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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
�
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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Lecture/Concert Schedule 2007-2008 (Updated 3/26/08)
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2007-2008
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Annapolis, MD
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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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c95bb7193af0bf4486e98723c89b52a4
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Text
The St. John’s Review
Volume 52, number 1 (Fall 2010)
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
Barbara McClay
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President;
Pamela Krause, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review.
Address correspondence to the The St. John’s Review, St. John’s
College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800.
©2010 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 on-line at
www.stjohnscollege.edu/news/pubs/review.shtml.
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essay
Jacob Klein’s Two Prescient Discoveries..............................5
Eva Brann
“YOU ARE THAT!”: The Upanishads Read Through
Western Eyes.......................................................................21
Robert Druecker
Principles of Motion and the Motion of Principles:
Hegel’s Inverted World........................................................71
Peter Kalkavage
The Work of Education........................................................99
Jon Lenkowski
Falstaff and Cleopatra........................................................109
Elliot Zuckerman
Review
Portraits of the Impassioned Concept: A Review of Peter
Kalkavage’s The Logic of Desire: An Introduction to
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit......................................123
Eva Brann
�4
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
5
JACOB KLEIN’S TWO
PRESCIENT DISCOVERIES
Eva Brann
Jacob Klein was in the last year of his nine-year tenure as dean of
St. John’s College in 1957 when I came as a young tutor. He died
in 1978, still teaching. In those twenty-one years during which I
knew him, he was above all a teacher—mine and everybody’s.
His spirit informed the college. While dean, he was a fierce
defender of his conception of this remarkable community of
learning. This passion had generous parameters, from a smiling
leniency toward spirited highjinks to a meticulous enforcement of
rules meant to inculcate intellectual virtue. As a tutor, he shaped
the place through lectures that the whole college attended and
discussed, through classroom teaching that elicited from students
more than they thought was in them, but above all through
conversation that was direct and playful, serious and teasing,
earthily Russian and cunningly cosmopolitan. We all thought that
he had some secret wisdom that he dispensed sparingly out of
pedagogical benevolence; yet he would sometimes tell us things
in a plain and simple way that struck home as if we had always
known them. I, at least, always had the sense of hearing delightful
novelties that somehow I’d known all along. He also had an
aversion to discipleship and a predilection for wicked American
kids. And he could be infuriating whenever someone tried to
extract definitive doctrines from him. His reluctance to pontificate
was in part indolence (we sometimes called him “Jasha the
Pasha”)—an indolence dignified by his aversion to philosophy
carried on as an organized business—and in part pedagogical
reservation—a conviction that to retail one’s thought-products to
students was to prevent inquiry. This aversion to professing
authority is, to my mind, his most persuasive and felicitous legacy
Keynote Address at the Conference on Jacob Klein, held at Seattle University on
May 27-29, 2010. Eva Brann is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
�6
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
to the college, and the reason we still call ourselves tutors—
guardians of learning—rather than professors—professionals of
knowledge.
Nonetheless, there were doctrines and they were published.
He had set himself against academic publication, so much so that
I had to translate Jasha’s youthful book on the origin of algebra in
secret—though when confronted with the fait accompli he capitulated quite eagerly. This book is now the subject of Burt
Hopkins’s acute and careful analysis, The Origin of the Logic of
Symbolic Mathematics: Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein (to be
published in 2011).
Today I would like to present two of his chief discoveries
from a perspective of peculiar fascination to me—from the standpoint of the contemporary significance and the astounding
prescience, and hence longevity, of his insights. Now I grew up
intellectually within a perspective enforced by our program of
studies and reinforced by Jasha’s views (forgive the informality;
it was universal in his circle), which were rooted in certain continental philosophers, of whom Husserl was the most honorable.
The guiding notion of this perspective was that modernity is best
apprehended as being in a ruptured continuum with Greek
antiquity—a continuum insofar as the terms persist, ruptured
insofar as they take on new meanings and missions. That
perspective makes those who hold it avid participants in the
present—critically and appreciatively avid.
I will state immediately and straightforwardly the issues of
our present-day lives to which Jasha’s insights speak. First, they
speak to the ever-expanding role of image-viewing and virtual
experience in our lives. Here the questions are: What degree of
“reality” is ascribable to images? What does life among these
semi-beings do to us? Do we lose substance as they lose their
ground? Do originals retain their primary or even a residual
function in the virtual world? Second, Jasha’s insights speak to
the burgeoning brain science that tends to ascribe an ultimately
physical being to human nature. Here the questions are
approachable in terms of “emergence.” Granted that brain and
mind are intimately linked, what is the manner in which the latter
EVA BRANN
7
emerges from, or projects into, the former? How might an entity
emerge, be it from above or below, that is radically different from
its constituents? These are questions about consciousness (what
we are aware of) and about self-consciousness (who we are) that
should be of great concern to us, because they dominate public
life quite unreflectively. To put this in a form that is not currently
fashionable: Do we have souls?
Klein’s two insights, then, are both interpretations of Platonic
writings and are set out in A Commentary on Plato’s Meno (1965)
and Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra
(1934). The latter is a learned book written by a private European
scholar for academic readers, the former is a very accessible work
written by an American teacher for lovers of Socrates. Of both
these insights Burt Hopkins has produced detailed analyses,
which have added a new edge to doctrines I’ve lived with familiarly for half a century. I will, however, feel free here to
supplement, embroider and question Jacob Klein’s interpretation
of Plato and Burt Hopkins’s reading of Klein as I go. I’ll do it
implicitly, so you shouldn’t trust this account for faithfulness to
the letter, though I hope you may trust it for faithfulness to the
spirit. You’ll see, I think, what I mean when I speak of the
immediacy and naturalness of Klein’s interpretation: His readings
sit well.
The first insight, then, begins with an understanding of the
lowest segment of the so-called Divided Line in Plato’s Republic,
that mathematical image (picture it as vertical) of the ascent to
Being and the learning associated with that ascent. In this lowest
segment are located the deficient beings called reflections,
shadows, and images, and a type of apprehension associated with
them called eikasia in Greek and usually rendered as
“conjecture.” Klein’s interpretation starts with a new translation
of this noun: “image-recognition.” The nature of these lowest
beings—they are revealed as basic rather than base—is set out in
Plato’s Sophist. Consequently, the Republic and the Sophist
between them lay the foundations of the Platonic world.
The second discovery involves a complex of notions from
which I’ll extract one main element: the analysis of what it means
�8
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
to be a number, and what makes possible this kind of being—
which, as it turns out, makes possible all Being. Again, the
principal texts are the Sophist and the Republic, supplemented by
Aristotle’s critical account of Plato’s doctrine. To anticipate the
perplexity that is also the doctrine: Take any number—say two. It
is constituted of two units. Each is one, but both together are two.
How can it be that two emerges from elements that are each
precisely not two? I might remark in passing that Socrates thinks
that one mark of readiness for philosophical engagement is a
fascination with this perplexity. And from my experience with
students, I know that Socrates was correct.
So now, after these broad previews, some nitty-gritty.
Socrates begins by dividing the whole line mentioned above in
some arbitrary ratio, and then he divides the two subsections in
that same ratio. So if the whole line is, say, sixteen units, and the
ratio is, say, triple; then one segment is twelve units, the other
four. Then subdivide the twelve-unit segment similarly into nine
and three units, and the four-unit segment into three and one.
There are now four segments, two by two in the same ratio with
each other and with the first division of the whole. Whether you
want to make the top or the bottom segment the longest depends
on whether you assign more length to the greater fullness of
Being or to the larger profusion of items. It can also be shown that
in all divisions of this sort—called “extreme-and-mean ratio”—
the middle segments will be equal. Socrates will make the iconic
most of this mathematical fact.
Now the subsections make a four-term proportion called an
analogia in Greek—a:b::b:c—and they mirror, as I said, the
division of the whole line. You can read the line up or down.
Down is the cascade of Being, which loses plenitude as it falls
from true originals to mere images. Up is the ascent of learning,
ending in the direct intellectual vision of the prime originals, the
eide, the “invisible looks” in Klein’s language, usually called the
“forms.” Beyond all Being there is the notorious Good, the
unifying power above all the graduated beings, the principle of
wholeness, which I’ll leave out here. At the bottom is the aforementioned “image-recognition.” Now just as each of the object-
EVA BRANN
9
realms assigned to the upper sections is causally responsible for
the ones below, so, inversely, in learning, each stage, each
capacity, is needed for the learner to rise. None are left behind; all
remain necessary. And so the bottom, the first capacity, is also the
most pervasive. Children recognize images early on. Look at a
picture book with a two-year-old: “Kitty,” he’ll say, pointing.
“Careful, it’ll scratch.” “No, it won’t,” he’ll say, looking at you as
if you were really naïve. That’s image-recognition, the human
capability for recognizing likeness as belonging to a deficient
order: a cat incapable of scratching.
It is as fundamental for Socrates as it is low on the scale of
cognitive modes, because imaging is the most readily imaginable,
the least technically ticklish way of representing the activity by
which the realm of intelligible Being produces and rules the world
of sensory appearances. Each step downward in the scale of being
is a move from original to image; each step upward in the scale of
learning involves recognizing that something lower is an image of
something higher.
Just to complete the sketch of the Divided Line, here are the
stages of knowledge and their objects in brief. Above images,
there are the apparently solid objects of nature and artifice. The
acquaintance with these is called “trust,” pistis. It is the implicit,
unreflective belief we have in the dependable support of the
ground we tread on and the chair we sit in—the faith that our
world is not “the baseless fabric of a vision” that melts into thin
air.
This whole complex of dimensionally defective images and
taken-on-faith solidity of our phenomenal world is itself an image
of the upper two parts of the line. The third part, equal in length
to the second from the bottom, contains all the rational objects
that look, on the way up, like abstractions from the sensory
world—mathematical models and logical patterns. To these we
apply our understanding, a capacity called in Greek “thinkingthrough,” dianoia. They are then revealed to be the originals of
the sensory world, the intelligible patterns that impart to the
sensory world such shapeliness and intelligibility as it has. Thus
they make natural science possible; for they are the rational
�10
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
counterparts of the sensory world. Finally, there is the realm of
direct knowledge. As happens so often in the dialogues, the
contents of these upper reaches are named in inverse relation to
the contents of the lower ones: “invisible looks” (since eidos is
from the vid-verb, the verb for seeing), and they are reached by a
capacity for direct insight (which Aristotle will in fact analogize
to sensing)—noesis. Above and beyond them all is the very Idea
itself, the idea of all ideas—the Good, which produces, nourishes,
and unifies all beings, and grounds all human learning.
Implicit in this ladder of Being is the answer to the question
that matters most: What is an image, such that we can know it as
an image? The answer is given in the Sophist, whose main
character is, in his general person, an image incarnate—the mere
image of a truly truth-seeking human being. Socrates poses the
opening question of the Sophist, but he sits silently by as a
Stranger from Italian Elea, a follower of Parmenides, finds a
solution. I’ll venture a guess why he falls silent. In the Sophist
appears a serious ontological teaching, and ontological doctrine is
not Socrates’ way: He is the man of the tentative try, of
hypotheses. I’ll even venture a—perhaps perverse—appreciation
of this mode: His stubborn hypotheticalness, his unwillingness to
assert knowledge, is the complement of his unshakable faith in a
search for firm truth, carried on in full awareness of human
finitude.
What then is the Parmenidean solution? I call it Parmenidean
although the Stranger, the intellectual child of Parmenides, calls
himself a parricide, since he is about to deny a crucial
Parmenidean teaching: that Nonbeing is not, is neither sayable
nor thinkable. For he will in fact affirm a yet deeper teaching of
his philosophical father: that what counts is being thinkable and
sayable. The Elean Stranger will show how Nonbeing can be
thinkable and how speech is in fact impossible without it—as was
indeed implicit in Parmenides’ very denial.
It is thinkable as Otherness. To say that something is not is
usually to say that it is not this but that, that it is other than
something perspectivally prior. (I say “usually,” because there
“is” also something called “utter non-being,” which is indeed,
EVA BRANN
11
though superficially utterable, insuperably unthinkable.)
Relational, comparative Nonbeing, however, is one of the great
ruling principles of ontology. It is totally pervasive, since
whatever is a being is other than other beings. It is the source of
diversity in the world and of negation in speech. Has the Stranger
really done in his philosophical progenitor? No, as I intimated. He
has actually saved Parmenides from himself; for he has shown
that Nonbeing is, is Being in another mode. Being is still all there
is. There is no parricide. Moreover, this Other, a piece of apparently high and dry ontology, turns out to give life to the realm of
ideas and to the world of human beings: it informs the one with a
diversity of beings and articulates the other with the oppositions
of speech.
Why was this modification necessary in the search for the
Sophist? Because a Sophist is indeed a faker, himself an image of
a truth-seeker and a producer of images of what is genuine.
Otherness, the great genus of “The Other,” is the condition of
possibility for images, since it has three tremendous powers. First,
it makes possible that a thing not be what it is. And that is just
what characterizes an image: “It’s a kitty,” the child says,
pointing. But not really; it doesn’t scratch. Or people bring out
photographs in order to be in the presence of an absent one, but
they are not real enough to assuage longing. Hence an image is
understood first, and most ontologically speaking, as not being
what it is, but also, second, as being less than the original it represents; for it represents that original in a deficient likeness. Here a
second capacity of the Other shows up: it creates a defective,
derivative Otherness. And third, it makes negative knowledge and
denying speech possible: we can think and say, “The image is—
in some specifiable way—like its original; but likeness is not
identity.” The sentence “An image is not the original” displays
Otherness as negation, articulated as Nonbeing. The ability to
utter—and mean—that sentence is specifically human. Its loss
would be, I think, a serious declension of our humanity. Therefore
this complex of consideration, illuminated by Klein in his book
on the Meno, seems to me crucial for navigating our imageflooded world with full awareness.
�12
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
More particularly, the ability to distinguish image from
original is crucial today because the shaping of our American
lives, which is more and more a matter of declining options and
refusing temptations, is much in need of suggestive approaches
for coping with images. What are the truths and falsehoods of
images in general? What consequently are the effects of discretionary image-viewing on our consciousness? Do all images in
fact have originals, or is it images “all the way down”? And if
there are always originals, how can we find our way back to
them? What is real within our world, what is genuine beyond it?
I’ll assert simply that without occasional reflection on such an
eminently current issue our lives tend toward passing by rather
than being lived. “The unexamined life is unlivable (abiotos),”
Socrates says in the Apology (38a)—and so a life without
reflection on its central issues is thus, in effect, unlived.
I’ll now go on to Klein’s second interpretive discovery, a
much more technical, but equally future-fraught, construal.
A preoccupation of Socrates—it might be puzzling to readers
who haven’t yet seen the implications—is often expressed by him
in this way: “Each is one, but both are two.” To be gripped by this
odd perplexity is, as I said, a beginning of philosophizing. The
oddity comes out most starkly when we think of countingnumbers, the natural cardinal numbers. Take the first number,
two. (For the ancients, one is not a number; it is the constituent
unit of which a number is made.) Each of its units is one and
nothing more. Yet this unit and another together make up the
number two. Neither is what both together are. This ought to be
strange to us, because we are used to the elements of a natural
collection having each the quality that characterizes the whole:
The doggy species subsumes dogs. Whether we think of
dogginess either as an abstracted generalization or as a qualitybestowing form, each member has the characteristic that names
the kind. Clearly, numbers are assemblages that work differently
from other classes. Numbers have a uniquely characteristic, a socalled “arithmological” structure. The recognition of the significance of this situation and its peculiar appearance among the great
forms, particularly in respect to Being, is Klein’s achievement.
EVA BRANN
13
Let me begin by briefly reviewing the kinds of numbers Klein
takes into account. He observes—a previously ignored fact—that
the first meaning of the Greek word that we translate as number,
arithmos, is that of a counted assemblage of concrete things. Any
counted collection—a flock of sheep, a string of horses, a herd of
cattle—does not have, but is an arithmos. If we think as Greeks
(and we may, with a little effort), we count ordinally, because we
must keep items in order: first, second, third (and then go on
cardinally four, five, six, for verbal convenience). But when we
have counted up the whole, we allow it to become a heapnumber—a distinct, discriminated group. It is a counted
collection that has lost its memory. An arithmos is such a sensory
number. It is, for example, a sheep-number, and its units are
sheep-monads. To me it seems undecidable whether such a
concrete number has an arithmological structure, since in it the
sheep are both sheepish and mere units; as a flock we discriminate
them, as units we count them.
Next come the mathematical numbers made up of pure
monads, units that have no quality besides being unities. A mathematical number is defined by Euclid thus: “An arithmos is a
multitude composed of monads,” where a monad is a pure unit.
This type of number has an arithmological structure with a
vengeance, and you can see why: a pure unit has no characteristics besides unitariness. It’s neither apples nor oranges, which is
precisely why you can count fruit or anything at all with it. Being
thus devoid of qualities, it has mere collectibility, but it has no
other contribution to make to the assemblage. Being two is not in
the nature of a monad as a monad, though adding up to two is.
“Two” appears to emerge from these associable units. If you think
this is unintelligible, so does Socrates. It will get worse.
The difficulty is implicitly acknowledged in the modern
definition of number. It begins with arithmos-like concrete assemblages. If their elements, treated now as mere units, can be put
into one-to-one correspondence, the collections are said to be
equivalent. The collection or set of all equivalent sets is their
number. This definition evades the questions, What number is it?
and Does the set of sets arise from the units of the concrete
�14
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
collection, or does it bestow on them the numerosity? Therein lies
an implicit recognition of Socrates’ problem.
It gets worse, for now a third type of number appears. Klein
knows of it from Aristotle’s critical report in the Metaphysics,
where there is mention of “form-numbers,” arithmoi eidetikoi.
The highest genera in the Platonic structure of forms are
organized in such numberlike assemblages. These are, unlike the
indefinitely many mathematical numbers, limited in multitude.
(There may have been ten, the so-called root-numbers of the
Pythagoreans.) Now the super-genera in the Sophist are Same and
Other. The highest after these is Being, which consists of Motion
(kinesis) and Standstill (stasis). (This last is often translated as
“Rest,” but that inaccurately implies a cessation from, or deprivation of, motion, though the two genera are coequal.) Notice,
incidentally, that the three kinds of numbers run in tandem with
the three rising upper segments of the Divided Line—concrete
numbers with the sensory world, pure units with the mathematical
domain, form-numbers with the eidetic realm.
Each of these forms acts like a monad in an arithmetic
collection. However—and this is Aristotle’s most pertinent
criticism—these high forms are not neutral units. They are each
very much what they are in themselves, indefeasibly self-same
and other than all others. They are, as he says: asymbletoi,
“incomparable,” literally “not throwable together.” Thus, unlike
pure, neutral mathematical numbers, they cannot be reckoned
with across their own genus, and so, a fortiori, it would be seen
that their association within their genus is unintelligible. For how
can Motion and Standstill be together as the genus of Being if
they have nothing in common and so cannot be rationally added
up?
Klein claims that Aristotle’s cavil is in fact Plato’s point. The
forms are associated in what is the very paradigm of an arithmological structure: what each is not, that they are together. It is
because they have a number structure in which unique eide
associate in a finite number of finite assemblages that
innumerable sensory items can collect into concrete countable
heaps organizable into finite classification. Furthermore, it is in
EVA BRANN
15
imitation of these eidetic numbers that we have the indefinitely
many mathematical numbers uniting as many pure units as you
please—though we are left to work out the manner of this
descent. For my part, I cannot claim to have done it.
I have mentioned before what is certainly the foremost
stumbling block for most people in accepting the forms as causes
of worldly being and becoming. The perplexity is usually put as
“the participation problem”: how do appearances “participate” in
the forms? These are infelicitous terms, because they imply the
least satisfactory answer—that dogs somehow take a part in, or
appropriate a part of the form, a non-solution scotched in
Socrates’ very early attempt in the dialogue Parmenides at articulating his great discovery of the forms. “Imaging” might be a
more felicitous term, since it is at least less awkward to the intellectual imagination than is “partaking.”
But let me stick here with the familiar term, and follow Klein
in pointing out that the participation problem has two levels. On
the lower level, the question is how the phenomenal world participates in the forms. On the higher level, it is how the forms
associate with, participate in, each other. For unless they do form
assemblages, genera and their constituent eide, the sensory world,
even granted that it does somehow receive its being and structure
from these, can have no learnable organization. Crudely put: we
can classify the world’s beings, natural and artificial, in terms of
hierarchies of kinds, such as the genera, subgenera, species, and
subspecies of biology, only because their causative principles
have a prior, paradigmatic structure of associations and subordinations. On this hypothesis, even only artificially distinguished
heaps can be counted up by reason of the arithmological character
of eidetic groupings.
The eidetic numbers are thus intended to be a Platonic
solution to the upper-level participation problem. It is, so to
speak, a highly formal solution. For while the type of association
is named—the arithmoi eidetikoi with their arithmological
structure—the cause of any particular association is not given.
There is no substantive answer to the question, Just what in a
form makes it associate numerologically with a specific other?
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There should be no such answer, because the eidetic monads are,
after all, incomposable. Motion and Standstill have in themselves
nothing in common. Moreover, why are they the sole constituents
of Being? And yet, there must be an answer since they are in fact
composed. As Klein keeps pointing out, in the upper reaches the
logos, rational speech, fails. One way it fails is that to reach the
number two, for instance, we count off one, one, two; that is, three
items—yet there are not three, but only two. For Two, be it mathematical or eidetic, is not over and beyond the two units; it is just
those two together. How two items can become one our reason
cannot quite articulate. Nor can it say what makes either an
eidetic monad, which is a qualitative plenum, or the mathematical
unit, which is a qualitative void, associate with others in
“families,” (that thought-provoking classificatory term from
biology) or in “numbers” (those colorless collections that yet
have highly specific characteristics).
Now we come to Klein’s novel construal of just this eidetic
number Two, which occurs in the Sophist, although it is not
explicitly named there. Being is a great eidetic genus. It is
composed of Standstill and Motion. Neither of these can have any
part in the other; it is just as unthinkable for Standstill to be
involved in Motion as for Motion to be involved in Standstill. Yet
there is nothing in the world that is not both together. Our world
is one of dynamic stability or stable dynamism, in place and in
time. The duo responsible for this condition in the realm of forms
is called Being. Being is not a third beside or above Motion or
Standstill but just the togetherness of these subgenera. Being is
only as both of these together, and neither of them can be except
as part of a pair. As an unpaired monad, neither is; both are as a
couple: Being is the eidetic Two. And once more, it is this arithmological structure that descends to, makes possible, and is
mirrored in, the mathematical number structure of any mathematical two—on the one hand. On the other hand, it makes the
phenomenal world appear as I have just described it: at once
stable and moving, variable and organizable. On the way up, it
might look as if the eidetic numbers are an erroneous levering-up
of a mathematical notion; on the way down, they appear as the not
EVA BRANN
17
quite humanly comprehensible, but necessary, hypothesis for an
articulable world, a countable and classifiable world. And again,
seen from above, Being must—somehow—bring about its own
division; but seen from below, Being emerges from its
constituents. And just as the modern definition of number in terms
of equivalent sets leaves unarticulated the question of whether the
number set is the ground of or the consequence of the equivalent
sets, so too in Klein’s exposition of the first eidetic number, Two,
it is left unsaid whether the genus determines its eidetic monads,
or the reverse, or neither. It is left, as textbooks say, as an exercise
for the reader—a hard one.
I might, before I end, even venture a still formal but
somewhat more specific answer to the associability question. In
the upper ontological reaches, at least, what might be called
extreme Otherness—by which I mean either contrary (that is,
qualitative) or contradictory (that is, logical) opposition—seems
to be the principle grounding togetherness. Motion and Standstill
are as opposite as can be, and for that reason yoked in Being; so
are Same and Other. I will not pretend to have worked through the
hierarchy of these five greatest genera. Nonetheless I have a
suspicion that Same and Other, the most comprehensive genera,
are not only intimately related to each other as mutually defining,
but may ultimately have to be apprehended together as prior to
and thus beyond Being, as a first self-alienation of the One, the
principle of comprehension itself. As such, they might even be
termed the negative Two, but that’s too far-out. In any case, these
Plotinian evolutions are beyond my brief for today. I refer to
Plotinus at all only because his One is in fact articulable only
negatively and, is self-diremptive.
Now the strange structure of number, in which indiscernibly
different but non-identical elements like pure monads, mere units,
can be together what they are not individually, is only a case,
though the most stripped-down, clarified case, of what is
nowadays called “emergence.” Recall that emergence is the
eventuation of a novel whole from elements that seem to have
nothing in common with it. Examples range from trivial to lifechanging. Socrates himself points out that the letters sigma and
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
18
omega are individually different from the initial syllable of his
own name, “So,” and that this is one new idea composed of two
elements (Theaetetus 203c). Two molecules of hydrogen and one
of oxygen combine to form water, whose liquidity emerges as an
unforeseeable quality. Individuals form communities that evince
a might beyond the additive powers of their citizens. The
emergent entity is other than rather than additional to, novel to
rather than inferrable from, its elements. In the reverse case,
sometimes called projection, the elements falling out from a
totality are qualitatively quite different from it. This case might be
called inverse emergence; an example might be the relation of
Platonic forms to their participant particulars.
The most significant problem of emergence is also the most
contemporary one. Since it seems indisputable that specific brain
lesions lead to specific psychic disabilities, it is claimed by scientists who don’t want simply to identify mind with brain that the
soul is brain-emergent. Does that make it a mere epiphenomenon?
A miracle? “Emergence” names the event as a bottom-up process.
But could it be a top-down happening, could the soul shape, or
participate in shaping, its physical substructure? These are the
recognizable old questions of “one-and-many”: one over, or in, or
out of, many?
I want to make a claim that in this company especially should
garner some sympathy: when deep human matters are at issue, it
helps a lot to have delved into some ontology; the inquiry into
Being may not affect our lives materially, yet it illuminates our
daily lives more directly than does research providing factual
information or theory producing instrumental constructs. This is
the hypothesis under which Jacob Klein’s opening up of two
Platonic preoccupations, images and numbers, is of current
consequence. Herein lies the prescience, the foresightedness of
his Platonic discoveries.
