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SJC
St.John's
College
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE 2013-2014
Date
Speaker
Title
August 23, 2013
Ms. Pamela Kraus
Dean
St. John's College
Annapolis
Robert Frost's "To
Earthward"
August 30
Professor Irene Pepperberg
Department of Psychology
Harvard University
Grey Parrot Number
Acquisitions: Parallels
With and Differences
From Young Children
September 6
Ms. Linda Wiener
Tutor
St. John's College
Santa Fe
Artistic Expression in
Animals
September 13
Mr. David Townsend
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
The Declaration of
Independence: Is That
Philosophy, or Did You
Make It Up Yourself?
September 20
Mr. William Braithwaite
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
Is Obscenity Obsolete?
September 2 7
(Homecoming)
Mr. Matthew Linck
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
Knowing and Ground: A
Reading of Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit
October 4
Long Weekend
No Lecture
October 11
Professor William Peirce
Department of Economics
Case Western University
Can Taxes Be Fair?
Should They Be?
October 18
Professor Ronna Burger
Department of Philosophy
Tulane University
In the Wilderness: Moses
as Founder and Lawgiver
60 College Avenue I Annapolis, Maryland 21401
I 410-263-2371 I www.sjc.edu
�October 25
Professor Daniel P. Maher
Department of Philosophy
Assumption College
Aristotle on Friendship
and Teaching Philosophy
November 1
(Parent's Weekend)
Parker Quartet
Concert
November 8
All-College Seminar
No Lecture
November 15
Mr. George Russell
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
The Emancipation
Proclamation and the
New Birth of Freedom
November22
Mr. Michael Brogan
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
Dwelling in the Land of
the Confessions
November 29
Thanksgiving
No Lecture
December 6
King William Players
"A Door Made of Frosted
Glass"
December 13 January 5
Winter Vacation
No Lectures
January 10
Professor John T. Scott
Department of Political
Science
University of California, Davis
Resentment, Justice, and
the Appeal to Providence
in Adam Smith's Theory
of Moral Sentiments
January 17
(Steiner Lecturer)
Professor Christopher Ricks
Boston University
T. S. Eliot: More Than
One Waste Land
January 24
Professor Richard Velkley
Department of Philosophy
Tulane University
Why Does Heidegger
Matter?: Leo Strauss's
View
January 31
Long Weekend
No Lecture
February 7
Professor David Roochnik
Department of Philosophy
Boston University
Teleology as Death Wish:
A Nietzschean Critique of
Aristotle
�February 14
Concert
February 21
Professor Graham Hannan
Department of Philosophy
American University in Cairo
Dante's Ontology: What
the Florentine Poet Can
Teach Contemporary
Philosophers"
February 28- March 16
Spring Vacation
No Lectures
March 21
Mr. Daniel Harrell
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
Making Time Count
March 28
The Aulos Ensemble and
Soprano, Sherezade Panthaki
Concert
April4
Mr. Robert Goldberg
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
The Liberal Education of
Plato's Laws
Aprilll
Professor Tobin Craig
James Madison College
Michigan State University
The Place of
'Technology' in Bacon's
Critique of Ancient
Philosophy
April 18
Professor Christopher J. Kelly
Department of Political
Science
Boston College
Rousseau 's Chemical
Apprenticeship
April25
King William Players
Shakespeare's King Lear
May2
Reality Weekend
No Lecture
May9
Commencement weekend
No Lecture
�McGuire, Terry
From:
Sent:
Subject:
Waters, Taylor
Tuesday, June 10, 2014 1:15 PM
Wednesday Night Lecture Series
Summer 2014 Wednesday Night Lecture Series"
St. John's College Annapolis
Join us this summer for a series of informal lectures, sponsored by the Graduate Institute
Wednesdays at 7:30p.m., Great Hall
"On High Mountains: An Overview of Nietzsche's Perspectivism"
Wednesday, June 18
JS. Black, Director of the Graduate Institute, St. John's College, Annapolis
"Hume's Philosophy of Science"
Wednesday, June 25
James M Mattingly, Georgetown University
"On Reading Poetry Aloud: Some Lessons from Shakespeare's As You Like It"
Wednesday, July 2
William Braithwaite, Tutor, St. John's College, Annapolis
"Machiavelli and Absolution"
Wednesday, July 9
Stephen D. Wrage, United States Naval Academy
"Mastery, Freedom, Friendship: Tutor and Pupil in Rousseau's Emile"
Wednesday, July 16
Gianna Englert, Georgetown University
"The Relationship of Art and Truth in Plato's Republic"
Wednesday, July 23
Jamuna Reppert, Claremont Graduate University
On the Humanity of Thucydides' Demosthenes"
Wednesday, July 30
Andrea Radasanu, Northern Illinois University
1
�
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Lecture/Concert Schedule 2013-2014
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2013-2014
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Kraus, Pamela
Pepperberg, Irene M. (Irene Maxine)
Wiener, Linda F., 1957-
Townsend, David
Braithwaite, William
Link, Matthew, 1975-
Peirce, William
Burger, Ronna
Maher, Daniel P. (Daniel Patrick), 1964-
Russell, George
Brogan, Michael
Scott, John T.
Ricks, Christopher
Velkley, Richard L.
Roochnik, David
Harman, Graham, 1968-
Harrell, Daniel M., 1961-
The Aulos Ensemble
Panthaki, Sherezade
King William Players
Goldberg, Robert
Craig, Tobin
Kelly, Christopher J., 1970-
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
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PDF Text
Text
The St. John’s Review
Volume XLVIII, number two (2005)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Audra Price
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the
distribution list, subscriptions are $10.00 for one year.
Unsolicited essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome.
Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College,
P Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are
.O.
available, at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John’s College
Bookstore.
©2005 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Memorial Pieces
Memorial for Beate Ruhm von Oppen.......................... 5
Introduction to “The Tuning Fork”............................. 27
David Stephenson
The Tuning Fork..........................................................28
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
A Visit to Santayana.................................................... 43
Steve Benedict
Essays and Lectures
Kant’s Philosophical Use of Mathematics:
Negative Magnitudes...................................................49
Eva Brann
Four Poems
Where the Poet Lives...................................................73
Early Pupil
She and the Tree
Outlay
Elliott Zuckerman
Review
Platonic Pedagogy?
Eva Brann’s The Music of the Republic:
Essays on Socrates’ Conversations
and Plato’s Writings..................................................... 79
David Roochnik
�4
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
5
Memorial for
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Introduction: Elliott Zuckerman
During her years at the College, Beate brought us her words
and her music, and her concern about how words and music
ought to fit together. Now we are devoting to her memory
some of our words and our music.
In many of her writings and in her person, we were
reminded of the history of the twentieth century. In a time of
exaggeration, she insisted upon accuracy. And by reminding
us of war, she enhanced our devotion to the activities of
peace.
***
Delia Walker
I do not want to talk about Beate’s intellectual brilliance, of
which you are all aware, but I want to talk about her as my
sister and about the time when we were young.
She was my big sister, my senior by several years. Because
of the difference in our ages and circumstances, we lived
apart more than we lived together, but I could always rely on
her help and advice.
I must often have been a burden and a responsibility, not
to say a nuisance, but she was always there for me, especially
during the difficult war years. I know she worried about me,
and she helped me and gave me courage in tricky situations.
She even tried her hand at matchmaking! I didn’t always
agree with her advice about things, but in this instance I did,
wholeheartedly, and here I am, after fifty years of happy marriage. Thank you, Beate. I know she loved Harlan very much.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
6
In spite of being by miles the brainier of us two, she
always had unbounded confidence in my abilities and capabilities, and her belief in me was an enormous help to get me
through periods of low self-esteem and depression. Indeed, if
she had not been continually rooting for me, I might often
have given up. So today I want to say a big “thank you” to
her.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank my
family and Beate’s friends for the tremendous support they
have given me in this sad time.
She was very enthusiastic about my playing – far more
than I deserved – and so, though I really stopped playing seriously some years ago, I have blown the dust off my flute and
together with her friend, Chester Burke, we will play some
Telemann – a composer of whom she was very fond.
[Delia Walker and Chester Burke then played the Flute Duet
in G major by Georg Philipp Telemann.]
***
Peter E. Quint
My first trip to St. John’s College was in the late spring of
1976. I returned from that visit with many vivid memories,
but the most lively and impressive were of my conversations
with a wonderful and, it seemed to me, exotic person: a
German Englishwoman, of profound leaning and extraordinary charm, who—quite amazingly—lived right here in
Maryland.
Beate Ruhm von Oppen was one of the last of a brilliant
generation of scholars—historians, scientists, philosophers,
lawyers—who, having escaped Nazi Germany, were obliged
to resume their studies or careers in another, more welcoming land. This necessity of perhaps starting anew may have
seemed like great misfortune at the outset, but it had the
advantage—for them, and certainly for us—that they were
perfectly at home in two languages and two cultures.
MEMORIAL
7
Yet as with many other victims or opponents of the Nazi
regime, the experience left Beate with a certain, let us say,
intellectual and emotional distance from her native land.
Even in recent years, I believe that Beate thought long and
hard before accepting a high honor for her distinguished life’s
work from the German government.
Some years ago Beate, with her extraordinary linguistic
skills and deep knowledge of history, was chosen to be the
English translator of the memoirs of Konrad Adenauer, the
venerable first Chancellor of post-war West Germany. For
some days the English and the French translators actually
worked in Adenauer’s house in order to receive his last
minute changes on the German manuscript. Beate told me
that the translators worked at Adenauer’s dining room table,
and apparently because the sun was streaming in, they
adjusted a window curtain in a way that made the work most
comfortable for them. But Adenauer himself would come in
and, seeing the curtain in an unfamiliar position, would
firmly move it back to the spot that he approved.
A charming and slightly ludicrous tale—but would I be
wrong in detecting, in Beate’s telling, a subtle note of disapproval that even in this trivial instance some residual authoritarian attitude survived in the avatar of the New Germany?
The work of Beate’s that will most certainly live is her
extraordinary edition of the letters of Helmuth James von
Moltke sent to his wife Freya, that “beautifully edited” work,
in the words of the Stanford historian Gordon Craig. Moltke
was a Prussian aristocrat who opposed Hitler and knew from
the outset that the war would end in catastrophic shame and
defeat for Germany. Moltke sought tirelessly to recruit likeminded Germans of the resistance, and in three meetings at
Kreisau, his East Elbian estate, he organized the drafting of
detailed principles for a new democratic Germany after
Hitler’s defeat. At the same time, Moltke was making strenuous efforts to save whatever lives he could as a legal officer in
the German intelligence service, which was, as Beate noted,
“the focal point of much opposition to the regime.” The let-
�8
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ters reflect this ceaseless work, as well as deep concern for
Freya and their two young children, who spent the war at
Kreisau.
Moltke fell under particular suspicion shortly after the
attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944, and following a trial
before the notorious “People’s Court,” he was executed at
Berlin-Plötzensee in early 1945. The American diplomat
George Kennan, who knew Moltke personally, called him:
“the greatest person morally, and the largest and most
enlightened in his concepts that I met on either side of the
battle lines of the Second World War.”
Beate had been led to Moltke through her work on religion and the German resistance, lectures that were delivered
at Princeton in 1971, and much of her academic life was
focused on the issues and conundrums of resistance to a
regime of repression so horrible that it would seem impossible to imagine if it had not actually occurred.
In the editions of Moltke’s letters, Beate’s indispensable
introductions and notes reflect her remarkable knowledge
and understanding of the German resistance, as well as the
broader history of the period. Indeed the notes have a sad,
elegiac quality of their own. As each new personality of the
resistance enters the scene, there is a trenchant summary of
his career which more often than not ends—as though a bell
were tolling through out the volume—with the words: “executed in August 1944”; “executed 29 September 1944”;
“executed,” “executed.” It is fitting and appropriate that the
German edition was awarded the Scholl prize, which honors
another circle of the German resistance, the Munich
University students of the White Rose movement.
Beate’s first German edition of Moltke’s letters appeared
in 1988, and in 1990 Alfred Knopf, Inc. published an edition
in New York—wonderfully translated into English by Beate—
which brought this moving document of the human spirit to
American and British readers. The English introduction
reflects the precision and trenchancy which Beate’s friends
9
MEMORIAL
will immediately recall from her brilliant and learned conversation.
Moltke’s mother was an English-speaking woman from
South Africa, and the story of Beate’s edition of her letters is
also noteworthy. When these letters found no American or
British publisher, Beate translated them into German for a
German edition. So she translated Moltke’s letters from
German into English, and his mother’s letters from English
into German. Ordinarily one only translates into one’s own
native language, but Beate, as we know, had two native languages.
In my last telephone call with Beate earlier this summer,
she recounted that she was deeply absorbed in choosing
books to be given to the St. John’s library. Despite many
upheavals, Beate had much good fortune in her life: in getting
out of Germany when she did; in finding a subject, Moltke,
who was so congenial to her independent spirit; and in reaching a place, St. John’s College, that suited her so well in its
uncompromising quest for excellence in the life of the mind.
***
Steven Werlin
I want to make two separate speeches about Beate. Both will
be short. The first begins with an anecdote. Sometime in the
1990s, when I lived in Annapolis, I had the pleasure of driving Beate either to or from the airport. It was a long drive—
she preferred Dulles to BWI or National—and I always
enjoyed the trip. I valued the chance to chat.
One time we were running a little bit late, and it started
to rain. I was speeding around the Washington beltway—too
quickly, it turned out—and my car went into a skid. Before I
regained control, we had scraped the passenger side of the
vehicle along the right-side barrier. I pulled to the side of the
road in a panic.
I asked Beate whether she was all right. I apologized. I
asked her whether she was sure was all right. I apologized
�10
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
again. I asked her whether she was very sure she was all right
and apologized a third time. So much I remember only
approximately. I had let my car slide out of control with a
passenger who was within a half-dozen years of my grandmother’s age, and I was very upset.
Whatever I said, however many times I apologized, I must
have gone too far. The following is the part of the story I
remember very clearly: Beate finally turned to me and said,
“Steven, my dear, I made it through the bombing of London.”
I wanted to share this anecdote because I thought it
would be important for us all to think about how very funny
Beate was. I knew that others this afternoon would speak of
her scholarship and her courage. I wanted to point out that
she was a pleasure to be around.
I got to know Beate at two different dinner tables at 101
Market Street [the residence of the Klein’s], where three different sorts of dinners were served. There were large formal
occasions at which I was most often present as a waiter; there
were large informal occasions, also in the dining room, where
leftovers from formal dinners would be consumed by those
whom the hostess lovingly called her “vacuum cleaners”;
there were private dinners, for one or two friends, at the
small table in the kitchen. Beate was mainstay at all three,
because whenever she was around, conversations would be
interesting and serious, but also fun.
Here’s my second speech: I am now the Dean of Shimer
College, a small Great Books school near Chicago. I mourn
Beate’s passing for my students’ sake. I had been trying for a
couple of years to convince her to give a talk at Shimer. Most
recently I asked her to speak at commencement last spring.
She refused, saying that she was too old and unwell for the
trip.
When I heard she had passed away, I decided to try to
share my sense of her with my students, and so I invited all
who were interested to come to a Friday evening discussion
of her essay on the White Rose. It’s a lovely piece: serious and
challenging, surprising in its conclusions and beautifully writ-
11
MEMORIAL
ten in that English which she enjoyed calling “Standard MidAtlantic.”
Moved by some of her stronger claims, our conversation
focused on the importance of taking language seriously, of
paying close attention to the words that we and others use.
Much of what was said was predictable: angry claims about
the ways in which words like “terrorist” and “Nazi” and
“homeland” can be used too lightly, and the damage that
ensues when they are. But the conversation lacked depth of
passion, just as Beate said such conversation among those of
my generation and those who are younger generally do.
