well. This art of writing is properly called “exoteric”—
not “esoteric”—for the author realized that it would be available to be
read by anyone who was able to read, whatever his ability and whatever
his degree of sympathy or antipathy toward free inquiry.
Though it becomes obvious on close inspection, especially under
the guidance of Strauss, that many books of the philosophers have an
exoteric character, it is not so obvious that Aristotle’s Metaphysics is
one of these books. In fact, it is not so obvious that the Metaphysics
is a book at all, not in the way that, say, the Nicomachean Ethics is.2
Bruell is aware that the Metaphysics looks at first glance, and for most
readers at last glance as well, like a patchwork; and he does not rule
out the possibility that someone other than Aristotle may have been
responsible for the final form of the work (30).3 But he takes it as
heuristic principle that whoever was responsible for the Metaphysics
as it has come down to us from antiquity, whether it was Aristotle
himself or one (or more) of his followers, had sound reasons for organizing it as he did, and that we cannot begin to understand the teaching of the book, much less evaluate it, without paying the closest
possible attention to the stages in which it is presented. If the Metaphysics looks more like an assemblage of notes for lectures delivered
at different times than a through-composed book like Plato’s Laws,
Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed, or Machiavelli’s Prince,4 that
very appearance should be regarded as contributing to the exoteric
character of the work. On Bruell’s interpretation, every chapter, and
virtually every sentence, of the Metaphysics is in its proper place. Bruell slows the reader of the Metaphysics down, way down, and he requires
2. See W. D. Ross, Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarion Press, 1970),
Vol. 1, xiii-xxxiii.
3. Pagination for citations from Aristotle as Teacher will be given within parentheses. The same practice will be followed for citations from the Metaphysics
and other works by Aristotle. When only the Bekker number is given, it should
be read as referring to the Metaphysics, except when a different work is specified in the text.
4. See Ross, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, xxviii, on the formulations at 1069b35
and 1070a4.
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the reader to pay the closest possible attention to the exact working of
the text. That by itself is one of the many merits of Bruell’s book.
The layout of Aristotle as Teacher is unusual. It does not contain
chapter headings of the kind that one typically finds in an extended
study. Bruell frequently refers to what modern editors of the Greek
text of the Metaphysics say about their editorial decisions, and he explains why he is or is not persuaded by them. But aside from these
references, and a few references to Thomas Aquinas’s commentary,
there is virtually no mention of the secondary literature (see 135).
There are no footnotes or endnotes in Aristotle as Teacher. There is
no bibliography, there is no index of persons, and there is no index of
subjects. In the course of his treatment of the individual chapters of
the fourteen books of the Metaphysics, Bruell makes many references
to passages from other chapters. These references are always interesting. But the reader longs for an index of Aristotelian passages dealt
with in the book, so that he can quickly find out what Bruell says
about a given passage, and what he does not say about it.
Straussians have occasionally suggested that the Metaphysics is
an exoteric work. Those who, like the present reviewer, have found
this claim implausible have wondered what in the world an intelligent
and thorough interpretation of the Metaphysics as an exoteric book
could possibly look like. Bruell’s book, written with a magisterial
command of the text, and in lucid and unaffected prose of a high stylistic order, is that interpretation. It behooves anyone who wants to
know, or who thinks that he already knows, what Aristotle is doing in the
Metaphysics to come to terms with what Bruell has to say about it.5
Before proceeding further, I need to say something about the
translation of some key Aristotelian expressions. One of these is
ousia, which Bruell translates sometimes as “thing” and “sometimes
as “essence,” in keeping with the fact that for Aristotle this word can
signify both an ordinary individual and the intelligible character that
the individual shares with other individuals like it. For the former
signification I prefer “entity,” since this word is broad enough to
cover both things and persons, sub-rational animals in between, and
gods too if they exist. For the latter signification, and often for the
former too, I shall leave ousia untranslated, as Bruell frequently does
5. The reserve with which Bruell communicates his interpretation could lead
one to infer that Aristotle as Teacher is itself an exoteric work. This inference
would be an error. There is no surface to Aristotle as Teacher. It is all depth.
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as well.6 Another expression is to ti ēn einai, which Bruell translates
as “the what it was to be.” Clearly, this expression names something
of capital importance for Aristotle.7 Early in the Metaphysics, in his
restatement of the four causes (983a27-32) that were presented in the
Physics (194b23-195a3), Aristotle names ousia and to ti ēn einai first.
He does not mention eidos here as one of the causes, as he did in the
parallel passage in Physics, where it is the second cause mentioned.8
In Book Lambda, the unmoved mover is said to be to ti ēn einai, indeed the “first” ti ēn einai (1074a35-36), but never “form” (eidos),
not even “pure form.”9 In what follows I shall also leave this expression untranslated.
6. “Beingness” is not unthinkable as a translation for the second signification
of ousia, but it is unthinkable as a translation for the first signification. Aristotle
calls such entities as individual men, horses, and plants, ousiai. It makes no
sense to speak of these entities as “beingnesses.”
7. Since the imperfect ēn can function as durative, I prefer translating it as “is”
rather than “was.” The formulation, “the what it was to be,” has an odd sound to
my ears, as though implying “what it was to be, but no longer is,” or “what it
was meant to be, but didn’t quite turn out to be.” Since the ti is interrogative,
one might translate the expression as “the what is it to be.” But that translation
is not entirely satisfactory either. Something of what Aristotle means by the expression can be gathered from the contexts in which he uses it. When he launches
his inquiry into to ti ēn einai in Book Zeta, ch. 4, of the Metaphysics he uses the
expressions to soi einai, to musikōi einai, to epiphaineiāi einai, to leukōi einai,
etc. (See 994b27: to apeirōi einai; and De Anima 429b11 ff: to megathōi einai
vs. to megathos, to hydati einai vs. to hydōr, to sarki einai vs. to sarks, to euthei
einai vs. to euthy.) These dative of possessors are stronger than genitives and
could be translated respectively as “the being proper to you,” “the being proper
to musical,” “the being proper to surface,” “the being proper to white,” etc. Such
expressions are presented as exemplifications of to ti ēn einai in the sphere of
what is sensible. (See also 1029b21: ho logos tou ti ēn einai; and De Anima
429b20.) When Aristotle is not speaking of this or that particular individual, he
tends to use the longer expression, to ti ēn einai. In the course of his treatment
of sensible ousia, Aristotle often uses to ti ēn einai interchangeably with eidos.
But the former is not a synonym for the latter. Furthermore, though in certain
contexts Aristotle will speak of hylē as ousia, he never to my knowledge speaks
hylē as to ti ēn einai (cf. Metaphysics 1032b14).
8. The presentation of the causes in Book Delta of the Metaphysics (1013b1627) follows the order of the Physics.
9. Eugene Ryan, “Pure Form in Aristotle,” Phronesis, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, 1973,
209-224.
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Bruell says of the formal cause, or the form, that it is “the perceptible or intelligible character of a being, nothing more” (20). The “nothing more” is intriguing, since Aristotle treats the form not only as what
is intelligible about a sensible (or perceptible—aisthētē) entity (ousia)
but, along with matter (or material—hylē), as an actual constituent of a
sensible, and composite, entity (Physics 193b6). It is not only one of
the causes, it is nature (physis) to a higher degree than is matter (ibid.,
193b7; 193b19—taking morphē here as equivalent to eidos: 193b3-5).
Indeed, it is activity, or being at work (energeia—Metaphysics 1050b2;
see 1043a28). If the eidos were not somehow a constituent of an entity,
then it is hard to see how it could be the perceptible or intelligible character of that very entity, or of its nature (Physics, 193b7). Bruell is
hardly unaware of the passages I have just cited. But he has reasons for
not placing as much weight on them as I and others do.
One of the pervasive themes of the Metaphysics is the criticism of
the “Platonic” account of the eidē as what is intelligible regarding sensible entities and, at the same time, as actual causes of these entities,
though separate from them. Bruell detects in the Metaphysics a roughly
parallel, but obliquely communicated, criticism of the “Aristotelian” account of eidē as well, and of the “Aristotelian” account of ousia more
generally (140). Aristotle’s account is certainly not problem-free, one
indication being his employment of the single word eidos to name both
a constituent within, hence bound to, a particular sensible entity, and the
species to which it and entities closely resembling it belong. Aristotle’s
explicit teaching is that the eidos is present in a sensible entity, causing
it to be the very being that it is, and yet also apprehensible, through the
joint operation of sensation, imagination, and the intellect (nous), and
explicable, in terms of genus and specific difference, as the intelligible
character of that entity.10 (See De Anima 431a16; 431b3). This is a demanding construal of the eidos indeed. But it is not nonsensical.
10. Bruell writes, “In concluding this portion of the argument [in Book Zeta
ch. 4], Aristotle does not speak of the form (eidos) but of species (eidē)” (138).
Bruell speaks here as though eidos (singular) does not mean species (singular)
and that when Aristotle wishes to speak of species (singular or plural) he uses
eidē rather than eidos. But Aristotle will use eidos with speaking of species in
the singular. See, for example, Categories 5, 2b7-23, Topics 4, 122b18-123a19.
Nor is his usage of eidos (singular) for species (singular) confined to the logical
writings. See, for example, Metaphysics 1038a25-26. Consider 1023b2. The
hylē of the eidos is intelligible hylē, rather than sensible hylē. It is the genus:
1024b4-10, 1038a3-9, and 1045a33-35.
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When Bruell comes to Aristotle’s treatment of the Platonic understanding of the forms, he writes, “Not even the considerable latitude
that Aristotle avails himself of in speaking of his teacher is sufficient
to permit the mention of Plato in connection with an imperfect grasp of
the formal cause (compare A 7 988a34-b6)” (29). The passage that Bruell refers to here could seem to undermine the point it is supposed to
support. For Aristotle writes there that “concerning to ti ēn einai [which,
in the case of sensible entities, Aristotle closely associates with eidos—
e.g., Physics194b26; Metaphysics 1032b1-2] and the ousia, no one [so,
not even Plato] has clearly introduced (apodedōke) them, though those
posting the forms do speak of them.” With his pointed reference to
988a34-b6, Bruell implies that Plato himself, as distinct from his followers, did not intend to introduce the formal cause clearly, inviting us
to infer that Plato was as aware as was Aristotle of the problematic character of the formal cause.