Addendum
I have omitted here, as too complex for brief exposition, a third,
more directly global interpretation of the modern condition,
EVA BRANN
19
which is central to Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin
of Algebra. It is an understanding of the basic rupture between
antiquity and modernity, of the great revolution of the West, as
brought about by, or at least paradigmatically displayed in, the
introduction of algebra. Algebra works with quantities abstracted
from concrete collections (such as were betokened by the Greek
arithmoi), with “general,” essentially symbolical “numbers,”
such as the variables x, y, z or the constants a, b, c. These letters
are symbols of a peculiar sort: they represent neither a concrete
thing nor a determinate concept, but rather present themselves as
the object of a calculation—a mere object, an indeterminate
entity. Klein saw algebraic problem-solving procedures, so
effective precisely because so contentlessly formal, as
emblematic of a modern rage for that second-order, deliberately
denatured thinking which dominates as much of our lives as is
method-ridden. The human consequences of this symbolic
conceptuality are great.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
“YOU ARE THAT!”
The Upanishads Read Through
Western Eyes1
Robert Druecker
Introduction
The original title of this essay—“You Are That!”—was a
quotation, from the Chāndogya Upanishad, of an exclamation
made several times by a man named Uddālaka to his son
Śvetaketu. The “That” refers to a realm or state of being, known
as “Brahman.” One who experiences it is called a “knower of
Brahman” (brahmavid). Uddālaka was a knower of Brahman,
speaking to his son out of his direct experience.
The classical Upanishads are expressions of, and invitations
to, this direct experiencing. Understanding them, therefore, is a
matter of understanding what that experiencing is like, not a
matter of believing or knowing some truths about the world.
Thus, elucidating the meaning of this title will convey a sense of
the experience of Brahman, which is what the Upanishads as a
whole are about.
But, of course, their ultimate aim is not simply to produce
understanding in this sense, but rather to bring about the direct
experiencing of the Brahman-realm. Even Śaṅkara, the most
highly esteemed expositor of the Upanishads, a man noted for his
theoretical acumen, considered direct experience as surpassing all
understanding. He is said to have regarded theoretical reflection
as one hundred times more efficacious than oral instruction,
meditation as one hundred thousand times more efficacious than
theoretical reflection, and direct experience of the Brahman-realm
as defying all comparison.
The revised title of the essay is: “‘You Are That!’: The
Upanishads Read Through Western Eyes.” In making this change,
Robert Drueker is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
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I have followed Aristotle’s recommendation to begin with the
things best known to us, where “us,” in this case, refers to the St.
John’s community. Thus, Part One will give a sense of what the
Brahman-realm is like by elaborating on an analogous experience
in Homer and Aristotle. Part Two will elucidate the experiencing
of Brahman in a more direct way.
Finally, many of the writings in the Upanishads are dialogues
involving a knower of Brahman. Yājñavalkya is the central figure
in the conversations in the oldest Upanishad. In working on the
lecture, I imagined him, a knower of Brahman, as my interlocutor.
Throughout the essay, I will allow the voice of Yājñavalkya to
provide his understanding of analogues between the Brahmanrealm and the worlds of Homer and Aristotle.
Part One: Νοεĩν and Ittisāl (Conjunction)
A. Homer
Homer frequently refers to human beings or gods waking up to,
or realizing (νοεĩν), the full significance of a situation.
Sometimes, on the other hand, what they realize is their ability to
wake up to the full meaning of a situation (νόος in some uses).2
The verb in the aorist expresses an individual’s sudden flash of
insight. For instance, Hektor, resisting his parents’ entreaties,
holds his position, as he watches Achilleus coming toward him.
He is pondering what might happen should he retreat or should he
offer to return Helen; but then Achilleus closes upon him: “And
trembling took hold of Hektor when the realization suddenly
struck him (ἐνόησεν) [what single combat against Achilleus really
meant], and he could no longer stand his ground there, but…fled,
frightened.” (II, 22.136-37).3 The use of the progressive aspect,
however, conveys the process of fitting pieces together gradually
to form a wholly new picture, as when Theoklymenos tells the
suitors that the realization is dawning upon him (νοέω) that there
is an evil on the way that they will not be able to avoid (O,
20.367-70).
Because of the intensity of the character’s involvement in the
situation, the experienced shift in significance is often accompanied by strong emotion, as is the case with Hektor. When the
DRUECKER
23
insight concerns an individual object instead of a situation, the
realization is always accompanied by such emotion; it is as if the
shift in the meaning of the situation were compressed into a single
thing or person. So, For example, Menelaos, having caught sight
of Paris, leaps down from his chariot. Then, Homer tells us,
“when [Paris] realized the full significance of Menelaus standing
there among the champions, the heart was shaken within him” (I,
3.29-31). The full significance here is that Menelaus is drawing
near Paris, seething with an overwhelming desire to kill him.
“Realization of significance” has a variety of meanings that
spread over a directional arc.4 A character begins in a situation in
which he has already seemingly recognized (γιγνώσκειν) the
surrounding things or people as definite individuals that are
familiar. Then, once awakened to their real significance, he or she
experiences a corresponding emotional impact; a way of dealing
with the newly perceived situation comes to light and the will to
do so arises. Thus, the present naturally extends itself into the
future. When the primary meaning is at either end of this arc, the
other parts of the arc are co-present. Thus, when the emphasis is
on present clarity of mind, the future is nonetheless kept in view.
(For instance, when Kirke tells Odysseus that no magic can work
on his ability always to realize what is the real meaning of the
situation in which he finds himself, she also has in mind the
insightful character of his future aims, plans, and actions [O,
10.329].) And, on the other hand, when the emphasis in on future
action, clear vision in the present is also involved. (For instance,
when, according to Achilleus, Peleus vowed to the river
Spercheus that Achilleus would sacrifice to him upon the latter’s
return home, this wish [νόον] was not a representation of a vague
future, but rather a distinct depiction of the wished-for future
action and of the detailed steps leading to it [I, 23.144-49].)
The realization of significance may or may not be prepared by
a thought process. But when it is, the realization is distinct from
the preceding reasoning, in the same way as “seeing” one of
Euclid’s proofs is different from figuring out how it is justified in
terms of previous propositions. For Yājñavalkya, realizing
Brahman can also be characterized as including an emotional
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
response—joy (ānanda)—and a way of acting—calm responsiveness to the whole situation.
The realization may penetrate to great depth and extend far in
space and time, like that of Theoklymenonos mentioned earlier or
like that of Athena when she speaks to Achilleus as he is drawing
his sword to kill Agamemnon. The more intense the situation and
the deeper and broader the realization, the more likely it is that the
characters are raised above their ordinary abilities, so that they are
able to see almost all the implications and consequences of the
situation with unusual clarity and to act with extraordinary
foresight. This experience of being raised above the ordinary is a
divine manifestation.5
Homer most often mentions Athena and Apollo in such
moments. For instance, Odysseus’s sudden realization of the true
meaning of return—the moment when he recognized the right
time to reveal himself to Telemachos—occurs in the presence of
Athena (O, 16.155ff.). And Hektor’s sudden waking up to danger
when he was about to oppose Achilleus is Apollo’s manifesting
himself (I, 20.375ff.). These two examples point to the difference
between the two gods. Athena remains untroubled and serene in
the midst of action, while she discerns at every juncture what the
situation requires, plans the deed with precision, and readies
herself to bring it about energetically. Apollo, on the other hand,
is associated with a cognitive attitude of stately objectivity, wideranging gaze, distance and freedom, clarity and good form. He is
the god of the saving or preserving awareness (σωφροσύνη)
expressed in the Delphic dictum, “Know thyself,” meaning
“Realize what human beings really are, that is, how great a
distance separates them from the omnitemporal gods” (HG, 21617, 215, 52, 57, 59, 78-79, 66). Yājñavalkya would remark that
such traits as serenity in the midst of action, the freedom of a
ranging gaze, and saving, or preserving, awareness pertain to the
Brahman-realm as well.
In a manifestation of Athena or Apollo, the god is revealed as
the very essence of the realization. That is, the realization’s
ultimate meaning is that it is a ray of the divine, illumining human
life. Homer realizes that the complete lucidity in which we
DRUECKER
25
sometimes act is a connection with something superior to us, even
though we think of it as a quality of our own minds. In decisive
moments, what a warrior realizes is both himself and the deity
together (HG, 7, 247, 174, 184-85). Yājñavalkya would comment
here that in the Upanishads, this non-separateness of the human
and divine is known as “non-duality” (advaita; BU, IV.3,32):
“Whoever meditates on a divinity that is other (anyām) [than
himself], thinking, ‘This [god] is one (anyah), I am another
(anyah),’ does not know [‘I am Brahman’]” (BU, I.4.10).
Homer’s recognition of moments in which the divine and the
human are non-dual is sharply opposed to a view that would see
Athena and Apollo as external causes of the events he is narrating
(HG, 213). Somewhat similarly, according to Yājñavalkya, we are
invited to awaken to Brahman not as an external cause, but rather
as what is most profound in our experience.6
When the god is present in moments of non-duality, the
warrior’s ego and personality recede into the background (HG,
241f.). That sort of impersonality, which also characterizes the
moment when we experience the truth of a Euclidean proposition,
is inherent in the Brahman-realm, according to Yājñavalkya.
The divine coming-to-presence has been said to occur at “the
critical moment when human powers suddenly converge, as if
charged by electric contact, on some insight, some resolution,
some deed.”7 Lightning comes forth from the clouds to strike
buildings or trees that have risen from the earth; so, too, the divine
suddenly emerges from the background to shock an individual
only when that individual has gone forth from himself toward the
background. Yājñavalkya could note that the instant of recognition of the Brahman realm is also compared to “a sudden flash
of lightning” (BU, II.3.6; cf. KeU, IV.4). Moreover, he would
think that moving toward the background might be, in some way,
analogous to a “moving-towards” Brahman—something like the
movement involved either in practicing meditation or in coming
to wonder, “Who am I?”
While in the examples given so far the divine manifestation
has come in an awakening to significance or in an elaborating of
a plan, this should not lead us to think the divine is encountered
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
merely by turning inward. The appearance of the goddess is not,
for instance, Achilleus’s pondering whether to kill Agamemnon or
to check his anger (I, 1.193), but rather the resolution of his introspection in a flash of certitude (HG, 174, 48). Yājñavalkya would
agree that introspection neither characterizes the Brahman-realm
nor is a means thereto. However, there is, he would add, a
different sort of inward turn that can facilitate its realization.
There are many instances in which a god is present at a
moment when none of the characters is aware of it. But
sometimes a warrior, when awakening to the full significance of
his situation, may realize that his very awakening is itself the
manifestation of a god. An interesting example occurs when
Poseidon appears to the Aiantes in the likeness of Kalkas. At first
neither brother is aware of the presence of a god; but, after
Poseidon departs like a hawk, Aias son of Oïleus realizes that
some god, whom he does not recognize, has addressed them,
while Telemonian Aias notices only his own increased strength
and energy (I, 13.43-80). On other occasions the human being
recognizes the god by name—sometimes only after the encounter,
but sometimes already at its inception (HG, 207-08).
A god may be especially close to a particular individual in
that the human being regularly displays the qualities of the
particular god, as Athena acknowledges Odysseus does (O,
13.330-32; HG, 192-95). There is even one person who seems to
be fully awake to divine presence—Homer himself, who
sees events through and through even when the participants see only the surface. And often when the
participants sense only that a divine hand is touching
them the poet is able to name the god concerned and
knows the secret of his purpose (HG, 195-96).
According to Yājñavalkya, there is just as much idiosyncratic
variety in realizing Brahman as there is in recognizing the
presence of a god in moments of waking up to meaning: different
individuals respond differently, both in frequency and in degree,
to such events.
Up to this point in our consideration of Homer we have
DRUECKER
27
emphasized cognition. This is appropriate because cognition in a
broad sense is the way in which we come to realize Brahman.
However, this focus on cognition gives a distorted picture of the
world as Homer depicts it. For there are many gods—Ares,
Aphrodite, Poseidon, Hera, and others—who manifest
themselves in the world in addition to Athena and Apollo, who are
especially associated with realizing significance. Moreover, the
appearance of a deity often involves an inner phenomenon other
than awakening, as when Hektor’s body is “packed full of force
and fighting strength” (I, ,17.211-12) or when Athena puts
“courage into the heart” of Nausikaa (O, 6.140). Yājñavalkya
could point out that these phenomena of enlivening, energizing,
and strengthening were included, along with realization, in what
the Upanishads call the “Inner Controller” (antaryāmin; BU,
III.7.1).8 He might also remark that Homer did not think of nonduality as limited to cognition, because he recognized that these
phenomena, too, were divine manifestations.
In addition to a character’s “waking up” to the presence of a
god, a deity often manifests itself by affecting a character from
outside. Most notably, Patroklos’s aristeia was put to an end by
Apollo, who “stood behind him, and struck his back and his broad
shoulders with a flat stroke of the hand so that his eyes spun” (I,
16.791-92). Yājñavalkya would point out that events like this
might be echoes of Brahman as “pouring forth,” or “emitting,” all
things. (MuU, I.1.7.) He would add that, just as Homer recognizes
the one Apollo both in his striking of Patroklos and in Hektor’s
realization mentioned earlier, so too the Upanishads express the
realization that the inner controlling and the outer emitting are
one when it states: “This Self is…Brahman” (BU, II.5.19).
B. Aristotle and Averroes
For help in thinking through the experiences highlighted by
Homer, we turn to Aristotle. In moments of realization, we are in
a state of what he called “being-at-work,”—what I will call
“activity.” Activity is “complete over any time whatever”; it is not
a temporal phenomenon. By contrast, a motion “is in time and
directed at some end…and is complete when it brings about that
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
at which it aims” (NE, 1174a15-21). For example, whereas the
activity of dancing is “all there” at each moment, the motion of
learning to dance is complete only when you’ve actually become
a dancer.
Homer’s gods Athena and Apollo are manifested in activities
of ours that would be “choiceworthy in themselves” (NE, 1144a1)
even if they didn’t effect anything in addition. The active state of
our ability to awaken to significance is what is best and most
powerful in us and is “either divine itself or the most divine of the
things in us.” When it is directed toward the most divine, timeless
things, it is a pure beholding (NE, 1177a13-21).
One living in this state of activity would be living a life that
“is divine as compared with a human life.” Hence, Aristotle said,
“one ought to immortalize” (NE, 1177b25-34); that is, one ought
to be as much as possible in this best state of activity—the activity
of Homer’s Athena and Apollo, or of Aristotle’s impersonal
divinity. When we are in that state, we are in the same state over
a limited extent of time as is the divine over the whole of time.9
Moreover, “each person would even seem to be this [best state of
activity]” (NE, 1178a1). “[A]nd so the person who loves and
gratifies this is most a lover of self” (NE, 1168b33).
Yājñavalkya could comment that the Brahman-realm, too,
has the characteristics of being an atemporal phenomenon, of
being a sort of pure beholding, and of being our true self.
Moreover, it, too, is impersonal, not divided up into essentially
different Athena-moments and Apollo-moments. Finally, knowers
of Brahman, living the life of their true self, are leading a life that
transcends the human. Consequently, since most of us live in
ignorance of Brahman, most of us are not living the life of our
true self.
Aristotle seems to agree formally with this conclusion: it is,
after all, an implication of Apollo’s injunction “Know thyself.” It
might be objected, however, that Aristotle’s characterization of
the true self as divine contradicts Apollo’s insistence on
separating the human from the divine. Yājñavalkya would reply
that when a similar objection is voiced in his tradition, the
response is that the contradiction is only apparent. Someone who
DRUECKER
29
took the “You” in “You are That!” to refer to his ordinary sense of
self, would be engaging in self-inflation. Students are encouraged
to ponder “Who am I?” as a practice, in order to shift them from
the ordinary to the true sense of self. So, Yājñavalkya and
Aristotle could both take “Know thyself” in a double sense: “With
respect to your ordinary sense of self, think mortal thoughts, but
recognize that the true you is divine activity.”
In On the Soul Aristotle began to sketch what might be
entailed in realizing his analogue to “You are That!”—namely, the
immortalizing involvement in the best activity. One of Aristotle’s
foremost interpreters, Averroes, has developed Aristotle’s blackand-white sketch into a detailed, full-color portrait that bears a
striking resemblance to the Upanishadic picture. To that portrait
we now turn.10
The customary name in philosophical texts for Aristotle’s best
state of activity is “intellection.” Following Aristotle’s lead,
Averroes begins his account of intellection with what is clearer to
us, and he ends it with what is clearer by nature. There are three
main figures in his initial portrait—the “material intellect,” the
“disposed intellect,” and the “agent intellect.” Averroes compares
intellection, as Aristotle does, to a craft in which some material,
like clay, receives a form—say, that of a bowl (OS, 430a10-14).
When I acquire a simple intelligible, such as, ‘straight line,’ it is
received as form by the material intellect—which, not being
corporeal, is material only in the sense that it serves as materialfor. My disposed intellect,11 now having the acquired intelligible
as an active disposition (ἕξις), is in what Aristotle calls a first state
of maintaining itself (έχειν) in (ἔν) its completed condition
(τέλος), with respect to this intelligible. Henceforth we shall say,
somewhat inaccurately, that the mind in this state is “in first
actuality.” By analogy, we could say that Suzanne Farrell, the
accomplished dancer, is “in first actuality” when not dancing
(since she maintains all the dispositions of a dancer), but is “in
second actuality” when dancing (since she then makes use of
those dispositions.) Similarly, when I am not contemplating the
intelligible ‘straight line,’ my intellect is “in first actuality” (since
I have the disposition necessary to contemplate it if I so choose),
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but when I am contemplating it, perhaps in the course of a demonstration, my intellect is “in second actuality” (since I am then
making use of the disposition).
According to Aristotle, “the soul never engages in intellection
without an appearance” (431a24), which Averroes takes to mean
imaginative appearance.12 Thus, when I am led up to (ἐπάγεσθαι)
a particularly suggestive instance, say a good image of a straight
line, that image specifies that the material intellect will receive the
intelligible ‘straight line.’ Averroes said that the material intellect,
as so determined by my imagination,13 is “conjoined” with it and
that my disposed intellect is precisely this conjunction of the
material intellect with my imagination.
One of the unusual features of Averroes’ interpretation is that
according to him, there is only one material intellect. My disposed
intellect and your disposed intellect are the results of its conjunctions with the different images in our respective imaginations; we
actualize it differently. In this way the one material intellect is
said to be incidentally many. (Zedler 1951, 175.) Moreover, since
my imagination is corporeal, the intelligibles of mundane things
in me, and, consequently, my disposed intellect itself, are
generable and corruptible.14 Yājñavalkya might also say that the
one Brahman is incidentally many individual selves (jīvātman).
Now, before the intelligible ‘“straight line’” can be received
by the material intellect, the irrelevant portions of the image in
which it is “embodied” must be taken away (ἀφαιρεῖσθαι). This
abstraction brings it into the state of actual intelligibility. To
elucidate this act of abstraction, Averroes referred to another of
Aristotle’s comparisons: The passage from potential to actual
intelligibility is like a color’s transition from potential visibility to
actual visibility when the lights in a room are turned on. The
“light” that illumines the darkness of the image, producing the
abstraction of the latent intelligible, is the agent intellect.
This picture of the agent intellect as shining from the outside
onto a potential intelligible embedded in an image is, however,
only the way it first appears to us. Averroes said that if we
consider its role in the intellectual insights we have when we draw
conclusions from the intelligibles that we have acquired—for
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31
example, the insight that one and only one straight line may be
drawn between two points—we come to a deeper view. In reality,
the agent intellect is related to the intelligibles of my disposed
intellect as form to material. It is as though the agent intellect
were a light full of Color itself. What really happens when it
shines on an image is that the image’s conjunction with Color
itself draws out of the latter a particular color, one that had been
potentially within Color itself. Then that particular color is
received by the material intellect. Even in my acts of intellecting
simple intelligibles in the world, the agent intellect is incidentally
in partial conjunction with my imagination.15 Since I am, then,
intellecting it to some degree, it must be at work as the form of
my disposed intellect.
For Averroes, this understanding means that the agent
intellect itself is the source of the intelligibility of the corporeal
world. For since the image arises on the basis of sense perception
of things in the world, the potential intelligibles in my imagination are due to the potential intelligibles in the things in the
world. Consequently, Averroes takes the agent intellect to be
Aristotle’s unmoved mover from the Metaphysics (1072b18-30;
1075a5-11). Hence, there is only one agent intellect; and it is its
very activity of unchanging, eternal self-intellection.
Correlatively, the potential intelligibles of things in the world are
their actualities, their being-at-work maintaining themselves in
their respective states of completeness. Their intelligibility
depends entirely upon the agent intellect in the following way: for
each of them its state of completeness is the closest state to the
agent intellect’s self-intellection that its materials are capable of
attaining.16 The agent intellect’s responsibility for all intelligible
being makes it analogous to the one source of all existence in
Yājñavalkya’s tradition.
But how can the self-directed intellection of the agent
intellect be responsible for our intellection of the intelligibles in
things outside of itself in the world, when it and the object of its
intellection are absolutely one? Reflexively turned toward itself,
it is not aware of the multiplicity of the potential intelligibles of
mundane things as such. Yet it nevertheless does comprehend
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them, somewhat in the way that the craft of pottery-making
comprehends the forms of all the bowls for which it could be
responsible. But to be actively responsible for the intellection of
this intelligible on this occasion, the agent intellect must also be
“turned outwards,” as it were, away from itself, in order to shine
on the appearances of mundane things in the imaginations of
individual human beings.
When it is turned outward but still not illuminating any
appearance, the agent intellect seems to be lacking any intelligible. And yet as an image arises, the agent intellect will bring one
of the intelligibles into focus. Thus, surprisingly, the agentintellect-as-turned-outward is pure potentiality, pure material-for;
it is the material intellect. In order to appear as such, that is, as
empty of intelligibles of mundane things, it must become
“temporarily ignorant of itself” (Blaustein 1984, 214-15).
This self-forgetfulness is concretely realized by its
conjunction with our imaginations. By virtue of that conjunction,
the agent intellect becomes “ignorant” of being the self-intellecting source of all intelligibility; it appears, instead, in each of
us in a double form—first, as our partially actualized receptivity
for intelligibles (our disposed intellect) and, second, as light
eliciting those intelligibles by abstraction from our images. The
agent intellect’s ignorance of itself seems to be in remarkable
agreement with the role of ignorance in the Upanishads:
according to Yājñavalkya a knower of Brahman “knows
knowledge and ignorance, both of them, together” (IU, 11). For
Brahman, too, turns outward, so that ignorance, that is, awareness
of multiplicity, is one of its aspects (Aurobindo 1996, 61-62 and
94). But Brahman is both knowledge and ignorance; the two are
inseparable (Aurobindo 1996, 58 and 72).
From the perspective of an individual human being, as I learn
more, the agent intellect becomes the form of my disposed
intellect to an ever greater degree. In this way my three principal
differences from it will decrease. First, in acquiring more intelligibles, my disposed intellect becomes less and less a partial view
of the agent intellect. Second, in advancing to intelligibles that are
less and less referred to the corporeal world, my disposed intellect
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33
becomes purer.17 Third, in embracing ever more encompassing
intelligibles, it approaches the agent intellect’s unitary vision.
Ultimately, while still “in this life” (Ivry 1966, 83), I may
arrive at the point where I have acquired all the intelligibles.18
Then I will have achieved a state of complete conjunction19 with
the agent intellect. My disposed intellect will have lost all traces
of individuality,20 which are what make it my disposed intellect; it
will have perished as such. All of me that is not intellect is “cut
off” from my intellect, which is identical with the agent intellect
(Blaustein 1984, 272). In this sense the state of complete
conjunction has been said to involve an “existential break” from
the world.21 Once again Yājñavalkya would recognize in this
existential break an analogue, at a deep experiential level, to a
prominent feature of the realization of Brahman.
In complete conjunction, I experience myself permanently
(Ivry 1996, 83) as shining forth intelligibility, but this “myself” is
not the self I used to think I was, for the conjunction removes that
which had prevented me from recognizing that the agent intellect
is my form.22 Averroes says that at this point the agent intellect,
united with us as our form, functions as our sole operative
principle.23 We might wonder what life in this state of conjunction
would be like. One suggestion is that I might experience it as “a
wakeful loss of rationality,” a loss of consciousness of my
humanity (Blaustein 1984, 272). I would not be engaged in
thinking things out; I would not be conscious of myself as an
individual, as a member of the human species.
Alternatively, guided by his own experience, Yājñavalkya
would propose that perhaps I might be aware of myself (what
Aristotle in the Ethics pointed to as my true self) engaged in selfintellection, while simultaneously being aware of experiencing
my ordinary self involved in its everyday activities against this
backdrop. Yājñavalkya would offer two possibilities, the second
of which would not be analogous to his own experience. First, in
each instance of intellection, I could perhaps experience the agent
intellect as transitioning from unitary self-intellection to the
offering of an aspect of itself to my imagination. Second,
analogous to the end of the path outlined in the Yoga-Sutras (that
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is, kaivalya),24 it could be that when I am engaged in self-intellection I ignore the particulars of the world and desist from
everyday activities, and so, ultimately, wither away and die.25
Part Two: Cit (Pure Awareness)
To begin our consideration of pure awareness, let us return to
Aristotle. In the Nichomachean Ethics he writes:
[O]ne who is seeing is aware (αỉσθάνεται) that he is
seeing, and one who is hearing [is aware] that he is
hearing,…[and, in general,] whenever we are
perceiving [we are aware] that we are perceiving and
whenever we are engaged in intellection (νοῶμεν) [we
are aware] that we are engaged in intellection
(1170a29-31).26
To what aspect of experience is Aristotle pointing here? Many
believe this passage means that perceptual consciousness is
accompanied by a reflection on, or a thought about, that
consciousness.27 For example, I know that I’m looking at you
seated there before me. However, such reflection seems to occur
only intermittently. Hence, an alternative interpretation has been
proposed,28 according to which perceptual consciousness is
always “selfaware”—that is, aware (of) itself,29 but not conscious
of itself—although, at any given time, we may notice
selfawareness to a greater or lesser degree. Yājñavalkya would
emphasize that only diligent practice could enable me to
recognize the difference between reflective consciousness and
selfawareness in my own experience.
To clarify the difference between selfawareness and reflective
consciousness, we shall draw upon some descriptions of
experience by the philosopher J.-P. Sartre.30 Consciousness is
necessarily always aware (of) itself, but precisely as being
conscious of an object beyond itself. “[T]his awareness (of)
consciousness…is not positional; that is, consciousness is not for
itself its own object. Its object is outside of it by nature…. We
shall call such a consciousness ‘consciousness of the first
degree’” (S, 23-24). In this essay, “consciousness” will always
DRUECKER
35
mean positional consciousness, consciousness of an object.
