1
20
4
-
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Text
8
.~
i
\
\
~
:
ST
JoHN's CoLLEGE
ANNAPOLIS. MARYLAND 21404
FouNDED 16% AS KING WtLllAM·s ScHOOL
Friday Night Events:
June 7
- Lecture:
Summer 1985
Meno's Paradox and the Zetetic Circle
Mr. Jon Lenkowski
8:15 p.m. in the King William Room
June 14- Lecture:
What Does-counting Presuppose?
Mr. Samuel Kutler
8:15 p.m. in the King William Room
June 21 -_All College Seminar:
Prometheus Bound
8:00 p.m. - Rooms posted
June 28- Lecture:
on Aristotle's Ethics and Politics
Mr. Laurence Berns
8:15 p.m. in the King William Room
July 5
Mr. Douglas Allanbrook
- Concert:
(Program to be announced)
8:15 p.m. F.S.K. Backstage
July 12 -Lecture:
On Plato's Timaeus
Mr. Peter Kalkavage
8:15 p.m. in the King William Room
July 19 - Lecture:
On Sophocles' Antigone
Miss Janet Dougherty
8:15 p.m. in the King William Room
July 26 -Lecture:
Aristotle's Metaphysics VII, 17
Mr. Stewart Umphrey
8:15 p.m. in the King William Room
August 2 - Lecture:
On Lavoisier
Mr. Chester Burke
8:15 p.m. in the King William Room
TELEPHONE 'JOI- 263-2371
�
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
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The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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1 page
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paper
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Graduate Institute
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Friday Night Events: Summer 1985
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1985
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Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 1985, sponsored by the Graduate Institute.
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Lecture Schedule 1985 Summer
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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text
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pdf
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Lenkowski, Jon
Kutler, Samuel
Berns, Laurence, 1928-
Allanbrook, Douglas
Kalkavage, Peter
Dougherty, Janet
Umphrey, Stewart, 1942-
Burke, Chester
Graduate Institute
Lecture schedule
Summer lecture series
-
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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2 pages
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paper
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Office of the Dean
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Lecture/Concert Schedule - 1995-96
Date
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1995-1996
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Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1995-1996 Academic Year.
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Lecture Schedule 1995-1996
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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text
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pdf
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September 1, 1995. Brann, Eva T. H. <a title="For the first time" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/266">For the first time</a> (audio)
September 1, 1995. Brann, Eva T. H. <a title="For the first time" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1246">For the first time</a> (typescript)
February 9, 1996. Ruhm von Oppen, Beate. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3587" title="Song and dance and faith and prayer">Song and dance and faith and prayer</a> (audio)
February 9, 1996. Ruhm von Oppen, Beate. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3586" title="Song and dance and faith and prayer">Song and dance and faith and prayer</a> (typescript)
Contributor
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Brann, Eva T. H.
Buchenauer, Nancy
Grant, Ruth
Wiggins, Grant
Weigle, Marta
Brown, Peter
Cosans, Christopher Ernest, 1963-
Schoener, Abraham
Seeper, Dennis L.
Davis, Wade
Page, Carl
Higuera, Marilyn
Smith, Brother Robert
Salm, Eric
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Watkins, Calvert
Skinner, Jody D.
Dink, Michael
Sparrow, Edward
Goldwin, Robert A., 1922-2010
Dougherty, Janet
Littleton, Daniel
King William Players
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
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STJOHN'S
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE 2007-2008
(Updated 3/26/08)
College
August 24
Mr. Michael Dink
Dean
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Rhetoric and Liberal
Education"
August 31
Mr. Louis Petrich
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"The Questions of Lear
and Cordelia"
September 7
Professor Julie Fiez
University of Pittsburgh
"Agonizing Over a Decision:
What Can Neuroscience Tell Us
About the Relationship Between
Thought and Emotion?"
September 14
Mr. Michael Grenke
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"The Costs o f Civilization"
September 18
(Tuesday Afternoon)
Professor Deborah Malamud
New York University
School of Law
"Affirmative Action Today:
Race, Class, Immigration, and
the Constitution"
September 21
All College Seminar
September 28
Professor David McNeill
University of Essex
"Knowledge, Ignorance and
Imitation in Book 10 of
Plato 's Rep ublic"
October 5
Long Weekend
No Lecture
October 12
Ms. Janet Dougherty
Tutor
St. John's College
Santa Fe
"Cartesian Certainty, or
Awakening from the Dreams
of a Slave"
October 19
Professor Angela DiBennedetto
Villanova University
"Cell Death"
October 26
Ms. Claudia Honeywell
Tutor
St. John's College
Santa Fe
"Logos and Power in Book One
of Herodotus' Histmy"
November 2
"Cafe Zimmennarm"
Baroque Orchestra
ANNAPOLIS • SANTA FE
OFFICE OF
THE DEAN
P.O. Box z8oo
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND
2.I404
4I0-62.6-2.5II
FAX 4I0-2.95-6937
www. ~jca. edu
�November9
Professor Mario Livia
Senior Astrophysicist at the Space
Telescope Science Institute
"The Golden Ratio"
November 16
Ambassador Andrew Young
"Race in America Today"
November 30
Brendan Lasell,
Tutor
St. John's College
Santa Fe
"'Leibniz's New Gemnetry''
December?
King William Players
"The Tempest"
January 11
Professor Alan Levine
American University
"The Idea of America in
European Political
Thought: 1492-9/11
January 18
Professor Thee Smith
Emory University
"The Gospel at Colonus"
January 25
Professor Corinne Painter
Washtenaw Community College
"Capturing the Sophist in
the Space of Non-Being"
February 8
"Pomerium" Chapel Choir:
"Mannerist Music of the
Renaissance" (works by
Marenzio, Giaches de Wert,
Monteverdi, Gesualdo)
February 15
Mr. Robert Druecker
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"'YouAreThat!': The
'Upanishads' Read
Through Westem Eyes"
February 22
All College Seminar
March 21
Professor Mitchell Miller
Vassar College
'"Making New Gods'?:
Reflections on Plato's
Symposium "
March 28
Ms. Ingrid Marsoner
Piano
"Bach, Goldberg Variations"
April4
Mr. Adam Schulman
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Self-knowledge and
Moral Seriousness in
Jane Austen's
Pride and Pr~judice"
�April II
Mr. Chester Burke,
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Searching for 'Being'
in Maxwell's Electromagnetic
Field"
Aprill8
Mr. Matt Caswell,
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Kant on Evil and
Human Nature"
April25
King William Players
Arcadia
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
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3 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
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Office of the Dean
Title
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Lecture/Concert Schedule 2007-2008 (Updated 3/26/08)
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2007-2008
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 2007-2008 Academic Year.
Identifier
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Lecture Schedule 2007-2008
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
Publisher
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St. John's College
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English
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text
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
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pdf
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Dink, Michael
Petrich, Louis
Fiez, Julie A.
Grenke, Michael W.
Malamud, Deborah
McNeill, David
Dougherty, Janet
DiBennedetto, Angela
Honeywell, Claudia
Café Zimmermann (Musical group)
Livio, Mario, 1945-
Young, Andrew
Levine, Alan
Smith, Thee
Painter, Corinne Michelle
Pomerium Chapel Choir
Druecker, Robert
Miller, Mitchell
Marsoner, Ingrid
Schulman, Adam
Burke, Chester
Caswell, Matthew
King William Players
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
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PDF Text
Text
The St. John’s Review
Volume 53, number 1 (Fall 2011)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Deziree Arnaiz
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President;
Pamela Kraus, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review.
Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s
College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800.
©2011 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing
The St. John’s Communications Office
Current and back issues of The St. John’s Review are available online
at www.stjohnscollege.edu/news/pubs/review.shtml.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Contents
Essays
Reading the Constitution as a Great Book............................1
William Braithwaite
Platonic and Jewish Antecedents to ...................................33
Johannes de Silentio’s Knight of Faith
Jacob Howland
Kant’s Rational Being as Moral Being ...............................47
Joseph Smith
Reflections
What Did You Learn? .........................................................73
Lise van Boxel
Poem
To the New Recruits............................................................81
Elliott Zuckerman
Reviews
Delphic Examinations
A Review of David Leibowitz’s The Ironic Defense of
Socrates: Plato’s Apology ............................................83
David Bolotin
Toleration
A Review of Eva Brann’s Homage to Americans.............101
Janet Doughterty
�4
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
1
Reading the Constitution as a
Great Book
William Braithwaite
Our national political conversation is just now being much
exercised in a deliberation about the Law and the Divine:1 on
one side, those who hold sacred a certain place in New York
City, because of those who died there; on the other, those who
plead the cause of religious freedom. Jews, Christians, and
Muslims have spoken on both sides. These circumstances can
remind us that the horrific brutalities we human beings
continue to inflict upon one another often arise somehow from
what we believe about the Divine: either that it is, and the
disputes over what it is, or that it is not, and the disputes over
what, in this event, we should look up to, if anything. These
questions are so ancient, universal, and persistent that they
appear rooted in some primal dividedness of the soul. Politics
and law cannot, it seems, escape the Divine; nor we, our own
double nature.
In Book I, Chapter 1 of the Physics, Aristotle observes the
most natural path of inquiry starts from what is familiar.
Especially to those Americans who have grown up with it, the
Constitution is familiar. But if this makes us think we already
know what it says, we might fail to read it with the care that a
great book deserves. We can study the Constitution with this
kind of care even while suspending judgment on whether it
truly is a great book. We then avoid the error that is committed
when, for example, one reads Euclid while assuming he has
been made obsolete by Algebra—looking down, from a place
of assumed superiority. We cannot know a priori whether
William Braithwaite is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This article was
originally a lecture delivered at the College in Annapolis on Constitution Day,
September 17, 2010.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
2
Euclid’s Elements, Aristotle’s Physics, or the Constitution, is
outdated, and we disable our judgment if we begin by looking
down on what we may come to learn we should look up to.
Diminishing its magnitude in relation to ourselves, we distort
what it presents to us. We will not see it for what it is.
Other obstacles besides familiarity can get in the way of
reading the Constitution well. It is short; so we may suppose,
mistaking its brevity for lightness, that it doesn’t need much
time. It can be taken to belong to a special discipline, the law;
lacking expertise, we read it without confidence that we can
understand very much. It’s political; since it touches issues we
may care passionately about, we search it for what we want it
to say, and can fail to notice that what it does say might not
agree with our partisan inclinations, or even when it does
agree, that its grounds may be different from our presuppositions.
This essay has five parts. In the first, I will suggest why I
think the Constitution can usefully be read as the preeminent
chapter, one of four, in what we might call the Book of the
Constitution. The second and third parts deal, from two
different points of view, with the distinctively American
experience of trying to form a political union based on an idea,
rather than on blood ties or religious beliefs. In the fourth part,
I will propose a way of thinking about the Constitution’s
Article VI, which contains the well-known “Supremacy
Clause,” providing that the Constitution “shall be the supreme
law of the Land.” In Part V, to conclude, I will suggest brief
and tentative answers to two questions: Is the Constitution
really a great book? Who can understand it best?
I
The Constitution is arranged into a Preamble, seven Articles,
and at the very end, formulaic legal words attesting authenticity. Some Articles are divided into numbered Sections. Parts
of Sections, or of Articles with parts not separately numbered,
BRAITHWAITE
3
are called Clauses. These are either paragraphs, sentences, or
parts of sentences.
The Preamble: “We the People of the United States, in
Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure
domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,
promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessing of
Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish
this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The grammatical skeleton is: “We the People . . . ordain
and establish this Constitution”—a subject, two transitive
verbs, and one direct object. “We” is plural; “the People” can
signify one or many. If we wanted to translate this sentence
into Ancient Greek, should the verbs be singular or plural?
Should the aspect of the verbs be aorist, to signify something
completed? Was the American Founding over and done with,
once and for all, when the Constitution was ratified, in 1789?
A verb of progressive aspect would signify that the ordaining
and establishing are continuous; they may still be going on.
Would the verbs be active voice, middle voice, or passive
voice? It makes a difference—doesn’t it?—whether the lawmaker says (active voice): I ordain and establish a constitution,
a regime of laws, and you choose to accept it? Or (middle
voice): I choose to obey, for my own reasons, only the laws I
make for myself? Or (passive voice): I make the laws, and you
have to accept them, like it or not?
“The People” are “of the United States.” A State is more
than a geographical place—land and water. The New York
mosque controversy reminds us that there are sacred and nonsacred places, garbage dumps and burial grounds. What kind
of place is a State of the United States—Maryland, for
example? What does it mean to say that places are “united”?
We all know that churches, temples, and mosques are sacred
places. Do legislatures and courts partake of the sacred also?
Those who serve there do take an oath, to uphold the law
(Article VI, last Clause). Why do we require this?
�4
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
The Preamble says that “the People” “ordain and establish”
the Constitution. “Ordain” means put in order; “establish”
means make firm. But political things seem to be disorderly
and always in flux. How is it possible that what is always
changing can be arranged so that it is stabilized?
In the Physics, Aristotle leads us through a long inquiry
into this question. Among his elemental ideas are place, form,
and material. What material do “the People” work on when
they “ordain and establish” a Constitution? And what is the
form of a constitution? Is it found in the words? If the Constitution has a place, where is it? In the national and State
capitals, and halls of city government? In ourselves? When
people speak of a “living Constitution,” where do they think
the Constitution lives?
The Preamble states six aims: union, justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and securing the
blessings of liberty. What is the principle of order here? Did
the men who wrote the Constitution believe, for example, that
without union, justice would be harder to achieve? That without tranquility at home, Americans would be less well prepared
for common defense against threats from abroad? That
liberty’s blessings are secure in proportion to the general welfare of all Americans?
The Preamble speaks of a “more perfect” union. Some
kind of union already existed, and it was deficient, less perfect.
It is named, in Article VI, “the Confederation.” This was the
union ratified in 1781, though first proposed in the Continental
Congress in 1777, ten years before the Philadelphia Convention proposed the Constitution we now have. The predecessor
constitution we know as the Articles of Confederation. If the
Constitution was a maturation, then it matters to know what it
grew out of, just as it matters, if you want to know a tree or
fish, to know how and from what it came to be what it is when
it is full-grown. To read the Constitution well, we must read
also the Articles of Confederation. I will say more about the
Articles later.
BRAITHWAITE
5
The Preamble may be the best-known part of the Constitution. We turn now to the least-known part, at the very end,
the Attestation Clause. It says: “done in Convention by the
Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day
of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven
hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the
United States of America the Twelfth In witness whereof We
have hereunto subscribed our Names.” Thirty-nine signatures
follow.
Constitution Day is September 17 because this is the day
the Delegates signed it, attesting what they had done; it is the
Constitution’s “birthday.” But why should its birthday be the
day it was written, rather than the day it became legally
effective? The 39 men who signed were the ones who proposed
it, but under Article VII, only “the People” could make it law,
by ratifying it in State Conventions. Is the Constitution’s
birthday the date of publication, rather than the date of ratification, because publishing the words was more its coming into
being than the actions of ratification which made it law?
The Attestation Clause dates the Constitution from two
beginnings: the beginning of the Christian religion and
calendar (“Year of Our Lord”), and the beginning of the
Americans as a separate people (“of the independence of the
United States of America the Twelfth”). As the beginning of
the Constitution implicates the Articles of Confederation, its
end implicates the Declaration. To read the Constitution well,
we must also read the Declaration, out of which it somehow
grew.
The words of the Declaration came into effect on October
19, 1781, when the commander of the main British army, General Cornwallis, acknowledged military defeat by his surrender
at Yorktown, Virginia. But Americans celebrate their independence on July 4, the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration in 1776. Were the words more the beginning of the
United States than the deeds of war necessary to make them
effective?
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The Constitution is a plan of government. The Articles of
Confederation were a treaty, agreeing to a “league” among
thirteen independent, sovereign States. The Declaration of
Independence is neither of these. It is an argument. Its aim is
to justify the action of Great Britain’s American Colonists in
separating themselves from the Mother Country. It has an
argument’s five-part formal structure: Introduction, Statement,
Proof, Refutation, and Conclusion.
An introduction is what leads us into. Here is the Declaration’s: “When in the course of human events, it becomes
necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which
have connected them to another, and to assume among the
Powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the
Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent
respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should
declare the causes that impel them to the separation.”
The Colonists appeal to Law, from three sources. Two are
mentioned here; the third we will get to shortly. “Laws of
Nature” points us back toward Aristotle’s Physics, the first
sustained inquiry into the regularities and patterns we can see
in the world around us. He shows that the phenomena of the
natural world are not chaotic and jumbled, but on the contrary,
have characteristic regularities and patterns, ways of being and
working. Nowadays we would say they change, grow, and
move according to laws—for example, the laws of force,
which, as Newton demonstrates, govern the motions of the
planets. If “Nature’s God” refers to the God of the divinely
created order of the world described in the Book of Genesis,
then this phrase points us back toward the Bible. In the
Declaration, law comes ultimately from the Divine, by way of
Nature, or from Nature as a manifestation, a showing forth, of
the Divine.
The Declaration does not “dissolve” all ties with Great
Britain—only the political ones. Ties of blood, language, religion, and law, along with common culture, history, and habits
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remain. In the Refutation, the Americans call those in England
“our British brethren.” The American War of Independence
was in some sense a war within the family, a war of brothers.
It thus recalls stories of other, more ancient animosities among
kindred: Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau; Polyneices and Eteocles, the sons of Oedipus; Romulus and Remus. How do we
reconcile the apparent inevitability of war with the shedding of
kindred blood, which seems to be one of the most unnatural of
human actions?
Thucydides claims that his History of the Peloponnesian
War is the only book we need to read about war. It recounts the
war of the Athenians and the Spartans, both of them Greek
peoples, who once were united in resisting invasion by the
Persians, an earlier war recounted by Herodotus. In the later
war, they turn against each other. The paradigm of war,
according to Thucydides, is the killing of kindred, the people
of one’s own kind.
In their War of Independence, 1776-81, the thirteen
American States united against their “British brethren.” Three
generations later, the Americans fought another war, also
against kindred—our Civil War of 1861-65. Both wars were
between people related by blood, or “consanguinity,” as the
Declaration puts it. Both were wars about the words of the law:
the earlier war was about who may speak words of law (only
those who speak with “the consent of the governed”); the later,
about what the words of the law meant (are all men created
equal, and if so, in what politically relevant ways are they
equal?).
Both wars were also about Equality and Liberty: the
American Colonists wanted to free themselves from a lawmaking power in which they had no equal voice; the American
South, calling itself “the Confederacy,” wanted to be free to
tell the negro slave and his descendants that they would never
have any voice in making the laws to which they were
subjected.
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The proposition to be proved in the Declaration’s Proof
section is that “the present King of Great Britain” (he is
nowhere named) is a tyrant. This Section begins: “To prove
this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World.” Eighteen
complaints follow, and more than half deal specifically with
the power to make laws. Throughout this 18-count
“indictment” of the King, the Americans speak as if claiming
no more than their rights under established English law. This is
the third source of law they appeal to—not new rights, but
traditional ones, belonging to them as Englishmen. The King is
a tyrant because he has abused these traditional rights. Exercise
of the powers of government without the consent of the
governed is tyranny, the Americans argue. This is the startingpoint of their argument; it is found in the Declaration’s second
part, which begins with the famous “self-evident truths.” There
it is asserted that the only just powers a government has are
those “derived from the consent of the governed.”
That a government’s just powers derive from consent of
the governed depends on prior premises. The first of these is
asserted in the Declaration’s most famous words—“That all
men are created equal.” This is the philosophical source of the
American people’s claim that to be ruled rightly, they must be
ruled by their own consent, by laws they themselves have
made. “All men are created equal” are the words under contention during the Civil War, in which my own ancestors were on
opposite sides. Whom did the Declaration’s authors intend to
exclude, if anyone, from the words “all men”? Did they mean
to exclude negro slaves and their descendants? In 1857, the
Supreme Court of the United States, in Dred Scott v. Sanford,
said Yes. Did the Court read the Declaration rightly and well?
Do the Declaration and the Constitution exclude negroes from
citizenship? I will say more about this question later. Many
people seem to believe that the Constitution is about rights,
mainly. It isn’t. What they are probably thinking of is the first
ten Amendments, which we now call, collectively, the Bill of
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Rights. These were added later, in 1791, after the original
Constitution was ratified. The Articles of Confederation and
the Constitution are about powers; the Declaration and the first
ten Amendments are about rights. According to the Declaration, the powers are derived from the rights, and the rights are
derived from “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”
Rights are primary, because they are the source; powers are
derivative, because they pre-suppose rights. Thus the soul of
American law is the Declaration, for it is there that the organic
bond between powers and rights, or between government and
nature, is made explicit. As the beginning and end of the
Constitution implicate the Articles of Confederation and the
Declaration of Independence, the powers in the Constitution
implicate the rights asserted in the Declaration and the Bill of
Rights. To read the Constitution well, we must also read the
Bill of Rights.
With the Bill of Rights in mind, we have become accustomed to speaking of “individual” rights. The Constitution
never does. Throughout the Constitution proper and the Bill of
Rights, the standard language is “person,” “persons,” or “the
people.” The Third Amendment does refer to “the Owner”; the
Sixth, to “the accused”; but these terms are used nowhere else,
I believe. The Sixth also uses three masculine pronouns, but
for reasons that I will spell out later, with respect to the
Rendition Clause, I believe it doubtful that these refer only to
males. What is the difference, if any, between “individual”
rights and rights of “persons,” or “personal” rights? Does the
difference matter?