At a certain point, however, the conversation turned. In
order to explain how it turned, I need to share one fact about
Shimer College. At Shimer, teachers aren’t called “tutors.” It’s
not that we’re called “professors,” as we would be at most
colleges. At Shimer, there is no clear tradition. Lots of words
get used—teacher, instructor, facilitator, co-inquirer, and
worse.
We started to talk about whether it did and whether it
should matter to us what teachers are called. That question
brought the issue close to all of our lives. Several of my colleagues were present, but there were many more students—
first year, sophomore, junior, and senior—and they talked
seriously about what various decisions about the consequences that their various decisions about what word to use
in this particular instance might have. They were judging
their language, taking control of it in a serious way.
I think Beate would have been delighted.
***
Freya von Moltke
Read by Johannes Huessy
During the twelve heavy years that we lived under Hitler’s
regime in Germany, my husband, Helmuth James von
Moltke, wrote hundreds of letters to me. These letters were
not only a precious record of my husband’s thought, but also
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
12
a commentary on the events in Germany seen through the
eyes of a German and committed opponent of the Nazis. He
was executed for his opposition. For many years I kept the
letters with me as I first lived in South Africa, then back in
Germany, and eventually in the United States. Gradually I
came to realize that these letters were of historical importance and should be published. I did not believe, however,
that I was the right person to edit the letters. In Vermont,
Beate, so committed to German resistance, came into my life.
I came to love and admire her, and I entrusted the letters to
her. Over many years she edited and translated them, and
they were published in both German and English.
With Beate our letters were in very good hands. In her
work with them lively Beate invested most generously the
treasures of her gifts: her character, her mind, and mostly her
heart. And I came to cherish her friendship.
Later she began work on another collection of letters
from our family, the letters my mother-in-law, Dorothy von
Moltke, née Rose Innes, sent to her father, the Chief Justice
of South Africa from 1905 to 1935. These letters record her
life as a British-born wife and mother through World War I
and into the Nazi period, again a comment on Germany’s
troubled history of the first half of the twentieth century.
Beate translated this correspondence from English into
German, and part of the letters was published in 1999 in that
language.
So today, as you are all gathered to celebrate Beate’s life,
I want to add my voice to express my profound gratitude and
my sadness at her passing. How fortunate for her that she
died without having to leave St. John’s College.
Since I am not able to be with you in person I am very
grateful to have my words conveyed to you by one of your
students, Johannes Huessy, class of 2005, a friend of ours,
and belonging to the young generation, whom to teach had
become so central to Beate’s life.
***
MEMORIAL
13
Brother Robert Smith, F.S.C.
Beate was and is so many things to so many people that an
occasion like the present one is precious. It requires us to sort
out diverse strands in our own deeply felt but unsorted allegiances. This clarification has not been needed until now; she
was always there and ready to charm, and that was enough.
Now one needs to become explicit about what drew us to her
so strongly and for so long. That process will take a while,
and it begins for most of us now. We cannot judge ourselves
unless we fathom our enthusiasms.
Beate had an impact on people in public ways and also
privately. No generalizations can convey this, and so I rejoice
that so many people are here and have and soon will have
spoken.
I want to begin with an odd bit or two of evaluations others have made of her, principally because at least one such
view originally surprised me, but when I thought of it, it
seemed true and important. Robert Bart said something that
awakened my attention to an aspect of her I had not explicitly noted. Bart was a considerable influence in the College
for many years. He was often quite perceptive and articulated
his opinions clearly in his own idiosyncratic way. He said he
found Beate’s opinions on the work of students and her judgment of their characters to be very deep and accurate. This
judgment bears on a central matter in the life of this College.
We arrive at grades for Seminar—the central part of our work
here—by discussion and consensus between the two leaders
who share responsibility for it. We also decide in a similar
way on whether a student should be allowed to continue in
the College or not, and on whether he or she will be graduated. To show how important a judgment Bart thought he was
making about Beate, one has to realize how seriously Bart
took the matter of student evaluations. One anecdote will
suffice to show this. After an enabling meeting that started at
7 p.m. and did not end until 2 a.m., Bart was heard to say
with satisfaction to an exhausted colleague: “I think we really
did talk things out tonight.” That very careful man alerted me
�14
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
to the real power of judging character Beate undoubtedly
possessed.
I talked about this someone else who expressed himself as
surprised by Bart’s opinion—he imagined Beate would probably have remained rather quiet on such occasions. This
shows how many sides there were to her. She was like the
man described by Pascal: when the talk turned on poetry, he
had lots to say, otherwise one would never have known he
had any views on the subject.
She was also impressive in other public ways. For many
years an important part of college life centered on dinners
given regularly by Jacob Klein and his wife. Klein was in the
opinion of most a great man and the dean whose thoughts
still influence us. People invited to give the Friday night lecture attended by all members of the Community came to
those dinners. Faculty members in turn were also invited and,
more frequently than most, Beate. It was agreed that when
she was present, her wit and general sprightliness helped
make the occasion a delight. That was certainly the opinion
of the Klein and his wife, both distinguished conversationalists themselves.
I want to bring up two more subjects. One of them is
unusual, and I think no one else is likely to have considered
it or thought it important. The other is a nostalgic look at reasons for a disappointment I have and will continue to feel
now that she is no longer reachable by telephone.
Let me turn to the first of the two topics. It will surprise
most of you.
She never attended family reunions because some Oppens
had insufficiently kept their distance from Hitler, and she was
unwilling to risk having to speak to them. She was proud of
one relative, a “parson,” to use her expression, who behaved
quite honorably.
Later, she did think of going to a family gathering, but
finally never did. She wrote an account of herself and her
father for a family publication, and she was immensely
pleased when some stranger, a man of some distinction, asked
MEMORIAL
15
her if she was indeed related to the man who was her father.
When she said yes, he told her of his admiration for him and
about the memorabilia on him and his career as an actor he
had collected.
Why am I speaking of this matter? There are, I think,
good reasons for doing so.
This aspect of her life shows both Beate’s seriousness and
her complexity. She paid respect to whatever she thought
deserved it, and this trait was balanced by her carefulness in
talking to people only about topics she thought appropriate
to a given audience. Beate never, or at least very rarely, mentioned the matters I have just spoken about. More importantly, in this very matter she did something else that goes to
the heart of who she was. In all the years she was at St. John’s,
in the annual directory published by the College, if you look
at the entry “von Oppen, Beate” you will find the words “See
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate.” She said, “My father gave me life,
but my mother’s second husband gave me nourishment and a
chance for a long life.” She always spoke of him—and she
was not sparing him in doing so—with affection and respect.
Consideration for her forbearers went along with a sense
of what is important over history. In fact some families were
the military bulwark that guaranteed continuity in a country,
and they made possible whatever degree of civilization
existed there. Beate’s respect for those who embody these
claims is of a piece with another worthwhile fact about her.
She never became an American citizen, despite her high
regard for this country and what it did for the world in two
great wars. She remembered, though, that England had
helped preserve her life and gave her an opportunity to serve
in the second great war. She said, “I swore allegiance to the
Queen and Charlie, too.” This last was her translation of “to
the Queen and her heirs.”
My second reason for talking about her origins is the
common sense and respect for herself that she showed in
keeping silent about them. Americans in one of their founding documents distanced themselves from titles, and in this
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
16
country mentioning a claim to one seems ridiculous to most.
Beate was as far removed from such a taint as possible. She
had the respect of all who knew her. She deserved it for her
personal and professional qualities. She needed no peacock
feather even if their borrowed attractiveness were valued
here.
Let me now conclude by saying how much one will miss
her. For many years I have called her whenever I heard or
read something new on any of the topics that interested the
two of us. I always wanted to hear her opinion and thereby
evaluate my own. One example: I recently read about a musical called, I think, “Quickening” composed for this year’s
Edinburgh Festival. It was on a religious subject. I immediately thought of Beate and the fact that she knew by heart
every work of every one of Bach’s cantatas. When I read
about this piece, I did not quite take the phone down and call
her about it, but I automatically thought of doing so.
Let that stand for many thoughts about the past and the
future that will preemptively summon my attention and stir
my gratitude toward someone so recently gone.
***
Ben Walker
I’d like to say a few words about my aunt Biti on behalf of
myself, my siblings, Becca and Philip, and also our partners
and children. We all called her Biti rather than Beate, so I’ll
continue to call her that throughout this talk.
Although Biti lived 4,000 miles away from us, she was a
constant presence throughout our childhoods and adult lives.
She never felt like “the aunt who lived on another continent,”
but a close and trusted friend and confidante.
She would come to visit us in England as often as she
could, normally twice a year. As we each grew up and left
home, her visits started to include trips to our homes in
Bristol, London, and Oxford, where she would come and stay
with us. She always took a very keen interest in what we were
MEMORIAL
17
doing in our lives and greatly enjoyed seeing where and how
we lived, at first hand. It was a great pleasure to have her to
stay, and you knew there would be no shortage of conversation while she was with you.
When she was back in America, we would all enjoy correspondence by letter with Biti. She was the only person with
whom I had regular correspondence by mail, and these letters
were always much more than just a quick summary of recent
events. Her letters to us would be questioning and insightful,
full of enthusiasm for whatever she was currently involved
with, full of personality and wit. Sometimes she wrote as if
she had discovered something or someone that had been a
huge secret, like Paul Scott or E.M. Forster, and she had to
share the good news with everyone.
But her handwriting was terrible; sometimes it would
take ages to decipher what she had written. She would complain about mine, and particularly Becca’s, but hers was
appalling!
Often letters would start in the normal way, but after she
had filled the sheet she was writing on, her words would spill
out onto the margins, and then on to the margins of newspaper cuttings she was sending us, as if she could never quite tell
us everything that she wanted to say.
For someone who surrounded herself with books and
even referred to her books as her friends, she was an amazingly social person. She had the ability to make friends with
people from all walks of life, young and old. She loved to talk
and was an entertaining and fascinating raconteur.
Discussions with Biti could sometimes be frustrating, as her
train of thought would often lead her seemingly miles away
from the topic being discussed, only to return twenty minutes
later via a very circuitous route; however, these conversations
were always fascinating as she would tell us about aspects of
her life that we did not know, and also stories about our own
childhoods that we had forgotten.
Her memory was quite amazing. She had the ability to
recall the most minute detail of events in her life that took
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
place decades earlier, even to the most mundane detail of
doctor’s appointments and dinner menus. Although at times
she would do the majority of the talking, conversations with
Biti were never “one way.” She took an active interest in all
of our lives, our partners and families, our work and hobbies,
our passions and thoughts.
She could drive you mad with her continual talking at
times. So it was easy to forget that Biti was a great listener.
She never felt it necessary to give advice, but she drank in all
information and would remember it. Months later she would
refer to details of a conversation that had taken place on her
last visit, and it was very reassuring. I always enjoyed talking
to her, she was wise and understanding and I felt terribly
close to her.
She also had a great sense of humour – laconic and underspoken, but never cruel. She could take you completely by
surprise with her turns of phrase, but sometimes you could
only tell that she knew how witty she was being from a twinkle in her eye. I’ll never forget her laugh, or her smile.
She really helped to form the person I am today – what
great passions she had – music and literature, history and philosophy. Such clear views about politics and religion. Good
influences for an adolescent to have in the family.
I have a copy of an autobiographical short story that she
wrote, called “The Tuning Fork,” [reprinted below] in which
she describes waiting to cross the border between Germany
and Holland in 1936. In it, she describes how, although she
was practically penniless, she spent a portion of her last 10
marks on a tuning fork. “It was a modest tuning fork, and
cheap,” she wrote, “ but it depleted my minimal resources. I
probably realised this, yet probably felt, too, that there was
not only practical but also symbolical value in a gadget that
gave you true pitch.” At the end of the story, she writes, “I
still have it. Tuning forks don’t take up much space.”
And it was those small things of symbolic significance that
meant the most to her. She wanted little, and she asked for
less. Dark chocolate and some photos seemed about it. She
MEMORIAL
19
was generous, thoughtful, and unselfish. But the small things
were important to her – the correspondence, above all, providing treasured insight into our lives, a strong link back to
her family in England, and a true measure of our love for her.
I’ve been struck, whilst going through her papers over the last
few days, quite how many letters there were from all of us to
her: it makes me realise how important a figure she was to the
whole family. But there were also letters from so many other
people—she had so many friends—people who she maintained contact with for decades and across continents.
For the last few years of her life, as many of you will
know, Biti was faced with an agonizing decision. She knew
that the time had come to move from her lovely home on
Wagner Street, and she needed to decide where to go. Should
she stay in America, or move back to the United Kingdom
after 45 years? She found this decision incredibly difficult to
make, and every time she spoke to someone else about it, her
feelings would veer from one option to another. When she
finally decided to move to a retirement community just a few
miles outside of Annapolis, we were all selfishly disappointed.
We knew that this meant we would see less and less of Biti as
she was finding continental travel more and more difficult.
Becca felt it particularly keenly. With two young children, she
knew that the opportunities to visit Biti in America would be
few.
But we all secretly knew that this was the right decision
for her to make. We knew what a unique place she had found
to live, what an amazing community, providing not only the
intellectual stimulation she thrived on, but also the social and
emotional support she needed. It was already clear to us
before she died, but has become even more so since then,
what a special place she had found in the heart of this community, how many very close friends she had, how she had
touched the lives of so many people around her. She was
every bit as loved and valued by her friends and colleagues in
Annapolis as she was by her family, and that’s why the decision was so hard for her to make.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
20
Thank you to all of you here in Annapolis for making this
such a happy home to her for the last forty years, so far away
from her family in England. And thank you, Aunt Biti, for all
the love that you shared with us. We’ll always remember you
for the wonderful woman that you were.
***
Eva Brann
We knew each other for nearly forty-five years and for almost
twenty we lived next to each other, with only a thin dry wall
between us. We spent a lot of time in each other’s company,
eating, talking and, in the earlier years, walking.
Beate had a brisk, sometimes even brusque English exterior, a fund of stories ranging from historical happenings to
personal mishaps, a far-flung American and transatlantic
acquaintance, and a sprightly, occasionally acerbic wit.
People, among them the Graduate Institute students she liked
so much to teach, were charmed and fascinated. So was I. She
was good company, and she seemed well seated in life.
But it wasn’t quite that way. If fate had been kinder, she
would actually have been – or so I often imagined – a decisive
Englishwoman, living in a small village in one of the prettier
shires, minding the vicar’s theology and singing in his choir –
not herself a housekeeper but well-served by someone who
had become attached to her.
It wasn’t that way. She wasn’t really English but was born
in Switzerland and then, in the starving years after the First
World War, had a German childhood; she herself attributed
her small stature and some other effects to her undernourishment as an infant. She was rightly proud that because of the
complexities of her early years she grew up preternaturally
sensitive to the political climate. In the first year of the Nazi
takeover, when my own parents’ thoughts were still far from
emigration, she, a mere teenager, removed herself to
Holland, where, incidentally, she had an unlikely but often
remembered experience with a famous Indian guru. She
MEMORIAL
21
aided her family in their immigration to England, where life
was far harder for refugees than it was for those of us who
luckily landed in the States. Her university studies were
oppressed and curtailed by lack of money. There was a brief
and deeply buried expectation of happiness which ended
when the young man died in Africa under Montgomery, a
general whose cavalier strategies she despised.
Around her, complexity and anomaly accumulated.
Though she lived most of her life here, she never became an
American citizen but remained a British subject, a resident
alien who had endless troubles with the INS over her everlost green cards. She was never a full-time, regular tutor, for
she had truly no mind for mathematics. I recall hours in her
first apartment on Church Circle trying to persuade her that
a geometric diagram could display a truth expressible in
words. Nevertheless, the college was her one true home, for
her appointments, though made from year to year, were soon
made quite routinely, and she served the college well in her
own way, not least as long-time editor of St. John’s Review.