As an example of first degree consciousness, let us take my
perceptual consciousness-of-a-coffee-cup-on-a-table—say, in the
mode of staring-at.31 In this experience, the perceptual
consciousness is not an object for itself, whereas the coffee-cupon-a-table is an object for it. But in each such act of
consciousness, there lives an attentive presence by virtue of
which the consciousness is aware (of) itself. When, as is usually
the case, the attentive presence goes unnoticed, we experience
only a dim awareness (of) consciousness.
Yājñavalkya could point out that in his tradition this
awareness is called the “witness” (sākshī; ŚU, VI.12-14) and the
self-aware quality of consciousness is called “self-luminousness”
(svajyotir). He might add that this is what he was referring to
when he said, “You cannot see the seer of seeing; you cannot hear
the hearer of hearing; you cannot think of the thinker of thinking;
you cannot perceive the perceiver of perceiving” (BU, III.4.2);
and when he said, “It is the unseen seer, the unheard hearer, the
unthought thinker, the unperceived perceiver. Other than this
there is no seer…hearer…perceiver” (BU, 7.23). Sartre would
seem to agree with him that this awareness cannot be the object
of consciousness: this sphere “is a sphere of absolute existence,
that is, of pure spontaneities, which are never objects” (S, 77).
As opposed to this selfaware, first-degree consciousness-ofobjects, which makes up most of our waking lives, there arises
from time to time “a consciousness directed onto [the firstdegree] consciousness, [that is,] a consciousness which takes [the
first-degree] consciousness as its object.” Sartre calls it a “seconddegree” or “reflecting consciousness.” Whereas in the previous
case there was no duality at all to synthesize, here “we are in the
presence of a synthesis of two consciousnesses, of which one is
consciousness of the other.” When I think, “Staring at this coffee
cup on the table is wasting time,” this act of reflective
consciousness involves a synthesis of the thinking consciousness
and the reflected-upon consciousness-of-the-coffee-cup.
Moreover, just like first-degree consciousness, second-degree
consciousness—my thinking, in this instance—is self-aware (S,
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28-29).
When the thinking consciousness posits the previously
unreflected-upon staring consciousness as its object, it is not its
own staring that it is positing. What the reflecting consciousness
states about the staring consciousness does not concern itself; it
concerns the staring consciousness, which the reflecting
consciousness reflects upon. Hence, what reflecting
consciousness is turns out to be selfaware consciousness of
another, prior, selfaware consciousness, which, in turn, is
consciousness of an object that is not a consciousness. Reflecting
consciousness really does re-flect; that is, it bends backward to
look at an earlier moment of consciousness.
The fact that it is not its own staring that the thinking
consciousness posits in reflecting on the staring consciousness
raises the question whether the I that seems to be thinking “is that
of the consciousness reflected upon” and not, in fact, an I
supposed to be “common to the two superimposed consciousnesses.” Indeed, one suspects that the reason why every reflection
possesses a sense of self is that the reflective act itself gives birth
to the sense of self in the consciousness that is reflected upon (S,
28-29).32 Sartre offers an example in order to test this hypothesis:
I was absorbed just now in my reading. I am going to
seek to recall the circumstances of my reading….
Thus I am going to revive…also a certain thickness of
un-reflected-upon consciousness, since the objects
were able to be perceived only by that consciousness
and remain relative to it. That consciousness must not
be posited as the object of my reflection; on the
contrary, I must direct my attention onto the revived
objects, but without losing sight of the un-reflectedupon consciousness, while maintaining a sort of
complicity with it and making an inventory of its
content in a non-positional way. The result is not in
doubt. While I was reading, there was consciousness
of the book, of the heroes of the novel, but the I was
not inhabiting that consciousness (S, 30; italics in the
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37
last sentence added).
Here Sartre reawakens the original self-aware consciousness and
dwells in the awareness.
That awareness is also a precondition for reflection. Should
he reflect, upon being absorbed in his readings, “I was absorbed
in my reading,” then, instead of dwelling in the awarenesscomponent of the original consciousness, he would, as it were,
transform it into an act of consciousness, the object of which is
the original consciousness, (of) which the awareness was aware.
There certainly is an I present to that second-order
consciousness.33 So, we may call it “self-consciousness.”
Based on this I of reflection, Sartre shows how I construct a
unified sense of self in three stages: first, as a unity of states, like
my hatred of Peter; then as a unity of actions, like my playing a
piano sonata; and finally as a unity of qualities, like my spitefulness. For instance, let us suppose a first-order consciousness of
disgust and anger, present together with the perception of Peter. If
the self-consciousness reflected only on what was appearing in
the first-order consciousness, it would be thinking, “I feel
disgusted with Peter.” But instead, the angry disgust at Peter
appears as a profile, or perspectival view, of the disposition
“hatred of Peter,” just as a house will show itself to me in different
profiles depending upon where I am standing. The hatred appears
to be showing a “side” of itself through the momentary
experience of angry disgust. To the self-consciousness, the angry
disgust appears to be emanating from the hatred. On a later
occasion, perhaps, the hatred will appear upon reflection as an
actualization of a quality of spitefulness, which is in me (S, 4546, 51, 53). But in neither case does the self-consciousness realize
that the hatred or the spitefulness is arising in the moment of
reflection; rather it supposes that the state or the quality was
already there in the first-order consciousness.34
This process resulting in a sense of self leads me to say things
like “my consciousness,” when in fact “[t]he I is not the owner of
consciousness; it is the object of consciousness” (S, 77).
Yājñavalkya could report that a process of construction of the
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sense of self (aham-kāra) also figures prominently in the
Upanishadic tradition. It leads to the arising of many fears and
desires, which, in turn, function as barriers to the realization of
Brahman by keeping us “glued” to objects. I note that there is a
remarkable agreement here with Sartre, who wrote: “But perhaps
the essential role [of the sense of self] is to mask to consciousness
its own spontaneity…. Hence, everything happens as if
consciousness…were hypnotizing itself over that sense of self,
which it constituted” (S, 81-82).
Usually we do not notice the awareness-aspect of
consciousness because we are so taken up with what is appearing
to consciousness. Yet, on occasion, awareness may stand out in
our experience. For instance: Some people are engaged in a
heated discussion at an outdoor café, when a nearby car suddenly
backfires. Several of the participants may be so caught up in the
conversation that they don’t even notice the loud sound; others
may be startled and shift their attention to the street; someone
who was anchored in awareness, however, would notice, but not
be jarred by, the sound.
Another example: On a good day the football quarterback Joe
Montana, at the top of his game, would experience a pass play as
follows.35 He was conscious of the linemen rushing at him, of his
receivers running downfield, and so on. But instead of looking
with hurried, anxious glances, he experienced an awareness
spread over the whole unfolding scene. All the players seemed to
be moving in slow motion, and everything appeared with great
clarity and distinctness. He was keenly aware of his own body, the
motions of his limbs and an overall sense of relaxation, as his arm
drew back and the ball headed toward the receiver.36 Taken by
itself this example may mislead us into thinking that awareness is
dependent on the attainment of a certain level of skill, in this case,
that of an MVP quarterback. But the previous example and the
following one make it clear that this is not the case.
A third illustration: Some automobile drivers experience
freeway traffic as follows: “First, one driver cuts me off; then a
slowpoke is holding me up. My consciousness narrows to focus
on the offending driver; and, irritated, I react by honking or
DRUECKER
39
suddenly changing lanes.” Another driver may perceive the same
cars on the beltway as if they were moving in a force field. She
experiences that field as calling forth the alterations in her driving
required in order to maintain a smooth flow of traffic.
A fourth instance: “Surgeons say that during a difficult
operation they have the sensation that the entire operating team is
a single organism, moved by the same purpose; they describe it as
a “ballet” in which the individual is subordinated to the group
performance” (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, 65).
A fifth example: The following story shows a transition out of
awareness into self-consciousness:
Suppose a woman is engaged in sewing something. A
friend enters the room and begins speaking to her. As
long as she listens to her friend and sews in
[awareness], she has no trouble doing both. But if she
gives her attention to her friend’s words and a thought
arises in her mind as she thinks about what to reply,
her hands stop sewing; if she turns her attention to her
sewing and thinks about that, she fails to catch everything her friend is saying, and the conversation does
not proceed smoothly. In either case….she has transformed [awareness] into thought. As her thoughts fix
on one thing, they’re blank to all others, depriving the
mind of its freedom.37
This example enables us to avoid the misconception that
awareness is incompatible with words. For it was a shift in the
way in which she attended to speech, or to her sewing, that led to
the woman’s loss of the ability to attend to both simultaneously.
A sixth and final case, as described by Merleau-Ponty (1945):
Being most of the time in the consciousness-mode, we live in a
world that “only stirs up second-hand thoughts in us.” Our mind
is taken up with “thoughts, already formulated and already
expressed, which we can recall silently to ourselves and by which
we give ourselves the illusion of an interior life. But this supposed
silence is in reality full of words rattling around.” However,
occasionally we may “rediscover primordial silence, underneath
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the words’ rattling around.” Then we pass from the mode of
consciousness-of-objects to dwell in awareness. We experience “a
certain emptiness,” “a certain lack which seeks to fill itself,” to be
transformed into speech (213-14). Then there can emerge “an
authentic word, one which formulates something for the first
time”—such as “that of the child who is pronouncing her first
word, of the lover who is discovering his feeling” (207-08), or of
“the writer who is saying and thinking something for the first
time” (214). In the mode of awareness, we can live through a sort
of original emergence.
Words usually serve to keep our thoughts moving within
already formulated articulations. They could be said to function
like “preciptitates” (Niederschläge)38 of previous “chemical
reactions,” brought about by our own words or those of others.
However, when awareness becomes prominent, it acts as a
catalyst, which facilitates a fresh chemical reaction.
All the above examples manifest an awake, keen involvement
in experience together with an absence of the sense of self and of
self-focused emotions and motivations from the foreground. And
each of them brings to the foreground a different property of
awareness: the first, “unstuckness” to objects; the second,
spaciousness, not merely in the spatial and the temporal senses;
the third, responsiveness to dynamic qualities of the surrounding
field; the fourth, organic connectedness with whom or what39 is in
the field; the fifth, motion away from the directing I; and the sixth,
a sense of emptiness out of which newness arises spontaneously.
We might say that a good seminar could give evidence of
some of these signs of increased awareness. If, over time, the
participants have developed seminar skills analogous to the skills
developed by the members of a surgical team, the seminar might
be experienced as a sort of ballet. Along with the development of
those skills, some of the members may have cultivated their
awareness to some degree, paralleling the range of levels of
awareness in the operating team. That cultivation may enable
them to experience “a certain emptiness,” from which an
“authentic word” may emerge with greater frequency.
Such characteristics of awareness as those listed above have
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led people in certain pursuits, such as martial arts, to cultivate it,
so that it will remain reliably in the foreground. In developing a
painterly vision,40 for instance, one must learn to forget what
things are, in order to see how they are actually appearing to the
eye—which means, how they are coming into being before our
eyes. As Merleau-Ponty says of Cézanne: “It is the mountain that
he interrogates with his gaze. What exactly does he ask of it? To
unveil the means, visible and not otherwise, by which it is making
itself a mountain before our eyes.”41
We might expand on this account in the following way. As a
potential painter’s awareness becomes more prominent, she no
longer sees things as already “finished off,” but, instead, as
having a potential for greater “aliveness.” It is as if they were
calling to her to join in their emergence. Then she may heed the
appeal and begin to paint. Now it is this particular piece of fruit
before her that she captures “coming into being before her eyes”
in such a way that it can do so later before our eyes.42
Another example of the cultivation of awareness is found in
psychoanalysis. In his recommendations on the proper attitude to
be adopted by the analyst, Freud counsels a state of mind
possessing, first, an absence of reasoning or
deliberate attempts to select, concentrate or understand; and [second,] even, equal and impartial
attention to all that occurs within the field of
awareness…. This technique, says Freud…“consists
simply in not directing one’s notice to anything in
particular and in maintaining the same ‘evenly
suspended attention’…in the face of all that one
hears” (Epstein 1904, 194).43
That is, the analyst deliberately withdraws from consciousnessof-objects and dwells in the awareness component of
consciousness. This open attentional attitude is to be distinguished, on the one hand, from a merely passive attention, in
which the mind wanders freely from object to object, and, on the
other, from a focal attentional attitude, searching for a particular
meaning (Epstein 1904, 195). Partly because evenly suspended
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attention was criticized as unattainable,44 Freud’s prescriptions to
practice it did not become integrated into psychoanalytic training
programs.
However, Wilfred Bion, perhaps the most thoughtful psychoanalyst of the latter part of the twentieth century, forcefully
advocated this practice in the following terms:
[T]he capacity to forget, the ability to eschew desire
and understanding, must be regarded as essential
discipline for the psycho-analyst. Failure to practise
this discipline will lead to a steady deterioration in the
powers of observation whose maintenance is essential.
The vigilant submission to such discipline will by
degrees strengthen the analyst’s mental powers just in
proportion as lapses in this discipline will debilitate
them….
To attain to the state of mind essential for the
practice of psycho-analysis I avoid any exercise of
memory…. When I am tempted to remember the
events of any particular session I resist the
temptation…. If I find that some half-memory is
beginning to obtrude I resist its recall….
A similar procedure is followed with regard to
desires: I avoid entertaining desires and attempt to
dismiss them from my mind. For example…it interferes with analytic work to permit desires for the
patient’s cure, or well-being, or future to enter the
mind. Such desires…lead to progressive deterioration
of [the analyst’s] intuition….
[There is an aspect of ultimate reality] that is
currently presenting the unknown and unknowable [in
the consulting room]. This is the ‘dark spot’ that must
be illuminated by ‘blindness’ [that is, ignorance].
Memory and desire are ‘illuminations’ that destroy the
value of the analyst’s capacity for observation as a
leakage of light into a camera might destroy the value
of the film being exposed (Bion [1970] 1983, 51-52,
DRUECKER
43
55-56, 69).
The effect of failing to observe this discipline is to interpret
what the patient says in terms of what the analyst wishes or
already “knows,” thus closing her off from what may be emerging
for the first time in the current hour. Bion’s psychoanalytic state
of mind may be comparable to Socratic ignorance. Both represent
an opening up of the self in conversation, for the sake of noticing
emergent possibilities that would otherwise remain unthought.
Another area in which a practice has been advocated for the
enhancement of awareness is philosophy. In the early twentieth
century, Edmund Husserl proposed pursuing wisdom by
following a path that he called “phenomenology.” By this he
meant an account of the things appearing to you precisely in the
way in which they actually appear.
Philosophy students sometimes think that studying phenomenology entails mainly reading books. However, learning to see the
things appearing to you precisely in the way in which they
actually appear takes practice. Martin Heidegger, Husserl’s best
known student, had great difficulty at the beginning of his study
of phenomenology.
It concerned the simple question how thinking’s
manner of procedure which called itself “phenomenology” was to be carried out…. My perplexity
decreased slowly…only after I met Husserl personally
in his workshop…. Husserl’s teaching took place in a
step-by-step training in phenomenological “seeing”
which at the same time demanded that one relinquish
the untested use of philosophical knowledge…. I
myself practiced phenomenological seeing, teaching
and learning in Husserl’s proximity after 1919.45
The phenomenological seeing that one would practice is
founded on an act called “the phenomenological reduction.”
While the reduction was instituted in the service of phenomenological philosophy, Husserl was aware of a powerful transformative effect it could have upon the person practicing it:
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Perhaps it will even turn out that the total phenomenological attitude, and the [reduction] belonging to it,
essentially has, first of all, the vocation of effecting a
complete personal transformation, which would, in the
first place, be comparable to a religious conversion,
but which beyond that contains within itself the
significance of being the greatest existential transformation to which humanity as humanity is called.46
Yājñavalkya would note at this point that the designation
“greatest existential transformation”—like the earlier “existential
break” associated with conjunction in Averroes—also fits with the
experience of “waking up to” (pratibodham) Brahman (KeU,
II.4).
In characterizing the phenomenological reduction, I shall
borrow the descriptions of the Husserl’s closest collaborator in his
later years, Eugen Fink, because they are vivid and strongly
suggestive of awakening to Brahman.47 The phenomenological
reduction is a two-part act (F, 41). Husserl called the first
component of that act a “disconnection” (Ausschaltung) or an
epoché (ἐποχή)—a suspension of the “natural attitude,” the
attitude in which we take things for granted, or as a matter of
course (als selbstverständlich).
Disconnection means that you deliberately abstain from all
beliefs; you inhibit your customary acceptance of what “counts”
(das Geltende) for you (F, 39-40). In Sartre’s terms, you cease
living in acts of positional consciousness. While remaining
disconnected, as we observed Sartre doing, you turn your
attention from the objects of consciousness to the awareness
ingredient in consciousness-of-objects. You are not caught up
with objects, but are attentively “spread” over the whole of
consciousness-of-objects, without positing that whole as an
object. And you alter your mode of attention from an active
searching-for to a receptive letting-things-come. You are learning
to do something involuntary, like preparing to receive “the
visitation of sleep,” which comes as the god Dionysus visits his
followers, when they no longer are distinct from the role they are
playing.48 You are not gradually acquiring things in the way the
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disposed intellect acquires intelligibles.
The disconnection includes the “nullification” of the sense of
yourself as an empirical human being—it “un-humanizes”
(entmenschlicht) you inasmuch as it “lays bare the…onlooker in
himself” that is “already at work” in you, into which you now
“fade away” (F, 40). In the terminology of this essay, you
disidentify with your sense of self, and you pass into awareness
instead of remaining in consciousness. Yājñavalkya might remark
that the realization of Brahman involves a similar correlation
between the deconstruction of the sense of self (nir-aham-kāra)
and a fading away into the “witness,” which, as we have seen, was
already at work.
You are now in a position to notice precisely what appears to
you in just the way in which it appears. As with Freud’s evenly
suspended attention, all the phenomena are treated equally; none
is assumed in advance to have priority over the others. As in the
case of painterly vision, you are not imposing your knowledge on
your experiencing; you are operating “prior” to your identification of things or events. Your going backwards involves a sort
of reversal of the outward-turning action of the agent intellect.
For the agent intellect elicited intelligibles from their latent state
in the appearances, whereas the disconnection goes back behind
those intelligibles, which, due to language, are already at work in
our ordinary experience of the appearances. In its open attentiveness, the disconnection has an “empty” relationship to
experience, perhaps somewhat like the agent intellect in its
“empty” state as material intellect.
The second component of the phenomenological reduction,
the reducing proper, is a leading-back.49 In the reducing, “while
explicitly inquiring backwards behind the acceptednesses…with
respect to your belonging to the world,” you “blast open
(sprengen),” through transcendental insight, the “captivation and
captivity (Befangenheit)” caused by those world-acceptednesses.
You experience this as a “breakthrough” (Durchbruch; FK, 348).
As a result, you discover for the first time that a primordial
conviction (Husserl calls this an Urdoxa) has been underlying all
of your experiences—an unformulated, implicit acceptance of the
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world and of yourself as belonging to it (F, 40-41). Here ‘world’
refers, not to the collection of all things, but to what is originally
given as a universal background, in the way a horizon is given for
vision. While you may have occasionally experienced a
breakdown of particular beliefs in the past, that did not shake your
implicit acceptance of the horizon.
You are now sharing in the onlooker’s awareness of the
world, which is the “universally flowing and continuing [world-]
apperception,” the “underground” (Untergrund) out of which
every act of consciousness springs up. In this sense, phenomenology is said to make the ultimate ground of the world available
to an experience (FK, 349, 352, 340),50 one in which we
experience “how…the world is coming about for us” (Husserl
1962, 147.29-32).
Yājñavalkya might accept the notion that painterly vision,
evenly suspended attention, and the phenomenological reduction
are at least partial Brahman-experiences, ones that go beyond the
spontaneously arising Brahman-moments on the football field or
on the highway. However, he would point out two differences.
First, they are cultivated in the service of other ends—painting,
healing patients, or pursuing wisdom—whereas realization of
Brahman is the supreme end (BU, IV.3.22), pursued for its own
sake. Second, in the other contexts awareness is to be actualized
only on particular occasions—before the canvas, in the consulting
room, or in the phenomenological “workshop”—whereas one
remains continually in the Brahman-realm.
According to Husserl, in going about the course of ordinary
life, the phenomenologist has the epoché as “an active-dispositional51 attitude to which we resolve ourselves once and for all”
and which “can be actualized again and again” (Husserl 1962,
153.36-37 and 140.19-20), like the dancer’s repeated re-actualizing of the dancing that she has as a first actuality. This raises the
question whether the knower of Brahman could be said to be
Brahman in this dispositional sense.
In the Upanishadic tradition you may engage in a meditative
practice, in which you could pass through several stages. At the
beginning you deliberately concentrate and turn your
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47
consciousness inward, while endeavoring to dwell more and more
in awareness (Sekida 1985, 62 and 93).52 You need to keep
reminding yourself to notice the awareness, which is always
there. Initially you cannot accomplish this while you are doing
something else, because a thing or event always captures your
attention.
After a while you will be able to maintain this centering of
yourself in awareness. While your mind gradually has become
dominated by awareness, you still occasionally experience
moments of conscious reflection on the immediately preceding
moment of awareness (Sekida 1985, 93).53 You are now “allowing
the mind to fluctuate.” The following analogy may convey some
sense of this experience.54 Suppose a neighbor were to ask you to
look after her children. When the children come, you could take
one of three different courses of action: first, you could abandon
responsibility by telling them that they can do whatever they want
as long as they don’t bother you; or, second, you could try to
control them by telling them what to do and what not to do; or,
third, you could
allow the children to play. This “allowing” is not
active, since you do not interfere. It is not passive,
since you are present with the children…in a total
way. It is like a cat sitting at a mouse hole. It appears
to be asleep, but let the mouse show but a whisker and
the cat will pounce. It is only by allowing that one
truly understands what allowing means.
“Allowing” brings awareness to the fore in a way that pushing
away and controlling do not.55 You are aware of movements from
focused to unfocused consciousness, of shifts from perceptual to
thinking consciousness, of fluctuations from consciousness-of to
empty awareness, and so forth, as well as of the reversals of all
these. “Allowing is…so to say, what fluctuating awareness is
‘made of.’”
Eventually no reflection is experienced any more; this total
wakefulness completely purifies one of the “sleepiness” which is
what the “habit” of consciousness really is (Sekida 1985, 62 and
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94).56 To be aware you don’t have to be conscious of something;
nor do you need to be someone, much less someone special (Low
1993, 40).
Positional consciousness-of-objects, which was first for us,
here shows itself to be in fact a derivative of non-positional
awareness, which is what is first in itself. Initially, consciousness
seemed to have the component of awareness; but now we may say
that awareness sometimes manifests itself partially in the form of
consciousness-of-objects, while in itself it is pure awareness (cit).
Again, this is quite analogous to what Averroes said of the agent
intellect. In itself it is pure, having no reference to the world; but,
through its outward turn, it conjoins itself with our imaginations,
resulting in the emergence from it of particular intelligibles.
Upon emerging from this absolute silence, you may be so
forcefully struck by something in the world that you consciously
recognize that you are just pure awareness (Sekida 1985, 95). You
momentarily become conscious of this “objectless being present
with the children in a total way” as yourself. You are now
conscious of having arrived in the Brahman-realm.57 Yājñavalkya
might note that this recognition is what is expressed in the words:
“I am Brahman!” (BU, I.4.10), adding that this experiencing of
pure awareness is what he was referring to when he said:
Though then he does not see [any thing], yet he does
not see while seeing. There is no cutting off of the
seeing of the seer…. But there is no second
(dvitīyam), no other (anyad), separate from him, that
he could see…. When there is some other (anyad),
then one can see…the other (BU, IV.3.23 and 31).
According to this account, pure awareness seems to be empty.
Yājñavalkya could respond that, while it is empty of objects, it is
full in the sense that it is an experiencing of the moment-tomoment “going forth of things in different directions”
(vyuccaranti), like “sparks from a fire” (BU, II.1.20).
Alternatively, it is an experiencing of the whole’s springing forth
(sambhavati), which is like a spider emitting (srjate) a thread of
its web, or like plants springing up from the earth (MuU, I.1.7). It
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is as if in pure awareness we had “gone backward” to a point just
“before” things, self, and world emerge. This brings to mind a
passage in Sartre: “Thus, each instant of our conscious life reveals
to us a creation ex nihilo...[—]this inexhaustible creation of
existence of which we are not the creators” (S, 79).
Yājñavalkya’s characterization of the fullness of pure
awareness is conveyed by the traditional name for the Brahmanrealm, saccidānanda. The three parts of the one word express the
oneness of pure existence (sat), pure awareness (cit), and pure joy
(ānanda). Since there is no “of,” as in “consciousness-of,”
awareness is pure sat rather than a consciousness of it. Fink seems
to be giving voice to the same experience when he refers to the
unique identity of the onlooker and the universally flowing worldapperception: as “there is…no other (anyad), separate from him,
that he could see,” so there are no objects to separate the onlooker
from the flowing world-apperception (FK, 355).
This oneness of existence and awareness appears in the
Thomistic branch of the Aristotelian tradition as follows: Each of
us exists by virtue of a separate act of “is-ing” (esse), which is
something other than our essence, our humanity. A human being
is, not by virtue of being human, but by participation in, or
reception of, is-ing from, absolute Is-ing, just as a piece of wood
that is afire is so by participation in Fire (ST, Q.3, A.4r). Absolute
Is-ing is like the Sun, and a human being is like some part of the
air. Each individual instantiation of the intelligible human essence
remains illuminated, that is, continues is-ing, only as long as
absolute Is-ing is shining on it (ST, Q.8, A.1r). That is why
Thomas says that what we call “creation” is, in fact, an ongoing
“flowing out, arising, springing out (emanatio)” (ST, Q.44, A.1r)
from absolute Is-ing. This much of Thomas’s view can help us to
understand how the Upanishadic experience of cit is an
experience of sat.
Jacques Maritain (1956) applied Thomas’s understanding of
the distinction between esse and essence to interpret the
experience of the knower of Brahman in the following way.58 In
reflecting consciousness we experience our soul in its acts. What
we experience in reflection is not our intelligible essence but
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rather our self as “prisoner of the mobility, of the multiplicity, of
the fugitive luxuriance of the phenomena and the operations
which emerge in us from the night of the unconscious—prisoner
of the apparent self” (145-46). But, as we have seen, the cultivation of awareness, as distinct from consciousness or reflecting
consciousness, enables those on the path toward realizing
Brahman to pass out of ordinary self-conscious experience and
into “an exceptional and privileged experience, emptying into the
abyss of subjectivity…to escape from the apparent self, in order
to reach the absolute Self” (146). These practitioners “strip
themselves of every image, of every particular representation, and
of every distinct operation to such a degree that…they reach not
the essence of their soul but its existence, substantial esse itself”
(148) “by an…annihilating connaturality” (146), in the absolute
silence of total wakefulness.