“Person” comes from Latin persona, meaning mask, especially one worn by an actor. Our persona is our public face, the
one we put on, for example, when we mask our private feelings
from strangers or acquaintances we don’t know very well.
Good manners require that we sometimes do this. Does politics
require it too? What do people mean when they say “All politics is personal,” or “The personal is the political”? “Personal”
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seems nowadays sometimes to mean “private.” What are the
real differences, the ones that matter, between our public or
political lives and our private lives? Does the Constitution
suggest which things belong to which? Should it?
The use of “person” in the Constitution was not motivated
by an effort to find what some call today “non-sexist”
language. “Person” is a technical term in law; it means human
beings in their public, or political, capacity. This usage came
into English law from Roman law, and is directly traceable to
the codification of twelve centuries of Roman law that was
ordered by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century. The
language of “individual” rights began, I believe, to be more
common and customary in American law during the middle of
the twentieth century, when the now-extensive body of court
opinions on the Bill of Rights was developing. “Individual,”
like “persona,” is also Latin in origin, but its meaning and
connotations are quite different. It is cognate with “indivisible,” that is, with the unit, the monad, the atom. This carries
implications of the uniquely private—that which makes each
of us, as each snowflake is said to be, absolutely different from
every other of the same kind. Has the elemental language of
mathematical physics crept unawares into our understanding of
the law? Our vanity, pride, and ego certainly prefer “individual” rights. We cannot help wishing to be special; most of us
do seem to have a deep longing to be loved for no other reason
than that we are who we are. But what the Constitution secures, in law, is “personal” rights, not “individual” rights. In
exchanging the former for the latter, what have we gained, and
what have we lost?
We now have a book of four parts: the Declaration of
Independence of 1776, the Articles of Confederation of 1781,
the Constitution of 1787, and the Bill of Rights of 1791. This
is the Book of the Law for a self-governing people. To read
well its pre-eminent “chapter,” the Constitution, we must read
the whole of which it is a part. The theoretical first principles
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of this people are Equality and Liberty; these are mediated by
Justice. The practical first principles are Prudence and
Tolerance; these are mediated by Law.
Among this self-governing people, all persons are politically equal. Each has equal right to speak freely in public
places about all that relates to the common good. Each has,
also, equal right to worship freely in his own church, temple,
or mosque. It is the work of the law (among other things)
constantly to mediate, heedful of prudence and tolerance,
claims to these fundamental rights and to other rights derivative from them. Which, if either, is primary—the right of
freedom of religion, or the right of freedom of speech? Both
are mentioned in the First Amendment, ratified in 1791, and
both are in the foreground of our national political conversation today. How are these two rights related?
II
To be one and whole is a human yearning. When our heart says
yes, and our head says no, we say we are conflicted. We are at
war with ourselves. We are not one and whole. In friendships,
the things of each are common to both, says Phaedrus in
Plato’s dialogue of that name (279c). In marriage, the Hebrew
Bible’s teaching (Genesis 2:24), inherited by the Greek Bible
(Mark 10:7-8), is that a man and woman become “one flesh.”
Modern biology and genetics confirm this. So does Aristophanes, in Plato’s Symposium (189c-193e). What would a
community that is one and whole look like? Might much of its
law not need to be written? This would be the law of custom.
In English legal history, unwritten or customary law was called
the common law. The American Colonists inherited this law,
and, consonant with its animating spirit, they reshaped it to
their own circumstances. We learn the common law by living
in it. We abide by the law, and it abides in us. It becomes a
second nature, and eventually we may feel as if it were natural
simply. At home in our community, we feel one and whole,
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both in ourselves and in relations with others. We have a place.
We know who we are. To be one nation and whole, a true political union, has been what Americans have aimed at since the
beginning. It has therefore been our greatest political problem
as well. Is it also the greatest political good and the greatest
political problem simply?
After their War of Independence, from 1775 to 1781, the
Americans, recently united against a common foe, tried to
establish a political union among themselves. Their first
attempt, the Articles of Confederation, failed. Their second attempt, the Constitution, has stood the tests of 225 years. What
made the American Union under the Articles “less perfect”?
Both the Articles and the Constitution aimed at union. The plan
of government each designed toward this end was different,
however. This difference is apparent on the face of the two
documents. The Articles are wordy and legalistic. Their substance is marred by excessive precision through avoidable
repetition, the spelling-out in detail of cumbersome procedures
for resolving differences among the States, and the political
asymmetry of imposing obligations on the States without giving the national government powers to enforce them. Article
IX (of thirteen Articles) spells out the powers of the Confederation Congress. It is over 1,400 words, in nine lengthy, unnumbered paragraphs. It would take over ten minutes to read it
aloud, at a brisk pace.
About two-thirds of Article IX deals with two subjects,
boundary disputes and raising “land forces,” that is, an army.
The complicated procedure for settling boundary disputes between States is set out in a single sentence of about 400 words.
This sentence piles one dependent clause on top of another:
three clauses begin with “if,” or “but if”; two others, with
“provided that.” It is a labor to read and understand it. The
provision for raising land forces gives the Confederation Congress power to request a proportionate quota of soldiers from
each State. These requisitions “shall be binding,” but the Arti-
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13
cles give Congress no legal power to enforce them. This is true
also of Congress’s power to collect contributions from the
States to “a common treasury” and to pay expenses for “the
common defence or general welfare.” Consequently, there was
no national army and no national treasury, except insofar as the
States chose voluntarily to comply with Congress’s quotas and
requisitions.
The different aims of the Articles and the Constitution are
revealing. The Constitution’s Preamble, we recall, states six:
union, justice, domestic tranquility, defense, general welfare,
and securing the blessings of liberty. The Articles, in Article
III, state three: defense, security, and general welfare. Notably
absent are justice and domestic tranquility. That the Articles’
primary object was defense against foreign enemies is
indicated by that part of Article III in which the States agree “to
assist each other, against all force offered to, or attacks made
upon them, or any of them.” The vulnerability felt by the
American States in 1781 is understandable. They were militarily weak, having just fought an exhausting five-year war.
They had won only with the help of the French and good luck.
England, Spain, and others still coveted further possessions in
the New World. The Americans had won their independence;
now they had to keep it.
The Confederation’s “union” was “less perfect” in being
more for defense against attack from outside than for political
union within, and in being more detailed on paper than feasible
in practice. The States agreed to a mutual defense treaty, but
did not empower Congress to raise a national army through
legally enforceable quotas of soldiers from each State. The fear
of foreign enemies was counterbalanced by an equally
powerful fear of yielding local powers to that genuinely
national government which some thought necessary for true
political union. Fear breeds, and is bred by, distrust. A sign of
the States’ fear and mutual distrust was their uncertainty about
what to call their relationship. In the Articles of Confederation,
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14
the introductory “Whereas” Clause and the Attestation Clause
at the end call it “a perpetual union.” Article I calls it a
“confederacy,” Article II a “confederation,” Article III, “a firm
league of friendship.” Perhaps they could not find the right
name because they were not yet sure what they wanted to
name. “League” may have been closest to the truth, in its sense
of coming together for a common purpose. History has
decided, however, to call our first, “less perfect” Union “the
Confederation.” This fits, because “to federate” means to come
together in a league. In another way, it does not fit. The Latin
root of “federate” and “federal” is related to fides, meaning
faith or trust. What is missing from the spirit of the Articles of
Confederation trust is mutual trust. A coming together for a
common purpose is not yet a union.
III
What drives us apart, makes us decide to separate? What are
the differences that get in the way of forming a real and lasting
union? Are there natural kinds, natural differences that inevitably have political consequences? Male and female seem to be
different kinds by nature. Aristotle argues in Book I of the Politics that some men are naturally slaves, or slavish. Linguistic
and cultural differences can feel almost natural. Whatever the
source of whatever differences there are, political arrangments,
if they are to be decent and sensible, will have to take account
of them. Which differences matter most, politically? How do
they matter, and to what extent? We now consider some differences of kind that are implicated in the Constitution.
In 1972, it was proposed to amend the Constitution to
provide that “Equality of rights under law shall not be denied
or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of
sex.” The intent of the Equal Rights Amendment was to prohibit, with the force of written law, discrimination against women. The main argument for it was the claim that the Constitution “excluded” women, because the only sex-specific pro-
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nouns in it are masculine. It is true that the Constitution’s text
does not anywhere use feminine pronouns. Does this signify
intent to exclude women from the rights of citizenship and the
holding of public offices?
Article II vests the Executive Power of the National
Government in a President and specifies requirements of age,
citizenship, and residency. It says, “No Person” shall be eligible to the office without these requirements. “Person” is neuter in grammatical gender, and does not exclude women. This
Section further provides, with respect to the President, “Before
he enter on the Execution of his office, he shall take the
following oath or affirmation” (emphasis added). Do these
masculine pronouns exclude women? The conventions of
English grammar, both in 1787 and in 1972, allowed masculine
pronouns to refer to the female sex. Whether a particular
masculine pronoun was presumed to include females, or
intended to exclude them, was to be determined by context.
Supposing that the Constitution as a whole is the proper
context, let us look at other uses of masculine pronouns to see
if they exclude women.
An example is in Article IV. Its Section 2 includes what is
called the Rendition Clause. It says that a criminal fugitive
who flees from the State where he committed a crime “shall on
Demand of the Executive Authority of the State from which he
fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having jurisdiction of the Crime.” If we read the “he” in the phrase “the
State from which he fled,” to refer only to men, here is the
result: A man who robs a grocery store in Maryland and is later
discovered by Maryland authorities to be in police custody in
Virginia, is constitutionally required, by the Rendition Clause,
to be “delivered up” to Maryland police. But his female
accomplice is not, because she is not a “he.” It seems to me
unlikely that the authors of the Constitution intended this
result.
The Equal Rights Amendment came close to being ratified
before the time to do so ran out in 1982. How should we under-
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stand the American people’s declining to ratify it, after more
than ten years of public deliberation about it? No serious
argument seems to have been raised, during the Democratic
primary-election campaigns of 2008, that then-Senator Hilary
Clinton was constitutionally ineligible for the Presidency because the ERA had not been ratified. The question remains,
nevertheless, whether there are differences between men and
women of such a kind that the law can properly make distinctions between them for some purposes, such as combat duty in
military service.
We turn now to another common misreading of the
Constitution. Among some Americans, both black and white,
an opinion persists that it favors, or supports, slavery. Three
specific provisions deal with this subject directly, two others
indirectly. None uses the words “slave” or “slavery.” Used
instead is “Person” or “Persons.” It should seem odd that a law
said to approve of slavery fails to name its subject plainly and
correctly. What could account for such reticence? Article II
vests the National legislative power in a Congress consisting of
a Senate and House of Representatives. Section 2 provides that
each State shall have not more than one Representative in the
House for every 30,000 of its population. With exceptions not
relevant here, population includes “the whole Number of free
Persons, . . . [and] three fifths of all Other Persons.” No one
disputes that by “Other Persons,” the Constitution’s authors
meant slaves.
Does the phrase “three fifths of all Other Persons” mean,
then, as some people continue to believe, and to say publicly,
that according to the Constitution, the negro is three fifths of a
Person? Such an opinion would be consistent with the opinion
that the phrase “All men are created equal” in the Declaration
of Independence was intended to mean “All white men,” and
therefore to exclude negro slaves and their descendants (this is
the reading of the Declaration by the Supreme Court in the
Dred Scott case). Often not noticed by those who say these
things is that the Three-fifths Clause deals not only with repre-
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sentation in the House, but also with taxation. The relevant
language says, “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States” according to population,
counted according to the formula just noticed.
From each State’s point of view, representation in the
House and direct taxation have opposed incentives. To get
more seats in the House, the Slave States wished to count all
their slaves; to pay less taxes to the National Government, they
wished to count none of them. The Free States, on the
contrary—those in which slavery was forbidden—wished to
have the Constitution count no slaves for representation in the
House. This would give the Free States greater power there,
increasing the prospect that Congress could eventually abolish
slavery. But for taxation, the Free States would have been glad
to agree to count all slaves. This would increase the tax contributions required from Slave States to the National Treasury. In
this controversy over representation in the House, what the
Free States wanted was that the Constitution not prohibit or
impede the eventual abolition of slavery; what the Slave States
wanted was its constitutional preservation. These opposed
interests were compromised by joining the opposed incentives
of gaining political power and reducing taxation. More House
seats meant more taxes; paying less tax meant fewer House
seats, and less political power.
In Mathematics, three one-fifth parts of 100 is the same as
100 three-fifths of each unit. But the dispute in the Constitutional Convention addressed by the Three-fifths Clause was
not about counting parts of slaves. It was about whether to
count all slaves as whole Persons, or some of them, or none.
Has the Three-fifths Clause been read in the mode of mathematics, rather than with a proper understanding of the language
of the law? Reading the Constitution in the mode of mathematics is consistent with thinking of individuals, of ones or
monads; but as we noticed earlier, the Constitution speaks of
“persons,” not of “individuals.” Ones can be fractionally
divided; “persons” cannot. What the Constitution says is that
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three-fifths of the total slave population were to be counted as
“Persons” and two-fifths were not to be counted at all. Did the
authors of the Constitution mean to say, by these words, that
out of every 100 slaves, sixty were Persons, and forty were
property? Which ones were which?
If the text obliges us to acknowledge that the Constitution
acquiesces in counting two-fifths of the slave population as
property, then we must concede that it also counts three-fifths
of that population as Persons. More slaves are constitutionally
recognized as human beings than are not so recognized. Is this
pro-slavery or anti-slavery? It seems more just to the text to
say that the Constitution looks up to the ultimate good aimed
at—placing slavery “in the course of ultimate extinction,” as
Lincoln was to put it—more than it looks down at the political
constraints that made this good temporarily unachievable in
1787. Would negro slaves have been better off in 1787—would
we be better off today—if the opponents of slavery in the
Convention, acting on high-minded principle, had simply
refused to consider any compromise whatever with the slave
interests? (This was the stance, later on, of the Radical
Abolitionists.)
We have taken note of two differences that American
Constitutional Law has had to deal with: man and woman,
master and slave. The first difference is natural. Slavery,
according to Aristotle’s Politics, has two forms, one natural,
the other conventional. In American law, slavery is against
natural law, or natural right. “All men are created equal.”
Slavery existed here, legally, only by convention, by positive,
written law. It could therefore be abolished, without injustice,
if the lawmaker changed the law. The Slave States saw, and
feared, that Congress would do exactly that. They were
willing, in consequence, to fight a Civil War to keep what they
claimed as their freedom, or “natural” right, to hold the Negro
in bondage. In the decades leading to that war, the Southern
legal arguments turned more and more to the assertion that “the
Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” made Negro slavery
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lawful because it was both natural and consistent with the
Bible. The slave interests felt these claims to be vindicated
when the Supreme Court decided the Dred Scott case in 1857.
So the war came.
It can be tempting to view the Union victory in the Civil
War as a victory for the jurisprudence of natural rights, on
which the Constitution is founded. With different political
leadership, and if President Lincoln had not been assassinated,
perhaps the victory might have had some chance to become
that. But it didn’t. What the South lost on the battlefield, it won
in politics and the law. One visible sign of the South’s triumph
was racial segregation—that vestigial remnant of slavery
which the most unregenerable elements in the South clung to,
in defeated rage, dragging down with them their decent and
moderate, but timid, compatriots. This was the South in which
I grew up, in Virginia, during the 1940s and 1950s.
The triumph of Southern jurisprudence involves, and is
involved with, the story of what we today call “judicial
review,” and this story belongs to a third difference for our
examination—the different aspects of sovereignty. The specific
question is this: what distinguishes the making of law,
legislative power, from the interpretation and application of it
in particular cases, judicial power?
The Constitution, in Article I, vests the law-making power
in Congress. The power to decide “Cases and Controversies” is
by Article III vested in “a Supreme Court and such inferior
courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and
establish.” What we seek is to discern how these two powers,
aspects of sovereignty, differ. We cannot, on this occasion,
make an adequate inquiry into this question. I offer, instead,
some observations we might draw upon, in order to begin
thinking about how a judge differs from a legislator.
“Judicial review” refers to the Supreme Court’s power to
act as a kind of super-legislature by declaring Acts of Congress
“unconstitutional,” which is taken to mean, “not lawful,” or
not law. Is judicial review consonant with the spirit of the
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Constitution? What is the source of the Supreme Court’s power
to overrule the deliberate will of “the People,” expressed in
laws passed by Congress? What is at stake here, in the words
of the Declaration, is the “consent of the governed.” The
Declaration accused the British King of the arbitrary exercise
of power. What are the differences, with respect to “consent of
the governed,” between an arbitrary king, an arbitrary Congress, and an arbitrary Supreme Court? If “arbitrary” means
unreasonable and willful, then all three are forms of unjust
rule, even if different in formal appearance and practical
consequences. Are an arbitrary Congress and an arbitrary
Supreme Court dangerous in equal degree? This may depend
upon the remedies available to the People, and on the kind of
harm either branch might do by its willfulness. Senators’ terms
are six years; House Members’ terms, two; the constitutional
power to remove them belong to the People, and can be
exercised at the ballot box. Supreme Court judges serve,
constitutionally, “during good behavior”; they seldom resign
voluntarily. With good health, most serve as long as physically
and mentally able. The most recent retiree was ninety years
old. The Chief Justice and the newest Associate Justice are
both about 50; they are likely to serve for several decades.
Bad or questionable laws enacted by Congress may be
more accessible to correction, both constitutionally and in
practice, than abuses of power by the Supreme Court. The
Court decided Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, holding
that racial segregation of negroes and whites in public schools
was unconstitutional. To reach this result, the Court had to
overrule its own prior decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy
was decided in l895. Both Brown and Plessy involved state
legislation, not an Act of Congress, so these two decisions
were not, technically, exercises of the power of judicial review.
But the jurisprudential progenitor of Plessy, insofar as it addressed racial segregation, the remnant of slavery, from the
perspective of positive law rather than of natural law, or natural
right, as affirmed in the Declaration, was the Court’s decision
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in Dred Scott v. Sanford, which did involve an Act of Congress.
Dred Scott was decided in 1857. There Mr. Chief Justice
Taney held that Congress had no power to exclude slavery
from United States Territories not yet admitted to the Union as
States. On the way to this conclusion, Taney opined that the
words, “All men are created equal” were intended by the
Declaration’s signers to mean only white men. “The Negro has
no rights a white man is bound to respect,” he said. I believe
this to be a misreading of the Declaration; if it is, Taney’s opinion “de-natures” the Constitution by poisoning its seminal
source in the Declaration’s doctrine of natural right, tranforming its vital principle from the sovereignty of reason into the
will of the sovereign. Beginning with the Dred Scott decision,
and its repudiation of the political principle that “All men are
created equal,” the Supreme Court’s prestige and authority
stood behind the legally sanctioned and publicly tolerated policy of racial segregation for a hundred years, until the Brown
decision in 1954.
By contrast, efforts to change legislation enacted by
Congress can begin, if the People choose, after the next
election. The Civil Rights Movement of the l960s can be seen
as a “bottom-up” citizens’ effort (assisted by a better-instructed
Supreme Court) to make this ballot-box power effective
against those Members of Congress who held influential
committee chairmanships that made it possible for them to
impede, stall, or stop civil rights legislation in the National
legislature. A bad law is sooner corrected than a corrupted
understanding of the law itself. In the most important moral
controversy ever to divide this country, the Supreme Court was
on the wrong side for a century. Dred Scott was the first time
the Court effectually exercised the power of judicial review. In
doing so, the Court abandoned, in order to assert the political
power of a “super-legislature,” what might have been its
proper role as law teacher to the nation.2 It also prepared the
groundwork for suffocating the natural-right source of
American law in the Declaration of Independence. Without
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22
natural law, or natural right, the highest thing in American law
is the power of the sovereign. By asserting the power of
judicial review, the power of exercising a veto over Congress,
the Supreme Court declared itself first sovereign. We are under
a Constitution, a Chief Justice of the Court said in 1907 (and
repeated in 1908), but the Constitution means what the Court
says it means.3 This understanding of law seems to take as its
essence the political (and sometimes military) force that is
certainly necessary to make law effective in practice, rather
than that ultimate good which law looks up to, aims at, and
constantly strives toward. This good, according to the
Preamble, is to “establish Justice.”
IV
What is law for us? This is Socrates’ opening question in
Plato’s short dialogue Minos. The Constitution, I suggest,
answers Socrates’ question for Americans in the way I shall
now crudely sketch out; for a fuller answer, we would need of
course to read Plato’s Laws, to which the Minos is propaedeutic, and some other books as well.
Article VI in the Constitution has three unnumbered
Clauses. The first requires that the National Government honor
“Debts and Engagements” made under the Articles of Confederation. The obligation to perform contracts continues, notwithstanding a change in the external form of government.
This first Clause gives constitutional recognition and stature to
the principle of keeping your promises. This is a moral
principle, because a promise invites reliance, and to ask
reliance is to accept moral responsibility. Promise-keeping
nurtures trust. When our words invite others to rely firmly on
what we say, we vitalize our personal, social, and commercial
relations. Our expectation that most people, most of the time,
will generally do what they promise, governs such commitments as “I’ll meet you at the Dining Hall at 11:45” and my
marriage vows, as well as our commitments to friends and all
the buying and selling we do everyday, including the commer-
BRAITHWAITE
23
cial contracts we enter into by e-mail and telephone with
people we have not met, don’t know, and will never see. The
law of promise-keeping is very ancient, its origins obscure.