She had contracted once to write a history of twentieth-century Germany, but had to give it up, laboring, as I thought,
under too great an accumulation of detailed knowledge and
too overwhelming a sense of the responsibility for telling the
inner truth close to her political conscience. She was, one
might say, the ultimate historian, with no disposition for universals but a great urge to make the particulars express the
moral significance whose burden she so acutely felt. On the
other hand she was a good part journalist, with a reporter’s
bold inquisitiveness and a jaunty, even daring style, the style
of moral exposé. Her completed work was eminently readable and vividly opinionated.
At home nowhere and everywhere, she was up to her last
trip to see her family this summer – she died four days after
her return – an intrepid if overloaded traveler. Something in
her life left her a kind of pack-rat, with a propensity for accumulation. We used to go to yard sales together, where I’d
come away with a candlestick and she would acquire the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
largest object around, preferably non-functional; computers
which she couldn’t use anyway, typewriters of which she had
five. I recall that we were walking once in the woods (they
were then still to be found around Annapolis), when we came
on an overgrown wreck of a truck; seeing her appraisingly
eye the seat in the cabin I shouted out a forfending
“Absolutely not!”
Her religious convictions were in suspension, oddly compacted of adherence and distance. She declared herself an
agnostic but had faith only in the faithful. Baptized a
Zwinglian, she was Jewish on her mother’s side, and therefore technically Jewish. Yet she had no relation to Judaism
and a great distaste for that emotional and academic exploitation of Jewish history which she mordantly called the
“Holocaust industry.” In fact every sort of unthinking proprietary position offended her and roused acerbic epithets. For
example, she used to call feckless pacifists “peace-mongers.”
Yet she herself occupied her special historical territory whose
invasion by uncomprehending academic forces troubled her
unceasingly.
Though she admired the Lutheran theologian and resisting martyr to the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (with whose
complicated abstractions she could hardly deal), her real sympathy was with the Catholics because of the moral clarity to
be derived from the doctrine of works; she had the deepest
suspicion of the moral consequences of elevating subjective
faith over political deeds.
Perhaps the defining emblem of her semi-deliberate convolutions was her very name. She originally had the surname
Ruhm from her much beloved adoptive father Ernst Ruhm,
the natural father of her sister Delia. Just when a German surname would be least helpful in England she added her own
natural father’s name, von Oppen. He was an actor, a minor
matinee idol, whom she insisted on visiting when she learned
about him in her teens – a meeting at once gratifying and
wrenching. She was clearly anxious to carry with her all her
connections – all we’ve learned to call “roots” in America.
MEMORIAL
23
But the attendant results were confusion: Mail went ever
astray, being sent indifferently to all her initials, R, v. or O.
The territory she made her own, with the most detailed
mastery and avid reading, brought up to date to the very last
days, was, I think, deep down another exercise in preserving
and exonerating her origins and connections. She was, after
all, German, and German was her first language. She was,
incidentally, able to translate not only German into English,
her language of daily use (which most of us refugees can do),
but English into German as well; she was symmetrically bilingual, an unusual phenomenon. Her deep, absolutely persistent interest was in the German resistance to the Nazis. She
knew these “resistential” figures (as she called them)
minutely; they were her kin, and she worried over them and
their reputation (just as, Delia has told me, she worried about
her as the little sister). She found her hero particularly in
Helmuth von Moltke, who was hanged by the Nazis and to
whose surviving family, his wife Freya and their sons, she was
close. In publishing his correspondence with Freya in German
and in English she did his memory a great service.
As all else in her life, this was not so much an ebulliently
ardent passion as a held in, tenacious adherence. This mode
was, I think, the defining feeling of her life.
I have asked myself: What made us life-long companions?
I think above all Bach and Language. When we met in 1960
I already owned records of most of the cantatas and instrumental music. She introduced me to the motets. But above all
she sensitized me to something utterly new to me and
infinitely valuable in listening to sacred music: the relation of
the music to the words – music as an exegesis, a gloss, an
incarnation of the sacred text. This was a preoccupation
which was perhaps even more ingrained, more central, than
the Resistance, at once a deflection from and a focusing of
feeling. She also taught me, incidentally, that it is therefore
barbarous to listen to such music as a background to other
occupations – a lesson that left me at least with the grace of
qualms about doing it.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
I learned a lot too from her resistential studies. She had
an absolutely horrendous writer’s block, stemming, I think,
from the plethora of her information, her aversion to generalization, and the oppressive sense of the importance of this
work. So I got to work through each prospective publication
with her with, I sometimes think, more profit to me than to
her – one benefit being that I was able to think somewhat better of the country of my birth. And I learned to admire her
for her admirations, for to have true heroes is to me a sign of
an underlying soundness of soul.
Some part of our frequent dinners together was spent in
our common pleasure in language, her British English (to the
end a schedule remained a “shedule” for her) and my adoptive American. We rejoiced in the sayings of our German
childhood and put them into hilarious English. We tried to
find exact renderings of idioms in the other language and
rejoiced in silly literalisms. In short we disported ourselves
bilingually. Sometimes she would decode for me the affectionate scrawls of alumni letters, for she, who had an almost
undecipherable handwriting, was especially good at reading
that of others. This handwriting of hers, furiously determinate yet unreadable, always seemed to me to signify something. She was an extremely sociable, communicative being,
charming, witty, intriguing, a teller and re-teller of stories,
ranging, as I said, from historical circumstance to personal
complications. Yet her favorite medium was epistolary: contact through distance. She carried on a far-flung and persistent correspondence, letters whose typed parts were vivacious
but which were wreathed about with her hopeless supplementary scribbles. Her niece Rebecca described them lovingly
at the funeral in August. I should say here that her niece and
nephews, Rebecca, Philip, and Ben, were the human beings
she was most straightforwardly fond of, and they returned
her affection.
Here is a chief, perhaps central trait of Beate’s being that
was totally at odds with her incessant, self-circling anxiety –
a wonderful phenomenon. When real trouble struck – breast
25
MEMORIAL
cancer, heart disease, colitis – she became absolutely serene,
reasonable, patient. It was the gallantry of disaster confirmed,
and a sign of the strength beneath all the agitation.
For the rest, she was completely without pretensions
(though rightfully wanting recognition for her righteous
labors), quite without malice (except when oppressed by too
powerfully impending an opposition), generally without
falsehood (though inhibited to the point of furtiveness about
her feelings), and, all in all, as devoid of intentional harm as
a human being can well be.
In the last few years I took to listening through our thin
party wall for worrisome thumps that brought me to the
phone, for the TV that grew louder as she grew deafer but
was a sign of life, and for the ominous silences, the last of
which brought me over to find what I had feared. I might say
that the silence next door is sounding pretty loud these days.
***
Beate Ruhm von Oppenis was a tutor on the Annapolis Campus of
St. John’s College.
Elliott Zuckerman is tutor emeritus on the Annapolis Campus of
St. John’s College.
Delia Walker is the sister of Beate Ruhm von Oppen.
Peter Quint is Jacob A. France Professor of Constitutional Law at
The University of Maryland.
Steven Werlin is a graduate of St. John’s College and dean of Shimer
College.
Johannes Huessy is a student on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s
College.
Freya von Moltke is widow of Helmuth James von Moltke.
Brother Robert Smith is tutor emeritus on the Annapolis Campus of
St. John’s College.
Ben Walker is the nephew of Beate Ruhm von Oppen.
Eva Brann is former dean and tutor on the Annapolis Campus of
St. John’s College.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
27
The Tuning Fork
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Introduction by David Stephenson
At the memorial service for Beate Ruhm von Oppen, I discovered a literary side to her I had not suspected. On that occasion her nephew mentioned a memoir, “The Tuning Fork,”
which recalls Beate’s flight as a teenage girl from Germany, a
precarious exodus even in the early days of Nazi domination.
Her family gave me a copy on request, and I immediately saw
how much it deserves publication in full in The St. John’s
Review.
The story rings as true as only experience can, neither
exaggerating nor belittling the fears or desires of a young student brought up in a time when freedom and truth were dying
only bit by bit. It is the personal character of her account that
tells me most what I want to know: why were so many
Germans persuaded by Hitler’s obvious lies and so few moved
to challenge them? Beate juxtaposes her school’s playful complicity in the new racial games against her own ambivalent
reaction to the bloody movies and songs that could move even
unsympathetic youth to tears. Her family’s reluctance to send
their child away requires no explanation; the gradual evolution of her own determination to leave “the fatherland” can
best be glimpsed in her own words.
Why purchase a tuning fork with money she might need to
live in exile? She explains her desire for “a gadget that gave
you the true pitch” in a world grown cacophonous, an instrument that she later justifies on the ground that it doesn’t “take
up much space.” But her love of music also shines through this
act of hope and daring. And that was also something she could
take with her wherever she went.
David Stephenson is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
My own acquaintance with Beate grew primarily out of
her musical interests. After she came to St. John’s College, she
attended every musical performance and always discovered
the most appropriate compliment for every group. She was
particularly encouraging to the College’s fledgling orchestra.
Yet her comments about professional musicians could be
sharply critical. For example, though herself the source of several widely admired translations from German to English and
from English to German, she often expressed her disapproval
of translation when it pertained to music. She believed that
linguistic sonority had to play a significant part of a composition to any text: translation into English inevitably distorted
or corrupted its effect.
And her sensitivity to the nuance of verbal expression
extended well beyond music and poetry: at least some of the
power of political propaganda in general she attributed to
clever distortions of language. Hitler’s depredation of his
native language in Mein Kampf as well as in his speeches did
not deceive her more-than-musical ear. She never stopped worrying about the effects of political rhetoric in every language,
even our own.
The Tuning Fork
I was born in Switzerland at the end of the First World War
and grew up, or started to grow up, in Germany. I cannot
think back to a time when politics was not in the air. I remember the evidence of food shortages in my kindergarten and
elementary school days. I remember the feeling of insecurity
communicated by all around me when the currency collapsed, and when inflation galloped away in geometric or
exponential progression, so that, for instance, a lawyer’s or
doctor’s earnings of one day might not be enough to buy a
loaf of bread the next day.
Some years ago you could see, in the window of an
antique shop in our Main Street in Annapolis, an old German
50,000 Mark note, said to have been “used in Hitler’s
Germany.” Perhaps it was used as wallpaper. It might be more
RUHM
VON
OPPEN
29
accurate to say that it was used—as money—in pre-Hitler
Germany, though I’d hate to refer to the Weimar Republic as
just that. It was a specimen of the kind of money that helped
to bring about Hitler’s Germany. Fifty thousand Marks now
would be worth about $13,000. In “normal” times four
Marks were a dollar. The date of issue on that 50,000 Mark
note was November 19, 1922. The very fact that such a note
was printed and put into circulation was, of course, a sign
that inflation had got out of hand. In the summer of 1922 the
dollar was worth not four Marks, but over 400. The next
summer it was over 4 million. And by November 15, 1923 it
was 4 trillion (4,000,000,000,000). If my reckoning is
right—but you’d better check it—that 50,000 Mark note
issued in November 1922 was worth one-eighty-millionth of
a dollar, a year later one eight hundred thousandth of a cent.
That was very cheap wallpaper, but expensive too. What it all
meant, among other things, was the pauperization and
demoralization of the social fabric.
It was in that month, November 1923, that Hitler, the
leader of a tiny party, staged his abortive putsch or coup d’etat in Munich, when he tried for the first time, and failed, to
seize power. That year had also seen communist attempts to
seize power in central Germany; they too were foiled. Hitler
was sent to a comfortable prison for a while and used his
leisure to write his book, Mein Kampf. When he got out
again, he adopted a policy of legality and with that he eventually prevailed.
By the time I had entered elementary school, in 1924, a
new currency had been established and money once more was
money, though scarce. But I noticed my teachers were not
enthusiastic about the political system, though we dutifully
and decorously celebrated the 80th birthday of our President.
His name was Hindenburg and he had been a famous field
marshal in the First World War, halting the Russian advance
in East Prussia. Being, as it were, a personal link between the
old, pre-war empire and the new, post-war republic, and loyal
to the new constitution, he was a national figure acceptable to
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
the moderate right and moderate left and lasted a decade as
head of state, while chancellors, or heads of government, succeeded each other at a breathtaking rate. The country had
many political parties and an election system based on proportional representation, so that votes were distributed across
a wide spectrum and a large number of parties, and governments had to be formed out of coalitions of several of them.
They were correspondingly shaky and short-lived. I remember many elections during my school days and reports of violent rhetoric from left to right, as well as physical violence,
street fights, murders, assassinations.
Then, after the Wall Street crash of 1929 with its worldwide repercussions, there was another economic crisis a mere
six years after the beginning of the recovery from the earlier
one, with a growing, and intolerable, rate of unemployment.
It grew from 1.3 million in September 1929 to 3 million a
year later, to over 6 million in 1931. With a total population
of about 65 million, this meant that one in every two families
was hit. It was not only working class families that were so
affected. There was for instance, much unemployment among
academics too. The extremist parties, the Communists and
the Nazis, made great gains and finally occupied more than
half the seats in the national parliament, where they were
now able to paralyze the democratic process. They joined, for
instance, in a strike to paralyze the transport system in Berlin.
Otherwise they could fight each other to death, and did, with
casualties on both sides, despite the general strategy of the
Communists at that time to treat the social Democrats—
whom they called “social fascists” for the purpose—as their
number one enemy and to flirt with the possibility of a Nazi
victory as a promising prelude to a communist takeover. All
this impinged, of course, on a Berlin school child—the transport strike, the posters, the polarization, the combination of
both extremes against the middle, and the weakness and
apparent helplessness of the middle.
When President Heisenburg appointed Hitler Reich
Chancellor on January 30, 1933, he was acting in accordance
RUHM
VON
OPPEN
31
with the letter and perhaps even the spirit of the constitution.
Hitler’s party, the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ (or
“Nazis” for short, to distinguish them from the “Sozis” or
Social Democrats), was by then the strongest party in the
country, with about one-third of the vote; the Social
Democrats had only one-fifth; the communists one-sixth; the
Catholic Centre Party, together with its Bavarian affiliate,
about the same. And there were many others, but all of them
had less than 10 percent of the vote, the largest of them the
Nationalists, with 8.8 percent; Hitler became the head of a
coalition government. I still remember seeing the faces of
these gentlemen in an evening paper that carried the
announcement.
No one knew what it meant. I was somewhat scared, for
I had read Hitler’s book. I had had to do it secretly, at night
with a flashlight under the bedclothes, for my parents, like
many other respectable people, regarded it as pornographic—which indeed in a manner of speaking it was. Also
it was very long, and that was probably why very few people
read it, though once its author had become ruler of the land,
it was widely and compulsorily distributed, for instance, as a
present to newlyweds, bound like a bible. But that did not, of
course, ensure its perusal.
Before saying anything about what I had found in that
book, let me, quickly, give you an account of the rest of my
Berlin schooldays, to show how life at school changed in the
seventeen months before I left. There was much talk of
national solidarity and the Community of the People. There
were changes in personnel and in the curriculum. And there
was a dramatic rate of attrition. My own class was reduced by
more than half—probably because girls (it was a girls’ school
I went to) or their parents thought that since the new regime
had set its face against too much academic education for
women (who were not to exceed ten percent of university
enrollment), it was hardly worth struggling through more
Latin and trigonometry and the rest, up to the rather stiff
school-leaving exam, which was normally taken at [age] 18.