[F]rom the fact that existence is…limited only by the
essence that receives it…one can understand that this
negative experience, in reaching the substantial esse
of the soul, reaches, at once, both this existence
proper to the soul and existing in its metaphysical
profusion and the sources of existing, according as the
existence of the soul…is something that is emanating
and is pervaded by an inflow from which it holds
everything…. It is the sources of being in his soul that
the human being reaches in this way (153-54).
Thus, through practice in experiencing pure awareness (cit), the
knower of Brahman has come to experience himself as the inflow
of is-ing flowing out from absolute Is-ing (sat). One might say
that the transition from experiencing myself as the witness to
recognizing pure awareness is like going from having my finger
on the pulsing of the world to recognizing my finger as the
pulsing of the world. Maritain’s interpretation clearly distinguishes the Sun of Averroes’ outward-turned self-intellection of
intelligible essences from the Sun of outflowing self-aware
existence.
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51
Now we are in a position to say that when Śvetaketu realizes
“You are That,” he is experiencing himself as the outflow of sat
and he is recognizing, as his true self, pure awareness (of) the
continual emanation of sparks that are “on the way” to becoming
things—and that this recognizing is that very outflow. Moreover,
in this recognition Śvetaketu is what is recognized: “One who
knows the supreme Brahman becomes that very Brahman” (MuU,
III.2.9; cf. BU, IV.4.13) and “becomes this All” (BU, I.4.10).
Just as we wondered earlier what the daily experience of the
state of complete conjunction would be like, so now the
analogous question arises with respect to the Brahman-realm. In
the discussion of the phenomenological reduction, I raised the
possibility that we could acquire pure awareness as a first
actuality, in the sense of an active disposition. The knower of
Brahman would then alternate between pure awareness and
consciousness-of, in the way that I can “turn on” or “turn off” my
contemplation of the Pythagorean Theorem as I wish. This
suggestion would parallel Aristotle’s experience that we are, for
intermittent periods of time, in the same state as the divine itself
is over the whole of time. The difference would be that instead of
turning from one mode of consciousness (say, perceiving or
thinking) to another (intellecting), the knower of Brahman alternates at will between two different ways of total experiencing—
between consciousness and pure awareness. It would be
somewhat analogous to looking at the well-known ambiguous
figure of the duck-rabbit, and seeing it now as a duck, now as a
rabbit.
We learn from Yājñavalkya that living in the Brahman-realm
is, instead, like a hypothetical double seeing of both the duck and
the rabbit at once, rather than like a seeing of them in alternation
(Carter 1997, 54).59 The knower of Brahman is engaged with
“consciousness-of” while simultaneously remaining in the realm
of pure awareness. The following analogy, in which the author
(Sharma) quotes Ramana Maharshi, conveys something of this:
The ordinary person only sees the reflection in the
mirror but the realized person sees the reflection as
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well as the mirror. “For instance you see a reflection
in the mirror and the mirror. You know the mirror to
be the reality and the picture in it a mere reflection. Is
it necessary that to see the mirror we should cease to
see the reflection in it?” Similarly, the realized one
continues to experience the world in his realized state.
Thus the realized person appreciates “the distinctions”
of sound, taste, form, smell etc. “But he always
perceives and experiences the one reality in all of
them.”60
Brahman-knowers experience the everyday world in the mirror of
purified awareness, and this makes possible their keen yet calm
involvement in that world. In the analogy we could take “seeing
the reflection” to stand for consciousness of the world, and
“seeing the mirror,” for pure awareness. When I see the mirror
along with the reflections, the latter are not being viewed “from
outside,” as they are in the mode of consciousness, but rather as
emerging out of awareness. One might also apply the analogy to
the self by saying that knowers of Brahman experience their
ordinary selves, too, as being virtual images cast by the mirror.
The mirror analogy may be applied to the modes of experiencing other than those encountered specifically in meditative
practice. Consciousness-of-objects in any manner—perceiving,
sensing, emoting, evaluating, thinking, and so on—and selfconsciousness, too, are like a vision of things in the virtual space
of the mirror. There are two fundamentally different modes of
consciousness-of-objects, depending upon whether the object in
question is an object in the true sense. When it maintains itself
throughout a succession of acts of consciousness, it is an object in
the etymological sense, namely something set or put (jectum)
before or over against (ob) the act of consciousness. This settingover-against is what is meant by “subject-object duality.” Such an
object shall be referred to henceforth as an ‘Object.’ It has an
identity, to which we may return again and again.
The following example illustrates the different layers that
may arise in perceptual consciousness-of-Objects. It begins with
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53
the emergence of an implicit Object from the background,
continues with a prepredicative explicating of it, and then
undergoes various layers of predicative development. The
following illustration may help to explain this: While I am
engaged in seminar, someone’s coffee cup may emerge from the
margins of my consciousness and may attract my attention and
become an explicit object of consciousness. My attention may
travel from its color to a figure on the side, and then to its overall
shape, and so on.61 Then my interest may awaken sufficiently so
that I think, “The cup has a circular figure on the side.” This shift
represents a transition from the cup’s just previously having
become implicitly determined as having a circle on its side to its
being grasped in an active identification as determined by the
circle on its side.62 Then I may think, “The fact that the cup has
that circular figure on its side is puzzling. I wonder what it stands
for.” My thought may subsequently be led to such Objects as “the
circular,” “shape in general,” and “property.”63
“Prior” to such perceptual consciousness of Objects and its
developments, there is a sensory consciousness of objects that has
been vividly described by Erwin Straus (1956). We sense objects
in the same way in which we respond to the dynamic quality of a
tone, which is “a state of unrest, a tension, an urge, almost a will
to move on, as if a force were acting on the tone and pulling it in
a certain direction” (Zuckerkandl 1959, 19). We are in a
symbiotic relation (Straus 1956, 200) with the “tones,” to which
we respond with incipient movements as we do to dance music
(239). This pre-linguistic, flowing realm is the ground from which
Objects emerge (204). We live simultaneously in the Objective
and the sensory and may experience the tension between them, as
the latter resists being fit into the former. Some people may be
especially attracted to the loss of their stance over-against
Objects, to the dispersion of their self-consciousness, and to the
blurring of the distinctness within the Objective realm (284 and
275). Precisely because of its lack of subject-Object duality and
self-consciousness, sensory consciousness is occasionally
mistaken for awareness by beginners. It is, however, just another
way of viewing the reflections in the virtual space produced by
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the mirror.
All of the above are distinctions that can be seen clearly in the
vision of that virtual space. In addition to seeing these distinctions, the knower of Brahman sees the virtual space and its reflections as emanating from the mirror. This second sort of seeing is
pure awareness. While awareness is never totally absent from our
experience, we notice it to varying degrees.
Usually, the degree to which we notice it is very minimal—as
when we seem to be, in Sartre’s words, “hypnotized” by what we
are conscious of. This is our “default” mode of experiencing.
When we are reading, thinking, conversing in seminar, dancing,
gazing at a sunset, or “even stretching out a hand to open the
door,” we are absorbed in that moment’s action (Sekida 1985, 91).
When we are self-conscious, we are also absorbed in the selfconsciousness. In absorption, awareness seems to have gotten
lost; but it has only receded into the deep background.
In some special moments, which have been called moments
of “flow” (Csikszentmilalyi 1990), awareness becomes prominent
in an incidental way:
A rock climber explains how it feels when he is
scaling a mountain: “You are so involved in what you
are doing [that] you aren’t thinking of yourself as
separate from the immediate activity” (53).
The absence of the self from consciousness does
not mean that a person in flow has given up the
control of his psychic energy, or that she is unaware of
what happens in her body or in her mind…. A good
runner is usually aware of every relevant muscle in his
body, of the rhythm of his breathing, as well as of the
performance of his competitors within the overall
strategies of the race (64).
We do not deliberately pursue such moments; they just
happen. The flow experience may be spontaneous, as in the earlier
examples of the driver and of the woman sewing; or it may be
skill-related, as in the examples of Joe Montana, the surgeon, and
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55
the rock climber. In the case of skill-related flow experiences, one
might say that the body’s usual resistance to intended action is
overcome by practice. As a result, consciousness as “overagainst” the body disappears, allowing awareness to become
prominent. We move out of flow when the “over-againstness”
arises again as the “I” becomes active either in reaction (“Wow!
This is so exciting!”) or in action (“If I bear down, I can keep this
going”).
As we saw in relation to painting, psychoanalysis, and
phenomenology, prominence of awareness may be deliberately
cultivated in order to be able to engage in some pursuit. Here
awareness is practiced, so that the practitioner comes to
experience the witness as a disposition. Once the practitioner
comes to possess the witness as a first actuality, he or she can then
activate it when engaging in the activity for the sake of which it
was developed.
Finally, in the double seeing of the knower of Brahman, pure
mirror-awareness is permanently prominent as a second actuality;
and there is a “loose,” “unstuck,” clear consciousness-of-objects
as well. This is said to be the state of one “freed while alive”
(jīvanmukta; cf. BU, IV.4.7).
In virtue of the oneness of sat and cit, this double seeing is
one with the out-flowing of existence. Thus, freedom manifests
itself on the one hand inasmuch as one’s awareness is active or
creative in respect to the world, and on the other hand inasmuch
as one’s action is responsive or receptive with respect to the
world—a reversal of the usual receptivity of consciousness and
activity of action (Yuasa 1987, 68). In the realm of action, this
freedom is freedom to respond without a “hitch” to the [field of
dynamic qualities] in the field of experience, which are analogous
to the directional arc involved in realizing the full significance of
a situation mentioned in Part One. These field [tensions] include
what Yājñavalkya takes Aristotle to be referring to when he
speaks of feeling feelings or performing actions as required
(δεῖ)—in the required cases, with respect to the required people,
in the required way, and for the required reasons (NE, 1106b1727).
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Another way of putting this is to say that the freedom of the
knower of Brahman manifests itself in the ability to be able to
move freely through the world with grace and effortlessness,
which [preserves thoughful awareness] (σοφροσύνη):65
For σοφροσύνη is precisely the virtue of general and
unself-conscious self-possession, of universal grace
and effortless command neither specified by particular
action, which would transform it from σοφροσύνη to
some particular virtue, nor checked by any opacity,
which would translate it into a mode of self-control.
What could work better for its model than a pure
objectless knowledge?
Knowers of Brahman have no inner barriers that can impede the
spontaneous emergence of whatever is called for by the current
moment.
In conclusion, we note certain formal parallels between the
role of Brahman in the Upanishads and that of the agent intellect
according to Averroes. First, each is the source—Brahman, the
source of all existence; the agent intellect, the source of all being,
that is, of all intelligibility. Second, both are “self-luminous” and
are responsible for “seeing” in some sense. Third, the non-dual
relation between the individual self and Brahman is like that
between the disposed intellect and the agent intellect. Fourth, a
“self-forgetting” “outward turn” occurs in the case of each of
them. Fifth, both the experience of Brahman and the experience
of intellection could be said to involve a breaking-free from my
ordinary captivation by the images on the walls of a cave-like
dwelling; both involve engaging in practice; and both ultimately
arrive at an existential breakthrough to “immortalizing.” In that
breakthrough, in both cases, I deconstruct my ordinary sense of
self and discover my true self as being both non-private (that is,
not mine alone) and non-dual with respect to the true self of
others.
There are fundamental differences, however, in other
respects. In the case of intellection, one escapes the captivity of
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57
opinions and of the perceptual world by becoming free for intelligibles through the gradual purification of theoretical study; in
the case of realizing Brahman, one escapes the captivity of the
mundane way of experiencing objects, regardless of whether they
appear in sensory, perceptual, or intellectual consciousness, by a
sudden shift from involvement in consciousness (whether firstdegree or reflective) to pure awareness—a shift that may be
experienced by the practice of cultivating awareness. Moreover,
the one, impersonal, non-dual, true self of us all, in which we
share in our immortalizing, is understood by Averroes to be the
self-intellection of the agent intellect; Yājñavalkya, on the other
hand, understands it to be pure awareness. And finally, in intellection, the material intellect realizes conjunction with the agent
intellect, which is the source of all intelligibility in the world; in
experiencing Brahman, however, pure [selfawareness] realizes
that it is non-dual with respect to the emergence of existence in its
entirety, encompassing both the sensory and the intelligible
realms.
Jacob Klein makes the following comment on Aristotle: the
receptive aspect of “νοεῖν…is the state of wakefulness, a state of
preparedness and alertness…. Νοῦς…when it is…one with the
νοητά….[—o]nly then can be said to be wakefulness ‘at work’”
(Klein 1964, 65). Looking back at the beginning of this essay,
Yājñavalkya might wonder how Homer’s realization of the full
significance of a situation,66 Aristotle’s reception of an intelligible, and Averroes’ complete conjunction with the agent
intellect’s self-intellection would compare, in regard to their
degrees of wakefulness, with dwelling in pure awareness.
He might think that the major difference between the
Upanishads and our three Western thinkers is that in the former
the state of empty receptivity is supreme—that is, even more
wakeful than “wakefulness at work.” But, alternately, it might be
that Averroes’ account of complete conjunction is a satisfactory
partial depiction of Brahman. If we focus on the emerging
revelation that occurs in the empty, receptive intellect’s becoming
one with a “profile” of the full, unitary agent intellect, we may be
considering one face of Brahman, as it were, namely, the intel-
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lectual one. Perhaps Klein was directing our attention to the
wakefulness of the experiential living-through of such a moment,
a wakefulness that, however, is not limited to the intellectual
sphere.
Let us allow Yājñavalkya the last word: “What you may be
overlooking is that the empty, receptive material intellect is an
appearance of the outward turning of the full source of determinacy, the agent intellect, whereas, in the case of Brahman, the
full and determinate is an appearance of the outward turning of
the empty.”
1
This essay is a revision of two NEH-supported lectures given at St. John’s
College, Annaopolis, on February 15 and 19, 2008 and dedicated to the
memory of Ralph Swentzell, who did so much to further the study of Eastern
Classics at St. John’s College.
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meditate on them as [being] simply the Self (BU, I.4.7).
9
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1075a7-11: “So, the condition the human intellect...
is in at some period of time...is the condition the intellection that intellects
itself is in over the whole of time.” Cf.: “For the gods, the whole of life is
blessed, and for human beings it is so to the extent that there is in it some
likeness to such a state of activity” (NE, 1178b25-26).
10
I am indebted to my colleague, Michael Blaustein, for a very fruitful recent
conversation about Averroes. This section is based upon the works of Altmann,
Black, Blaustein, Hyman, Ivry, Leaman, and Zedler listed in the bibliography.
Leaman and Zedler have been particularly helpful for the early part, but I have
taken most of it from Black. In the later part I have relied heavily on
Blaustein’s working out of the details of the relation between agent and
material intellects and have made significant use of Altmann and Ivry,
especially the latter’s thoughts about conjunction while we are still alive.
However, responsibility for any errors that there may be in the interpretation of
Averroes is mine alone.
2
This and the following few paragraphs are based on K. von Fritz, “ΝΟΟΣ
and ΝΟΕΙΝ in the Homeric Poems,” Classical Philology 38 (1943), 79-93.
‘aql bi al-malaka, which means intellect in natural disposition, aptitude,
faculty; intellectus in habitu.
3
12
Also: “the intellective [part of the soul] intellects the [intelligible] looks in
appearances” (De anima 431b2). I accept Nussbaum’s (1978) suggestion about
the meaning of φαντσία. It is based on such passages as the following 428a1,
7, 14ff., & and 29ff., as well as; 428b30ff.), wherein in which the link between
φαντσία and φαίνεσθαι seems compelling.
The translations from Homer are based upon those listed in the bibliography.
4
This “directional arc” is analogous, at a higher level, to Merleau-Ponty’s arc
intentionnel on the level of sensing (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 158).
5
The following few paragraphs are based on W. Otto, The Homeric Gods: The
Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954).
6
Since this essay is intended to be an introduction to a way of experiencing, it
will not go very far into the many conceptual distinctions that have come to be
seen as part of the Upanishadic teaching. For instance, there is no discussion
of the distinction between nirguṇa and saguṇa Brahman. While it is true that
such distinctions do reflect distinctions in experience, the reader who is being
introduced to the way of experiencing in question is not likely to have encountered them.
7
This quotation and the situation described in the following sentence derive
from HG, 6, 210, 195.
8
The Inner Controller is depicted mythologically as follows:
He entered in here right to the tips of the nails, as a razor slips into
a razor-case…. When he breathes he is called ‘breath’; when he
speaks, ‘speech’; when he sees, ‘eye’; when he hears, ‘ear’; when
he thinks, ‘mind.’ They are just the names of his actions. Whoever
meditates on any one of these does not know [the Self], for [the
Self] is not completely active in any one of them. One should
11
13
In fact, for Averroes, the imagination or, more properly, the cogitative
power—which, together with the imagination and memory, prepares what is
given in sensation, so that, when illumined by the agent intellect, the intelligible look can appear through and in-form the material intellect—is a fourth
intellect, the passible intellect (LC, 449.174, and cfp. 409.640). “The cogitative
power has the following functions: it can make an absent object appear as
though present; it can compare and distinguish the re-presented objects with
each other; it can judge whether a given re-presented object bears a relation to
a directly presented sense intention” (Zedler 1954, 441).
14
Yet because the human species is eternal, the succession of human souls in
which intellection of intelligibles of mundane things occurs ensures the continuity of intellection in the material intellect and the omnitemporality of the
intelligible looks of mundane things as such. Through the repeated presentation of potential intelligibles in imaginative appearances, this succession
“provides a replica in time and in matter of the eternal” intellection of the
agent intellect (Zedler 1951, 173). It is possible that the belief that souls
migrate into different bodies in succession is a reflection in the form of popular
myth of the truth of the omnitemporal unity of the material intellect in the
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60
multiplicity of disposed intellects (Altmann 1965, 82).
15
The agent intellect in this incidental connection would be what Aristotle
referred to as the intellect that enters “from outside the door”: “It remains then
that intellect alone enters additionally into [the seed of a human being] from
outside the door (θύραθεν) and that it alone is divine, for corporeal being-atwork has nothing in common with its being-at-work” (De generatione et
corruptione 736b27). Cf.:
But the intellect seems to come to be in [us] while being an
independent thing, and not to be destroyed…. [I]ntellecting or
contemplating wastes away because something else in us is
destroyed, but it is itself unaffected (without attributes). But
thinking things through and loving or hating are affections
(attributes) not of the intellect but of that which has intellect,
insofar as it has it. For this reason, when the latter is destroyed,
the intellect neither remembers nor loves, for these acts did not
belong to it but to the composite being which has perished; the
intellect is perhaps something more divine and is unaffected (OS,
408b18ff.).
What Averroes actually says is that the incidental connection constitutes a
“disposition” (isti‘dād, which means readiness, willingness, preparedness,
inclination, tendency, disposition, propensity; dispositio) of the agent intellect,
but one located within human souls. It is a disposition to receive the intelligible looks of mundane things. Thus, the material intellect is in reality the
agent-intellect-as-having-such-a-disposition-in-human-beings.
16 Based
on Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1072b12: “[I]t is beautiful and in that way
a source.”
17
When my disposed intellect is actively engaged in intellecting an intelligible
look, it is also intellecting itself, since, as Aristotle points out, the intellect is
one with what it intellects, in that the second actuality of both is identical, as
lumber’s being built is one with the activity of building. In contemplating itself
as informed by the intelligible look, my intellect is also directed toward the
image, which specifies the particular look that is to be received, in the same
way in which, when we look at a painting, we are directed toward the scene
that we see in it. However, since the mundane thing toward which the intellect
is directed via the image is not pure intelligibility, the disposed intellect’s selfintellection is not pure self-intellection; its act of intellection is not absolutely
one with its object of intellection. In this way it differs from the self-intellection of the agent intellect; for the object of the agent intellect’s intellection
does not point beyond itself.
18 What had been my intellect would now be either fully (Blaustein 1984, 272
and 283) or partly assimilated to the agent intellect. That is, either “I” would
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be engaged in intellection of everything intelligible or, having abandoned all
the contingent aspects of my intellection, I would be focusing solely on its
formal aspects, which are supplied by the agent intellect, so that I would be
participating in an aspect of the formal governing source of the whole
(Leaman 1998, 101-03).
19
Ittisāl =connectedness, unitedness, union; juncture, conjunction, link;
connection; contact (from wasala = to connect, join, unite, combine, link,
attach). Continuatio = a following of one thing after another, an unbroken
series, a connection, continuation, succession (from continuare = to join
together in uninterrupted succession, to make continuous). Wasala may be a
reformulation of Aristotle’s θίξις.
Altmann (1965, 83) says that this notion reflects Plotinus’s συνάπτειν (= [1]
[transitive] to join together; [2] [intransitive] to border on, lie next to;
combine, be connected with). Consider: “[W]e lift ourselves up by the part [of
the soul] which is not submerged in the body and by this conjoin at our own
centres to something like the Centre of all things…. [W]e must suppose that
[our souls conjoin] by other powers, in the way in which that which is engaged
in intellection naturally conjoins with that which is being thoroughly intellected and that that which is engaged in intellection…conjoins with what is
akin to it with nothing to keep them apart” (Plotinus, VI.9.8.19-30).
Altmann (1965, 83n.) also mentions that Plotinus refers to his experience of
union as a contact (ἁφή). However, in Averroes, “conjunction” (ittisāl) is to be
distinguished from “union” (ittihād); the latter signifies oneness, singleness,
unity; concord, unison, unanimity; combination; amalgamation, merger, fusion;
union, (from wahada = [1] to be alone, unique; [2] to make into one, unite,
unify; to connect, unite, bring together, amalgamate, merge). In Greek the
corresponding word is ἕνωσις = combination into one, union.
20
In its perfected state, as engaged in intellection of the agent intellect, the
disposed intellect is called the intellectus adeptus (Hyman n.d., 188), “intellect
that has reached to or attained or obtained.”
21
Altmann 1965, 74, characterizing the position of Averroes’ teacher.
22
Blaustein 1984, 284. Cf. also: “[T]he material intellect’s awareness of itself
even when it is not thinking of any intelligible form…is itself a kind of
actuality, however empty. Averroes claims that this kind of self-awareness is in
fact the obverse of the [agent] intellect’s fully conscious awareness of itself;
the material intellect’s awareness of its own potentiality is a dim awareness of
its actuality as the [agent] intellect.” (Ibid.)
23
It is interesting to note that with respect to conjunction, the agent intellect
exercises all four kinds of responsibility that Aristotle describes in the Physics.
It is responsible for my attainment of conjunction in functioning as my end
(τέλος). Moreover, it is responsible for the motion of learning, by which I
approach conjunction; for my learning is really its producing intelligibles in
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
me by revealing itself to me as the form of my disposed intellect (Blaustein
1984, 276-77). Since the agent intellect is what I am increasingly intellecting
and, thus, coming to be, it is also responsible for conjunction in the manner of
a form. Finally, it is also responsible as material, since the material intellect is
ultimately identical with it. The same could be said of Brahman, with the key
difference that its responsibility is not limited to the realm of intelligibility.
24
Patañjali 1989, IV.34; see also Feuerstein’s comment in Patañjali 1989, 145.
Kaivalya is “the aloneness” of seeing.
25
As far as Averroes’ own position with respect to individual immortality goes,
there are two interesting possibilities. He may have thought that the only
immortality was the impersonal immortality of the state of conjunction and
that philosophers were orienting their lives accordingly; the belief in personal
immortality on the part of ordinary people would then be the closest approximation to truth of which they were capable. On the other hand, he may have
held that, while only a few intellects may attain conjunction, all souls are
immortal (Zedler 1954, 451-52). There is a somewhat similar divergence in the
Upanishadic tradition between Śankara’s position that the individual self is in a
sense unreal and Rāmānuja’s view that individual selves, while not
independent, are real.
26
Cf. the following passages: “Since [in all cases of seeing and hearing] we
are aware (αỉσθανόμεθα) that we are seeing and hearing, it must either be by
sight that we are aware [for example] that we are seeing or by some other
[sense]” (OS, 425b11-12). “To each sense there belongs something special and
something common. For example, what is special to sight is to see, [what is
special] to hearing is to hear, and similarly with the rest. But there is also a
certain common power that goes along with all of them, by which one is also
aware that one is seeing and hearing (for it is not, after all, by sight that one is
seeing that one is seeing).” (De somno et vigilia, 455a12-5.)
27
We may speak of self-consciousness in the sense as consciousness of myself
only “after” the construction of the sense of self, which is discussed in the text
below.
28
By Kosman (1975), who also made reference to Sartre’s La Transcendence
de l’Ego. In planning the lectures, I had intended to use Sartre to introduce the
notion of selfawareness (see footnote 29) as an alternative to anything in
Aristotle. However, Kosman’s article, which I discovered while writing the
lectures, made it possible to cite Aristotle himself in order to introduce this
notion.
29
I write “selfawareness” and “awareness (of) itself” to suggest that the
relationship between awareness and what it is aware (of) is not the same as
that between consciousness and the object of consciousness. I am following
Sartre’s practice in L’être et le néant (pp. 18-20), where he writes conscience
(de) soi to refer to what I am calling “selfawareness” or “awareness (of)
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63
itself.”
30
In La Transcendance de l’Ego, from which the quotations are taken, Sartre
uses only one word, conscience, which I have rendered as “consciousness”
when it is positional and as “awareness” when it is non-positional. Moreover,
he does not here write conscience (de), as he did later (see footnote 28).
31 What is said will apply as well to consciousness that is imagining, remembering, judging, thinking, intellecting, feeling, or evaluating.
32
See footnote 34.
33
The last two sentences represent my understanding of Gurwitsch 1985, 5,
second paragraph.
34
Gurwitsch (1941) pointed out that this account of the arising of the sense of
self is incompatible with the fact that reflection can accomplish no more than
to render explicit the content of the reflected-upon consciousness (332-33). He
later (1985) offered a corrected account of the construction of the psychical
empirical sense of self (15ff.). It is based on the recognition that both states
and qualities “designate psychic constants, i.e., regularities of
experience…rather than mental facts which themselves fall under direct
experience” (15), as they do in Sartre.
35
I remember many years ago reading an article by him in The Washington
Post, in which he described his experience in something like these terms.
36
These characteristics are similar to those in the example of the violinist in
Csikszentmihalyi 1990: “A violinist must be extremely aware of every
movement of her fingers, as well as of the sound entering her ears, and of the
total form of the piece she is playing, both analytically, note by note, and
holistically, in terms of its overall design” (64).
37
Bankei 2000, 58. I have substituted “awareness” first for “the Unborn” and
then for “it,” referring to her Buddha-mind.