Abraham relies on it when he buys a burial place for Sarah;
Jacob relies on it when Esau sells him his birthright. This law
was for a long time unwritten, residing in the habits and
customs of people’s ways of dealing with one another. In
England, it was one element in the nurturant soil of what came
to be called the common law.
The second Clause of Article VI is the famous Supremacy
Clause. It provides that the Constitution, laws enacted pursuant
to it, and treaties made by the United States, “shall be the
supreme Law of the Land.” This Clause makes the Constitution the highest written, or positive, law for the American
people. Unlike the law of promise-keeping, the Constitution
and its Supremacy Clause are recent in time, and its authors are
known by name. All peoples have laws of promise-keeping.
But only the Americans have “this Constitution,” ordained and
established by themselves.
The third Clause of Article VI requires all members of
Congress and the State legislatures, and “all executive and
judicial officers” of the United States and of the several States,
to bind themselves “by Oath or Affirmation” to support the
Constitution. This requirement resonates with the tones of the
closing lines of the Declaration of Independence: “And for the
support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the
Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each
other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” These
closing lines recall, in turn, the Declaration’s beginning, with
its reference to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”
The three Clauses of Article VI ascend hierarchically. They
move from the law of promise-keeping that has grown up
spontaneously and been preserved among all peoples by
custom, to the highest law of a particular people, to the laws
that are highest simply, the Laws of Nature and the Laws of the
Divine, however understood. The written Constitution referred
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to in the Supremacy Clause is in the middle of Article VI,
placed between the unwritten laws of custom and the unwritten
laws of the Natural and Divine orders.
Is the being of the Law to be found more in its stability,
which may be most manifest in its written and unchanging
words, or more in what the Law is grounded upon and in what
it looks up to? The structure of Article VI suggests that what
we hold, or ought to hold, most solidly to be Law is the ways
and usages, of unremembered origin, that give identifying
character to us as a particular people. This, according to the
Declaration of Independence, is the English common law (with
its reliance on natural right), as we have adapted it to American
circumstances. The structure of Article VI suggests, as well,
that what American Law looks up to is the relation between
Nature and the Divine. The Divine is referred to in the
Declaration four times: as “Nature’s God” and the “Creator,”
the source of “unalienable rights,” and hence of the just powers
of government, and of law; as “divine Providence”; and as
“Supreme Judge of the World.” As presented in the Declaration, the Divine could appear to be the transcendent original
form of which the National Government’s three branches—
legislative, executive, and judicial—are the earthly image and
shadow.4 Such a view seems consistent with the Biblical
testimony that Man is created in God’s image (Genesis 1:27).
What does this way of reading Article VI suggest about
reading the Constitution as a great book?
Reading the Constitution as a great book entails trying to
see what is in it, not only expressly, but also implicitly. I have
suggested that both women and blacks are “in” the Constitution, as potential citizens—human beings who were not
citizens in 1787, but whom the Constitution did not legally bar
from becoming citizens. Women are “in” because they are
“Persons,” and the men who chose the Constitution’s masculine pronouns knew these pronouns could be understood as
including women. Women are in the Constitution because they
are not out—they are nowhere excluded, expressly or by impli-
BRAITHWAITE
25
cation. Blacks are “in” because even if the Constitution grudgingly acquiesces in treating 40% of negro slaves as not
countable in the population, it affirmatively treats 60% of them
as countable “Persons,” that is, as potential citizens, as “men”
politically within the meaning of “All men are created equal.”
It is best to interpret the words and intentions of the
Constitution and the law in the same way we want our own
actions interpreted, that is, in the way we should try to interpret
the actions of others—by the good that is aimed at, rather than
by the necessities, circumstances, and human weaknesses that
impede or hobble the practical realization of our better hopes
and dreams.
Reading the Constitution as a great book entails trying to
see, also, what lies under it—a Western tradition of over two
thousand years, accessible to us in a few hundred surviving
books. But much of what underlies the Constitution and the
law is not in books. It was, and is, unwritten. No express words
in the Constitution command us to be just, prudent, and
tolerant. We learn such things, to the extent we do learn them,
by living with, and among, others.
Reading the Constitution as a great book also entails trying
to see what is above it, what it appeals and aspires to—Nature
infused with the Divine, the Divine as the First and the Final
Cause of Nature. To read the Constitution most deeply, we
have to read the Bible and Plato’s Laws, Aristotle’s Physics
and Metaphysics, Aquinas’s Summa, and much more.
Reading the Constitution as a great book entails, finally,
trying to see what is behind it, the background out of which its
thought emerges. This background begins to reveal itself when
we ask the questions, Does it make a difference that the
Constitution was written in English? Could its meaning be
expressed in German, or French, or Chinese? Perhaps what is
particular in it could not be. But what about the things in it that
are universal? Which things are these? If it makes a difference
that the Constitution was written in English, then, for the same
reason that reading Homer illuminates the background neces-
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26
sary for reading Plato, reading Shakespeare illuminates the
background for reading the Constitution.
To begin to know what the Constitution and the law are—
this is the work of a lifetime.
V
A great book, for me, is one that speaks with the authority
of depth and weight about serious questions that really matter
to me. Friendship is such a question. Who are my best friends?
Surely those who want for me the highest good I am capable
of. How do I know who these are? Aristotle’s Ethics might help
me to know. Whom can I love? Whom can I trust with the
innermost thoughts and secrets of my heart? Who, or what,
should I love and trust the most? Plato and the Bible, Jane
Austen and George Eliot, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky have a lot to
say about these questions.
A great book, for others as well as for me, is one that
speaks with coherence and insight about questions that will
matter a lot to most of us throughout our lifetimes. Work is
such a question: What should I do with my life? What work am
I most fit for?
Aristotle’s Politics and Tocqueville’s Democracy in
America can help us think about how to find a place in the
American polis where we, all and each of us, may thrive with
the talents we have by nature and the good habits we can
acquire by care and self-discipline.
A great book simply, for all human beings, speaks with
clarity, harmony, and proportion about questions that stay with
mankind always. What is Law? Does God exist? If God is not,
where are we? What is the soul? Is it immortal?
The Constitution was not a great book for me when I was
in law school, or during the 25 years of law practice and law
teaching that followed. Nor was it a great book for me when I
came to St. John’s College in 1995. But, for me, it is now.
Whether or not it is in itself a great book, I have found that it
BRAITHWAITE
27
has always been a doorway and a path for me to the questions
in the greatest books. What I had not known before was how to
read it. Can the Constitution be a great book for you? Yes, if
you choose to let it. But no book can matter very much for any
reader who is not ready, or able, to accept as a genuine possibility that he may always have to be stretching upward in order
to approach its meaning.
Who can read the Constitution? Anybody willing to make
the effort. But as with all other difficult and worthy activities,
some people are likely to be able to do this better than others.
A book published fifty years ago has something to say on this
point. Its title is The People Shall Judge. The Preface begins
this way:
This book expresses the faith of one American
college in the usefulness of liberal education to
American democracy. If the United States is to be a
democracy, its citizens must be free. If citizens are
to be free, they must be their own judges. If they are
to judge well, they must be wise. Citizens may be
born free; they are not born wise. Therefore, the
business of liberal education in a democracy is to
make free men wise. Democracy declares that “the
people shall judge.” Liberal education must help
the people judge well.5
If a liberal education helps us read the Constitution better, then
those with such an education have an advantage over those
who lack it. It is unhappily the fact that most lawyers and
judges today lack a liberal education, since one is to be had in
only a very few colleges.
Perhaps the most discerning readers of all will be those
with much leisure who are able to use it well in reading the
greatest books. Probably it would help to have had some direct
experience of politics or war. The opportunities for such a life
are infrequent, however, and the men and women few who can
make the most of such opportunities when they are available.
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BRAITHWAITE
29
The rest of us must do the best we can with whatever gifts we
have, trusting in the indemonstrable premise that one evanescent glimpse of something high, even from a great distance,
may be worth more than the solid worldly goods always
tempting our grasp from nearby.6
EPILOGUE
The artist of the work depicted in these four images is Albin
Polasek. He was born in 1879, in Moravia, now the Czech
Republic, and apprenticed as a wood-carver in Vienna before
emigrating to the United States at age 22, later becoming an
American citizen. He was head of the Sculpture Department of
the Art Institute of Chicago for nearly 30 years.
At age 28, while still a student in sculpture at the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, he made
the work shown here. It is one of his most famous. Its title is
Man Carving Out His Destiny. (Later he made the following
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female companion piece called Unfettered, an exquisite nude
in bronze, with blue-green finish:
BRAITHWAITE
31
NOTES
1. At the time of this lecture, public debate was raging over whether
a community center proposed by a Muslim organization should be
built near the site of the attack on the World Trade Center in New
York City.
2. See George Anastaplo, The Constitution of 1787: A Commentary
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 135.
Unlike Milton’s Eve in Paradise Lost, Polasek’s Woman directs her gaze exuberantly upward.)
The first two views of Man Carving Out His Destiny show
the work in progress, initially as a small-scale plaster model,
then in full size, in stone, in a version that very likely was
preliminary—compare the positions of the right arm in the
studio and outdoor versions. The last two views show two perspectives of the finished work.
As you see, the work of the Man whom the sculpture depicts is not finished. If we take this statute to represent a selfgoverning people shaping themselves by means of the law,
then the verbs in our Greek translation of the Preamble should
be progressive in aspect, not aorist: self-government is never
over and done with, because our own lives are always a work
in progress. So far as “the living Constitution” dwells within,
to “ordain and establish” it is up to us.
3. “We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the
judges say it is, and the judiciary is the safeguard of our liberty and
of our property under the Constitution.” Charles Evans Hughes,
“Speech before the Elmira Chamber of Commerce, May 3, 1907,” in
Addresses of Charles Evans Hughes, 1906-1916, 2nd ed. (New York:
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), 185. “Congress may pass laws, but the
Supreme Court interprets and construes them, and determines their
validity. The Constitution, with its guarantees of liberty and its grants
of Federal power, is finally what the Supreme Court determines it to
mean.” Charles Evans Hughes, “Address Delivered at Youngstown,
Ohio, September 5, 1908,” ibid., 307.
4. Cf. Anastaplo, The Constitution of 1787, 26.
5. The People Shall Judge: Readings in the Formation of American
Policy, Vol. I, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), vii.
6. Cf. Plato, Phaedrus 279c.
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Platonic and Jewish Antecedents
to Johannes de Silentio’s
1
Knight of Faith
Jacob Howland
As very young children, we tend to engage the world with the
joyful expectancy and unimpeded capacity for delight that
spring from a trust as yet unbroken. But repeated experiences
of loss and disappointment almost inevitably cool our enthusiasm for life, and teach us the usefulness of detaching
ourselves from what Kierkegaard in Either/Or calls “the fair
wind of hope.”2 According to Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling, Abraham was an
exception to this rule: through “the wonder of faith,” Abraham
remains “young enough to wish” and “preserve an eternal
youth.”3 Fear and Trembling begins with the story of a man
whose ever-increasing admiration for Abraham was proportionate to the degree to which “life had separated what had
been united in the child’s pious simplicity.”4 Silentio thus
announces the central question of his book: how can a mature
understanding of the ways of the world coexist with a childlike
love of life?
Silentio is neither the first nor the last to pose this question.
The associate between wisdom and resignation is something of
a commonplace. In the Greek tradition, it appears as early as
Aristophanes’ Clouds, in which Socrates, who is portrayed as
the ascetic head of a school into which men have withdrawn
from the city in order to devote themselves to philosophical
studies, is called “miserably unhappy” by Pheidippides.5 In the
Hebrew Bible, the same sentiment occurs in the Book of
Ecclesiastes: “I set my mind to study and probe with wisdom
Jacob Howland is McFarlin Professor of Philosophy and past Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Tulsa.
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all that happens under the sun.—An unhappy business, that,
which God gave to men to be concerned with! I observed all
the happenings beneath the sun, and I found that all is futile
and pursuit of wind.”6 In modern literature, this theme is
expressed by Goethe’s Faust:
True, I am more clever than all the vain creatures,
The Doctors and Masters, Writers and Preachers;
No doubts plague me, nor scruples as well.
I’m not afraid of devil or hell.
To offset that, all joy is rent from me.
*****
Hemmed in by all this heap of books,
Their gnawing worms, amid their dust,
While to the arches, in all the nooks
Are smoke-stained papers midst them thrust,
Boxes and glasses round me crammed,
And instruments in cases hurled,
Ancestral stuff around me jammed—
That is your world! That’s called a world!
And still you question why your heart
Is cramped and anxious in your breast?
Why each impulse to live has been repressed
In you by some vague, unexplainèd smart?7
Three decades after the publication of Fear and Trembling,
Friedrich Nietzsche would argue that loving life is inconsistent
with understanding it; wisdom produces nausea, while the
appetite for life can take root and grow only within an atmosphere of illusion.8 For his part, Silentio insists that there is a
solution to the problem of the unity of youthful enthusiasm and
adult knowledge, the name of which is “faith.” But while
Silentio does not doubt the actuality of faith—particularly as
exemplified in Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice Isaac—he
cannot satisfactorily explain its possibility, much less
reproduce its movements in his own life.
The subtitle “A Dialectical Lyric” announces that Fear and
Trembling is simultaneously a philosophical and a poetic
HOWLAND
35
work—one that employs intellect and imagination to
illuminate its subject. Yet Silentio is unwilling to accept without qualification the title of “poet” or “philosopher.” More
precisely, in denying that he is a philosopher, he affirms that he
is a poet, and in denying that he is a poet, he affirms that he is
a philosopher.9 If, as this contradiction seems to imply, he both
is and is not a poet and a philosopher, we might be entitled to
assume that he both does and does not know what he is talking
about. We are thus invited us to identify and ponder the potentially fruitful inconsistencies in Silentio’s discussion of faith.10
Here is one such inconsistency. Silentio states: “I can very
well describe the movements of faith, but I cannot make
them.”11 But if the movements of faith are wholly internal, and
so invisible to others, how could Silentio know them without
having experienced them? Caveat lector: Silentio’s explanation of the internal structure of faith—in particular, his
assertion that faith involves a movement of finitude that
follows a movement of infinite resignation12—deserves critical
scrutiny.
I. Silentio’s Flat-Footed Knight
The clearest description of the phenomenon that Silentio is
trying to understand in Fear and Trembling is contained in his
imaginative description of what he calls the “knight of faith.”
Silentio’s first encounter with this knight is inauspicious.
“Dear me!” he exclaims, “Is this the person, is it actually him?
He looks just like a tax collector.”13 In Silentio’s imagination,
the knight of faith is literally and figuratively “pedestrian.”14
We watch him as he strolls around the city and makes his way
through the week. At work, he labors with the precision of an
“Italian bookkeeper”; at church, he is “impossible to distinguish from the rest of the crowd”; at leisure, he resembles a
“mercenary soul.” He walks like a “postman,” talks of food
like a “restaurateur,” plans construction projects like a
“capitalist,” and relaxes with his pipe like “the local tradesman . . . vegetating in the twilight.” In brief, Silentio detects in
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the knight of faith not the slightest “crack” through which one
might catch sight of the infinite: “He is solid through and
through. . . . He belongs entirely to the world; no bourgeois
philistine could belong to it more.”15
But Silentio’s imagination goes beyond appearances, for
he also tells us what the knight of faith thinks and feels. From
this perspective, it is clear that he is free of the bourgeois
philistine’s social ambition, restless anxiety, and slavish
adherence to convention. Although he is poor, he “thinks about
an appetizing little dish of warm food his wife surely has for
him when he comes home.” Indeed, he “firmly believes that
his wife has that delectable dish for him,” and to see him eat
this meal would be an “enviable” and “inspiring” sight. But if
she doesn’t have it, “oddly enough—it is all the same to him”;
whatever he may find on his plate, so to speak, leaves him
deeply satisfied. He runs into a stranger at a building site; “in
no time he erects a building, having at his disposal all the
resources required for that purpose.” For “if it came to that,” he
thinks, “I could easily get it.” The knight of faith evidently has
an active imagination—for how can a man who “does not have
four beans” afford delicious delicacies, much less finance a
building project? What is more, “he enjoys and takes part in
everything”; “everything that happens—a rat scurrying under a
gutter plank, children playing—everything engages him with a
composure in existence as if he were a girl of sixteen.” In a
word, “he lets things take their course with a freedom from
care as if he were a reckless good-for-nothing.”16
Silentio remarks in passing that the knight’s appetite is
“heartier than Esau’s.”17 This statement cuts two ways. Jacob
purchases Esau’s birthright for a bowl of stew, and later steals
his brother’s paternal blessing. Like Esau, the knight of faith,
in his simple contentment and guileless freedom from care,
must be an easy mark for more cunning men. But unlike Esau,
the knight of faith is always blessed in life, because he receives
everything as a blessing. And this is the main point. To the man
for whom “life had separated what had been united in the
HOWLAND
37
child’s pious simplicity,”18 Abraham presents a paradox. Just
so, the knight of faith presents a paradox to Silentio, for whom
“God’s love, both in a direct and inverse sense, is incommensurable with the whole of actuality.”19 Silentio supposes that
the movement of faith comes after that of infinite resignation;
faith makes whole what life has fractured. But his imaginative
description of the knight of faith tells a different story. While
this knight knows the difference between actuality and possibility, reason and imagination, he combines them in his day-today existence in such a way that each augments the other: he
enjoys the products of his imagination as if they were actual,
and the actual conditions of his existence as if they were what
one could wish for in imagination. Silentio claims that the
knight of faith is “not a poet,”20 yet we see that his love of life
is essentially poetic and authorial.21 Inasmuch as he “enjoys
and takes part in everything,”22 God’s love has furthermore
never appeared to him to be “incommensurable with the whole
of actuality.”23 The knight of faith is thus no more familiar with
Silentio’s conception of resignation than he is with his Godforsaken conception of actuality, because the former is
dependent on the latter. The knight of faith, to repeat, is “solid
through and through”;24 there are no cracks, because he has
never been broken.
Let me put this point another way. Although Silentio does
not explain why he thinks that God’s love is incommensurable
with the whole of actuality, this is evidently a general
conclusion that he has drawn from experience. On the whole,
and setting aside particular exceptions, men act as if they did
not love God, and events proceed as if God did not love man.
Now this conclusion rests on the inherently uncertain presupposition that inductive reasoning gives one access to the nature
of actuality as a whole. Silentio accordingly envisions faith as
the solution to a problem that his intellect has posed.25 This
problem, however, is entirely foreign to the knight of faith.
Like Alyosha Karamazov, and unlike Alyosha’s brother Ivan,
he has always loved life “before everything else,” and in
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particular, before its “meaning” and “logic.”26 And because
love has always come first for him, he has never felt the weight
of the incommensurability that comes to light when one is
guided primarily by the mind rather than the heart. Unlike
Silentio, the knight of faith never renounced the world, so he
does not need faith to get it back.
II. Philosophers and Fools
The differences between Silentio and the knight of faith can be
delineated more clearly by looking at two antecedents to the
latter—one from Athens, the other from Jerusalem. The first
suggests that there may be more than one way to combine a
youthful passion for life with a mature understanding of it,
while the second suggests that the problem as Silentio understands it—namely, how to make the movement of faith after
the movement of infinite resignation—may be insoluble.
Plato’s Socrates resembles the knight of faith both externally and internally. Like Silentio’s knight, Socrates is poor; if
anything, he is even more carefree in his poverty inasmuch as
he does not work at all.27 Like Silentio’s knight, he is just as
satisfied in times of scarcity as in times of plenty. Alcibiades
explains in the Symposium that, during military campaigns,
Socrates put up with hunger better than anyone, yet he alone
was able to enjoy his meals when food was abundant.28 This
last detail suggests Socrates’ equanimity in the face of death,
something he amply demonstrates during his trial and execution.29 Like Silentio’s knight, Socrates is superficially pedestrian, and not just because he lacks the financial resources to
attain any higher rank than ordinary foot-soldier. “He speaks of
pack-asses and blacksmiths and cobblers and tanners, and
seems always to say the same things in the same ways,” Alcibiades observes.30 But as with the knight of faith, the inner is
not the outer: anyone who opens up his speeches or is vouchsafed a glimpse of his soul finds a sublime beauty beneath his
quotidian exterior.31 Like the knight of faith, Socrates’ appar-
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ent simplicity exposes him to the schemes of more cunning
men. Callicles accordingly warns him that he runs the risk of
being put to death by his enemies.32 But again, Socrates simply
is not afraid of death—a fact that has caused some commentators to infer that Socrates hates life, or, in Silentio’s terms,
that he embraces death with a kind of infinite resignation.33
This inference, however, flies in the face of his earnest and
energetic engagement with the essential tasks and opportunities of a human life. As Socrates makes clear in the Apology,
his watchword is wakefulness, not sleep.34 And yet, he takes
leave of life without apprehension and without regret.35
Socrates’ relationship to the world could be described as
one of engaged detachment. He approaches life in a manner
analogous to an athlete who “leaves everything on the field,”
but who nevertheless immediately forgets the result and is
utterly gracious in defeat as well as victory. In my view, it is
philosophical eros—which Socrates regards as even more
essential to the philosopher than intellectual capability36—that
sustains his attitude of engaged detachment. Socrates’ philosophical eros relates to a conception of actuality that differs
both from Silentio’s inductive disappointment and from the
poetically augmented conception of the knight of faith. Silentio describes a youth whose love for an unattainable princess is
“transfigured into a love of the eternal being.”37 Here we have
something like Socrates’ philosophical love of the Ideas or
Forms, except that Silentio associates this love with a movement of resignation that springs from an intellec-tual acknowledgment of the disappointing character of actu-ality. But
Socrates’ longing for wisdom is not a consequence of his
understanding of the world, and is not born of frustration.