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The teaching personnel changed in two ways: there were
a few dismissals, of Jews—we had very few Jews at my
school; and our English teacher, who was a Jew, was at first
said not be subject to dismissal because he had not only
served in the war but had even been shot in the head. But
eventually he left all the same and the next English teacher
was less good; and that one was in due course replaced by an
even worse one, a teacher trainee. The other change among
the teachers was a change in tone and color. A very few
revealed themselves as Nazis which, they said, they had been
all along but could only now, at last, openly avow to be. (On
the whole the school had been vaguely nationalistic, but
hardly Nazi.) Others toed the new line as best they could and
exhibited varying degrees of cravenness or caution and dignity, enthusiasm or moderation or reserve. Many new things
were required: the Hitler statue at the beginning of classes,
attendance at new celebrations that proliferated and at which
you had, of course, to stand at attention (with upraised arm)
when the new national anthem was played and sung. This was
the old marching song of the Nazi movement, with text by
Horst Wessel, saying: “Raise the flag, close the ranks, we
storm-troopers march in firm and steady tread. Comrades
shot by the Reds and Reactionaries are marching on with us.”
It was the battle song of the new revolution.
So there was all that. And there were changes in such subjects as history and science. Let me take biology, for that is
where I had my brief hour of glory. I had not done well with
the dissection of tulips and the like. But I shone once biology
was converted into race biology. Not only was there Mendel’s
law, about which my father had told me before (only that its
implication and application were now rather different from
what I had gathered from him), but—and this is where the
real fun came in—we now learnt about the German races,
“Aryan,” of course, all of them.
There were six, if I remember correctly, ranging in excellence from the Nordic to the East Baltic. Nordic was best
because Nordic man had created almost all the culture there
RUHM
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33
was, and he had qualities of leadership. The Mediterranean
race was also quite good (for, after all, there had been ancient
Greeks and Romans and there were modern Italians, good
fascists, full of leadership). The Mediterranean race could
most easily be memorized as a smaller, lightweight, and
darker version of the Nordic: what they had in common were
the proportions of their skulls and faces (long, narrow skull,
long face) and the characteristic ways of standing on one leg,
with no weight on the other, one standing and one play leg,
as a literal translation of the German names for them would
have it. Such legs could be seen in Greek statues, and such
were the legs of Nordic man. Now the Falic race was next
best. It shared many of the sterling qualities of the Nordic—
high-mindedness and the rest—but could be distinguished
from it by the fact that it stood squarely on two legs. No playleg there. Also its face was a bit broader. That race lacked,
somewhat, the fire of Nordic man, or let us say the thumos,
but made up for it by solidity and staying power. The color
scheme was fairly Nordic, blonde hair, blue eyes. So was that
of the East Baltic race whose virtues were less marked than
those of the Nordic and the Falic and whose features were
less distinguished, including a broader skull and a broadish
nose. I could not quite make out the use of this race, unless it
was, perhaps, territorial, to keep the Slavs out. The Slavs were
not a German race. Then there was German race that looked,
we might have said, a bit Jewish or perhaps Armenian, but it
was neither. It was Dinaric and seemed to be much the same
as what earlier classifications had called Alpine. Indeed, this
race dwelt in the mountains. It looked sturdy enough, but not
as prepossessing as the Nordic; and its head had awkward
measurements: Dinaric man had a prominent nose and not
much back to his head. But he had a redeeming feature: he
was musical.
Now all this, of course, seemed good clean fun, and easy
to visualize and memorize. Indeed there were visual aids: pictures of well know personages to help recognition and memorization: Hindenburg for the Falic race, somebody like
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Haydn for the Dinaric, Caesar for the Mediterranean. Then
there was a picture of Martin Luther, the great German
Reformer, and I forget now what race he was said to represent. To me he looked Slavic. But that, of course, could not
be. I suppose he was declared a darker type of East Baltic or
Falic. All this was child’s play, and this child played it with
zest and success.
History was harder. You could not inwardly laugh that off
and outwardly play it as a parlor game. You had to learn, or
appear to learn, appear to make your own—to some extent,
in some way, at least— and you had to read, say, and write the
things that had been neglected or “falsified” in the Weimar
Republic of evil memory, under “the System” (“in der
Systemzeit” as the Nazis referred to it). So we were all given
a short brochure on contemporary history, the recent and
most “relevant” period of German and European and world
history. It started with the German surrender at the end of the
world war, a surrender brought about by trickery abroad and
treason at home, by President Wilson’s 14 Point peace proposal, and the stab in the back of the undefeated German
army, a piece of treachery committed by Jews, Marxists, and
Catholics—feckless folk with international ties. These traitors
then set up their system of abject surrender abroad and iniquity and immorality at home. They accepted the shameful
peace treaty of Versailles, which not only saddled Germany
with sole responsibility for the war (in Article 231, which
Germans called the “war guilt clause” or “war guilt lie”), but
also provided for the payment—virtually in perpetuity—of
crippling reparations. Germany was unilaterally disarmed
(whereas Wilson had envisaged universal disarmament) and
was first blockaded by the British—after the cessations of hostilities—to enforce submission, and then, in 1923, invaded by
the French, who marched into the Ruhr valley to seize
German coal and steel production as reparation payments
were in arrears. It was reparations that caused the economic
misery during the republic’s fourteen years of shame.
Attempts to revise the reparations schedule to make it more
RUHM
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35
tolerable were fruitless and fraudulent. The last revision provided for the spreading of payments until 1988, and the
country was dying in the attempt to do the victors’ bidding.
The nation would have to stand together and rally ‘round the
Führer—or the “People’s Chancellor,” as he was then still
called—to throw off the shackles of Versailles. The cover of
this brochure had a muscular worker on it, stripped to the
waist and bursting his chains.
We also learned about the parts of Germany that had
been taken away by the Treaty of Versailles, which dictated
peace, and about the Germans who languished under foreign
domination. We learnt that German defenselessness was further aggravated by the geographic position of the country: it
was surrounded by hostile powers. Thus a bombing plane
could take off from France and fly right across Germany and
land in Czechoslovakia, without refueling. The lesson was
brought home by air-raid exercises. They were not very realistic, but they were educative. I still remember leading my little troop of classmates to their several homes, staying close to
the houses, as instructed, to avoid exposure to imagined
falling shrapnel and flying glass. That was in the first year or
so of Hitler’s power, five or six years before his war. It was
useless, of course, as an exercise in air-raid precautions, but it
was useful for fomenting fear and a spirit of national defense.
It also showed that the Czechoslovak Republic, even if militarily it amounted to no more than an aircraft base, was the
power that enabled France—or planes based in France—to
bomb the whole of Germany. And in addition—but this point
was not given too much prominence until four years later, in
the crisis leading up to the Munich settlement that dismembered the Czechoslovak Republic—the country was a political entity in which six-and-a-half million Czechs held over 3
million Germans in subjection, as second-class citizens.
Clearly the Sudeten region had to be united with Germany.
So much for what was taught in class and done in extramural exercises under the responsibility of the school. But
there was one other thing I should mention. Schools were
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obliged to take their pupils to certain films, propaganda films
that were being shown commercially. So, obediently, our class
went to see the movie Hitlerjunge Quex, the story of a Hitler
Youth of the working class whose father was a communist and
whose mother was long-suffering and tried to cope with conditions and her husband, but in the end attempted suicide, by
gas, from misery and despair. Quex (who was a very idealized
version of an actual Hitler Youth who had been killed) first
belonged to a communist youth group, as was natural in view
of his home background. But on one occasion, one excursion,
he was so revolted by their beastly ways that he ran away
through the woods, and came upon the camp of a Nazi youth
group which instantly and deeply impressed him as his own
and the country’s salvation. (It was a sunrise scene, to make
sure we all got the point.) Here were shining faces, clean
limbs, real comradeship, purpose, discipline, dedication, and
hope. So he joined the Hitler Youth and was active, devotedly
active in the distribution of leaflets and all that. He continued, of course, to live with his parents in the working class
district of Berlin. And one day, at dawn, the communists took
their revenge, and his particular personal enemy, a brute of a
man, pursued him through the deserted streets—also through
the maze of an amusement park, a very effective, macabre,
cinematic touch that, and long before The Third Man—and
finally caught up with him and knifed him. But Quex died for
the cause, and when his friends found him, on the point of
death, and propped him up, he raised his right arm in salute
to the German future and the camera swung up to the clouds
and the sound track into the marching song of Hitler Youth,
with the lines, “The flag leads us into eternity, the flag is more
than death.”
The trouble was twofold: that the film was most effective
and affecting (however corny it may sound as I now tell it)
and it was made with terrific competence and with the participation of some very good actors; and, secondly, that the
school was under an obligation not only to take us to see it,
but also to discuss it with us. So we had our class discussion.
RUHM
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37
I do not remember much about it except for the fact that I
decided to play the part of aesthetic and dramatic critic, arguing that, powerful though the movie was, it could have been
even better if it had been less black and white (metaphorically
speaking), if it had had more nuances, more human diversity
and verisimilitude. Why did I take that line? In order not to
embarrass or endanger our teacher who was leading the discussion, who, I had reason to believe, was very unhappy
about the Nazis, and who was a widow with two children for
whom she had to provide.
Then there was a film about Joan of Arc, replete with horrors of the Hundred Years’ War. It exposed the sadism of the
British and the brutality of the Catholic clergy. On that occasion I objected to the screening of atrocities; and that was
about as far as one could go and get away with it.
On the Saturday when it was announced that the country
had left the League of Nations in protest against the continuing discrimination of Germany in the disarmament negotiations, our class of fifteen-year-old girls went off to learn how
the peasantry lived, to make us a proper part of the People’s
Community. We were to spend two days roughing it with a
farmer in Brandenburg. The regime wanted us Berliners to
experience the hard life of the rural part of the population.
We took a train to the nearest station, then walked the rest of
the way to the rather grey and bleak village, to be received by
a distinctly unfriendly farmer. We sang to cheer our progress
on the country road. Suddenly one of the girls started singing
that song about Jewish blood spurting from the knife in a better future. About two other girls joined in. I could hardly
believe my ears.
The farmer was surly. I spent a restless night with the others, who seemed undisturbed, in the hay in his barn. What
with that song and the severing of the connection with the
League—and everything else that had happened and was happening—I began to think it might be better to be elsewhere.
But my parents and my little sister were in Berlin, our home,
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with no prospect of getting out. I could see no way of leaving
the country and leaving them.
A way did offer itself some months later. The Quakers
were starting an international boarding school in Holland
and announced a summer course there. After another disturbing weekend at the end of June 1934, which saw the
bloody liquidation of the rebellious S.A. leaders and other
enemies and suspects, and when rumors were flying about
that men were being shot in the nearby cadet school at
Lichterfelde, a little group of children assembled on a platform of the Zoo Station in Berlin, to take the train to
Holland. I had just turned sixteen and may have been the oldest.
The summer school was a wild success. A bigger group of
children came from Hamburg, and many stayed on or came
back later. They were mostly Jewish or part Jewish. I was
overcome by the feeling of freedom and by meeting
grownups you could really talk to freely. And they were
devoted to the task in hand, to making us more comfortable
and teaching us English. The English lessons were so good
that, having been bottom of my class in Berlin—English was
our third foreign language after French and Latin, and my
classmates had all had some kind of head start—I found that
I had overtaken not only them, but also the teacher trainee in
charge of them when I returned for a visit.
My mother had insisted on my coming back for a secretarial course. She did not think it wise to emigrate without a
marketable skill. Then, in January 1935, my parents allowed
me to go back to Holland. The months until the beginning of
the academic year in October were bridged at the school in
Holland by my being maid of all work, baby-sitting and tutoring, even taking a class in music when the music master was
ill. Before that I spent Christmas with the family in Berlin and
visited my grandmother in Frankfurt. That was the last time
I saw her. In December four of us in the top class passed the
English university entrance exam. Two, oddly enough, went
back to Germany for good—one of them the son of the
RUHM
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39
Friends’ Yearly Meeting, who could easily have stayed
abroad. But two went back to England. I was one of them.
It was spring 1936. They took me off the train after it had
crossed the border from Germany. They asked me for my religion, for while they wanted to protect the Dutch unemployed
from the competition of foreigners, they also wanted to protect the virtue of young women. I was seventeen. They
accused me of coming to work in Holland. I denied it, though
they were right. They had no proof; but I had the burden of
proof. The fact was that I had in the previous December
passed the examination given by Oxford for entrance to
British universities. Being penniless and not wanting to be a
burden on the American uncle who had paid my school fees
for the year it had taken me to prepare for that exam at the
International Quaker School in Holland, I had gladly
accepted the school’s invitation to stay on as unpaid general
dog’s body until it was time to go to England to study, the following October. So I was earning my keep as matron’s assistant, occasional coach or tutor, baby-sitter, and so on. But
these services, however unpaid and unperformable by natives,
were work prohibited by law or regulations of the land that
was, like most European countries, struggling with an economic crisis at the very time when the Hitler regime created
large numbers of refugees or would-be refugees, trying to
keep such aliens out.
To admit my status as a worker, albeit unpaid, would have
meant being sent back to the fatherland, with the additional
black mark of having tried to flee it. So I denied it. The denial
was an automatic reflex. Unfortunately, my response to the
question about my religion was equally automatic. I said
“Protestant,” having been baptized at birth according to the
Zwinglian rite and having attended Protestant religious
instruction at my German schools, with even a spell of
Lutheran Sunday school thrown in for good measure. It was
a mistake. I did have the presence of mind and necessary minutes and pennies to send a cheery postcard about my “good
trip” to my Jewish grandmother in Frankfurt from the Dutch
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
side. I wanted to reassure; she had a heart ailment, of which
she died before the year was out.
Now I was put on the next train back to Emmerich,
where I was received, not to say taken in to custody, by the
Evangelische Bahnhofsmission. (Readers of Günter Grass may
remember his remarks about that institution in his Dog
Years.) It felt like a half-way house on the way to more serious, more purely political confinement. They were stern and
forbidding and had nothing evangelical about them. There
was even a touch of Nazism. As I was sitting, somewhat disconsolately, in a dark reception room, a boy of about eight
came in and sang one of those Nazi songs—I don’t know
why; perhaps it was just youthful exuberance. It grated
enough to make me decide to accept no food from this establishment or run the risk of having to sit at the table with these
professional Protestants. My grandmother had given me
enough provender for the day.
What I did not have was money, beyond the ten Marks
one was allowed to take out of the country. Yet, when the
woman in charge of this Internal Mission house allowed me
to go for a short walk in town, I could not resist buying a tuning fork at the window of a small music shop. I went in and
bought it. My instrument at the time was the violin, which I
played as badly as I had played the piano and would later play
the oboe. I may have justified the rash purchase to myself as
useful: a violin has to be tuned and there isn’t always a piano
or other instrument present to give the pitch. It was a modest
tuning fork and cheap; but it depleted my minimal resources.
I probably realized this, yet probably felt, too, that there was
not only practical but symbolic value in a gadget that gave
you the true pitch.
Before I went for the walk in the strange town I had telephoned my school and told my friends there what had
befallen me. They said they would certify me as a bona fide
pupil—I was taking lessons with the music master—and get
the local police to put an official endorsement on the document that would impress the Dutch border officials. The doc-
RUHM
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41
ument duly arrived by Express mail the next day, but also a
message that the police station had closed by the time my
friends got there and that they had made their statement
sound as persuasive as possible without the police backup.
They advised me not to try the same border crossing again,
from Emmerich to Zevenaar, where I was now known, but to
take another, from Cleve to Nijmegen, where I wasn’t.
This meant crossing the Rhine. I boarded the ferry, paid
my last Pfennige to the nice conductor, and asked him how
far from the landing place on the other side the railway was.