38
This word is used passim in Husserl 1964.
39
It need not be living beings with respect to which we experience the
connection: “The [mountain] climber, focusing all her attention on the small
irregularities of the rock wall that will have to support her weight safely,
speaks of the sense of kinship that develops between fingers and rock.” “This
feeling is not just a fancy of the imagination, but is based on a concrete
experience of close interaction with some Other.” (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, 64)
40
A popular book on learning to draw tells us of a subjective state that artists
speak of, which is characterized by “a sense of close ‘connection’ with the
work, a sense of timelessness, difficulty in using words…a lack of anxiety, a
sense of close attention to shapes and spaces and forms that remain nameless.”
It is important for the artist to experience the shift from the ordinary state to
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
this one. The student is encouraged to set up the proper “conditions for this
mental shift” and to become “able to recognize and foster this state (Edwards
1979, 46). These characteristics correspond quite well with the qualities of a
consciousness in which awareness is in the foreground.
41
Merleau-Ponty 1961, 166, translation modified.
42 The articulation in this paragraph emerged in a conversation with Nina
Haigney, just a few minutes before I delivered this lecture. It was an example
of the sort of thing it attempts to articulate—a conversation, with awareness to
some degree in the foreground, allowing for the experience of “a certain
emptiness,” followed by the emergence, in two people, of an “authentic
word”—or a least a relatively authentic one.
43
The quotation from Freud is from “Recommendations to Physicians
Practicing Psychoanalysis” (1912).
44
By Theodore Reik in 1948; see Epstein 1904, 199-201.
45
M. Heidegger, On Time and Being, quoted in Ihde 1977, 15; italics added
and translation corrected at one point.
46
Husserl 1962, 140.27-33; to maintain consistency of terminology, I substituted “reduction” for “epoché.”
47
Husserl himself conveys the same view in different language (Husserl 1962,
Sections 37-42).
48
Merleau-Ponty 1945, 191, where, however, the expression is not being used
to characterize the phenomenological reduction.
49
The distinction between disconnection and reducing proper parallels that in
the Buddhist tradition between mindfulness (sati) and seeing distinctly in
detail (vi-paśyana).
50
Cf. “And so also must the gaze made free by the epoché be…an experiencing gaze” (Husserl 1962, 156.13-15).
51
I take habituell to correspond to an adjectival form of ἓξις.
52
This stage in the yogic tradition involves eight members, the last three of
which are concentration, meditation, and in-stance (samādhi), which is
opposed both to ex-stasy and to our ordinary counter-stance vis-à-vis objects
(Patañjali 1989, II.29).
53 Cf. Patañjali 1989, I.42 and 44: coincidence with reflection (savicārā
samāpattih).
54 The quotations in the remainder of this paragraph are taken from Low 1993,
149-50; italics added.
55
When allowing the children to play, you are not caught up in their playing;
DRUECKER
65
so, you have a kind of distance from it. Yet you are “with” them, accompanying them. Thus, your distance is of a different kind than the distance that
occurs in objectification, where the ob-ject stands over against you (discussed
in the text below). Moreover, while it might seem as though the objective,
perceptual world were free of captivation, when compared to the dynamic,
sensory realm (discussed in the text below), one can see that the former is, in
fact, grounded in the primordial doxa of the latter.
56 The
role that this experience of pure awareness plays in the Upanishadic
tradition parallels that of the “aloneness of seeing” (drśeh kaivalyam; Patañjali
1989, II.25) in the yogic tradition (Patañjali 1989, III.50; IV.26 and 34).
57
This account of realization of Brahman is based on zen sources. However, as
Shear (1983 and 1990) points out, this experience of awake, pure
selfawareness lacks any empirical qualities or content. As a result, differing
references to it as the Brahman-realm or Buddha-nature are not pointing to
qualitative differences in the experience (Shear 1983, 57-59; 1990, 392). [Note
added in revising the lecture: I now think it would be better to say that the zen
account is an interpretation of the realization of Brahman.]
58
The page numbers given in this paragraph refer to Maritain 1956.
59
Sekida 1985, 91-97, also depicts the corresponding state in the zen tradition
in this way. Carter proposes the comparison with binocular vision. It is interesting that Bion also uses this analogy (Grinberg, Sor, and Tabak di Bianchedi
1993, 35-36).
60
Sharma 1993, 43; first two sets of italics added. The quotation is from
Ramana Maharshi as reported in D. Goodman, ed., The Teachings of Sri
Ramana Maharshi (NY: Arkana, 1985), 42 and 41.
61
Cf. the description in Husserl 1964, 124-25.
62
Cf. the description in Husserl 1964, 206-08.
63
Cf. the descriptions in Husserl 1964, §§58-61, 80-82, 86-87 and in Husserl
1950, §10.
64
The page references in the remainder of this paragraph are from Straus
1956.
65
I believe that Kleist (1964) had the same phenomenon in view when he
reported Herr C.’s words after two anecdotes, one about a graceful dancer who
lost his grace when self-consciousness arose and the other about a bear, who
effortlessly parried every thrust of Herr C.’s rapier with a graceful swipe of his
paw:
[I]n the same degree as, in the organic world, reflection becomes
more obscure and weaker, grace emerges there ever more radiant
and supreme.—Yet just as…the image in a concave mirror, after
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
66
withdrawing to infinity, suddenly comes right in front of us again,
so when consciousness has, as it were, passed through an infinite,
grace will again put in an appearance. Hence, it appears most
purely in the human bodily structure that has either no selfconsciousness or an infinite self-consciousness (Kleist 1964, 67).
That is, in our terms, grace emerges in the realm of animal, sensory
consciousness, a realm that we can experience, but not enter completely
(Straus 1956, 284). And it emerges again in the realm of pure [selfawareness],
in which we are no longer caught up in first- or second-degree consciousness.
66
Another question to pursue might be whether Homer’s realization of full
significance became narrower and more limited in passing over into intellection.
DRUECKER
67
containing Ia, QQ.2-11.
TU
Taittitrīya Upanishad
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Sartre, J.-P., L’être et le néant (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1943).
_____, La Transcendance de l’Ego: Esquisse d’une description phénoménologique (Paris: Vrin, 1966). [Originally published 1936.]
Schütz, A., “Scheler’s Theory of Intersubjectivity and the General Thesis of
the Alter Ego,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2 (1942), 323-47.
Sekida, K., Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy, ed. A. Grimstone (NY:
Weatherhill, 1985).
Sharma, A., The Experiential Dimension of Advaita Vedanta (Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass Publishers, (1993).
Shear, J., “Mystical Experience, Hermeneutics, and Rationality,” International
Philosophical Quarterly 30 (1990), 391-401.
_____, “The Experience of Pure Consciousness: A New Perspective for
Theories of Self,” Metaphilosophy 14 (1983), 53-62.
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Snell, B., “Die Ausdrücke für den Begriff des Wissens in der Vorplatonischen
Philosophie,” Philologische Untersuchungen 29 (1924/1976).
Straus, E., Phenomenological Psychology, tr. in part, E. Eng (NY: Basic
Books, Inc., 1966).
_____, Vom Sinn der Sinne (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1956).
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Latin text, Volume II, containing Ia,
QQ.2-11, T. McDermott, O.P., ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company,
1964).
The Principal Upanishads, ed. and tr. S. Radhakrishnan (New Delhi: Harper
Collins Publishers India, 1994).
The Upanishads, tr. V. Roebuck (New York: Penguin Books, 2003).
Ueda, S., “Pure Experience, Self-awareness, Basho,” Études
phénoménologiques 18 (1993), 63-86.
Upanishads, tr. P. Olivelle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
von Fritz, K., “ΝΟΟΣ and ΝΟΕΙΝ in the Homeric Poems,” Classical
Philology 38 (1943), 79-93.
Yuasa, Y., The Body: Toward an Eastern Mind-Body Theory, tr. N. Shigenori
and T. Kasulis (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987).
Zedler, B., Introduction to Aquinas’s On the Unity of the Intellect against the
Averroists (Milwaukee: Marquette University, 1968).
_____, “Averroes and Immortality,” New Scholasticism 28 (1954), 436-53.
_____, “Averroes on the Possible Intellect,” Proceedings of the American
Catholic Philosophical Association 25 (1951), 164-78.
Zuckerkandl, V., The Sense of Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1959).
71
Principles of Motion and the
Motion of Principles:
1
Hegel’s Inverted World
Peter Kalkavage
Oh, judge for yourselves: I have been concealing
it all the time, but now I will tell you the whole
truth. The fact is, I…corrupted them all!
—Dostoevsky, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”2
In the Phenomenology of Spirit, late in Hegel’s chapter on force
and understanding, a baffling figure comes before us. It is the
famous “inverted world.” This figure completes the dialectic of
understanding. As a result of the inverted world, consciousness—
the sole but protean hero of Hegel’s philosophic epic—undergoes
a conversion: it ceases to put truth in objects or things and instead
places it in the thinking subject.
My plan is to take us through Hegel’s chapter on understanding with the following questions in mind: Why, for Hegel, is
understanding logically unstable? Why is force its proper object?
What is the inverted world, and how does it come about? What
does it show us about the nature of thinking, and the nature of
nature? Finally, how does the inverted world bring about the great
turn in the Phenomenology from knowledge as the consciousness
of things to knowledge as grounded in self-consciousness?
Understanding, Verstand, has a range of meanings in Hegel.
It refers most generally to our capacity for making distinctions,
our power of analysis. In his Encyclopedia, Hegel indicates the
function and limit of understanding as follows: “Thinking as
understanding stops short at the fixed determinacy and its
distinctness vis-à-vis other determinacies.”3 In other words,
understanding establishes fixed boundaries and stable identities.
Fond of schematizing, it regards mathematics as the model of
Peter Kalkavage is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
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what it means to know. In the Phenomenology, the archetype of
Verstand is the “new science” inaugurated by Galileo and
Descartes and brought to its peak in the force-theories of Newton
and Leibniz. The chapter “Force and Understanding” presents a
critical reflection on this science. Hegel studied the physics of his
day extensively and acknowledged its impressive achievements.
But it does not for him embody absolute truth; it is not science at
its highest, most complete stage. Hegel’s exposé in the
Phenomenology reveals why this is the case, why the supposedly
stable principles of modern physics are ultimately unstable.
Hegel’s chapter is difficult even by Phenomenology
standards. To guide us through its twists and turns, I have divided
my presentation into six parts. The first three deal respectively
with Force, Law, and Explanation. These are related as follows.
There are forces at work in nature that operate according to
immutable laws (for example, the law of universal gravitation).
The scientist explains nature by showing how a given
phenomenon (say, a body in free fall) is an instance of a force
grounded in one of these laws. Hegel’s account preserves this
familiar interweaving of force, law, and explanation but at the
same time places it in the context of a dialectical unfolding.
Hegel’s logic, unlike ordinary logic, proceeds genetically, like
life. Concepts, stages, moments, categories, whatever we wish to
call them, do not merely succeed each other, or relate to each
other in the manner of different aspects, but emerge out of the
evolutionary process that is thought. In the chapter before us,
force gives birth to law, and together these give birth to explanation, which eventually gives birth to self-consciousness. This
amazing process as a whole, this labor, defines understanding.
I. Force
The Phenomenology is the journey of consciousness to absolute
knowing, or what Hegel calls Science. We come upon understanding at a pivotal moment in this journey: at the transition from
the sensuous to the intelligible. The previous shapes of
consciousness are sense-certainty and perception. Like all the
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shapes in Hegel’s book, they embody certainty—a claim to know
absolutely or unconditionally. Sense-certainty places its absolute
trust in the sensuous particular, the whatever-it-is that is here and
now; perception trusts the thing and its properties. Both shapes of
knowing, together with their corresponding objects, prove to be
self-contradictory: they negate themselves.
Force is the Phoenix that rises from the ashes of thinghood. It
is an example of what Hegel calls determinate negation. This is
negation that preserves and lifts up what is negated [79, 113].*
Force is the proper object of understanding because it resolves the
dissonance that defines the thing of perception. The thing is a One
and a Many: this one thing and its many properties. To save this
opposition from being contradictory, perception posits another:
the thing is independent or for itself and dependent or for another,
that is, related to other things. In the dialectic of perception, these
opposed aspects become identical: the thing is shown to be
independent insofar as it is dependent, and dependent insofar as it
is independent [128]. It makes no sense, then, to regard the thing
as absolutely real: a thing is what it is, not through itself alone but
only in relation to what it is not, namely, other things. How this
ideality of thinghood comes about does not concern us here. The
relevant point is that force solves the problem at hand, the
problem of substance and relation. Things as things dissolve in
their essential relation to other things: they lose their substance.
Force, by contrast, is substance that is relation. It is the higher
category of substantial relation, the unity of being-for-self and
being-for-another, of independence and dependence.4
Let us look more carefully at what this means.
Force, our new object, is not something seen or heard or felt
but only thought. It is the purely intelligible inner core of perceptible things. Force is not property but act, the act of selfexpression.5 In the force-world, a thing does not, strictly
speaking, have a property but rather emanates what we call a
property from an intense invisible center.6 By analogy with
*
Numbers in square brackets refer to paragraph numbers in Phenomenology
of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).
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language, force, in Hegel’s terminology, is the utterance or
Aüßerung of an inner point. Hardness, for example, is not a
quiescent attribute lodged in the thing but an act by which the
thing asserts itself or “makes its point.”7 Moreover, to act is to act
upon another thing. Action implies interaction. This is how force
makes it possible for individual things to be what they are through
their relation to other things: their being-for-self is a being-foranother, and their being-for-another a being-for-self.
Force, Hegel tells us, is a movement [136]. This is not
movement in space but dialectical movement—conceptual instability or transition. Consider a metal sphere. Its hardness is one of
the properties by which the sphere, at the level of perception,
defined itself as an independent thing. Hardness is now to be
regarded as emergent from an intensive center, a center of force.
Force is the transition of a given content—in this case,
hardness—from inner to outer. As Hegel stresses in an earlier
version of his system, force is not cause as opposed to effect but
rather the identity of cause and effect.8 The intensive center of
force does not produce something other than itself but exactly
itself.9 It is a self-realizing potential. It is like an inward thought
that finds faithful expression in outward speech.
Dialectical movement comes into play when we attempt to
spell out precisely what is happening in the transition from inner
to outer. What we find is that the act of self-expression involves
negation. The hardness of the sphere, as an emergent property or
effect, must come out of hiding, be released from mere implicitness or potency; but if it were simply released, set free, it would
not be the hardness of the sphere, the expressive manifestation
sprung from the intensive center of force. And so, we must
conclude that as a property is affirmed or posited, it must at the
same time be negated as something independent or on its own. As
the property is emitted, it must remain the property of the thing,
the expression of the center of force. Hegel uses the terms force
proper and force expressed to distinguish the two moments
involved in the action of force. Force proper refers to the
intensive center (force as cause), force expressed to force as
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“there” in the perceptible world (force as effect). These moments,
Hegel says, are self-canceling [135]. Force proper must negate its
inwardness in order to be external or manifest, and, as we saw
earlier, force expressed must negate its outwardness in order to be
the expression of force proper. This self-cancellation on the part
of both moments of force is what it means to say that force is a
movement. We phenomenological observers see this dialectical
truth in the movement of force, but understanding does not. It
clings to the safety of stable distinctions and assumes that the
movement from inner to outer occurs simply, that is, without any
negation or self-otherness.
Force can do what thinghood cannot: it is a deeper, more
potent category. Why, then, does it self-destruct? To answer this
question, we turn to the phenomenon of interaction, the realworld event in which force meets force. As we proceed, we must
bear in mind that understanding claims not merely that there are
forces at work in the world, but that force is the absolute truth of
things—their abiding substance. Hegel will show, to our
amazement, that “the realization of force is at the same time the
loss of reality” [141]. Like the thing, force will fail to be
substantial.
The self-annihilation of force results from what Hegel calls
the “play” of two forces: active and reactive. This play is implicit
in Newton’s Third Law: “To every action there is always opposed
an equal reaction.” Force is spontaneous and impulsive but not
self-inciting. It must be inspired by the presence of another force
in order to express itself [137]. Hegel here borrows terms that
Leibniz uses in his analysis of collision. One force solicits, the
other is solicited: one is active, the other passive or re-active.10
This is like the human situation in which I voice my opinion,
translate my inner thought into outer speech, thereby inciting you
to respond with a verbal expression of your thought and opinion.
Perhaps the forcefulness of my expression prompts you to an
equally forceful counter-expression—an equal and opposite
reaction.
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The play that is essential to force can be maintained as
logically stable only if the difference between active and passive
force, soliciting and solicited, remains clear and distinct. We must
be able to say: “This force is active, that one passive.” Hegel
proceeds to show that this is not the case. The two opposed determinations of force—soliciting and solicited, active and passive—
become identical, or pass into each other. Once this happens,
force as the solid substance of things vanishes. It loses its status
as a self-subsisting entity and becomes merely ideal, what Hegel
calls a moment.11
To see how this evaporation of force as substance comes
about, imagine banging your fist against a wall. When you hit the
wall, the wall hits back: it re-acts. At first, it seems that your fist
is active and soliciting, the wall passive and solicited. But you
could not hit the wall unless, at the moment of impact, the wall
acted on you and solicited the hardness of your fist. This hardness
is just as much solicited by that of the wall as the hardness of the
wall is by that of your fist. Fist and wall have exchanged determinations, like actors who reverse their roles in mid-scene, and it
is impossible to call one of them only active and the other only
reactive. Each is both. Soliciting is a being solicited, and being
solicited is a soliciting.
Let us recapitulate the story of force. Force starts out as a
mere concept in the mind of a subject who claims to know
absolute truth: it is in itself or implicit, a theoretical good
intention. Then it is put to work as the substance of things: it
becomes for itself or actual. But in the act of making itself real, it
becomes evanescent and unreal: the distinction on which its reliability as substance rests becomes a play or interchange of nowfluid determinations. As force leaves the stage of the solidly real,
it assumes a new role. It reverts to being inward or conceptual,
retreats from the world and goes back inside the thinking subject.
We may imagine this as the act in which understanding experiences the dissolution of force, internalizes what it has experienced, and then comes up with a revised perspective. As Hegel
observes, force does not return to its original ideality but
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77
advances to a new state [141]. Force falls but does not simply fall.
Paradoxically, it falls up. In negating itself, it becomes a new and
improved universal, a new object that stands over and against the
thinking subject. This higher object, which force has generated, is
the deeper inner of things.
II. Law
The dialectic of law will lead us to the inverted world. Law, our
newly postulated absolute, will prove unstable. It will fall. This
fall is more dramatic than anything we have witnessed so far in
the Phenomenology. It is the collapse of the very citadel of
objective truth, truth that is grounded in objects.
In the fall of force and the rise of law, consciousness experiences a new relation to its object. Hegel calls it a mediated
relation. Understanding now “looks through [the] mediating play
of forces into the true background of things” [143].12 In other
words, understanding sees rest within motion, sameness within
difference, form within flux. Law is the eternally abiding, purely
intelligible “look” or ἰδέα of the always-changing world. Verstand
at this point is even more recognizable as the modern scientific
understanding, which seeks laws of nature so that it may gaze
upon change under the aspect of eternity.
Our new object, law, is the imperturbable base and depth of
the world. World, here, refers to the unstable play of forces, the
role-reversal of our soliciting and solicited “actors.” This play is
appearance, as opposed to law, which constitutes the world’s
essence. In its perpetual self-otherness, appearance recalls the
elusive “matrix” of Plato’s Timaeus, where the powers of body—
earth, air, water, and fire—constantly turn into each other, play the
game of self-cancellation (49B-C). Law is different from the
objects we have seen so far: the sensuous This, the thing of
perception, and force as individual substance. It is a world unto
itself, separate from but also governing and shining through the
world of appearance. Law opens up a supersensible world set
over and against the sensible world. Hegel calls it an “abiding
Beyond above the vanishing present”—a Jenseits or Over There,
as opposed to the Diesseits or Over Here [144]. Unlike the
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turbulent realm of sense, this Other World is “restful” [157]. It is
the heaven of scientific theory.
This two-world thesis will be the death of understanding. As
Hegel will show, the waywardness of appearance, the to and fro
of change, invades theoretical heaven: the Beyond will collapse
into the very realm from which it was to be strictly distinguished.
It will become an aspect of appearance. The certainty of understanding is that there are two worlds: the truth will be that there
is only one. Intelligibility is not separate from change, like a law
or a platonic Form, but is change—change as dialectical logic or
what Hegel calls the Concept. The clue, then, to the discovery of
concrete truth is not in some other world but in this one, not in
motionless being but in unstable becoming, where opposed determinations flow into each other. This inverts our normal
perspective on things, governed as that perspective is by the sober
teachings of Verstand. As we think our way through the inverted
world, we are inverted.
The conclusions I have sketched are already present in what
Hegel says just before his analysis of law. He reflects on the
nature of appearance, in effect telling us where the dialectic of
understanding will end up. Understanding mis-understands
appearance and the intelligible essence that supposedly governs it
in another world. From the perspective of understanding, law is
an eternal thing-like object that grounds and “saves” the appearances. But this object, the supersensible Beyond, has in fact been
generated by appearance [147]. Appearance is the dialectical
father, law the offspring. What understanding calls law or essence
is in fact, Hegel says, appearance as appearance.
To grasp the meaning of this utterance, we must observe that
appearance is not sensuous presence: it is neither the This of
sense-certainty nor the thing of perception. Appearance is process
and play, flash and shining forth. It is not presence but fleeting
presence—presence that constantly cancels itself to become
absence.13 It is becoming as the unity of coming-to-be and
passing away. In his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel defines time as
“that being which, inasmuch as it is, is not, and inasmuch as it is
KALKAVAGE
79
not, is; it is intuited becoming.”14 Time is appearance in its most
rudimentary form. It is the same process of self-negation that we
saw in the Now of sense-certainty. When the Now negated itself
to become the next Now, it gave birth to universality as the Now
of Nows, say, an hour of minutes [107]. Appearance, through its
self-negation, also begets a universal, as we have seen. This is
law.
Appearance, like time, is a process of self-transcendence,
self-beyonding. The understanding erroneously treats this selfbeyonding, which it has glimpsed in the self-contradictory play of
force, as a Beyond that is objectively there. It reifies process. But
essence, here identical with the supersensible, is the intelligible
truth of appearance, the truth that the play of force has itself
generated and brought to light. As Hegel puts it, “the supersensible is…appearance as appearance” [147]. The meaning of this
pivotal sentence, to which I alluded earlier, is that essence and
appearance, inner and outer, are identical. As one commentator
puts it: “The essence of essence is to manifest itself; manifestation
is the manifestation of essence.”15 Appearance, in other words, is
not a low but a high category. It is the self-otherness of essence,
the instability of sensuous things that has come out into the open
as their higher and deeper truth. In this revelation appearance
proves to be not something in need of being “saved.”
Hegel’s critique of the supersensible Beyond recalls Plato’s
Forms and the problem of separateness. This problem is
highlighted in the dialogue Parmenides, where the old Eleatic
stings young Socrates with the absurdities of his two-world
theory. How is it that a Form, a separate entity off in its own
world, is nevertheless manifested in its sensuous instances? Why
are we able to see the original in the image? Law is like a platonic
Form in that it is eternally self-same and purely intelligible. But it
is unlike a Form in being a universal that governs movements,
events. Law is the eternal self-sameness of perpetual selfdifference. Consider Galileo’s law of free fall. Expressed as an
equation, this is the familiar s = 1/2 gt2, where s is the distance a
body traverses as it falls, g the gravitational constant, and t the
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time during which the falling takes place. For our purposes,
however, the more revealing form is s ∝ t2: distance varies as the
square of the time. This expresses a constant difference or
otherness, as opposed to a mere identity. It helps us see what
Hegel means when he says that law is “universal difference” and
“the simple in the play of force” [148]. Things as such don’t come
into the picture. As far as Galileo’s law is concerned, it makes no
difference whether the falling object is a cow or a cannonball.16
What matters is the motion, the event. Galileo’s law is the simple
universal in this event. It is the perfectly general, purely intelligible form of falling.
Let us now turn to the dialectic of law. Understanding has, we
recall, a mediated relation to its supersensible realm of law. It
looks through the medium of becoming, as through a veil, to
glimpse being and truth in the unchanging forms of change. It
imagines that it will in this way take hold of absolute knowing.
Problems will emerge when understanding tries to explain how its
universal laws fit the actual determinate content of appearances.
Up to this point, law is only a good idea. This idea must now
prove itself in the act of governing. Law must become actually
true or what Hegel calls for itself.
To uncover the actuality of law, we turn once more to Galileo,
this time to his experiments with the motion of a ball rolling down
an inclined plane. Assume that we have found the law that
governs this movement and have expressed it mathematically. We
say: “This is true; it is the law.” But it isn’t absolutely true. Air
resistance, surface friction, and the phenomenon of rolling as
opposed to sliding all come into play to qualify the law. In order
for a law to be true, it must, as Hegel puts it, “fill out the world of
appearance” [150]. This can happen only if there are many laws
that apply to a given case. Here we have a sign of trouble to come.
Law, by definition, is sheer universality; its glory is to be above
cases and particulars. But the events to which law must apply if it
is to be actual truth involve cases and particulars: phenomena
have a determinate content that must somehow be subsumed
under law. The world is not movement in general but this
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81
movement in these circumstances. The problem can be stated as
follows: law, though stable, is general or empty, while appearances, though shifty, are full and differentiated. To overcome this
asymmetry, to unite the universal and the particular, law must be
on more intimate terms with the phenomenal world if it is to be
the truth of that world.
A single law, as we have seen, is not enough to “fill out” the
appearances. We need many laws to prevent law from being an
empty inner. These must be organized into one law that unifies
them—a mega-law. Hegel here refers to Newton’s inverse square
law of attraction, which unifies the laws of planetary motion and
those of ordinary mechanics. But this mega-law is, alas, the
victim of its triumph over specificity. By transcending the
difference among the many different laws, it becomes utterly
abstract. Hegel calls it “the Concept of law itself,”17 that is,
lawfulness as opposed to a law [150]. But then, what to do about
all the different ways in which lawfulness manifests itself in
nature? To address this problem, understanding interprets
lawfulness, the pure form of law, as the “inner necessity” of all the
different laws [151]. This inner necessity results in a new, more
abstract version of force—force as such [152]. Earlier, force was
differentiated as active and passive; law was the simple universal.
Now force is the simple or undifferentiated, and law is the source
of difference [152]. Gravity, for instance, is just plain gravity, a
simple force of nature, whereas the law by which a body falls
involves difference as distance traversed and time squared. So
too, electricity is just plain electricity, whereas the law of
electricity expresses the difference between positive and negative.