In his treatment of Book alpha (“little alpha”), Bruell correctly
notes that, for Aristotle “truth is being, as knowable” (31). Since “we
do not know ‘the true’ without the cause” (993b23-24), Bruell is led to
infer, “Truth, then, or nature is being, as caused or in so far as it is
caused.” But he immediately expresses a doubt about this inference,
and rightly so. For the inference can be sustained only by ruling out the
possibility that there could be an instance of truth that is being, not just
as caused, but as cause, that is, that there could be a first uncaused cause
and a first truth. For unless there is a cause that does not depend on a
yet more fundamental cause, and unless there is a truth that does not
owe its intelligibility to a yet more manifest truth, then we are caught
in an infinite regress, both in causes and in truths, with no cause sufficient of itself, nor any number of causes in the series sufficient taken
together, to account for what is caused and no truth evident of itself to
ground other truths (994b16-23; see 1005b5-1006a12). But Aristotle
says that what is most true (alēthestaton) is the cause of subsequent
things’ (tois hysterois) being true (993b26-27).11 He expands his point
11. Thomas Aquinas and others have detected the outline of an argument, from
gradations of being, for the existence of God right here in Book alpha (993b23994a2), an argument quite distinct from the argument from motion in Book
Lambda. This argument is not fleshed out. But if not only to on, but also ousia
as the premier instance of to on, has a pros hen character, which I think is Aristotle’s view (see, for example, 1004a3-5), then the ground has been laid in
Book alpha for an argument that there is an ousia that is in the highest degree
(malista) and is, moreover, the cause, or at least a cause, of other ousiai.
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immediately afterwards by saying that the first principles (archai), not
just of truths, but of eternal beings (to the extent that they have principles distinct from themselves—he likely has in mind the stars here), are
always the most true. Nothing else is the cause of their being. And, he
adds, just as each thing has being so it has truth (993b28-34). If Aristotle
is serious in making these claims, then he cannot mean that truth is
being as caused, period. Being as caused presupposes, in his account,
being as uncaused. Aristotle says that it is clear (dēlon) there is some
first principle (singular), and he expressly rules out an infinite regression of causes, either in a direct line or in type (994a1-2). Bruell does
not deny that there is some first principle or principles, but he asks
whether they are knowable (32). Whether or not they are knowable to
us, however, they would be knowable by nature if they knew themselves, a possibility that Aristotle has already mentioned (983a6; see
also 993b11; 1029b3-5; Posterior Analytics 71b34-35; Physics
1084a19; Nicomachean Ethics 1095b2) and will argue for explicitly in
chapter nine of Book Lambda (1074b15-35). Bruell presumably regards
these passages as exoteric.12
Aristotle begins chapter 2 of Book alpha by arguing that there can
be neither an infinite regress with respect to the hou heneka (the “for the
sake of which,” i.e., the final cause) nor with respect to to ti ēn einai. If
so, then there must be both a first hou heneka that is not for the sake of
anything else (994a8-10; 994b9-16; cf. 1072b1-3) and a first to ti ēn
einai that is not bound up with hylē and is not the einai of anything else
(1074a35-36), but is non-composite or simple (1072a31-34; 1075a5-10;
cf. Physics 266a10-267b20), fully actual and in no sense potential
12. Regarding latter chapters of Book Lambda, Bruell chooses “to depart so
far from [Aristotle’s] injunction (L6 1071b3-5) as to refrain from adding to
them, elliptical though they are” (251). Apparently, Bruell understands these
chapters, and earlier passages in the Metaphysics (e.g., 988b25-26; 1009a3638; 1012b30-31; 1037a10-17; 1037a33-b6; 1040b34-1041a3; 1041a7-9;
1045b23; 1064a33-1064b3: hoper peirasometha deiknunai) that anticipate
them by making mention of entities that are immaterial and separate—separate,
that is, from the perceptible entities with which we are familiar—to be accommodations to readers who would rather be moved (250) than see the truth for
what it is. Prior to the latter chapters of Book Lambda, Aristotle will use locutions such as “immaterial and separate ousiai . . . if they exist.” One can say
that Aristotle is hinting in such passages that immaterial ousiai, in fact, do not
exist. But one can also say, instead, that he is reluctant to positively affirm the
existence of such ousiai prior to advancing a complete argument for their existence, which he does not do until Book Lambda.
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(1071b13-14, 19-22; 1074a36), necessary (1072b10), necessarily eternal
(1071b4), an unmoved mover (1072a25-26: cf. Physics, 260a18-19), and
the principle on which heaven and nature depend (1072b13-14).
Aristotle argues that there are only four species of cause, and that
within none of these species is there procession, or ascent, into infinity.
Bruell is struck by the fact that Aristotle says, without elaboration, that
even in the case of to ti ēn einai, the formal cause, there cannot be a
procession into infinity (33). He speculates that this might be because
the other three causes presuppose the formal cause, and that it is only
on the basis of this presupposition that each of them, too, must have a
first causes—from which we are invited to infer that if there is no first
formal cause, then there is no first final, moving, or material cause either. Aristotle’s point, I think, is simpler. He is not committing himself
here to the existence of an actual sequence or series of formal causes,
but only noting that if one formal cause were the effect of another formal cause, then in this case too there could be no procession into infinity—and, again, he does argue for a first to ti ēn einai later on.13 Bruell
writes “[Aristotle] assumes that there is a beginning to the series [that
he is considering at present in terms of their downward direction], a
first cause, as if the necessity that there be such a beginning had been
shown also for causes in this way, as one might have been led to believe
that it had been shown for causes coincident with their effects in time”
(34). It is not clear that Aristotle is speaking at this point exclusively of
causes antecedent in time to their effects, rather than of causes more
generally (cf. 994b6-9). He does argue elsewhere that temporally antecedent causes—for example, fathers as causes of sons—can regress
backwards in time indefinitely, the world having no beginning in time
and the human species being eternal (Physics 206a24-206b27 cf.
258b10; 266a7.). But, as for causes coincident with their effects, Aristotle does not just lead us to believe that they cannot proceed to infinity
13. 1074a36. In Book Zeta, Aristotle will speak of the specific differences that
are present in the definitions of various species (eidē) as having a formal character that limits the genus, which is in turn the intelligible material (hylē
noetikē) that is also present in the definition (cf. 1023b2; cf. 1036a9-11); see
the passages referred to in footnote 10, supra. At the end of his interpretation
of Book alpha, ch. 2, Bruell notes that an infinite ascent in formal causes would
give rise to a problem for the possibility of science or knowledge (35-36). Such
a thing, however, would not be problem for knowledge alone. It would be a
problem for being itself: there would be no ousiai that are without qualification
(consider 1086b16-19).
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in the ascending direction. As Bruell noted earlier, “[Aristotle] explains
more generally why there must be a first cause, if there is to be any
cause at all” (33). Bruell does not elaborate on this general explanation.
He speaks as though he finds it unpersuasive; and he may think that Aristotle found it unpersuasive as well. Aristotle’s explanation or, rather,
argument is that there cannot be an actual infinite number of anything
(Physics 207b11-12.). Least of all, then, can there be, in a series of
causes coincident with a given effect, an infinite number of them efficacious at an instant. For if, per impossible, there were an infinite number of such causes, each the effect of another cause, then there would
be no cause, or number of causes, higher up in the series capable of producing any other cause or effect further down in the series. And so, “if
there were no first (cause), there would be no cause (properly so called)
at all” (994a18-19). One cannot avoid this conclusion by asserting that
“the whole infinity of causes” produces the given effect, for an infinity
of causes is not a whole. In the case of a series of causes coincident
with their effects, then, there simply must be a cause that is not itself
an effect within the series. Aristotle’s medieval followers, on both sides
of the philosophical-religious divide, held this to be a necessary truth.
Bruell seems to think that Aristotle’s shifting between speaking of
causes that temporally precede their effects and speaking of causes that
are coincident with their effects, and his sometimes treating both together in general statements, are hints that he may not have been altogether serious about his argument for the necessity of a first cause in
the case of causes that are coincident with their effects (see 32-36). It
would have been helpful if Bruell had spelled out exactly what he thinks
Aristotle might have found defective in this argument, which he makes
in his own name. Quite a lot turns on it.
As for causes that temporally precede their effects, it is here that
an infinity of formal causes in particular is ruled out. For though, to return to Aristotle’s example, in natural generation the series of fathers
and sons regresses backwards indefinitely into time past, the formal
cause, to ti ēn einai, in this case to anthropōi einai, is present throughout
the series. If this formal cause itself has a formal cause, which as such
would be temporally coincident with it, then the same argument applies:
there can be no ascent into infinity.
Aristotle announces at the beginning of Book Gamma that there is
a science that considers being qua being (to on hēi on). He says that
being (to on) is said in many ways, though always in relation to one
(pros hen) nature or principle (1003a33-34; 1003b5-6; cf. Categories
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1a12-15). That one nature or principle is ousia (1003b6-10; cf.
1003b17-19; 1028b2-7). Being, then, is not a universal like horse, in
which all the members of the class are equally horses. It is not a genus,
and it cannot be divided into subordinate genera (998b22-26; cf.
1070b1). To be subdivided, specific differences would have to be introduced; and yet these differences, too, are, in some sense of that word.
Aristotle gives two examples of what he means by the special kind of
“universal” that being is. Many things are called “healthy,” but always
with reference to health. Bruell sees a problem with this example:
though we call lots of things “healthy,” we do not call health “healthy”
(65). However, the second example that Aristotle gives is more apt,
namely, “the medical” (or “that which is medical”– to iatrikon –1003b12; cf. 1030b2-3.) A medical knife, a medical procedure, a medical building, a medical degree, etc., are all called “medical” with reference to
some one instance of medical that is medical in the preeminent sense,
and that is the medical art (hē iatrikē). The medical art is rightly called
“medical.” In the same way, ousia is rightly called a being (on), and
ousiai are rightly called beings (onta).14 Bruell, however, has misgivings
about calling Aristotle’s ousiai “beings” (65). For being is always said
in relation to some one nature or principle (1003b6; cf. 1028a 14-15),
and that turns out to be ousia. But ousia is not itself said in relation to
ousia. So it seems that ousia cannot be a being, after all. This, I take it,
is the reasoning behind Bruell’s misgivings. Aristotle, however, says at
once that ousiai are beings: “Some [things] are called beings because
[they are] ousiai,” (1003b6; cf. 1028a 14-15) others because they are
qualities of ousia, and so forth. The color of a horse is a quality of an
ousia; but the horse itself is an ousia. It is, then, in a quite special sense
that a horse is said in relation to ousia: the relation is one of identity,
where something that is really one is thought of as two (1018a4-9; cf.