It was a fair step, especially with the luggage. He found me a
free ride to the station. This turned out to be a local butcher,
who gave me the seat beside him in his van, with the carcasses
behind us. He wasn’t an anti-Nazi. He sounded like a Nazi or
at least a loyal citizen of the Third Reich. In the absence of
money I gave him my last German postage stamps and signed
a document acknowledging my debt to him for the additional
small amount it cost to connect my old rail ticked with the
new stretch from Cleve to Nijmegen.
So off I went, crossed the frontier without further incident, and reached the school safely. The tuning fork came in
handy when we played Haydn quartets. I still have it. Tuning
forks don’t take up much space.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
43
A Visit To Santayana
Steve Benedict
Three years after graduating from St. John’s, I spent some
time in Europe traveling and studying languages and music.
In the summer of 1950, while in Rome, I persuaded a friend,
Tilghman B. Koons, to accompany me up the steep incline of
the Via San Stefano Rotondo to the Convent of the Blue
Nuns, where I knew George Santayana was living out his final
years. I had read a magazine piece a year or so earlier by Gore
Vidal reporting on an unannounced visit he had paid
Santayana two years earlier, and I brashly decided to see if
we, too, could pay our respects. Several hours after the visit,
which turned out to be more than brief, I made detailed
notes, which languished in my files for nearly 52 years. Last
July, I finally sat down to reconstruct the visit. While many of
Santayana’s philosophical observations doubtless appear in
his writings and interviews in more extended and coherent
form, I thought St. John’s readers might enjoy these late-inthe day fragments that seemed to tumble out of him with little prompting. Not exactly a conversation, it was more like
listening in to a monologue of memories and observations, in
no particular sequence, that happened to surface at the
moment. Readers more familiar with Santayana’s work than
I will doubtless be able to flesh out gaps and identify certain
allusions that remain obscure in my transcription of this longago encounter.
***
Upon arriving at the Convent on the afternoon of September
19, 1950, we were received by a nun who told us that
Steve Benedict is a 1947 graduate of St. John’s College. He retired in 2000
and is living in Spencertown, New York. His career was spent in government,
philanthropy, and education, with a primary emphasis on arts funding and
administration.
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Santayana had not been well for some time and was seeing
very few visitors. Even so, she agreed to tell him that two
American students hoped to be able to greet him. She
returned in a few minutes and told us Mr. Santayana would
see us briefly, but cautioned us not to tax his energy. She led
us into the Convent and down a long hallway on the ground
floor. Santayana was already standing at the end of the corridor in a long robe, which only partially covered his striped
pajamas. He greeted us with a handshake, looked at us with
large glistening eyes I have never forgotten, and led us into
his apartment. It was a modest space, sparely furnished, with
a cot-like bed partially screened off. He issued a firm instruction to sit down, motioning to two straight-backed chairs
–“you here, you there.” With no introductory chit-chat or
questions about who we were, he began speaking. He told us
he had recently been reading Terence for the first time and
found him very amusing and much indebted to his predecessors. He remarked that he had re-read Virgil and that
Lucretius, along with Virgil, had been important for him. He
spoke of them quite casually, as though they were contemporaries. In fact, he brought this quality of immediacy to all of
the philosophers he mentioned.
Santayana spoke of writing an article for an English book
entitled Why I Believe in What I Believe. He hadn’t intended
to contribute to it, but an Englishman pestered him with
three letters and had agreed to hold off publication for a year
if necessary in order to include his contribution. That was
very flattering, he commented. “After all,” he added, “I might
be dead in a year.” Preoccupation with the article was probably a good part of the explanation for the torrent of remarks
and opinions that followed.
Mr. Santayana had been reading a book by an
Englishman, O.F. Clarke, entitled Introduction to Berdyaev,
and added that he did not agree with Berdyaev: “Everything
is creative. There is no room [in Berdyaev] for imagination,
for reason, for spirit.” He said the article he was writing discusses what scientists call “energy,” using the figure of wind,
BENEDICT
45
which seemed better to him than other terms and images for
matter. “Wind is invisible. It can’t be touched. It ‘acts,’ causes
things to happen.” He mentioned that he has often used a
quotation on wind from Genesis: “‘The spirit of God moved
across the waters.’ Or, as the Cockney would say, ‘a devil of
a wind’–but I won’t use that in the article.”
Santayana insisted that his ideas about matter had not
changed. His only objection to his earlier books was that he
wished he had written them differently and waited until later
to write The Life of Reason. Nonetheless he thought he had
remained logically consistent. He now felt he had nothing
more to say–he had finished his work and would not write
any more books, only articles.
We asked Mr. Santayana how America looked to him
after 40 years. He replied, “I don’t want to go back. There is
too much going on there and I am kept busy enough here.
No, I don’t want to go back.” Friends had sent him Time and
Life magazines. He was amused by the advertisements–“slick,
well-groomed people coming out of their houses, buying new
cars.” But he enjoyed the pictures. This led him to reminisce
about Harvard, where he had studied for four years and then
taught: “I am completely a Harvard man,” he said. “I have
been accused of making too many rich friends. But I didn’t
seek them. They just happened to be rich.” He told us that his
best friends had big houses in the country and were able to
invite people for weekends. His most intimate friend married
a rich Washington widow. He went to dinner with them once
and found his friend at the head of the table, his friend’s
mother-in-law at the other end, his wife buried at the side
between two daughters. He was asked to stay on at the house
but declined after this experience.
“I never intended to go into philosophy and teaching. It
was all an accident,” he went on. This led him to muse on the
accidents of his life: If he had gone to England, he would
have done much more Plato, if to Germany, more German
philosophy. With a chuckle, he added that he did not have
much kinship with Goethe.
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Mr. Santayana then remarked that had just re-read T.S.
Eliot’s The Cocktail Party and didn’t understand why it is successful in performance. He thought the conversion of the girl
unconvincing. The play was too much of a tract. He thought
“Four Quartets” and the essays were much better, in his opinion. He recalled Eliot as a student of his at Harvard in his
course, “Three Philosophical Poets.” Eliot wrote an essay for
him, he said, and it was “very good–that’s an understatement.”
Then came an abrupt switch. “It is interesting that the
two most intelligent men in the history of the Western mind,
Plato and Leibniz–were dishonest. If you abstract Plato from
his mise-en-scène, which is so attractive, you don’t know
what he is saying. Plato has never been a favorite of mine, but
of course I owe him something. The Symposium, for instance,
I find very attractive. But I owe more to Aristotle and
Lucretius and others.”
Leibniz, he elaborated, tried to manipulate ideas as well
as people. He tried to bring the church together–“very
difficult”–and to make peace between states, and he had a
certain amount of success. The dishonesty revolves around
his assertions on matter (calculus, by implication, is dishonest) and the rearrangement of the elements (energy, mind,
matter, potentiality, etc.) into forms by imposing a new idea
from without. The Leibnizian calculus asserts that an infinite
number of points–which are only positions–in a line reduces
and expands them as if they were material. Leibniz tried to
manipulate people and institutions in the same way; however,
Santayana concluded, he had the right idea about spirit as
developing action, as did Hegel. The action or energy is not
internal, but occurs with respect to its history and experience–its relations with other forms and ideas. Hegel, he said,
knew this clearly.
Mr. Santayana said he had been praised by the English
critic, Collingwood, an Hegelian, for having held up the idea
as a crystal, examining all of its faces. In believing that the
spirit does not change but only moves on from experience to
BENEDICT
47
experience, Santayana concluded that the highest theoretical
and practical ideal is therefore passivity–the reception and
assimilation of experience, the “digesting” of action. I
brought up Gandhi and without hesitation Santayana said
that Western Buddhism and some of the Upanishads especially are very much akin to his beliefs. He added that he did
not mean to include Oriental Buddhism, which is different: “I
believe in the existence of an absolute truth,” not that man
can achieve it necessarily, but that human opinion strives
toward absolute truth. Others, he said, put it in different
terms: “God is truth,” or “The truth is everywhere.” I had
been smitten by Plotinus in my sophomore year at St. John’s
and was emboldened to ask if this wasn’t a form of pantheism akin to that of Plotinus. He replied, “I should think not.
All creation has a direct causal relation with respect to God
or the truth, but creation is different in Plotinus.” This led
him to criticize a French translation of Plotinus, which he
called “verbally accurate,” but added that the translator did
not really understand ideas. “He compares important passages with the Greek, but never learned Greek properly,
despite three years at Boston Latin School.”
No more books after this, Santayana said. As for his autobiography, he hoped it could be published after his death in
one volume. Marginal notes were impossible to include during the wartime printing shortage, but he hoped they could
be restored, as in his earlier books. He commented that he’d
had to dispose of many of his books because of space. He said
the room next door is crammed with books, but the nuns also
use it. “Now I never read Shakespeare. The room was always
full of nuns. And now the new Mother General is doing the
whole place over. Anyway, I probably only have a year or two
more to live.”
As he was saying this, a nun glowered at us in the doorway. We rose to depart, shook hands and asked if we could
come see him next time we were in Rome. Looking straight
at us with those penetrating eyes, he said, “Yes, please do.”
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He paused for a moment and added, “Come and see....” and
his voice trailed off.
****
George Santayana died at the Convent two years later, on
September 26, 1952, at the age of 89.
49
Kant’s Philosophical Use of
Mathematics: Negative
Magnitudes
Eva Brann
I hope that this consideration of a peculiar little work of great
interest will appeal to readers who want a taste of Kant’s
early work as well as to those who like to ruminate on the
meaning of the simplest mathematical notions. My text is an
essay called “An Attempt to Introduce the Concept of
Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy (Weltweisheit).” Its
date is 1763.
Its appeal to me has these three aspects: First there is the
tentative mode expressed in the title; here we hear Kant’s
pre-critical voice—not yet the magisterially conclusive notes
of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) but a tone at once
spiritedly daring and gropingly uncertain. A second and more
specific aspect is the inchoate appearance of major elements
of the first Critique; not only can we see its elements come
into being, but we can watch at their incipiency topics that
Kant will return to all his life. The third appealing aspect of
the essay is its pedagogic suggestiveness; for a teacher seeking
to help students reflect on mathematical formalisms, it is a
useful source.
The piece on negative magnitudes has been eclipsed by its
much longer contemporary, “The Only Possible Basis of
Proof for a Demonstration of God’s Existence (Dasein),”
dated 1763. This essay was subjected to an extensive and
deep analysis by Heidegger in his lecture course of 1927 (The
Problems of Phenomenology, translated and edited by Albert
Hofstadter, Indiana University Press, 1982, ¶8); his elucidation of Kant’s use of the term “reality” is particularly relevant
to the essay on negative magnitudes.
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John’s College, Annapolis.
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What evidently drew Heidegger’s attention to this particular essay, however, was its brisk definition of Dasein—his
central word—as “absolute position.” When the verb “is” is
used not as a copula to relate a subject to its predicate as in
“God is omnipotent” but is asserted abruptly, absolutely, as in
“God is” or “God exists,” it signifies, Kant claims, a mere
positing of an object. By this, in Heidegger’s interpretation,
Kant means that the object is affirmed by a knowing subject
as available to perception. (I observe, incidentally, that in
order to express the character of existence as non-attributive
absolute position more adequately, Kant proposes language
that anticipates the existential quantifier of propositional
logic: We should say not “A narwhal is an animal” but “There
exists an animal, the narwhal, which has unicorn-attributes.”)
In other words, existence is not a predicate and adds no
objective attribute to God’s essence. Since it is the crux of
what Kant first called the “ontological argument” (whose best
known proponent is Anselm), that existence is a necessary
attribute of God’s essence, Kant’s understanding of existence
as a non-predicate seems to be a rejection of that proof.
Kant’s own demonstration calls on the concept of a “realground” (Realgrund), a concept that emerges in the essay on
negative magnitudes, to be discussed below. This concept in
turn involves the postulate that essence is prior to existence
and actuality to possibility. Since Heidegger’s thinking is
dominated by the reverse claim, he is a severe if respectful
critic of Kant’s understanding. He regards Kant’s exposition
of existence as a half-way house, situated between the notion
of existence as one predicate among others and his,
Heidegger’s, own understanding of Dasein as “extantness,”
i.e., “being-at-hand,” with respect to things and “being in the
world” with respect to human beings.
There is yet another contemporary essay that has bearing
on the essay about negative magnitudes, the “Enquiry
Concerning the Evidence of the Principles of Natural
Theology and Morality, in Answer to a Question Posed by the
Royal Academy of the Sciences at Berlin for 1763.” The aim
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51
of this essay (which did not win the prize) was to establish
what evidence and certainty natural theology is capable of; it
is thus a discourse on method. It begins with an investigation
of the difference between mathematics and metaphysics (a
difference that plays a major role especially in Kant’s last
work, the Opus Postumum).
Thus both pieces, the one on God’s existence and the
other on theological certainty, illuminate the essay on negative magnitudes, the former through its concept of an ultimate reality and the latter through its restrictions on the use
of mathematics in first philosophy. I will draw on them in my
exploration.
*****
Anyone who has stepped out for a moment from the routine familiarity of operations with signed numbers will have
wondered just how, say, 5, +5, |5| and -5 differ from each
other, and, furthermore, whether +5 and -5 are operations
on or qualifications of the number 5. Although his essay concerns numerable magnitudes, especially those discovered in
nature, questions of that sort seem to have been going
through Kant’s mind, as he considered the illuminations that
the actual quantification of experience might offer to philosophy.
In the essay on natural theology Kant sets out four definitive reasons why the mathematical method is inapplicable to
philosophy and is not the way to certainty in metaphysics (¶14):
1. Mathematical definitions are “synthetic,” in the sense
that the mathematician does not analyze a given concept, but
first synthesizes or constructs it, i.e., puts it together at will.
(In the first Critique synthesis will have acquired a deeper
meaning; it will no longer mean arbitrary construction but an
act of the understanding expressing in the imagination the
formative givens of the intuition.) In philosophy or, as Kant
says interchangeably, Weltweisheit, “world-wisdom” (as distinguished from the scholastic philosophy of mere, unapplied
concepts, see Logic, Intro. 3), on the other hand, definitions
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are analytic, in the sense that concepts are given to, not made
by, the philosopher, and he then endeavors to analyze them
into their implicit elements. (In the Critique a way will be
found for the philosopher too to form pure synthetic judgments.)
2. Mathematics is always concrete, in that the arithmetician symbolizes his numbers and operations perceptibly, and
the geometer visibly draws his figures. (In the Critique these
inscriptions will be within the field of the imaginative intuition.) Philosophers, on the other hand, use words exclusively, and these signify, in Kant’s understanding, abstractly,
non-pictorially. (In the Critique this rift between word and
picture is closed.)
3. The mathematician tries to employ a minimum of
unproved propositions (i.e., axioms and postulates), while
the philosopher makes indefinitely many assumptions, as
needed. (In the Critique the principles of experience will be
systematically restricted.)
4. The objects of mathematics are easy and simple (!),
those of philosophy difficult and involved.
In the Preface of “The Attempt to Introduce the Concept
of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy” Kant accordingly
eschews the introduction of mathematical method into philosophy, but censures the neglect of the application of mathematical matter to the objects of philosophy. The really useful mathematical doctrines are, however, only those that are
applicable to natural science. (This restriction prefigures the
use of mathematics in the Critique, where its role is the constitution and understanding of the system of nature, i.e., of
matter in quantitative and qualitative change.) As a preliminary example, Kant gives the continuity of space, which is, if
inexplicitly, postulated in the Euclidean geometry he assumes.
The concept of continuity will give insight, he thinks (but
explains no further), into the ultimate ground of the possibility of space. (The claim does prefigure the arguments for the
establishment of a spatial intuition in the Critique.) The main
example in this piece will, of course, be the concept of nega-
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53
tive magnitudes, which Kant now proceeds to clarify and
apply. I shall follow his arguments through the three sections
of the essay.