The assumption at work here is that law will express the
necessary action of simple forces. Hegel shows that this
assumption is false. Force and law are in fact “indifferent” to each
other, that is, fundamentally unrelated [152]. Electricity indeed
manifests itself as positive and negative, but not because of any
inherent necessity. The law does not express causal connection
but rather what Hume called “constant conjunction.”18 It does not
reveal the origin of difference, but simply states difference as a
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fact. It sidesteps the primordial act by which electrical force as
such divides into its two opposite forms. The result, Hegel says,
is that “necessity here is only an empty word” [152].19
Indifference shows up in yet another way for the scientific
understanding. The very elements that the law combines in its
formulas lack necessary connection with each other. Galileo’s law
of free fall, for instance, expresses a constant conjunction of
distance and time. But it sheds no light on why these should be
connected at all, let alone connected in this particular way. There
is nothing in the concept of distance traversed that necessarily
implies the concept of time squared, and nothing in time squared
that implies distance traversed. As mathematical variables, s and
t are logically indifferent to each other. They are quantitatively
conjoined in a ratio but not conceptually united in a λόγος.20
The necessity that understanding craves, we must note, would
be achieved if in its world-view there were a place for inner
difference, that is, the immanent self-differentiation of the
absolutely simple. That would account for why electrical force
necessarily, out of its own nature, divides itself into positive and
negative. Law, in that case, would be the Concept or dialectical
truth. But understanding is no dialectician. It likes its identities
neat and its distinctions restful. And so, to prevent simple force
from becoming (in its view) compromised, understanding takes
difference into itself [154]. Necessity now acquires a new
meaning. It ceases to be causality in the phenomena and becomes
instead the necessity at work in the human subject’s act of
theorizing.
III. Explanation
We are on the threshold of the inverted world, which is a second
supersensible world [157]. Understanding will reach this extreme
point of its effort once it is revealed that explanation is nothing
more than the propounding of tautologies—differences that make
no difference. Explanation, here, is not scientific account-giving
in general but rather a species of bad argument that regularly
occurs in physical science. It is the act in which understanding
propounds a law that supposedly governs an appearance but ends
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83
up being identical to the appearance. In explanation, ground and
grounded become the same.
We saw earlier that force is the absolutely simple (electricity),
whereas the law of force expresses a difference (positive and
negative). Understanding uses explanation to bridge the gap
between force and law, simplicity and difference. But its effort is
sophistical: it distinguishes force and law, and then “condenses
the law into force as the essence of the law” [154]. Hegel uses
lightning to illustrate his point. Lightning occurs: it is a
phenomenon. Indeed, as a flashing forth, lightning functions as
the symbol for appearance as such. Understanding explains
lightning by enunciating a law that supposedly expresses how the
force of electricity works. Force is assumed to be simple, but the
process of explaining involves positive and negative. The explanation purports to the necessary ground of the phenomenon. But
in fact, it just repeats what happened at the surface of the
phenomenon. It says: “There was a strong electrical discharge
because of positive and negative electricity.” This simply says all
over again what lightning as a phenomenon is. It is not something
new and different, but same: a tautology. Understanding posits
differences and then, once these differences disappear in the
phenomenon (in this case, once the electrical discharge subsides),
allows the differences to sink back into an undifferentiated simple
force—mere electricity. A distinction is made only to be
withdrawn.21 In other words, the distinction is merely an artifact
and formality of the process of explanation.22
Explanation, for Hegel, borders on the absurd, or at least the
comic. Why does electricity divide into positive and negative?
Because that is its law. And why is that its law? Because
electricity divides into positive and negative. When we ask understanding why something is the case, it pretends to show us some
underlying ground but in fact only repeats the appearance that
prompted our question in the first place. This sleight of hand is not
confined to physics. Why are human beings the way they are?
Because of their genes. What are genes? That which makes us
who we are. Or, to shift to the world of Molière: Why does opium
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induce sleep? Because it has a “dormitive virtue.” These are all
tautologies masquerading as etiologies, accounts of cause. In the
earlier version of his system, Hegel summed it up nicely. All
explanation, he says, ultimately reduces to the deflating
admission: “That is just how it is.”23
We might be tempted to accuse Hegel of oversimplifying
explanation in order to make his case. But Hegel is right. We are
surrounded by explanations that purport to reveal a law, a
necessary ground, for how the world works—or how the mind
works, or how language and culture develop—which, when
examined more closely, prove to be nothing more than
tautologies. I point this out to remind us that, in reading those
parts of the Phenomenology that are critical of theory-building,
we must allow our scientific, as well as our pre-scientific or
natural, perspective to be inverted.
Hegel, we must note, inverts what we ordinarily mean by
tautology. Tautology, for him, is not a static A=A, but rather the
dialectical movement in which a difference is posited and immediately canceled [155]. This recalls the play of force, in which
active and passive were posited as different and then became
identical. The movement of tautology is a turning point in the
dialectic of understanding. It is the point at which the shiftiness of
appearance “has penetrated into the supersensible world itself”
[155]. In the platonic analogy, motion becomes part of the once
restful realm of the Forms.
IV. The Inverted World
Who among us has not wondered: What if the world as it is, is the
exact opposite of the world as it appears? What if what we call
real is really nothing but a dream, and dream reality? What if
good people are in themselves bad, and bad people good? What
if, in obedience to some perverse cosmic law, being reverses
seeming, inner reverses outer? To pose such questions is to set
foot on the terrain of Hegel’s inverted world.
The dialectic of understanding is a series of postulated
objective inners. The first was force. When force as the substance
of things vanished, a new inner appeared: the restful realm of law.
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But law led to the sleight-of-hand called explanation, where
differences make no difference. This movement of tautology
generates another inner: the inverted world, which is the inner
truth of the first supersensible world [157].24 Hegel has taken us
on one long journey into the interior of appearance. But the
inverted world brings us full circle, confirming the truth of La
Rochefoucauld’s maxim: “Extremes touch.” The inverted world
will obliterate the Beyond. It will collapse the distinction between
essence and appearance, and make appearance the standard to
which law must conform.25
Inversion is our new principle, according to which, “what is
self-same repels itself from itself” and “the not self-same is selfattractive” [156]. Hegel’s language of repulsion-from-self and
attraction-to-other recalls the magnet, which soon emerges as the
paradigm of inversion.
The first thing Hegel tells us about the inverted world is that
it completes the inner world opened up by understanding [157].
We saw earlier that law failed to “fill out” the world of
appearance: it lacked a principle of change or alteration. As an
inverted world, the supersensible realm acquires this principle. It
becomes an exact replica of the world we actually live in. This is
the irony of the inverted world. Strange seeming at first, this
world in fact restores what is familiar to us and what had been lost
in the abstractions of understanding. It lets our world be as fluid,
playful, and self-contradictory as it seems.
This is our perspective, not that of understanding, which
clings to its abstractions and continues to think in terms of a
supersensible Beyond, where every restless appearance finds its
restful double. The inverted world is what the world is implicitly
or inwardly, what it is in itself. Hegel offers a broad range of
examples. The first ones he cites are suited to the theoretical bent
of understanding. Like, under the law of the first supersensible
world, becomes unlike under that of the second, inverted world;
black in the first is transposed to white in the second; the north
pole of a magnet in the first world is south in the second; the
oxygen pole of the voltaic pile becomes the hydrogen pole, and
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the hydrogen the oxygen [158]. But then Hegel goes beyond
theory. Revenge on an enemy in this world turns into selfdestruction in the other; crime in the first turns into punishment;
guilt into pardon; disgrace into honor.26
It would be highly instructive to think through all of Hegel’s
examples of inversion. Let us focus on one: the magnet. This
remarkable object will help us make the transition from inversion
as understanding represents it to the philosophic Concept of
inversion.
From the perspective of understanding, the poles of a magnet
are inverted in the sense that each pole has reference to a
separately existing and opposite in-itself. This in-itself—the home
or, in Gilbert’s phrase, the “true location”27 of the magnet’s
poles—is the Earth, the Ur-magnet that orients our mini-magnets.
It seems strange to regard the Earth as a Beyond, but this view
makes sense if Earth is the Earth of scientific theory. That the
Earth is a body in no way detracts from its theoretical function as
the locus of magnetic essence divorced from the things whose
essence it is. In our current usage, which was also prevalent in
Hegel’s day, the north pole of a magnet is called north because it
points to the magnetic north pole of the Earth. But as Hegel
argues in his Philosophy of Nature, it is more accurate to call it
“south,” since, by the law of magnetism, it must point to its
opposite.28 With this in mind, we can say that each pole of our
mini-magnet points to, and is defined by, the opposite pole of the
Earth-magnet. North “here” has its inner truth in South “there,”
and South “here” has its truth in North “there.”
Hegel calls this approach “superficial” [159]—superficial
because non-dialectical. Through its ingenious idea of inversion,
understanding, to its credit, hits upon a great principle of nature:
polar complementarity.29 But it fails to grasp the true meaning of
this principle; its two-world thinking gets in the way. In truth, a
magnet’s inversion is not to be found anywhere but in itself. The
magnet is self-inverting, which is to say that it contains negativity
within itself, or is self-other. How do we know? Because any
attempt to isolate a pole fails. If we chop off one of the poles, it
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simply reappears in the now-smaller magnet. “Pole” is not a
material chunk of a body but one term of an opposition. In the
Phaedo, Socrates tells an Aesop-like fable about how god, seeing
that Pleasure and Pain were always quarreling, tied their heads
together, so that where the one was the other was bound to follow
(60B). The same moral can be inferred from the magnet, where
each “head” always entails its opposite.
The magnet illustrates what is true in all cases of inversion. In
its true meaning, the inverted world is not a Beyond but rather the
intelligible form of the actual world. Inversion in this sense
undoes the superstition of understanding, according to which
things exist in one world but have their intelligible essence in
another: “antitheses of inner and outer, of appearance and the
supersensible, as of two different kinds of actuality, we no longer
find here” [159].30 Magnetic north, as I indicated earlier, is not
south somewhere else but right here: “the north pole which is the
in-itself of the south pole is the north pole actually present in the
same magnet.” Similarly, in the moral sphere, crime calls down
on itself the law’s judgment and correction, invokes its nemesis as
its fulfillment, not in some other world, but right here. Crime and
punishment are the inseparable poles of the moral magnet—a fact
well known to Dostoevsky. Moral self-inversion is at work even
when we don’t get caught. Having done something wrong, we
suffer the torments of conscience and punish ourselves: we strain
to negate our negation.
Let us sum up what we have seen so far. Understanding
embraces the principle of inversion as the true inner meaning of
its supersensible law. According to this principle, a given determination finds its truth in its opposite: it is the law of all determinations to be transposed into their opposites, to move. But understanding regards this shift in a static way, as mere reference to
another object-like world, another substance or medium. We see
what it does not: that inversion defines appearance as such. It is
the essence of all determinations in the realm of appearance to be
self-inverting, to summon their opposites in a new version of the
play of force.
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The precise meaning of the inverted world, and the corresponding critique of the supersensible Beyond, lead us to the
metaphysical primacy of motion. Understanding treats motion or
change as though it needed to be saved by transcendent principles
and mathematical formulas, as though rest alone were intelligible.
But motion, as the inverted world has revealed, is the intelligible
as such, the Concept as the unity in which opposites flow into
each other. In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel makes this point
with respect to our friend, the magnet: “For the magnet exhibits
in simple, naïve fashion the nature of the Concept, and the
Concept moreover in its developed form as syllogism.”31 He adds
in a note: “If anyone thinks that thought is not present in nature,
he can be shown it here in magnetism.”32 Magnetism, as opposed
to the thing we call a magnet, is a movement of poles toward and
into each other. It is the logically structured fluency of opposite
determinations present in a simple object.
To think the inverted world, then, is “to think pure change or
think the antithesis within the antithesis itself, or contradiction”
[160]. The inverted world, our second supersensible world, is not
alongside the first, but has in fact “overarched the other world and
has it within it…; it is itself and its opposite in one unity” [160].
The inverted world, rightly understood, generates what Hegel
calls “inner difference.” This act of immanent self-differentiation
is the genuine necessity that was lacking in understanding’s effort
to connect force and law.33 The simple force of electricity divides
itself into positive and negative because, as a simple force, it is
inwardly tense, polarized with respect to itself [161]. Difference
isn’t something tacked on as an explanatory construct but is
inherent in unity. To be one is to be self-divided, to contain rather
than exclude opposition. In revisiting electrical force, Hegel
applies the wisdom of the magnet: positive and negative
electricity “animate each other into activity, and their being is
rather to posit themselves as not-being and to cancel themselves
in the unity” [161]. This is our familiar play of force, which,
having been constrained by static principles and mathematical
formalism, now rises up against understanding to proclaim: “I, in
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my instability, was the truth all along! I, pure change, am the
essence of law!”
V. Infinity—And Beyond
Hegel gives inner difference an evocative name: infinity [161].
Infinity, here, is not indefinite ongoing-ness, which Hegel calls
“bad infinity” [238]. It is neither the potential infinite of Aristotle
nor those limitless mute spaces that terrified Pascal. It is rather the
logical process by which opposites flow into each other. Infinity
is transition as such. It is the self-negation of a finite determinateness. The magnet, with its inseparable poles, is the sensuous
symbol of infinity in this sense of the term.
Infinity sums up the dialectical movement we have already
seen in tautology. It is the “absolute unrest of pure selfmovement, in which whatever is determined in one way or
another…is rather the opposite of this determinateness” [163].
This flow of opposites into each other inverts the perspective of
understanding, which is infatuated with rest and wants to keep its
terms clear and distinct. Hegel makes the striking claim that
infinity “has been from the start the soul of all that has gone
before.” It is the energy of self-negation that was implicit in all
the finite shapes of consciousness that have appeared so far—and
will continue to appear. When one of these finite shapes selfdestructs, refutes itself, it is experiencing the infinity, the selfopposition, that it holds within. In suffering contradiction, it is
getting in touch, so to speak, with its inner magnet.
Hegel identifies infinity with what he calls “the absolute
Concept” [162]. Infinity and Concept both embody the self-differentiation of the self-identical, which for Hegel is truth. This selfdifferentiation appears in its purest form in Hegel’s Logic. Here in
the Phenomenology, Hegel calls infinity as Concept “the simple
essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal blood” [162].
Infinity, he says, “pulsates within itself but does not move,
inwardly vibrates, yet is at rest.” It is Hegel’s version of the Logos
of Heraclitus—the Fire that enlivens, pervades, consumes, and
unifies all things.
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Life, soul, blood. These words suggest that the force-world
we are now transcending, the world that seemed so eventful and
alive, was not really alive at all. To be sure, there was motion, but
not life—vis viva, but not organic being.34 Understanding is
prejudiced on behalf of physics. This is no doubt largely because
the phenomena of physics, unlike those of biology, are readily
reducible to the homogeneity of mathematical formalism, that is,
equations. Life is the scandal of Verstand because the determinations of life are fluidly interconnected and defy rigid boundaries.
To appreciate this fact, we have only to think of how animal
organisms, in their embryonic development, exhibit spontaneous
self-differentiation, develop their different organs and systems,
wondrously, from within.
Infinity, which has been generated by the inverted world,
brings us to self-consciousness. This step had already been taken
in the phenomenon of explanation, our internal movement of
differentiating what is simple or self-same [163]. Explaining
things, Hegel observes in passing, is fun—a holiday of the mind.
The reason, he says, is that in the act of explaining why the world
does what it does consciousness enjoys conversation with itself,
Selbstgespräch [163]. To explain is ultimately to enjoy the play of
our own inner movement, our self-consciousness.
Inversion, inner difference, infinity, explanation all converge
in self-consciousness, which now officially comes on the scene in
the Phenomenology. The truth of the magnet was the repulsion of
the self-same and the attraction of the self-different. This truth is
now fully revealed as the self. To be self-conscious, to be aware
of myself as myself, is to be tautologous in Hegel’s sense of the
word. It is my act of generating inner difference that is immediately canceled or negated. Hegel describes self-consciousness as
follows:
I distinguish myself from myself, and in doing so I am
directly aware that what is distinguished from myself is
not different [from me]. I, the self-same being, repel
myself from myself; but what is posited as distinct from
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me, or as unlike me, is immediately, in being so distinguished, not a distinction for me [164].
Hegel compares this movement of self-identity with the axial
rotation of a sphere [169]. As the sphere turns, it continually
generates different positions in space and continually cancels
them. It is constantly returning out of the self-otherness that it
constantly begets. Every move “away” is a move “toward” and
back home.
Hegel stresses that self-consciousness was behind the drama
of consciousness all along. It was the energy of self-divisiveness
that was the living soul of sense-certainty, perception, and understanding. Now it is revealed that, just as infinity is the true inner
of all objects, self-consciousness is the truth of consciousness. In
other words, external things are and are true only insofar as they
are and are true for a thinking subject or self. “True” means “true
for me.”
VI. From the Play of Force to the Drama of Man
How does Hegel get from the paradoxes of physics to the fight for
recognition with which the drama of self-consciousness begins?
This will be my closing question.
I begin by observing that force is already on the verge of selfconsciousness. Once physics takes force as its central concern,
once it identifies force with nature itself—as happens most
dramatically in the physics of Boscovich—it invites a connection
between the spontaneity of inanimate bodies and the inner state of
human beings.35 Nature and human nature find their common
source, their essence, in impulsiveness, or what Hobbes was the
first to call conatus, striving. Force, seen in this light, is protowill.36 If we keep in mind this connection between force and will,
it becomes less surprising that Hegel’s chapter on understanding
begins with force and ends with self-consciousness, which, for
Hegel, is our impulse or drive to self-affirmation.
As I suggested earlier, the dialectic of understanding
generates life as well as self-consciousness. Life and selfconsciousness come on the scene together. Both exhibit infinity as
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the process of self-differentiation. But for the self at this nascent
stage of its development, the mingling of life and selfconsciousness poses a problem. On the one hand, the self is aware
of itself as being beyond body and finitude. To be an inwardly
turned being is, in a sense, to experience myself as the absolute, a
god. But I am also immersed in organic life, the necessary
condition for self-awareness: I am aware of myself only because
I am alive, rooted in this living body, which is the immediate
object of my desire, care, and anxiety. And so the self is burdened
with a double being. It is both a transcendent or pure self, the self
in its glory, and an empirical self caught up in the mortifying
contingencies of the flesh. This incarnation of inwardness, this
unhappy unity of the divine and the mortal, is the contradiction
that self-consciousness must somehow resolve, the riddle of its
existence.
In the fight for recognition the self seeks to transcend its
animality or life. “Self-consciousness,” Hegel says, “is in and for
itself when, and by the fact that, it is so for another; that is, it is
only as a being that is recognized” [178]. Recognition, here, is not
blank awareness but honor. In winning the recognition of another,
I confirm the absoluteness that I experience within. This recognition is my self-recognition, my certainty of myself as absolute,
made concrete, out there, really existent. I use this other
individual to accomplish my goal, which is to achieve selfcertainty through the negation of my self-otherness. But this
other, who is also at my stage of raw self-consciousness, wants to
use me for the same reason. And so there is a fight for recognition.
In this fight I seek to negate the presumed absoluteness of this
other individual who confronts me. I also risk my life. I do so in
order to show myself and my alter ego that I am more than an
animal. I show that I am a pure self, a self that is worthy of being
recognized as absolute.
The two individual selves are thus bound together in what
Hegel calls a “double movement” [182]. It is double because two
selves are involved and because the negation each performs on
itself it also performs on the other, which is itself. This reciprocal
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action recapitulates the dialectic of force, in which the opposed
determinations of active and passive, soliciting and solicited,
came to be lodged in each of the separate forces: “In this
movement [of selves] we see repeated the process which
presented itself as the play of forces, but repeated now in
consciousness. What in that process was for us, is true here of the
extremes themselves” [184]. In other words, self-consciousness,
as a collision of interacting selves, is force made self-conscious.
In the Phenomenology Hegel mounts a critique of force. But
the poverty of force is also its potency, its impulse to develop into
self-consciousness, and, after many inversions, into the mutual
recognition that is spirit. Spirit, for Hegel, is the spirit of the
Greek polis, the spirit of the Roman Empire, the spirit of the
French monarchy, and the spirit of the German Reformation. This
last, which posits the absolute testimony of the heart, sets the
stage for Kant’s moral world-view, conscience, and the beautiful
soul. Each of these worlds is an attempt on the part of selfhood to
incarnate itself so that it may know itself as the shared truth of a
concrete community of selves. This communal selfhood Hegel
calls the “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’”[177].
What, then, is the dialectic of force in Hegel’s
Phenomenology? It is the Prelude to the Great Fugue of conceptualized history, which begins with the fight for recognition and
ends in absolute knowing.
Endnotes
1
A lecture delivered at St. John’s College in Annapolis on 15 October 2010.
The first version of the lecture was given at the Spinoza Society in
Washington, DC on 8 March 2010.
2
Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Dream of a Ridiculous Man and Other Stories
(West Valley City, Utah: Waking Lion Press, 2006), 16.
3
The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S.
Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 125. Hegel extols understanding in the
Preface of the Phenomenology, where he calls the analytic “force” of Verstand
“the most astonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power”
[32].
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KALKAVAGE
What pure labor of fine flashes consumes
Many a diamond with imperceptible foam,
And what peace seems there to be conceived!
When over the abyss a sun reposes,
Pure works of an eternal cause,
Time scintillates and the Dream is to know.
4
Hegel identifies force with relation, Verhältnis, in the so-called Jena Logic
(The Jena System, 1804-1805: Logic and Metaphysics, trans. John W.
Burbidge and George di Giovanni [Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 1986], 47).
5 Leibniz is the father of this idea: “Substance is a being capable of action”
(Principles of Nature and Grace, G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, trans.
Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989], 207).
6
A thing’s property, for Hegel, is a universal, but one that is bedingt: conditioned or be-thinged. Force, by contrast, is unbedingt—an unconditioned or
unbe-thinged universal [132]. In other words, force is purely thinkable. It is
not, like color, qualified and limited by a material medium.
7
See Newton’s Principia, Definition 3, where body or mass is identified with
the force of resistance or vis inertiae.
8
See Jena Logic, 54.
9
“Force thus expresses relationship itself and the necessity to be within itself
even in its being-outside itself, or to be self-equal” (Jena Logic, 56).
10
“A Specimen of Dynamics” in Leibnitz, Principles of Nature and Grace,
121.
11 In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel at one point offers what is perhaps his
most deeply revealing critique of force. This is in the context of his argument
that Kepler’s account of planetary motion is philosophically superior to that of
Newton (Philosophy of Nature, Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of the
Philosophical Sciences, trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970],
65-83). He remarks: “Seldom has fame been more unjustly transferred from a
first discoverer to another person.” (Ibid., 66.) Hegel’s detailed critique elaborates the three aspects of scientific theorizing that we see in the
Phenomenology: force, law, and explanation.
12
Italics Hegel’s. Throughout his analysis of force and law, Hegel refers to the
syllogism. The middle term of the syllogism mediates between the two
extremes, not as a distinct and static tertium quid, but as the dialectical identity
of the extremes. For a fuller account of the syllogism, see Hegel’s Science of
Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press, 1976), 664 ff.).
13
In his poem “The Cemetery by the Sea,” Paul Valèry precisely captures
appearance as the dazzling unity of shining forth and evanescence:
Quel pur travail de fins éclairs consume
Maint diamant d’imperceptible écume,
Et quelle paix semble se concevoir!
Quand sur l’abîme un soleil se repose,
Ouvrages purs d’une éternelle cause,
Le temps scintille et le songe est savoir.
95
14
Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 34.
15
Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,
trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1974), 125.
16
Throughout this part of his discussion, Hegel’s word for “thing” is Sache,
not Ding—that is, a generalized “matter at hand” or πρᾶγμα, as opposed to the
thing of perception.
17
Miller’s English translation reads “the Notion of law itself.” In all citations
from Miller the word Notion is changed to Concept wherever it appears.
18
Hegel cites his agreement with Hume on this point in the Jena Logic, 52-53.
19
The pseudo-necessity of scientific theory re-appears at the level of observational reason. For example, so-called “psychological necessity” (the supposed
necessity of psychological laws) proves to be “an empty phrase” [307].
20
Λόγος means both ratio and account. In the Philosophy of Nature, 59, Hegel
gives a genuinely conceptual λόγος of Galileo’s law of free fall.
21
More examples occur in the Jena Logic, 51. Why is the soil wet? Because it
rained. What is rain? Falling moisture. Which is to say that the soil is wet
because of wetness. In his Science of Logic, 458-466, Hegel identifies explanation with the sophistical “arguing from grounds.”
22
Berkeley had made a similar claim: “Force, gravity, attraction and terms of
this sort are useful for reasonings and reckonings about motion and bodies in
motion, but not for understanding the simple nature of motion itself or for
indicating so many distinct qualities” (De motu, 17, trans. A. A. Luce in
Berkeley’s Philosophical Writings [New York: Collier Books, 1965], 255).
23
24
Jena Logic, 61.
Donald Verene suggests that Hegel’s phrase was inspired by a play of that
name by Ludwig Tieck (Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the
Phenomenology of Spirit [Albany: SUNY Press, 1985], 39). The inverted
world is, in German, die verkehrte Welt. Verkehrt means either upside down, or
twisted and perverse. Hegel uses the term with the latter meaning in a section
entitled “The Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit” [377]. Scholars
disagree as to whether, in the context of the inverted world, verkehrt means
perverse as well as upside down. Gadamer makes an interesting case for the
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double meaning (Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, trans. P.
Christopher Smith [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976], 35-53).
25
This fits the analysis of the inverted world in the Science of Logic, 509: “In
point of fact, it is just in this opposition of the two worlds that their difference
has vanished, and what was supposed to be the world in and for itself is itself
the world of Appearance.” Hegel adds (510): “the world of Appearance is thus
in its own self the law which is identical with itself.”
26 An otherworldly inversion occurs in Sophocles’ Antigone. When Creon
accuses Antigone of having bestowed equal honor on both her brothers, even
though one was the enemy of his city and the other its defender, Antigone
responds (l. 521): “Who knows if down there this is holy?”
27
William Gilbert, De Magnete, trans. P. Fleury Mottelay (New York: Dover,
1958), 26.
28
Philosophy of Nature, Addition, 166. Hegel here follows Gilbert, De
Magnete, 27.
29
“There has been a lot of talk in physics about polarity. This concept is a
great advance in the metaphysics of the science; for the concept of polarity is
simply nothing else but the specific relation of necessity between two different
terms which are one, in that when one is given, the other is also given. But this
polarity is restricted to the opposition” (Philosophy of Nature, 19).