1021b6-8). Aristotle frequently speaks of ousiai as beings later in the
Metaphysics (e.g., 1071b5), as he does here, and Bruell of course acknowledges this. But he regards this way of speaking as loose (100;
126), for reasons that become clearer later on (e.g., 230-231; 238).
Bruell distinguishes between two models of a philosophical science: “philosophy as originally conceived, on the one hand, and a divine
14. Cf. Physics 192b8-13. Among the onta that Aristotle lists here are animals
and plants, which are incontestably ousiai, if not exactly ousiai in the fullest
sense of the word. Only the separate ousiai of Book Lambda, chs. 6-10—if
they exist—would count for Aristotle as ousiai in the fullest sense of the word,
as I shall argue below.
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science (A2 983a4-11), on the other” (38). By the former, Bruell means
the various attempts at physics that were advanced by the preSocratics.15 He speaks of a need that Aristotle found himself under to
revise these two models. Regarding the model of “a divine science,”
Bruell says that Aristotle “cannot point to the needed revisions so visibly and unambiguously as to jeopardize the survival of a ‘metaphysics’ [Bruell reminds us that ‘metaphysics’ is not Aristotle’s term]
whose attractiveness offers the broad back on which the skeletal form
of a philosophic science might have the prospect of riding into and
through ages even less hospitable to philosophy than his own” (39).
The task that Bruell sets himself in his interpretation is to bring this
skeletal form gradually and cautiously into view, though only for those
who have eyes to see.
Not all readers of the Metaphysics have eyes to see. But Aristotle,
as Bruell interprets him, offers something of value to virtually everyone
who reads through it. When Bruell comes to speak about Book Kappa,
which makes something of a new beginning in the Metaphysics, he distinguishes between, by my count, four different groups of readers. These
readers can be grouped as follows (using numbers in brackets, so as to
reserve numbers in parentheses for Bruell’s pagination): [1] In the first
place are those who have not been “disappointed in the result, or at the
lack of result, of the investigation of ousia in Zeta and Eta, at its failure
to reach its announced goal (Z2 1028b27-31, Z17 1041a6-9).” That failure is “redeemed for them” by “the treatment of potentiality and truth
in Theta [and/or] of ‘the one’ in Iota” (225). For these, the most careful
readers of the Metaphysics, i.e., the readers who are equipped both intellectually and emotionally to apprehend and accept the austere teaching of this work, the inquiry into the science of being qua being is
substantively finished, that is, finished to the extent that it can be finished (1028b3), by the end of Book Iota. The express theology of the
latter chapters of Book Lambda, in particular, is not for them. However,
15. Aristotle does not make a sharp a distinction between these two endeavors.
Cf. infra, footnote 34. Regarding “philosophy as originally conceived,” Bruell
refers us to Book Alpha ch. 3-6, 8-9, and to Book alpha ch. 1-2 (38). Book Alpha
ch. 3-5, 8 (and 7 too) treat physical theories, though not exclusively. But physical
theories per se are not obviously the chief concern of ch. 6 and 9, nor of Book
alpha ch. 1, though they return for consideration in ch. 2 of that book. With his
references, Bruell suggests that “philosophy as originally conceived,” in distinction from “a divine science,” is physics properly understood, i.e., the study
of nature in the deepest sense of the word physis.
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another group of readers have been disappointed by the failure of the
investigation of ousia in Zeta and Eta, and this failure has not been redeemed for them by anything that was said in Books Theta and Iota.
Among these are [2] readers for whom Book Kappa, with its repetitions
of portions of Books Beta, Gamma, and Epsilon, is able to remind of
points already made and thereby to sharpen “their awareness of a problem which they will already have felt and which the sequel will, somehow or other, have to solve” (225).16 Some of these readers are
educable, psychologically as well as intellectually, and there is a
chance that by the end of Book Kappa, or by the end of the first five
chapters of Book Lamba at the latest, they will have come to understand what the first group of readers understood without reading beyond Book Iota. But also among the readers of Kappa are [3] a third
group to whom “the cold light of the intervening books [between
Books Alpha and Kappa] . . . will have proved no avail” (225). Nothing
they will have read prior to Book Lambda will have led them to doubt
that a philosophical science is able to demonstrate the existence of separate, incorporeal, eternal ousiai, and they continue to hope that the argument of the Metaphysics will culminate in this demonstration. However,
even within this group there are [4] some who are “unable to accept
Lambda’s result (its silence [i.e., Book Mu’s silence about Book Lambda’s
result] constituting a tacit acknowledgement of their good judgment in
that regard)” (254). It is largely, though not exclusively, for this fourth
group that Books Mu and Nu are written. For though they were unable
to accept Lambda’s result, “they have retained, whether for good reasons
or bad, an interest in the ideas and the mathematicals.” The good reasons
add up to a genuine theoretical interest in the greater intelligibility of the
ideas and the mathematicals in comparison with the sensible, composite
individuals with which we are familiar (999b1-4). The bad reasons add
up, it is not difficult to surmise, to baseless hopes and a deluded attachment to the idea of eternity (see 264 on “we wish,” and compare De
Anima 432b5-6), from which Aristotle has gently tried to pry his most
mature readers loose. In either case, Books Mu and Nu will hammer the
remaining nails that Aristotle has at his disposal into the coffins of
Pythagoreanism and Platonism. As for those readers who were able to
accept Book Lambda’s result, if they bother to read Books Mu and Nu at
all they will likely regard them only as superfluous and annoying appendices that detract from the comforting theology of Book Lambda.
16. Bruell does not spell out what this problem is here.
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To repeat, this is my count of the different groups of readers that
Bruell indicates. If I have enumerated and distinguished them more or
less correctly, there is surely overlap, and there may be other groups
quite different from these.17 At any event, at this point we have to ask
what it is that the first group of readers, the fully adult readers, have
come to see by the end of Book Iota at the latest. That is to say, what
does Bruell think is the deepest stratum of the teaching in the Metaphysics? It is not easy to be sure about this. If Aristotle expressed his
deepest thoughts in the Metaphysics with such circumspection that only
a very small number of readers, perhaps no more than a handful of them,
have ever read this book adequately, and if they in turn have refrained
from writing down exactly what they have discerned in it, then Bruell
must realize that Aristotle and his most competent readers had good
reasons for their reticence. Times have changed however. The attitude
of the public to philosophy today is less likely to be one of suspicion
and hatred than of indifference and contempt. Contemporary readers of
the Metaphysics underestimate the daring of Aristotle’s thought, and
hence fail to learn from it, because they find the express theology of
17. Working with Bruell’s guiding premise that in the Metaphysics Aristotle
tailors his teaching to different groups of readers, I venture to suggest a fifth
group, distinct from the four noted above. Near the beginning of Book Mu Aristotle says—I quote Bruell’s paraphrase—“‘first’ to be considered are what
the others have said about these questions,” i.e., the questions about the possibility of “some ousia that is without motion and everlasting” (254). Bruell
emphasizes the word “first” (1076a12) because this passage “conveys the impression or suggestion” that the investigation into this possibility “is about to
begin in earnest.” This impression or suggestion would then be an understated
repudiation of the results of Book Lambda. The alternative is that Aristotle is
only announcing a fresh beginning, of which there have already been several
in the Metaphysics: the “first” points to a “second.” That is, Aristotle leads us
to think that, after first treating what others have said about separate ousia, he
will add something further of his own about it. Whether it would depart significantly from Book Lambda or not, there is no way telling since the Metaphysics does not contain a further account of separate ousia or of anything else
after the critical treatment, in Books Mu and Nu, of what others have said.
This fifth group of readers, of whom I am one, infers that Aristotle simply
never got around to writing the sequel to Books Mu and Nu. To this group
Bruell might respond that the absence of the expected sequel should not be explained away so conveniently when it can be interpreted as the tacit response
to an expectation deliberately raised at the beginning of Book Mu only to be
deflated when the reader in this fifth group turns over the last page of Book
Nu and sees nothing there.
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Book Lambda preposterous. Bruell, for all his caution, discloses what
he takes to be the deepest stratum of Aristotle’s teaching in the Metaphysics more candidly than did any previous readers, if there were any,
who interpreted the book along the lines that he does. And so, I do not
think it inappropriate to attempt to state just what Bruell understands
this deepest stratum to be. As far as I can tell, it consists of several interrelated theses, which are not expressed unequivocally but are indicated here and there (again using numbers in brackets).
[1]There are no separate ousiai, which is to say, there is no God
and there are no gods. [2] The harmoniously ordered cosmos is not eternal. It is a transient phase, destined to pass away eventually. [3] The
heavenly bodies are not moved by an unmoved mover (or movers).
Their apparent, circular motion is caused by what they are, including
especially what they are made of, rather than by any mover apart from
them. [4] The articulation of the given world and the distinctions between things is largely the effect of the human intellect, so much so that
one is tempted to infer that the human intellect is the deepest root of
things. But that inference would be problematic since the human intellect is mortal. It is hardly the deepest root of itself. [5] The deepest root
of things is, in fact, matter, not just the “materiality” of the four elements, but something coursing beneath these, eternal, moving, not accessible to perception, and not really accessible to the intellect either.
The existence of this ultimate matter can be much more plausibly inferred than can the existence of separate ousiai, but only as a kind of
limit case of what the human intellect can infer. We know nothing about
it other than that it exists, and that it is some kind of cause. We cannot
even be sure that the claims we venture to make about it are governed
by the principle of non-contradiction.18 Since this eternal, moving, and
imperceptible matter is the deepest root of things, it is the deepest root
of the human intellect too. The human intellect is no more than a possibility, so to speak, that was always latent in this matter. [6]. On the
18. Aristotle claims that the so-called principle of non-contradiction is indemonstrable (1006a5-10). It is known, however, as self-evident, and is
thereby a first principle (archē) for the demonstration of other things (cf. Posterior Analytics 99b15-100b17). It is the most certain of all principles. It is a
principle about which one cannot be mistaken (Metaphysics 1005b8-25),
though one individual might not understand the articulation of this principle,
while another might feign ignorance about it because it cannot be demonstrated
(1011a3-b17) or just prevaricate about it (cf. 1005b 25-26). Bruell is not convinced that Aristotle was as confident of this principle and of its logical equivalent, the principle of excluded middle, as he lets on (67-83; see the full
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other hand, the human intellect, as tossed up by this matter and then
impinged upon by it, constitutes, somehow, a world, an ordered whole
that is more or less knowable, by physics in particular. Physics, and
not metaphysics, is the philosophical science—though only if physics
is properly conducted, that is to say, modestly conducted, without any
pretense of being able to draw the deepest root of things into the sunlight. The given world is the home of man, and it is the region to which
science, including philosophical science, is limited. It is given, not by
God or the gods, but by primordial matter acting upon one of its own
potentialities.