Rather, it is nothing less than the most dedicated and persistent
love of the whole of actuality—and here actuality must be
understood not as the dispiriting way of the world or the
tedious limitations of human life (whether real or imagined),
but as that which most fully is, in the distinctive integrity of its
being.38
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The second antecedent of Silentio’s knight of faith that I
would like to consider is the Hasidic fool in Rabbi Nachman of
Bretslav’s influential story “The Clever Man and the Simple
Man.”39 Nachman’s tale is a religious allegory about two childhood friends who follow separate paths in life. “Determined to
conquer the world,”40 the clever man travels extensively,
becomes an expert in “every artistic achievement,”41 and
ultimately “penetrates the heart of everything in nature and in
the soul of man.”42 He becomes “enormously rich and wise,”43
yet his wisdom serves only to make him miserable: “a violent
disgust at the imperfection of life drove him from place to
place, and he nowhere found rest.”44 This is consistent with
Silentio’s assertion that God’s love is incommensurable with
actuality. But the clever man goes further than Silentio, for
when he is summoned by the king, he reasons—and tries to
convince others as well—that the king does not exist.
The simple man remains at home and learns the humble
trade of shoemaking. He is a clumsy craftsman and lives in
great poverty, yet he does not suffer from the spiritual anorexia
that afflicts his clever friend. Indeed, he is “joyous and in good
spirits from morning till evening.”45 Like the knight of faith, he
uses his imagination to enhance his experience, and so savors
everything that life sets before him. His wife gives him bread
and water, but he delights in these as if they were the finest
meat and wine: “Thus he seasoned the scanty bites with gay
fancies . . . and while he ate he really tasted all the choice
dainties of which he spoke.”46 He rejoices in his “shabby
sheepskin” as if there were no “nobler garment.”47 People
often make fun of him and attempt to dupe him, but their
insults and tricks have no effect on his good humor. “Ay,
friend,” he is accustomed to answer, “just see how foolish I
am! You can be a good deal cleverer than I and still be a proper
fool.”48 And when the king calls for him, he answers immediately, responding to this unexpected bit of good fortune estatically: “the joy of the simple man was overpowering.”49
It is significant that the simple man’s happiness is not
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41
purchased at the price of ignorance. Because the simple man
“had passed his life without intrigues, he knew how to see into
the heart of right and wrong.”50 In the person of the simple
man, this essential moral knowledge is inseparable from the
knowledge of how to live joyfully, come what may. In
Nachman’s story, it also pays off by conventional standards.
Valued by the king for his “virtue and simple understanding,”51
the simple man becomes the governor of his province and
finally the king’s prime minister. Meanwhile, the clever man
becomes impoverished due to his unwavering devotion to
exposing the “madness and delusion” of those who continue to
believe in the king’s existence.52 One day he meets the simple
man, and tries to prove to him that he, too, has been fooled
about this fundamental matter. The simple man cannot counter
his arguments, and does not even attempt to do so. Rather, the
story ends with the simple man declaring to his friend, “You
will never receive the grace of simplicity!”53
Rabbi Nachman’s tale recapitulates the main themes of
Silentio’s imaginative encounter with the knight of faith. Both
narratives trace the practical and theoretical problem of resignation to the sovereignty of the intellect in the soul.
Conversely, both teach that equanimity, together with the
ability to live joyously, springs from the poetically productive
love of a trusting and grateful heart. But Nachman’s story does
not merely confirm that Silentio’s problem of how to repair
what life has fractured is foreign to the knight of faith, for it
also warns that there may be a point beyond which what the
intellect has broken cannot be made whole. Measured by the
exacting standards of the intellect, the world manifests an
ineluctable imperfection. The “violent disgust” elicited from
the clever man by this imperfection convinces him,
furthermore, that there is no king—and such a repugnant world
is utterly inconsistent with the hypothesis of intelligent rule.
The simple man rightly refuses to challenge this inference,
because logical argumentation cannot address the deeper issue
of the clever man’s profound spiritual and emotional
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incapacity. How could one who regards every blessing as a
curse learn to feel joy? By the “grace of simplicity,” on the
other hand, the simple man is able to experience life as a
blessing, and it is this experience that leads him thankfully to
acknowledge God—the melech ha’olam, or “King of the
Whole,” who is the ultimate source of all blessings.
III. A Very Brief Conclusion
Rabbi Nachman’s simple man is wiser in his foolishness than
the clever man is in his wisdom, for only the simple man has
attained knowledge of himself and others. In this respect, the
simple man resembles Plato’s Socrates, who is also wrongly
considered by more cunning and worldly men to be deluded.
Like the knight of faith, Socrates and the simple man understand intuitively that love precedes cognition in the wellordered soul. This is a secret that Silentio makes available to
his readers, even if he himself fails to grasp it. But unless we
readers either love the whole or can learn to do so, our
knowledge will be of no more value than Silentio’s ignorance.
NOTES
1. This article was originally presented at the Sixth International
Kierkegaard Conference at St. Olaf College in June of 2010. I would
like to thank David Possen for his critical comments, and Ed Mooney
for his encouragement.
2. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I, ed. Howard V. Hong and
Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 292.
3. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, ed. C. Stephen Evans and
Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 15.
4. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 7.
5. Aristophanes, Clouds, l. 104 in Four Texts on Socrates, trans.
Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West (New York: Cornell
University Press, 1998), 120.
6. Ecclesiastes 1:13-14. JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh, 2nd ed.
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1999), 1766.
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7. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, trans. George Madison
Priest in Great Books of the Western World, ed. Robert Maynard
Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, vol. 47 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1952), Part I, ll. 366-370 and 402-413.
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of
History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 814.
9. “The present writer is not at all a philosopher; he is, poetically and
tastefully expressed, a free-lancer” and “I am not a poet and go about
things only dialectically.” Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 5 and
79.
10. This is not the only indication that Fear and Trembling presents
us with a partial and incomplete understanding of its subject, yet one
that nevertheless enables a discerning reader to glimpse more than its
author has seen, and thus to begin to correct his mistakes. As Stephen
Evans observes in his Introduction to Fear and Trembling, the book’s
epigram—“What Tarquin the Proud communicated in his garden
with the beheaded poppies was understood by the son but not by the
messenger”— invites us to see Silentio as a messenger who is
unaware of the deeper significance of his own message
(Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, x). But because we do not know
whether this is the point of the epigram as Silentio understood it, we
also cannot know whether Silentio himself understands that he says
more in Fear and Trembling than he knows.
11. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 31.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 32.
14. Ibid., 34. The Danish word is Pedestre.
15. Ibid., 32-33.
16. Ibid., 33-34.
17. Ibid., 33.
18. Ibid., 7.
19. Ibid., 28.
20. Ibid., 33.
21. The word poet comes from the Greek poiētēs, which derives from
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the verb poiein, meaning to make or to produce—clearly apposite in
reference to the knight of faith. The word author comes from the
Latin auctor, which, among other things, signifies an authority, a
creator, a principal cause, a founder of a people. Note, too, that
Silentio consistently emphasizes the fruitfulness of faith as
exemplified in “father” Abraham, the auctor generis or progenitor of
the people.
22. Ibid., 32.
23. Ibid., 28.
24. Ibid., 32.
25. His relationship with God is mediated by his intellect: it is not
God’s love that makes him “unspeakably happy,” but the “thought”
that God is love. Ibid., 28.
26. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard
Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco: North Point Press,
1990), 231.
27. Plato, Apology, 23b-c.
28. Plato, Symposium, 220a.
29. See Alcibiades’ description of his exemplary composure in battle
in Symosium. 220d-221c. Alcibiades also makes it clear that Socrates
has no desire for conventional honors, which others pursue as a
means of overcoming the oblivion associated with death—cf. 220de and 208c-d.
30. Plato, Symposium, 221e-222a.
31. Plato, Symposium, 216e-217a.
32. Plato, Gorgias, 486a-b.
33. See “The Problem of Socrates” in Friedrich Nietzsche, The AntiChrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed.
Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 162.
34. Plato, Apology, 30e-31a; cf. Republic, 476d.
35. Plato, Phaedo, 117-118.
36. In explaining who the philosopher is, Socrates accordingly begins
not with the philosopher’s intellect but with his desire: he is a lover
of the whole of wisdom. See Republic, 475b).
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37. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 36.
38. See especially Republic, 476a-d.
39. Martin Buber, The Tales of Rabbi Nachman, trans. Maurice
Friedman (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999), 71-94. On the
significance of this story within the context of Yiddish literature, see
Ruth R. Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
40. Buber, Tales, 72.
41. Ibid., 74.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 78.
44. Ibid., 74-75.
45. Ibid., 75.
46. Ibid., 76.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 78.
49. Ibid., 85.
50. Ibid., 86.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 90.
53. Ibid., 94.
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47
Kant’s Rational Being
as Moral Being
Jay Smith
In the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure
Reason Kant writes:
This discussion as to the positive advantage of critical
principles of pure reason can be similarly developed in
regard to the concept of God and of the simple nature of
our soul. . . . Even the assumption—as made on behalf of
the necessary practical employment of my reason—of
God, freedom, and immortality is not permissible unless at
the same time speculative reason be deprived of its pretensions to transcendent insight. . . . I have therefore found it
necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for
faith. The dogmatism of metaphysics, that is, the preconception that it is possible to make headway in metaphysics
without a previous criticism of pure reason, is the source
of all that unbelief, always very dogmatic, which wars
against morality.1
As evidenced by the Critique of Practical Reason and other
works such as Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, the
simple act of limiting the excessive and dogmatic claims of
speculative metaphysics in order to secure morality proved
more contentious, difficult, and complex than the passage
above suggests. The situation of practical reason changes in
radical and complicated ways as it emerges out of the shadows
of speculative reason to become the primary faculty that determines our rational being. I will first discuss the context established for practical reason and morality in the Critique of Pure
Jay Smith is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe. This article was first delivered
as a lecture at St. John’s College in Santa Fe on April 10, 2009.
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Reason. Then I will try to show how pure practical reason is
connected to rational faith in the Critique of Practical Reason.
This examination will uncover the uncanniness of pure practical reason, an uncanniness hidden in part by Kant’s commitment to, and transformation of, a traditional view of pure
reason. The uncanniness is caused by the operation of a power
that is beyond, or out of, the normal course of nature—a power
that differs from natural powers. This essay tries to show that
Rational Being, for Kant, is Moral Being, and that this equivalence preserves a higher dignity for human beings than is
compatible with the mere pursuit of secure and comfortable
living.
I. Practical Reason and Rational Faith in the Critique of
Pure Reason
Kant connects a concept of knowledge with a synthesis made
possible by the reception of givens under the forms of sensibility, namely, space and time. By synthesis, Kant means an
activity that produces a unity. These sensible givens are made
ready for further synthesis by the productive imagination. Finally, by the exercise of synthetic judgments, the worked-up
impressions are brought under the unity of the categories of
the understanding, so that an object of experience is constituted. This constitution is possible only because these spatiotemporal givens worked up as presentations or representations
are accompanied by the formal ‘I think’—they are prehended
and apprehended by the same mind. It is this assertion of the
necessity of an overarching unity, a transcendental unity of
apperception, that is Kant’s response to Hume’s claim that the
mind is only a bundle of impressions. Without this ‘I think’
belonging to a persistently identical self-consciousness, the
subject would not recognize all these presentations as its own,
and, immersed in the stream of lived happenings, would
simply forget itself.
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Let me give an example as a way to explain this process
without getting too bogged down in Kant’s technical details. I
am standing in the kitchen, I hear a loud noise, I turn, look out
the window, and see a motorcycle going by. These impressions—hearing the loud noise and seeing the motorcycle—
arise in a temporal sequence and are spatially arranged: I was
standing by the refrigerator when I heard the noise, and then I
turned my head to look out the window and see a motorcycle
going by. These happenings, even given in a spatial and
temporal arrangement, are not yet an experience in the Kantian
sense. There is as of yet no constituted object of experience. To
have an experience it is necessary that these two happenings be
brought into unity—in this case, under the category of cause
and effect: the loud noise is the backfire of the motorcycle.
To be able to constitute an experience out of these happenings, I must be able to temporally and spatially rearrange these
happenings, cutting their ties to the way I happened to notice
them while standing in the kitchen. This rearrangement, which
prepares them to be taken up into the categories of the understanding, is the work of the productive imagination. The sound
I heard before I saw the motorcycle is not the cause of the
motorcycle but vice versa. Our mind in this way rearranges
these happenings to give us an objective experience, an experience in which the subject who has the experience—namely the
transcendental subject who spontaneously produces the ‘I
think’ that marks these happenings as happenings of the same,
constant mind—also posits a correlative transcendental object
of experience, a bare x, a placeholder as it were. The happenings become an experience, are constituted into an object of
experience, when the reference point shifts from the subject of
the happenings to the posited placeholder, so that the
happenings are experienced as centered on an object over and
against the subject. “Oh, that loud noise was the backfire from
the motorcycle.”
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This concept of knowledge and this description of how our
experience is constituted—that is, how we shape experience
and give it unity—are easily grasped by us and, for the most
part, accepted. For instance, here is a common puzzle: we
present someone with a series of, say, six pictures—six different stages of a person chopping down a tree. These pictures
are presented in a random order with the expectation that
everyone will reorder them in the same way. In Kantian terms,
we would say that each person can synthesize these
happenings into an objective experience valid for everyone.
Why is this concept of knowledge important for a
discussion of Kantian morality? First, because all objective
experience is constituted in this way, even what we take to be
our internal experience is given under a form of sensibility,
namely time, worked up by the productive imagination and
subsumed under the categories of the understanding. What we
take to be our inner experience, our inner selves, our deepest
and truest desires, are constituted and conditioned in this
manner. Kant calls this inner self the empirical or phenomenal
self. We have no speculative access, no intellectual intuition
either into the thing-in-itself that is the self or into a putative
“real” or “authentic” self—which Kant labels the noumenal
self. This lack of speculative access into the self has significant
repercussions on our discussion of morality and on what is
demanded from practical reason.
Kant’s concept of knowledge also produces a second, more
complicated consequence for our discussion of morality. Kant
seeks to reject the sort of speculative thought that emerged
from mythical thinking when we began to claim access to a
universal unity, a One. This One could be seen as the cause and
the ground of the Many; in the light of this One, the Many
could be conceived as a whole, a totality.
In striving for such a conception, the human mind marks
out for itself an extramundane point of reference in which the
flow and jostle of concrete events and phenomena are joined
together in a stable whole. In this distancing view, one is able
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to differentiate between the totality of what is and individual
entities, between the world and what occurs within it. Things
are understood not in their particularity but in what underlies
them. They are understood as ideas, as essences, as forms or
substances; that is to say, they are understood in regard to what
connects them back to the One. As part of this cognitive stance,
of this bios theōrētikos, the soul, in striving for an intellectual
intuition of the cosmos, forms itself as it becomes conscious of
itself in the recollective and reflexive intuition of the One. The
uniting of the knower with the One is both an ecstatic selftranscendence and a reflexive self-assurance that enables one
to see and live his or her life from this extramundane point of
reference. Within this self-assurance, fears of death, of
isolation, of frailty, of contradiction, of surprise, and of novelty
can be faced.
Kant provides a universal unity as well, but of an entirely
different stripe. He begins with the transcendental unity of the
knowing subject which, in relating itself to itself, requires, as a
posited correlate, a symmetrical concept of everything that
stands over and against the subject—that is, a transcendental
concept of the world as the totality of all appearances. Kant
calls this correlate a Cosmological Idea, which aims at the
whole of possible experience and the unconditioned. The
unconditioned is the ground of appearance and occupies what
would have been the place of the One. Perhaps an example
from Aristotle might be helpful here. At the end of the
Metaphysics Aristotle talks of an unmoved mover whose
activity is thought thinking on thought. The experience that he
wishes to ground is a theoretically worked-up experience that
has its roots in our sense-experiences of an ordered whole, an
eternal cosmos of ordered motions. Given that we can have
such an experience, how is it possible? To understand Aristotle’s unmoved mover, I am often tempted to make a transcendental move of positing the unmoved mover as a necessary
logical construct that lays out the conditions for the possibility
of this eternal and ordered motion while unifying everything in
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light of an overarching end. Aristotle, however, does not make
this move. Instead, he makes the puzzling assertions that such
an unmoved mover is alive, and that, in its activity of thought
thinking on thought, it exhibits the best kind of life there is, the
bios theōrētikos—which is a real possibility only for some of
us and only for short periods of time. In whatever way we are
to understand this exhibited life, we can point to it as
something transcendent, as a One that is the ground of the
order of the cosmos, a One of which we can say that it is not
merely a logical construct. Dante, in the context of a religious
journey, also calls upon this One at the beginning of his
Paradiso: “The glory of Him who moves all things pervades
the universe and shines in one part more and in another less.”2
Kant recognizes that this orientation toward the One, in the
philosophical context, is motivated by the needs of reason.
Reason is marked by universality and necessity as it strives for
systematic completeness and perfection. Speculative reason
seeks this One, this universal unity, as it attempts to bring
together in one synthetic act the conditioned—that is, the
whole of possible experience—and the unconditioned—that is,
the ground or end of such a whole. The results unfortunately
are the antinomies, the contradictions that reason inevitably
falls into when it seeks to know, to speculatively point at, the
overarching unity, the One. As Kant explains: “Either,
therefore, reason through its demand for the unconditioned
must remain in conflict with itself, or this unconditioned must
be posited outside the series, in the intelligible.”3 The positing
of something outside the series of appearances is needed in
order to point to a ground for appearances that makes the
possibility of appearances conceivable. This positing is also
needed in order to give a fuller account of us than are provided
by references to an empirical ego and to a transcendental unity
of apperception. But why take the trouble to label this positing
the intelligible world, especially since Kant has denied us any
intellectual intuition, and since his concept of knowledge en-
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53
sures that an intelligible world could never be a possible object
either of experience or of knowledge?
As a way to begin, let us look at what Kant accomplishes
in resolving the antinomies of pure reason by the positing of an
intelligible world. First, Kant preserves an idealizing synthesis,
a world-constituting synthesis that allows the distinction to be
made between the world as a whole and what is in the world.
This distinction helps to guide understanding in its work of
knowing objects in the world. In preserving the synthesis,
however, Kant downgrades the cosmos into the object-domain
of the natural sciences, into a kingdom of nature, a kingdom
whose only unity is a unity under a certain set of laws. This
unity is not a unity that could become an object of knowledge,
much less exhibit the highest form of life. It is not the One that
holds together the Many. This regulative unity merely assures
us that for any set of conditions a previous set of conditions
can be found from which the latter can be understood and so
on, ad infinitum. This world of nature, of appearances, is no
longer a whole organized according to ends; because its unity
is merely regulative, it has the heuristic goal of advancing
theory-construction. The regulative unity of the Cosmological
Idea does not provide an extramundane point of reference, nor
can it satisfy reason’s demand—or our need—for a whole that
contains contingencies, neutralizes negations, and calms the
fears of death and isolation.
Second, Kant preserves a space outside of nature that does
not conflict with the regulative unity needed for the
functioning of the understanding, as he states in the section that
discusses the Antinomy of Pure Reason:
The sensible world contains nothing but appearances, and
these are mere representations which are always sensibly
conditioned; in this field things in themselves are never
objects to us. It is not surprising that in dealing with a
member of the empirical series, no matter what member it
may be, we are never justified in making a leap out
beyond the context of sensibility. . . . On the other hand,
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to think an intelligible ground of appearances, that is, of
the sensible world, and to think it free from the contingency of appearances, does not conflict with the unlimited
empirical regress.4
As we said above, this intelligible world cannot be known
by us. The resolution of the antinomies of pure reason
therefore evokes resignation, which Kant expresses in this
way:
The greatest and perhaps the sole use of all philosophy of
pure reason is therefore only negative; since it serves not
as an organon for the extension of knowledge but as a
discipline for the limitation of pure reason, and, instead of
discovering truth, has only the modest merit of guarding
against error.5
If there is to be a positive use of pure reason, it will not be in
its speculative use but in its practical use. Furthermore, Kant’s
assertion that he found it necessary to deny knowledge6
suggests that it is not in the search for truth that we find our
dignity; it is rather in guarding against error that some other
possibility is preserved for us.