30
The first supersensible world was a theory of transposed essence, the second
that of transposed reversed essence. The transposition of essence is the theoretical analogue of what Hegel calls self-estrangement (Selbstentfremdung). In
the realm of pure theory, things have their essence in another world. In the
more advanced, praxis-oriented stages of spirit, man’s essence, the meaning of
his life, will be outside of and beyond his actually present world: “In the
Phenomenology, Hegel repeatedly discusses the duality he wishes to surmount,
a dualism which expresses the torment of spirit obliged to live in one world
and to think in the other” (Hypollite, Genesis and Structure, 382).
31
Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 163.
32
Ibid., 165.
33
Inner difference first appeared when force split into two interacting forces
[138].
34 The closest we got to life was with magnetism, which Gilbert regarded as a
kind of soul: “Wherefore, not without reason, Thales, as Aristotle reports in his
book De Anima, declares the loadstone to be animate, a part of the animate
mother earth and her beloved offspring” (Gilbert, De Magnete, 312). Hegel, in
a similar vein, praises magnetism in the Preface: “Even when the specific
determinateness—say one like Magnetism, for example—is in itself concrete
or real, the Understanding degrades it into something lifeless, merely predi-
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cating it of another existent thing [the Earth], rather than cognizing it as the
immanent life of the thing, or cognizing its naïve and unique way of generating and expressing itself in that thing” [53].
35
In order to save continuity in nature, specifically in the phenomenon of
collision, Roger Boscovich argued that the repulsive force mutually exerted by
two colliding bodies is exerted before the actual collision. All action is action
at a distance, and there is never any actual contact between two bodies. Max
Jammer puts it succinctly: for Boscovich, “‘force’ is consequently more fundamental than ‘matter’” (Concepts of Force: A Study in the Foundations of
Dynamics [New York: Dover, 1957], 178).
36 Schopenhauer goes even further by simply identifying force and will:
“Hitherto, the concept of will has been subsumed under the concept of force; I,
on the other hand, do exactly the reverse, and intend every force in nature to
be conceived as will” (The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1, trans. E.
F. Payne [New York: Dover, 1969], 111).
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LENKOWSKI
99
The Work of Education
Jon Lenkowski
Good morning to you, ladies and gentlemen, students, colleagues,
distinguished guests, family and friends; and, most particularly, to
the current graduates who will receive master’s degrees today.
While it is customary at commencements to be congratulatory
and encouraging, I’m not going to do that, at least not primarily.
Rather, I’m going to try to address the following two connected
questions: What exactly have you been doing here? and What
have you learned? The first of these two questions goes to the
peculiar nature of the work we have tried to get you to do here;
the second looks easier, but may also require further consideration. Having spent a certain time with us, these seem to be the
very same questions you have to be asking yourselves; and they
are not very easy questions to answer. I’m going to go over some
old ground and I want to assure you that, while I’m enjoying
myself, I promise not to keep you very long.
To say that you have spent a certain number of semesters here
and read a certain list of deep and important books, and have had
conversations about them, is not really to say enough, because it
does not capture the essence of the specific work you have been
doing. It is true that we read a lot of books. But we view this not
really as an end, but as a beginning, since we hope and expect that
you will return to these same books, and others like them, again
and again throughout your lives. And therefore what you have
been doing here must be properly called a commencement—that
is, only the beginning of an activity that will just continue in you
as an essential and constant part of your lives. But this can happen
only insofar as the books that we have read here together have
already gotten a sort of permanent hold on you. Thus our hopes
Commencement address to the Graduate Institute of St. John’s College in
Annapolis, Maryland, 14 August 2009. Jon Lenkowski is a tutor at St. John’s
College.
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for your future are inextricably linked to what we assume has
already taken root in you here. Let’s try to think through the
implications of this.
First of all, it would have to mean that you have not kept the
books at arm’s length, but have allowed them to enter into you in
deep and essential ways. In other words: that you have made the
books your own. This looks different from something like
memorization—say of songs or even certain verses of poetry—
which is also a sort of internalization. Memorization might look
like making something my own, but really I’ve only made it
always readily available to myself. I can now repeat the song
anytime the mood strikes me—but it is still kept at a distance and
is in no way active in me. On the contrary, it is our great hope that
what you have read, studied and discussed here will stay with you
in an active way; will continue to reverberate and resonate in you;
will remain active in the sense that these matters will forever
make demands on you, will continue to inform and remain central
to your lives and to whatever you think and feel as human beings.
This also distinguishes what we have you do here from
merely technical and professional studies. It is true that these also
make demands on us, but only in our capacity as professionals of
one sort or another, not as human beings as such. So while they
may be active in us in our professional work, they are compartmentalized and only kept off to the side, without touching us as
human beings, without being allowed to become, or without
being thought of as, central to our lives. Our hope here, on the
contrary, is that what we have you study will make deeper and
more thoroughgoing demands on you, simply as human beings
and as citizens.
Thus to say that you make the books your own is to say that
you carry your education inside yourselves, where you continue
to let it work on you. This is then what we expect you to have
been doing here: making the books your own, or—what is the
same thing—bringing your education within yourselves. To see
how completely appropriate this way of speaking is to what we do
here in particular, you have only to consider what you have
studied: the philosophy, politics, language and literature, history,
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101
mathematics, and science you have studied here are not simply
making claims in the abstract, are not merely certain subjectmatters over there, alien to me. Rather, we make the book our
own. We enter the book and make ourselves part of the book’s
world. Or, maybe better: we allow the book to enter us; we internalize the book and let it inform and illuminate the ways we look
at ourselves. Whether a political teaching centers on Athens in the
fifth century BC or on Florence in the sixteenth century, it is
always—immediately and directly—drawing my attention to my
own political situation. Whether it is Plato’s version, or Freud’s
version, of the tripartite soul, my attention is drawn—immediately and directly—to the phenomena of my own inner life. If this
were not the case these books could at most be only of antiquarian
interest. These books are always making such demands upon us,
saying things about us, demanding that we turn toward
ourselves—so that to read the books thoughtfully and intelligently is always to be turning toward ourselves.
This turning toward oneself has two aspects. First there is the
question of the unity or unification of the various things we study.
And here I would remind you that both our undergraduate
program and our graduate program, despite the variety of subject
matter in both, claim to be unified programs. So where is the unity
to be found? This question is addressed vividly in Book VII of
Plato’s Republic at 537b-c, where Socrates says:
And the various studies acquired without any
particular order by the children in their education must
be integrated into a synopsis, [or seeing-together,]
which reveals the kinship of these studies with one
another and with the nature of what is.1
This seeing-together (σύνοψις in Greek) is directed first of all to
the integration of what are there called gymnastic and musical
education, but then subsequently also to what is called the higher
musical education, or what we might call the liberal arts. It is the
“seeing-together that reveals the unity of these studies.” Only in
turning inward, toward ourselves as the locus of these various
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studies can we achieve this synopsis or seeing-together, for it is in
me, in my “seeing them together,” that these various studies find
their unity, gather and integrate themselves and do their work.
And this leads me to the second aspect of this turning inward
toward oneself: as the books become your own and enter into
your souls, they continue to work upon you and upon your view
of all things, including your view of yourselves.
This does not mean that what we read is simply believed or
swallowed whole or uncritically. It’s more that claims and
counter-claims—or even nuance and counter-nuance—vie with
one another; that what were fixed, and maybe dearly-held, views
get unsettled and become questionable. This is the work done by
the books and by our conversations about them. And all of this is
going on in us. Thus our attention is quite naturally, even effortlessly, drawn inward.
But we are not mere observers here; rather we become active
participants in this, our own inner drama. A certain activity or
work on our part seems to kick in almost automatically. Or it
could be said that the work that the books do elicits, and is
completed by, a certain corresponding work on our part. But
though this might initially arise automatically, a certain effort
seems required to sustain it and make it work for us. This
sustained effort at turning inward, turning toward yourselves, is
the peculiar and proper work we have been intent on getting you
to do. The tasks of reading the assignments and participating in
class, while necessary and important, are really only a first step,
preparatory to this more essential activity. We might name this
activity rumination, or simply thinking, and it consists in carrying
on a conversation within one’s own self, as the ideas take hold
and confront one another.
In Book I, Chapter 2 of the Politics (1253a8 ff.) Aristotle talks
about the importance of language for man, the political animal:
Now it is evident that man is more of a political
animal than bees or any other gregarious animal.
Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and
man is the only animal that has speech. And whereas
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mere voice is only an indication of pleasure and pain,
and is therefore found in other animals (for their
nature reaches as far as the sensing of pleasure and
pain, and the communication of these to one another,
and no further), the power of speech is intended to
articulate what is advantageous and what is disadvantageous, and therefore similarly what is just and what
is unjust. And it belongs to man that he alone among
the animals has any sense of good and evil, of just and
unjust and the like, and the association of living
beings who have this sense constitutes a household
and a city.2
Language is different from mere vocal sound and thus sharply
distinguishes human beings even from other social animals. What
is so important about the power of speech, according to Aristotle,
is that it is language that allows us to consider matters of justice
and injustice, good and evil, and—we would add—other matters
of the same order. We must note here that, while it is speech that
clearly distinguishes man from other animals, Aristotle himself is
more interested in the specifically human activity that speech
alone makes possible for us. It is this activity of thinking and
considering that really makes us human; it is this that is the
specifically proper activity of human being as such.
And this has been our principal aim in your time here with us
that, along with internalizing the books, and carrying your
education within yourselves, you have accustomed yourselves to
this turn inward, this rumination, this conversation with
yourselves, as the proper and essential work, or being-at-work
(ενέργεια in Greek) of human being as such—and to such an
extent that this activity becomes simply a part of your lives. This
is the principal aim of the education we offer you, and may well
be the essential and intrinsic goal of education as such.
To help me make the case for this last claim, let me return
briefly to Book VII of Plato’s Republic. I will read from 518b6d7, abbreviating the passage slightly. Socrates says:
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[T]herefore education is not what the professions of
certain men assert it to be. They assert that they put
into the soul knowledge that isn’t in it, as though they
were putting sight into blind eyes.... But the present
argument indicates that this power is already in the
soul of each and that, just as an eye is not able to turn
from darkness to the light without the whole body
turning, so also the instrument with which each learns
must, together with the whole soul, be turned around
from becoming, until it is able to look at what is....
And therefore there would be an art of this turning
around, concerned with the way in which this power
can most easily and efficiently be turned around: not
an art of producing sight in it, but rather, this art takes
as given that sight is there, but not rightly turned, nor
looking at what it ought to look at.3
So: education is not a matter of taking knowledge that is already
in the teacher’s soul, and then transposing it to the soul of the
learner. Rather it is a sort of turning of the power of seeing that is
already in the learner’s soul, in the right direction—a turning
brought about by a certain art (τέχνη) called the art of turning
around (περιαγωγή, μεταστροφή).
Book VII begins with an image of our education—that is, our
rise from ignorance to knowledge—depicted as the gradual ascent
of released prisoners from within a dark cave up to the light of
day. At each stage the released prisoner is torn away from what he
had been looking at, and what he had implicitly trusted as real, to
now confront something entirely new which conflicts with what
he had previously seen. This confrontation compels him to turn
inward—that is, to weigh the one against the other, and also
against all of the other views he had once held at stages already
passed through, each one of which had also made truth-claims
and had at one time been simply and implicitly trusted and
believed in. He is now forced to “see all of these together”
(συνορᾶν, the infinitive of συνοράω—that is, σύνοψις, synopsis)
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105
and carry on a conversation with himself, in which each of these
has its say.
The description of the release from shackles and of the
violent turning around of these prisoners at the beginning of the
Cave passage might suggest the necessity of some external agent
(a Socrates, for instance), but even the simplest reflection on the
passage quickly gets one to see that this process can occur entirely
within a single soul—in other words, through a conversation with
oneself. Such an inner dialogue, in which one “talks right through
something” is in Greek called διαλεκτική, dialectic, from the verb
διαλέγειν, where λέγειν means “to speak” or “to talk,” and the
prepositional prefix διά means “right through.” So someone who
finds himself in the same situation as this released prisoner would
have to effortfully “talk right through” this panoply of claims and
counterclaims upon him that he now finds in his soul. This is
captured nicely in the middle voice of the verb, where διαλέγεσθαι
often has the sense of talking with oneself. A bit further on in
Book VII, at 532b4-5, the release from bonds and the turningaround connected with it are identified with dialectic.
This, then, is the picture of education given in the Republic.
It is supposed to culminate in light, or in genuine knowledge. But
whether this culmination is ultimately a real resolution, and
whether all of the antagonisms in the soul between claims and
counterclaims are ever really left behind, seems difficult to assess,
especially since what the Republic claims to be the ultimate
moment of this journey upward—namely, the Good or the Idea of
the Good—is explicitly said to be beyond being (Book VI, 509b).
But however this turns out, we in the meantime accomplish
something of enormous significance:
First: This turn inward, turn toward the self, where the
synopsis or seeing-together occurs, could be called, or likened to,
a kind of conversion, since we have been turned around and
turned inward toward ourselves.
Second: Furthermore, and as a consequence of this, whatever
progress we make here toward knowledge seems at the same time
to also be a progress toward self-knowledge. So here knowledge
and self-knowledge seem to come together or coincide.
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Τhird: If we persist in this turn inward and allow it to develop
into a full-blown conversation with oneself, we are making actual
within ourselves the proper and essential work (ἔργον)or being-atwork (ἐνέργεια) of human being as such.
Fourth and finally: This dialectical movement of the soul
within itself, which is the essential work and the very heart of the
education we have tried to provide for you here, is at once the
inner essence of education as such.
Postscript
The inward turn talked about here might invite comparison with
the concept of Er-innern, Er-innerung in Hegel (cf.
Phänomenologie des Geistes, VIII: Das Absolute Wissen, the very
last paragraph), and importantly revived by Gadamer (cf.
Wahrheit und Methode, Erster Teil, Sec. II, 2, d, penultimate
paragraph), as well as the concept of Er-eignen, Er-eignis in
Heidegger (cf. Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), passim).
In ordinary German, the verb erinnern normally means “to
remind,” and with sich in the reflexive form “to remember,”
though Hegel and Gadamer take the word more literally to mean
something like “to interiorize”—an easy enough connection via
the adverb inne (English “within”) in the verb root. The verb
ereignen normally means “to happen” and the noun Ereignis
means “an event.” The standard etymology (cf. Der Grosse
Duden, Bd. 7: Etymologie) traces ereignen, through a shift in the
root, to the archaic eräugnen, carrying the sense of showing
(itself) before the eyes (Augen in German). The connection
between this and “to happen” seems clear enough. But Heidegger,
true to his fierce independence, takes the verb in an entirely
different direction, linking ereignen through the root directly with
the adjective eigen (English “own” or “one’s own”)—a
connection that Duden explicitly warns against. Heidegger’s
insistence on linking ereignen to eigen, together with the
particular stress he puts on the motive power of the prefix er-,
leads him to take er-eignen to mean something like “on the way
to appropriating,” or “on the way to ownness.” (The current
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107
standard way of rendering this in English is “en-owning,” which,
while neither German nor English, tries to capture both the sense
and flavor of Heidegger’s usage.) Of course, there is an agenda
behind this reading. And yet it seems too simpleminded to dismiss
Heidegger’s interpretation as just bad philology. Should not the
presumption at least be that he has seen into something hidden
and essential which has allowed him to look beyond the everyday
and obvious?
Notes
1 The
Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968),
216. Translation slightly altered and emphases added by the author.
2 Translation
3
by the author.
The Republic of Plato, 197. Emphases added.
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Falstaff and Cleopatra
Elliott Zuckerman
I
Falstaff and Cleopatra do not look alike. We all have a mental
picture of Falstaff, and most of us think we can visualize
Cleopatra. Yet it is surprising how few words in their plays are
devoted to their physical descriptions. Falstaff comes upon us
unannounced in the second scene of Henry the Fourth Part One.
At the same moment we move suddenly from formal verse into
prose. If we envision as a whole the four plays of Shakespeare’s
mature history cycle—Richard the Second, Henry the Fourth
Part One and Part Two, and Henry the Fifth—then it is in that
scene that Falstaff begins his domination and transformation of
the two middle plays. After the regular verse that we have heard
so far, both Falstaff and the prose come as something new. They
announce that the messy world of London lowlife will be exposed
to us, inserted below the arena of dynastic rivalry and war. To put
it impressionistically into color and sound, it is as though the
greenish white and the glitter of Richard the Second have been
replaced by the rich browns of smelly taverns and Spanish sherry,
later to be succeeded by the golden brass of Henry the Fifth.
At the end of two full acts all we are actually told about
Falstaff’s looks is that he is old and that he is fat. We also learn
that he has wit, but wit, so far as I know, is not limited to a
physical type. As it happens, all three of these definitive words—
fat, old, and wit—are used by Prince Hal in the opening phrase of
their first exchange. But it is Falstaff’s habitual drink that Hal
calls old, and it is his wit itself that he calls fat:
Thou art so fat-witted with drinking of old sack…1
A lecture delivered on 2 April 2010 at St. John’s College in Annapolis. Elliot
Zuckerman is a tutor emeritus.
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Later on, Falstaff will famously tell us that he is not only witty in
himself but the source of wit in other men. But here the Prince is
not referring to the expanse of Falstaff’s humor or the infectiousness of his intellect. In his banter Hal is calling his
companion thick-witted, the opposite of what we might call a
“rapier” wit. Yet isn’t it remarkable that in his opening words Hal
uses the three words—four, if we add sack—that signify what
may be most important in Falstaff’s being? Fat, Wit, Old, Sack—
it is one of those marvelous details in Shakespeare about which
we wonder whether he placed them there strategically in premeditated design, or whether they simply turned up, self-generated by
genius.
As for Cleopatra, all hints about her looks are eclipsed by
something said about her that beggars all description. It may be
the greatest compliment ever paid anyone:
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies.2
Perhaps such hyperbole is necessary not only because she tempts
one of the greatest Roman heroes to betrayal, emasculinity, and
death, but also because—in the company of Juliet and Cressida,
Rosalind and Viola, Imogen and Isabella—she is played by a boy.
I think she is the only heroine who explicitly refers to that
convention, when, near the end, she evades the captivity in which,
as she says, some squeaking actor will “boy” her greatness.
(Among her countless talents, Cleopatra is good at transforming
nouns into verbs.)
Cleopatra is not only associated with crocodiles and snakes,
but she is expanded into a personification of Egypt and the Nile.
We see her playing the capricious monarch and the jealous rival.
My favorite among her various guises is in her scene as music
lover. She calls for music by echoing the opening line that this
audience ought to know well:
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111
Give me some music, moody food
Of those that trade in love.
[Music is called for. After a performance of whatever
length, she interrupts:]
Let it alone, let’s to billiards. 4
By replacing music with billiards, Cleopatra demonstrates her
infinite variety.
In an instructive anthology of French prose, designed for use
in the language tutorial of the college, there are samples of the
short character sketches of La Bruyère. Each paragraph is a list of
personal and sartorial characteristics, and ends with a declaration
of what the person is: il est riche, il est pauvre. Such generic tags
cannot be attached to the great people in Shakespeare. There is
only one Hamlet, one Rosalind, one Lady Macbeth—only one
Falstaff and only one Cleopatra. Why, then, did I put those two
together in the title of this lecture, and why have at least some of
you already guessed why they deserve to be paired? Whether for
good or for ill, the Fat Wit and the Serpent of the Nile, each in his
or her respective world, represent a counterpoise and a threat to
what is going on politically.
The History Tetralogy has the bones of a Morality Play. In the
line of legitimacy, Prince Hal lies between Richard the Second,
who was legitimate but weak, and the Henry the Fifth that Hal is
to become, who will legitimize the crown his father wears
uneasily. Meanwhile there is a gamut of Honor, ranging from
Falstaff, for whom it is a mere word, to Hotspur, for whom it is
everything. Hotspur, by the way, is the only rival to Falstaff in
liveliness and language. In Part Two the underlying schematism
is further personalized by the introduction of the Lord Chief
Justice, representing the moral order for which the future king
must eventually reject Falstaff. Falstaff is also the Prince’s
surrogate father—a role that is memorialized in a long and
separate scene.
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Richard II
{
Falstaff
Henry IV
HAL
Hotspur
Lord Chief
Justice
Henry V
Prince Hal is at the center of four triads, which at their most
neutral should give him—and us—the wherewithal for a proper
political and moral choice. The trouble is that Shakespeare in his
fecundity has endowed Falstaff with so much being that the scales
are, so to speak, outweighed.
Falstaff cannot be a measurable factor within the world when
he is already a world in himself. As he tells the Prince in the
peroration of a play within the play:
…banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins—but
for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack
Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more
valiant, being as he is old Jack Falstaff, banish not
him thy Harry’s company, banish not him thy Harry’s
company, banish plump Jack, and banish all the
world.5
The Prince answers truthfully but mysteriously in a tone the actor
must think up for himself: “I do, I will.”
Cleopatra, too, despite her pairing with Antony, also has her
separable world. This is paradoxically most evident in the manner
of her death, which is sharply divided from the death of Antony.
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113
All the other Shakespearean tragic heroes die at the end of their
plays, but after the succession of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and
Macbeth, it is in Act Four that Mark Antony has his prolonged
suicide in the presence of Eros. The playwright needs an entire act
for something new: the exotic and polysemous apotheosis of
Cleopatra. That redemption looks forward, I think, to the final
plays, often called Romances, that follow, in which old dissensions are harmonized, lost children are found, and statues come to
life. When Cleopatra embraces the asps she is showing the tragic
hero how such things ought to be done. All the boyishness is gone
in this triumph of the woman. And it is accomplished amidst
verbal music that rivals the sensuality of that other triumphal
woman, Isolde, who, twenty minutes after the suicide of her
lover, achieves her first and final sexual climax.
Most of the Romans can’t understand Cleopatra, and are
persistently fascinated with her and with Egypt. Even Antony has
what she calls “Roman thoughts,” but unfortunately not often
enough. The most extremely Roman of them all—I refer to
Octavius Caesar, who is an undisguised boy marching in from the
arena of Coriolanus—seems to be unable to recognize her attractiveness. That is, anyway, how I interpret his entry, near the end
of the play, into her room in Alexandria. “Which is the Queen of
Egypt?” he asks.7 He was only the adoptive son of Julius.
I mention Julius because I want to tell a brief anecdote about
what happened some years ago in a Graduate Institute preceptorial. At the end of the first act we came to Cleopatra’s famous
reference to her youth:
My salad days,
When I was green in judgment, cold in blood...8
I asked what she could have meant, and an elderly man in the
class observed that she was referring to a Caesar salad. I thought
the interpretation was entirely Shakespearean. This addition to all
the other meanings of the salad metaphor would have seemed to
him apt and irresistible.
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II
Cleopatra’s arrival on the barge at Cydnus is a celebrated passage
of English verse. It is also a powerful example of how
Shakespeare can transform his sources. In this case the source is
the good prose of North’s translation of Plutarch. The speaker is
Enobarbus, who earlier spoke the lines describing Cleopatra in
general. He has one of the most privileged roles in Shakespeare.
The transformation from good prose to great verse, and then from
great verse to great poetry, is worth a lecture of its own. It is
certainly worth a Tutorial of its own. Here I can only point to a
detail or two that have been added to the description. They have
been italicized in the example:
The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne
Burn’d on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were
silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes.
*****
Antony,
Enthron’d i’ the market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to the air; which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature.8
I have italicized the places where the winds, the water, and
the air itself are in love. Cleopatra has seduced Nature itself. And
as I transcribed these passages I felt obliged to insert a plea for the
restoration of this play—I am tempted to say this poem—to a
more secure place in the program. Not only should it be a seminar
reading, but it contains a detail that entitles it to be the very last
reading of the senior year. For—as my colleague Mr. Kutler likes
to point out—somewhere in its text it contains the word UNSEM-
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INARED.
The word unseminared—which refers to the deprivation of
something even more important than the Seminar—is used only
once in Shakespeare’s works. There are many thousands of such
words. When they occur in Ancient Greek we may assume that
other instances haven’t survived. In Shakespeare they tell us that
his genius had at its disposal a language that was rich in transitional flux. It could be said that Elizabethan and Jacobean English
displayed a variety that rivaled Cleopatra’s; or that, like Falstaff,
the language was fat and witty in itself.
When talking about iambic pentameter, or blank verse, I like
to show its remarkable range by quoting pairs of lines that as
neighbors highlight the immense contrasts possible in both the
language and what had become its characteristic dramatic
medium. Some of you already know the following lines as my
favorite example, from Hamlet’s dying injunction to Horatio:
Absent thee from felicity awhile
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story.9
The first line is Latinate and quick-syllabled, leaving unrealized
two or three of the metrical stresses. The second is Anglo-Saxon
and monosyllabic, realizes extrametrical stresses, and even
provides clusters of consonants—“this harsh world”—that slow
the line down further, and that are unimaginable in, say, Italian
verse. Here is another such line, from Macbeth:
The multitudinous seas incarnadine
Making the green one red.10
Each of the two lines could belong to a different language. (If, by
the way, you don’t see that all but the last of these lines are legitimate and unarguable lines of iambic pentameter, please ask me
to show you—at the risk that I’ll actually do so!)
Such extravagance is in sharp contrast with the economy of
the other great modern dramatist we study here. According to one
set of tallies, Shakespeare’s lexicon is almost ten times that of the
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sparse and highly selective lexicon of Racine. (As the students
know, most of Racine’s vocabulary compensates for its brevity by
being untranslatable!) The difference is of course reflected in the
difference of the action. In answer to the on-stage horrors of
Shakespeare—even Sophocles would not have allowed the
audience to witness the gouging-out of eyes—the typical action
of the Racinian queen is to go off into the wings and then return,
having slightly changed her mind. The so-called unities of time
and place are usually ignored in Shakespeare, no more blatantly
than in Antony and Cleopatra, where Act Four has as many as
fifteen scenes. Those scene-numberings are, by the way, entirely
editorial. It is a delightful fact that in the First Folio, our only
original text, the heading of the play is Act One, Scene One—and
then there are no further act and scene divisions. Perhaps a
careless omission, but it is nicer to think that the first editors
realized that this play ought to flow on unimpeded, like the river
Nile—or like the overflowing dotage of Antony, which is
mentioned in the opening lines.
There is something about the richness of Shakespeare’s
language that is not always approved: his propensity for punning.
One of the great classical critics of Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson,
played right into my hands when he wrote about it. “The quibble,”
he said—in his day a pun was called a quibble—“is the fatal
Cleopatra for which Shakespeare lost the world.”11 Just as for
Antony the world was well lost, so Shakespeare’s attraction to
wordplay is happily inseparable from his love of the word.