If Bruell’s interpretation is that the Metaphysics is intended to communicate the above theses, or theses resembling them, to its most careful readers, then it must be said at once that this interpretation is, strictly
speaking, irrefutable. Any passages in the Metaphysics that can be marshalled as evidence against it can be consistently interpreted by Bruell
as exoteric accommodations. And there is no way he can be proven
wrong. Still one can raise a few questions about these theses.
[1] The thesis that there are no separate ousiai is not argued for,
much less demonstrated, by Aristotle or by Bruell. It is what certain
passages in the Metaphysics “meant perhaps to suggest” (233). Since
there is no way of actually demonstrating that there are no separate ousiai, a less strident version of this thesis would be simply that there is
nothing in our experience of, and thoughtful reflection on, the given
world that enables us to reasonably infer that separate ousiai exist. This
version may be closer to what Bruell discerns in the Metaphysics.
[2] The thesis that the harmoniously ordered cosmos is not eternal
may be intimated (1074b10-13; see 252, bottom: “many times”), but it
is not argued for either. For this thesis to be taken seriously, some kind
of account needs to be given of how a well-ordered and, especially, intelligible cosmos could emerge out of chaos by chance, rather than
through the agency of something like a divine intellect or a demiurge
(994b8-22; 1060a26-27; 1075b24-27).
paragraph on 83). One thing is clear, however: if this principle, or one logically
equivalent to it, is not self-evidently known, then there can be no demonstration,
hence no genuine science (Posterior Analytics 71b20-34; cf. Republic 533b5c6), philosophical or otherwise, of anything in this world, to say nothing of whatever is above or beneath it. (Compare Strauss, “Freud on Moses and
Monotheism,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, edited by Kenneth Hart Grene, [Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1997], 285.) And
that would count as a point in favor of belief in revelation, which does not need
to validate its fundamental claims in the same way that philosophy does.
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[3] The thesis that the heavenly bodies move themselves and are
not moved by anything else is at odds with Aristotle’s theory, even his
very definition, of motion (Physics 201a10; a29). It is possible that he
did not intend his theory of motion seriously. But there is no alternative
theory of motion argued for in the Physics. And, as we shall see shortly,
the denial of Aristotle’s theory of motion undercuts a criticism of one
of the moral presuppositions of religious belief.
[4] The thesis that the human intellect is crucially responsible for
the world as we experience it (Anaxagoras’s audacious thought? [26])
cannot be simply dismissed. Among other things, there is textual support for the claim that Aristotle seriously entertained this view.19 But to
argue for it, while at the same time arguing for the possibility of science
as a communicable endeavor, one has to make a distinction between
what is idiosyncratic about this or that human intellect and what is common or pertains to the human intellect as such. Kant and Husserl, in different ways, made this distinction, which is the distinction between
empirical and transcendental subjectivity. And it is not unthinkable that
this distinction was anticipated in Aristotle’s distinction “in the [human]
soul” (en tēi psychēi) between an intellect that “becomes all things,”
the potential (or passive) intellect, and an intellect that “makes [!] all
things” (De Anima 430a13-16), the active intellect. Though the distinction between active and passive intellect would support this particular
thesis, Bruell does not speak to it, whether because he thinks that the
active intellect sounds too much like something divine, which Aristotle
as a philosopher could not take seriously, or because, if it is not divine,
it cannot plausibly be claimed to be deathless and eternal (cf. 250), as
Aristotle says it is (De Anima, 430a22-24), or for some other reason, I
do not know.
[5] The thesis that matter is the deepest root of things is, in my
opinion, much the least plausible of these theses, both on the merits and
as an interpretation of Aristotle. The most interesting textual support
that Bruell adduces for it is a rather obscure sentence near the beginning
of Book Lambda (1069a30-36; Bruell, 246). But, however one interprets this sentence, there are problems with claiming that matter is the
root of all things. For one cannot make good sense of the claim that the
mind is produced by, or is ultimately a property of, matter, given the
intentionality peculiar to the former. In fact, it is difficult to rescue the
claim that matter is the root of all things from the charge of ultimate
19. See Physics 223a22-27; De Anima 426a20-26; Metaphysics, 1036a1-8.
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self-contradiction.20 And even if one could show that something like
Aristotle’s passive intellect can be construed as physically produced by
matter, or as a mysterious and superfluous epiphenomenon of matter,
or as itself just a complex mass of matter—and I think that one cannot
show any of these things—one would be left only with an intellect that
(wondrously) corresponds to the things it apprehends. But on that basis
one would not be able to make a meaningful distinction between true
opinion and knowledge strictly so called. For this distinction one would
need, again, to introduce something like the active intellect, something
that knows it is knowing. Aristotle presents the intellect—the active
and/or divine intellect surely—and matter as radically diverse principles. Neither is reducible to or derivable from the other. One can claim
for whatever combination of reasons that the intellect and the truths that
it knows are occult properties latent in an aboriginal hylē. This claim
is, after all, one of the reigning dogmas of our time. But one cannot
make sense of it without transforming hylē from mere materiality (or
potentiality—dynamis), as we encounter it in the given world, into an
uncaused cause, primordial but also permanently present in its actualizing activity (energeia), and essentially elusive.
[6] Bruell aims in Aristotle as Teacher at showing that the pursuit
of a science of being qua being in the Metaphysics is as much concerned with the possibility of science or knowledge (epistēmē) as it
is with illuminating being. The Metaphysics aims at introducing its
readers to a philosophical science, which precisely as philosophic, requires exposing the problematic character of science, which is in fact
the problem of philosophy itself, to the extent that philosophy aspires
to validate, unequivocally, its claim to be the most choiceworthy way
of life for those who have what it takes to live it. That aspiration is
obviously compromised if philosophy cannot get at the deepest root
of things. For then it cannot know beyond the shadow of a doubt that
the deepest root of things is not much more akin to what its greatest
rival holds as a matter of faith than anything that natural reason can
penetrate to on its own. In that case, “does not science or philosophy
come into fatal contradiction with itself?” (28). If philosophy cannot
know more about the root of all things than that some such root exists,
then it cannot know beyond the shadow of a doubt that this root really
is a blind, deaf, and mute necessity rather than the God who dwells in
20. See Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life (New York: Harper and Row,
1966), 127-134.
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a thick cloud and reveals himself out of the freedom of his own inscrutable will, to those of his own choice, at a time and place of his
own choosing.
We encounter several of the above theses in Kant. For he, too, holds
that the human mind, stimulated by something essentially hidden from
it, constitutes the world, and that there can be a scientific investigation,
a physics, of the world, so constituted, even a metaphysics of nature,
but no metaphysics of whatever it is that lies beneath nature and outside
the constitutive activity of the human intellect. The conspicuous difference between Kant and Aristotle, as I take Bruell to interpret Aristotle,
is that Kant expends enormous effort in arguing for his theses, and he
does so openly and directly, for pages on end. Bruell’s Aristotle does
not clearly advance arguments for any of the theses suggested above.
The arguments may exist, disassembled, their premises partially concealed here and there in the thickets of Books Zeta through Iota. But
Bruell has not reassembled them. Or if he has, I have not been able to
discern them. Bruell’s Aristotle teaches by and large indirectly, by way
of intimations (e.g., 38), divergences from earlier intimations (39),
pointers (83), indications (100), thoughts that he allows himself to express only in conditional form (163), suggestions (101), tacit admissions
(118), tacitly withdrawn suggestions (125), and silence (128).
The preceding paragraph could lead one who knows nothing of
Bruell as a thinker and teacher to infer that his interpretation of the
Metaphysics is just too idiosyncratic to be worth the effort required to
grasp it. That inference would be seriously mistaken. The progressive
deepening of one’s understanding that results from following Bruell
as he thinks his way slowly, patiently, sentence by sentence and word
by word, looking behind and to the side as well as ahead, through the
maze that is the Metaphysics is worth incomparably more than the effort it takes to keep up with him. That Aristotle chose to teach indirectly, with a view to the diverse abilities and needs of his readers,
cannot be ruled out, if only because we know that he had before him
the examples of his teacher and of his teacher’s teacher. And we know
how indirectly they taught.
Though Bruell speaks of the “attractiveness” of “the broad back
on which the skeletal form of a philosophic science might have the
prospect of riding,” he does not describe it. For this reason, it is necessary to restate, if only briefly, the traditional interpretation of the Metaphysics so that it can be compared with the teaching that Bruell finds
indicated beneath the surface. The traditional interpretation takes sev-
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eral forms, and in restating it I can only sketch what I understand to be
its most coherent form. Others would surely sketch the traditional interpretation differently than I do. But all variations of the traditional interpretation have more in common with my sketch of it than they do
with Bruell’s interpretation.
According to the traditional interpretation, the concern of the Metaphysics is being, not the being of any particular entity, but being as such,
or being qua being (1003a20). But, as noted earlier, being is not a genus.
Ousia is the primary instance of being (1028a 14-15), and it is that in
relation to which everything else, such as color, size, position, and so
forth is said, in a derivative sense, to be. The inquiry into being qua being
is then primarily an inquiry into ousia. There is, however, a range of
opinion about what most deserves to be called ousia (1028b8-1029a5).