To conclude this first section, let us consider why this
space is labeled “the intelligible world.” Our metaphysical
desire, the desire for a One that can satisfy reason, cannot be
satisfied speculatively; moreover, as Kant has shown, attempts
to do so propel us into a land of illusion and deception. Unlike
David Hume, who claims that this desire will disappear once
we see that it cannot be satisfied, Kant rightly asserts that this
metaphysical desire will not wither. The needs of reason are
always pressing, and it is these needs that provide the context
for Kant’s exploration of practical reason. The burden that
speculative reason attempted to carry in response to the
demands of reason and the needs of our metaphysical desire
can only be carried by practical reason—and in particular, by
practical reason intimately bound up with morality. This is why
Kant says,
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The idea of a moral world has, therefore, objective reality,
not as referring to an object of an intelligible intuition (we
are quite unable to think any such object), but as referring
to the sensible world, viewed, however, as being an object
of pure reason in its practical employment, that is, as a
corpus mysticum of the rational beings in it, as far as the
free will of each being is, under moral laws, in complete
systematic unity with itself and with the freedom of every
other.7
Kant strives to preserve for us a rational core, a moral world
whose objective reality is affirmed by the fact of the ought. An
ought requires an I beyond the empirical ego, an I not reducible
to the kingdom of nature, an I somehow connected to considerations of freedom. Kant tries to preserve rationality by relying on pure practical reason, and on its affiliated concept of a
world of rational beings, each of which acts at all times as if,
through his maxims, he were a legislator in the universal kingdom of ends. Reason, which requires universality, necessity,
and ends, must be at play in this moral world that is also intelligible. Comprehending such a world would be an exalted and
stirring project; but Kant’s articulation of the project at the end
of the Critique of Pure Reason—as was pointed out by Kant’s
critics—lacked both clarity and content. Let us turn now to the
work that tried to respond to such concerns, Kant’s second
Critique, The Critique of Practical Reason.
II. Kantian Moral Being
Here is how Kant introduces his Critique of Practical Reason:
The theoretical use of reason was concerned with the
objects of the cognitive faculty only, and a critique of it
with regard to this use really dealt only with the pure
cognitive faculty, since this raised the suspicion, which
was afterwards confirmed, that it might easily lose itself
beyond its boundaries, among unattainable objects or
even among contradictory concepts. It is quite different
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with the practical use of reason. In this, reason is
concerned with the determining grounds of the will,
which is a faculty either of producing objects corresponding to representations or of determining itself to
effect such objects (whether the physical power is
sufficient or not), that is, of determining its causality. For,
in that, reason can at least suffice to determine the will and
always has objective reality insofar as volition is at issue.
The first question here, then, is whether pure reason of
itself alone suffices to determine the will or whether it can
be a determining ground of the will only as empirically
conditioned. Now there enters here a concept of causality
justified by the Critique of Pure Reason although not
capable of being presented empirically, namely that of
freedom; and if we can discover grounds for proving that
this property does in fact belong to the human will (and so
to the will of all rational beings as well), then it will not
only be shown that pure reason can be practical but that it
alone, and not reason empirically limited, is unconditionally practical. Consequently, we shall not have to do a
critique of pure practical reason but only of practical
reason as such. For, pure reason, once it is shown to exist,
needs no critique. It is pure reason that itself contains the
standard of critical examination of every use of it. It is
therefore incumbent upon the Critique of Practical
Reason as such to prevent empirically conditioned reason
from presuming that it, alone and exclusively, furnished
the determining ground of the will. If it is proved that
there is pure reason, its use is alone immanent; and the
empirically conditioned use, which lays claim to absolute
rule, is on the contrary transcendent and expresses itself in
demands and commands that go quite beyond its sphere—
precisely the opposite from what could be said of pure
reason in its speculative use.8
A mouthful to be sure! Let us try and bring some clarity to this
passage. First, Kant refers to pure reason as a unified faculty
that can be talked about either in its speculative or practical
use. Next, pure reason is concerned with the questions of
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freedom, God, and immortality, as is made clear by Kant’s
insistence upon universality and necessity. Finally, pure reason
bears within itself the “standard of critical examination of
every use of it.” Pure reason does not look to a higher authority
for its standards, nor does it see its finiteness as marked and
determined by reference to an infinite, divine reason. The unity
of pure reason is preserved over the difference between its
speculative and practical use by promoting pure practical
reason to a place of primacy, while at the same time demoting
speculative reason to secondary status. This reversal of priority
is quite striking when compared to theological explorations of
the relation between human and divine reason. A look to
theology’s distinguishing of divine and human reason puts this
reversal of priority in an interesting light. For some theologians, human reason is intimately connected to divine reason,
because the former takes its standards and orientation from the
latter. Thus, as regards human reason, the primary faculty is
speculative and the supporting faculty is practical. In speculative reason man looks up to an order of higher ontological
status than himself—God and his created order—while
practical reason guides man’s actions within this order of ends.
God, however, cannot have speculative reason as primary,
since there is no order of higher ontological status for him to
look up to. If there were such a higher order, he would not be
the creator, but the divine craftsman. So for God it is his reason
in its practical aspect that is primary. He creates by his word—
Let there be light!—and then he beholds that it is good.
By reversing the primacy of the two faculties of reason,
Kant makes human reason resemble divine reason: pure
practical reason, or reason in its moral activity, comes first;
then speculative reason follows—creating, then beholding.
There is no ontologically higher order that is open to man’s
speculative view, and thus the traditional metaphysical claim
that actuality anchored in this higher ontological order is prior
to potentiality becomes suspect as well. This rejection of the
priority of actuality is part of what is at stake in Kant’s
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rejection of the ontological and cosmological arguments for
the existence of God. For Kant, possibility—a possibility not
tied to an already existing actuality, but a possibility tied to
freedom—will be central. Since there is no existing order of
the Good that is open to our view, and thus no way to measure
our actions by reference to such an order, this reorientation is
a significant break from traditional ethics with its concerns
about such things as the distribution of goods, and with its
grounding of obligation in the demand that we bring to
fulfillment our potentialities as human beings.
Let us now turn more directly to the passage quoted above.
Kant seems to assert that practical reason determines the
faculty of the will, but that the will can be determined in two
different ways: it can produce objects corresponding to representations, or it can bring about such objects. To understand the
first alternative, we must see how something can be a cause of
our actions. In the Preface to the Critique of Practical Reason,
Kant says, “Life is the faculty of a being to act in accordance
with the laws of the faculty of desire. The faculty of desire is a
being’s faculty to be by means of its representations the cause
of the reality of the objects of these representations.”9 In other
words, this faculty of desire requires representations of certain
objects, from the very concrete (such as desiring an ice cream
cone) to the more abstract (such as honor or shame). The
subject is affected by a certain representation of a desired state
of affairs, and then practical reason goes to work to determine
how to attain or bring about such a state of affairs. The content
of this representation and the attendant evoking of pleasure or
pain is determined by our experience. Kant claims that we do
not innately know what we desire and what will bring us
pleasure or pain; and furthermore, he claims that these will
vary from person to person. We find what it is that makes us
happy through experience. When practical reason determines
the will through representation, it is operating as empirical
practical reason. Under various descriptions it should be
familiar to all of us.
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When we strive toward a desired end—usually happiness—empirical practical reason is at work as the overall endin-itself that needs no reference to another end. Maxims and
rules of conduct formed in consideration of this end Kant calls
hypothetical imperatives: if you want this, then you must act in
this way. A way of life organized around such imperatives is a
prudential life. Kant indicates this dependency upon experience by the word empirical. This dependency on experience
motivates most of our actions, and that is why Kant sees those
actions as pathological—because they are determined heteronomously rather than autonomously.
Kant thinks that heteronomous determination is natural to
us, since he believes that we are inwardly determined in the
same way as the course of nature is determined. Our inmost,
authentic desires, which we believe both determine and
express who we really are, have been shaped by our education,
by our experience, and by our society—that is, from without.
Hence to be determined by these inclinations is not to be free,
but to be determined heteronomously. Kant regards everything
we think of as deeply, inwardly human—our desires, our social
roles, our insights, our feelings of love, care, and devotion—as
heteronomously determined, which is to say, conditioned from
a moral perspective, and radically pathological. Kant considers
all desire-driven action to be pathological because it arises in
us as a pathos, as a suffering of a determination that arises
outside of us. In this sense, therefore, pathological activity is
not contrasted with normal activity—since it is precisely
normal activity that is pathological—but with autonomous
activity, that is, with freedom and the formal determination by
one’s own will.
This other possibility of determining the will, in which we
are not determined heteronomously, is to have the will effect
the object by the exercise of the faculty of pure practical reason
that is not grounded in our experiences. This way of determining the will may be rather puzzling, but we can at least
understand that it would eliminate the mediation caused by
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representing to ourselves objects of experience that then activate the faculty of desire, thereby bypassing our dependence
on experience. To be subject to representation and desire is in
fact to be determined pathologically; moreover, to be motivated by concerns for happiness is to be determined heteronomously. Kant frames this option in the form of a question:
“The first question here, then, is whether pure reason of itself
alone suffices to determine the will or whether it can be a determining ground of the will only as empirically conditioned.”10
Kant claims that what is at stake here is freedom and the possibility of autonomy in the sense of self-determination. Our
freedom might well be at stake, but it is hard to accept the
claim that pure reason alone, pure practical reason, can be
sufficient in itself to determine the will. The common view,
which is easier to accept, was expressed by Hume in his
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals: “Reason being
cool and disengaged, is no motive to action, and directs only
the impulse received from appetite or inclination, by showing
us the means of attaining happiness or avoiding misery.”11
There are, of course, actions that we perform under the guidance of reason for which we have no immediate inclination—
for example, submitting to a painful and risky surgery, or dragging oneself out of bed early to work at a job one dislikes. But
the motivations for these actions are also tied to inclinations—
to the desire for health or the desire for food and shelter. In
other words, reason in its practical work can only direct inclination—that is, in Kantian terms, it can function only as conditioned or empirical practical reason.
Kant is aware of this limitation, of course, and so he asserts
that it is “incumbent upon the Critique of Practical Reason as
such to prevent empirically conditioned reason from presuming that it, alone and exclusively, furnishes the determining
ground of the will.”12 If we stand aside from our mode of
representation, if we leave aside our faculty of desire—which
is, after all, the defining faculty of life—we are certainly in an
uncanny place. Is it possible that there could be an ethics or a
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morality that is not the fulfillment of desire in some form, a
fulfillment guided by the representation of the way the world
is? Kant proposes that such an ethics or morality is possible,
and that it is made possible by the operation of pure practical
reason, a practical reason that is not dependent upon the representation of a desired object or state of affairs, not dependent
on ends that are given to it. This claim about a will that can
determine itself apart from representation sets the stage for the
prominence of will as a basic metaphysical category for many
thinkers following Kant.
Kant pushes us very hard here. In effect, he says that we
are less free than we believe. There is no internal sanctuary in
which we can discover our true selves, and if we respond to
divine commands or act on promises of an afterlife we are
being determined heteronomously. Morality for Kant will not
consist of a set of norms for bridling desire in order to keep our
conduct free of excess. In relation to the smooth, normal
course of events—now seen as pathological—morality is always an interruption, a going beyond the way the world is, a
going beyond even the pleasure principle. Kant, in fact, rejects
the distinction between higher and lower desires, between
higher and lower pleasures, a distinction based on whether the
desire originates in the intellect or in the senses. Such a
distinction lies at the center of much moral reasoning and
education, and is implicit in all appeals to moderation. The aim
of such a morality is to refine our desires by reflection and to
redirect them toward objects of higher ontological status, that
is, objects that are visible to the mind only. By lifting our eyes
to the intelligible heavens, as it were, we lift our desires as
well. A simple example: Pleasures of the senses have a limit—
sound, for example, can become so loud that it can destroy the
sense organ; pleasures of the mind, on the contrary, can be
unlimited—learning simply prepares the mind for more
learning. Kant flatly states that all desires are on the same
level; this is indicated, for instance, by the fact that we can and
do leave a poetry reading because we want to go running and
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vice versa. His contention is supported further by the fact that
there is no intelligible heaven open to our view, and by the fact
that we are determined in what we desire, we are fully conditioned beings. Because we are fully conditioned beings, we are
less free than we believe, and everything we take as proper to
our humanity stands on one side of the ledger, while only an
invisible marker stands on the other side, pointing toward an
empty dimension into which we can think ourselves, and in
which we can imagine that it is possible to determine our moral
being rationally, that is, universally and necessarily.
If, however, on the one hand we are less free than we believe, Kant nevertheless also indicates that we are freer than we
know. In his critique of practical reason, Kant often refers to
the experience of moral necessitation, the experience of the
ought—I ought to perform this action, I ought not to have done
this, this ought not to have happened—and he gives us an interpretation of this experience that indicates that we are freer than
we know:
Lest anyone suppose that he finds an inconsistency when
I now call freedom the condition of the moral law and
afterwards . . . maintain that the moral law is the condition
under which we can first become aware of freedom, I want
only to remark that whereas freedom is indeed the ratio
essendi of the moral law, the moral law is the ratio
cognoscendi of free-dom. For, had not the moral law
already been distinctly thought in our reason, we should
never consider ourselves justified in assuming such a
thing as freedom (even though it is not self-contradictory).
But were there no freedom, the moral law would not be
encountered at all in ourselves.13
The positing of freedom is bound up with the moral law as a
condition of its possibility, and this interpretation shores up the
experience of the ought, making it a necessary, rather than a
contingent, element in human cognition. In order, then, for the
moral law to be encountered as the moral law—and for Kant
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that means it must be encountered in its universal and necessary character—it is necessary to posit freedom. In this way,
we are freer than we can know, since the moral law necessarily
calls forth the postulate of freedom: even though freedom is
not a possible object of knowledge for us, we must postulate it.
This rational necessity of positing freedom is, for Kant, the
first tenet of a rational faith.
Of course it is critical for Kant that this positing of freedom
should not contradict the doctrine of freedom found in the
Critique of Pure Reason—namely, that freedom, though
incapable of being an object of experience, is thinkable and
conceivable as a transcendental connected with our noumenal
selves, as part of the intelligible world needed to resolve the
antinomies. This theoretical conceivability does not ground the
concept of freedom, does not give it objective reality, but it
does leave open the possibility of freedom. In the Groundwork
of The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant says:
The intelligible world signifies only a “something” that is
left over when I have excluded from the determining
grounds of my will everything belonging to the world of
sense, merely in order to limit the principle of motives
from the field of sensibility by circumscribing this field
and showing that it does not include everything within
itself but that there is still more beyond it; but of this
something more I have no further cognizance.14
The only cognizance of the freedom proper to our intelligible,
noumenal self, is an indirect one, a posited one. Only through
the experience of the moral law, as interpreted in a certain way,
can I become aware that I must be free.
Of course this experience of the ought, of the moral law as
universally and necessarily binding, can be interpreted otherwise. For example, following Freud, we could see the categorical imperative as an internalization of the strictures of our
parents and society, resulting in the formation of the superego;
or, following Freud’s contemporaries, we could see it as no-
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thing more than the consequence either of long-settled custom
or of the necessities dictated by prudence. Kant, however, is
strongly drawn to this interpretation of the moral law because
it solidifies many aspects of his thought. In the Preface to the
Critique of Practical Reason he says,
The union of causality as freedom with causality as
natural mechanism, the first of which is established by the
moral law, the second by the law of nature, and indeed in
one and the same subject, the human being, is impossible
without representing him with regard to the first as a being
in itself but with regard to the second as an appearance,
the former in pure, the latter in empirical consciousness.15
This positing of freedom fills out a possibility foreshadowed in
the Critique of Pure Reason, allows for some kind of unity of
the human being, and supports a view of reason that is not
unavoidably in contradiction with itself. Our noumenal self in
its freedom prescribes universal and necessary laws to our
empirical and conditioned self, which experiences itself as
necessitated by these prescriptions, not heteronomously, but
autonomously, as self-determining. The preservation of the
universal and necessary character of these prescriptions allows
Kant to see this experience as rational. Only in this way do we
gain some purchase on the intelligible world. We will take up
this rationality again at the end of this essay.
But why talk of this purchase on the intelligible world in
terms of a rational faith? We see a similar move on the part of
Maimonides in his recognition and resolution of a question that
I am going to frame as an antinomy: Is the world eternal or
does it have a beginning in time? Maimonides is concerned
about the claim that Aristotle has demonstrated the eternality
of the world. To hold onto the belief that God created and
governs the world in the face of such a demonstrated claim is,
for Maimonides, to be placed in an impossible situation.
Neither he nor Kant could tolerate the proposition that we must
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sacrifice reason for faith—that we should believe precisely
because it is absurd. Maimonides spends a great deal of time
showing that Aristotle did not claim to demonstrate that the
world is eternal; and, in fact, he tries to show that it is not
possible to demonstrate either that the world is eternal or that
it has a beginning in time.16 We do not have a coherent,
scientific account of our world to base such a demonstration on
because our best physics (an Aristotelian one) and our best
astronomy (a Ptolemaic one) are in contradiction. Thus, we are
at liberty to decide this issue on other terms. Aristotle can hold
a considered opinion that the world is eternal because it
concurs with and supports his other metaphysical concerns. Of
course, Maimonides is also at liberty to base his considered
opinion on considerations of compatibility with his traditional
faith. Kant goes a bit further than this compatibility, because he
sees the moral law as universal and necessary: he holds that in
determining the moral law we act as legislative members of a
kingdom of ends. The underpinning of such universal,
necessary, and teleological action must likewise have this rational character. Thus, for Kant, freedom is a tenet of a rational,
not a traditional, faith.
Let me now address the other two tenets of this rational
faith. As mentioned above, somehow the will, quite apart from
representation and desire, brings about an object. This object,
for Kant, is the highest good, in which happiness ought to be
distributed according to how much one deserves to be happy.
Kant tells the painful truth: that in this world, those who
deserve happiness often do not attain happiness—the wicked
do indeed often prosper, and the good often suffer. Virtue is not
its own reward; moreover, happiness does not constitute a
coherent system: the things that make us happy often work
against each other. In addition, it is not in our power to bring
about this highest good. We can act individually as if we are
legislating members of a Kingdom of ends, but to bring the
highest good into being requires that others act with us—thus,
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to do so is not in our power. God is posited as a necessary
condition for the possibility of such a highest Good, inasmuch
as He can somehow harmonize our actions with those of
others. Furthermore, the human will is not good, as we can see
through the experience of being morally determined: we must
struggle against our sensual nature as we strive to be virtuous.
Now although we can strive to perfect our will, it is an impossible task, which Kant must reframe as an infinite task in order
to make the completion of our striving at least conceivable.
The condition for the possibility of such an infinite task is the
immortality of the soul. Thus in order for the will to bring
about the highest good, and thereby to have a rational hope that
our actions are not completely futile, the rational postulates of
God and immorality are required. The postulate of freedom
grounds the moral law while the other two postulates, God and
immortality, transform our moral actions (namely, making the
world into what it ought to be and perfecting our will) into an
infinite task. It is important to see that these rational postulates
give us neither any knowledge of what God is in himself nor
any knowledge of what life after death may be like. All I know
is that it is necessary to assert these tenets in order to make it
conceivable that we can bring about the highest good as an
object of our will. In this way, our metaphysical desire is
addressed and met by a rational faith; and this is the only way
that these desires can be met, since Kant has demonstrated that
they cannot be met by striving for a speculative vision.
Let us now marshal further support for Kant’s assertion
that we are freer than we know. We have already seen that in
claiming to be the sole power that can determine the will,
empirical practical reason oversteps its boundaries and closes
off the uncanny space of freedom. This space is preserved by
pure practical reason. But is there other evidence of our
freedom?
Kant presents several examples that show situations in
which our freedom is made manifest. In the Critique of
Practical Reason, he rebuts the claim that we are impotent in
the face of our desires—that, for instance, those of us who lust
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are controlled by our lust. Kant responds that a lustful person
about to enter a brothel would soon learn to control his lust if
he encountered a gallows in front of the door together with an
official proclamation that anyone frequenting the establishment would be hanged. We can certainly conceive of controlling our lust under such a threat, but if we do exert control,
it is for the sake of self-love and self-preservation. Kant then
extends this rebuttal with a slightly different example: A prince
pressures someone to bear false witness against an innocent
man whom the prince wants eliminated. Kant claims not only
that everyone knows what ought to be done in such a situation,
but also that it is quite conceivable that someone in that
situation would refuse to bear false witness even despite the
threat of the gallows. The first example shows that we can
exert control over our desires if something serious, like our
life, is as stake; the second example shows that we can refuse
to perform an action even if our life is as stake. These
examples show that our relation to moral activity takes place
on two planes; in one we appear to be determined by the
situation, while in the other we appear to be free.17
A few pages later in the same book, Kant provides another
bit of evidence for our being freer than we know—what might
be called a phenomenological description of the difference in
self-critical response between losing at a game and cheating at
a game. He who loses a game (or, by extension, loses the game
of life by not becoming as successful or respected as he might
have desired), might be angry with himself or at his unskillful
play; but if he knows himself to have cheated at the game, he
must despise himself as soon as he compares his action with
the moral law. These two failures are different; the second
clearly lies in the moral realm and is connected to freedom.18
In this second response, we see again that there is a plane of
moral action that points to an independence from external
determination.
Finally, let us look at one last piece of evidence for our
freedom: the categorical imperative. Both our own inclinations
and sometimes the blandishments of others, including our
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friends and family, try to persuade us that we are a special case,
that a normally prescribed action is necessary just this once,
and that to take the action is really, in this situation, better for
all concerned. We may be told that this action is what God, or
our church, or our family, or our country demands of us if we
are to fulfill our responsibilities. These persuasions of sentiment, reason, and authority are effective because they touch on
our foremost moral weakness—the temptation to make a specific exemption for ourselves in a special case. The tendency
toward self-favoritism or particularism is a commonplace both
in philosophical systems of morality, where judgment of
actions typically must be made by an impartial spectator, and
in everyday legal practice, where we may not sit in judgment
in our own case. The Categorical Imperative is a rational procedure that makes this common and pervasive temptation
explicit, because it demands that actions be judged by universal and necessary laws: we must act so that the maxim of
our action can serve as a law for all rational beings—including,
quite pointedly, the law-determiner himself or herself.