Tonight there is no time to discuss the wonders of
Shakespeare’s quibbling, for, as you’ll hear, there is a rarer and
more hidden aspect of his wordplay to which I shall devote a few
minutes. But recently I have been reading learned discussion of
the pun—there are such things—and have been confirmed in
something I have always suspected: that an investigation of the
pun must lead to a discussions of language itself. But even when
you hear an everyday pun, let it be enough to remember
Shakespeare’s predilection when you automatically groan. If the
groan is simply to let the punster know that you “got it,” a smile
of appreciation is a better indication. But if it is a groan of
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reproach, the practice of our greatest poet requires that you at
least take the time to decide whether the pun is a good one.
But more broadly you might remember that there are petrified
puns at the roots of our words—a Platonic dialogue is devoted to
quibbling etymologies, strongly countering the now popular
notion that the form of words is merely conventional. Punning is
related to rhyming and to metaphor. Bear in mind the dangerous
double-meanings of the Delphic oracles, where the wrong choice
of interpretation might mean one’s death. Remember that it was
with a quibble that Odysseus escaped from the Cyclops. Much of
the sense of music depends upon the ambiguities of what can
fairly be called tonal punning, for every modulation pivots on a
pun. And above all consider what you are doing when you dream.
The other aspect of wordplay I just referred to is the
Anagram, and it is the occasion for my second anecdote. The
anagram got me into trouble in my early years of teaching at St.
John’s. In a language tutorial we were reading one of the sonnets,
which I present here. I’ll read the whole sonnet, but I’m afraid
that I shall talk about only line eleven, which I have italicized:
SONNET 64
When I have seen by time’s fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age,
When sometime lofty towers I see down razed,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store,
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay,
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate:
That time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
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There can be little doubt that the poet is asking us to hear the
connection between RUIN and RUMINATE, and I think he is
also asking us to see the connection in the printed text. We did so
in that class, long ago, noticing that when we removed RUIN
from RUMINATE we were left with a bereft MATE. We didn’t
stop there, but went on to look for more anagrams. We found
TIME, which is the theme of the sonnet, and words related to that
theme, such as MINUTE, MATURE, and REMAIN. Someone
happily discovered NATURE. There are more, but I’ll let you find
them for yourselves.
At a dinner-party that evening, I boasted of what we had
discovered in class. I was overheard by one of the elderly
members of the faculty, who later took me aside and told me that
at St. John’s College we don’t do such things. Perhaps he thought
I also counted up the letters in all my texts, in order to discover
what was at the dead middle.
It is now fashionable to include anagrams among the
treasures one seeks in the sonnets. I know of recent major studies
that do so. When the poem is printed out and non-dramatic, there
is an invitation for anagram hunting. But what about the plays,
which were presented without a text to follow, to an audience not
all of whom could read? Are we to find literal wordplay in the
spoken text?
For a test case, I seek the help of Iago. In most of the action
of Othello, we watch with fascination and dread the virtuoso
performance wherein Iago, malignantly and I think motivelessly,
brings to destruction a great hero and his innocent wife. He does
so by means of a handkerchief. His performance begins with what
is almost a whisper: “Ha,” he says, “I like not that.”12 What am I
to make of the fact that HA—that H and A—are the first two
letters of HANDKERCHIEF? What are you to make of it? Did
Shakespeare make anything of it? Did Shakespeare even notice
it? Does his intent matter, despite the warnings that there is
something called the Intentional Fallacy? Isn’t the richness and
variety of the play enough, without the need to pile up
superfluities?
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I think similar questions must be asked about any such
discovery, particularly when its attraction feels irresistible. Their
discovery is only a preliminary to the criticism of the poem.
Criticism begins with the attempt to decide whether what is
discovered is properly there.13
III
One reason why Shakespeare the Poet and Shakespeare the
Dramatist vie for supreme beauty is that the poetry spreads
itself—leaks out, so to speak—into the action. I am referring to
what, for want of a better name, I call Enacted Metaphors. The
poetic trope is staged for us. Cleopatra, on the upper level of the
storied stage, has the wounded Antony reeled up to her, and she
observes that fishing is a great sport. The blind Duke of
Gloucester thinks he is jumping off a cliff, but only falls from one
step of the stage to another. In a speech filled with other sublimely
monosyllabic lines, Othello extinguishes a lamp while on his way
to smother Desdemona:
Put out the light, and then put out the light.14
Whole scenes can be large figures of speech. The unweeded
garden of England, with a gardener named Adam. The Forest of
Arden, which always has Another Part. Lady Macbeth twisting
her spotted hands while wandering in disturbed sleep.
Falstaff stages his own resurrection. True to his denigration of
Honor, he plays dead in battle. When he gets up, he has the chance
to celebrate his ebullience in more than speech. Then, to make the
act entirely outrageous, he carries off the body of Hotspur, dead
from Honor, in order to claim the victory as his own. When
Falstaff was lying in pretended death, we heard an impromptu
eulogy from Prince Henry, which is in great contrast to the repudiation of Falstaff at the end of the play. Falstaff’s pretended death
is comic; his true death is pathetic, and it comes when he is still
alive. Cleopatra also keeps dying, and her deaths and recoveries
bring on the death of Antony and his brief resurrection. Her final
death, carefully staged, is, in the largest sense of the word, comic.
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About Falstaff’s actual death, there is an aspect I have never
seen mentioned in the books I have read. In two significant ways
the very end of his life parallels the death of Socrates. As you
know, when Socrates is about to die he refers to a debt he owes to
the demigod Asclepius—who, as I interpret it, cured him of
Becoming. Falstaff, right after his rejection, refers to the money
he owes Justice Shallow. More important, both Socrates and
Falstaff die from the bottom up. The effect of the hemlock starts
at the feet. And in her description of Falstaff’s death, Mistress
Quickly notices that the final coldness began at his feet. I asserted
earlier that one of the duties of criticism was to try to judge
whether an anagram, say, was admissible. A similar attempt at
discernment should be brought to bear on the significance of such
classical parallels.
The most magnificent of all the staged metaphors must be the
death of Cleopatra. She herself stages it. She nurses the asps, like
the mother of death. She readies herself to meet Antony again,
and her ladies follow her, to assist in the seduction:
The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch,
Which hurts, and is desir’d.15
But this operatic love-death is not that of the singing divas. They
depend upon the easier effects of passionate music. Cleopatra’s is
the triumph of clarity and wit.
Epilogue
In the Folio version of King Lear, shortly after the five Nevers
that hammer out the culminating despair of the negative action,
the King, with the dead Cordelia in his arms, imagines that his
daughter is about to speak. As a staged metaphor, it might remind
us of Cordelia’s initial refusal, five acts earlier, to speak more than
a single repeated negative. At the end of the play she is saying
nothing. At the beginning she had uttered the word Nothing, and
with that word she seems to have released the army of uncanny
evil manned by her sisters and their allies.
Cordelia, who seems to be Grace itself, and who takes upon
herself a redeeming forgiveness, must be eliminated from the
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121
world. Nothing could be more perverse than the eighteenthcentury happy ending, in which she survives and is married off to
Edgar. This is not only absurd; it is, in another sense, not absurd
enough. From the point of view of stagecraft, it is easy enough to
save Cordelia. Shakespeare makes that obvious, so that we see
that the killing of Cordelia is of the utmost importance. While we
are all reasonably hopeful that there is still time to save her, he has
Edmund delay until it is too late the casual word that would have
meant rescue. It is being asserted, I think, that in order to
eliminate the extreme evil, the extreme good must also go. At the
end of this tragedy, and I think most of the others, the world must
be deprived of both Grace and Evil, leaving us with the merely
good and the merely bad.
I’ll go one rash step further and draw an analogy with my
chief subject. Both Falstaff and Cleopatra reveal a seductive
amorality that also, like Grace and Evil, must be purged. England
and Rome are left with the ordinary, the political, the moral, and
the livable.
1
Henry IV, Part I, I.1.4.
2
Antony and Cleopatra, II.2.278-81.
3
Ibid., V.2.262
4
Ibid., II.51-4
5
Henry IV, Part I, II.4.457-63.
6
Antony and Cleopatra, V.2.135.
7
Ibid., I.5.86-7
8
Ibid., II.2.230-58
9
Hamlet, V.2, 361-63
10
Macbeth, II.2, 77-8
11
Samuel Johnson, A Preface to Shakespeare, §44
12
Othello, III.3.37
13
I once gave a lecture on the opening note of “Dove sono,” the great C-major
aria of the Countess in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. It was only while
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speaking the lecture that I realized that the first syllable of the Italian text, DO,
was also the DO of the C-major scale.
PORTRAITS OF THE
IMPASSIONED CONCEPT
Peter Kalkavage, The Logic of
Desire: An Introduction to Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit.
122
14
Othello, V.2.7.
15
Antony and Cleopatra, V.2.343-44.
Paul Dry books, xvi + 537 pages, $35.
Book Review by Eva Brann
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is an enthralling “picture
gallery” (447)* of the successive incarnations in which human
consciousness appears in the world; it is also a repellant trudge
through the abstract dialectic by which its concept develops. I
would claim that until you’ve undergone the complementary
experiences of delighting in the imaginative recognition of the
various “pictures” and of suffering the pains of thinking through
the logic, you haven’t quite lived—if living means having
plumbed the possibilities of passionately driven thought in search
of self-awareness.
Like all great classics of philosophy, the Phenomenology is
written for all of us, the amateurs of thinking no less than the
professional philosophers (451), provided we have this single
qualification—that we are Hegel’s contemporaries in the sense of
living with him at the end of time, when consciousness has come
to full self-realization as spirit. More mundanely put, the
Phenomenology presupposes only “some familiarity with the
history of philosophy” (xii), and that can be supplied by any of
the good commentaries available.
Nonetheless, the book is a nest of labyrinths at whose every
turn we readers meet, in Peter Kalkavage’s words, a monstrous
Minotaur, a “Demon of Difficulty” (xi). To overcome each new
Minotaur we need help of a more global sort than even the best of
*
Page numbers in parentheses refer to The Logic of Desire.
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paragraph-by-paragraph commentaries can provide. This is
exactly what Kalkavage gives us in The Logic of Desire. It is a
full-scale narrative, a readable yet faithful retelling of Hegel’s
story. It has several serious predecessors (which are given full
credit in a brief analytic biography), but is in a class of its own for
its engaging, distinctly American-flavored accessibility, its downamong-the-readers and do-it-yourself egalitarianism. Indeed, an
early reader of the book wrote to me to praise it as “a popularization of the right kind, explicating the thinking of Hegel in its
own terms, while constantly watching the mind of the potential
reader to see whether that mind is taking it in.” The Logic of
Desire intends to lead us “into the thick of Hegel’s arguments”
(xii), not from a commentator’s outside view but from the
position of a reader venturing into the labyrinth. That is, of
course, what an “introduction” should do – bring us into a text.
The Logic of Desire is, so to speak, a friendly doppelgänger of the
Phenomenology that steadily accompanies it (being as long as the
text) without ever eclipsing it.
Kalkavage presents Hegel’s book as one of a quartet of great
books on education, together with Plato’s Republic, Dante’s
Divine Comedy, and Rousseau’s Émile. All four of these works
present the drama of the soul’s development and liberation, as
Hegel puts it, from consciousness’s “immediacy” (its unreflectively natural familiarity with its world) to its “mediated” (that is,
conceptualized) appropriation of that world as fully selfconscious spirit. The Phenomenology is the story of the epochs in
the education of spirit, the life changes self-generated by its
“passionate self-assertion,” its spirited longing, its desire, to come
into its own. This eventful journey of consciousness’s becoming
spirit is a tragic drama, because the spirit-to-be “cannot become
wise without making a fool of itself. An extremist at heart, spirit,
our human essence, is fated…to learn through suffering” (2). The
journey that consciousness drives itself through is a logical one –
hence the title The Logic of Desire.
This logic is new upon the scene of rationality. Hegelian
dialectic is a living, developmental logic. It is not the work of
individual human understanding passing judgment on this or that
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by reference to a fixed set of categories, but rather the work of
Thought itself—“the Concept” in Hegel’s language. This
energetic Concept drives itself in a violent, dialectical (that is,
self-antithetical) motion from continuously new “self-positings”
through inevitable “self-otherings” to ever current and ever
collapsing self-reconciliations, until an ultimate consummation of
mutual absorption by self and other is reached. In the hackneyed
and unhelpful language of some Hegel-explications, this rising
and plunging onward motion of the spirit is referred to as thesis,
antithesis, and synthesis, but Kalkavage does not use this terminology in his inside chronicle of spirit’s way. He finds fresh
language for every “moment,” every station of consciouness’s via
dolorosa.
In the self-motion of dialectical logic, two elements are
compounded: desirous striving and spirited assertion. Here one of
the accepted translations of the German Geist as “Spirit” (the
other is “Mind”) proves serendipitous, for it alludes to “spiritedness,” that proud self-assertion and other-negation which the
Greeks called thymos. The desire that drives the dialectic is thus
shown to be a powerfully negative and destructive force, and it
reincarnates itself in a succession of figures—that portrait gallery
of impassioned concepts by which spirit drives itself to cancel,
keep and raise (the three main meanings of the well known
Hegelian verb aufheben) all significant oppositions. The
paradigm of all these oppositions is that of subject and object, self
and other.
The Logic of Desire presents an exemplary attitude for a
reader to adopt toward a book. To use a fancy term, it embodies a
“hermeneutic,” a principle of interpretation. The most respectful
such hermeneutic rule I know is the so-called “principle of
charity”: give the text a chance to make maximum sense.
Kalkavage outdoes this principle by embracing a “principle of
appreciation”: savor and learn from the text to the utmost of your
ability. The principle of appreciation is to the principle of charity
as awed generosity is to squint-eyed tolerance—a way of treating
a book with magnanimity rather than with mere civility.
Thus it is not until the last pages, in the epilogue, that we
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learn that Kalkavage could not possibly be a whole-hearted
Hegelian, that the book that has captivated him has not captured
him. The main sticking-point is that very condition mentioned
above, that coloring of spirit’s eros, of its desire to know itself, by
thymos—spirit’s aggression toward its other. “Desire here is not
other-affirming but self-affirming and other-negating” (454).
Thus, if Hegel succeeds, he will—and this is in fact his aim—
have killed philosophy, the love of wisdom, not only by the
combative self-positing of consciousness (which is discordant
with the open inquisitiveness of philosophy), but also by the
claim that the curriculum of self-development can be completed;
for, once Absolute Science, the knowledge that has absorbed all
its conditions, has been attained, philosophy is superseded.
Kalkavage’s approach is therefore a welcome counterweight to a
mode that is all too prevalent in contemporary philosophy: to allot
living space only to those problems and solutions currently within
the consensual range of the philosophical profession. The Logic of
Desire teaches the lesson of non-credulous admiration.
Does it follow from this way of reading that Kalkavage’s
Hegel must be either left-leaning or right-leaning? Hegel students
on the left—notably Marx—interpreted his work as atheistic
because God becomes man and is his congregation, while on the
right this entry of God into his people was thought to preserve
some transcendence. Kalkavage says that “what Hegel no doubt
intended is that each is absorbed into the other. God must be
humanized in order to be self-conscious, and man divinized in
order to enjoy absolute self-knowledge” (509, n. 2). This view,
certainly supported by the text itself, compounds right and left
Hegelianism. The Phenomenology is neither a theology nor an
anthropology but a theoanthropology.
There remains, however, the question of Hegel’s politics. In
some final advice to the now-engaged reader about which book to
tackle next, Kalkavage recommends Hegel’s Elements of the
Philosophy of Right as “the most deeply philosophic political
work of modernity, which contains his most powerful critique of
modern liberalism” (452). But since the liberalism Hegel was
critiquing has much in common with contemporary conservatism,
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here too, the right-left question has no bold solution. Hegel’s
conservatism is too sui generis to fall neatly under any predetermined rubric. And yet, perhaps we can find a pidgeon-hole for
him. There is among Hegel’s epochal portraits a figure called “the
beautiful soul.” It is described by Kalkavage as being afflicted
with “spiritual narcissism,” as being “miserable in principle”
(345, 348); it is too pure to be practical, and is, on top of that, a
harshly unforgiving judge of those who are doers. Kalkavage
points out that Hegel himself is, in turn, a particularly harsh judge
of this beautiful soul (507, n. 28; 509, n. 48). In this portrait,
Hegel paints a wickedly true-to-type likeness of a liberal intellectual—thereby revealing himself to be the “right” Hegel after
all.
I might add here that Kalkavage recommends, as another next
reading after the Phenomenology, The Science of Logic. It
postdates the Phenomenology by five years, and yet it is an everfascinating question whether the former comes “before” or
“after” the latter. For the Logic (or its shorter, more accessible
version, often called the “Lesser Logic”) is in fact God’s pretemporal life-plan for the spirit in the world—that is, its purely
logical unfolding told through the abstractly dialectical moments
of the Concept. When this ideal plan, this Concept, enters time, it
takes on appearances. Hence “phenomenology” is the account of
the phenomena, the appearances of the Concept in a dialectal
sequence of forms. In Kalkavage’s more accurate and eloquent
rendering: “[P]henomenology, as the prelude to science, is spirit’s
rational communion with itself in its manifold appearances in
history” (108). Then the question for us readers might well be:
Does Hegel know the Concept through its appearances or the
converse? Does experience of the appearances precede the logic
that makes it rational, or is the dialectic plan prior to any comprehension of the shapes that invest it (516, n.10)? Kalkavage opts, I
think, for the first case, and that decision puts the Phenomenology
first in Hegel’s system and first for us readers.
Kalkavage has, as I said, done an end-run around the leftright controversy. And yet, as he leads us to listen to Hegel’s
language, to savor his symbolism, to follow his figures, we come
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to see Hegel as an uncircumventably religion-bound writer. If the
structure of the Phenomenology is dialectical, its pathos is
religious. The above-mentioned “beautiful soul” is one of a
myriad of examples. When, as its dialectic demands, this
judgmental, holier-than-thou bystander is finally reconciled with
the doer (the Phenomenology is a roman à clef that names no
names, to which Kalkavage often supplies the key; in this case,
the man of action is Napoleon) they come together in mutual
forgiveness “Spirituality no longer consists in life-denying
judgmental inwardness, and the world is no longer God-forsaken
and vain” (357). Kalkavage’s rendering captures the spiritual
aspect of the event.
But more—he catches and conveys at once the pervasive
Christianity and the self-willed heresies of Hegel’s book. For
example, the religious drama of the Phenomenology culminates
not in the Resurrection of Easter Sunday, but in the Passion of
Good Friday. It is this “speculative Good Friday” that images the
conceptual ultimate reconciliation of man with God, the
revelation that God needs man in order to be fully God. The
Passion of Jesus (who is never named) already contains, has
conceptually collected and recollected within itself, the resurrection of the spirit, which is not a separate ascent but just “man
in history” (449-50). For it is in history that man and God are
united, and this union culminates in the infinite sadness of God’s
death which is also the first moment when spirit knows itself as
spirit. Philosophy must “go down” in order genuinely to “go up”
into the eternal Now of Absolute Science. (This moment of
consummation is far more complex, of course, than my account
of it.) Kalkavage accompanies his presentation of this bold
tampering with the climactic events in the calendar of the church
year by a remarkable list entitled “Hegel’s Heresies” (398). This
list on the one hand leaves me convinced that Hegel was indeed
the ultimate heretic; on the other, however, I remain mindful of
the fact that “heresy” (Greek for “choice” [hairesis]) is, after all,
a version of faith—though perhaps a willfully original one.
Indeed, the Phenomenology exhales such awe before the events of
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God’s appearance on earth that it is palpable even to a nonChristian.
The Phenomenology is complex beyond summary but
without loose ends, and labyrinthine but without cul-de-sacs. The
complexities and abrupt corners, the startling turns and sudden
familiarities, the space-inversions and time-loops that mark the
Concept’s path are lovingly—and clearly—traced out in The
Logic of Desire. Near the center of the book an “Interlude” is
devoted to schematizing these movements and their achieved
moments, without letting us forget that conceptual thinking is
essentially unpicturable and that the Phenomenology speaks with
a forked tongue. The phenomenal picture gallery is an aid to be
continually subverted; its visualizable images are countermanded
by its sightless logic. For images are “out there,” since they are
objects, and thinking is within us, since we are subjects. To keep
the reader on the conceptual track, Kalkavage continually recapitulates—as Hegel does, but often very abstrusely—the purely
logical progress. But Kalkavage also asks the question of
questions about this text: “What, possibly, is lost in the move
from picture to Concept?” (518, n. 30.) He has, in fact, given an
answer, intimated above. What is lost is the element of positive
love animating philosophy when it welcomes some sort of vision.
This autobiography of the spirit is, then, the recollection of its
continually morphing recognition of itself both in and as the
world, of the moments of reconciliation between self and other, of
the mutual “mediation,” the bridging of the gap, between subject
and object. As in any autobiography, time is essential, and indeed
the latter is spirit’s ultimate definition: time is spirit’s intuition of
itself, meaning that its self-othering and self-finding, its
projection of itself into an object and its consequent seeing itself
in that object, is the motion, the dialectical flux of appearances,
that we call time. But this time is not necessarily chronological.
The time-loops mentioned above testify that spirit’s phenomenal
progress is not a mathematical continuum, a succession of linear
befores and afters. For example, Newton’s force of attraction,
which holds together the world filled by bodies, appears chronologically much later than God’s power which unifies the creation
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inhabited by souls. Yet Hegel regards the latter as more conceptually complex, more replete with dialectical reconciliations, and
so, as Kalkavage points out, it appears later in Hegel’s account
(77). The grades of spirit’s self-education are not always consecutively numbered.
Consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit, are the
beings whose experiences, whose successive times, are recollected in the Phenomenology. By whom? Who is the true teller of
the tale? All the Peoples of the Book, Jews, Christians, and
Muslims, are familiar with this enigma of authorship, which no
amount of textual analysis can solve. For suppose that numerous
hands are discerned—the question remains, Who guided the
hands? Just two centuries ago, in 1807—Kalkavage’s book
celebrates this bicentennial—Hegel, a professor of philosophy at
Jena, published his book. And yet, scandalous as it may seem, it
is not he but the spirit that guided his hand, the hand of one who
knows “conceptually grasped history,” who recalls the Golgotha
where spirit completed its suffering and became absolute—that is
to say, fully itself and self-sufficient. “[T]he Phenomenology,
strictly speaking, is the work of spirit rather than the work of
Hegel” (267; 494, n. 12). The willingness to utter such words is
testimony to a readiness to take this terrific book and its demands
seriously; it is what gives The Logic of Desire its own intensity.
Who or what, then, constitutes this gallery of impersonal
persons, from consciousness to spirit, that exhibits the unnamed
but identifiable human shapes of history? Logically, as concepts
in thought, they are the immature moments of the pure Concept;
temporally, as individuals on earth, they represent Everyman
(521, n. 71), the various human embodiments of the appearing
Concept that we readers, participating in Hegel’s “inwardizing”
(the literal translation of the German word for recollection,
Erinnerung) can still find within ourselves. For the spirit’s autobiography is also ours, and we now recognize the struggles which,
though opaque to our predecessors, have brought us to our
common modern humanity, to the community that has grasped its
history conceptually (449).
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This consummation of Hegel is, I think, as dubious as it is
high-toned, but on the way there are many moments of wonderful
down-to-earth plausibility, and The Logic of Desire reports them
with down-home humor. I don’t know where else Hegel would
find himself so appreciatively joshed, in accordance with the
Socratic wisdom that playfulness can levitate dead earnestness
into live seriousness. (I should point out, though, that there is also
weighty evidence that Hegel himself has a sense of humor.) An
example of Kalkavage’s wise levity is a section called “Artful
Dodgers” that recounts a moment in the life of consciousness—a
moment in my history, recapitulable within me—when I no longer
find myself in external works and objects but shift suddenly to
being immersed in “the heart of the matter” (die Sache selbst).
That shift, however, lands me, by a convoluted evolution, in a
drama of deceit that leads to an inevitable downfall by selfnegation. For this project, to dwell with the true matter, is my
cause, and to my fellow workers it connotes a loss of the objectivity they were led to expect of me. Say—this is Kalkavage’s
example—I was a molecular biologist trying to discover the gene
for self-consciousness. Having become engaged with the matter
itself as it matters to me, I become irritated by other researchers
taking up my interest; my scientific “objectivity” shows its limits.
Since I can’t reappropriate my matter, I take my cunningly noble
revenge by interesting myself in theirs: I write a best-seller called
Genes Are Us (222). Thus I take part in a “pathology of appropriation”; for in praising the work of other laboratories I praise my
own. I am the Great-Souled Biologist.
Whoever has some small familiarity with modern institutional research will laugh out loud at these insights into the
mutual invasion of different scientists’ “techno-space” (221). Yet
who would have thought of this psychological episode as being a
way-station to the reconciliation of subject and object? But so it
is, for what consciousness learns at this moment is that
“subjective me-ness and objective this-ness are both essential to
the matter itself” (223).
Finally, for all the human intensity of The Logic of Desire, it
is a narrative kept as free as possible of personal opinion. Such
�132
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
obiter dicta are relegated to the endnotes, which consequently
abound in concise illuminations and suggestive queries. Here is
Kalkavage on the beautiful soul: “Sensitive types are often
merciless judges” (508, n. 39). And a few notes later, he asks a
question incited by Hegel’s harsh condemnation of this same
beautiful soul and other condemned types hanging in his picture
gallery: How do such judgments fit into his scheme of mutual
forgiveness and the ultimate reconciliation of oppositions? “[W]e
wonder about the connection of reason and judgment in
philosophy. Is the philosopher allowed to condemn, or does
genuine rationality preclude all condemnation?” (509, n.48.)
This is a version of the unabashedly strange question—asked
of us not as an academic exercise but as a living perplexity—
whether Hegel the philosophy professor and Hegel the spirit’s
secretary quite coincide. It is also an example of the engaging
directness with which Peter Kalkavage leads us into one of the
wonders of the West.
�
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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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Office of the Dean
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ISSN 0277-4720
thestjohnsreview
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132 pages
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The St. John's Review, Fall 2010
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2010
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Pastille, William
Brann, Eva T. H.
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
McClay, Barbara
Sachs, Joe
Druecker, Robert
Kalkavage, Peter
Lenkowski, Jon
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pdf
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Volume 52, Number 1 of the The St. John's Review. Published in Fall 2010.
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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_52_No_1_Fall_2010
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St. John's Review
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