But since virtually everyone agrees that a sensible entity, which Aristotle
calls a whole (synolon) of eidos (or morphē) and hylē (1029a5-6) or a
composite entity (synthetē ousia—1070a14), is an ousia, and since we
cannot at the early stage of our inquiry be sure that there are any ousiai
that are separate from sensible ousiai, Aristotle begins with a consideration of sensible ousia, with how it is related to to ti ēn einai and how it
is known. Now ousia as the primary instance of being would seem to be
being least mixed with non-being.21 So, if there are imperishable ousiai,
i.e., ousiai that do not come to be and pass away, they would be ousiai
more fully than perishable ousiai are (cf. 1059b12-14; 1060b1-3).22 As
imperishable, and hence not bound up with hylē, which is not itself fully
intelligible, separate ousiai would also be more intelligible than sensible
ousiai, if not initially so to us, still more intelligible by nature, or intrinsically intelligible, or intelligible to themselves. Similarly ousia, as the
primary instance of being would seem to be that which is most actual
and least potential. So if there are unmoved ousiai, they would be more
fully ousiai than are moved ousiai (since what is moved is, to some extent, potential and not entirely actual: Physics 201a11; a30; b33; Metaphysics 1026a15-16 ). Finally, if there are ousiai that are altogether
separate from, and in no way depend on, other ousiai, either as features
21. See Plato, Republic 476e7-478e7.
22. Consider the full implication of 1026a27-32. Even if there are separate ousiai, why wouldn’t physics still be the first science, unless sensible ousiai are
found wanting in something that should pertain to them as ousiai, namely immobility and imperishability? I read the aporia noted at 1086b16-20 as resolvable through an account of separate ousiai that would recapitulate, in its
essentials, the chief claims of Book Lambda, chs. 6-10.
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of those ousiai or predicated of them, then they are ousiai more fully
than dependent ousiai are (1017b23-26; 1029a27-28). In sum, the primary instance of ousia, ousia in the unqualified sense, would be characterized by imperishability, intrinsic intelligibility, complete actuality,
and unqualified independence.
Among the sensible ousiai that inhabit the sublunar sphere, we find
something that, if not actually eternal, is imperishable at least as long
as we can attend to it in thought. And this is the form (eidos) of the sensible, perishable, composite entity, to the extent that its form is identical
to, or inextricable from, the species (also eidos) to which the perishable,
sensible composite “belongs,” as their common name suggests and
which is there for thought long after the composite itself perishes. But
for Aristotle, unlike the Platonists, the form is not separate, except in
logos, from that of which it is the form.23 It does not, so to speak, stand
on its own, as does the perishable, sensible, composite entity of which
the eidos is predicated. The hylē of the sensible composite does not, as
matter, stand on its own either. Matter, taken by itself, is merely potential being (1060a20-21); in this way it exists only in relation to actual
being, to something that, as such, is, not potentially but actually. Moreover, matter as such is not knowable (1036a8-9); we can know a perishable, sensible composite only to the extent that we can apprehend its
eidos (De Anima 429a27-28; 431b3, 27-432a1), apart from its matter
(ibid, 429b22). As potential being, matter can neither actually be nor
be knowable or even perceptible (De Anima 424a18-19). The perishable, sensible composite entity, then, has relative to its eidos the advantage of standing on its own, of being an individual and not something
that is only as predicated of something else. On the other hand, the eidos
has relative to that of which it is the eidos, the advantage of being imperishable to the extent that it continues to be intelligible, as species,
after the composite entity perishes.
The inquiry into sensible ousiai leads to the problematic result that
the features of separability, individuality, and independence, on the one
23. Bruell puts repeated, and wholly justifiable, emphasis on Aristotle’s criticism of the notion of subsistent universals, including any attempt to interpret
his own species and genera as subsistent. There is, however, nothing particularly controversial about this. The criticism is recognized in the traditional interpretation of the Metaphysics, and generally concurred in as well. It has no
adverse bearing at all on—in fact, it reinforces—Aristotle’s account of separate
ousiai in Book Lambda. For these ousiai are not universals. (And the Biblical
God is not a universal either.)
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hand, and immobility and imperishablility on the other, both of which
are characteristic of ousia (see, e.g., 1017b22-28; 1026a10-16), are bifurcated in the sublunar sphere. We cannot find any ousia in this sphere
that bears the features of both sets of characteristics, which is to say
that nothing here is without qualification. As for the superlunar sphere,
the stars are indeed separate individuals (as eidē are not) and they seem
to be imperishable too, for they have been up in the heavens, participating in ceaseless circular motion for as long as people have recorded
what they have seen in the heavens. But motion, including circular motion, requires a mover distinct from and causative of what is moved.
The stars, then, can be inferred to be moved without cessation by something distinct from them, which is itself unmoved (Physics 265a13 ff.;
Metaphysics 1072a19-26).
In Book Zeta, well in advance of the theology he advances in the
second half of Book Lambda, Aristotle makes the following statement.
Even if we had never seen the stars, nonetheless, I suppose, there would be eternal ousiai besides those [ousiai]
we knew; so that also now [i.e., when we have seen the
stars] even if we are not able to know what [these eternal
ousiai] are, still it is equally necessary for there to be some
[eternal ousiai]” (1040b34-1041a2).
I note at once that Aristotle’s statement here is not only elliptical, but
guarded as well. He uses oimai (“I suppose”) in the first main clause;
and in the second main clause he uses isōs, which I have translated as
“equally,” but which one could also translate as “probably” or even
“perhaps,” though doing so would produce something of a clash with
the word anagkaion (“it is necessary”), with which the second main
clause, and the sentence as a whole, concludes. In any case, my point
is not that Aristotle is advancing an actual argument here for the existence of separate ousiai, separate from all sensible ousiai, the stars included. His argument in Book Lambda for the existence of separate
ousiai is a cosmological one. What Aristotle is advancing in the above
quoted passage is, I would say, only an ontological consideration. That
is, if ousia is the premier instance of to on, if there are only sensible
ousiai, and if no sensible ousia is both imperishable and independent,
then there is nothing that is without qualification. And that may well
be exactly how it stands with being: “the nothing” is always present
with and within it. But Aristotle does not leave it at this Heideggerian
conclusion. The inquiry into sensible ousiai has led to the conclusion
that if there is anything that is without qualification, then it is both in-
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dependent and individual, on the one hand, and imperishable on the
other. The stars coming closest to fitting the bill, but their movement
leads Aristotle to think beyond them to the unmoved source of their
movement.
The trajectory of the enquiry into being qua being, which begins
with an inquiry into sensible ousia, leads to the latter chapters of Book
Lambda where Aristotle concludes that there must be an eternal unmoved mover of the fixed stars, a mover that moves by being the object
of desire or imitation, a mover that engages in an eternal act of intellection (noēsis). This unmoved mover is that on which, again, he says
heaven and nature depend. This mover is responsible for the movement
of the sphere of fixed stars. But Aristotle has to invoke a number of
other unmoved movers similar to it in order to account for the circular
motions of other heavenly bodies. Not only are the unmoved movers
intelligent beings, but the heavenly bodies that are moved by them are
intelligent as well. They move because the “sight” they have of the unmoved movers gives rise to an eros, to a desire to imitate, to the extent
possible for a sensible entity, the changeless activity of the unmoved
mover’s self-knowledge.24 This imitation takes the form of perfect circular motion, the motion that is most like immobility: what moves in a
perfect circle is always on its way to where it already is.
The account of the unmoved mover in Book Lambda, and especially the need to invoke a number of them, along with the necessary
presupposition that the heavenly bodies are themselves luminous intelligences, is so foreign to our way of thinking that not only is it hard for
us take it seriously, it is also hard for us to believe that Aristotle could
have taken it seriously. However, the heavenly bodies, the fixed stars
especially so, surely appear to move in circular motion, not just in Aristotle’s time but according to astronomical observations predating those
of the Greeks by centuries. Given the astronomical records available to
Aristotle, together with his own account of what motion is, the cosmological argument he advances in Book Lambda for separate, imperishable, and individual ousiai, is as reasonable an account as anyone at the
time could have come up with to explain the phenomena.25
24. Aristotle is aware that nous was eros were claimed, by Anaxagoras and
Empedocles respectively, to be principles of the whole. Such claims did not
keep him from grouping them among the physicists as distinct from the
mythologists.
25. The problem that Aristotle’s account Lambda gives rise to, and which he
does not address, is how there can be a multiplicity of unmoved movers, given
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Hoping that the above summary, inadequate in more ways than one,
provides something of a depiction of the “broad back” on which “the
skeletal form of a philosophic science” has ridden, all but unnoticed,
across more than two millennia, I turn to a comparison of the latter with
the former. There is a problem with the traditional interpretation of the
Metaphysics, for there are passages that appear to undercut it. I interpret
them, not so much as lapses or “nodding” on Aristotle’s part, but as the
raising and re-raising of aporiai that do not get resolved until the latter
chapters of Book Lambda, or as provisional formulations, or as formulations that are qualified by the context in which they occur—especially
when Aristotle makes certain statements about “all ousiai” in passages
where only sensible ousiai are under consideration.26
The difference between what I have called, with some misgivings,
the “traditional interpretation” of the Metaphysics and the interpretation—if I have it in focus—that Bruell suggests turns on the question
of which is the more plausible. One criterion for the plausibility of an
interpretation of an ancient author is whether it does justice to the boldness of the author’s teaching. If we are to evaluate these two interpretations in terms of which one brings the bolder teaching into view, we
would do well to attend to the following, insufficiently appreciated passage from Strauss’s lecture, “Progress or Return.”
There is a fundamental conflict or disagreement between
the Bible and Greek philosophy. This fundamental conflict
is blurred to a certain extent by the close similarity in
points. There are, for example, certain philosophies which
come seemingly close to the biblical teaching—think of
philosophic [!] teachings which are monotheistic, which
speak of the love of God and man, which even admit
prayer, etc. And so the difference becomes sometimes althat they are not differentiated by matter and that they all seem to be engaged
in the same intellectual act.
26. The following passages are, in my opinion, problematic for the traditional
interpretation, but they are not devastating: 999a4-5; 1030a11-13; 1032a18-19;
1043b21-22; 1059a38-b2; 1060b18-19; 1075a23-24; 1088a29-33. All these passages can be taken as hints by Aristotle (though read as hints, they are not particularly subtle) that there is no separate, individual, imperishable ousia or ti
ēn einai. The traditional interpretation has to regard these passages as not intended to be taken without qualification. But there are passages that Bruell, too,
has to regard as not intended to be taken without qualification. See, supra, footnote 12.