Now it may seem that following commands, doing as one
is told, has the same form as Kantian duty. But this is problematic for several reasons. First and foremost is the sacrifice of
freedom in following a command that is not the product of
one’s own self-determination. In a bold move, Kant places
following commands together with following inclinations (two
functions that are kept strictly separate in most moral systems)
under the same heading, namely, being determined heteronomously. It is at this point that Kant introduces his famous
distinction distinguishing actions that are merely in conformity
with duty from actions that are in conformity with duty and
done for duty’s sake. Kant places actions that merely conform
with duty in the category of legality, which is, strictly speaking, an empty formalism, since it is independent of intentions
and motivations. Actions that are both in conformity with duty
and done for the sake of duty bring into play the pure practical
reason as well as a will that can determine itself, apart from
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desire and representation, by means of the universal form of
the categorical imperative. The pressing question here is: How
can a form, namely the form of universality, serve as a material
incentive?
Kant’s answer to this question takes us to a strange place.
In his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant asserts
that we are free to decide, after a certain age, which of our
inclinations we will we allow to influence us. He does not
mean that we cease to feel these inclinations; he is asserting,
rather, that in feeling them we are not necessitated to act. Or,
to put it more broadly: we can choose our character by deciding which of our inclinations to emphasize. It is in this freedom
of choice that we can decide to have the universal form be the
principle of the maxims by which we act. This decision
happens in the twinkling of an eye. Kant describes it in this
way:
[I]f a man is to become not merely legally, but morally, a
good man . . . this cannot be brought about through a
gradual reformation, so long as the basis of the maxims
remain impure, but must be effected through a revolution
in man’s disposition. . . . He can become a new man only
by a kind of rebirth, as it were a new creation.19
Strictly speaking, this does not constitute evidence of Kant’s
uncanny space of freedom. But he is not the only thinker to
claim that our freedom to decide what will influence us determines what character we will have. In the myth of Er near the
end of the Republic, Plato depicts our souls in a place outside
of time, having to choose a life, a character that they will fall
into.20 Kant suggests something similar: a place of freedom, a
place outside of time, in which we can actually exercise the
faculty of choice.
III. Conclusion
Kant’s step of setting our humanity aside, of asking us to be indifferent to our desires, has evoked passionate criticism. Some
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are upset by his refusal to allow our inclinations—especially
our positive inclinations such as care and sympathy—to serve
as a ground for obligation; others complain that he ignores the
consequences of our actions; yet others are genuinely puzzled
by what in the world (or out of it, for that matter) Kant could
possibly mean by designating humans as “finite rational
beings.” For the most part, these criticisms come from critics
of single-principle moralities such as Kant’s that place a
premium on conformance to duty and obligation; such moralities tend to denigrate concerns for life-fulfillment or happiness,
that is, questions about what is good to love or good to be, both
for ourselves and for others. The great benefit of Kant’s moral
system is that it can resolve complicated situations in which
there are competing goods, and cut short the angst of moral
remorse. But the critics of single-principle moralities ask, At
what cost do we purchase this benefit? And for them, the
answer seems unacceptably high: At the cost of our humanity.
All of these are understandable concerns, but behind most
of these criticisms is the fear that if we become indifferent to
our desires, to our humanity, we will lose what makes us most
truly who we are. This self is our personal self—not personal
in the Kantian sense of having standing in a court of law as a
bearer of rights, but personal in the sense of a personal touch
or personality. In creating the moral world by acting as if we
are members of a possible kingdom of ends (a creation ex
nihilo, since we are not guided by a pre-existing good nor tied
to our existing potentialities), we are acting impersonally. Kant
is asserting that at the very core of our being exists an impersonal space. It is this space that Kant seeks to preserve,
because he sees it as the guarantee for whatever dignity we
have. As he says in the Groundwork of The Metaphysics of
Morals:
There is a sublimity and dignity in the person who fulfills
all his duties. For there is indeed no sublimity in him
insofar as he is subject to the moral law, but there is
insofar as he is at the same time lawgiving with respect to
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it and only for that reason subordinated to it.21
Our dignity demands that happiness is not a blessing to be
bestowed on us by a higher power as a reward for obedience or
service; rather, it is a right belonging to reason, and it ought to
be distributed in proportion to the worthiness of being happy.
If we insist that a personal self lies at our core as the
foundation for our dignity, we abandon the possibility of being
a lawgiver in a possible kingdom of ends; in effect, we
abandon reason. If we replace Kant’s pure reason with a reason
that is socially and historically mediated, we relinquish the
possibility that reason can access the space of freedom. For
Kant, it is this lawgiving self, a universal, necessary, and enddetermining rational power, which is admittedly impersonal
and uncanny, that is at the center of our being. This rational
power, this pure practical reason, determines its own ends, and
therefore it should be respected as an end-in-itself—that is, as
a moral being. In Kant’s view, as expressed in the passage from
the Introduction of the Critique of Practical Reason quoted
earlier,22 pure practical reason allows us to attain a threefold
end that other moral systems cannot match: the requirements
of reason are satisfied by rational faith; the supremacy of our
faculty of pure reason (which defines who we are) is preserved
as practical; and our dignity remains intact—not as knowers of
eternal truth, but as autonomous moral beings.
NOTES
1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp
Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929), 29 (Bxxix-xxx).
2. Dante, Paradiso, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander
(New York: Anchor Books, 2007), 3.
3. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 482 (B592).
4. Ibid., 482 (B591).
5. Ibid., 629 (B823).
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6. Ibid., 29 (Bxxix-xxx).
7. Ibid., 637-38 (B836).
8. Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason” in Practical
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 148-49.
9. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, 144n.
10. Ibid., 148.
11. David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals,”
in Moral Philosophy, ed. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing, 2006), 274.
12. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, 148.
13. Ibid., 140.
14. Kant, “Groundwork of The Metaphysics of Morals,” in Practical
Philosophy, 107.
15. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, 141.
16. Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, Part II, Chapters XV-XIX.
17. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, 163.
18. Ibid., 170.
19. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans.
Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson, ed. John Silber (New York:
Harper and Row, 1960), 42-3.
20. Plato, Republic 614b-621d.
21. Kant, “Groundwork,” in Practical Philosophy, 88.
22. See above, pp. 00-00 and note 8.
REFLECTIONS
73
What Did You Learn?
Lise van Boxel
Congratulations on successfully completing the Master’s
Program in Liberal Arts.
Now that you have your M.A., it is a good time to reflect
upon what you have learned and the reasons why you began
the journey that led you to your degree. What knowledge have
you acquired at St. John’s College? Have you gained any
practical skills here? Your employers or potential clients, your
friends and your family will certainly ask such questions. What
will you say to them? What do you say to yourself?
Before turning to a consideration of possible answers to
such questions, consider briefly some of the presuppositions
that often underlie them. Frequently, the real meaning of
“What did you learn?” is, “In what way has this education contributed to your value as a worker or to your ability to earn a
living?”
These questions are not ridiculous. Unless you are lucky
enough to be independently wealthy or to have a patron, you
have to think about how to support yourself. On the other hand,
it is wrong-headed to think of education simply or primarily in
these terms, as if employability and income were the highest,
most important considerations for a human being.
Friedrich Nietzsche offers a vivid description of this
impoverished and narrow understanding of education—an
understanding that characterizes the modern era. In sum, he
argues that an education that looks solely or primarily to the
marketplace deforms the souls of its students because it is
Commencement Address to the Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, August 12,
2011. Lise van Boxel is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
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ignorant of, or denies, the proper fullness and activity of the
human soul:
[T]he present age is . . . supposed to be an age, not of whole,
mature and harmonious personalities, but of labour of the
greatest possible common utility. That means, however, that
men have to be adjusted to the purposes of the age so as to
be ready for employment as soon as possible: they must
labour in the factories of the general good before they are
mature, indeed so that they shall not become mature—for
this would be a luxury which would deprive the ‘labour
market’ of a great deal of its workforce. Some birds are
blinded so that they may sing more beautifully; I do not think
the men of today sing more beautifully than their grandfathers, but I know they have been blinded.1
Nietzsche grants that the emphasis on science, and more
specifically on science directed by the marketplace, will indeed
produce economic success, at least in the short term. However,
he adds that this kind of science is a desiccated version of the
comprehensive understanding that is the proper goal of science
or higher learning more generally—a goal that the modern
world has largely abandoned:
I regret the need to make use of the of the slave-owner and
the employer of labour to describe things that in themselves
ought to be thought of as free of utility and raised above the
necessities of life; but the words ‘factory’, ‘labour market’,
‘supply’, ‘making profitable’, and whatever auxiliary verbs
egoism now employs, come unbidden to the lips when one
wishes to describe the most recent generation of men of
learning. Sterling mediocrity grows even more mediocre,
science ever more profitable in the economic sense. . . .
Those who unwearyingly repeat the modern call to battle and
sacrifice—‘Division of labour! Fall in!’—must for once be
told in round and plain terms: if you want to push science
forward as quickly as possible you will succeed in destroying
it as quickly as possible; just as a hen perishes if it is
compelled to lay eggs too quickly.2
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If Nietzsche’s account of the trend in modern education
aptly describes the kind of education you did not receive and
to which, I think, St. John’s is opposed, how might you describe what you did learn here?
While denouncing an overly narrow view of education,
Nietzsche alludes to the effect of a complete education: it
would create “whole, mature and harmonious personalities.”
Neither you nor I can honestly claim that you acquired a complete and harmonious soul as a result of several years of education at St. John’s. This is not to say that I reject the idea that the
truly authoritative education aims at, and can produce, a harmonious soul. Rather, I think this education is the ongoing
activity of a lifetime. Nonetheless, I do believe that the liberal
education you received here can contribute greatly to the
attainment of this goal. However, I will put aside these ideas
for the moment, and I will turn instead to a more modest articulation of what a liberal education is and what skills may be
acquired as a result of it.
To do so, I will replace Nietzsche’s high-flying, though
accurate, description of a complete education with Aristotle’s
sensible, though still ambitious, account of a liberal education.
In distinguishing a specialist from someone who, like you, has
been generally educated, he says:
With regard to every [kind of] contemplation and inquiry,
both lowlier and more esteemed alike, there appear to be two
ways of being skilled, one of which it is well to call the
science of the thing, and the other as it were a kind of educatedness. For it is characteristic of an educated man to be able
to hit the mark and judge appropriately what the speaker sets
forth finely and what he doesn’t. For something like this is in
fact what we suppose the generally educated man to be, and
that to be educated is to be capable of doing this very thing—
except that we believe that this one, the generally educated
man, is able to judge about virtually all things, though being
one man, but that the other one is able to judge [only] about
some limited nature.3
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I do not recommend launching yourself into this quotation
when asked what practical skills you acquired at St. John’s
College, though if you decide to do so, take a deep breath, and
deliver it with panache. You can, however, capture the essence
of what Aristotle says in your own words.
In my own words, I say that, as a result of your liberal
education, you are better able to judge when an argument or
account is adequate and when it is not. When it is inadequate,
you are more capable of seeing how it is deficient and what
would need to be addressed to alleviate this shortcoming. Such
judgment can be brought to bear on any argument, regardless
of the field. If the argument includes technical language, all
you need is the time to look up the definitions of these words
before you are able to proceed as you would with any other
account. At bottom, such an argument is no different from any
other.
To Aristotle’s description, I would add that, as a result of
your education, you are now better able to admit when you do
not know something, and to do so without embarrassment. Do
not underestimate the value of this intellectual honesty. It will
help you to continue to learn. In addition, it will be greatly
appreciated by other people, most of whom are anxious about
their own ignorance, but are afraid to admit that they do not
know. It can be a tremendous relief to encounter someone who
can say without shame that he does not know, but that he wants
to learn.
This training in judgment—in clear thinking—is an
essential part of a liberal education. And it can indeed help you
to advance your career. I advise you, therefore, to consider how
you can describe this skill to others so that you can represent it
with the full strength that it deserves and in a manner that is
readily apparent to others. If you do this, you will be well
equipped to respond to those who want to know how you can
apply what you learned to the workplace.
This account of your education, however, is neither
complete nor does it capture the most important element of
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education. Aristotle would say that, in order truly to judge well,
one must have a satisfactory understanding of the ultimate end
at which one aims. It is not enough to have an idea of the
proximate goal that one seeks to fulfill. One must have
adequate knowledge of whether and how this proximate goal
accords with the highest and most comprehensive goal at
which human beings can and should aim. Without a sufficient
account of this authoritative, supreme good—the Good—no
judgment is adequate, strictly speaking, and consequently one
cannot truly be said to know. Thus, any education can and must
be considered in terms of whether and how it can contribute to
the Good. Regarding questions about whether your education
here was practical, therefore, the real issue is not whether this
education will contribute to your employment opportunities,
but whether it contributes to your knowledge of the Good. And
the real question about your job is not whether your education
has made you suitable for it, but whether it can contribute to
your ability to lead a good life.
No, I will not let go of the highest account of education to
which Nietzsche alludes and which, I dare say, all great
thinkers share. Moreover, I expect that you empathize with me
in my refusal to forgo these highest goals.
While some of you came to St. John’s partly in order to
advance your career, I doubt that any of you came here
primarily for this reason. You came because you had
questions—questions that perhaps you could not quite articulate, even to yourself, but that you could not put aside. As you
made your way through the works of our Program, I suspect
many of you began to recognize your questions reflected back
to you in the Great Books: “What is justice?” “What is love or
friendship?” “What kind of beings are we, and what is our
place in this world?”
Many and perhaps all of these questions arise from a
common origin: the yearning to have a good life, combined
with the realization that you do not know clearly enough what
this is. I suspect, in other words, that the fundamental reason
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why you came here was because you thought this education
might help you to understand the Good.
Since our human life is limited, and since the clock is
already ticking on the time that we have, this question of the
Good is urgent. No one wants to realize at the end of his life
that he misused or wasted his time. And since none of us know
how much time we have, it is foolish for any of us to postpone
the question of the Good indefinitely.
Such talk of mortality and the Good sounds very serious.
Well, what did you expect? Has anything valuable that you
have read or discussed here been unserious? Thankfully,
seriousness does not have to be grave. You need only recall the
company you have kept as you have pursued your questions,
and you will feel, not weighted down, but elevated by the
astounding souls who have walked alongside you.
Here is Plato, on the same journey as you, speaking with a
voice as nuanced and relevant as it was some 2,400 years ago.
With a touch of mischief, he doubles himself, adopting the
voice of Socrates, who recollects taking this same path, just a
day earlier: “I went down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon, son of Ariston.”4
Another man introduces himself with the words: “Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the
Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment
that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war.”5
He hands you his book, which contains his thoughts about your
shared questions, saying as he does so: “I have written my
work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the
moment, but as a possession for all time.”6
Homer turns his blind eyes upon you and points to Achilles
and Odysseus, each of whom tackles the questions of the good
life and what it means to be a good human being. Shakespeare
speaks to you with a profundity that is surely expressed in
some of the most beautiful language ever heard. Nietzsche
reaffirms life with a cry from his electric soul: “We still feel it,
the whole need of the spirit and the whole tension of its bow.”7
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79
These souls are among the best students and teachers ever
to have lived. Their greatness consists largely in the fact that
they investigated the most serious eternal questions with
unmatched comprehensiveness and depth. What have you
learned from them about the Good?
If you have learned anything, it is that, when speaking to
one who does not already know the answer, you cannot
respond meaningfully to this question in a single sentence or
two. You might say, for example, that they taught you that the
good life is the philosophic life or the life devoted to the
Divine, but then you would have to explain what philosophy or
the Divine is and what it would mean to dedicate your life to
such things.
While there are answers to these questions, each answer
leads to a new question—and this is not the occasion for a long
conversation. It is the occasion, however, to remind you that all
of these great students and teachers spent their lives engaged
with such questions. Inquiry is thereby shown to be central to,
if not the essence of, a good human life. Furthermore—and this
is worth emphasizing, since you are have now exited the
Master’s Program—these students were able to learn from virtually everything and everyone, if not directly, then indirectly.
Life after your M.A. may not be as leisurely as it was when you
were a student, but you can and will find opportunities to learn,
if only you come to embrace life itself as a learning opportunity.
I hope and expect that something of this way of life has
become a part of you and that, if you look around now at the
faces of your fellow students, you will see in their eyes something of the souls of those great human beings who are your
models.
Continue to be thoughtful. Be open-minded. Retain the
flexibility of soul that is necessary for continued learning. In
sum, keep the goal of a good life always before you. Use the
Good as your North Star to guide every significant action and
decision you make. Doing this will not guarantee that you
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always make the right decision, but it will mean that you will
have done the best that you could do, and that, whatever contingencies you may face, you will have led the best life that is
possible for you.
Let me conclude with one of Plato’s favorite valedictions:
“Have success in action, and do what is good.”8
NOTES
1. Friedrich Neitzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for
Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 97-98.
2. Ibid., 99.
3. Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, 639a2-15, trans. David Bolotin.
4. Plato, Republic, trans. Allen Bloom, 2nd ed., (New York: Basic
Books, 1991), 3.
5. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, in The Landmark
Thucydides, ed. Robert B.Strassler (New York: Free Press, 2008), 3.
6. Ibid., 16.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kauffmann
(New York: Vintage, 1989), 3.
8. Plato, Republic, 303 and 472.
POETRY | ZUCKERMAN
To the New Recruits
Elliott Zuckerman
From now on I’ll refer to you as waiters,
even those whose ears do not resemble
the picture in the magazine.
You will be issued the standard bill of fare
including a list of all the famous sauces
and all the substitutions we allow.
You’ll wear the studded cuff
the collar and the pied cravat
and those who can will wear the earrings
that fascinate the men who dine here,
whether they arrive by pre-arrangement
or enter dazed directly from the street.
I ask you not to fall in love.
When two of you collide, just smile,
stand up again and go about your business.
The moppers will come running.
Ignore the murmuring of the clients who
deplore the loss of sequence in the dance.
After a month or two you’ll get the steps
and grow to like the music.
Then we can film the service.
We’ll play it back at half the pace of life
And next we’ll show it speeded up.
The comic rondo will delight us all.
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REVIEWS
83
DELPHIC EXAMINATIONS
David Leibowitz, The Ironic Defense of
Socrates: Plato’s Apology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010.
204 pages, $80.
Book Review by David Bolotin
David Leibowitz’s book on Plato’s Apology of Socrates is in the
first place a thorough and penetrating interpretation of the dialogue. It also claims, however, and attempts to show, that the
Apology is the key to the entire Platonic corpus, and to this end it
includes thoughtful interpretations of various aspects of other
dialogues. Yet the book’s ultimate ambition goes much further
even than this. For its chief aim is to show, in Leibowitz’s words,
“that Plato’s Socrates is not just a colorful and quirky figure from
the distant past, but an unrivaled guide to the good life—the
thoughtful life—who is as relevant today as he was in ancient
Athens” (1).* Thus, Leibowitz combines his interpretations with
arguments for the truth of the Socratic positions that he has
brought to light. The book even includes arguments in Leibowitz’s own name that reply to objections a reader might make to
Socratic views. Now it is likely to be younger readers who are
most open to the question of whether Plato’s Socrates is an
unrivaled guide to the good life, and thus the book’s primary
audience is not other scholars but these younger readers. But
Leibowitz asks of his readers that they follow him in his
scholarly, and even more than scholarly, attention to the details of
Plato’s text (24-25). And his reason for doing so is indicated in his
book’s title. Socrates was ready and even wanted, on Leibowitz’s
* Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in The Ironic Defense of Socrates:
Plato’s Apology.
David Bolotin is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe.
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view, to be convicted at his trial and executed, out of a wish to
promote the cause of philosophy by becoming a martyr for it. But
this wish required him to explain to potential philosophers what
philosophy is while concealing from the other citizens—even as
he was courting death—those aspects of it that, as he thought,
could never become publicly acceptable (59-60, 154-160). And in
order to achieve all this in a single address, Socrates had to speak
ironically, a term that Leibowitz well explains to mean speaking
“in a ‘double’ fashion so as to be understood differently by
different listeners” (18). But this implies that Socrates’ deepest
thoughts could be revealed only in hints, whose intended meaning
could come to light only though careful attention to his words. We
who have the good fortune to be able to study these words as
Plato presented them must therefore pay great attention to subtle
details of Plato’s text. Leibowitz himself has surely done this, and
though his account of the philosophic life and his argument for its
being the good life are ultimately stated with great directness, he
develops them in stages, following Socrates’ own guidance,
through an almost line-by-line reading of the Apology.
It would be too large a task for me to comment on Leibowitz’s work in its entirety. So I shall limit myself instead to what
he himself presents as the core of his account, his interpretation
of Socrates’ story of the Delphic oracle. According to Leibowitz,
this story is a fiction, whose purpose is to call attention, as
inoffensively as possible, to the central theoretical crisis in
Socrates’ life. As we know from the Phaedo and from Aristophanes’ Clouds, Socrates in his youth was a student of natural
philosophy. But the Phaedo also teaches us that Socrates’ study of
nature led him to an impasse, since he realized that he could not
be certain of the causes, i.e., the necessary causes, why things
come into being, are as they are, and perish. Recognizing the
limits of his knowledge of nature, Socrates also came to recognize
that he could not even be certain that there is nature, which he
understood as a necessity that limits what a being or class of
beings can do or suffer. The implications of this awareness of
ignorance were made more acute by his recognition that many
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people at least implicitly deny that there is nature, since they
believe in gods with unlimited power to intervene in the world.