First Section
There are two types of opposition: logical, through contradiction and real, without contradiction. If contradictories are
logically connected, the result is a “negative nothing, an
unthinkable” (nihil negativum irrepresentabile; now as later
in the Critique, representabile = cogitabile, i.e., to think is to
represent in the cognitive faculty). Thus a body in motion is
a “something” (which is in the Critique the highest objective
concept, i.e., that of an object in general); so is a body at rest.
But a body at the same time in motion and at rest is an
unthinkable nothing. It is not so much a non-object incapable
of being as a less-than-nothing incapable of being thought.
Real-opposition (Realentgegensetzung), on the other
hand, involves no contradiction and thus no unthinkability.
For this opposition does not cancel the being of the object
thus qualified; it remains a something and thinkable (cogitabile). Suppose a body impelled in one direction and also
driven by a counterforce in the other. The resulting motion
may be none = 0, but the body so affected is not a no-thing.
Kant calls this result nihil privativum representabile, where
privativum has a dynamic sense, as of an achieved condition.
This nothing is to be termed zero = 0. (The distinction of
“logical” and “real” underlies the Critical difference between
merely analytic and synthetic, i.e., ampliative, judgments.)
Kant also refers to real-opposition as real-repugnance
(Realrepugnanz) because two precisely antagonistic predicates
of an object cancel each other, though they do not annihilate
the object they qualify. Moreover, it is somewhat arbitrary (or
rather, determined by extraneous human interests) which
pole is called negative. For example, ”dark” may seem to us
intrinsically negative, but it is cancelled by its own negation
“not-dark” (which might, of course, actually be light). Thus
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one may say that in real-repugnance both opposing predicates
are affirmative.
Kant gives, among others, the following example.
Suppose a person owes 100 dollars and is, at the same time,
owed this sum. This debtor-lender is worth 0 dollars, since
the two conditions cancel each other, but this fact does not
cancel him, the bearer of these modifications.
Kant then offers an example (slightly adjusted by me) that
expands the concept of real-opposition. Suppose a vessel
going from Portugal to Brazil is carried due west by an east
wind with an impelling force that would cause it to run 12
miles on a certain day, and is also subject to a countervailing
current retarding it by 5 miles; the boat’s total progress is
seven miles a day. Here the result is not = 0. It is clear that
Kant regards real-opposition as taking place along a scaled
spectrum of quantifiable qualities at whose center there might
be (though there is not always) a neutral fulcrum, 0.
If there is an “origin,” then on one side there are the positive quantities, on the other those that can be regarded either
as the relative negatives of the former, or as opposed positives
in their own right. Thus the opening question, what is really
meant by +5, -5 and |5|, might be answered by Kant like
this: The plus or minus sign is neither an implicit operation
nor a qualification of the number as itself inherently positive
or negative, for the number is, like its “absolute” expression
|5|, always positive. The plus and minus signs signify rather
the relation of numbers to each other: -5 is the negative of
+5; it is negative only in relation to a positive five. To be
sure, since Kant is not speaking of bare numbers but of magnitudes symbolizing quantified properties such as are representable along one dimension, magnitudes in real-opposition,
the application to pure numbers is conjectural.
Objects in real-opposition have, of course, many negations besides those directly opposing a positive: a ship sailing
westward is also not sailing southward, but its course is in
real-opposition only to the eastern direction. Moreover, there
are cases, say of lack of motion, which are not the result of
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55
real opposing forces but of a total absence of impelling force.
Negation that is the result of real-opposition Kant calls privatio, that which has no positive ground is called defectus or
absentia. His example of an absent or null result is what we
would call potential energy (not to be confused with “potential-opposition,” see below): “Thus the thunder that art discovered for the sake of destruction lies stored up for a future
war in the threatening silence of an arsenal of a prince, until,
when a treacherous tinder touches it, it blows up like lightning and devastates everything around it.” Aside from Kant’s
pacifistic poetry, this example shows that Kant is considering
only the magnitudes of actualized forces.
It is pretty clear that what Kant is struggling to do is to
present a conceptual underpinning for what we call directed
magnitudes as they occur in the world, including signed numbers insofar as they represent natural qualities, whose plus or
minus tells us whether we are to move respectively to the
right or the left along the line-spectrum (conceived as a
straight line, where left is negative by convention). Not that
Kant is thinking of our mathematical number line—he does
not even mention an origin (=0), and his opposition-spectra
are evidently not necessarily infinite in either direction. While
he does insist on the relative directionality of negative numbers, insofar as they countermand their positives, he also reiterates that the negatively directed magnitudes are not negative numbers insofar as these are regarded as being less
than 0.
For the use of directed magnitudes in philosophy it will in
fact be essential that the opposed quantities are indeed inherently positive, as will be shown in Section Three. Hence a
debt can be called negative capital, falling negative rising, and
so on, where it is our perspective that gives a negative emotional tint to one of the terms. Kant sums his view up in a
basic law and its converse: 1. Real-repugnance takes place
between two positives, power against power, which cannot be
contradictories but must be of the same kind (while the complement class in a contradiction, e.g., “non-dark objects,” is
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not necessarily of the “same kind” as “dark objects”; they
might be invisible objects). 2. Where a positive opposes its
proper positive, a real cancellation will occur.
Furthermore certain rules of operation follow. For example, if the opposites are quantitatively equal, their sum will =
0, or A – A = 0, which shows, Kant explains, that both A’s are
positive (since A = A). Also A + 0 = A and A – 0 = A, since
no oppositions are involved. But 0 – A is philosophically
impossible since positives cannot be subtracted from nothing:
There are no inherently negative qualities and so, as was said,
no directed magnitudes inherently less than 0 (!). This oddsounding but unavoidable consequence will have important
metaphysical implications.
Real-repugnance, strange though its label be, has an
Aristotelian antecedent. It is, I want to argue, a dynamic version of the logical opposition Aristotle calls contrariety
(Metaphysics 10.4). Kant himself says as much in his
Anthropology of 1798; he there contrasts contradiction or
logical opposition (Gegenteil) with contrariety or real-opposition (Widerspiel, ¶60).
As a formal logical opposition contrariety occurs in the
Square of Opposition, which is a tabulation of the
Aristotelian doctrine on the subject: If the basic proposition
is “Every S is P its contradictory is “Some S is not P” and its
,”
contrary is “No S is P Contradictories cannot both be true
.”
nor can they both be false, but contraries, though they cannot
both be true, can both be false; for if not every S be P yet
,
might it be false that no S is P Contrary propositions bear a
.
certain formal relation to contrary terms, for these cannot
both at once belong to an object but they might both fail to
belong to it. Thus an object could not be at once pitch black
and pure white, but it need not be either, which is untrue of
contradictories, such as black and not-black.
The above paragraph is really a digression to show that it
is not contrary propositions but contrary terms denoting
qualities that are related to Kant’s real-opposition. Contraries
are qualities that are not simply in abrupt polar opposition
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(though their extremes delimit a maximum difference) but
are connected through a spectrum of gradations. Aristotle
makes privation a particular case of contrariety, and for Kant
negation, interpreted as privatio, in German Beraubung,
meaning “deprivation,” introduces into some of the ranges of
opposition a kind of null point or zero through which the
quality goes by degrees into a negative or oppositional mode.
(As was noted, not all the spectra have such a center; for
example when bodies are brought to rest = 0 by countervailing forces this 0 is not an origin in the spectrum of forces but
is a net effect in the bodies’ position, measured in spatial
extension rather than as qualitative intensity.) Some of Kant’s
examples will be given below.
What turns contrariety into real-repugnance is the
dynamic view Kant takes of this opposition: It means not just
being supinely, matter-of-factly opposed; it means being
antagonistically, aggressively opposed. Moreover, this striving
in many different dimensions of quality is quantifiable in
degrees of intensity, as Kant’s examples will show.
Second Section
Kant now calls for examples from 1. physics, 2. psychology,
3. morality.
1. In physics his prime example is impenetrability, which
is a positive force, a true repulsion that might thus also be
called “negative attraction.” For attraction is a cause, contrarily directed, by which a body compels others to push into
its own space.
2. From psychology (Seelenlehre) come Kant’s most pungent examples of real-opposition. He raises the question
whether aversion could be called “negative pleasure.” The
fact that in German aversion, Unlust, looks like a direct contradictory of pleasure, Lust, gives him pause, but he observes
that in “real-understanding” (Realverstand), meaning in
actual psychic perception, aversion is not just a negation of
desire or even its diminution, but a real-repugnance, a positive perception. Then, to illustrate, comes an almost comical
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quantification: A Spartan mother hears of her son’s heroism;
a high degree of pleasure ensues, say of 4 degrees. Then
comes the news of his death. If the resulting Unlust were a
mere negation, a mere negation of the Lust, it would equal 0.
But 4 + 0 = 4, as if the death made no difference to her
delight. Kant concedes however (some notion of a mother’s
feeling!) that the positive Unlust of his death, the real-repugnance, will diminish the mother’s Lust at her son’s bravery by
one degree; it will therefore = 3.
In the same vein, disgust is negative desire, hate negative
love, ugliness negative beauty, error negative truth, and so on.
Kant warns against regarding this terminology as mere word
mongering: It is a philosophical pitfall to regard the evils of
positive privation as mere defects. Thus Kant is denying,
surely quite incidentally, the theological doctrine (found in
Plotinus, Augustine, Thomas) of evil as privation of good (privatio boni), for in Kant’s view in this essay evil, though a relative negation, is yet a positive force.
3. Kant naturally regards his concept of real-opposition as
having important uses in philosophy insofar as it is “practical
prudence” (Weltweisheit), that is, applied morality. Nonvirtue (Untugend) is, in human beings, not a mere denial of
virtue (Tugend), but a positively negative virtue, vice. This is
the case because humans, unlike animals that are morally
unendowed, have an “inner moral feeling” that drives them
to good actions. For instance they harbor a law of neighborly
love. To do bad deeds, human beings have to overcome this
natural inclination to good. (A quarter century later, in the
second Critique, the Critique of Practical Reason, 1788, Kant
will, on the contrary, see the test of true morality in the overcoming of natural inclinations.)
Thus certain people must make a noticeable effort to
engage even in sins of omission (such as neglecting to offer
neighborly help), which differ from sins of commission (hurting one’s neighbor) only in degree; hence the slide from the
one to the other is all too smooth, though the beginning is
effortful.
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Kant apologizes for what may seem to enlightened readers the prolixity of his exposition. He is writing for a
“indocile breed of judges, which, because they spend their
lives with a single book, understand nothing but what is contained therein.” The book is, I imagine, the Bible.
In an appended Remark, Kant forestalls the notion that
the world conceived in such a dynamic balance is capable neither of augmentation nor perfection. He points out (1) that
in potential oppositions (to be explained below) though the
total quantity of effect may = 0, yet there may be an increase
in apparent change, as when bodies widen the distance
between them; (2) that it is the very antagonism of natural
forces that keeps the world in its perfectly regular courses;
and (3) that though desire and aversion do balance each other
considered as positive quantities oppositely signed, who
would claim that aversion is to be called a perfection?
Moreover, though the net quantity of moral action in two
people may be the same, yet the quality of the one who acted
from the better intention is to be more greatly valued. Kant
adds that these calculi do not apply to the godhead, which is
blessed not through an external good but through itself.
Third Section
Kant introduces this section, which contains his startling
application of the concept of real-opposition to metaphysics,
by insisting once more that it is a mere attempt, very imperfect though promising: It is better to put before the public
uncertain essays than dogmatically decked-out pretenses of
profundity. This section is accordingly called “Containing
Some Reflections Which Can Be Preparatory for the
Application of the Concept Here Thought Out to the Objects
of Philosophy.” I dwell on this language because it is not a
tone familiar to those of us who have spent time with the
three Critiques.
1. Everyone easily understands how it is that something is
not—the positive ground for its being is absent; there is no
reason for it to be. But how does something cease to be? The
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question arises because we must understand every passingaway as a negative becoming. As such it requires a real or positive ground.
In the first two sections Kant had spoken of real-opposition or real-repugnance, by which were meant normally
apprehensible contrarieties. Now, in the third section, he
introduces real-grounds (Realgründe). As far as I can make
out from the examples, real-grounds are natural, including
psychic, causes: forces, powers, and acts exercised by material
or psychic agents. “Real” here is used not as in real-opposition, which is opposed to logical contradiction, but it seems
to mean “affecting perceptible existence.” Real-grounds seem
to be a first-level, underlying causal reality, apprehended
through its effects. Thus Kant uses “reality”—and, as we shall
see, “existence,” “being” (Wesen), as well as “actuality”
(Wirklichkeit)—quite loosely in these exploratory essays;
Heidegger shows that Kant’s later systematic meaning of reality is the “whatness” of a thing, all its possible predicates, its
essence, while existence is perceptibility.
Kant’s examples are mainly from the soul. It costs real
effort to refrain from laughing, to dissipate grief, even to
abstract from a manifold representation for the sake of clarity; thus abstraction is negative attention. Even the apparently
random succession of thoughts has real grounds, which are
“hidden in the depths of the mind (Geist),” i.e., in what we
call the subconscious. Whether the change is in the condition
of matter and thus through external causes, or of the mind
and thus through inner causes, the necessity for a causal realopposition remains the same.
Kant is focusing here, it seems to me, on a partial converse to, and a kind of complement of, a question, evidently
not asked by the ancients, which is to become a modern preoccupation: “Why does something exist rather than nothing?” It was first raised as a metaphysical problem with a theological answer by Leibniz (The Principles of Nature and
Grace, Founded on Reason, 1714), and was repeatedly taken
up by Heidegger (especially in the end of What is
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61
Metaphysics, 1949), who treated it as “the basic question of
metaphysics,” though to be resolved without recourse to theology.
Leibniz asks for a reason, sufficient and ultimate, to
account for the existence of a universe of things in progress
and finds it in God. Kant, on the other hand, asks for an adequate reason why a present condition in the world should go
out of existence and finds real-opposition as the cause. It is,
however, an unexplained cause, which, Kant says at the end
of the essay, he has been and will be thinking about and will
in the future write about. This appears to be a harbinger of
Critical works not to appear for almost two decades.
Meanwhile the metaphysical consequences are exceedingly
strange: The sum total of all real grounds equals zero, and
“the whole of the world is in itself Nothing.” More of this
below.
2. Kant says that the theses to be here proposed seem to
him “of the most extreme importance.” First, however, he
distinguishes real-opposition, or as he now calls it, “actual”
opposition, from “possible” or “potential” opposition. The
latter type of opposites are also each other’s negatives, real to
be sure, but not, as it happens, in conflict. Thus two forces,
each other’s opposites, may be driving two different bodies in
opposite directions: They have the potential to cancel each
other’s motion but do not actually do so in the given situation. So also one person’s desire may be the other’s aversion,
yet their ability to stymie each other is only a possibility.
Kant then offers the following first general thesis:
In all natural changes of the world their positive
sum, insofar as it is estimated by the addition of
agreeing (not opposed) positions and the subtraction from one another of those in real-opposition,
is neither increased nor diminished.
Recall Newton’s Third Law of Motion (Philophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 1687):
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To every action there is opposed an equal reaction:
or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each
other are always equal, and directed to contrary
parts.
It is pretty evident that Kant is struggling to ground in
metaphysics and apply to the human world the most dynamic
of Newton’s Laws of Motion or perhaps the Law of the
Conservation of Momentum, which is implied in (or, some
argue, implies) the law of equal action and reaction; it states
that when the forces acting on bodies in the same and in contrary directions are summed (over time) the quantity of
motion (i.e., the mass compounded with velocity = mv) is not
changed. Kant says without proof that although this rule of
mechanics is not usually deduced from the metaphysical
ground from which his first thesis is derived, yet it could be.