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most invisible. But we recognize the difference immediately if we make this observation. For a philosopher or philosophy there can never be an absolute sacredness of a
particular or contingent event.27
According to Strauss, the existence of God (or of gods), simply as a
first principle, even as an intelligent first principle, of the whole would
not by itself be a problem for philosophy. What would be a problem for
philosophy is an intelligent first principle that could freely reveal itself,
or himself, to man. For revelation, at the initiative of God, in his own
good time, to human beings of his own choosing who may not be
philosophers, would surely be a particular and contingent event, and an
event of absolute sacredness.28 Such a thing would be a problem for
philosophy because the full truth about this first principle would not be
accessible to man as man. That is, it would not be accessible to reason,
since reason can only work with the necessary as distinct from the contingent or accidental.29 And so, Strauss says quite consistently, philosophy must attempt to refute, not the existence of God, but the possibility
of revelation.30
Two divergent ways in which philosophy might refute the possibility of revelation suggest themselves here. One way, of course, would
be by refuting the existence of God. Strauss thought that every argument
purporting to do such a thing either begs the question outright or leads
to a dead end. A quite different way would be by arguing for the existence God but, in so doing, demonstrate that, contrary to what believers
believe, God is not the kind of being who is able to reveal himself to
man. This is the way followed by a kind of rational theology that consists in no small measure of a theological critique of the possibility of
revelation. Strauss is well aware of this kind of rational theology.31 In
27. “Progress and Return” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity,
117. Cf. Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (New York: Schocken, 1956—
translation of the 1930 German original), 149.
28. Creation would be a contingent event also: hence the effort of philosophers
to demonstrate, not the non-existence of God, but the eternity of the world.
29. Metaphysics 1027a19-21. Posterior Analytics 73a21. See Bruell, 123-125;
193-195.
30. “Reason and Revelation,” (Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological
Political Problem, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 150, 174.
See Bruell, 8-9; 28.
31. See Strauss’s references to “natural theology” in “Reason and Revelation,”
154, and “Progress or Return,” 131. And consider his perhaps surprising state-
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his lecture “Reason and Revelation,” he writes, “Plato’s and Aristotle’s
attempts to demonstrate the existence of God far from proving the religious character of their teachings, actually disprove it.”32
To limit ourselves to Aristotle,33 in the first book of the Metaphysics
Aristotle describes the science being sought as divine science.34 It would
be a divine science on two conditions: if God, most of all, possessed it,
and if it were about divine matters (983a5-8). These formulations are,
to be sure, conditional, for Aristotle has not yet advanced an argument
for the existence of a god, or a separate ousia of any sort, though he
does say that God is believed by all (dokei . . . pasin)—when he could
easily have said, “believed,” simply, if he had wished to quietly disassociate himself from this belief—to be among the causes and a principle
(archē tis). What is most remarkable about this passage, however, is the
ment in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, that the “Arab philosophers . . . actually
were believers in revelation” (151; cf. 155) in light of the curious expressions,
“selective revelation” and “particular revelation,” which he uses shortly afterwards (155; 157). By these latter two expressions, I understand Strauss to mean
revelation accomplished through God’s free choice, that is, revelation strictly so
called, as distinct from a non-selective and more general “revelation”—though
“disclosure” would be a better name for it—accomplished by philosophers, i.e.,
a “theology” established “on the basis of Aristotelian natural science” and culminating in the setting of “three fundamental theologems beyond all doubt”
(149). Spinoza’s Critique of Religion is an early book by Strauss. But The City
and Man is not (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964). Note the phrase, “in the ordinary [!] sense of the divine,” in the penultimate sentence of the latter work.
32. “Reason and Revelation,” 146. By “religious” in this sentence I understand
Strauss to mean “revealed.” Rational theology is not religion. It does not rely
on the claims of revelation, and it may attempt to demonstrate the impossibility
of revelation strictly so called —as the demonstrations of the existence of God
in Plato, Aristotle, and the great Muslim philosophers, to say nothing of Spinoza, can be interpreted as doing.
33. Though consider Republic 380d1-6; 381c5-9; 383e6.
34. The expression autēs hē ktēsis at 982b29, the beginning of the passage about
divine science, refers back to hautē (epistēmē) in the preceding sentence, and
thereby further back to the epistēmēn 982b8, including to epistasthai in between
at 982b21. And tēn ktēsin autēs at 983a11-12 refers back to tautēs (epistēmēs)
in the preceding sentence, the conclusion of the passage about divine science.
Book Alpha, ch. 2, could hardly be more explicit in stating that the science we
are seeking (982a3; 983a21) is divine science, which in this chapter is identified
with wisdom (sophia—982a6-19; cf. 981b25-982a2). Bruell speaks only briefly
to this passage. See 10-11, 38.
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conjunction of these two conditions. Aristotle acknowledges the possibility that someone—a human being, given the context—other than God
could come to possess the very knowledge, or science, of divine matters
that God himself possesses (983a9-10).35 God, if he exists, does not
dwell in a thick cloud that is utterly impenetrable by man; nor is he jealous of man’s attempt to know him. Indeed, Aristotle goes so far to say
that it is not possible for God to be jealous (983a2-3). How can Aristotle
be so confident on this point, unless he is already looking toward the argument he will make in Book Lambda? For according to that argument
God does not think, and perhaps because of his very excellence cannot
think, of what is beneath him (1074b18-1075a10). And so he can hardly
be jealous of what is going on beneath him, including the speculative
activity of philosophers. If God exists, according to what Aristotle says
close to the very beginning of the Metaphysics, then he is surely not the
God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And he is not one of the gods of
Cephalus, Ion, and Euthyphro either. If God cannot even think of man,
then he cannot freely reveal himself to this man. Moreover, if as Aristotle
argues in Book Lambda, God causes as final cause, as object of desire
and imitation, alone, then he is not a free cause.36 Though he is the cause
on which nature and the heavens depend, he does not create the world
(which is also eternal), freely or otherwise. Whatever access man has to
God is through man’s (speculative) initiative alone, not the reverse. Because God does not even think of what is beneath him, not only does he
not reveal himself, he does not reward and punish human beings for their
moral and immoral choices. And if this were not enough to rule out divine freedom, and thereby the “absolute sacredness of a particular or
contingent event,” Aristotle argues that God is simple and not composed,
pure actuality devoid of potentiality, and necessary. How then can he
freely choose to do anything (cf. 1071b13-22; 1072b7-10)?37
35. Thomas Aquinas, who in his commentaries on Aristotle’s works typically
limits himself to stating only what he thinks Aristotle is saying, softens in his
own name Aristotle’s suggestion that man can come to possess knowledge of
God: this knowledge, he says, is something “borrowed” (mutuatum) from God.
(Sententia Metaphysicae, lib. 1 l. 3 n. 13). That is, for Thomas but not for Aristotle, if we can come to know not just that God exists, but something of what
he is essentially, in himself and to himself, revelation is needed. Note the distinction between preambles to the articles of faith and the articles of faith themselves in Summa Theologiae 1, q. 2, art. 2, ad 1.
36. Compare Summa Theologiae 1 q. 19, art. 3 ad 5; art. 10, corpus.
37. One of the great tasks that the Christian theologians of the Middle Ages set
themselves, arguably their greatest task, was to answer this very question.
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However persuasive or unpersuasive one finds the theology that
Aristotle presents in Book Lambda, it is a rational theology that gives
every appearance of trying to refute the possibility of revelation, of trying to rule out the “absolute sacredness of a particular or contingent
event.” If there is any reason to believe that God exists, then, according
to this book, there is every reason to believe that he is incapable of revealing himself. Aristotle’s Metaphysics throws a challenge into the
face of revealed religion; and it makes no secret about this. Even the
casual reader has to be struck by places where Aristotle dissociates himself from the religious beliefs of the multitude and from the poets who
have, after a fashion, educated them. Sometimes he does this implicitly
and gently (983b33-984a2; 989a9-12; 1023a19-21; 1091b4-8), but
sometimes quite explicitly as well (997b8-12; 1074b3-8), even caustically (983a3-4; 1000a9-19; and, above all, 995a3-8).38
One can object that Aristotle’s argument for the existence of God
depends not only on a whole cosmology but also on an account of how
motion occurs that modern science does not accept. For Aristotle, something in motion depends on a mover distinct from it, sustaining it in motion for as long as it is in motion (which in the case of the stars is
forever), and ultimately on a mover that is not itself in motion. But if,
contrary to what Aristotle teaches, a thing in motion can move itself
without depending on a mover distinct from it, then it sounds as though
something that is potential can actualize itself, or, better, that something
that is actual can actualize one or more of its own potentialities, all by
itself. If that is so, then the argument against radically free choice is
compromised. For radically free choice, whether in the case of God or
in the case of man, means self-determination.39 And though the claim
that things can move themselves without being moved by another is
hardly identical to the claim that a being can freely determine itself to
do this rather than that, the former claim is a giant step in the direction
38. The last passage cited is interesting because it does not occur in the middle
of the Metaphysics, nor in the middle chapter of the book (alpha) in which it
occurs, nor in the middle of that chapter. It is, one might say, “exposed.” The
existence and placement of this passage, and of others cited above, could lead
one to infer that the Metaphysics was never intended to be a book, i.e., a written
work composed for public distribution. If the Metaphysics has an exoteric
teaching, it is hardly a teaching designed to throw theological-political persecutors off track. Bruell acknowledges this (253). In his view, Aristotle’s art of
writing in this book serves a pedagogical function.
39. Consider 1072a26-30.
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of the latter. If man can freely determine himself to do this rather than
that, then a vital component of the critique of the moral presuppositions
of belief in revelation has to be abandoned. Aristotle’s view that whatever is in motion is moved by another, and more generally that whatever
is potential can be actualized only by something already actual, precludes, absent significant qualifications, man from acting freely, hence
from deserving reward or punishment for his actions, in this world or
in another. And to repeat, God, as Aristotle presents him in Book
Lambda, neither rewards nor punishes.
If, as Bruell suggests, Aristotle does not intend his rational theology
seriously, then there is nothing in the Metaphysics that seriously meets
the challenge that the possibility of revelation poses to philosophy. If
the deep teaching of the Metaphysics is that there is no divine being, it
is a teaching that is only intimated. There is no argument advanced by
Aristotle, or by Bruell on Aristotle’s behalf, for this teaching such that
one can confidently identify its premises and assess its logical cogency.
So the question of boldness boils down to which of two interpretations
of the Metaphysics causes more problems for the religious believer: (1)
an implicit teaching that merely denies, without so much as the appearance of a demonstration, that God exists, or (2) an explicit teaching that
attempts to demonstrate that God does exist, but exists in a way that is
incompatible with how religion, whether the religion of the Greeks or
that of the Bible, understands him to exist. Different readers of the
Metaphysics may give different answers to this question.