Moreover, at least some of these believers claim to have had
evidence of there being such gods from their own experience of
them. Thus, Socrates had to admit that, for all he knew, the study
of “nature” was a pseudo-science based on a false premise, and
also a turning away from the deepest human evidence of truth.
According to Leibowitz, it was this crisis resulting from Socrates’
youthful pursuit of natural philosophy that led him to the crossexaminations that he pretended to undertake at the instigation of
the Delphic oracle. In keeping with this suggestion, Leibowitz
presents these examinations primarily as attempts by Socrates to
learn that his interlocutors lacked the evidence of omnipotent
gods that they thought they possessed—or in other words, that
what they had thought of as evidence was illusory. For if he could
know this about his interlocutors, then even though he lacked
certainty that natural necessities are at the root of things, he could
at least know that he knew no one else with a firmer hypothesis
(63-69). Leibowitz also argues that there was a second reason for
Socrates’ “Delphic” examinations, even on the assumption that he
could successfully refute his interlocutors’ claims to superhuman
wisdom. For he says that Socrates came to doubt, even on the
assumption that there is no such wisdom, whether the life of
philosophy is the best or happiest life, and he interprets the crossexaminations as having the subordinate aim of confirming that it
is (72-73).
In discussing Leibowitz’s interpretation of Socrates’
“Delphic” activity, I will stress what I see as difficulties with his
account rather than its merits. This is not because I am blind to
these merits—which seem to me to be quite considerable—or that
I disagree with Leibowitz about what is primarily at stake in
Socrates’ examinations—which I do not. But since I believe that
he does not give an adequate account of this central aspect of
Socrates’ life, I feel compelled to say why.
Let me begin with the second of the two reasons that Leibowitz gives for Socrates’ Delphic examinations, since it is the one
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he focuses on first in his own elaboration. To repeat, Leibowitz
claims that Socrates had to examine the various classes of nonphilosophers in order “to confirm that the life of philosophy or
science, or to speak more cautiously, the life based on human
wisdom, is the best or happiest life if indeed there is no ‘superhuman wisdom’ to guide us” (72). And the first thing I would say
about this suggestion is that I can see little if any evidence for it
in Plato’s text. The only time that Socrates even mentions the
question of whether his life is preferable to those of his interlocutors, as distinct from the question of whether he is wiser than
they—though even here it is not simply distinct from it—is in the
context of his examination of the craftsmen. And the reason he
asks it seems to be that he had to grant to the craftsmen a superiority of sorts in wisdom, since they were wise in their crafts, even
though, like his other interlocutors, they turned out to suppose
falsely that they were wise with regard to the greatest things. For
that reason he asked himself whether he would prefer to be as he
was, neither wise in their wisdom nor ignorant in their ignorance,
or to be as they were; and he replied that it was better for him to
be as he was. But apart from this, Socrates’ account of his examinations deals only with the question of whether he was wiser than
his interlocutors. It is true, of course, that he will later claim that
his own way of life is “the greatest good” (or, perhaps more
precisely, “a very great good”) for a human being, and that “the
unexamined life is not livable for a human being” (Apology of
Socrates 38a1-7). But he never suggests that these conclusions
relied on any fruits of his examinations other than the knowledge
he gained of his interlocutors’ inferiority in wisdom.
Further difficulties with this suggestion of Leibowitz’s
emerge when we consider his discussion of it in more detail.
Leibowitz stresses, and rightly, that after coming to the conclusion that the first political man he examined was not wise,
Socrates “did not leave it at that. Instead, he tried to show him
both that he thought he was wise and that he was not. . . . In short,
Socrates exposed him as a fraud” (75). Not surprisingly, this
caused Socrates to be hated, both by the politician and by many
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of the bystanders, and Leibowitz asks what Socrates’ reason could
have been for “the seeming malice of his procedure. Why did he
rub the man’s nose in his foolishness” (75)? Dismissing what I
agree is the implausible suggestion that Socrates hoped to steer
the politician toward philosophy, Leibowitz proposes an answer
to his question in terms of Socrates’ eagerness to establish—even
assuming “that he is already confident that no superhuman
wisdom (divine guidance) exists”—that “philosophy is the best
way of life for any human being capable of living it” (77-78). And
he suggests that Socrates hoped to confirm this belief by prompting his interlocutors, once they saw that they lacked wisdom
about the noble and good, about which he questioned them, to
acknowledge that their lives appeared “fundamentally defective
or unsatisfying” (78). In other words, Socrates confirms that
philosophy is the best way of life by showing that everyone can
in principle be brought to agree with him that their alternative
ways of life are unsatisfying. Ultimately, then, there is no dispute,
since the philosopher is the only one whose belief in the goodness
of his life can be maintained in the face of scrutiny. According to
Leibowitz, Socrates’ interlocutor will come to feel dissatisfied
with his life because the beliefs that Socrates shows to be false or
inconsistent are central to his way of life. But how will Socrates’
interlocutor reveal his dissatisfaction with his life? Leibowitz
says that he will do so by “getting angry at Socrates. . . , blaming
him for his distress, perhaps even coming to hate him” (79). This
anger and hatred will reveal the pain he feels once he sees not
only that Socrates’ refutation is sound, but also that it destroys a
prop on which his satisfaction with life has depended. And
accordingly, “anger and possibly even hatred are part of the
confirmation that Socrates seeks, not unintended, or altogether
unintended, byproducts of his examinations. In many cases, they
may be the only confirmation available” (79).
But as I said, there are difficulties with this account. In the
first place, it assumes that Socrates is successful in showing his
interlocutors that they are unwise, or that their fundamental
beliefs are false. But Socrates says explicitly, in the only case
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where he describes at length this aspect of his examinations, that
his (first) interlocutor did not see this, but that in Socrates’ view
he continued to suppose that he was wise (Apology of Socrates
21d4-5). According to Leibowitz, however, this continuance of
his false belief, and therefore also his continuing sense of satisfaction with his life, was the result of “powerful defenses,” which
allow people to “bury this awareness [viz., that their lives are
unsatisfactory] by the next day or even the next minute” (79-80).
“But this changes nothing,” he continues. “For in their one
moment of clarity, they themselves have judged their lives to be
defective” (80). Socrates’ first interlocutor has revealed this judgment by his anger, or more precisely, “the disturbing insight that
leads to his anger is clouded by or in the anger itself,” so that
Socrates’ attempt to show him that he was not wise “both did and
did not succeed” and “its success was partial and unenduring”
(80-81). This is how Leibowitz can square his account with Socrates’ unambiguous statement that he thought he had not succeeded in his attempt to show this interlocutor that he was not
wise.
But in fact Leibowitz’s suggestion is unsupported by the text
of the Apology. On the basis of the dialogue, it makes more sense
to say that Socrates’ interlocutors, or at least those among them
who became angry at him, never stopped believing that they knew
what the noble and good (or virtue) was, even when their assertions about it were refuted. They may have recognized that they
were unable to give an adequate account of it in the face of
Socrates’ questions, but this meant only in their view that they
were unable to give adequate expression to what they knew (cf.
Meno 79e7-80b4; Laches 194a7-b4, 200b2-4). And so their anger
at Socrates must not have stemmed from the pain of becoming
aware of their ignorance, and thus dissatisfied with their lives, but
rather from the more common pain of being insulted (cf. Meno
94e3-95a3). Indeed, an additional difficulty with Leibowitz’s
suggestion is that an interlocutor’s anger could never reveal
clearly that its source was anything other than this more obvious
one. Leibowitz acknowledges the difficulty of interpreting an
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interlocutor’s anger, but he dismisses it on inadequate grounds,
with a mere assertion that in practice it “may not be very difficult”
to distinguish the anger that he says Socrates is looking for from
other kinds (79).1
But if Socrates’ attempt to make his (older) interlocutors
aware of their ignorance was not aimed at eliciting the kind of
anger and hatred that Leibowitz suggests it was, what was its
purpose? I am not certain of the ultimate answer to this question,
but the most plausible beginning point is that Socrates must have
wanted to confirm what he in fact discovered, that he would be
unable to show them their ignorance of virtue, or in other words
that their confusion about it was ineradicably deep-seated or that
they had a stake in holding on to this confusion. This discovery
must have been important enough to Socrates that he was willing
to incur the anger and hatred that he knew he would arouse in the
course of coming to it. But he was not looking for the anger itself.
Leibowitz has given a surprising amount of weight to what he
regards as Socrates’ attempt to discover through conversation that
his interlocutors, in addition to being his inferiors in wisdom,
lived less satisfying lives than his own. His Socrates does not
assume that his discovery of their lack of wisdom, or their
confusion about virtue, is sufficient to confirm the superiority of
his life to theirs. They themselves must be made to see, if only
partially and only for a moment, that their lives are unsatisfying.
Leibowitz argues for the significance of such a moment by
reminding his readers that we human beings want more than
illusory happiness, such as the “happiness” of a deceived cuckold,
but a contentment rooted in truth (82-84). But what if it turned out
that some human beings were satisfied with illusory happiness, or
that their contentment with their lives was not affected, even for
a moment, by the discovery that they were based on falsehood?
How could this imagined state of affairs have been of any concern
to a man like Socrates? Would it have made him doubt the superiority of his life to theirs? Hardly. And more generally, in order to
be convinced of the choiceworthiness of the philosophic life,
Socrates did not need to burst other people’s bubbles.
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Leibowitz’s belief that Socrates deliberately sought to
provoke anger and even hatred in his interlocutors has an unfortunate bearing, it seems to me, on the tone of his own writing. For
too often he expresses his unavoidably challenging views with
unnecessary and un-Socratic harshness, a harshness that could
well provoke anger and hatred, especially in older readers. I have
already cited his claim that Socrates exposed the first of his
examinees “as a fraud,” and that he rubbed his nose “in his
foolishness.” Along the same lines, he claims later in the book
that those refuted by Socrates’ youthful imitators—their fathers,
or at least men of their fathers’ generation—act “as if Socrates
were to blame for their own stupidity.” And he adds that when
they are asked how Socrates corrupts the youth, as they accuse
him of doing, they are “of course not about to reply, ‘by teaching
the young to expose men like me for the fools and frauds we
really are!’” (105). Such language on Leibowitz’s part seems to
me to show a failure to appreciate the respect—even intellectual
respect—that Socrates, like any sane man, would naturally feel
for at least some of those who turn out to be confused about the
questions he raises. Another example of Leibowitz’s harshness is
his suggestion that “ordinary decency” (which he here distinguishes from the “deeper and more solid decency” of the
philosopher) is “perhaps the chief enemy” of philosophy (109).
Or consider his claim that Socrates is confident, even before
conversing with his typical interlocutor, that “his moral beliefs are
always false. . . , in the first place because they are sure to
presume the existence of ‘high’ things. . . , yet Socrates knows
through his own reflection that highness in the relevant sense is
literally inconceivable” (96). A footnote makes clear that by
“highness in the relevant sense” Leibowitz means “intrinsic worth
or goodness” (97). And later in this footnote he adds, “Given the
unintelligibility of the notion [viz., of intrinsic worth or
goodness], it is a cause for wonder, then, that belief in high things
has such extraordinary vitality in people’s lives” (97). Now in
company with Kant, as well as most ordinary people, I disagree
with Leibowitz’s assertion that intrinsic worth or goodness is an
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unintelligible notion (whether or not it is as fundamental a
concern for us as Kant thinks it is). But even apart from this, why
does Leibowitz choose to assign the word “high”—even if
slightly qualified at first—to a notion that he rejects as unintelligible? Later in this footnote he admits, “[T]o deny that there are
high things is not, of course, to deny that there are admirable or
beautiful ones” (97). But this admission rings hollow in the wake
of his initial rejection of the very notion of highness. And readers
of what he calls ordinary decency, who are likely to be deeply
attached to the notion of highness, whether or not they understand
it adequately, are therefore also likely to feel anger and hatred
toward a way of life that is said to reject it out of hand. Under less
liberal conditions than those which prevail now in the West, such
feelings could lead to a renewal of the persecution of philosophy.
Even now, they are likely to stand in the way of Leibowitz’s
attempt to guide the most promising young people toward the
philosophic life (cf. 174). And I fear that Leibowitz’s apparent
indifference to these concerns—in practice, if not in principle (cf.
59-60)—is at least partly rooted in his view of Socrates as a man
who deliberately sought to provoke anger and hatred.
But let me turn now to the primary reason that Leibowitz
gives for Socrates’ Delphic examinations, namely, his concern to
meet the theoretical challenge to philosophy posed by those who
claim to have evidence of an omnipotent god or gods. For, to
repeat, this claim directly calls into question the presupposition of
philosophy that there are natural or necessary limits to all possible
change. Now it is not immediately apparent, to say the least, to
the reader of Plato that Socrates’ Delphic examinations had this
anti-theological motive. But Leibowitz’s excellent interpretation
of many large and small details of the Apology (and of other
dialogues) might well convince even a reader who, unlike me,
was not already persuaded of it that this view was sound.
However, Leibowitz’s account of the precise manner in which
Socrates’ refutations aim to meet this challenge to philosophy
seems to me to be problematic, both in itself and in terms of the
textual evidence that he claims for it. According to Leibowitz,
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Socrates thought that his Delphic conversations, which were
primarily about virtue, “are somehow the key to answering the
question of whether or not there are gods, and hence whether or
not philosophy in the full sense is possible” (71). More precisely,
I would say, and in keeping with the bulk of Leibowitz’s argument
(e.g., 67-68, 72), Socrates thought that they were somehow the
key to answering the question of whether or not human beings
have genuine evidence of there being gods. In Leibowitz’s view,
Socrates suspected that the belief that one has experienced the
presence of a god, a belief whose soundness—or, as I would say,
the alleged evidence for which—he could not dispute directly,
“rests on other false beliefs” (88), about virtue or morality, whose
falsity he thought he could show. Accordingly, his refutations are
intended to lead his pious interlocutors, once they have seen the
falsity of their own beliefs about virtue, to come to understand, if
only for a moment, that what they previously may have interpreted as experience of the supernatural was no such thing.
Leibowitz suggests that these interlocutors would perhaps reveal
their loss of faith in what they had taken to be their experience of
a god “by getting angry,” and he adds that “their reaction to what
he showed them must have been a crucial part of his confirmation
of the possibility of philosophy” (88, cf. 96).
I have the same doubts about this last suggestion as I do about
Leibowitz’s earlier suggestion that Socrates intended to provoke
in his interlocutors a momentary awareness of ignorance about
virtue and an angry response to it. But leaving this aside, let us see
how he supports his more fundamental claim—that according to
Socrates, belief that one has experienced the presence of a god
rests on one’s beliefs about virtue or morality. He leads up to this
suggestion through his account of Socrates’ examinations of the
poets, which he begins by quoting from Socrates’ own report of
these examinations. What Socrates says, in Leibowitz’s translation, is that he “soon came to know . . . that the poets do not
make what they make by wisdom, but by some sort of nature and
by divine inspiration, like the prophets and those who deliver
oracles. For they too say many noble things, but they know
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nothing of what they speak. And it was evident to me that the
poets also are affected in the same sort of way (22b8-c4)” (86).
According to Leibowitz, this passage means more than what it
says clearly, which is that the poets, like the prophets and those
who deliver oracles, do not speak as they do by wisdom or with
knowledge of what they are speaking about. Leibowitz thinks it
also means that these three classes are all “consciously or unconsciously . . . makers [not merely of poems and other verses, but]
of gods and of reports of seeming evidence of gods,” and that they
make these gods and these reports about gods by nature and not
by divine inspiration (87-88). Now I do not accept this interpretation of the text or the argument leading up to it, but rather than
going into tedious and I think unnecessary detail, let me say only
what seems to me most important: by presenting Socrates as
denying that his interlocutors were divinely inspired—though
Socrates explicitly asserts that they were, whether or not he meant
it literally (cf. Philebus 15e1)—Leibowitz weakens the focus of
Socrates’ concern, which was not to learn what cannot be learned,
namely, that there are no gods and no divine inspiration, but rather
to learn that the poets and the others do not possess knowledge of
what they speak about (which would of course include the gods).
But to continue with Leibowitz’s account, he goes on to ask,
“How has Socrates confirmed . . . that all three classes make what
they make by nature and not by wisdom or divine inspiration?
How has he to this extent settled the question of the gods? He
explains briefly with the words, ‘for (γάρ) they too’—the prophets
and those who deliver oracles as well as the poets—‘say many
noble things’—he does not say true things—of which they know
nothing. In other words, he implies that the belief that one has
been inspired by a god rests on other false beliefs about the
noble” (88). But these words of Socrates, which are presented by
Leibowitz as an answer to his question of how Socrates has
settled the question of the gods (to the extent at least of ruling out
that poets or prophets are divinely inspired), are clearly intended
rather by Socrates to explain why he has just likened the prophets
and those who deliver oracles to the poets. And from all that I can
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see, Socrates is not concerned here to settle the question of the
gods, except to the extent that his interlocutors’ claim to knowledge of them can be successfully challenged through the discovery that they say the many beautiful things they do—primarily, as
I agree, about virtue and about the noble, rather than the gods (cf.
Republic 598d7-e4, 599c6-e1, 600e5-6; Ion 531c2-d2)—without
knowledge of what they are speaking about.
But precisely how could the discovery of such ignorance on
the part of his interlocutors help Socrates make any progress at all
with respect to his question about the gods? Leibowitz addresses
this question directly in a section of his book entitled “Socrates’
Approach to the Theological Problem” (92). He contends that
Socrates tries to show his interlocutors, or at least those among
them who claim to have had “vivid and detailed experience of a
god,” that “the moral content of their experience—the divine
command, let us say—is incompatible with the moral perfection . . . that they demand, perhaps without knowing it, of god”
(93). “Consciously or unconsciously,” as Leibowitz elaborates a
bit later, “the believer raises the claim that god’s commandments
and actions are just, and this claim can be examined” (94). And,
returning to the original passage, “In the most successful cases the
interlocutors then come to doubt, at least for a time, that their
experience was genuinely divine” (93). This would of course
corroborate Socrates’ own suspicion. Leibowitz illustrates the
possibility of such conversations by referring to Socrates’
refutation of the definition of justice that he attributes to Cephalus
at the beginning of the Republic. In Leibowitz’s view, Cephalus’
belief that it is a requirement of justice always to return what one
has taken—to the extent, at least, that this really was his belief—
seems to have its origin, or to find support, in dreams in which a
Zeus-like figure commanded him to pay all his debts or be
tormented forever. On this view, and assuming that Cephalus
really held this belief about justice, Socrates would have hoped to
confirm that Cephalus would not respond to a reasonable critique
of this belief by objecting that a god’s commands must be obeyed
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whether or not they are just or seem just to our human reason, but
would instead come to doubt that his dreams were really divine.
This account, however, of Socrates’ approach to the
theological problem suffers in the first place from a lack of textual
evidence. Leibowitz’s premise that Socrates’ interlocutors
thought of morality or virtue as consisting in obedience to
divinely revealed commands seems to me to find no support,
except in the Euthyphro, where the virtue in question is piety (cf.
Leo Strauss, Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse, 134-35). The only
other instance I can think of where interlocutors in a Platonic
dialogue speak of virtue as obedience to divine commands, and
where their beliefs about what the gods have commanded are
transformed in the wake of a rational critique of their opinions
about virtue, is in the Laws. But in the Laws, the philosophic
character is not Socrates, but an Athenian stranger. And though
this stranger does indeed seem to be a kind of fictional “Socrates”
(who chose to flee Athens rather than accept death at the hands of
the city), his intention is not to provide a theoretical defense of the
possibility of philosophy, but rather to help frame a code of laws
for a newly founded city in Crete in which philosophy would, to
the extent possible, have legal sanction. Now it is true, as these
two instances suggest, that Leibowitz’s account does indeed
capture a genuine aspect of Socratic thought. But I see no
evidence that it gives an adequate picture of what Socrates hoped
to learn about the gods, or about our knowledge of them, from his
Delphic examinations.
Moreover, there is at least one substantive difficulty with
Leibowitz’s account, a difficulty that he raises himself, namely,
that it deals only with those interlocutors who believe that the
gods are just, and not with anyone who believes that they are
“unjust or unconcerned with justice” (95). Now for Leibowitz to
state the objection in this way is perhaps unfair to his own
argument, since he has just said that in Socrates’ view the believer
“consciously or unconsciously” (94) claims that god’s commandments and actions are just, and he has argued that Socrates
confirmed this view by seeing his interlocutors’ response to his
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refutations. But at all events, Leibowitz goes on to downplay the
significance of this objection by claiming, as he suspects that
Socrates discovered, that the belief in gods who are unjust or
unconcerned with justice is both rare and “almost never
supported—at least among believers who are even modestly
educated and sane—by the experience of revelation, that is, by
seeming evidence that natural philosophy cannot assess” (95).
Still, he acknowledges that “Socrates’ approach to the theological
problem cannot tie up every loose end,” and that “the possibility
of revelation from an amoral, willful, or radically mysterious god
cannot be ruled out” (95). But this last is a very serious admission.