(The first Critique will be partly devoted to giving the transcendental grounds of the laws of motion and conservation.)
Not only bodies in motion but souls in emotion obey the
law of conservation, and so do humans in action.
Astoundingly, Kant really means this: For every “worldchange,” i.e., every “natural” change (which includes the psychic realm) there is an equal and opposed change, so that the
sum of measured final positions, i.e., states of existence taken
globally, is equal to what it was before the change, or the total
effect = 0.
Every becoming, then, induces an actual or potential
counter-becoming or cessation. It can now be seen why Kant
introduced potential real-opposition: Kant’s forces not only
act in opposed pairs but they may act on different objects, i.e.,
the real-opposition may not be actualized in one body or one
soul or even in the same mode in one soul. Nevertheless these
potential oppositions enter into the summed effects of the
world-total.
Kant then goes on to give more concrete non-mechanical
examples—though these are not non-natural, because (as will
still be true in the Critiques) the soul, excepting in its practi-
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cal-moral employment of reason, is subject to natural
dynamic forces. The examples of this third section differ
from the ones in the previous section exactly as the course of
the exposition requires: They are cases not of actual but of
potential real-opposition. Thus if one person’s pleasure and
displeasure arise not from the same object, but the same
ground that caused pleasure in one object is also the true
ground for feeling displeasure in another, then in analogy to
two bodies moving in contrary directions by repulsion, there
is one potential real-ground and cause for the positive and the
negative feeling. These feelings oppose but also bypass each
other; they may cancel each other but need not do so. This is
why the Stoic sage had to eradicate all pleasurable drives—
because they always engender an associated but diverse displeasure that affects the final value of the pleasure, though
perhaps not the actual pleasure itself. Even in the use of the
understanding, we find that to the degree that one idea is clarified, the others may be obscured, though surely not by the
clarification. Kant adds that in the most perfect Being the
zero sum result does not hold, as will be shown.
Now comes the second thesis, which is simply the translation of the first thesis into its causative grounds:
All real-grounds of the universe, if one sums those
similarly directed and subtracts those opposed to
one another, yield a result which is equal to zero.
Kant immediately states: “The whole of the world is in
itself nothing, except insofar as it is something through the
will of someone other.” Regarded by itself, the sum of all
existing reality = 0; the world is an almost Heraclitean system of balanced oppositions, of mutually negating positivities. In relation to the divine will the sum of all possible reality, of the world’s existence, is, however, positive. But it itself
is not therefore in real-opposition to the divine will; it is not
the godhead’s relative negation. Consequently existence, i.e.,
whatever is perceptibly there in the world, is through its
internal relations nothing, but in relation to the grounding
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will of the divinity it is something; it is positive. For there can
be no real-opposition of the world to the divine will. (This
thought is still to be found in the Opus Postumum; there too
the real-opposition of forces is metaphysically exploited.)
The nullity of the physical and psychical world in its
summed effects, the nothingness of the underlying universe
of summed causes, and the positivity of creation only in relation to God—Kant presents these results without any discernible pathos, without acknowledgment that this cancellation of the world-whole of effect and cause might bear a religious or moral interpretation beyond the intellectual proof of
God’s existence. Nor can I discover that he ever reverted to
this nullifying construal of the laws of conservation. Perhaps
it is to be regarded as a passing notion that served as a spur
to further inquiry into the world’s relation to its ground.
(Kant does hold on to the “law of the antagonism in all community of matter by means of motion”; any divergence from
its reciprocity would, he now argues, move the very center of
gravity of the universe, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural
Science of 1786, ¶563. In this essay too the notion of realopposition is put to work in the specific antagonism of repulsion and attraction, forces which between them are responsible for the way matter, i.e., “the movable,” fills space.
However, the explanation of these forces in their specificity
remains an unsolved problem for Kant into the Opus
Postumum.)
So Kant concludes by making explicit the heretofore tacitly assumed converse of the proposition that the realgrounds are responsible for the null-ity of existence: Because
the internal sum of existence is zero, it follows that the “realgrounds,” i.e., the forces and powers producing effects in the
world, must be in a corresponding opposition: The realm of
existing and possible reality is in itself shot through with
grounding polarities that cancel existence, though in respect
to the divine will (Kant does not speak of “God” in this context) it has positive being (Wesen). This overt conclusion of
the last section is surprising since it follows close on the asser-
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tion that the zero sum of all existence flows necessarily from
the grounding being (Wesen) of the world; it is hard to tell
whether we are to infer from the zero sum of effects to the
underlying real-opposition of causes or whether these causes
are posited first. I hesitate to detect Kant in unwittingly circular reasoning here. (He is, to be sure, the master of intentional circularity in the Critique, where the grounds of the
possibility of experience are inferred from experience while
experience is certified by the grounds. Perhaps the apparent
circle in the above paragraph is a precursor of critical thinking.)
The metaphysical intention is however quite clear: (1)
The world exists as a complex of quantifiably opposed
effects; negative magnitudes express such relative opposition;
when summed with their positives they yield zero. (2)
Underlying these existences, there is a realm of grounds;
these are forces, powers and actions; they are also in mutually cancelling opposition, and, like their effects, they are so
only relative to each other. (3) In respect to an ultimate
ground they are positive, but since no real-opposition to it is
possible their positivity is not a relation of opposition to the
divinity. Kant himself knows that he has not yet sufficiently
clarified the character of real-grounds, nor their relation to
the divine will.
His first definition of a real-ground actually occurs in a
General Remark appended to the third, final section of the
essay. A logical ground is one whose consequence can be
clearly seen through the law of identity; for example composition is a ground of divisibility, i.e., it is identical with part of
the meaning of the concept and can be educed from it analytically. A real-ground, by contrast, has a relation to its effect
which, although quite truly expressed as a concept, yet allows
no judgment, no true understanding, of the real-ground’s
mode of action. In other words, the relation of a real cause to
its effect is not apprehensible by mere logical analysis. (Here,
of course, is formulated the problem that Kant will solve in
the Critique by means of the “synthetic judgment a priori”—
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the cognition in which real connections are made—not, of
course, by the logical law of identity but through our cognitive constitution.)
In this essay, this understanding of a real-ground raises—
for the first time for Kant—the fundamental question of causation: “How should I understand it THAT, BECAUSE
THERE IS SOMETHING, THERE IS SOMETHING ELSE?”
The will of God is something. The existing world is something else altogether. Yet the will of God is the ultimate realground of the world’s existence. Kant says that no talk of
cause, effect, power and act will help: God and world are
totally each other’s other and yet through one of them the
other is posited. And the same holds on a lower level for the
natural causes in the world, be they of an event or its cancellation. Kant promises an explication in the future, but for
now he remarks only that the relation of real-ground to what
is posited or cancelled through it cannot be expressed in a
judgment, i.e., a mental “representation of the unity of a consciousness of different representations,” but is in fact only a
mere, non-analyzable concept, that is, a general representation or a thought (Logic ¶1, 17). Kant is saying that the relation of an effect to its cause cannot be articulated as an
affirmed attribution of a predicate to a subject. It is his way
of expressing Hume’s rejection of empirically grounded causation. (In the Critique the attempt to make God’s causal relation to the world comprehensible to reason will be shown to
be hopeless, but causality within the world will be grounded
in the very constitution of the spatial intuition.)
So ends the essay in which the reflection on negative magnitudes has led, through the concept of real-opposition,
directly to the problem of causal connection and indirectly to
God as ultimate cause. I have not done justice to the
exploratory tone of the essay, to Kant’s witty derision of
those who get stuck in premature dogmatism, and to his sense
of having made a mere, even insufficiently explicated, beginning, but a beginning of something very important: the
inquiry into causation.
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*****
An elucidation of some of the matters left unclear in the
essay on negative magnitudes occurs in the essay on “The
Only Possible Grounds of Proof for a Demonstration of
God’s Existence” of the same year (1763), and it seems to me
so daring that I cannot resist carrying this exposition a little
further. The reflections I shall refer to are not those that most
interested Heidegger, the ones concerning existence as position, but those dwelling on the relation of possibility to actuality (or as Kant says, to existence) and on an absolutely necessary “existent” (Dasein; First Part, Second and Third
Reflections).
Possibility, Kant says, depends entirely on the law of contradiction: That is a possible something the thought of which
accords with what is thought in it. This “comparison” of a
subject with its predicates through the law of contradiction is
to be called logical or formal possibility; a triangle cannot
have other than three angles, for that would contradict its
definition. But it also has something additional, a given character as a triangle in general or in particular, say a rightangled triangle; these are the data of its material or real possibility.
Therewith possibility without prior existence is abolished. For a thing is not impossible—a “no-thing”—only
when contradictory predications are made of it, when it is
formally impossible, but also when it offers no real material,
no data, to thinking. For then all thinking ceases, for everything possible must be something thinkable, must offer stuff
for thought. It follows that for Kant possibility is conditioned
on actuality.
There is, to be sure, no formal inner contradiction in the
brute negation of all existence, since nothing has been posited
to begin with. But that there be a possibility and that
nonetheless nothing actual exist—that is contradictory. For if
nothing exists, nothing material is given to be thought about.
Therefore to say that nothing exists is, according to the previous analysis of existence (Dasein) as a positing act of
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thought, to think and say that there is absolutely nothing.
And then to add that something is possible is clearly self-contradictory, for no material for thinking at all is given.
Thinking involves material givens; without them it contradicts its own character. Thus the cancellation of the material
data of possibility also cancels possibility. It is absolutely
impossible that nothing should exist. I understand Kant to
mean that one can—logically—deny all existence, but having
denied it one cannot then retrieve its possibility.
The only really elucidating example of a necessary existence is, Kant says, that of the unique Subject (i.e., God), to
be touched on below. Meanwhile, if we ask, for example,
how existence precedes possibility in respect to “body,” we
may grant that the concept body contains no logical impossibility, yet to call on its predicates of extension, impenetrability, force, to be the data of possibility (either assumed or
experienced) in the absence of actually existing, given bodies,
is quite unwarranted. Without such data the concept “body”
is empty. (We see here the forerunner of the dictum in the first
Critique that the mere functions of the understanding are
empty without the givens of intuition.)
Then Kant explains the concept of an absolutely necessary existence. To say that it is that whose contradictory is in
itself impossible is a merely nominal explanation. Since existence is no predicate, its denial can never conflict with other
predicates. However to deny the positing of the thing itself is
not a denial of predicates but of something else, and hence is
not contradictory. Kant is looking not for logical but “realnecessity” (Realnotwendigkeit), for what cannot be denied in
any “real-explanation” (Realerklärung). This is it: “What I am
to regard as absolutely nothing and impossible must be that
which eradicates all thinking.” Now total nonexistence in fact
cancels all the material and data of thought, and hence it is
impossible.
It follows that there is an absolutely necessary being. For
all possibility assumes something actual, whose cancellation
would itself cancel all inner possibility, i.e., the real coherence
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69
of predicates. That part of existence, on the other hand,
which does not provide the material for all that is thinkable,
but without which there would still be matter for thought—
and thus possibility—that part is, although in a real sense possible, yet in the same sense conditionally possible, i.e., contingent; not all existence is necessary. (In his Inaugural
Dissertation of 1770 Kant will say that all worldly substances
are in fact contingent since they maintain reciprocal relations,
while necessary beings are independent, ¶19; an earlier version of this existence proof is to be found in Kant’s Nova
dilucidatio of 1755.)
Kant now goes on to show that the one necessary, noncontingent existence is God, a being that is one, simple,
unchangeable, eternal, and a spirit. But its philosophically
most important attribute is that it is (in scholastic terms) the
ens realissimum, the most real being, that which contains the
highest reality. For it contains all the givens, the data, of possibility either as directly determining other existences or as
being the real-ground of which they are the consequences. (In
the Critique, the ens realissimum will be relegated to the status of an ideal of reason, a regulative idea that marshals our
thoughts of the world; in the Opus Postumum God is once
more the most real existence, though one reason necessarily
posits for itself.)
Does the attribution to God of the most and the highest
reality mean that all realities, i.e., all real attributes, must be
assigned to God? Here the concepts of the essay on negative
magnitudes come into their own: It is common doctrine that
one reality can never contradict another reality, since both are
truly affirmed. But this assertion leaves out of account the
notion of real-repugnance, i.e., of real-opposition. Realities
may, indeed must, oppose each other without one of them
being in itself negative. That was the essay’s main finding. In
God, however, even real-opposition cannot take place,
because that would result in privation or defect and would
contradict God’s maximal reality. Thus God contains no realities in opposition to his positive predicates; for example, the
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real-oppositions attributable to bodies, such as being subject
to contrary forces, cannot without contradiction belong to a
being that has intellect and will; hence the ens realissimus has
clear positive determinations.
It is, it seems to me, implicit in these pre-Critical essays
that neither existence (Dasein) nor actuality (Wirklichkeit) is
as yet convertible with subjective perceptibility, though both
will indeed be so later, as Heidegger observes. Instead these
terms mean objective givenness, thereness, be it sensorily
received or essentially apprehended. The road to the first
Critique will be the development of this conversion from the
object of experience as given to the subject to its being constituted in the subject. The roots, however, of the primacy of
the subject are already present in one respect, now to be
shown.
*****
There is, then, necessarily a God, a being comprehending
not all, but all the highest positive reality. He is a real-ground
of the world; the world, in turn, amounts quantitatively to a
self-cancelled nothing, though it may well be qualitatively
positive. One way to get hold of this—by Kant’s own frequent confession—still inchoate complex is to ask just how
daring a departure from tradition it is.
Kant, who without naming Anselm is attempting to rebut
his argument for the existence of God, calls his own proof
“ontological” (later in the Critique that is what he will call
Anselm-type proofs). Anselm argues (Proslogium 2, 4) that
God is a maximal being whose essence is to be thought as
largely and inclusively as possible; thus it must include the
predicate existence. This—that existence is a predicate—is
what Kant denies, but he accepts something that seems to me
even deeper in, or rather behind, Anselm’s argument: that
when I must think that God exists, he exists. But this is thinking of the type Kant himself engages in when he makes God’s
existence follow from the existential necessities of thinking:
What is required for thinking to be possible must necessarily
exist. (This type of proof becomes explicit in the Opus
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Postumum.) Here Anselm and Kant are brothers under the
skin. I can think of counterarguments to their assumption
(though without being quite persuaded by them): Is it utterly
impossible that a being that must exist in thought fails to exist
in fact—is it so totally unthinkable? Is it not possible to think
that thinking can do utterly without the material, the data
grounded either in a highest reality, as in the essay on God’s
existence, or in some sensory influx from a transcendent outside, as in the first Critique? Is it unthinkable that possibilities
do not disappear when actualities fail, but that there is spontaneous, autonomous, self-generated, worldless thinking?
Kant has, it seems, levered the Cartesian-type certification for
personal existence; Cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I
am,” into a proof of God’s existence: Cogito ergo Deus est,
“I think therefore there is a God.” But what if “I think”
entails instead: “I make the world,” if I myself give myself the
data?
Such misgivings and intimations aside (they will become
Kant’s own in the Opus Postumum), he has found an
approach to a question that seems never to have occupied the
ancients and was, as was mentioned, first formulated by
Leibniz (Principles of Nature and Grace, 7): “Why does something exist rather than nothing?, especially since ‘nothing’ is
simpler and easier than ‘something.’” Leibniz finds the
answer in the ultimate sufficient reason called God. Kant
argues the other way around: Nothing is harder than something, indeed impossible for thought, and God becomes necessary not as a sufficient reason inferred from the world’s
existence but as a necessary being implied by human thinking.