Nothing I have said about the explicit teaching of the Metaphysics
simply rules out there being a parallel but only implicit teaching, exactly as Bruell interprets it. But if the explicit teaching is as I have described it, and if the implicit teaching is as I understand Bruell to have
interpreted it, then we are left with an oddity. Aristotle would be arguing on the very surface of the book that philosophy in its inquiry into
being qua being can win a decisive victory against its perennial rival,
revealed religion, while effectively indicating beneath the surface of
the book that it cannot do any such thing.40 Would Aristotle not be leaving himself open to the accusation that he is corrupting, not necessarily
the young, but any reader of the Metaphysics who naively takes its surface teaching seriously? What does philosophy gain by promising more
40. One would expect the reverse: a surface teaching understating the challenge
that philosophy poses to revealed religion, and a deep teaching that does not
understate it.
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to the uninitiated than it knows it can deliver? Different readers of the
Metaphysics may give different answers to these questions too.
The incontestable merit of Aristotle as Teacher is that it leads anyone who reads it carefully back to the Metaphysics with an enhanced
appreciation of the problems it explores and open to the possibility that
Aristotle’s thoughts about these problems and how they might be resolved are much more profound than has hitherto been recognized and
stated. Aristotle as Teacher should be read as long as the Metaphysics
is read. If I have given excessive weight to the traditional interpretation
of the Metaphysics in this review, it is not because I find it more congenial to revealed religion than Bruell’s interpretation. The opposite is
true: the rational theology expressly advanced by Aristotle in the Metaphysics, and developed further by the great Muslim philosophers of
the Middle-Ages, constitutes a formidable challenge to the claims of
revelation. If one does not appreciate the magnitude of this challenge,
one is unlikely to appreciate the alternative rational theology developed, without appeal to the claims of revelation, by the great Christian
theologians of the Middle-Ages when they rose to meet it.
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Eva Brann, Un-Willing: An Inquiry into
the Rise of the Will’s Power and an Attempt
to Undo It. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books,
2014, xi + 367 pages. $35.00
Book Review by Matthew Linck
“Does it add up? Not on your life.” Thus begins the penultimate section
of the concluding chapter of Eva Brann’s book on the will. It is in this
chapter that Brann lays out what she calls the “un-willed life.” Brann has
her reasons for keeping her picture of the un-willed life reserved for the
end of the book. And even though one could skip right to the end, I would
like to try to say why that would be a mistake. In other words, I want to
say how the book makes a whole. Some questions will then be raised.
The book does not, I think, make the kind of whole one might expect. The table of contents is deceptive. Reading the names of the chapters and the section headings, one would think the book to be a study of
the will as understood by many great thinkers in the Western tradition.
One would also think the book to show the will in a variety of modes,
from ego-centered to cosmic in scale, from grand conception to narrow
academic topic. One will expect to learn a lot from reading the book.
And these things are all true. Brann approaches her subject mostly by
careful explication of the texts and arguments of individual thinkers. (A
glance at the table of contents will indicate the principal players, although there are many not-to-be-missed mini-essays on will-conceptions
by others in the endnotes. These are listed at the front of the book following the table of contents.) Furthermore, these expositions are grouped
thematically, although those themes do not always admit of easy summary. And, indeed, one can learn a lot, especially where the subjects are
unfamiliar. For me, this was true especially of the sections on Sartre,
compatibilism and neuroscience.
But one cannot make a whole out of things that do not add up just
by putting them between the same covers. The wholeness of Brann’s
book comes from two other sources. The first is the rhetorical force of
the not-adding-up. This, to me, makes good sense of what might look
like a lopsided book: 243 pages on something that turns out not to be
Matthew Linck is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
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coherent, 21 pages on the alternative. The power of Brann’s concluding
pages comes not so much from an accumulated argument as from the
experience of being bandied about by all these competing conceptions
of the will. One is made receptive to the hope that there is some way out
of this mess. Let me say something about the mess before turning to the
second source of wholeness.
Since Brann herself supplies summaries of the main conceptions of
and approaches to the will at the beginning of her concluding chapter, I
think I can be pretty brief. I will give a rundown of some of the book’s
main thrusts, indicating some corresponding proper names parenthetically.
There was a time in the West when a human being and a human
life were understood without recourse to the idea of a will (Socrates,
Aristotle). And even for those thinkers where a kind of proto-will can
be glimpsed (Lucretius, the Stoics), it does not rise to the level of a fullfledged faculty. This all changes with Augustine. For Augustine, a
human life—his life—cannot be made sense of without a faculty of
willing. As Brann emphasizes, Augustine’s framing of the will is deeply
embedded in his Christianity and the question of sin. Correlatively,
since man is made in the image of God, God too must now be understood as having a will. From here we’re off. Chapters III-V offer visions
of the will from Scholastics, early-moderns and German Idealists
(Thomas, Scotus, Ockham, Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant,
Fichte). The range of conceptions run through in these chapters defies
summary (but see the block quotation below). The recent queries and
debates concerning free will and determinism, whether from philosophers or scientists, are already prefigured in these early chapters. Brann
covers these topics in chapters IX-XI. Despite the faint echoes of prior
thinking, these chapters seem to me essential since they speak the language of our own everyday thoughts about the will. Even if one has
never read a philosophical defense of compatibilism or leafed through
the purported findings of neuroscience pertaining to the will, the cast
of mind, the questions asked, and the unexamined prejudices are deeply
familiar. In between these chapters are Brann’s “linguistic interlude”
(chapter VI, a delightful and important aside), conceptions of the will
that exceed the individual person (Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche)
and what Brann calls the “will’s last ontologies” (Hegel, Bergson,
Peirce, Heidegger, Sartre). It is all of this that Brann contends doesn’t
add up. The following gives a good sense of the range and likely incompatibility of the notions surveyed.
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[T]he will can be conceived as having the nature of a passion,
a power, a capacity, a faculty, an agency, a decision—or an illusion. It can be conceived as an operation that is an extended
process, a final impulse, a long deliberation, or a momentary
choice. It can be conceived as having its termination in seamless execution or in aborted realization. It can be conceived in
terms of its causality, as rationally connected or radically contingent. It can be conceived as having its finality in an external
end or in itself. It can be conceived with respect to its standing
as the highest human good in its obedience to duty or as a nugatory epiphenomenon in its subjugation to nature. It can be
conceived in scope as a hyper-human force causing universal
suffering, as bestowing individual potency, as a general determination overriding individual choice, or as the very principle
of individuality. It can be conceived, looking to the soul’s salvation, as vulnerable to perversion and sin or as analogous to
binding love. But above all, it can be conceived with regard to
human selfhood as being to some degree free from nature’s determinism, as self-activating and deliberately deciding—or as
altogether determined by natural law working on conditions
fixed from way back. It’s a notional miscellany. (243-4)
For every item on the list above, there is a text, an author, a movement,
or a research program considered by Brann. So, it is a lot of work to
follow her down all of these paths, but one might be ready for something else by the end. Hence the closing pages of the book are fitting
given what comes before.
There is, though, that other source of wholeness in the book,
namely, Brann herself. The mind, voice, and good sense that carry the
book along are not incidental to its substance. Issues that might at first
seem to be to one side—how to read a book, professionalism versus
amateurism, the role of self-examination in sifting philosophical arguments, regard for everyday speech—turn out to be essential. They are
essential because they both argue for and exemplify key features of
the life Brann advocates at the end of the book. Hence the book does
not just argue for this or that, but is an example of the very thing it
means to bring forth.1 Let me mention here the special place that
1. Here is an example (the context is Heidegger’s conception[s] of the will and
his propensity to rely on neologisms [under the guise of the retrieval of original
meanings]): “There is the perfectly sensible Socratic inquiry into the one being,
the eidos, intended by words in common use that have multifarious instantia-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Thomas Aquinas holds in Brann’s thinking and in the book. Brann is
convinced that Thomas’s account of the will (notwithstanding whether
there is a will) is the best we have. Her conviction is grounded largely
in believing that Thomas’s account is most in accord with experience.
Well, whose experience? Brann is upfront—principally her own experience, but not just. Despite the central place that Brann accords self-examination (and she invites us to do it), she also, carefully, looks for
whatever common ground she can obtain. (Nevertheless, the question
whether there just are different human types is raised more than once in
the book.) So, with a view both introspectively anchored and looking
widely, Brann sees in Thomas’s account a picture of human willing that
is wide enough in scope (many fail by being too narrow) and rightly ordered (others fail in wrong emphasis). Her reliance on Thomas throughout the book, then, is neither an appeal to authority, nor is it a claim that
Thomas simply has the best rational argument. Rather the reliance on
Thomas is a shorthand for reliance on her own criteria, themselves not
narrowly rational. (This would be the place to mention the centrality of
feeling for Brann.) But, one more twist to this: Brann relies on Thomas
for having laid out his picture of the will. Brann recognizes in Thomas’s
account something she can assent to, but she does not say she could have
seen it all without him. Hence she needs the books (and so do we). These
remarks about Thomas were meant to make good on the general claim
above, that Brann’s own thinking is a source of wholeness in the book,
but now with this addition: her manner of thinking is not independent
from the sources she is considering.
Hence the end of the book is also the heart of the book. My task
now is to say what Brann thinks the alternative to willing is and why
we should revoke the will’s license. It is important to note that these
are not the same thing. Brann could have presented us will an alternative
to willing as one possible mode of living among others. Instead, she
has endeavored to persuade us that it is better to be un-willing than willing (or worse, willful). So, first the alternative, then the revoking.
Brann presents Socrates as a model (not the model, not someone
to slavishly imitate) of un-willing. Brann highlights some key features
tions in the world—even in our world—for example the virtues and vices. But
what does it mean to search arduously for the meaning of a word-conceit used
in now-archaic language and then in different significations, words like
Galassenheit and Seyn, entirely without use-context, without living exemplars?” (162) Brann, it seems to me, tries to ground her thinking in “living exemplars” wherever possible.
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of his person. As a man, Socrates obeys above all his inner daimonion
which only stops him from doing this or that—he has no principle of
willful assertion; he is an “ontological optimist,” that is, he believes (or
at least proceeds as if) there is order and intelligibility in the world
grounded in the forms; he calls not on courage, but on his goodness,
thoughtfulness and justice throughout his life. As a thinker, Socrates is
always at the beginning of things and opens his thinking beyond the
tight logic of “rationality.” He has a vision of the human soul without
will, but one in which desire operates throughout. Socrates is committed,
perhaps, to only one maxim, “Virtue is knowledge.” Brann thinks virtue
here should be understood “not [as] a good will enclosed in its subjective
self-sufficiency,” but as “an on-the-brink power, a readiness to pass to
thoughtful doing without intermediate exertion of an executive will.” Finally, she contends that “this unhesitating passage to action . . . comes
from . . . doing deep, affirmative thinking.” (All of the above comes from
pages 248-51.)