For whatever may be the case about belief in gods who are unjust
or unconcerned with justice, the belief in a god who is radically
mysterious—in his actions, and even in his commands—has been
held by thoughtful people throughout the centuries (cf.
Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, III 25-26). For Socrates to
leave unchallenged, then, the alleged evidence of those who claim
to have had experience of such a god would be to fail to respond
to a most serious objection to the possibility of philosophy.2
But let me turn to Leibowitz’s most important reason for
focusing only on believers who believe in (intelligibly) just gods,
a reason that comes to light in what is also his most important
discussion of the confusion about morality that he thinks these
refutations disclose. Leibowitz claims that Socrates thought of
morality or virtue as something that people regard as the source
of happiness, not by constituting happiness itself, but by
promising it as a deserved reward. But since virtue itself, as the
argument continues, does not deliver this reward, it can have the
power that people think it has only if there are gods who do
deliver it. “Virtue, one can perhaps say, is a claim on the attention
and concern of just gods” (177). Leibowitz goes on to argue that
Socrates rejected the belief in just gods on several grounds, but
chiefly because the concern for virtue that it presupposes (and to
which it also gives support) rests, as he claims that Socrates
thought, on a confused and even contradictory view of our own
motivation. Leibowitz presents what he sees as this contradiction
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in the following way. He begins by observing that “virtue, seen in
the first place as noble, inspires devotion” (178). But then he says
that “devotion would seem to be harmful, if only because it
distracts us from the pursuit of our own good” (178). And since,
as he reminds us that Socrates claimed, no one voluntarily (or
knowingly) harms himself, he asks how voluntary devotion is
possible. His proposed answer to this question is that devotion to
virtue gives us hope that we will obtain—because we deserve to
obtain—a greater good than anything we might give up as a result
of such devotion. It is, then, as he says that Socrates suggests, “the
expectation, perhaps only half-conscious, of benefit to oneself
that makes devotion possible” (179). But this line of reasoning,
Leibowitz continues, which would seem to establish the possibility of voluntary devotion, “suggests instead the impossibility of
all devotion. For if benefit to oneself—as Socrates implies—is
our ultimate consideration, no true devotion is possible, for
devotion embraced as a benefit is not true devotion” (179). And
“if men are never truly devoted, they never meet the condition of
deserving rewards as they understand that condition” (179).
However, most of us never face up to this truth about our
motivation, and it is through this failure that we can preserve the
hopes that our attachment to virtue inspires. Accordingly,
Leibowitz concludes, our attachment to virtue, or at least the kind
of virtue that arouses hope in rewards from the gods, is rooted in
the contradictory thought that what we most care for is both the
noble and our own happiness.
This is a powerfully stated argument, as it seems to me, and I
am sympathetic to it, having even tentatively proposed something
similar to it in print myself. But Leibowitz proposes his argument
without tentativeness, and I must therefore say that in my view he
has failed to make his case. I will leave aside the difficulty that his
description of the believer as someone who thinks he deserves
divine rewards shows a surprising insensitivity to the fact that at
least the most thoughtful believers regard themselves as unworthy
to receive the blessings they hope for. For even apart from this,
the argument fails to show that the believer has contradictory
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thoughts about what he most cares for. A believer will readily
grant to Leibowitz that he cares very much about his own good or
his own happiness, which he hopes for both in this world and the
next. But he would deny that this is what he loves or cares for
most (cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II, qu.26, a.3).
He might fear that, because of his weakness, a loss of hope for his
own happiness could undermine his attachment to virtue, but he
would not believe that it would necessarily do so, and he might
even be thankful never to have experienced or yielded to such loss
of hope. And Leibowitz’s argument, it seems to me, has done
nothing to show that the believer’s view of himself is wrong. The
most he has done is to attribute to Socrates the claim that we care
mostly for our own good. But I don’t see his evidence even for
this assertion. What he apparently relies on is Socrates’ exhortation to virtue, “Not from money comes virtue, but from virtue
comes money and all of the other good things for human beings
(30a-b).” Leibowitz interprets this exhortation to mean that “men
should care above all for virtue, and for virtue for the sake of the
good things it brings. Men should and should not care above all
for virtue” (178). It is the latter of these conflicting claims that he
thinks Socrates means seriously. But Socrates’ statement that all
good things come from virtue does not say, as Leibowitz says it
does, that men should care for virtue for the sake of the good
things it brings, and surely not for the sake of these good things
above all. Socrates knew, of course, that the many among his
listeners might take him to be saying this. But that he made it easy
for them to do so means only that he understood them well
enough to know that he could not reach them with a higher
appeal. Leibowitz has therefore not shown that our own good is
our ultimate concern even according to Socrates. And so he has
also not shown, and not even shown that it was Socrates’ view,
that a believer’s hope for divine rewards rests on self-contradictory thoughts about what he cares for most.3 And this means,
finally, that he has neither undermined nor shown that Socrates
thought he had undermined the basis for this hope on the part of
the believer.
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It seems to me, then, that Leibowitz has not explained with
sufficient clarity what Socrates wished to accomplish through his
Delphic examinations or how he sought to accomplish it. In
particular, he has not explained adequately how Socrates hoped to
meet the challenge posed to philosophy or the study of nature by
those who claim to have evidence of miraculous gods. On the
other hand, he has outlined this challenge in an unusually
compelling way, and he has made a persuasive case that the
Apology presents the core of Socrates’ response to it. For this
merit, among many others, we should be grateful to Leibowitz for
his book. Even if he has not shown, as he intended to show, that
Socrates is an unrivaled guide to the good life, he has, I think,
shown that this is at least a serious possibility, and he will help his
best readers to keep considering the evidence for and against it on
their own.
NOTES
1. In a footnote, Leibowitz refers to Callicles’ anger in the Gorgias as a clear
case of what he calls the deeper kind of anger, but he offers no evidence that
Callicles ever becomes aware of his ignorance of virtue, as I believe he does
not. (Moreover, at the moment when he seems to come closest to that
awareness, at Gorgias 513c4-6, he is not angry at Socrates.)
2. I suspect that Leibowitz thinks that the possibility of revelation from a
radically mysterious god can indeed be ruled out, at least to some extent, on
the basis of what he speaks of as a necessary “second branch” of Socrates’
Delphic examinations, or the conversations he had with those “promising”
young people who could go “to the end of the road” with him in their
critique of our ordinary moral beliefs. Accordingly, when he says that
Socrates sought to determine “whether for them, as for himself, all traces of
seemingly divine experience eventually disappear,” I think he meant to
include in this even the apparent experience of a radically mysterious god
(98-100; cf. 134: “the so-called experience of the gods of the city, and
indeed of any gods”). But even if one admitted for the sake of argument that
this was Socrates’ intention and that he learned what he hoped to learn from
his most promising interlocutors, this would not be adequate to the question
at hand unless one could show the bearing of these conversations with
regard to his examinations of his more typical interlocutors. After all, a
radically mysterious god, and even a not so mysterious god, might be disin-
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TOLERATION
clined to reveal himself to people like Socrates. And I do not think that
Leibowitz has given an adequate account of the bearing of this “second
branch” of Socrates’ Delphic examinations.
3. There is perhaps the outline of a stronger argument for Leibowitz’s view
of our ultimate concern in his discussion of Glaucon on pages 96 and 97.
But even there I think he has failed to present an adequate case. In this
connection, I wonder about Leibowitz’s claim, in note 72 on page 99, that
Socrates would like to know “whether those who reconcile themselves to
unfathomable gods and inexpressible divine experiences could also, if
brought to see the truth about highness, reconcile themselves to the unintelligible nobility and goodness of the commands that these allegedly divine
experiences communicate.” For if Socrates knows, as Leibowitz claims he
knows, that “the noble and good,” or virtue, “does not exist” (180), because
it rests on contradictory thoughts about our motives, why would he care
whether others who appeared to understand his argument would accept its
conclusion? If they did not accept the conclusion, wouldn’t he assume that
they had not understood the argument?
Eva Brann, Homage to Americans
Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2010. 273
pages, $19.95.
Book Review by Janet Dougherty
Eva Brann’s Homage to Americans is an expression of heartfelt,
genuine, and ungrudging respect for the American people. As Ms.
Brann explains in the first essay of the book, “Mile-High Meditations,” true respect may involve—nay, it requires—thoughtful and
sometimes pointed criticism. In particular, she notes that toleration,
which has eclipsed and perhaps supplanted all other standards in
contemporary American society, is “helpless before reality” (7)* and
“culpably helpless in the face of evil” (3). Like Lincoln, Ms. Brann
displays a kind of “radical conservatism” in her writing: she reminds
us of our roots and thereby invites us to renew our awareness of our
convictions and our goals. She never preaches; she reflects. Beginning, as she says all reasoning must, in media res, Ms. Brann speaks
for herself and writes so as to invite her readers to engage in the
examination of our shared habits of thought. Homage to Americans
is the work of a master teacher who respects her students and therefore wishes them to think for themselves.
Homage to Amerians is divided into three parts: “Mile-High
Meditations,” “Close Readings,” and “Time-Spanning Speculations.”
“Mile-High Meditations” is a single essay in eight sections, named
according to the time and place of her reflections. In it we see Ms.
Brann’s mind at work, beginning with immediate responses to what
she sees around her and deepening into philosophical and practical
thinking of wide-ranging significance. The second part of the book
comprises close readings of Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance
*
Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in Homage to Americans.
Janet Dougherty is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe.
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and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The third part includes a lecture
given to the students of the Air Force Academy on “The Paradox of
Obedience,” together with a lecture given at St. John’s College on
the destruction of two great South American civilizations, the Aztec
and the Inca, by conquerors from Spain. The book is unified by Ms.
Brann’s persistent concern with the integrity of American culture,
and therefore with the prob-lem of reconciling the adherence to true
and defensible principles of human society with toleration of
otherness.
“Mile-High Meditations” is a fitting opening of the book, for in
it Ms. Brann puts into perspective the principle of toleration—which
means, in part, putting it into the context of the Western tradition.
Ms. Brann and the Americans to whom she speaks share this
tradition, albeit some of us half-heartedly and with little awareness.
Her writing moves seamlessly from contemporary American society
to Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Spinoza and Heidegger, Swift, Shakespeare, and Wallace Stevens. This is no display of erudition, but
rather of openness to the tradition wherever it can offer support for
genuine inquiry. Ms. Brann’s style of writing is egalitarian in its
openness to insight wherever it manifests itself, and therefore to the
tradition that shapes our society. In “Mile-High Meditations” she
invites her readers to reflect upon the appropriate limits to toleration,
and the invitation is unequivocally democratic. All may engage in the
inquiry she shares with her readers; all, that is, who are willing to risk
“respectful contempt,” the rightful punishment for those who fall
short of the standard to which we deserve to be held. This is democracy in the high sense. This is the democracy that we ought to count
as our heritage.
For a thoughtful citizen there are no insuperable barriers
between intellectual inquiry and everyday reflection. Americans can
seek depth of understanding wherever it is to be found and we ought
to begin wherever we find ourselves. Ms. Brann shows the way by
reflecting on an overweight couple playing chess in the Denver
airport. (Their tastes, happily, are not limited to fast-food pizza.) She
provides a model of judging cautiously without surrendering the
power to make judgments. Toleration, she shows us, cannot be held
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as a principle overriding all others without being intellectually flabby
as well as weak in the defense of right; but respect for others requires
openness to their sometimes surprising combinations of traits. With
no absolutes to rely on, Ms. Brann plunges into the morass of distinctions that alone help to untangle mere prejudice from thoughtful
conjecture. In this piece Ms. Brann exhibits an intellectual courage
and straightforward honesty worthy of emulation. She acknowledges
that she shares the “bias for the thinkable, the bias of our West” (63).
(Who, after all, lacks biases?) Her ability to examine the grounds of
her convictions and the convictions that characterize the West does
not fade but rather gains momentum as she identifies what may be
the bias of all biases: “The faith that some thoughts are true and their
opposites false is attended by this unease: It is not itself a truth,
meaning a mode of the intellect in which it is through and through
lucid and—or rather because it is—about something through and
through genuine. It is rather an opinion, even a prejudice” (27). The
prejudice that there are truths drives one to seek them. Ms. Brann
does not pretend to settle the difficulties she articulates and clarifies.
But she does work towards greater clarity and, ultimately, toward
answers.
The compelling question of this piece, as I see it, is whether our
biases serve us as human beings worthy of respect, and, in doing so,
serve humanity? Do they allow for the “personal practice of virtue”
(both intellectual and moral) that Ms. Brann, by her own admission,
prefers over general principles of morality (79)? While falsity is a
condition for thinking through to the truth (31), and a multiplicity of
perspectives can give us insight into another’s position, to acknowledge those perspectives is not to obliterate the sense that some things
are beyond the pale. Near the close of this essay Ms. Brann reflects
on the difference between intellectual and moral virtue (“a virtue in
thinking is, however, often a vice in doing” [82]), and announces the
importance of “doing right.” This conviction is easy to account for in
those who “care less about the livability of life than its consecration”
(8)—that is, those who acknowledge a firm religious faith. With
regard to faith in God, Ms. Brann is Socratic: she chooses “knowing
that I don’t know” (49). She begins and ends the essay, however,
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with a reference to the possibility of evil. Without assuming that evil
is always easy to recognize, one must acknowledge the problem of
evil while putting toleration into perspective. One brief reference to
Nazism is enough to prove the point: “What, for example, was the
attraction offered by the Nazis to the young but Romanticism writ
large and made official” (82)?
The key to toleration might be seen as “letting others alone,” but
in the face of evil it is clear that such thoughtless toleration is
shameful and irresponsible. In section IV of the essay, Ms. Brann
lays out several reasons for thoughtfully respecting, not merely tolerating, others. Throughout the essay she demonstrates what it means
to avoid forcing the truth into preconceived notions, by letting something be, but not letting it alone (12), and this distinction, it seems to
me, points to a standard for action as well as for thought. Like people
who espouse values in conflict with one’s own, the current trends
demand respectful examination; Ms. Brann demonstrates that they
are unworthy of slavish adherence. Toleration without respect is a
standard that is below the dignity of human beings. The contemporary emphasis on the dissimilarity of races, for example, on “dissimilation” rather than assimilation (59), is flawed in that it overemphasizes otherness. Particular humans combine their share in universal humanity with particular accidents and unique choices—here
Ms. Brann finds an opening into the perennial philosophical problem
of the relation of same and other. That problem is just beneath the
surface of the complex and delicate issue of how various ethnic,
racial, religious and otherwise differentiated groups relate to one
another in a society that derives its fundamental principles from
universal humanity and whose status depends upon the respectability
of these principles. American society cannot maintain its integrity
unless its members maintain a habit of thoughtful reflection. Ms.
Brann’s “Mile-High Meditations” provides us with a model.
In the next section of Homage to Americans, Ms. Brann goes on
to make available to the reader the kind of thinking and writing that
gave this nation its character. Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address are both models of
thoughtful eloquence; the first united Virginians, the second, Amer-
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icans committed to the preservation of the union, to uphold convictions that provided the basis for liberty and mutual, respectful, toleration. Ms. Brann’s examinations of these two texts are models of
close and informed reading. Her analyses reveal to the reader the
greatness of these documents in a way that a casual reading—that is,
a reading uninformed by knowledge of the tradition in which
Madison and Lincoln were steeped—cannot. After a paragraph by
paragraph account, Ms. Brann, quoting from Hume’s “On
Eloquence,” sums up Madison’s work as “at once ‘argumentative
and rational,’ grandly passionate and carefully constructed” (123).
As for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Ms. Brann shows in a line-byline reading its beauty as poetry and its resonance with the Biblical
language by means of which Lincoln tried to persuade his audience
of the “bonds of affection” (181) that could alone preserve the union.
Both sections of this central part of the work deserve slow and
careful readings. The section on Madison’s Memorial showed me
that I had read this document only superficially. While I have read
and heard Lincoln’s Address many times and with great appreciation,
Ms. Brann’s account showed me that it too is a richer piece of writing
than I had ever imagined.
In his Memorial and Remonstrance, Madison argued against a
bill to support Christian education and in support of the toleration of
all religions because he was confident that without governmental
interference they would thrive. He was far from disparaging the role
of religion in supporting a healthy society. Ms. Brann asks, “What
would Madison have said in the face of an observable decline of
religious commitment and the increasing legal expulsion of religion
from communal life” (110)? She wonders whether the kind of
rhetoric he uses in the Memorial is an irrecoverable art. These are
pressing questions for us to consider, questions, it seems to me, that
were easier to address in a time when the hope that the United States
could provide a “practical political pattern to the world” (161) was
not considered narrowly self-serving, and when few if any would
claim that “truth is a private predilection and everything is ‘true for’
them that believe it” (116).
Not only did Lincoln and Madison not share this prejudice, but
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
they did not feel obligated to respond to it. The depth of both
statesmen’s grounding in religion, far from being a hindrance to their
promotion of democracy, was at its heart. Lincoln looked forward to
a “new birth of freedom” in the aftermath of the Civil War, a new
birth that was possible only through the common respect for the
principles of the Declaration of Independence, and especially the
principle that “all men are created equal.” The principles of the
Declaration must be held, he thought, as sacred. Respectful
tolerance thrives on the support of such principles.
In the penultimate piece of Homage to Americans, a lecture
addressed to students of the U. S. Air Force Academy entitled “The
Paradox of Obedience,” Ms. Brann maintains her characteristic sense
of balance between opposing respectable views in the difficult
context of the use of armed force. She avers that an “unthinking
warrior is a fearful thing” (195), and argues that “submission can be
an act of freedom” (208). She broaches a question that is urgent for
those who defend this nation with force: how does one fulfill one’s
duty to obey one’s superiors while cultivating a thoughtful awareness
of the possibility that “personal, conscientious disobedience” (206)
may sometimes be morally necessary? Citing the Spartan obedience
to law rather than to an individual, Ms. Brann suggests the possibility
that freedom requires some sort of obedience. But blind obedience
cannot support freedom. It seems to me clear that the respectability
of a warrior must depend on the respectability of the nation he or she
serves, but it is equally clear after reading this lecture that the
nation’s general character is insufficient by itself.
The discussion of toleration that opens the book is complemented by the last piece in the book: “The Empires of the Sun and
the West”—and in particular by Ms. Brann’s account of the intolerance of human sacrifice that characterized Cortés and his men,
which contributed to their determination to conquer the Aztec
people. This is no whitewashing: the Spanish conquistadors were
guilty of unnecessary brutality, which Ms. Brann appropriately deplores (253). The motives of the Spanish conquerors were self-interested, but their prejudices, like ours, were integral to the Western
tradition that promotes respect for human dignity. Where then ought
REVIEWS | DOUGHERTY
107
we to set the limits to toleration? This is no small problem. Ms.
Brann peremptorily dismisses the suspension of judgment as any
kind of solution: “A non-judgmental historian is an incarnate contradiction and produces only an armature of facts without the musculature that gives it human shape (222). In this respect she sides with
Cortés himself, who “dignifies his subjects with his condemnation”
of their practice of ritual human sacrifice (223).
The role of human sacrifice in the Aztec (or Nahuan) culture,
Ms. Brann argues, is the key to their defeat by the Spanish conquistadors. For the Aztec people thought they were compelled to sacrifice
human beings in order to render more reliable the annual and epochal
returns of the sun, their primary god. The nobles themselves may
have experienced a sense of doom, for they were “living over a moral
abyss” (241) created by the compulsion to kill their own kind. They
were betrayed by their trust in their gods (248-9). The Spanish, by
contrast, worshipped “a god mysterious but not capricious, [who]
made nature according to laws and left it largely alone” (257).
Although Ms. Brann describes the conquistadors as ruffians, she
attributes their victory over the Aztecs and the Incas to the Western
culture that shaped them, and she supports their disgust and horror at
a practice they could not see as justified or tolerable.
This account of the conquest of the Aztecs is well informed and
extensively researched. Ms. Brann describes a wide variety of
sources, including Cortés’ own letters to his king, and acknowledges
their biases. No set of citations can demonstratively establish the
truth of Ms. Brann’s account, but its plausibility is, to me at least,
manifest. The contest was by no means a conflict between good and
evil: it is worth repeating that there was plenty of wrongdoing on the
side of the Spanish conquerors. But their victory does seem to have
been a victory of the West (our “West”—an ambiguous but convenient term, as Ms. Brann acknowledges [217]), of a culture that
produces a kind of human being who knows “how to fight back,” and
“how to correct our aberrations by returns to sounder beginnings”
(229). The Aztecs were trapped by their culture; we, with all our
defects, may find renewal at the heart of ours. This is not a promise
but a task.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Ms. Brann has accomplished a great deal if she has helped her
readers to understand that task. I think she has done that and more.
To read Homage to Americans is to prepare to undertake the task of
renewing our culture.
�
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<em>The St. John's Review</em>
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<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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thestjohnsreview
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108 pages
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The St. John's Review, Fall 2011
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2011
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Pastille, William
Brann, Eva T. H.
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Arnaiz, Deziree
Sachs, Joe
Braithewaite, William
Howland, Jacob
Smith, Joseph
Boxel, Lise van
Bolotin, David
Dougherty, Janet
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Volume 53, Number 1 of the The St. John's Review. Published in Fall 2011.
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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text
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English
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ISSN 0277-4720
St_Johns_Review_Vol_53_No_1_Fall_2011
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St. John's Review
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