In 1763, having proved in one essay the necessary existence of the highest and most real ground and so (for the time
being) answered Leibniz’s question, Kant is left with the
unanswered next question of the essay on negative magnitudes quoted above, which he prints in block letters: “How
can I understand THAT BECAUSE SOMETHING IS, SOMETHING ELSE MIGHT BE?” In other words, having proved
God’s existence, how can I understand him, or his agents in
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the world, as causal grounds? (This very same question will,
as was said, be presented in the Critique as unanswerable by
logical thinking alone, but solved with the aid of the a priori
relations given in the intuition.)
By 1781, the year of the first edition of the first Critique,
Kant will have given up not only his own so circumstantially
prepared ontological proof, the only possible one, as he had
once thought, but also in principle any expectation of a theoretical demonstration of God’s existence—and so, it seems,
any rational explanation of the first question, why there is
existence at all.
The second question, on the other hand, is just what the
Critique addresses. Kant distinguishes cosmological freedom,
the power to make an absolute beginning, from causality
according to natural law, which is rule-governed consequence
acting within what already exists. An insight into the first,
into absolute causation, i.e., creation, Kant shows, is in principle impossible for us, for it is beyond the limits of human
reason. The second causality, that of lawful succession, of
cause and effect in natural events, is grounded in the synthesizing character of our cognitive constitution. The essays here
considered show Kant—and for my part I find this intellectually moving—casting about for disparate clues to the concepts
and claims which would one day come to cohere in his master edifice.
73
Four Poems
Elliott Zuckerman
Where the Poet Lives
I saw the poet once
in furnished rooms above the estaminet.
There were others in his train, and I
just tagged along.
Foremost were my sidekick feelings.
If only earlier in the evening
I’d found the man alone
at his table in the whitewashed space,
the waiters not quite in position yet,
and memorably our eyes had met.
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74
ZUCKERMAN
Early Pupil
She saw that her piano and only hers
was missing black notes here and there
and deemed that this deficiency was due
somehow to my neglect, a lack
of thoroughness. But never
did she carp for long, clever
enough at twelve to know
that parents don’t pay cash for caviling.
Have it your way, she’d imply.
Go ahead and
have it your way, for all you teachers
insist on throwing bowling-balls overhand.
To the narrow living room of the detached
brick building in the borough’s heart
I brought her Haydn. It was
a hurdle that the piece, her first, was titled ‘Air,’
suggesting emptiness to her, and breathing.
I told her something about sonatas,
and life chez Esterhaz,
then asked the girl to name the head
bewigged in the oval insert on the page.
‘That is George Washington,’ she said.
Among the portraits later in the book,
she stopped at Purcell in a flowing wig.
I played the left hand ostinato,
and told her how a Trojan prig
abandoned the passionate empress Dido
to fiery death, while we can hear
the drooping half-steps of imperial despair.
Pointing to Purcell’s hair,
‘At last,’ she said, ‘a lady composer.’
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76
ZUCKERMAN
She and the Tree
Outlay
On that flat terrain is there a tree?
Given at least one tree, she likes to arrange her limbs
in imitation of the branches, seeking
a quiet contraposto.
We place ourselves on stools, shoes at the rungs,
the ales in steins on the expanse between us,
midway in bowls the usual cashews,
and new pistachios.
Her earlier attempts will be ignored,
for rearrangements are encouraged.
But when at last she settles on a pose,
they’ll give that pose her name.
Though hands can reach across to hands,
no actual touch dare fluster the display:
all my intent and all your puzzlement
diffused in what we say.
They emphasize the silence of the landscape,
she and the tree.
I wonder whether anything that hangs
high in the air among the pleasantries
could close those almond eyes.
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79
Platonic Pedagogy?
David Roochnik
No Platonic dialogue depicts a conversation between two
equally mature philosophers. There is neither a friendly collaboration, nor a serious battle, between peers. Instead, the
dialogues are consistently asymmetrical. Two familiar kinds
of conversations are those between an older Socrates and a
younger man (Glaucon, for example) who is, at best, a potential philosopher, and between Socrates and a non-philosopher
(such as Protagoras, Laches, or Agathon). What is conspicuously missing is a dialogue between Socrates and a thinker
offering a well-developed theoretical position, such as the
Eleatic Stranger or Timaeus, neither of whom receives as
much as a question from a present but silent Socrates.
One explanation of this absence is that the dialogues are
thoroughly pedagogical works. Their function, on this
account, is not to present a positive or systematic theory,
which is why they do not depict a symmetrical exchange
between two theorists (who either agree or disagree), but an
encounter whose asymmetry is designed to invite the reader
to participate. As Eva Brann puts it, Plato “wants us as soon
as possible to join [the dialogue], to be converted from passive perusal to active participation, to be drawn in among the
other silent interlocutors” (p. 88).
One version of this “pedagogical thesis” would maintain
that by entering the conversation the reader, guided by the
dialogue’s clues, can, and so should, attempt to reconstruct
the teaching or theory (or logos) it implicitly contains. A second version would argue that the dialogue contains no positive theory at all. On this account, Socrates’ attempt to drive
Eva Brann. The Music of the Republic: Essays on Socrates’ Conversations and
Plato’s Writings. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2004. David Roochnik is
Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston University.
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his interlocutors into thinking—and Plato’s attempt to
achieve the same with his readers—is the teaching. This may
sound odd, because pedagogy seems to be a means to an end.
The teacher teaches the student who, upon completion of the
instruction, is no longer a student, but instead is one who
knows. Perhaps, however, the dialogues are asymmetrical
because they are essentially pedagogical. In other words, perhaps Plato eschewed the sort of symmetrical dialogue that
would communicate a positive theory—not to mention the
fact that he never wrote a monological treatise—because he
believed there was no positive or independent theory that
could be detached from the attempt to teach it. (Brann’s own
definition of a “theory” is “a conceptual construction
designed in principle to yield satisfying explanations for every
problem brought to it” [p. 322].) Perhaps pedagogy, the leading of the younger by the older, is an end in itself. Or, to put
it somewhat strangely, perhaps pedagogy itself is the truth.
Such a view comes close to a form of skepticism, although not
of the Pyrrhonian or Academic varieties described by Sextus
Empiricus. (See Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1.1 and 1.4.)
I think Eva Brann might accept some of these remarks,
but I am not sure which of the two versions of the pedagogical thesis (if either) she would favor. Certainly, hers is a book
written by a teacher for students. Included in this collection
of essays are three “introductions”: to the Phaedo, Republic,
and Sophist. One essay, “Socrates’ Legacy: Plato’s Phaedo,”
was written for a student journal, and another is titled,
“‘Teaching Plato’ to Undergraduates.” It and three others—
“Why Justice? The Answer of the Republic,” “The Tyrant’s
Temperance: Charmides,” and “Imitative Poetry: Book X of
the Republic”—were delivered as lectures at undergraduate
colleges.
“Socrates’ Legacy: Plato’s Phaedo,” which Brann
describes as a “view, very sketchily stated, of Plato’s Phaedo,
which might help a serious student in reading the dialogue”
(p. 36), lays out twenty-one questions that she thinks Plato
“insinuates into the purported demonstrations of the soul’s
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81
immortality” (p. 37). These are followed by a paragraph containing fourteen sentences, the first two of which are declarative, the following twelve of which are interrogative. She
concludes the essay by imagining Socrates joining a conversation about them today. “He would not care so much about
devising well-formulated breakthroughs for received issues as
for staying with the inquiry at its origin in wonder...he
is…asking [the young men who participate in this conversation] to keep his perplexities alive. For that is what philosophizing means to him” (p. 41).
These remarks suggest that Brann would favor the second
of the two versions of the pedagogical thesis described above.
So too would her description of “Plato’s Theory of Ideas.”
Despite using this well-worn academic phrase as the title of
one of her own essays, she asserts that “the Ideas are not a
theory” (p. 322) at all, and so she recommends that we “convert the falsely familiar title “‘Plato’s Theory of Ideas’ to
‘Socrates’ Hypotheses of the Eide’” (p. 324). In a similar fashion, her description of “recollection” as a “myth” (p. 332)
rather than a theory, and her declaration that in the Timaeus
“the Timaean story of the origin and nature of time is not the
Socratic, and therefore not a central Platonic, theory”
(p. 275), but instead may even “supply the reason why Plato
has offered none” (p. 272), also seems to imply that beyond
teaching lies no positive theory at all. Brann seems to believe
that, at the end of the day, the philosopher must “go back to
the beginning” (palin ex archês), and ask her questions, provoke her students, yet again. Teaching, in this sense, is an end
in itself.
There are philosophical explanations of why this would
be the case. One is famously suggested in the Seventh Letter
and is quoted by Brann (on p. 320):
There is no treatise of mine about these things,
nor ever will be; for it is not sayable like other
kinds of learning, but out of much communion
which has taken place around this business, and
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from living together, suddenly, like a light kindled
from a leaping fire, it gets into the soul, and from
there on nourishes itself.
If Plato believes that “these things” are not sayable, then
there can be no positive theory of them, and thus neither a
monological treatise nor a symmetrical dialogue would be an
appropriate form of philosophical expression.
Another possibility, which I can here only state, is that the
dialogues resist symmetry, resist theory, because they are
attempts to do justice to “the constitution of the soul…its
topography” (p. 251), and this “topography” is itself assymetrical. Perhaps Plato wrote the sort of dialogues he did, in
which the partners are invariably unequal, because the soul is
somehow unequal to itself.
The eponymous, and far the longest, essay of this book,
“The Music of Plato’s Republic,” seems to challenge the
notion that the dialogues are essentially pedagogical, and
instead to favor the first of the two versions of the pedagogical thesis mentioned above, namely, that the Republic is
meant to teach the reader how to reconstruct the theoretical
doctrine to which it only points. Consider the following comments that Eva Brann makes about the images of the sun, the
divided-line, and the cave: “The logos behind these images is
absent in the Republic, but its terms may be recovered from
Plato’s oral ‘Unwritten Teachings,’ particularly the lecture—
or several colloquia—Concerning the Good…In these
terms…the Image of the Good represents the One and the
Image of the Cave the Indefinite Dyad” (p. 156). Later in the
essay, employing a diagram of great complexity (p. 195),
Brann begins to articulate such a logos, such a doctrine:
This scheme shows the Good as presiding over and
bonding a kind of pervasive duplication: The
Good as the cause of knowledge is responsible for
the unifying confrontation of knower and
known…and thus originates the soul…The Good
is as well the direct source of beingness…Finally,
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83
as generating source, the Good puts forth the sun,
a sensible secondary source that reduplicates the
whole structure of Being on the lower level of
sense and Becoming (p. 195-6).
Brann draws on both the Parmenides and the Sophist to
articulate the details of such a theory, a project that occupies
a major portion of this essay.
This attempt to “recover” the positive logos of the
Republic is consonant with the assertive tone that pervades
“The Music of the Republic.” The essay begins, for example,
with this statement: “The Republic is composed of concentric
rings encompassing a center” (p. 108). Books 1 and 9-10, on
Brann’s reading, comprise the outermost circle, and set the
mythic context of the entire work. Books 2-4 and then 8-9
are “the broad inner ring” consisting “of the construction and
destruction of the successive forms of a pattern city in
‘speech’” (p. 116). Books 5-7 “presents the actual founding of
a city ‘in deed’” (p. 116). This structure is diagrammed on
page 117, which is one of thirteen such diagrams found in the
essay.
This structural account of the form of the dialogue—an
account that seems of a piece with the attempt to recover its
complexly structured content—can be challenged. Consider
the following alternative: Book 1, as Socrates himself states in
Book 2, “is only a prelude” (prooimion: 357a2). In the
Rhetoric, Aristotle discusses this term. It is, he says, “the
beginning of a speech” (3.14.1) whose “necessary and specific
function…is to make clear what is the end (telos) for which
the speech is being given” (3.14.5). Brann’s arguments that
Book 1 establishes a mythic context are not without philological basis. Still, the bulk of Book 1 is a series not of mythic
allusions, but of refutations, almost all of which operate on
the basis of the “techne analogy.” So, for example, Socrates
refutes Polemarchus’ assertion that it is “just to give to everyone what is fitting” (332c2) by smuggling in the assumption
that justice is an art, a form of expertise, a techne. As medi-
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cine gives what is fitting—drugs, food and drinks—to bodies,
and cooking gives what is fitting—seasonings—to meats, so
too (if the analogy holds) must justice give what is fitting to
the determinate object of its expertise. (See 332c-d.) Because
no such object can be identified, the definition is rejected.
Socrates, then, begins the refutations of Book 1 with an
assumption, justice is a techne, which he neither makes
explicit nor defends. The refutations succeed because the
techne model of justice proves to be inadequate. Nonetheless,
it remains the case that justice, even if it is not a techne, must
still be regarded as a form of knowledge. Book 1 is a
prooimion suggesting the telos of the Republic because it sets
out a task: to give an account of justice as a non-technical
form of knowledge.
What follows Book 1 are not concentric rings but, to borrow Socrates’ own metaphor, three successive “waves” of
argumentation that become progressively more difficult to
“swim through.” Books 2-4 construct an “arithmetical” or
technical conception of both city and soul that ultimately
proves to be deficient. Books 5-7 are a response to this deficiency, but suffer from limitations of their own. As a result,
they are followed by Books 8-10, which, despite the scant
attention they receive from commentators, are rich with
insight (especially psychological insight) and so actually culminate the dialogue rather than serve as merely a descent and
completion of the ring structure.
This little sketch (elaborated and defended in detail in my
Beautiful City: The Dialectical Character of Plato’s Republic)
is mentioned only to raise a question. Is the purpose of the
essay “The Music of Plato’s Republic” to uncover a positive
teaching of the dialogue, one communicated by means of the
ring structure Brann attributes to it, and then conceptually
elaborated in a “recovered” logos about the Good? If so, does
this essay stand at odds with the otherwise interrogative and
aporetic stance seemingly taken by so many of the other
essays in this book?
ROOCHNIK
85
Perhaps “The Music of the Republic” is not quite what it
seems to be. Even though it includes a significant number of
diagrams, some of them (such as the one on p. 220) quite elegant, and contains numerically adumbrated outlines of the
arguments, and even though it seems to offer first steps
towards a coherent account of the whole (i.e., a theory), perhaps this is but the mathematical “sheen” of the essay and
does not fully reflect its author’s understanding of the full
content of the dialogue. In other words, a meta-mathematical
doctrine may not lie at the heart of the Republic. Perhaps
Brann’s diagrams and outlines, and her putative recovery of
the logos, perform a function more like that Socrates attributes in Book 7 to arithmetic, that “lowly business of distinguishing the one, the two and the three” (522c): “to draw the
soul from becoming to being” (521d). In other words, while
mathematics is without doubt of significant value, it is not the
model of a genuinely philosophical logos. Instead, arithmetic
and its kindred mathematical technai are conceived by Plato
to have instrumental value. As such, they are pedagogical in
nature. They are meant to inspire and provoke, to turn the
reader towards the project of philosophy. They are meant, in
short, to be questioned. The goal of Brann’s longest and most
“mathematical” of essays, then, is not to offer the last word
on the Republic, but to convert the reader “from passive
perusal to active participation.”
To sum up: is the apparent assertiveness, the “theoretical
optimism,” of “The Music of the Republic” compatible with
a thoroughly interrogative essay like “Socrates’ Legacy:
Plato’s Phaedo?” I believe it is. If I am right, then one of the
many virtues of this beautiful book is that it effectively imitates the Platonic dialogues themselves.
�86
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ROOCHNIK
87
�
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The St. John's Review, 2005/2
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2005
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Kraus, Pamela
Brann, Eva T. H.
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Price, Audra
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Stephenson, David
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Benedict, Steve
Roochnik, David
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Volume XLVIII, number two of The St. John's Review. Published in 2005.
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St. John's Review
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