With Socrates as a model, we might then ask, as moderns, where
our freedom resides. Brann wants to “relocat[e] freedom away from the
will” (253), to focus our attention not on “freedom of the will but freedom from the will,” and to suggest that “collectedness,” of a person or
a life, is not to be attained by “strenuous inward-drawing,” but by “other
means” (255). The key terms of these other means seem to me loving
attachment, desire as receptivity, the contemplation of beings, and imaginative living. How a life thus constituted issues in freedom, even Brann
is hesitant to say decisively—it remains, in a way, a “mystery” (262).
As for why this un-willed life should be preferred to the willful
one, is it enough to say that Brann thinks the latter is just plain bad for
us? That it diminishes our powers instead of enhancing them? That it
distracts us from what is important, truly worthy of desire and interest?
That it distorts our vision of the whole of things and leads, at its worst,
to genuine horrors? I hope it is not unfair to Brann to leave it at that.
The questions I would like to pose to Un-Willing were elicited
strongly by the book and, I think, are related. The first is whether instead
of endeavoring to revoke the will’s license we should rather think of
our task as overcoming the will. The second question is about how we
should read.
One way to take Brann’s global view is that with Augustine the
West goes astray, and that by thinking in terms of a will-faculty our selfunderstanding becomes perverted. Some subtlety is required here, since
Brann acknowledges that much of what falls under the name “will” is
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not without sense. There are ways of making sense of all the talk on the
will, as Brann attempts to do throughout Un-Willing. Nevertheless, for
her these ways are neither necessary nor felicitous. But what if our errancy vis-à-vis the will was in some way necessary? What if we both
need the will and need to show its deficiency? Or, in other words, what
if Hegel is right? It would be foolhardy to insert here a lengthy discourse
on Hegel (although maybe necessary), but I want to try to sketch out
the Hegelian picture in which my questions are grounded.
While there are metaphysical aspects to my question springing
from Hegel’s logical writings2 and questions about the need to revise
our understanding of nature occasioned by his Philosophy of Nature,3
it might be enough to limit myself to “spiritual” issues. I could perhaps
locate my concerns with respect to Brann’s discussion of the self/subject in chapter of XI of Un-Willing. Brann seems to me correct to suggest that the ancients did not have a notion of self and that their
understanding of soul is not simply its equivalent. She is also correct,
I think, that questions of will and agency go hand in hand with questions of selfhood. But if this is the case, then it would seem to follow
that Brann might want to jettison talk of the self with that of the will.
It does not seem to me altogether that she does. Maybe there is room
to insert a wedge here. The Hegelian account, I believe, holds that the
2. For instance, there seem to me to be far-reaching implications of Hegel’s
treating of being in the way he does. Much of this could be spun out from the
fact that a doctrine of being is included in a Logic, and one particularly pertinent feature of that doctrine (under the heading of Essence) is that being exhausts itself in appearances. The “ontological optimism” that Brann attributes
to Socrates by means of the forms seems off the table for Hegel. This metaphysical point is, I think, of direct consequence for Hegel’s approach to human
action.
3. At least two prominent elements of Brann’s account are ripe for consideration via Hegel’s understanding of nature. The first would be the cogency of
the debates surrounding determinism and free will. Speaking for myself, the
implicit metaphysics which grounds the mechanical view of nature is long
overdue for a systematic and thorough demolishing. To continue engaging such
debates on those terms is to throw good effort after bad. Whether a new metaphysics of nature will get a hearing is hard to say. The second issue would be
that of feeling. This feature of the human soul is important for Brann, and it is
for Hegel, too. But I think one would have to take up Hegel’s account of animal
feeling in the Philosophy of Nature, especially as the mark of inwardness and
proto-subjectivity, in order to see what might be radical in his understanding
of human feeling.
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notion of self must be developed (and, perhaps, purified) because the
telos of human history is freedom and freedom is centered on how
things count or don’t count, are justified or not justified, for me. Here
a whole can of worms is opened, not the least of which would be
Hegel’s contention that Christianity is—was—necessary for us. At the
very least we might see that the infinite relationship of the individual
to the divine is a “picture-thought” of the modern subject’s relationship
to absolute spirit. Talk of a will would be one feature of this necessary
passage through Christianity. But the real burden of the Hegelian account falls on its insistence that the realization of human flourishing
is a historical achievement. It is in working out this claim that an account of overcoming the will would be located. One version of such
an overcoming can be found, I think, in the closing section of the fifth
chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, for there we are given a picture
of human action in which willful self-assertion must be replaced by
action grounded in mutual confession and forgiveness.4 But, of course,
for Hegel replacement will not mean simply canceling; the passage
through willfulness must in some way remain at work in its overcoming. None of this can count as an argument against Brann, but only as
an indication of the space in which to pursue a certain kind of
question.5 Another way to ask this question would be to query whether
Brann is right that Socrates’s thoughts “could be anyone’s thoughts,
anytime” (248). I suppose, in a way, I am raising the old question about
4. A perspicacious reading of these paragraphs can be found in J. M. Bernstein,
“Confession and forgiveness: Hegel’s poetics of action” in Beyond Representation: Philosophy and Poetic Imagination, ed. Richard Thomas Eldridge
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 34-65.
5. One full-fledged example of the kind of argument I have in mind can be
found in Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as
Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Hegel’s treatment
of nature cuts deeply into many aspects of debates about the will, but one place
to look is Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends
of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). There is some direct overlap
between Un-Willing and Kenneth R. Westphal, “Autonomy, Freedom & Embodiment: Hegel’s Critique of Contemporary Biologism,” Hegel Bulletin 35
(2014): 56-83. An attempt to make good on Hegel’s account of freedom in terms
of the condition of modern institutions is undertaken in Alex Honneth, Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2014). A more Kantian flavored approach to these questions
can be found in Christine M. Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Indentity,
and Integrity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.)
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ancients and moderns, whether there is a genuine quarrel and, if so,
with whom to side.
Also at issue here would be whether Brann has done justice to
Hegel—can have done so—by analyzing his treatments of willing in
isolation. The question is not whether Brann interprets her chosen texts
correctly; the question is whether such interpretations can be adequate
if done (too much) in isolation from Hegel’s thinking more broadly.
This, as always, is a particularly vexed issue in dealing with Hegel, but
I wonder if Brann’s other readings don’t suffer similarly. For instance,
is it so clear that Thomas’s Aritotelianism can be easily separated from
its Christianizing (47)?
I also wonder if Brann’s treatment of the major thinkers in her book
is not too much one-at-a-time. After the strenuous effort of her surveying of so many conceptions of the will, Brann concludes that it does
not add up. Is this way of asking the question too static? What if instead
of asking if it adds up we were to see what these thinkers have to say to
each other? In some cases, such engagement is explicit: Kant dwells
with Rousseau in the development of his moral theory; Hegel has an
eye on Kant at every turn in working out his own positions. But even
where this is not so explicit, we can attempt to construct for ourselves
an imagined conversation between thinkers. I think, though, that this
act of the imagination cannot be just a comparing of arguments; we
must, again, endeavor to take up as much of a thinker’s thought as possible. On the one hand, this would require us to keep in mind how a
thinker sees, in some fundamental way, how things hang together; on
the other hand, it would ask us to keep an eye—if I can put it this way—
on the style of thinking involved.
The figure I most worry is slighted along these lines in Un-Willing
is Kant. My reservations are not about any particular assertions that
Brann makes about Kant’s thinking (she is illuminating here as well),
but about the spirit of the engagement. Here perhaps my own prejudices
and inclinations are at work, but it seems to me that both in spite of and
because of his excesses, Kant allows me to see something that I would
not have otherwise, that there is some element of human willing and
action that is excavated through his stark formulations. But not simply.
That is, I cannot just pluck out some insight from Kant to be combined
with insights from other thinkers. Somehow, I have to let Kant’s vision
of things as a whole set to work my own thinking. And then by putting
Kant into conversation with others, letting them, through my thinking,
contend with each other, I can think things I would not have otherwise.
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I fear that the structure and tone of Brann’s book could too quickly invite us to be over and done with a figure like Kant.6
Even as these questions were triggered by Brann’s book, and even
as I cultivated them, the book itself made me suspicious of them. Is the
Hegelian undertaking too sophisticated, too theoretical, too systembound, and, most of all, too remote from the immediacy of lived experience? Is the question of historicism itself too bound up with the will?
Is there a too-generous way of reading philosophical texts, a way that
slips into indulgence? At its best, Brann’s book shows us what it is like
to be comfortable dwelling at the beginnings of things, locating our concerns and principles nearby and within ourselves.
6. When consulting an essay on Kant that Brann’s book called to mind I found
there, and in two companion essays, these formulations: “Kant’s greatness,
like that of other great philosophers, lies in the simplicity of the fundamental
innovations on which his systematic edifice rests. . . The unavoidable dogmatism hidden behind the Kantian concept of ‘freedom’ (i.e., ‘will’ or ‘pure practical reason’) that has been pointed out so frequently, is irrelevant once we
address the problem of the modus operandi of the Kantian innovation.” “The
greatness of Kant’s practical philosophy is based on the fact that it is developed
within the framework of a critique of reason and that it is closely interwoven
with his theoretical philosophy, his philosophy of religion, and his philosophy
of history. In contrast, most contemporary ethical thought consists of ungrounded assertions, unprincipled casuistry and reflections lacking any organic
unity with the rest of our knowledge.” “Kant’s texts are not historical artifacts,
but still-contemporary deeds, erga: our age is, philosophically, the energeia
of Kant’s texts.” These quotations are from, respectively, Agnes Heller, “Freedom and Happiness in Kant’s Political Philosophy,” Vittorio Hösle, “The
Greatness and Limits of Kant’s Practical Philosophy,” David R. Lachterman,
“Kant: The Faculty of Desire,” all found in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 13.2 (1990). I offer these quotations only as examples of the cast of mind
I have in view.
�
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Pastille, William
Brann, Eva T. H.
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Trentina, Allison
Sachs, Joe
Brogan, Michael
Paalman, Susan R.
Petrich, Louis
Pihas, Garbriel
Benjamin, Marlene
Carey, James
Linck, Matthew
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